Superman vs. Aliens: Comic Plot, Characters & Lore
Superman vs. Aliens is a three-issue crossover written and penciled by Dan Jurgens and inked by Kevin Nowlan, published by DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics between July and September 1995. A distress call that sounded Kryptonian led Superman to Argo City, a domed city drifting far from any sun, where his powers faded and a girl named Kara helped him fight the Xenomorphs that had overrun her home. It was the Man of Steel's first meeting with the creatures, and it remains one of the better-known Aliens crossovers.
Plot Summary
The Kryptonian Probe
The first issue opened with LexCorp's LexSat satellites spotting an object burning through the atmosphere, and the alert went straight to Dr. Cheryl Kimble, the head of the company's private space program. Even with Lex Luthor no longer running the company, LexCorp was still the most powerful business in Metropolis, and it summoned Clark Kent and Lois Lane to its roof for a story it promised would be the story of the year. Kimble flew the two reporters out by helicopter to meet the incoming probe, telling them that science should never be judged in terms of good or evil and that discovery was the only thing that mattered.
On the way, Kimble let them listen to the garbled radio signal the probe had been sending, and Clark was stunned to recognize it as Kryptonian. He quietly overheated the helicopter's engine with his heat vision to force a landing on a beach, slipped away and flew off as Superman to catch the craft, which was coming in at the wrong angle and burning up as it fell. He could not slow it enough to stop a splashdown, but he pulled it out of the ocean onto the LexCorp recovery ship and saw markings on its hull that looked like the writing of his lost homeworld.
A Distress Call From Argo City
When Superman touched the probe, it struck an instant telepathic link and showed him scientists discussing the impending doom of their planet. They had built a dome over a city and planted explosive charges under it, so that when the planet exploded the city stayed intact and was pushed into space, where it still survived. The message said that the city's resources were exhausted and its people were dying, and it gave a location before the contact broke and the probe's power died, leaving Superman with a distress call he believed came from survivors of Krypton.
Kimble offered a LexCorp ship in exchange for the first look at any technology he brought back, and after two days of preparation Superman left from the orbital station LEXPORT, where he and Lois became the first civilians to walk its halls. During the trip through hyperspace, he remembered the three Kryptonian criminals he had executed with kryptonite in a pocket universe created by the Time Trapper, and he swore never to resort to killing again, no matter how deadly the threat. He landed at a domed city on the remnants of a planet, far from any sun, where his powers began to weaken because his body could no longer recharge from sunlight.
The First Xenomorph
The city looked Kryptonian but seemed dead, with no lights and no power, and every door was covered in scratches, as though something had tried to claw its way in. Inside a welded building, he found four unconscious survivors, loaded them into his ship and programmed it to fly them back to Kimble, even though Lois warned him that he would be left stranded. Nearby he found the dead husk of a strange creature that looked like a crab, the first sign of a Facehugger, and he tunneled under a crude barrier into the heart of the city.
Under the barrier, Superman broke into a cavern filled with what he took for strange rock formations, systematic in their organization but organic in appearance, which were rows of Xenomorph eggs. A Xenomorph came at him out of the dark, and he tried to tell it that he was no threat and only looking for beings like himself, but it slashed open his chest with its claws. He held its jaws open with his bare hands until its inner mouth struck him in the forehead, and when he fought on, its acid blood sprayed into his eyes and left him blinded.
Kara's Rescue
Superman was saved by a young blonde woman with a flamethrower, who drove the creatures back and spoke to him in Kryptonian, calling him Kal and naming the city as Argo. She took him to shelter, treated his burned eyes and bandaged them, and introduced herself simply as Kara, a teenager who had grown up fighting the monsters that had overrun her home. Meanwhile, on the ship carrying the survivors to LexCorp, a Chestburster tore its way out of one of the passengers, so the rescue Superman had arranged was taking the creatures straight to Earth.
In the second issue, Kara told Superman how the end had begun, when the city's machinery failed and an abandoned freighter crashed nearby after the colony's people had stripped what they could use from it. Years later, a man who had heard rumors of a dead beast on board shut off a cryogenic unit to see what it was, and the frozen Queen inside was not dead, and neither were her eggs. Kara put the number of Aliens at two million, while Superman guessed that he was working at about 20 percent of his strength, and with horror he realized that he had sent the creatures to the LexCorp station.
The Last Stand At The Box
At LEXPORT, the survivors' ship nearly crashed into the station on arrival, and Kimble and Lois found a body with its chest torn open and three survivors who were rushed to the infirmary. Lois explored the ship and found its walls coated with resin while an Alien lurked unseen, and soon a Chestburster escaped in the lab, which Kimble dismissed because the creatures were small. One of the creatures later impaled a crewman named Davis with its tail as Lois froze, and Kimble refused to open the doors when Lois was trapped, so Lois fled into a shuttle and blew the clinging Alien out through the airlock's force field.
On Argo, Superman carried Kara toward gunfire at the Box, the last safe place in the city, where he refused to pick up a gun and fought the Aliens by hand. He beat one of them unconscious and said he had not needed to kill it, but Kara shot it dead and told him he might feel good about being a saint while she was out to win a war. The two of them fought side by side for an hour until a leaking grenade belt blew up, and when it was over only Kara and one wounded man were left, and the man soon died, leaving her the last of her people.
Argo City Falls
Kara fell into despair after the battle at the Box, and Superman kept watch over her while the creatures gathered outside the walls in numbers neither of them could fight. The Aliens pierced the dome, the city's fuel lines ruptured, and much of Argo blew apart in a chain of explosions that brought a tower crashing down on the last shelter. Superman searched the rubble for Kara, but he could find no trace of her, and with his powers fading he was left alone in the open with the hive closing in around him.
The Aliens swarmed him in the wreckage, pinning him under their weight, and without his invulnerability he could only fight them off one at a time as more kept coming. He blacked out under the attack, and when he woke he was cocooned in the resin of the hive, unable to move his arms and legs and far from any help. Before him stood the Queen, and around her were rows of eggs, which he recognized as the eggs Kara had told him about, and the second issue ended with Superman helpless in front of the mother of the creatures.
Infested
In the third issue, one of the eggs opened and a Facehugger clamped onto Superman's face, forcing something down his throat while he struggled against the resin. When he woke, he was hanging upside down and the creature was dead, and for a moment he believed that his alien body had made the implantation fail before he realized that it had worked. The weakened Man of Steel now carried an embryo inside him, and the creatures that had tried to kill him earlier began treating him as one of their own hosts.
Kara had survived the fall of the city, and she arrived with her flamethrower and a transport unit she had salvaged from the alien freighter, although its power was dead. The Aliens moved aside to let Superman pass, and they worked out that he was carrying a Queen embryo, which the hive would protect at any cost. Kara told him bluntly that he was infested, but Superman believed that he could beat the creature inside him if he could only get close enough to a sun to bring his powers back.
The Truth About Argo
As they talked, Superman learned that Argo was not Kryptonian at all, but a city of the planet Odiline, named after its sister city of Argo on Krypton. The Cleric, the being who had once given Superman the Eradicator, had brought Kryptonians to Odiline long ago, but they died out because they lacked a genetic link to their homeworld. The people of Odiline adopted their culture and language anyway, and Kara laughed when she realized that Superman had believed her city came from Krypton, while he told her that Jor-El had sent him to Earth and that he was the last.
Kara gave Superman a photograph of herself as a six-year-old and told him to have it if he made it off the rock, and he promised to take her to Earth, where a special woman named Lois would help her settle in. The atmospheric pumps were failing and the air was getting thin, so Kara found two space suits, and she returned Superman's torn S-shield, which she had found in the rocks. Their only way off the asteroid was the old freighter, surrounded by a couple of million creatures, and walking back there would be like walking into a war zone.
Lois Fights Back
On LEXPORT, two Chestbursters emerged from the survivors in the medical lab, and Kimble saw the creatures as a weapons research boon, saying their acidic blood alone made them worth keeping. Lois, who had already fought one of the adults, argued that they were too dangerous, and she took matters into her own hands with a spray can and a match, burning the lab to keep the newborn creatures from growing up. Kimble pulled a gun from the weapons locker and aimed it at Lois, but an adult Alien was already looming behind her in the corridor, unnoticed by either of them.
Lois kicked the gun away and fought Kimble hand to hand, calling her cold and saying it was no wonder she fit in at LexCorp, until the Alien grabbed Kimble and Kimble begged Lois for help. Lois admitted that she was tempted to let Kimble be shredded, but for once she had a weapon, and she shot the creature, whose acid splashed across Kimble's arm. They trapped the Alien in a compartment and called security, but when they checked the monitor, the creature had already escaped, still loose somewhere aboard the station.
Into The Wreck
Superman and Kara reasoned that the Aliens would not harm him because of the Queen he was carrying, but they would tear Kara apart, so they crashed a vehicle into the creatures as a diversion and broke free on a sky cycle. The cycle overheated in the vacuum, and Superman used the last of his power to slow their jump down into a canyon near the old freighter. There they were met by a wall of Aliens, and Kara held them back with her flamethrower while she joked about whether anyone on Superman's planet ever said I told you so.
The freighter was bigger than Superman had realized, and inside its hold they found rows of eggs and a waiting Queen, who did nothing to them because of the embryo Superman carried. Kara cut loose with a thirty-second burst of flame that fried every egg inside the ship, and Superman did not tell her he disapproved, because he understood how she felt about the creatures that had destroyed her home. Straining his fading X-ray vision, he saw that the lower decks were mostly intact, with working transport booths, a functional power core and, nearby, a life pod that could take them away.
The Escape Pod
Back on LEXPORT, the escaped Alien killed a technician in the gyroscope room and smashed the gyroscope, and without balance control Earth's gravity began pulling the station toward reentry. On the asteroid, the dying city blew apart overhead, and Superman found himself saddened by the death of a place he had once thought of as Kryptonian, until another Alien attacked and Kara burned it, saying she might make a fighter out of him yet. Superman answered that he would not kill sentient beings, while they found that the pod's jettison tube was jammed and that only a huge explosion at the power core would clear the way.
Kara revealed that she had been implanted as well and insisted on going to the power core herself, since she knew the technology and would not make it anyway, while Superman kept a pocket transporter control to bring her back through a transport booth. Before she left, Kara told him that he had been a spot of light in her life, and inside the pod Superman felt the creature in his own chest trying to get out as she rigged the ship to blow. When Kara reached the booth, Superman stopped the beam, sure that one thing might still work, but the Queen smashed through the booth's glass after her just as the pod's launch sequence began, and the pod tore away without her.
Superman Expels The Queen Embryo
The blast was a hundred times stronger than Superman expected, and the city, the asteroid and the Aliens died in a blinding flash as the pod's computer guided it into hyperspace. When the pod dropped out back in Earth's solar system, the yellow Sun began restoring his powers, but at the same moment the Queen embryo in his chest started trying to cut its way out, leaving him doubled over in pain as he called it a little parasite. He knew that a Chestburster killed its host when it emerged, so his only chance was to fight it from the inside with a body that grew stronger with every moment of sunlight.
Floating in space above Earth, Superman bet that he could outlast the creature and keep it from carving him up, holding out with his returning strength until the embryo could no longer hurt him. The gamble worked, and with a strained grunt he managed to regurgitate the creature, which he described as gross and weird. The ordeal left the Man of Steel drained, and he admitted that he felt wasted, emotionally as well as physically, after losing Kara and the city he had once hoped was a piece of Krypton.
Return To Earth
Back near home, Superman saw LEXPORT burning up in Earth's atmosphere and pushed the falling station back into orbit, where Lois realized that Superman was back. Inside the station, the last Alien cornered Lois and Kimble, and when it bit down on Superman's arm, he threw it across the deck and told it he had tried to let its kind off easy and resisted the idea of killing it. He admitted that the creature reminded him of an entire city of people who had died and that he wanted it to join them, but he said he had gone down that path once before and would not do it again. Kimble, whose arm still bore the acid burn, said that she had made a mistake too in letting the creatures live, and she killed the Alien with a welder designed to seal a hull breach in seconds.
Later, looking down at Earth with Lois, Superman told her about Kara, who had made him feel like a big brother, and showed her the photograph he had kept. He explained that while Kara was in the transporter tube he had realized he could use it to teleport the Alien right out of her body, but it took precious time, and before he could bring her to safety the Queen reached the booth and everything went wrong. He believed that Kara had died with the asteroid, and the story closed on an image of her at the controls of an escape pod, while Superman hoped that she had finally found peace.
Key Characters
- Superman / Clark Kent followed a Kryptonian distress call to Argo City, lost his powers far from the Sun, was implanted with a Queen embryo and refused to kill the Aliens.
- Kara was a teenage survivor of Argo City who rescued Superman with her flamethrower and blew up the freighter to clear his escape.
- Lois Lane covered the story from LEXPORT, burned the station's Chestbursters and shot an adult Alien.
- Dr. Cheryl Kimble was the head of LexCorp's space program, who wanted the creatures for weapons research before killing the last one with a welder.
- The Xenomorph Queen was revived from a cryogenic unit aboard a crashed freighter and bred a hive of about two million Aliens.
- The Xenomorphs overran Argo City, reached LEXPORT inside the survivors Superman sent back, and died when the asteroid exploded.
Editions
DC Comics and Dark Horse released the three issues in the prestige format between July and September 1995, with Dark Horse handling the first issue and each book priced at $4.95. Jurgens and Nowlan drew all three covers, the first showing Superman waist-deep among the eggs as a Xenomorph lunged at him, and the series was collected as a trade paperback in 1996. It was reprinted again in the 2016 omnibus DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens, together with Batman/Aliens, Green Lantern vs. Aliens and other crossovers between the two publishers.
A sequel, Superman vs. Aliens II: God War, followed in 2002 with Chuck Dixon writing and Jon Bogdanove drawing, and it brought the Xenomorphs into the world of the New Gods. Superman met the hunters of the other half of the franchise in Superman vs. Predator in 2000, and he faced both species with Batman in Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator in 2007. Across these comics he built a long history with the hunters, and his famous cure for a Chestburster stayed one of the best-remembered moments of his crossovers.
Behind The Scenes
Dan Jurgens was one of the main Superman writers of the 1990s and had written and drawn The Death of Superman, so he built the story on the hero's continuity, from the Eradicator and the Cleric to the Phantom Zone criminals he had once executed. In Dark Horse's announcement, Jurgens said the dilemma at the core of the book was whether Superman should kill the creatures or let them destroy what might be the last remnants of his home planet. Removing the Sun was his way of making the fight fair, because a Superman at full strength would have ended the hive in minutes, and his weakness drives the whole story.
Kevin Nowlan had already worked on Aliens comics for Dark Horse, and Jurgens praised his feel for slime, grit and texture, which shows in the hive and the resin that covers Superman in the third issue. The series also gives the creatures a few ideas of its own, such as the hive sparing Superman once he carried a Queen embryo, a loyalty to the next Queen that matches the creatures' behavior in other comics. Kara shares her name with Supergirl, and many readers took the character as a nod to the Pre-Crisis Kara Zor-El of Argo City, which this version of the city pointedly was not.
Conclusion
Superman vs. Aliens is Dan Jurgens and Kevin Nowlan's 1995 miniseries that sent a fading Man of Steel to a domed city far from any sun to face the Xenomorphs. It moved from LexCorp's probe and the LEXPORT station to the ruins of Argo City, where Superman learned that the city was not Kryptonian, carried a Queen embryo and lost the girl who had saved his life. Its ending, with Superman coughing up the creature near the Sun and still refusing to kill the last Alien, keeps his code intact. It is a sad and personal story for a crossover, and it remains the starting point for every later meeting between Superman and the Aliens.
External Sources
- Superman vs. Aliens #1 on Dark Horse
- Superman vs. Aliens on the DCU Guide
- Superman/Aliens on Wikipedia
Tag Categories: Alien Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers
