After quite a few years in the doldrums, the Alien franchise is enjoying a full resurgence. The recent Alien: Romulus made a significant box office splash and Noah Hawley's new TV show Alien: Earth will be (chest) bursting onto our screens in 2025. Now Marvel has announced its latest Alien comic – a five-issue limited series that relocates the action to an unusual location: a luxury resort.
Alien: Paradiso is written by Steve Foxe with art from Edgar Salazar and Peter Nguyen. Although the series' human characters are on holiday, Marvel's press release for the book suggests that they're "far from innocent, and as the Xenomorph bathes this picturesque landscape in blood and carnage, the familiar corruption, greed, and horror that comes with the territory of Alien storytelling rears its ugly head!"
Marvel also says that each issue will include pages drawn by Peter Nguyen told from the alien's point of view, something that the films occasionally flirted with, in Alien 3 and Alien: Covenant.
"With Romulus taking the franchise back to its roots in many respects, I wanted to make sure we were offering readers a story they couldn't find anywhere else," Foxe said in a statement about the new book. "Setting our tale on the sun-kissed shores of a high-end beach resort populated by underhanded criminals, undercover marshals, and underpaid employees immediately spun us in a new direction."
He went on to add, "As someone who considers Alien perhaps the most perfect film of all time, I hewed very close to the fundamentals of what I found so horrifying in the first place: a small group of people out of their depth, stalked by an unknowable threat in a contained location. Edgar, Peter, and I are working to bring you the Alien you know, love, and fear, but in a way you've never seen before. Pull up a beach chair and watch out for the acid splash."
Marvel's official synopsis for the new series reads:
"Welcome to Paradiso, where the money flows like blood and the blood flows like acid! The Tulum of space, Paradiso is a hidden gem among the colonies with its tropical climate, white sand beaches and a remarkable population of hyper-wealthy criminals. When Colonial Marshals Dash Nanda and Lydia Reeves are sent there to bust a smuggling ring, they think they’ve hit the job-assignment jackpot. But the only ones getting lucky here are those HUNGRY enough to take what they need."
Alien Paradiso is published by Marvel Comics on December 11.
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