BW Media Spotlight

It’s the second half of the final story in the Aliens: Space Marines minicomic saga. And yet it’s only the second of three articles.

For those of you who came in late, Aliens was a toyline based on the first two movies. Being a boys line, they opted to shift the “main character” to Hicks, a soldier from the second film, but Ripley, the actual main character for most of the franchise, was still an important part, and they remembered the power loader exosuit from the second movie because they gave that to her since it would make a way cool toy. Like with the Super Powers Collection based on DC Comics characters and Superfriends incarnations, each figure was given their own minicomic, but instead of standalone stories we got a series of arcs that went through numerous figures. Get the human, get the alien, rinse, repeat, until you had the full story. It’s a surprising amount of continuity for a toyline pack-in minicomic; not the only toyline or promo comic set to do this (Drake’s snack cakes did a similar bit with their two Marvel sets, both of which I’ve reviewed in the past), but it was quite rare. The comics are really short, so you’re not quite getting a long story, but thus far it’s been a decent tale each time.

Last time we started looking at the longest and final arc in the line. Our heroes, including characters who died in the movies because that toyline needed filling, tried to go for some R&R on a human colony, only to have the xenomorphs drop in on a nearby farm to start a new hive. We left our crew in the largest stable I’ve ever seen staring down a bunch of xenos whose facehugger parents got a hold of bulls, creating bull/xeno hybrids the toyline called “bull aliens”. Can our heroes make it through alive?

Continue reading →