Original 'Aliens' Comic Book Sequel to Get Deluxe Reprint

A piece of Alien — and comic book — history is returning to print in 2016, with Dark Horse Comics announcing that it will be releasing an oversized hardcover edition of its first Aliens comic book series, written by film and TV writer Mark Verheiden.

The original six-issue series was published in 1988, and followed James Cameron's 1986 movie Aliens by featuring Corporal Dwayne Hicks and an adult Newt — the child Ripley rescues in Cameron's movie — as lead characters.

After 1992's Alien 3 revealed that those characters had died in the movie canon, subsequent collected editions and reprints of the stories renamed each character as stand-alone entities Wilks and Billie, but next year's hardcover will feature the original, unabridged work — in recognition, perhaps, of the fact that Neill Blomkamp's upcoming Alien movie will also reportedly feature Hicks in a lead role.

The first Aliens series is important beyond being the first follow-up to Cameron's Aliens; it also was the foundation of a relationship between the Oregon-based comic book publisher and 20th Century Fox that led to comic book series for Predator (indeed, Dark Horse invented the Aliens vs. Predator concept for a 1990 comic book series, more than a decade before the first AVP movie), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, for more than two decades, Star Wars.

Illustrated by Mark A. Nelson, Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series will be released Apr. 26.