Aliens #2

The second chapter of Dark Horse's six-part Aliens series delivers a cover that's quietly unsettling in the best way — a photograph of a snarling, claws-out Xenomorph pinned to a desk by a knife, set against a bird's-eye view of an eerily lit facility. Mark A. Nelson's overhead composition turns a simple act of stabbing a photo into something genuinely ominous, suggesting dread that lingers well beyond the image itself. With Mark Verheiden scripting and Nelson handling both pencils and inks throughout, this 1988 series was already showing it had serious teeth.