Batman/Aliens

Batman parachutes into the jungle near the Guatemala and Mexico borderline, investigating the disappearance of a Wayne Enterprises geologist. He encounters an American Special Ops team hunting a target, and both are set upon by the Aliens. Several members of the team are killed, but along the way Batman becomes familiar with the Aliens' life cycle, and collects two facehuggers in specimen jars.

The team leader sacrifices himself to blow up a nest of the Aliens, leaving only Batman and two members of the team alive, making their way to the team's evacuation point. One of the survivors, an intensely ambitious woman named Hyatt, leaves her teammate to be killed by one of the last Aliens and ambushes Batman, holding him at gunpoint while she relieves him of the lost geologist's voice recorder and one of the specimen jars. She says that the Aliens are an incredibly potent weapon if properly used, and bringing the information about them back to the U.S. government will make her career. She is so fixated on Batman that she fails to notice a gargantuan Alien hybrid - the result of an Alien embryo being implanted into a crocodile - rise behind her. The hybrid kills Hyatt, but Batman kills the creature by tying its legs and tipping it into the mouth of an active volcano. Alone, he escapes from the jungle.

In the Batcave, Bruce Wayne listens to the geologist's last message to his family, cut off as the man is attacked by an Alien. Bruce decides to drop the specimen jars containing the facehuggers into the cave's depths and tell no one about them. The Aliens are much too dangerous, he believes, "not because of what they are, but because of what we are."

This story was spun off of a two-part short story featured in Dark Horse Presents #101-102 entitled Aliens: Incubation. The events that Batman discovers on the geologist's recordings are fully depicted in this short story.

In 1927, an explorer discovered something frozen in Antarctica's ice, and he brought it home with him to Gotham City, where he sealed himself in a lab. It remained undiscovered until a present-day construction crew broke it open to find the explorer torn apart.

Dr. Fortune, an army scientist, soon gets wind of this when the Alien escapes into Gotham. Although Batman is able to find its nest and arrange for three victims to have the Alien embryos extracted before they can hatch on their own, Fortune takes custody of the Alien corpses for herself even after Batman is forced to kill the prime Alien in a desperate struggle through Gotham. When the Aliens attack Arkham Asylum, Batman is able to fight them off using Mister Freeze's freeze gun and a suit of empowered armor, but he is subsequently captured by Fortune.

Awakening on Fortune's base on a disused oil rig, Batman finds himself confronted by Alien/human hybrids created from DNA samples extracted from the Arkham inmates-examples depicted are Joker, Two-Face, Scarecrow and Poison Ivy-which have already defeated various special forces operatives from all major nations. Despite the odds against him, Batman is able to defeat the hybrids by using his knowledge of the original Aliens' abilities and the emotional 'weakness' of their hybrid natures, allowing him to trap them all in an area of the rig after he triggers an explosion. Confronting Fortune, Batman learns that she plans to use the Alien/supervillain hybrids to keep the superheroes in check, as various governments fear their power if they turn their judgement on the common man.

Fortune also reveals that she has been 'host' to an Alien queen embryo for decades, as a form of dry leprosy she contracted before being implanted prevented the queen from hatching, while allowing her to use some of its abilities. She now believes that she can use DNA samples from the Arkham inmates to harness the supervillains' genetic traits for survival and strength without their insanity, with the resulting hybrids guaranteed to be loyal to her due to her 'queen' status. However, when she uses the DNA of the new Alien and splices it with a sample taken from Killer Croc, her plan fails as the new Alien has no natural loyalty to her and Croc was naturally vicious without any psychological trauma. As a result, the Croc/Alien hybrid tears Fortune's head off before Batman escapes, the oil rig where Fortune was carrying out her work being destroyed in the resulting fight.

The stories have been collected into trade paperbacks:

• Batman/Aliens (by Ron Marz and Bernie Wrightson, 128 pages, 1998, Titan Books, ISBN 1-85286-887-2, Dark Horse, ISBN 1-56971-305-7)
• Batman/Aliens II (by Ian Edginton and Staz Johnson, 160 pages, 2003, Titan Books, ISBN 1-84023-734-1, DC, ISBN 1-4012-0081-8)
• DC Comics/Dark Horse: Aliens (by Ian Edginton, Ron Marz, James Hodgkins, Staz Johnson, Kevin Nowlan, Chris Sprouse, Bernie Wrightson, 400 Pages, 2016, DC Comics/Dark Horse, ISBN 1401266363)

• Batman: Dead End, a fan film where Batman fights groups of both the Predators and Aliens.
• Batman Versus Predator, a comic book confrontation with the Predator
• Aliens, a line of comics from Dark Horse
• Superman and Batman versus Aliens and Predator (by Mark Schultz and Ariel Olivetti, two-issue miniseries, January 2007)