For Reiser, bringing Burke back from the dead didn’t feel like so much of a stretch. We never actually see Burke perish in Aliens (even if it’s highly unlikely he survived that Xenomorph ambush), so when Marvel came to Reiser with the idea of doing an alternate reality Burke comic, he thought, “It’s really not implausible.” Crediting his son Leon for nailing the details, Reiser realized “there was enough time to get to the ship and it could all work. This could be true.”
For those who might be tempted to point out the infamous deleted scene from Aliens, in which Ripley finds Burke cocooned with a Xenomorph growing inside of him (“That was no massage,” Reiser said of shooting the scene), the comic has it covered. Where that deleted scene ended with Ripley handing Burke a grenade, presumably to kill himself, Aliens: What If…? #1 provides a simple explanation for both the explosion and Burke’s escape to the drop-ship. We won’t spoil that here, but it’s a good one.
That said, after getting him off of LV-426, the comic gives Burke his just deserts. Cutting ahead by several decades, we see Burke as the most hated man in the universe for threatening to bring a Xenomorph to Earth, living the only life befitting a middling functionary.
Satisfying as that new arc is, Reiser’s interest in the story stemmed from his chance to flesh out what is a pretty straightforward baddie on screen. “It was just my joke,” Reiser said of his alternative reading of Burke, but that was enough for Goldberg to come up with the idea of revisiting the character’s past and future. “He had this whole backstory, which justified Burke’s actions, as off the rails as they went and as tragic as the results were.”
As one of several people involved in the creation of the story, Reiser is quick to downplay his contributions. “I’m not a comic guy, I’m not even good at reading them. I get lost, I need things to be linear,” he admits. However, he not only approved all of the story details but also offered suggestions for how to craft the character of Burke on the page…within reason. “I realized I would look at dialogue, but I was looking at it as an actor. I would tell them ‘I would say it like that’ or ‘it feels a little bit too expositional,’ and then remember it’s a comic book.”
He may not be a comic book guy, but Reiser is a comic, and that background drove his part of the story. But of course, even then he had to contend with another funny guy, his son Leon. “The writers would sometimes send the draft and say, ‘Anybody have any pitches?’ And Leon would send in 20 lines of suggestions and they would see my 20.” And more often than not Reiser, admits, the team went with Leon’s ideas, a sting made easier by the fact that it was his son: “Yeah, his were funnier.”