To go back to the Burke comic book, I pounced on it it this Summer and found it a very entertaining read.
The general lore is done relatively seriously, and the gallows humour is peak!
An interesting thing to note is that the comic book both
updates Burke's age to match Reiser's current appearance (there is a timeskip) and
does not position itself as an uchronic timeline.
"What if?" are generally works which build from a premise which did not happen in the canon timeline, a premise contradicting official events. "What if Professor Xavier was a bad guy and had destroyed the world?", "What if Proteus had been set free to reign on his reality?", or in the case of Alien, "What if Newt had survived the Fiorina-161 crash?" for example.
But "What if Carter Burke had lived?" does not diverge in any way and does not contradict anything. In the theatrical AND extended cuts of AlienS, the scene implying Burke is impregnated does not happen. Which leaves the comic book free to do whatever it wants to do with the character. And not only does it free him from the hive, it actually uses a canonical event, Vasquez and Gorman's
chant du cygne, to bring about Burke's liberation.
Burke is then explicitly shown NOT contradicting the events of the AlienS finale... and even pulls of a "Aliens: Colonial Marines" kind of soft retcon, bringing about the beginning of Alien 3!
It's a smart move on Paul Reiser's part. The story works both as a funny little hypothetical scenario and as a potential tie-in should Hollywood choose to bring the character back in a future movie.