Originally published on Patreon
I had no idea what Marvel were planning to do with this title when it was announced, I purposely kept away from plot summaries so as to be surprised. When it comes to the Alien books it's a safe bet it's going to be set in the same kind of rough time as the first three films; but with Predator you never know. It could be set in modern day, historically, or even in the distant future. There's no real consistent setting for the franchise. And I was excited to see where this new title might go.
Unfortunately, I began to feel uneasy as soon as I opened the book and it gives you a time-line breakdown that acknowledges the first four movies. I mainly began to worry because The Predator was absolutely awful, and did some terrible things with the mythology, and apparently we're going to be carrying on from that. And it seems like we're incorporating that in the strangest way possible; though I'm left to conclude that from best guesses, as we don't get clear answers here.
I'm talking about the setting. The book takes us into space, where humanity has developed interstellar travel and is exploring and colonising space. And it's happening twenty years from now. Now, we get no explanation for how this is happening, and I'm left to assume as The Predator is being included as canon here it means humanity did some super fast backwards development from the Yautja tech we got in that film.
Whilst I can readily believe humanity using alien tech to leap forward and get a few extra rungs up the ladder it feels ridiculously too soon in this book. I had to go back and check that I hadn't misread the date more than once.
There are two points in time that we concentrate on here, the first is 2041, where a ship has landed on a distant planet and the humans are busy establishing a small colony. It's here that we get the important backstory for our central character, Theta, and we come back to these events several times over the course of this first issue.
The second time, the present for the book, is 2056. So, in 2041 humanity has already developed space cruisers, is colonising planets, and has functioning AI's to help them. Folks wear cool jumpsuits, and have sci-fi guns. In 2056 the only thing we hear about is of colonies already closing down and moving on, places where you can pick up parts for old ships and gather supplies that have become remote locations with few populating it.
I know I keep going back to this point, but this all feels way too soon for this kind of stuff. Not only does it feel hard to believe that humanity will have advanced hundreds of years in less than two decades, but that fifteen years later space and colonies are treated like places that have been around forever. It feels like Ed Brisson has created a lived in sci-fi future like the Alien universe, but has set it too soon. If this was 2156 I wouldn't have an issue with it, but this is a time where I'd still be alive and wandering around (fingers crossed I will at least) and that just feels too jarring for me and keeps taking me out of the story.
The story itself is fine, though nothing super special yet. The book begins with two Yautja fighting on an alien planet, with one of the warriors being bested and executed. However, the other pulls off its mask to reveal a human woman, who seems pissed that she just killed the alien hunter. It turns out, this woman, Theta, is hunting Yautja, searching for a very specific one that killed her entire family when she was a girl.
Having forged her own battle armour, complete with bio-mask with dreadlocks attached to it, she's been going through the galaxy trying to learn what she can about the hunters, searching for her target. She's killed at least a dozen of them in her search, but her ship is close to trashed, and she desperately needs supplies. Trying to make her way to a remote supply facility, her ship crashes in the frozen wastes, a hundred miles from her target.
The introduction is kind of short, and the stuff that happens in the present is simple enough to get us introduced and get us invested in the story, with flashbacks to Theta's childhood trauma getting us invested in the character. There are few action scenes in the issue, and only a few places where we see any Yautja, and it does feel kind of light on that front; so folks hoping that we'll get dropped straight into the action will have to wait a bit it seems. But it's a decent enough start to the story, with some good art and strong visual designs.
Issue one of Predator is fine. And that feels about all I can say for it at this point. Quite often Predator comics work better as completed graphic novels where the whole story is able to be read in one, and Marvel's Alien books felt the same too. Perhaps this will be a decent month to month book, but that's still yet to be seen. As it stands, this was a fine enough comic, though one that I felt had a very serious flaw that dragged the quality down for me.
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