Back when Dark Horse Comics were making Aliens and Predator comics the two franchises would cross over with other properties a lot. The most famous one being the two of them combining together, a marriage that felt so perfect it's just become an accepted thing that the two creatures live in the same universe; and will probably do so forever going forward. Another group that would often find itself going up against them were the DC heroes. Batman would famously kick these crossovers off when a Yautja came to Gotham looking for a hunt, and was bested by the Dark Knight. He would go on to have two more crossovers with the Predator, as would Superman, and Superman and Batman together, and the Justice League. These crossovers varied in quality quite a bit, but when they were good they were a ton of fun.
Predator Vs. Wolverine begins in the modern day, where Wolverine has been badly injured. He's beaten, cut all over, and it looks like pieces of him have been blasted away from the Yautja's plasma caster weapons. Trying desperately to escape the creature hunting him, he's making his way through the remote Canadian wilderness. As the creature hunts him, he remembers back to a time in his younger days, when he first encountered the creature.
The bulk of the book deals with this encounter, taking readers back to 1900 Alaska, where a young Logan is surviving out in the frozen wilderness. Living off the land, he's found a level of peace for himself. However, when a prospector named Tucker comes to him for help in a local settlement, telling Logan that a gang of bandit have kidnapped his son, he agrees to help bring the child home. Meanwhile, a lone Yautja hunter has comes to Alaska, looking into the vanishing of one of his kind. Finding the body frozen in the ice, killed with weapons from the local Athabascan people, it decides to try hunting in the area itself.
It's then, however, that the Yautja attacks, and a deadly battle between Logan and the alien begins. The creature is clearly more powerful than the young Logan, but thanks to some trickery and a friendly bear, he's able to defeat the creature. Or so he thinks. The issue then jumps forwards in time to closer to the present, when Logan was part of Team X. As he and his team travel into the South American rain forest on a mission, little do they know that the Yautja from Logan's past is there to hunt them; and he brought some friends along with him.
One of the things that this book seems to be doing well is using the long lifespans of both of the titular characters in order to create one of the longest running Predator narratives that we have. Most of the time when a Yautja goes up against a foe you have perhaps a day or two at most for things to play out. Here, however, we're getting a story that's spanning decades, more than a century, as what could have been a simple Yautja vs mutant fight gets to become a generations long vendetta between these two fighters. With the Yautja appearing in the present day segment its clear that Logan will manage to keep besting the creature, so it's going to be interesting to see how that alters the monster, makes him use different tactics and weapons, and likely see a fierce vendetta form. It's something that I don't think we've really seen before.
The book has multiple artists working on it, with each era of the story having its own artistic team. Initially, when I saw that the book had such a big art team on it I was a bit nervous about picking up the book, as often shifting art style can lead to a bit of a disconnect when reading for me. However, the choice to split them up in the way that the book does means that it's not really much of an issue, and that each segment has its own flavour, despite not shifting art style in any ways where things look jarringly different.
Greg Land is a name that I've heard grumblings about online in regards to his art, mainly due to accusations of tracing in his work. I don't know enough about that to really comment on it, but will say that his segment of the book at least didn't look too bad. The Yautja looked kind of off in places, with him being portrayed as much thinner and taller than most I'm used to, having a very lanky appearance; though that could have been the intention for that character. If Land if tracing his work for the book it's at least a million miles better than Salvador Larroca, who makes it incredibly obvious that his work is barely disguised tracing; and who puts himself in most books he works on. The fact that he worked on the first Alien series from Marvel does make for an amusing thought that Marvel seems to put their tracers on their Alien and Predator IPs.
Despite not minding Land's work on this book I much preferred Andrea Di Vito's work on the Team X part at the end. With it looking like that time period will be the main focus of the second issue I'm looking forward to seeing what they're able to do with that segment of the story. The fact that most of Team X that appear in these flashbacks are alive in the future and thus, survive their encounter with the Yautja doesn't feel like it diminishes the possibility for some brutal and bloody moments as most of them have healing abilities of some kind, and thus can still end up being messed up pretty badly by the alien hunters.
With a strong first issue this series looks set to be an interesting and well put together crossover for these two popular franchises. Wolverine is perhaps one of the best characters to do this with, but I doubt he'll be the last if this proves to be a popular series.
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