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Predator: Life And Death #1

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    Ian Jane
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  • Predator: Life And Death #1



    Predator: Life And Death #1
    Released by: Dark Horse Comics
    Released on: March 3rd, 2016.
    Written by: Dan Abnett
    Illustrated by: Brian Albert Thiess
    Purchase From Amazon

    A text piece on the credits page tells us that “this story takes place approximately forty-three years after the events in the motion pictures Aliens (and just a year after the events in Fire And Stone). From there? One with the first chapter in a new seventeen issue run through the Aliens/Predator/Prometheus universe that Dark Horse Comics has been doing such a fine job of expanding over the last year.

    The story begins aboard the rapid-response combat ship Hasdrubal, a member of the United States Colonial Marine Corps fleet. The ship is orbiting planet LV-797 when Captain Paget asks a man named Lorimer what sort of trouble he's going to get them into. Lorimer tells her that this is a 'standard compliance investigation' but she's not buying it, she's got thirty-lives under her command that she wants to protect.

    They talk about the mission, how Weyland-Yutani owns LV-797, named Tartarus, how the planet is scheduled for terraforming and how a rival corporation is striping the planet before the colonization fleet can get to the planet. That explains why the USMC are to check it out. She gets Sergeant Roth and his team at the ready soon enough, they're all set to drop - but finding an LZ will be tough as there is some unusual static interference messing with the ship's systems. Regardless, Ancane, Freebody, Jhalil, Singer, Chimo and a few others suit up and ship out with Roth in charge and Lorimer along for the ride.

    They re-reroute the landing but otherwise it goes off without any trouble. Once on the planet's surface, the first squad of Marines notes that it's hot and infested with bugs, which doesn't really seem to surprise anyone. The same can't be said of the excavator units that they find shortly after, covered in foil tarps, the kind that just might have wreaked havoc with the ship's sensors. But were they really hiding from the USMC ship or is there maybe something else here that might pose a danger to whoever was responsible for setting all of this up? And then the second squad finds a wrecked Lander Tractor unit that looks like it was brought down by some sort of energy blast - with one survivor, a man named Laurence Goode. He tells them they shouldn't have come here…

    The first issue of this crossover series is off to a good start, hitting all the right notes - a team of USMC characters land on a strange planet and bad stuff happens. This isn't necessarily new ground for a Predator or Aliens type of story, but it's an effective way of setting stuff up and Abnett's a good writer, no reason to think that as this progresses it won't go into some interesting directions. By the time we get to the last couple of pages, it starts to become clear how this Predator story ties into the Aliens and Prometheus storylines and, possibly, into the previous Fire And Stone crossover event. There's definite potential here and while we don't get loads of character development we get a lean, efficient story that delivers plenty of action and some nice shocks too.

    Brian Albert Thiess, with coloring work from Rain Beredo, does a great job with the artwork. The pencil work is nicely detailed and never too exaggerated while the design work incorporated into the look of not only the Predator(s) but the landscape that serves as the story's backdrop is impressive. Dark Horse is making this available with a few different covers from the likes of Dave Palumbo, Sachin Teng, Doug Wheatley and Chris Warner (paying tribute to a certain issue of Dark Horse Presents).

    All in all, a pretty satisfying start to the new run. Of course where it goes from here is what matters but this first chapter delivers.






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