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Predator: Life And Death (Trade Paperback)

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    Ian Jane
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  • Predator: Life And Death (Trade Paperback)




    Predator: Life And Death (Trade Paperback)
    Released by: Dark Horse Comics
    Released on: October 12th, 2016.
    Written by: Dan Abnett
    Illustrated by: Brian Albert Thies
    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…

    Now Paget and her troops must battle an enemy they can't see while balancing the objectives of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation with the necessity of getting off the planet alive . . .”

    Paget and her team figure that what they've just stumbled upon is XT - xenotech - but they don't know exactly what it is or what it's for and won't until they can study it. Paget wants to secure the landing zones first, but assures scientists Lorimer andSinger that they will examine it once they've prepped. Only Paget realizes they're being watched.

    And then they find a survivor named Goode. He's threatened with jail time and says he'd welcome it, after all he's survived…. something. Things that weren't there he calls them. He just wants to get off this rock and get back to somewhere safe. Paget figures since they found the XTthat maybe Goode's not nuts after all. She has a team set out to try and find if any of Goode's crew has been left alive, while she and Lorimer argue about what to do with the XT they've discovered. Lorimer is towing the corporate line to a ridiculous degree but Paget is keeping the safety of her crew in mind. She puts Singer in charge of putting a team together to examine the XT once the search and rescue marines are back safely from their mission.

    When she learns that three soldiers are MIA she radios the search and rescue team to tell them to keep an eye out and be careful, but what she really means to tell them, unofficially, is that there AREhostiles in the area. Paget hears gunfire in the distance, her people firing at something, and then two men, Melville and Captain Humble,appear out of nowhere.

    The chase is on. Paget and the survivors are racing across the compound. She's trying to get in radio contact with Sergeant Roth but there's no response, at least not at first - eventually she gets him on the other end and he warns her of 'hard contact.' We cut to Ross and his team as they open fire on the team of Predator hunters that are currently laying waste to anyone and everyone around them. They manage to kill one of the hunters, but the others… they simply vanish, seemingly into thin air. As they regroup they realize there were casualties on both sides, three Marines are dead.

    The other crew, they took out two hunters, maybe more, but after the skirmish they took their wounded into the jungle. After the various crews communicate they realize that, yeah, they held their own but they really don't know how many hunters are out there or when or where they'll strike next. The survivors that Paget's team rescued from the base, they explain what they know - the ship that they found on the surface of the planet doesn't belong to the Predators, but they sure seem interested in it. Lorimer, towing the Weyland-Yutani Corporation company line, accuses the team of illegal salvage attempts and orders Paget's crew to secure the ship. The company owns it. She takes him aside and lays it down - the Predators took out ninety percent of the team based on this planet and a bunch of her Marines. If they start preparing the ship that the hunters want to return to Weyland-Yutani, the Predators will come for them and probably kill them all. Lorimer isn't having it - he says the Marines can outpoint and out gun the Predators, and she's legally mandated to do what he tells her.

    And so the Marines split into two teams - one to head into the jungle to flush out the hunters and the other to get the ship ready. Essentially, they prepare for war.

    We won't spoil the ending but Dan Abnett has done a pretty great job of building this mini-series' finish into the tie in that will launch Prometheus:Life And Death next week while presumably closing out the Predator related chapter with some pretty great action. The plot moves quickly but not without a decent amount of exposition and it works quite well. The characters, at least the central ones, are well established here and what they do and how they do it, well, it makes sense in the context of where this is all going.

    Brian Albert Thies,with some help from colorist Rain Beredo, does a fine job with the art. He's got a sketchy sort of style but he conveys action really well and as such, the firefights and combat sequences are nicely rendered and plenty exciting. He also has a knack for drawing the alien spacecraft, both the interior and exterior of the massive ship,which makes the ending all the better. This was, all in all, a pretty entertaining read and the building blocks for the future Life And Death mini-series' have been effectively set in place.





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