Predators Comics Boot Up Film’s Sci-Fi Mercenaries

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Dark Horse Comics’ Predators titles clear the killing floor for the film of the same name, due in July. But can the franchise that Arnold Schwarzenegger fired up in the ’80s regain its heat in a new millennium with a mercenary mind?

“There can be a million Predator stories, but the creation will always endure,” said David Lapham, co-writer of Dark Horse’s Predators prequel series, the first issue of which launches Wednesday. “It’s bigger than even that first film.”

Lapham and Marc Andreyko’s pulp prequel sets the table for director Nimród Antal’s Predators, using the kind of tense mercenary gamesmanship more routinely found in war films and documentaries than in spacey sci-fi blockbusters. Screen the preview panels below and you’ll even find the obligatory Blackwaterreference. The franchise could use that kind of topical disaster capitalism to back up its been-there-done-that chess matches involving soft human targets and hard-core interstellar killers.

“Mercenary heroism is always culturally ascendant,” said Paul Tobin, writer of Dark Horse’s Predators film adaptation, out July 14. “What we see as mercenaries might change from pulp heroes to detectives to gangsters to whatever. But the theme of the lone man against all odds, and breaking all the rules, is always the basis for action-oriented pop culture.”

Lapham and Andreyko’s Predators prequel arrays the franchise’s bloodthirsty chessboard, using Guilherme Balbi and Gabriel Guzman’s strong but subtle pencils as a weapon. The narrative provides the back story of Royce, the film’s mercenary anchor (played by a beefed-up Adrien Brody), as well as divulging a tale that picks up where the Robert Rodriguez-produced movie leaves off.

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