Predator 2 #1 - Dark Horse Comics

PREDATOR 2 No. 1, February 1991

As comic book adaptions of a film go, Franz Henkel’s narrative for Issue One of “Predator 2” certainly appears to be a well-written conversion of Jim and John Thomas’ original screenplay. Indeed, the thirty-sheet storyline almost follows the 1990 American science fiction action flick to the letter, only deviating during the narrative’s more sedentary, dialogue-heavy sequences in an effort to maintain the different medium’s fast-paced momentum.

Such truncation might well cause some confusion to those readers unfamiliar with the plot of director Stephen Hopkins’ $57 million worldwide grossing motion picture. But it certainly means that there is rarely a pause of more than a half dozen panels between Lieutenant Mike Harrigan either shooting someone with a formidable-looking firearm or physically manhandling them ‘back at the Palace.’ Furthermore, a lot of the missing conversations are actually quite cleverly shoehorned into the grizzled street veteran’s numerous thought boxes, so despite the actual discussions not being shown, the information exchanged during them is carried over onto the printed page. 

Alongside this admirable attempt to keep his audience’s experience as exhilarating as possible, the author also does a tremendous job in capturing the sheer raw energy and sense-shattering violence of the movie’s opening. True, the lead protagonist’s fear of heights probably doesn’t carry over as well as it does on the silver screen, nor perhaps the desperate urgency needed to get Officer Johnson off to hospital before he bleeds to death. But the sheer gratuitous nature of Harrigan’s actions, as well as those of the deadly extra-terrestrial, are quickly established in any perusing bibliophile’s mind within moments of both characters making an appearance; “He wasn’t talking to me! Whatever he was hallucinating -- it must have been pretty ugly.”

Probably this comic’s biggest selling point though, besides it licenced tie-in to “the lowest-grossing film in the Predator franchise”, lies with Dan Barry’s pencils, Randy Emberlin’s inks and Lurene Haines’ colours. Between them the trio create a seriously grisly representation of (future) Los Angeles in 1997, with the artistic team’s visual recreation of both the alien hunter’s infra-red vision and invisibility cloak’s deactivation proving particularly effective – especially during poor Danny Archuleta's fatal exploration of Colombian drug dealer Ramon Vega’s “posh penthouse”.

Script by: Franz Henkel, Pencils by: Dan Barry, and Inks by: Randy Emberlin