Last year, Dark Horse Comics breathed new life into the Alien, Predator, and Prometheus franchises with their Fire and Stone series of interlacing stories. That revitalization carries over into their new, seventeen-issue opus, Life and Death, which takes place a year after Fire and Stone and forty-three years after Aliens. Despite a few missteps, Fire and Stone was enlivening as a fan of the different franchises. They even made interesting again my least favorite of the bunch, The Predator.
Which brings us to Predator: Life and Death #2. Dan Abnett, the writer, does something very fun and puts a group of Colonial Marines into the world of the Predator. It’s essentially like watching the testosterone-fueled marines in James Cameron’s Aliens face off against the Predator. Once again, they come across the crescent-shaped Prometheus ship. (How many times is this thing going to be rediscovered?) The Marines are working for Weyland, so they have a myriad of objectives they have to accomplish, one now being survival.
The book is colorful in personality and fun in its violence. When chaos erupts, it becomes that much more fun – everything you’d want in a Predator story. My hope is that as it goes along, the characters will spread out and bounce around like they did in Fire and Stone. We’re already seeing a few really interesting ones float to the surface.
Stick around, this could get interesting . . .
