Alien vs. Predator: Thrill of the Hunt
Alien vs. Predator: Thrill of the Hunt is a Dark Horse Books graphic novel written by Mike Kennedy and drawn by Roger Robinson, with a cover painting by David Michael Beck. Dark Horse dates the book October 6, 2004. Shane Burroughs and his older brother Charles reached an unnamed colony 238 light years from home, on the first planetfall in 114 years after the Big Deletion. A surveillance team had a living Yautja hunter in a holding room. Adult Xenomorphs were under a stepped pyramid in the jungle, Charles killed the hunter, and a Yautja ship destroyed the shuttle Russell Curtis. The survivors were on the ground at the end, and Alien vs. Predator: Civilized Beasts follows them eight months later.
Plot Summary
The Hunt
On the dropship, Shane Burroughs argued with his brother Charles about hunting. At a shareholder meeting the year before, Charles had called hunting life at its sharpest, and Shane repeated that line. The hunt they were talking about was a party in the jungle, a tall Yautja in front with a spear and a net of skulls on his chest, and more hunters in the brush behind him.
An adult Xenomorph closed on one of those hunters, and Xenomorph acid cut through the armor across his chest. The hunting party was destroyed before Lambda Exponential reached the planet. A surveillance team later found one survivor of that party at the blast site.
Planetfall
Charles Burroughs brought Lambda Exponential down onto a jungle world for the first planetfall in 114 years. Shane, his younger brother, was on the dropship and was afraid. Before the Big Deletion there had been about 250 colonies, and seven of them had survived. Someone had built an intelligent virus as an information weapon, and the virus infected every data system it could reach. The networks stopped, and people spent a century getting their machines to work again. Charles and Shane spoke as if that repair was finished.
The colony was 238 light years from home, far enough that a failed venture meant starving there. Charles put the landing forward as a new age of expansion, with society back online and its history being learned again. Volcanoes stood under the approach, and the ground looked better than Earth from the window. Bill Faulkner, the security chief, had moved the landing closer to the stretch of jungle he wanted the investors to see. He had hosted a satellite program called Thrill of the Hunt back in the 90s, and he issued locators before anyone went into the brush.
Mac was assigned the hotels and golf courses that were supposed to follow the prefabs. Jill Hauser, a xenozoolologist with the colony development office, came down with Charles and Shane. Biting bugs had broken out around the camp, the survey had recorded quakes, and drilling charges were suspended in case the crew had set one off. Charles did not want news of the quakes to leave the landing party.
The Captive Hunter
Faulkner took the brothers into a holding room at the camp. A surveillance team had found the hunter while checking a blast that was not one of theirs, and someone on the approach had seen the blast zone on the way in. The Yautja was alive under the lights, without his armor. Jill Hauser took him for wildlife rather than a monster, and Faulkner took the planet as a place full of them. Wreckage at the blast site looked as if it might have been a ship. The camp planned to move the hunter up to the orbiter, where the research equipment was better than anything on the ground. Shane had not been told about the find. The venture had been underway for 18 months, and Charles did not change the colony plan because of the hunter.
In the holding room the hunter's mask was off and his armor was gone. A colonist held the mask up against the green wall and looked at how the metal was built. Before Faulkner sent anyone back into the cage, the crew pumped mood-stabilizers into the air, a dose meant to drop a dozen horses, and the cage was locking when they went in.
The Hunter Escapes
The hunter broke out of the room. He had acted helpless and made no attempt to communicate, then killed Speirs, a valued employee, when the door was open, and took Domenic, a friend of Shane's, as a hostage. Faulkner wanted the body for a trophy room. Shane went into the jungle because Domenic's locator continued to move. Charles had come to the colony to hunt, and Jill went with the party.
The Jungle
The hunter carried a hostage through the trees, and the trail he left glowed after dark. Faulkner would not make camp while the glow lasted, and he would not let the party stop. Charles and Jill were with Shane, who had followed Domenic's locator out of the camp. The hunter had been baiting them the whole way, drawing the group deeper into the brush.
Xenomorphs Attack
Charles, Shane, Jill, and Faulkner walked into adult Xenomorphs in the trees, and Xenomorph acid hit Jill. She recognized the creatures from the Sagoro report while Charles fired into the swarm. Faulkner fell back and left the others to fend for themselves, and what was left of the hunting party ran for the camp.
Loren Sagoro, a cryptozoologist, had left pre-Deletion files on colony killings from more than a century earlier. The files described man-sized creatures with claws, tails, and acid blood, plus claims that someone had tried to turn them into weapons and cross them with humans, and that extraterrestrials had built the pyramids. Faulkner had read those files before the hunt and called them ghost stories. He classed the creatures as animals, and he did not expect them to stop Lambda Exponential. He had planned to come to the colony either way.
Charles went back out and left Shane to get the investors off the planet. Shane was the younger brother, and Charles wanted him on the business, not on a second hunt. Faulkner pressed the other risk. If Jill filed her report, she could shut the colony down, and a hundred thousand Lambda Exponential employees would be out of work. Shane followed his brother into the jungle anyway.
The Temple
Charles, Shane, and Jill found a stepped pyramid in the rock, with a lit opening above it and small figures in that light. The lights inside the temple were on when the three of them went in. A microwave signal from inside was not a comm frequency the camp used, and the pattern read as an alarm. An orbital map marked the Lambda Exponential hauler, and a second ship was closing on the planet. Charles took that map as proof that Jill had been right, and that Lambda Exponential were the trespassers.
Xenomorph Queen
The chambers held adult Xenomorphs, and the Xenomorph Queen came through a broken wall in a cloud of dust. Charles was ready to add carpet bombing to the budget and let the casinos pay for it. An explosion tore through the room with Charles, Shane, Jill, and Diaz inside. Diaz was alive afterward, and Charles pulled him clear of the rubble.
Charles wanted Jill's report stopped before anyone left the cave. He put a rifle in Shane's hands, sent him out, and meant to bring the temple down. Jill took the place as an archaeological discovery, and Shane would not let his brother kill her. Outside, the hunter came off the rocks in his armor. Charles fired and put him down in a spray of green blood. Charles described the shooting as protection for the investment, then stood over the dying hunter and ordered him off the world.
The Shuttle
A self-destruct explosion went off in the jungle before Charles, Shane, and Jill came out of the rock. The three of them walked back into the prefab camp, and Charles had the crew call the orbiter for a shuttle. Russell Curtis left the Lambda Exponential hauler and was warned of an obstruction in the flight path. A Yautja ship was there. The shuttle blew apart in the sky over the camp, and the people on the ground watched the fire come down through the trees. Jill decided not to file her report. The survivors had no ride off the colony.
Key Characters
- Shane Burroughs was the younger brother. He handled the guests and the books for Charles's colony, went into the jungle after Domenic, and would not let Charles kill Jill.
- Charles Burroughs ran the Lambda Exponential venture. He led the hunt, shot the captured hunter outside the temple, and called for the shuttle that the Yautja ship destroyed.
- Jill Hauser was the xenozoolologist on the dropship. She classed the hunter as wildlife, recognized the Sagoro files when the acid hit her, and was with the brothers when the shuttle was destroyed.
- Bill Faulkner was security chief, and he had hosted Thrill of the Hunt on a satellite feed back in the 90s. He held the hunter, wanted a trophy, and had dismissed the Sagoro files before the Xenomorphs reached the camp.
- The hunter was the Yautja the surveillance team brought in after a blast that was not theirs. He killed Speirs, took Domenic, and died under Charles's rifle outside the temple.
- Mac was with the landing party. Charles assigned him the hotels and golf courses that were supposed to follow the prefabs.
- Domenic was Shane's friend, and the hunter took him out of the holding room as a hostage. Speirs was a colony employee the hunter killed in that same breakout.
Continuity
Thrill of the Hunt is the first half of a two-book story, and Civilized Beasts continues it eight months later, after Russell Curtis was destroyed and the camp was stranded. Both books are set in the late future of Alien Resurrection, with the novel Aliens: Original Sin. Alien: Sea of Sorrows and the novels after it are set further ahead.
The Big Deletion is the wipe named in this book. An intelligent virus took the data systems, about 250 colonies were cut down to seven, and the first new planetfall came 114 years later. Civilized Beasts is where that wipe splits the colonists from illegal synthetics. In the earlier comics, humans met Xenomorphs again after Alien 3, and in Aliens: Earth Hive the creatures overran Earth. Resurrection treats those outbreaks as forgotten. The deletion is how these two graphic novels account for that gap.
Editions
Dark Horse Books published Alien vs. Predator: Thrill of the Hunt as an original graphic novel. It runs 96 pages in a softcover of about 5 1/4 by 7 1/2 inches. The publisher's listing dates the book October 6, 2004. A press release on June 10, 2004 had scheduled it for August 11, beside the film Alien vs. Predator (2004). David Michael Beck painted the cover, and Roger Robinson drew the interiors. The sequel is Alien vs. Predator: Civilized Beasts, the 2008 graphic novel by the same writer and artist.
Behind The Scenes
Mike Kennedy wrote the story. Roger Robinson pencilled the pages, and James Pascoe inked them. Grafiksismik colored the book. The title page prints the lettering credit as Michael D. Thomas. David Michael Beck painted the cover. Dark Horse's listing names Chris Warner as editor and Keith Wood as designer.
Dark Horse scheduled the graphic novel beside Alien vs. Predator (2004) and placed the colony long after that film's hunt in Antarctica. In Alien: Resurrection, General Perez says Ellen Ripley died trying to wipe the Xenomorphs out, and that for all intents and purposes she succeeded. The Big Deletion is the information virus in this graphic novel. It wiped the networks, including the records of Xenomorphs and Yautja, so the colony sits in that same late future, where those records are gone. The stone temple on the colony belongs to that later stretch. Dark Horse's solicitation called David Michael Beck a Society of Illustrators award winner for the cover painting. Civilized Beasts followed in 2008.
Conclusion
Alien vs. Predator: Thrill of the Hunt is Mike Kennedy and Roger Robinson's 2004 Dark Horse graphic novel, with a cover by David Michael Beck. It puts Shane and Charles Burroughs on an unnamed colony 114 years after the Big Deletion, with a captured hunter in the camp and adult Xenomorphs under the temple. The comic ends with Charles killing that hunter, a Yautja ship destroying Russell Curtis, and the camp left on the ground.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Avp Comics
