Aliens vs. Predator: Eternal: Comic & Lore Overview
Aliens vs. Predator: Eternal is a four-issue Dark Horse Comics miniseries written by Ian Edginton, drawn by Alex Maleev, and published from June 1998 to September 1998. Gideon Suhn Lee, a techno-baron in near-future Tokyo, had stayed thirty-eight for seven centuries by eating the hearts of Yautja. Reporter Rebecca McBride followed a massacre in Chamibia to his tower. A Predator tore out Gideon's heart in a subway under Ginza, and Rebecca shot the adult Xenomorph that had escaped his lab.
Plot Summary
Li Yatsen Finds The Burning Ship
Li Yatsen sold mountain villagers a cure mixed from snake blood, ginseng, and urine. Seventeen people died from it. The rest drove him onto a cliff, smashed his chest, and left him to bleed out in the cold. Li had little use for gods, but he prayed anyway. A Predator ship then fell out of the sky in flames over the mountain. Centuries later, Gideon Suhn Lee said the dead hunters aboard that wreck had saved his life, and that the metal and technology in the hull had built his fortune.
Predators End The Chamibia Peace
In the present, Gideon sent Major Cabot and Cabot's hunting team into Chamibia, a former French colony thirty years into a war between the government and communist rebels. Prince Laurent, grandson of former King Francois, had come out of exile in Berlin to negotiate the first peace in that war. Rebecca McBride and her cameraman, Earl, were the only news crew that went in, working for Independent News in London. Gideon told the team the civilians were not their concern, and that the hunters would come if the fighting was hot enough.
The rebels broke the ceasefire. Invisible attackers then killed Prince Laurent, the rebel soldiers, and Captain Okiri's men. Earl found a spear tip that weighed almost nothing before something killed him too. A United Nations team pulled Rebecca out burned and bleeding. Above the ground, the Yautja called the zone clear, with every person on it dead, and took their masks off in the heat before they passed out. Cabot brought the result back to Gideon as another paid hunt.
Gideon Shows Cabot The Ship
Three months later the hunters had not returned to Chamibia, and Gideon was out of patience. He walked Cabot through a trophy wall of masks and skulls and told him the hunt was not for trophies, war, or politics. Gideon said he was thirty-eight, and that he had been thirty-eight for seven centuries. He used the story of Subotai, a samurai who ate a Predator heart and lived past two hundred, to explain the method. Gideon had been living on that heart and the Yautja blood in it, and he intended to go on.
The tour ended at the wrecked ship from the mountain. Doctor Kishiro had cracked a lock on a cargo pod. The pod held organic sacs. Cabot recognized the sacs as eggs. A Facehugger came out of one and fastened onto a technician in a hazard suit while Cabot shouted for Gideon to get the lab crew out. Gideon had Kishiro lock the specimens down and watch them until the next day.
Eggs Hatch Inside The Tower
The embryos stopped feeding on the hosts and floated free in their chests. The hosts' vital signs then spiked together. What came out were not Predator young. Cabot told Gideon to kill the chestbursters while they were still small. Gideon refused, because he wanted whatever the new animals could be made to produce. The lab walls were lined with a Predator alloy that was almost impossible to break. The hunters broke that alloy anyway.
Yautja hit the tower looking for the embryos. Their targeting lasers crossed the lab. They would not kill an unarmed person, so Doctor Kishiro survived by stepping between them and Gideon. The hunters left once the embryos were the prize they had come for. Gideon's public account of the blast was a minor lab accident, and the families of the dead signed compensation the same hour. He told Cabot he was living on time borrowed from those hunters, and he ordered another hunt: kill them, and bring them down.
Rebecca McBride Reaches Tokyo
Rebecca came back to London with the spear tip and no tape. The other reporters dropped her. She gave the metal to Julian, a rich techno-pagan whose father was a stockbroker. Julian went by Crab, and he matched the spear metal to a company Gideon Suhn Lee owned. Rebecca sold what she owned, flew economy to Tokyo, and used Crab's otaku contact, a hermit who would only deal by computer, to dig into Gideon.
Fifteen people had been snatched and cut apart within a block of Gideon's tower. The first body turned up the day after the explosion. Unit K, a covert wing of the Japanese secret service, was already on the street, and no one Rebecca approached would talk about Gideon. The otaku, calling himself Lazarus, refused to send the files by modem and demanded a meeting. Rebecca was drugged on the street and woke in Gideon's home. Gideon was Lazarus. The friend Crab thought he had found was the man Rebecca had come to expose.
Gideon wanted Rebecca to write his life, because death was in his bones and the hunters were no longer giving up their hearts on his schedule. He had paid for her Chamibia visa when no one else would. He had left the spear tip for her to find. He had ordered Earl killed and her reputation destroyed so she would have nowhere to go but the story. Cornell, one of Cabot's men, was already dead, the third loss from a team of five or six. Gideon prepared the reserve and told Cabot they were going hunting again, with Gideon along this time.
Gideon Duels In The Subway
One adult Xenomorph from the tower was already dead, killed by the hunters. The other had snatched a salaryman off a bullet-train platform. Gideon wanted that survivor alive, as bait for the Yautja. His people cleared the subway with a fake warning about hallucinogenic gas. Cabot took point. Rebecca went with them. They found the salaryman already dead, staked out the way a goat is staked for a tiger.
The hunters could see the squad on infrared. Rebecca turned on the station's hot water so the steam would spoil that sight. Gideon drew a sword and called the fight the old way. He took the heart from a fallen Predator. A second hunter closed on him while he was holding it.
A Predator Takes Gideon's Heart
The hunter tore the heart out of Gideon Suhn Lee while Gideon was still holding the heart he had taken from the fallen Predator. The adult Xenomorph was still in the station. Rebecca took Cabot's gun and shot that Xenomorph at contact range. Acid and the blast burned her. Someone carried her up to street level at Ginza station.
Rebecca woke in a hospital a week later. Unit K questioned her every day. She did not give them the story. The government seized Gideon's personal assets and never found the Predator archive or the ship. A posthumous payment for the biography he had wanted made her rich. She set aside Earl's half and used the rest to fund Crab and his friends. She went back to London still looking for where the hunters came from, and for what they wanted.
Key Characters
- Gideon Suhn Lee was Li Yatsen, the peddler the mountain villagers tried to kill. He built a Tokyo fortune on the crashed ship and stayed thirty-eight by taking Yautja hearts, until a Predator tore out his own heart in the subway.
- Rebecca McBride was the Independent News reporter who survived Chamibia, traced the spear tip to Gideon, and shot the adult Xenomorph after Gideon died. She set Earl's share of the biography money aside.
- Major Cabot led Gideon's hunting team in Chamibia and in the tower, and his gun was the one Rebecca fired in the subway.
- Earl was Rebecca's cameraman. He found the spear tip in Chamibia, and Gideon had him killed so Rebecca would have no evidence and no career left.
- Doctor Kishiro opened the cargo pod, ran the containment after the eggs hatched, and lived through the tower attack by standing unarmed between the hunters and Gideon.
- Julian went by Crab. He matched the spear metal to a company Gideon owned, and the otaku he sent Rebecca to meet was Gideon, using the name Lazarus.
Editions
Dark Horse published the four issues from June 24, 1998, to September 23, 1998. Glenn Fabry painted the covers. Phil Amara edited the series, and Jeremy Perkins was the designer. A trade paperback collected the four issues in September 1999. The same story later filled part of Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 1. Marvel collected it again in Aliens vs. Predator: The Essential Comics Volume 2, released on August 5, 2020.
Behind The Scenes
Ian Edginton wrote the miniseries after Aliens: Rogue and Aliens: Purge. Alex Maleev, then known for The Crow, drew the interiors. As a boy in Bulgaria, Maleev watched Alien with no sound through a shop window, because the town had no video players. Perry McNamee and Dark Horse Digital colored the pages, and Clem Robins lettered them. Glenn Fabry painted the issue covers and the collection cover.
Conclusion
Aliens vs. Predator: Eternal is Ian Edginton and Alex Maleev's 1998 Dark Horse miniseries about Gideon Suhn Lee. It runs from a burning ship over a mountain, through the Chamibia massacre and the eggs in his tower, to a subway under Ginza. The comic ends with Gideon's heart gone, the adult Xenomorph shot by Rebecca McBride, and the Predator ship still hidden from the government that seized his fortune.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Avp Comics
