Batman vs. Predator II: Bloodmatch: Plot & Characters
Batman vs. Predator II: Bloodmatch is a four-issue crossover written by Doug Moench, penciled by Paul Gulacy and inked by Terry Austin, published by DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics between December 1994 and March 1995. A young Predator came to Gotham City to beat the champion who had defeated its predecessor, just as a drug lord put a price on Batman's head and seven hired killers came to collect. It was the second chapter in the run of Batman vs. Predator encounters, and it added the Huntress and a pair of Enforcer Predators to the hunt.
Plot Summary
The Contract On The Bat
The story opened during a Gotham City heatwave, at midnight on the South Street wharves, where Batman rowed up to a storage pier to watch a drug deal. Johnny Panetti, one of drug lord Manny Terraro's men, sold a case to two Colombian buyers and shot them both when they opened it and found it empty. Batman burst in, knocked the gun from Panetti's hand with the words "I hate guns" and took down his crew, only to find that someone else had already dealt with the men outside. That someone was the Huntress, who pinned Panetti's hand to a post with a crossbow bolt.
The two vigilantes argued about methods, with the Huntress insisting that Terraro had to be stopped by any means and Batman telling her he did not hunt people, he stopped them. Under questioning, Panetti revealed that there was a contract on the Batman, worth the kind of money that attracted the best killers in the world to a free-for-all competition. The police later reported the double murder as more fallout from Terraro's turf war, and Panetti told them only that Batman was dead meat, like a hunted deer. Neither Batman nor the Huntress knew that one of the hunters drawn by the bounty was not human.
A Challenger From The Stars
Far above the Earth, a young Predator sat in its ship and replayed a recording of Batman's fight with the hunter from the first story, calling the Dark Knight the champion of round one. The recording showed how the beaten hunter had killed itself and how its clan had given Batman the sword it used, as told in Batman vs. Predator. After that defeat the hunters had vowed never to hunt in Gotham again, but this young Predator broke the vow to beat the human Champion for itself, and that broken vow was the reason two Enforcers would later follow it to Earth. The young Yautja wanted the same prize, and the News 2 late edition soon reported a bright meteor over Gotham and an object descending toward the Palisades beyond Gotham River.
The hunter's ship came down in the wooded Palisades, where the Predator stalked a deer before turning its attention to the city across the water. Helena Bertinelli, the Huntress by night, was a teacher whose student Jamie Simmons had died of an overdose of Terraro's drugs, and she vowed to bring the drug lord down even if she had to hunt him to the ends of the earth. Meanwhile the sniper Marks took aim at the Batmobile from a rooftop, but the cloaked Predator reached him first and left a headless body for a pigeon keeper to find.
The Bat-Signal Is Stolen
At a Terraro hideout, two of his men, Frank and Lou, read a dossier from a friend in the Bureau that profiled the seven assassins chasing the contract. The list named the sniper Marks, the Sicilian knife artist Scarlatti, Ronnie the Rat from Cleveland, the Hong Kong killer Song Sung, the British gunman Redmount, the stuttering bomber Twitch and Demon-Man, an ex-wrestler and biker from the West Coast Satans. That night the Predator struck the roof of police headquarters, killing four officers with curved throwing blades, its spear and its wristblades, and tearing the Bat-Signal from its mount.
Commissioner Gordon realized that the hunter collected trophies and wanted to lure Batman with the Bat-Signal, and he was hurled down a stairwell trying to stop it. The Huntress tracked Frank to his office above a pool hall near headquarters, where the invisible creature stunned her, studied her and threw her aside as unworthy prey. It then crashed through the skylight and killed Frank at his desk, painting the bat symbol in blood and hanging the bodies upside down, the work Batman recognized from the See-Through Slasher. As Batman arrived, the stolen Bat-Signal lit the sky from the Palisades.
The Tree Of Heads
Batman drove the Batmobile across the river, guessing that Gordon had brought a portable signal to call him to another crime, while the commissioner lay delirious in hospital trying to warn him that the signal was false. In the woods he found the light on a rocky slope, smashed it with a thrown batarang and sensed that something was wrong. Hanging from a nearby tree were seven human heads in nets, at least three of them from the murdered police officers, the start of a new trophy display.
Batman understood that the creature was another of the same kind as the first, harvesting heads and using Gordon's signal to lure him onto its hunting ground. From the trees it called out to him in Gordon's voice, one of the borrowed voices that showed off its talent for mimicry. Then it attacked with its wristblades, and Batman found that this hunter was bigger than the first, younger and more bloodthirsty, fighting without the cold method of its predecessor. A wristblade swipe and a heavy log left him dazed in the Palisades clearing.
Strung Up In The Palisades
Batman tried to fight back with a broken log, but the Predator battered him with the same timber until he collapsed into darkness at its feet. While he lay unconscious, the explosives expert Twitch crept up to the parked Batmobile, planted a bomb in a suitcase and ditched one car while waiting to detonate the other, dreaming of the five million dollars from Terraro. Batman woke hanging upside down from a branch of the trophy tree, his head throbbing and his vision blurred.
Below him the Predator crouched on the ground and repeated "champion" and "round one" while it shaped a sculpture from stone, one that looked like a broken Batman mask. It then rose with its wristblades drawn, apparently ready to take Batman's head as its prize, and he swung on the rope to dodge the first slash. The Huntress had followed the signal into the woods, still dizzy from the pool hall, and recognized the thing from the roof. Her first crossbow bolt, set alight, flew past the Predator's face and into the tree.
Huntress To The Rescue
A second bolt cut Batman's rope, and he fell free just as the hunter turned on the Huntress, who remarked that she had thought Terraro's friends were ugly. The burning tree seemed to mesmerize the creature, giving Batman a chance to land a blow with a rock, but it recovered and lunged with a roar. The two vigilantes ran for it while the Predator fired its shoulder cannon, the blast blowing them through the air in a flash of fire and stone.
Twitch watched the fight from the rocks above the Batmobile and decided that a double kill, the Batman and the monster, would earn him a double payment from Terraro. When the Predator stepped onto the car, he pressed the detonator and the Batmobile exploded in a huge fireball. Batman and the Huntress had already dodged aside, and the blast missed the hunter as well, leaving Twitch staring at a monster that walked out of the flames unhurt. The Predator then turned toward the hill where the bomber was hiding.
Twitch Pays The Price
Calling out "Go, go" in a stolen voice, the Predator fired its plasma weapon again and blew Twitch off his feet, ending the bomber's part in the contract. The hunter left the burning wreck of the Batmobile behind and went to claim its new trophy. Batman and the Huntress escaped through the woods to her red sports car, and Batman wondered aloud whether they had met an alien headhunter. She pointed out that falling rocks from the sky had once been thought impossible too, until an entire science was formed around meteorites.
As they drove across the bridge into the city, the Huntress showed Batman the blood-spattered file folder she had taken from the pool hall, the Terraro dossier on the hitmen and one woman hunting him. She offered to work together, arguing that three children had overdosed on Terraro's drugs in two months, but Batman refused and told her to let him out. He disappeared into the night, leaving the Huntress convinced that the drug lord was hers. Neither yet knew that the Predator now held another head as a trophy.
Terraro's Assassin With Honor
At his glass-walled penthouse pool, Manny Terraro met Song Sung, the Hong Kong assassin who demanded half her payment in advance. When Terraro mocked her, she beat his bodyguards Bruno and Sal, threw one into the pool and held a knife to his throat, explaining that she was not a thief but an assassin with honor who wanted the money because she was the best. The frightened drug lord paid her on the spot, and she left to start her own hunt for the Batman.
In the Batcave, Bruce Wayne licked his wounds and studied the dossier on the seven hunters who passed for human, the ones who killed for money and not for trophies. At the same time a second Yautja ship was flying toward Earth, and News Radio soon reported listener sightings of another meteor over Gotham. In the Palisades, the young Predator stood under the moon with the severed head of Twitch, while Lt. Frank Stocker visited Gordon in hospital and vowed to get Batman the help he needed.
The Enforcers Rise From The River
In issue three, Batman ran a timed obstacle course in the Batcave while Alfred held the stopwatch, and he decided to face the hunter without his armored suit, relying on silence, stealth and speed. The Predator cleaned the skulls of Marks and Twitch for its collection, while the Huntress led two of the remaining hitmen into a dark alley. There Redmount and Ronnie the Rat mistook each other for their target and killed each other, with Redmount shot and Ronnie strangled by wire.
Federal agents tried to see Gordon in hospital, but Stocker and Officer Renee Montoya sent them away, and a government official later asked the police to stand aside for a secret team. Batman tested a scrambler with Alfred that could short out the creature's cloaking device, and the radio reported a second meteor over Gotham River. A ship splashed down in the water, and two Enforcer Predators waded out of the river with electricity crackling over their armor, armed with a combistick and sent to stop the rogue hunter.
Terraro's Last Meeting
The Huntress followed Song Sung from Terraro's club to his mansion, where the drug lord waited in a carved chair and the assassin fought her. Batman crashed in and told Terraro that he had been looking for him, but the Predator broke through the wall, uncloaked, and impaled the drug lord with its combistick. The Huntress shot it with her crossbow and Batman lured it out onto a closed causeway, while she knocked out Song Sung, tied her up and called the police about Terraro's corpse.
On the causeway, Batman's scrambler revealed a cloaked hunter, and he then found a dead Predator in different armor and realized there was more than one. The surviving Enforcer appeared, collected its partner's body and left Batman alone, following a code that kept it from harming him. On a nearby rooftop the young Predator held up the severed head of the slain Enforcer in the lightning, and Batman thought that, even against its own kind, it was one hell of a hunter, one of the bad bloods in a Predator vs. Predator fight.
The Trap On The Rooftop
In issue four, Alfred explained that two creatures had been sent to stop the first and that it had already killed one, leaving Scarlatti and Demon-Man as the last hired killers on a contract issued by a dead man. Batman rode the Batcycle into the city, and Demon-Man chased him through the streets firing a machine gun until Batman snagged him with a line and sent him crashing through a window. Two patrolmen watched from their car as the fight ended with the biker beaten and the Batcycle roaring away.
Gordon then called Batman on the special line to a trap at police headquarters, where federal agents in armored suits, led by Stocker, guarded a replacement signal. When the scrambler exposed a cloaked hunter, Gordon ordered them to open fire, but the wounded creature spilling green blood was the surviving Enforcer, and Batman shouted that it was the wrong one. The young Predator arrived moments later, cut down several agents with its wristblades and a throwing disc, and carried Stocker away in a net.
Inside The Hunter's Ship
Batman and the Huntress followed the power cable of the stolen signal back to the Palisades, where they found Stocker hanging upside down and swearing that the monster would pay. The Predator speared Scarlatti, the last of Terraro's hitmen, took his head and retreated into a cave whose walls had melted into the shape of its ship. Inside, the heroes cut Stocker free, only for the hatch to close and the Predator's ship to take off over Gotham with all three of them aboard.
Batman used the scrambler to see his foe, the Huntress hit it with a throwing star and a crossbow bolt, and he attacked with clawed gauntlets. The hunter answered with an energy discharge that electrocuted them both, leaving them stunned on the deck as it turned on the Huntress. Stocker drove the creature's own spear through its body, and the Predator took his head with its last strength, then stood dead on its feet. The spear struck the controls, the hatch opened and the heroes were sucked out into the night sky.
The Second Ship
The water of Gotham River boiled as the second ship, submerged there all along, burst into the air, its sensors triggered by the climb of the first. Batman caught the rising ship with his line and swung the Huntress to safety, nearly wrenching his arm from its socket before both dropped into the river. The Enforcer ship chased the hunter's craft into space and destroyed it with a beam, sacrificing itself in the blast to enforce the code of honor whatever the cost.
The government explained the flashes as a malfunctioning spy satellite, and the heatwave over Gotham finally broke with a thermal inversion that cooled the streets. Gordon learned that Stocker had been reported missing on undercover duty, while new reports of victims with frozen death-grins pointed to the Joker. Batman told the Huntress that this time it would be a man-hunt, and she asked whether that was as opposed to an alien one, while the Joker wished Gotham happy hunting. The Bat-Signal was back where it belonged.
Key Characters
- Batman / Bruce Wayne survived the bounty, two fights in the Palisades and the hunter's ship, refusing to kill even as the Predator hunted him as its champion.
- The Huntress / Helena Bertinelli was a teacher hunting Terraro after a student's overdose, who rescued Batman twice and fought the Predator aboard its ship.
- The young Predator was a bad blood hunter who came to Gotham to beat Batman, stole the Bat-Signal, killed most of the hitmen and an Enforcer, and died by Stocker's spear.
- The Enforcer Predators were two Yautja sent to stop the rogue, one killed and beheaded by it and the other shot by federal agents before its ship destroyed the hunter in space.
- Alfred Pennyworth tested the scrambler, timed Batman's training and kept him informed from the Batcave.
- Commissioner James Gordon was thrown down a stairwell during the raid on police headquarters and later directed the trap with the replacement signal.
- Lt. Frank Stocker was Gordon's aide, who joined the federal team, was captured by the Predator and killed it with its own spear before it took his head.
- Officer Renee Montoya guarded Gordon's hospital room against the federal agents.
- Manny Terraro was the drug lord who put five million dollars on Batman's head and was impaled in his mansion by the Predator.
- Song Sung was the Hong Kong assassin who called herself an assassin with honor, fought the Huntress and was left tied up for the police.
- Twitch was the stuttering explosives expert who blew up the Batmobile and was killed by the Predator's plasma blast.
- Marks was the sniper, a former CIA mechanic, who was beheaded on a rooftop while aiming at the Batmobile.
- Redmount and Ronnie the Rat were a British gunman and a Cleveland strangler who killed each other in a dark alley.
- Scarlatti was the Sicilian knife killer, the last of Terraro's hitmen, speared by the Predator in the Palisades.
- Demon-Man was a former wrestler and biker who chased Batman on a motorcycle and was stopped with a line.
- Johnny Panetti was the Terraro dealer pinned by the Huntress's bolt, who revealed the contract on Batman.
- Frank and Lou were Terraro's men who read the dossier, and Frank was killed in his office above the pool hall.
- Bruno and Sal were Terraro's bodyguards, beaten by Song Sung at the penthouse pool.
- The federal team was a secret unit in armored suits that took over the hunt from the police and lost several agents on the roof of police headquarters.
- The Joker appeared at the end, plotting new killings as the Bat-Signal returned.
Editions
DC Comics and Dark Horse published the four issues between December 1994 and March 1995 under the cover title Batman versus Predator II, with covers by Paul Gulacy. The series was collected as a trade paperback in 1995 under the full title Batman versus Predator II: Bloodmatch, with a new cover by Simon Bisley, and on June 7, 2017 it was reprinted with Batman vs. Predator and Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties in the DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Batman vs. Predator collection, with a cover by Mike Mignola. Its events follow the first Batman vs. Predator series, and Batman met the hunters again in Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties and Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator.
Behind The Scenes
Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy were already a famous team from Master of Kung Fu at Marvel, and their taste for martial arts, spy thrillers and hired killers shaped the story of seven assassins competing for one contract. Terry Austin inked Gulacy's pencils, and the colorists gave the Predator's cloak and energy weapons their bright electric look. The story added Enforcers who policed their own kind, a rogue hunter who broke the hunting code, and a ship-to-ship duel above the Earth.
Conclusion
Batman vs. Predator II: Bloodmatch is the 1994-95 miniseries by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy that sent a young Predator to Gotham to beat the champion who had defeated the first hunter. It mixed a mob contract and seven hired killers with the theft of the Bat-Signal, a tree of trophy heads, an alliance with the Huntress and two Enforcers sent to stop the rogue. Its ending, with Stocker killing the hunter and the Enforcer ship destroying it in space, left Batman alive and the hitmen dead without the Dark Knight taking a life.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers
