Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties: Plot & Characters

Published: November 1997 to February 1998
Writer: Chuck Dixon
Art: Rodolfo Damaggio (pencils), Robert Campanella (inks)
Colors: Pat Garrahy and Lee Loughridge
Lettering: John Costanza
Cover: Rodolfo Damaggio and Robert Campanella
Publisher: DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics
Format: Four-issue miniseries
Setting: Gotham City, Wayne Tower and the Batcave

Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties is a four-issue crossover written by Chuck Dixon, penciled by Rodolfo Damaggio and inked by Robert Campanella, published by DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics between November 1997 and February 1998. It followed the first Batman vs. Predator series and Batman vs. Predator II: Bloodmatch, and brought a Predator father and his son to Gotham City during a summer heatwave. It was the third chapter in the run of Batman vs. Predator encounters, and it pulled Robin, Alfred and Mr. Freeze into the hunt.

Plot Summary

A Heatwave Of Headless Gangsters

A Predator with cut-short dreadlocks seizing a tattooed Eightballs gangster in a blood-red alley, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

The story opened on the tenth straight day over one hundred degrees in Gotham City, as the heat pushed the street gangs into drive-by shootings. A red pickup of the Eightballs gang sprayed a corner with bullets, crashed during its getaway and left its crew firing an Uzi into the dark, unaware that something invisible was watching them. A hunter wrapped in its cloaking device dropped among the gangsters, seized a tattooed gunman and killed four of them in seconds, tearing out their heads and spines with its wristblades before vanishing again.

Sergeant Harvey Bullock, Renee Montoya and detectives Moses and Murphy arrived to find the bodies, joking grimly about youthful offenders and a turf war over Major Crimes cases. From the top of a rooftop water tower, Batman and Robin watched the police work below. Robin assumed the killings were just another gang feud, but Batman had seen this kind of butchery before and quietly hoped to God he was wrong about who was responsible, because he did not want to face that answer with his young partner beside him.

Memories Of The Buffalo Hunt

A Predator in its bridge tower lair beside hanging human skulls and spines, holding an old revolver, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

The killer returned to its lair high in a Gotham bridge tower, a bare room hung with human skulls and spinal columns that served as its personal trophy room. There it turned an old six-shooter over in its claws, a weapon that carried its own story and showed how the hunters treasured firearms taken from human prey. Around its neck hung a gold medallion etched with an alien symbol, the same token that Batman would use to end the hunt.

The revolver recalled a hunt on the Old West plains, where cowboys rode down a stampeding buffalo herd and one of them shot his own horse when it fell. The Predator struck down the riders, claimed the cowboy's gun and stood over the dead man and his horse with a curved blade raised while the herd thundered past. Back in the present, two of the creatures crouched on a bridge cable above the passing Batmobile, and Robin asked whether Batman had heard something like a howl or a roar from the dark steel overhead.

The Medical Examiner's Report

A cloaked Predator leaping across a Gotham rooftop, its shape barely visible against the tiles, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

At the city morgue, medical examiner Colleen Flanagan and the bald pathologist Mort told Batman that the gangsters had died before they were decapitated. The wounds were seared and cauterized, as if made by a weapon with four serrated parallel edges, and the heads and spinal cords had been torn out with incredible force. In the Batcave, Alfred noted that the blade had left no trace of metal behind, and he and Batman agreed that the visitors had come back to Gotham.

Batman decided to keep Robin in the dark about the creatures, while the mechanic Harold worked on the Batmobile in the cave. Across town, Mr. Freeze and his crew of Chilly, Snowy, Frost and Fridge broke into the main vault of the Gotham Trust and Securities, using a subthermal freeze gun to drop the vault door to absolute zero before Fridge shattered it with a sledgehammer. Above the street, a cloaked shape leaped from roof to roof and watched the robbery unfold.

Freeze On Finlay Boulevard

A Predator crouched among the bodies of Mr. Freeze's crew while the startled Mr. Freeze stands behind it, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

The bound guard Daniels answered a routine security call but left out the code phrase, so the police surrounded the bank while Freeze dreamed aloud of Bimini, the Caymans or Baffin Bay. His armored van rammed through the cordon, and his freeze gun turned Finlay Boulevard into an ice rink behind it. The Batmobile gave chase with all-wheel drive and road spikes, until a blast from the absolute-zero gun froze its windshield and cameras and sent it crashing on Stewart Street.

With the car towed for repairs, Batman sent Robin to search for Freeze's hideout somewhere refrigerated. The crew was counting its money in the cold room of a frozen foods warehouse when two Predators burst through the wall, killing Fridge, Frost and the others with blades and a plasma caster. Mr. Freeze stood untouched among the bodies, his cold body invisible to their heat vision, and the hunters peered into his goggles before leaving him for a prey that could actually fight back.

A Code Of Honor

A Predator with a skull on its armor crouching over a dead Spanish conquistador in a jungle clearing, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

Detectives found four dead bodies in the warehouse and most of the Gotham Trust haul left behind, the heads and spinal cords removed like someone boning a fish. Freeze fled into the heat by the rail yards, where his body began to steam, while Commissioner Gordon met Batman on a rooftop and complained that it had hit one hundred degrees. Batman told him they had a visitor, and Robin overheard enough to demand the truth, until Batman admitted that the murders were tied to the most dangerous cases he had ever faced.

Explaining the hunters to Alfred, Batman described a race that followed a strict code of honor and tested itself against the most dangerous quarry it could find. His words recalled armored Spanish conquistadors hunted through a jungle centuries earlier, their muskets useless against a cloaked hunter that left one of them dead beneath its claws, a skull lashed to its armor. Batman believed the creatures had been coming to Earth for centuries, and that defeating this latest "sportsman" would only encourage another of its kind to try.

The Jaeger Over Gotham

A cloaked Predator lit up in green radium paint as it leaps past a neon theater marquee and lands among startled pedestrians, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

While Robin and Oracle sifted through flying saucer stories and conspiracy websites about hunters from another planet, Batman decided to take a more aggressive approach. He had Alfred pose as a goateed truck driver to collect the AH-99 Jaeger attack helicopter, a WayneTech prototype police gunship stored at the Bristol warehouse, so that Batman could steal his own aircraft. Catwoman, meanwhile, was casing the Weinstad Diamond store when she glimpsed the shimmering form of a hunter crossing the Zesti Cola sign.

Batman found the cloaked hunter on the gunship's infrared and incandescent sensors and opened fire with the chain guns, loaded with rubber safety rounds at four thousand rounds a minute. He then sprayed the creature with an epoxy paint laced with radium, which neutralized its stealth abilities by making it glow on his screens and to the naked eye as it ran past the marquee of the Orpheum. The painted Predator fled into a blind alley behind Killingers, and Batman forced the Jaeger down between the walls after it.

Crash In The Alley

A Predator clinging to the side of the Jaeger police helicopter as it swings between Gotham buildings, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

The Predator refused to stay trapped, leaping out of the alley and landing on the body of the Jaeger, where it clung to the fuselage with its claws and rode out every turn Batman made to shake it loose, trimming the rotors and correcting his pitch. Batman fought the controls as the aircraft pitched and lost lift, while Alfred listened helplessly over the radio and asked whether he required assistance. Within moments the gunship was falling between the buildings with the hunter still riding it down, its strength holding firm against the spinning airframe.

The Jaeger exploded against the side of a building, and Batman escaped in a burst of flame, telling Alfred he was busy and would get back to him when he had landed. He drifted down under a parachute past the moon, admitting that he had made an error in judgment, while a gathering crowd watched the wreckage burn. High on a rooftop, the hunter raised a long spiked blade beside a second, smaller figure, and Batman realized that Gotham might have more than one visitor.

Robin Finds Freeze

Two Predators crouching on the steel girders under a bridge above a city street, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

Sergeant Bullock and Montoya cornered a stolen Creamy Dreamy ice cream truck, only to find its driver lying limp and Freeze long gone once the truck's power died. In the cave, Alfred and Robin calculated that Freeze could last perhaps twenty minutes in the heat, which narrowed his hiding place to a quarter-mile radius around Sheldon Park. Robin guessed that there was only one place Freeze would feel comfortable, the cold storage vault of an old furrier's shop dating back to 1947.

Inside, Mr. Freeze ambushed him among the racks of coats, but Robin knocked him down with his staff and tied him up for Batman. Freeze admitted that the creatures had killed his gang like animals yet looked right through him, as if he were not there. When Batman ordered Robin to take time off and spend it as Tim Drake, the teenager swung away angrily, never noticing the two Predators crouched on the girders beneath the elevated line and following his every move.

The Trap In Wayne Tower

A decloaking Predator writhing as blue electricity crackles over its body inside Wayne Tower, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

Batman decided he needed a place he could control, and Bruce Wayne used a fake inspector, Archie Nicholls of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to have Lucius Fox evacuate Wayne Tower for a night. The inspector, played with little subtlety by Alfred, claimed that a flesh-eating streptococcus bug had settled into the air conditioning system. Tim, meanwhile, went to the mall with Ariana Dzerchenko and their friend Ives and agreed to see old science fiction movies at the Bristol Drive-In.

As the hunters watched the city from a bridge cable, Batman set up a projector on the Wayne Tower roof, its lens tuned to a spectrum the creatures could see, and waited in a new insulated suit chilled to minus ten degrees Celsius to hide his body heat. A hunter climbed in through a window, and Batman struck it with a rocket-propelled tether that wrapped around its armor. He sent enough volts through the line to drop the Predator to the floor, and its electrified cloak flickered away.

A Borrowed Voice

The father Predator gripping Batman in his insulated armor as it reveals that its partner is hunting Robin, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

Batman demanded to know where the hunter's partner was and punched it across the face, sending blood flying from its mandibles. The Predator answered by throwing him across the atrium, and the two fell over the railing in a tangle of armor and dreadlocks. As they plunged toward the garden below, the creature spoke in Robin's voice, repeating his words about knowing the dangers when he took the job, and Batman understood that the partner was hunting his young friend.

The hunter seized Batman's helmet and crushed him against the wall, but the coolant hissing from his insulated suit burned its hand and made it recoil. Batman radioed Alfred that Robin was in grave danger and that the second visitor had chosen him as its quarry. Alfred called Tim's car phone at the drive-in just as a cloaked shape climbed over the screen, and Tim ordered his friends out of the car moments before a plasma blast tore up the ground beside it, then sped off in the Redbird with the hunter close behind.

The Ab-Zero Cannon

Batman in his insulated armor firing Mr. Freeze's ab-zero cannon from a tripod at a Predator lunging through the laundry room curtains, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

In the empty tower, the wounded Predator pulled off its mask and gasped in the air, then tracked Batman's trail of footprints to a men's room and blasted the door apart. Batman had already slipped away, punched through a wall and lured it into the building's laundry room, where he waited among the sheets with a weapon on a tripod. He taunted the hunter to come and finish him, calling it an ugly bastard as it stepped through the hanging sheets of the Wayne Tower laundry.

Batman explained that he had learned the creatures' weakness from Mr. Freeze, the fact that they did not like the cold, and so he had borrowed Freeze's ab-zero cannon from the police impound. A white jet of absolute cold caught the hunter full in the chest and froze it solid where it stood. Batman loaded the frozen father, an older champion in the mold of the Elder Predators, into the Batmobile and raced through the subway tunnels toward the Batcave, where its son had followed Robin's car by a transmitter.

Battle In The Batcave

The young Predator aiming an old pistol among the stalactites of the Batcave, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

The proximity alarms sounded as the young hunter entered the cave, and a blast from its plasma caster toppled the Batcave's mechanical dinosaur as Alfred dragged Robin to cover. Alfred produced a family heirloom shotgun loaded with double-ought shot, fired at the hunter and led Robin toward the bridge over the underground stream. There Robin took the gun, promising not to kill anybody, and fired it into the cave roof to stir up its colony of bats, which swarmed the creature and knocked it off its feet.

The hunter recovered and, in one more case of Predators using human weapons, turned an old pistol on Alfred and shot him in the shoulder. Robin attacked with his staff, but the young hunter caught him by the ankles and held him upside down, while Robin thought he was going to die in a drive-in movie. Then the Batmobile roared out of the subway tunnel with the frozen father strapped to its hood, and Batman told the creature that the game was over and its side had lost.

Father And Son

A Yautja ship flying away over the lights of Gotham City under a full moon, art from Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties

Batman held up the gold medallion he had taken from the father and told the young hunter that it would understand what it meant, that the hunt was finished. The Young Blood dropped Robin, and Batman told it to cut its losses, take its father and go home. Afterward he explained that it had been an initiation, a rite of passage in which Robin was meant to be the young hunter's first solo kill, while the father took Batman as his own prey because the hunters saw Batman and Robin as a father and son like themselves.

Alfred summed it up as each of them being a challenge equal to the hunters' skill, and Batman agreed that they had been trophies to be hunted and collected, but more of a challenge than the hunters had ever anticipated. The young Predator carried its frozen father down the subway tracks, and Batman reflected that they had turned on the hunters, defeated them and humiliated them. A Yautja ship rose over the lights of Gotham, and Batman hoped to God that this final insult would keep them from ever returning.

Key Characters

Batman / Bruce Wayne tracked the two hunters through Gotham, stole his own WayneTech gunship, laid a trap in Wayne Tower and froze the father with Mr. Freeze's cannon.
Robin / Tim Drake was kept in the dark about the visitors, captured Mr. Freeze on his own and became the young Predator's chosen prey at the drive-in and in the Batcave.
The young Predator was the son on his first hunt, who followed Robin to the Batcave, shot Alfred and was sent home with his frozen father and the gold medallion.
The father Predator was the older champion who brought his son to Gotham, killed Freeze's crew, rode the Jaeger down and was frozen solid in Wayne Tower.
Alfred Pennyworth posed as a truck driver and a safety inspector, fought the young hunter with an heirloom shotgun and was shot in the shoulder.
Mr. Freeze robbed the Gotham Trust, survived the slaughter of his crew because the hunters ignored him, and was caught by Robin in a furrier's cold storage.
Chilly, Snowy, Frost and Fridge were Freeze's henchmen, killed by the Predators in the frozen foods warehouse.
Oracle helped Robin search the internet for information on the murders and the hunters.
Catwoman was casing the Weinstad Diamond store when she glimpsed the painted hunter, and decided to stay in and rent a movie.
Commissioner James Gordon met Batman on a rooftop during the heatwave and learned that a visitor had returned.
Sgt. Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya investigated the gang killings, the warehouse massacre and the stolen ice cream truck for the Major Crimes Unit.
Detectives Moses and Murphy joked about youthful offenders over the bodies from the Eightballs killings.
Colleen Flanagan and Mort were the medical examiner and pathologist who found the seared, cauterized wounds.
Lucius Fox was persuaded to close Wayne Tower for a night by a fake health inspector.
Harold was the mechanic who repaired the wrecked Batmobile in the Batcave.
Ariana Dzerchenko and Ives were Tim's friends who went with him to the mall and the Bristol Drive-In.
The Eightballs were the street gang whose drive-by shooting drew the first Predator attack.
Daniels was the bank guard who skipped the code phrase and brought the police to the robbery.
Tom and Ziggy were Creamy Dreamy ice cream drivers whose truck Freeze took over to stay cool.

Editions

DC Comics and Dark Horse published the four issues with cover dates from November 1997 to February 1998 under the cover title Batman versus Predator III, with covers by Rodolfo Damaggio and Robert Campanella. The series was collected as a trade paperback in June 1998 under the full title Batman versus Predator III: Blood Ties, with a new cover by the same artists, and in 2017 it was reprinted with the first two stories in the DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Batman vs. Predator collection, with a cover by Mike Mignola. Batman later faced the hunters again in Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator.

Behind The Scenes

Chuck Dixon was writing Robin and Detective Comics at the time, which explains the focus on Tim Drake, his civilian friends, Oracle and a supporting cast of Gotham police officers drawn from the Batman titles. Rodolfo Damaggio and Robert Campanella gave the hunters a classic film look, and the story added flashbacks to an Old West buffalo hunt and a jungle hunt of conquistadors to show how long the creatures had visited Earth. Its father and son pairing turned the hunt into a mirror of Batman and Robin, with the young hunter's rank depending on a first solo kill.

Conclusion

Batman vs. Predator III: Blood Ties is the 1997-98 miniseries by Chuck Dixon and Rodolfo Damaggio that brought a Predator father and son to Gotham to hunt Batman and Robin as a matching pair of trophies. It mixed a heatwave, a Mr. Freeze robbery, a stolen gunship and a trap in Wayne Tower with a final battle in the Batcave. Its ending, with Batman freezing the father and sending the son home with a gold medallion, closed the original trilogy without the Dark Knight taking a life.