Buddy Wilcox was the mechanic at the center of Predator: Kindred, a four-issue Dark Horse series by Jason R. Lamb and Scott Tolson. As a boy in 1958 he watched a Predator kill his father in the woods outside Fleener Creek, Oregon, and he believed for decades that his own birthday wish had caused the death. When the same hunter returned to town, he put on homemade Predator armor and went into the forest to face it. He wounded the creature, killed the escaped murderer Jimmy McCutcheon and finally laid his father to rest.
Biography
Early Life
Buddy Wilcox grew up in Fleener Creek, Oregon, the son of a strict father who wanted to make a man out of him. In 1958, on his ninth birthday, the two went camping in the woods outside town, where Buddy brought back a few rabbits and had his first hangover. By the campfire his father cleaned his rifle and scolded him for bringing a horror comic, complaining that the boy was a wimp. Buddy later admitted that he had wished for his father to die that day, and he carried that wish with him for the rest of his life.
That night a noise came from the brush, and his father took his rifle and went to scare off what he thought was a coyote. Left alone at the fire, Buddy went after him and found a Predator standing over the body, its blades dripping with his father's blood. The hunter took his father's skull as a trophy, but it spared the boy. Buddy stayed in the woods for three days until hunters found him, and the town blamed the death on a bear in what became known as the Wilcox killing. He never told anyone what he had seen, and for years he believed that his birthday wish had killed his father.
Mechanic In Fleener Creek
Decades later, Buddy worked as a mechanic at the garage in Fleener Creek and was known around town as a Vietnam veteran. He was married to Brenda, and the couple had two young children, a son named Peter and a daughter named Lynne. At the breakfast table he was a gentle father who never raised his voice, telling Brenda that nobody wanted to get yelled at, especially kids, and that he had not liked it either when he was a child. He kept a locked door in the basement of the family house, and he never told his wife or children what lay behind it.
Peggy And Rod Dennison
Peggy Dennison, who worked at the garage, was regularly beaten by her husband Rod, an unemployed drinker. After one of his attacks Buddy held her while she cried and told her that nobody deserved to be a punching bag. He urged her to get help or get out, warning that the marriage would ruin her life if she did not end it one way or another. While he spoke, his thoughts turned to the night in the woods, and the old images of the Predator and his father's screaming face came back to him.
Rod Dennison later caught Buddy alone, accused him of having an affair with his wife and beat him, mocking him as a war hero. Buddy did not fight back and went home with a black eye and a bandaged face. The next morning his children asked what had happened to him, and Brenda pressed him to sit down and have breakfast with the family. Instead he went to the basement door, opened the padlock and disappeared into his hidden room, leaving his family upstairs to wonder what he did down there.
Questioned About Rod Dennison's Murder
Early the next morning, Sheriff Kelly Mathis and her father Ted came to the Wilcox house while Buddy was in the shower. He answered the door in a towel, and Kelly told him that there had been trouble at the Dennison place during the night and asked him to get dressed. When he asked whether Peggy was all right, she told him that Rod Dennison had been murdered. Brenda came down the stairs to find out what was happening, and Buddy went with the sheriff to the station to answer questions about the killing.
At the station, Kelly pointed out that Rod had beaten Buddy only days earlier, and she asked him what had really happened to his father in 1958. For the first time Buddy told someone the truth, admitting that he had seen the creature that killed his father. He told her that he had needed his father as someone to look to for strength, and that he guessed he had found him. Kelly realized that the same hunter had returned to Fleener Creek and that Buddy was the only person in town who had faced it and lived.
Attack On The Sheriff's Station
After Rod Dennison was found skinned in the woods, a crowd of armed townsmen came to the sheriff's station, where Buddy was with Kelly. They had heard about the killing and about the old Wilcox case, and they demanded that the sheriff arrest him as the murderer. Kelly told them that Buddy was not a suspect, and her father Ted Mathis stepped in to stop the argument when one of the men blamed him for failing to solve the case thirty years earlier. The standoff ended when the Predator crashed through the roof of the station and killed several of the men.
In the confusion of the attack, Jimmy McCutcheon, the leader of the escaped killers, slipped out of his cell and walked away into the night. Ted had his ribs broken and the mayor was injured in the attack. Brenda had already taken the children to stay with a friend in Hamilton, so Buddy returned to an empty house. Having seen the creature again with his own eyes, he decided that the time had come to stop waiting and to go into the woods after it himself.
Preparing To Face The Predator
Behind the locked door in the basement, Buddy had built a shrine to killing. Its walls were covered with newspaper clippings about murders, massacres and mysterious deaths, including the Condo Killers, the Zodiac Killer and the Holocaust, around a framed portrait marked with the letters RIP. A suit of samurai armor stood in one corner, candles burned on the workbench, and knives, guns and a rifle lay among his tools. Buddy had spent years in the room preparing for the return of the creature that took his father.
When Brenda came home and found him in the room in red war paint, with a necklace of teeth and a spear, she asked what he was doing. Buddy told her that the thing that killed his father had come back and that he was going to kill it. Brenda reminded him that his father had been killed by a bear and begged him to sit down and talk to her. He replied that nobody could help him and that there was nothing to talk about, and he strapped on the homemade armor with its clawed wrist blades and row of knives.
Buddy told Brenda that his life with her and the children had been a dream of a normal life, and that it was now time to wake up. She asked about Peter and Lynne and warned him that she and the children would not be there when he came back, and she begged him not to go if he loved them. He put on a mask modeled on the face of a Predator, with dreadlocks of his own, and walked out of the house into the woods to hunt the creature.
Fight With The Predator
In the forest, Kelly had found the hanging trophies of the hunter and arrested Jimmy McCutcheon, who welcomed the Predator as a god and offered it the sheriff as a sacrifice. The Predator arrived carrying the skull of Buddy's father, and Buddy arrived at almost the same moment. As soon as he saw the creature and the skull, he threw himself at it with his blades. During the struggle Jimmy grabbed a gun and shot Kelly in the shoulder, while Buddy and the hunter fought among the trees.
Buddy fought the Predator at close quarters, slashing at it with his wrist blades while the hunter answered with its own. He managed to drive a blade into its arm, but the creature was far stronger and knocked him to the ground. His mask came off in the struggle, and the hunter struck him in the face and left him bleeding from the mouth. Buddy got up each time and went back at the creature with his blades and knives, while Kelly and Jimmy traded shots nearby among the trees.
During the fight the Predator began to repeat the words of Buddy's father in his own voice, promising to make a man out of him and saying that it had not brought him up there to read comic books. The words stopped Buddy for a moment as he remembered the night at the campfire. The hunter lifted him off the ground by the wrist, but Buddy drove a blade into it and made it scream. Standing over the fallen hunter with his knife raised, he heard it call his attack kid's stuff.
Bleeding its yellow blood from the wounds Buddy had given it, the Predator broke off the fight. It walked away to its ship and left Earth, leaving Buddy alive in the woods for a second time. Afterward Buddy remembered his family at the kitchen table, his children telling him that they loved him and Brenda saying the same. He also heard her plea not to do this and his father's old promise to make a man of him, and he went after Jimmy McCutcheon.
The Fight With Jimmy McCutcheon
While Buddy fought the hunter, Jimmy McCutcheon had dragged the wounded Kelly into the lake and tried to drown her. When the Predator left, Jimmy begged it not to leave him and called it his father. Buddy caught him at the water's edge and drove his wrist blades through his head, dedicating the kill to his own father. Kelly then emptied her revolver into the body, and Buddy sat down against a tree with his blades still dripping as she stood over him.
Three weeks later, FBI Director Timothy Gray announced that McCutcheon, three of his accomplices and several agents had died in a botched escape near Portland. The announcement made no mention of the Predator or of the fight in the woods near Red Ridge, and the town kept the matter quiet. Kelly still had nerve damage in her hand from the gunshot and was back at work in the sheriff's office. Buddy burned the hidden room in his basement, and Brenda, who had come home with the children, agreed to try again with him.
Return To His Family
The Predator had left the skull of Buddy's father behind in the woods. In the rain, Buddy dug a hole in the forest and put his homemade armor and wrist blades into it from an old Air Force bag. He held the skull close to his face, told his father that he loved him and placed it in the grave with the armor. He set down a can of beer beside the grave, thanked his father, and filled in the hole before saying goodbye to him for the last time.
Personality And Traits
Buddy was quiet, gentle and patient in daily life, a father who never shouted at his children and a friend who tried to help Peggy escape an abusive marriage. He let Rod Dennison beat him without fighting back. Under that surface he carried decades of guilt over his birthday wish and his father's death, and he channeled it into an obsession with killing that he hid from his family. When the hunter returned he was willing to give up his marriage to face it, but he chose to bury the past and return to his family once it was over.
Skills And Equipment
Buddy was a strong and experienced mechanic and a Vietnam veteran, and he spent years preparing in secret for the return of the hunter. He built his own copy of Predator armor, with leather and metal plates, a mask with dreadlocks, wrist gauntlets carrying twin blades and a belt of knives, and wore red war paint and a necklace of teeth. His hidden room held a spear, rifles, handguns, a sword and a suit of samurai armor. Against the creature he relied on his blades and knives rather than guns, and they were enough to wound it and to kill Jimmy McCutcheon.
His armor made him one of the human Predators of the franchise, people who armed themselves like the hunters in order to face them. The clawed gauntlets imitated the wrist blades of the Predator, and the mask was shaped after its bio-mask. Buddy never had any of the creature's technology, and he faced an opponent with a smart disc, a spear and a ship using only weapons he had made himself. After the fight he buried the armor with his father's skull.
Behind The Scenes
Buddy Wilcox first appeared in Predator: Kindred #1, published by Dark Horse Comics in December 1996, and he appeared in all four issues of the series, which ended in March 1997. Jason R. Lamb and Scott Tolson wrote the series, Brian O'Connell penciled the first two issues and Roger Petersen the last two, and Bruce Patterson inked all four. Dave Nestelle colored the series, Steve Dutro lettered it and Phil Amara edited it, while Igor Kordey painted all four covers. Petersen drew the fourth issue, in which Buddy put on his homemade armor and mask and fought the hunter.
Dark Horse collected the series in a Predator: Kindred trade paperback in December 1997 and reprinted it in Predator Omnibus Vol. 3 in June 2008. Marvel later included it in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 in December 2022. The final issue was dedicated to three fathers and sons, a theme that runs through Buddy's story from the campfire in 1958 to the burial of his father's skull. The Predator Timeline lists both the 1958 hunt and the present-day return of the hunter to Fleener Creek.
Conclusion
Buddy Wilcox was a mechanic and Vietnam veteran in Fleener Creek, Oregon, who watched a Predator kill his father in the woods in 1958 and blamed himself for decades. When the same hunter returned, he took up the homemade armor and blades he had prepared in a hidden room and fought it in the forest. He wounded the Predator, which left Earth, and he killed the escaped murderer Jimmy McCutcheon at the edge of the lake. Afterward he burned his shrine, reconciled with Brenda and buried his armor and his father's skull in the rain.
Appearances
- Predator: Kindred #1-4 by Jason R. Lamb, Scott Tolson, Brian O'Connell and Roger Petersen (Dark Horse Comics, 1996-1997)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
