John Schaefer was a New York police detective and the older brother of Dutch Schaefer, whose disappearance in the jungle drew him into repeated wars with the Predators. He tracked a hunter from a sweltering Manhattan to Colombia in Predator: Concrete Jungle, fought the crew of a crashed ship in Siberia in Predator: Cold War and faced an old enemy again in Predator: Dark River. Years later he guided a team of hunters through the caves of Belize in Predator: Hunters III. In Predator: The Last Hunt, he led a camp of stranded captives on the planet Mabou in 2068.
Early Life
Schaefer grew up with his younger brother, Dutch, and as boys the two of them hunted deer in the woods behind their father's cabin, where the local boys killed for fun instead of need. Nathan Archer's novel of Concrete Jungle placed his childhood in Pennsylvania, while an Army file read during the Siberian crisis showed that he had been granted American citizenship in 1975. The same file recorded that he spoke fluent English, French and Russian, joined the New York Police Department in 1978 and made detective in 1986. Archer's books added German and Spanish learned on the streets, along with a military record.
Schaefer spent years in Narcotics with his partner, Detective Rasche, who knew almost nothing about his family beyond a brother mentioned once. When the Medellin trafficker Eschevera offered the two detectives a million dollars to back off during a meeting in the rooftop garden of a Manhattan brownstone, Schaefer threw him off the roof. Eschevera survived the three-story fall and declined to press charges, but the incident put both partners on the hit list of every dealer in the city. Their captain transferred them to Homicide before anyone could kill them, and by the summer of the heat wave they had worked together for six years.
Dutch worked in covert operations. In the novel he had risen to major in Vietnam before going freelance for General Philips on rescue missions, and the last time the brothers met, they spent a long night drinking in a bar. Dutch spoke of losing his whole team on a rescue mission in Central America, then of hunting, of being hunted and of camouflage that could make a hunter nearly invisible. Schaefer took it for drunken talk. In the comics, Dutch's last phone call mentioned a rescue mission near the Colombian border, and he vanished with his squad. Neither Schaefer nor anyone else heard from him again.
New York Heat Wave
The Heat Wave Killings
During a record summer heat wave, hotter even than 1987, Schaefer and Rasche were handling two or three homicides a shift on the streets of New York. At night Schaefer told his partner that something about the stars looked different that summer. When a report of shots fired sent them to Beekman and Water Street, Schaefer ignored an order to wait for the captain and forced his way into the building of the gang boss Lamb. Inside, the detectives found the members of two gangs hanging upside down from the ceiling, skinned like meat. The survivor, Carr, blamed Schaefer for the slaughter, fired at the detectives and escaped down the fire escape.
Captain McComb arrived with a heavily armed team, furious that Schaefer had entered the building, and ordered both detectives off the case. Schaefer suspected that the captain was hiding something. Soon afterward the killer struck an express train in Midtown, and the executives, bankers and lawyers aboard were hung in the same way as the gangsters. Schaefer went to Rasche's home in Queens to tell him about the attack, then joined him at the station. In Archer's novel, the second massacre took place on the NYPD firing range instead, and Schaefer took the deaths of the officers there personally, calling them his own men.
General Philips And The Tag
At the subway station, a two-star Army general told McComb that Schaefer might be useful if he was anything like his brother. Schaefer had not known that the general knew Dutch. Over drinks in a bar, the officer, Philips, said that Dutch had saved his life more than once and used to brag about his big brother back home. He told Schaefer that the killers liked the heat and the sport and would be gone in two or three weeks. Schaefer refused to drop the case and returned with Rasche to the building on Beekman Street, where he went into the bloodstained rooms alone.
There, a Predator dropped its cloak and smashed his gun hand. Schaefer struck its mask off with a board before the creature kicked him through a window, and clotheslines broke his five-story fall into the alley. He came out of it clutching the hunter's bio-mask, which Rasche hid from the others. That night Schaefer walked out of the hospital in his gown and took a cab to Rasche's home, where he showed his partner the device the hunter had planted in his neck. He swore to find the creature that had tagged him like an animal, and he smashed McComb's telephone until the captain called Philips an Army freelancer.
The Colombian Crater
Remembering that Dutch's last call had mentioned the Colombian border, Schaefer told Rasche to get his family out of the city and flew south. In Riosucio he hired a guide, and an old friend in the DEA supplied weapons for the ride into the jungle. On the fourth day they found an abandoned guerrilla camp that reminded Schaefer of one of Dutch's operations, and on the fifth they reached a vast crater of standing water ringed by flattened trees. It was the mark of the self-destruct that had ended the Jungle Hunter, and it told Schaefer that his brother had come this way.
That night the device in his neck burned, and Schaefer knew that the hunter had followed him from New York. He sent the guide away and armed himself with a fully automatic shotgun. The Predator ambushed him, but he saw the shimmer of its cloak and noticed its glowing blood, proof that his shotgun had wounded it. He knifed the creature's leg and ran, but it caught him at the edge of a river gorge. With his last strength he kicked the hunter over the edge, and it was impaled on a broken branch below. Back at camp, the guide spoke perfect English and radioed Philips as Decoy Niner.
Eschevera's Compound
The guide told Schaefer that he was not supposed to have killed the hunter, and Schaefer realized that he had been set up from the moment he left New York. Before the guide could deliver him to the general, gunmen sent by Eschevera shot the man dead. Schaefer woke tied to a chair with coat hanger wire in the trafficker's compound, where Eschevera, on crutches with his leg in a cast, left his man Paolo to torture him with a power saw. Schaefer broke the chair apart, overpowered Paolo with the wire and got free, planning to slip past a private army of more than a hundred men and reach Bogota.
Then the Predators struck the compound. The hunter he had killed had friends, and they tore through the cartel's soldiers while anti-aircraft guns fired into the night. A plasma blast killed Eschevera, and Schaefer ran through bullets and plasma into the jungle, where cartel gunmen caught him and planned to put his head on a post. He beat them and told them that the things hunting them did not care about cocaine. Soldiers then cut down the last of the gunmen, and Philips arrived with a helicopter. Schaefer accepted the rescue from the man who had sent him south, though the general warned that the creatures wanted only him.
Return To New York
Philips flew Schaefer north on a private jet and then by helicopter, explaining that the hunters had visited Earth for centuries, always in the heat, and that they seemed to like the Schaefer brothers. Schaefer realized that the general meant to hand him over to the creatures, because one of them exploding inside the city could destroy New York. He knocked Philips out, held the pilot at gunpoint and burst onto the heliport of the Pan Am Building with an assault rifle and a pistol. Rasche, who had escaped the general's agents with the mask and impounded weapons, disarmed the soldiers on the roof and got his partner away.
The partners hid in a storage space on the Lower East Side, where Schaefer watched cartoons and identified with the hunted animals. Outgunned by the hunters, federal agents and McComb's police, he went to recruit Carr, who opened fire the moment he walked in. The two men fought until Schaefer convinced him that something worse than any human had killed his crew. A Predator then burst in and seized Carr, and Rasche blew it apart with a police rocket launcher from outside. Through the dead hunter's damaged mask, Schaefer watched a ship fire on the buildings, and Carr offered to raise an army from the gangs if Schaefer supplied the guns.
Battle In Midtown
On Sunday, as the heat began to break, Carr returned with an army of gang members. Schaefer told them to aim at the shimmer of the cloaked hunters and punched a gangster who talked back. A rocket brought down an approaching ship over Midtown, and the gangs fought the creatures through the streets until McComb arrived with a police cordon and ordered them to surrender. A large ship then landed on the street and opened fire. A gold-armored Predator slaughtered the police, McComb was killed, a blast smashed Schaefer's mask and Rasche was hit by a plasma bolt as Army gunships closed in over Macy's.
Blind to the hunters, Schaefer had the fire hydrants opened, and the spray shorted their cloaking devices and revealed them in the street. He clubbed one Predator while Carr blasted another. A hunter lifted Schaefer off the ground, but lightning split the sky and rain began to fall, ending the heat that had drawn the creatures to New York. The Predators gathered at their landed ship, and one of them cut the tracking device out of his neck before they left. Schaefer told Philips to call off his helicopters, since the hunting season was over, and he walked out of the ruins of Midtown with his arm around the wounded Rasche.
Siberia
The Drug Bust
After the battle in New York, Rasche quit the force and moved to Oregon, but Schaefer stayed with the NYPD as a narcotics detective, keeping a framed photograph of Dutch on his desk. He laughed off Rasche's offer of a deputy's badge in Bluecreek. When an Army agent named Smithers visited his precinct office and asked for his expertise on an incident, Schaefer refused, saying that the Schaefer brothers had put in their time. He threatened the agent and wrote down the names Philips and Smithers, intending to chase the two men about Dutch on his own terms and at a time of his own choosing.
Schaefer then went undercover in a Hawaiian shirt, wearing a wire, to arrest a white-haired cocaine wholesaler called Baby in a kitchenware shop. Baby knew about the wire, and her gunmen opened fire. Grazed in the shootout, Schaefer beat one thug with a frying pan and threw him out a window, then toppled a shelf onto Baby and arrested her. A sniper working for Smithers killed her in his arms, wrecking months of casework. Schaefer brawled with the agents until they sedated him with an injection to the neck, and he was listed as missing after the sting.
Philips's Mission
Schaefer woke in an Army helicopter over New York beside Philips and Smithers, who told him that the hunters were back. A Predator ship had come down near the Assyma oil station in northern Siberia, and Philips offered information about Dutch in exchange for his help. Schaefer agreed at the training range, making clear that he owed nothing to Philips or the Army. There he mocked the plywood Predator targets, ripped an arm off one and threw it at a soldier named Wilcox, then disarmed him and put him on the ground bare-handed. The humiliation started a feud between the two men that lasted the whole mission.
At the briefing, Philips cited Schaefer's experience in New York and his fluent Russian. Schaefer mocked the team's heated Type 19D suits and Ice-Killer rifles and warned the soldiers that technology had made them soft. The squad, led by Captain Lynch, jumped into Soviet airspace from a converted stealth plane, with Schaefer joking that he had forgotten to set his VCR. At the wrecked Assyma station they found the skinned bodies of the workers, and Schaefer recognized the work of hunters who had taken new trophies. Soviet troops then captured the Americans, and Schaefer told their lieutenant in Russian that her comrades were dead.
Captured By Ligachev
Lieutenant Ligachev interrogated Schaefer, who insisted that the Americans had not hung the bodies. He showed little sympathy for the dying seismologist Sobchak, who revealed that the alien base lay seven kilometers down a canyon, and Ligachev asked him what kind of man he was. Later the two shared vodka, and Schaefer gave a cynical account of a world where nobody cared and soldiers were only numbers. He told her that the creatures did not care for the cold, and that in New York the only thing that had saved him was half an inch of summer rain.
When the Americans broke out, Schaefer grabbed Ligachev's rifle but left with her rather than with his own team. The American suits split and their rifles froze at minus seventy-eight degrees, and the Soviet troops won the firefight. The two of them set off alone for the canyon known as the Trench Of Death, while Sergeant Yashin and a Soviet squad followed. In Archer's novel, the lieutenant was named Ligacheva and commanded the guard detachment at Pumping Station 12, and she brought a bottle of Stolichnaya to her talk with the American, where the same exchange about the cold and the summer rain took place.
The Trench Of Death
A Predator killed Yashin and his squad in the canyon. Schaefer tackled the hunter, tore off its mask and punched it, telling it that New York had been better than Siberia. Its telescoping spear ran through his thigh and its wristblades cut his scalp, but he headbutted it, and the creature recognized him from New York. Ligachev killed it with her AK rifle, and Schaefer realized that it had been only a sentry and that the rest were seven kilometers away. In the novel he charged it with a sharpened Russian entrenching tool, and Ligacheva killed it by firing her AK-100 into its open mouth.
The Crashed Ship
Wearing a nametag with his name and carrying an AK, Schaefer climbed the melting ice canyon with Ligachev until the heat forced them to strip down. They found the ship lying in a melted crater, and he sorted C-4 charges and Teflon-coated depleted uranium rounds for what he called a going-away present. Inside, he realized that the hunters had raided the station for refinery parts to repair their ship. He restrained a grieving Ligachev so that they could plant the C-4, but an unmasked Predator lifted him by the throat and mimicked an order to go home. Schaefer answered that he was home and drove a blade into it.
Two more Predators arrived. A shoulder-cannon blast and a wristblade slash across the face brought Schaefer down, and a net pinned him until Ligachev's depleted uranium rounds killed one hunter and freed him. Outside, he held the detonator over a wounded Predator, but Wilcox shot it out of his hand with a laser rifle. Philips announced that his orders were to let the ship leave. Schaefer answered that the government had taken his career, his home and his brother, and he lunged for the explosives. Wilcox shot him in the back and lined up a shot at his head as he lay on the hull.
The Launch
Before Wilcox could fire again, Rasche shot him. Rasche had traced his old partner through Smithers, flown to New York and then reached Siberia with the Russians. Badly wounded, Schaefer crawled from the hull as Rasche joked that they had to stop meeting this way and told him that good friends were hard to find. Ligachev kicked the C-4 into the ship's engine, and the craft exploded in the sky while Schaefer smiled. Facing Soviet hearings, he remarked that the kid learned fast and suggested that the NYPD might find a place for her if the Russians did not want her. When Rasche teased him, Schaefer admitted that he liked her.
Return To South America
Alphabet City And Mercer
By October 10, 1996, Schaefer was working Narcotics in New York after what he called a two-week siesta in northern Siberia. He had almost given up police work, and almost everything else, but had stayed on the force because he had unfinished business. With his partner Brad, a preppy detective who had learned policing from television, he raided a crack house in Alphabet City. Schaefer crashed through the door alone, jammed his gun into a dealer's mouth, threw a thug through glass and shot a dealer who drew a revolver. He arrested only the pilot, a man named Mercer, who faced forty years in prison.
That night, after lawyers visited the prisoner, Schaefer pulled his gun on Brad to make him leave and confronted Mercer in cell ten. Mercer claimed that General Philips had recruited him in Cobija to fly a helicopter, that he had picked up Dutch and a woman after an explosion, and that Dutch had caught a worm-like infection. According to his story, Philips isolated the pilot for nearly a month and then dropped Dutch back in the jungle near the pickup point. Schaefer, who had met Philips before and had a feeling that his brother was alive, believed enough of the story to act on it.
The Jailbreak
Schaefer broke Mercer out of the precinct, kicked Brad, shot out a window and drove off in a blue sedan. Television news reported a jailbreak by a veteran detective of the Ninth Precinct. Hiding out with Mercer cuffed to a bed, Schaefer obtained forged passports under the name Trent Donahue from Enoch, a forger who owed him for standing by his kid brother. He knocked Mercer out and wheeled him onto the plane as a narcoleptic. On the flight he dreamed that a Predator tore open the exit door and spoke his name, and he fought it with a fork and a butter knife.
El Presidente's Hunt
Soldiers knocked Schaefer out with a rifle butt on the tarmac, and he woke in silk pajamas in the presidential palace, where he threw an apologizing soldier through a window. El Presidente showed him the captured guide Lopez and a tape from an earlier American team. On it, Schaefer recognized the Predator crouching on a pile of skulls as the hunter he had impaled years before. The creature had survived and gone mad. Citing an intercepted CIA file showing that Schaefer had beaten the hunters twice, El Presidente fitted him, Lopez and Mercer with ankle trackers and warned that if one escaped, all three would die.
Renegades ambushed their military transport on the road to Cobija, and Schaefer climbed out of the wreck as the fighting began. Lopez seized a renegade gunboat by pretending to be lost, and Schaefer leapt aboard and punched the gunner over the side before ordering Mercer to start the engine. The three prisoners headed upriver with their trackers in place, under El Presidente's order to defeat the creature again. When Lopez whispered that the Devil was near, Schaefer told her that it was no devil but the hunter he had fought near her El Rio Oscuro, the Dark River.
El Rio Oscuro
On the river, Schaefer dismissed Lopez's talk of the darkness beyond the shore and strung up the sixty-watt bulbs from the boat's hold, because he wanted the creature to see him. Lopez then revealed that Cobija was a military camp, and Mercer admitted that he had invented his story. The Predator attacked the boat soon after. Schaefer fought it hand to hand with a grappling hook while it mimicked the name Philips and demanded to know where he was. Its wristblades pierced his shoulder and it beat him bloody, until Lopez fired a flare into its face.
The creature's plasma fire hit the explosives aboard, and the gunboat blew up before the survivors went over a waterfall. Ashore, Schaefer bandaged his shoulder, and El Presidente's plane strafed them before dropping a tracker receiver, a map and a threatening letter. For two days he hacked through the jungle with a machete, following the signal from Mercer's tracker past a wall of symbols burned into the rock. A poisoned arrow struck his shoulder, and Lopez cut the wound open and hid him under leaves while he lay delirious for hours.
The Jungle Village
Schaefer admitted that he had never been truly afraid until that night. In a native village he found the Predator carrying out living experiments on a bull, a jaguar and Mercer. He refused to leave the pilot behind, unwilling to act like the creatures, and Mercer confessed that Philips had paid him to lure Schaefer back into the jungle. The hunter slashed Schaefer from behind and killed Mercer. Schaefer charged through the fire, kicked over a poison cauldron onto the natives and ripped open a weapons crate, then hit the Predator with a rocket launcher and walked out firing two submachine guns.
The Final Fight
Schaefer smashed through a hut wall and found Lopez tied up, and he fought the hunter until dawn. The creature snapped his ankle, broke the seal on his tracker and cut into his chest before Lopez shot it down. Schaefer shot the tracker off her ankle and clipped his own transmitting device onto the Predator's leg armor. El Presidente's jets and a missile, homing on the signal, struck the hunter. A riverboat rescued the pair, and Lopez carried Schaefer aboard. He reflected that it was the third time General Philips had used Dutch to bait him, and Philips believed that he was dead.
Philips At Gunpoint
Philips had earlier blamed Schaefer for the hunter's madness, remarking that Dutch's brother should have finished it off in the gorge. On a golf course near Washington, Lopez flipped the general's aide while Schaefer, recovered enough to stand and wearing a red jacket, held Philips at gunpoint. He told the general that this time it was about Dutch and the truth, and he marched him into the forest with a loaded .45. Dark River ended there, and the comic never showed what Philips told him. Whatever he learned did not end his search, since he was looking for his brother years later.
Belize
Arrival In Belize
Schaefer later left the police and settled in the tropics. When a party of Russians led by an old acquaintance came ashore in Belize, he called Jaya Soames and told her to come at once. He walked into a bar in a loud Hawaiian shirt, complaining about the heat, and Jaya introduced him to her team as a former New York detective who had faced the creatures in New York, Siberia and South America. He warned Raphael Herrera what would happen if he caused trouble. The Russian leader then walked in and greeted him as an old comrade. She was Colonel Valentina Ligachev.
Schaefer told a gloomy Mandy Graves that he had been far too serious as a policeman, but that years in the tropics had taught him to relax, and that he had taken up scuba diving. The whole Yucatan, he explained, was laced with flooded limestone caverns, and the creatures were moving unseen through the caves under the jungle. Ligachev's agents watched the team's hotel, so the hunters used a decoy. A tourist driving a white truck wore the loud shirt Schaefer had worn, and Ligachev stopped him at a roadblock and called Schaefer out by name while the team slipped away in a pickup.
The Buried Pyramid
After a hike through the rain, Schaefer led the hunters to a cave mouth. He explained that he used to make a living finding things that bad people did not want found, and that these bad people came from another planet. He had dived the system before and knew that it connected to a cenote at a Mayan dig, and he mentioned almost in passing that there were two creatures. The team swam through the flooded passages to the Predators' trophy room, then followed a freshly blasted tunnel to a buried pyramid. Schaefer and the others came out at a temple in the jungle, where they set an ambush.
When gunfire broke out among the Russians, Schaefer went to help, taking Jaya and Enoch Nakai with him and planning to drive the creatures toward the pyramid. A plasma blast knocked him down, and a wounded silver Predator lifted him off the ground. He knifed its arm, and it kicked him down an embankment. On the summit, the brown Predator killed its companion and left with a clan ship. Schaefer limped back and asked Ligachev for a ride, earning a curse. In the bar, he turned down Jaya's offer to join the team until he found his brother, and he warned the hunters that Herrera was a snitch.
Mabou And Glenelg
Stranded On Mabou
Predators kidnapped Schaefer and held him in stasis after he tracked one across a jungle in Thailand. He later woke inside a Predator ship that had crashed on the jungle world of Mabou, where the malfunction broke his stasis pod open while the badly injured pilot was alive. When the pilot attacked him in the cargo hold, Schaefer grabbed a spear and drove it through the creature. He worked out how to free the other captives from their pods, but they released alien specimens by mistake, and the group fell from about 300 people to 53. About a month later, a huge hunter visited the wreck and left again without harming them.
In 2068, two years after the hunter's visit, Schaefer knocked on the ramp of Theta Berwick's ship, the Sandpiper, and greeted her and Paolo Silva with a request for a ride off the planet and some cold beers. At his camp of about fifty survivors, he told Theta that Dutch had gone missing in Guatemala in 1987, and that after meeting a hunter in New York he had spent years tracking them. He had searched the wreck for a week, hoping to find his brother in a pod. When a survivor named Alejandro tried to seize the Sandpiper and another drew a gun, Schaefer calmed the camp.
The Trap On Glenelg
The crashed ship's black box pointed to a stasis farm on the planet Glenelg, and Schaefer gathered volunteers from survivors eager to strike back at their captors. Outside the farm, he admitted to Licia that he hoped to find Dutch inside, and he agreed that she was probably right when she told him that his brother was not there. The farm was empty and rigged with a bomb, and a Super Predator stepped out of the flames. Schaefer shouted at Alejandro to fall back as the volunteers were cut down, and Theta killed a Hell Hound that had knocked him to the ground before the battle went against them.
Schaefer woke frozen in a stasis pod aboard the hunter's ship and was taken with Paolo to an unknown planet, where the two men hung in chains from tall pillars as the prize of a duel. The Super Predator had healed Theta so that she could fight it fairly. When the creature stabbed her and tore away her prosthetic arm, Schaefer broke free and tackled it, giving her the chance to poison and behead it. He caught Paolo as Theta cut him down. With the Sandpiper destroyed, Schaefer agreed to try flying the Predator ship so that the three of them could bring hundreds of captives home.
Personality And Traits
Schaefer was bitter, sarcastic and openly contemptuous of authority, whether it came from Captain McComb, General Philips, El Presidente or the Soviet command. Rasche observed that he had no love for New York, his career or even its people, but he fought the hunters harder than anyone. He met danger with jokes, complaining about a forty-dollar haircut after a wristblade cut his scalp and about the VCR he had not set before the jump into Soviet airspace. He narrated Dark River in the same black humor, which writer Mark Verheiden compared to the tone of Die Hard.
He was a brawler who fought Predators with fists, headbutts, boards and a frying pan, and he distrusted expensive technology, warning the Cold War team that it had made them soft. His search for Dutch drove nearly every choice he made, from following his brother's trail into Colombia to breaking a prisoner out of his own precinct. He also had a firm moral line. He refused to abandon Mercer in the village after learning that the pilot had lied, and he understood the hunters well enough to turn their tactics against them. In Siberia, he softened enough by the end to admit that he liked Ligachev.
Relationships
Dutch Schaefer
Dutch was the center of Schaefer's life after his disappearance. The brothers had hunted together as boys, and Rasche saw that losing Dutch had been like losing nearly his whole family. Each of Schaefer's encounters with the hunters began with a lead on his brother, and General Philips used that lead to bait him in New York, in Siberia and with Mercer's false story in South America. None of it brought him closer. Years later in Belize he declined to join Jaya's team until he found Dutch, and on Glenelg he hoped to find him in a stasis pod, though he admitted that his brother was probably not there.
In the story Aftermath in Predator: Eyes of the Demon, Dutch mentioned a sister. Because John was Dutch's older brother, that sister was John's sister as well. The story did not name her or place her in New York beside the detective. It left her offstage while Dutch sat in the VA hospital at Mountain Home after Val Verde and later hunted in the Pisgah woods. No other John Schaefer comic gave her a scene of her own, so the family link rests on that single mention from Dutch in 2022.
Rasche
Detective Rasche was Schaefer's partner for six years in Narcotics and Homicide, and he narrated their fight against the hunters in New York. He rescued Schaefer from Philips on the Pan Am Building and fired the rocket that killed a hunter at Carr's building. After the battle he left the force and became sheriff of Bluecreek, Oregon, but when Schaefer vanished, he traced his friend through Smithers, followed him to Siberia and shot Wilcox before Wilcox could kill him. Rasche teased Schaefer about Ligachev at the end of the Siberian mission and told him that good friends were hard to find.
Ligachev
Lieutenant Ligachev began as Schaefer's captor in Siberia and became his only partner on the walk to the crashed ship. She saved his life twice, first by killing the sentry and then by freeing him from a net inside the ship, and he called her tough and praised her shooting. By the end he admitted that he liked her. Years later, as Colonel Valentina Ligachev, she competed with Jaya's team for the hunters' technology in Belize, greeting Schaefer as an old comrade, calling him out by name at her roadblock and cursing him when he asked her for a ride back to town.
General Philips
General Philips had served with Dutch and claimed that Dutch saved his life more than once, but he was Schaefer's most persistent adversary. He set Schaefer up as bait in Colombia and planned to hand him to the hunters in New York, arguing that hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake. In Siberia he blackmailed Schaefer with the promise of news about Dutch, then ordered him stopped when he tried to destroy the ship. In Dark River he paid Mercer to lure him back into the jungle, the third time he had used Dutch as bait, and Schaefer answered by marching him into a forest at gunpoint.
Lopez
Lopez was the black-market guide whom El Presidente forced into the hunt alongside Schaefer and Mercer. Hostile at first, she saved Schaefer again and again, firing a flare into the Predator's face, cutting open his arrow wound, hiding him in the jungle, shooting the hunter down at dawn and carrying him to the riverboat. Schaefer told her that he was starting to like her, though he called trust an overrated trait. She went with him to Washington, where she flipped Philips's aide on the golf course so that Schaefer could take the general into the forest and demand the truth about Dutch.
Behind The Scenes
Schaefer first appeared in Predator #1, published by Dark Horse Comics in June 1989. Mark Verheiden wrote the four issues, Chris Warner penciled them and drew the covers, and Ron Randall joined on the third and fourth issues. The comics carried no subtitle until later printings adopted the name Predator: Concrete Jungle. Verheiden brought Schaefer back in Predator: Cold War, penciled by Randall and published from September to December 1991, and in Predator: Dark River, again with Randall, from July to October 1996. Verheiden told Dark Horse that he had outlined Dark River in 1992, and he confirmed that its hunter was the one impaled in the first series.
Warner, who had drawn the first series, revived the detective as a writer in Predator: Hunters III in 2020, with art by Brian Thies, and the story gave him the first name John for the first time. The COVID-19 pandemic halted the series after two issues, and Dark Horse completed it in a trade paperback that November. Marvel brought Schaefer into Predator: The Last Hunt in 2024, written by Ed Brisson and drawn by Francesco Manna, where he joined Theta Berwick's story in 2066 and 2068. Earlier stories called him only Detective Schaefer, Schaef or Dutch's brother.
Lawrence Watt-Evans, writing as Nathan Archer, adapted the first two series as the Bantam Spectra novels Predator: Concrete Jungle in May 1995 and Predator: Cold War in May 1997. Neither book gave the detective a first name. Archer gave him a childhood in Pennsylvania, while the Cold War comic's Army file recorded that he had been granted citizenship in 1975, which implies a birth outside the United States. The novel replaced the comic's subway massacre with a slaughter on the NYPD firing range, because Predator 2 had used a similar scene, and it made Eschevera a man of the Cali cartel instead of Medellin.
Archer's Concrete Jungle also moved the crater across the border into Central America, with Schaefer flying to Panama City before reaching Riosucio. It dated the jungle mission to eight years before the heat wave and Dutch's last visit to seven years before, while the comic had the Americans vanish three years earlier and The Last Hunt placed Dutch's disappearance in Guatemala in 1987. The novel set the heat wave in August, called the heliport the MetLife heliport and ended with Schaefer walking away from Philips toward the subway, where the comic showed him leaving the ruins with Rasche.
In Archer's Cold War, the lieutenant became Ligacheva, the story took place six months after the New York hunt and Philips's file listed German and Spanish alongside Russian and French. The comic described the New York battle as the previous summer. Schaefer fought the canyon sentry with an entrenching tool rather than his bare hands, and Wilcox's bullet tore through his outer thigh instead of striking his back. Dark Horse's solicitation for Dark River #1 placed the Russian trip three years earlier, while in the story Schaefer called it a recent two-week siesta. Schaefer's appearances span both Dark Horse and Marvel comics.
In Predator vs. Judge Dredd, the 1997 Dark Horse miniseries by John Wagner and Enrique Alcatena, a Psi-Division telepath named Schaefer was the great-great-granddaughter of Dutch Schaefer. That made her a distant relative of John and a descendant of his younger brother. The comic tied her line only to Dutch and never named John. The series followed Judge Dredd as he hunted a lone Predator through Mega-City One with her psychic help. Schaefer of Psi-Division thus carried the family name into the far future of Mega-City One while leaving John's own story untouched.
Conclusion
John Schaefer was a New York detective who spent his life chasing the truth about his brother Dutch and fought the Predators in Manhattan, Colombia, Siberia, South America and Belize. He killed hunters, survived wounds from spears, wristblades and a bullet in the back, and refused to let Philips or any government bury what had happened. He never found Dutch. Taken from a jungle in Thailand and frozen aboard a hunter's ship, he woke on Mabou, led its survivors for two years and lived through the trap on Glenelg. His story ended with him alive in 2068, preparing to fly a Predator ship full of captives home.
Appearances
- Predator #1–4, later titled Predator: Concrete Jungle (Dark Horse Comics, June 1989 to March 1990)
- Predator: Cold War #1–4 (Dark Horse Comics, September to December 1991)
- Predator: Concrete Jungle, novel by Nathan Archer (Bantam Spectra, May 1995)
- Predator: Dark River #1–4 (Dark Horse Comics, July to October 1996)
- Predator: Cold War, novel by Nathan Archer (Bantam Spectra, May 1997)
- Predator: Hunters III #1–2 (Dark Horse Comics, February to March 2020)
- Predator: Hunters III trade paperback, completing the story (Dark Horse Comics, November 2020)
- Predator: The Last Hunt #1–4 (Marvel Comics, February to May 2024)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
