Mandy Graves, born Mandy West, was a former CIA agent who fought Predators in Dark Horse comics. In Predator: Bad Blood, she joined her husband, Robert Graves, and her old unit under John Pulnick against a Bad Blood Predator that had slaughtered dozens of people in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. She killed the creature and was the only member of the team to survive. She later joined the hunters of Jaya Soames in Predator: Hunters, and she fought on with them in Predator: Hunters II and Predator: Hunters III.
Early Life
Mandy West spent seven years in a CIA unit run by Claude Loudermilk, killing the agency's enemies alongside John Pulnick, Robert Graves and Phillip Smith. Pulnick later blamed that endless killing for his decision to retire and for the others' decision to run. Mandy, Graves and Smith went AWOL together, and Mandy and Graves married after leaving the agency, so she took his name. Pulnick opened a paintball field in New Jersey, and the CIA let him go in the hope that the three deserters would contact him. They never did in three years, although the agency planted Chris Hudson at the field to watch for them.
Pine Barrens Massacre
Freeing John Pulnick
After a rogue hunter massacred a party of lawyers at Pulnick's field, Loudermilk took over the case while posing as an FBI agent and held Pulnick in a guarded medical center as the suspect. Deputy Rich Kelso phoned the three deserters for help. Mandy and Smith burst into Pulnick's room with automatic weapons while Graves held a pistol to Loudermilk's head, and the group slipped Pulnick out in an ambulance before switching to a van. Pulnick introduced her to Kelso as Mandy West, and she corrected the name to Mandy Graves. When Kelso warned that the creature had killed at least fifty people, she replied that she had killed more.
The Two Predators
The five fugitives drove for four hours and continued into the Pine Barrens on foot. Later that night, the body of Sheriff Potts dropped from the treetops in front of them, and CIA agents surrounded the group until the rogue fell on the agents and slaughtered them. A second hunter in white armor, the Enforcer Predator, then attacked the rogue with a spear. When Smith opened fire to even the odds, the rogue leapt away while Mandy and Graves fired after it. The couple then turned their guns on the armored newcomer as it stood among the dead agents.
The armored hunter pinned Pulnick on his back with its spear at his face while Mandy and Graves took aim. Pulnick told her to lower her weapons, reasoning that the creature would have killed him by then if it wanted him dead, and it stepped off him and walked away. Mandy marveled at how gracefully something so hellish could move. Smith had a bleeding head wound, and Pulnick believed the armored hunter was after the same killer. Mandy was the first to notice that Kelso was missing. Agents had captured the deputy, and the rogue later killed him and hung his head from its trophy belt.
Battle With Loudermilk's Agents
Graves found two trails of green Yautja blood, but the team soon lost its way in the woods. When Loudermilk's helicopters swept the area with searchlights, Mandy opened fire, and Pulnick told his team to fight freestyle. She fought with a pistol in each hand while Graves cut down agents beside her, and in the middle of the firefight she admitted feeling a little sorry for the young men they were shooting. Nearby, the two Predators fought each other among the shacks of a Piney settlement until the rogue began to overpower the armored hunter.
The Hunter's Pod
Pinned down by helicopter fire in the final issue, Mandy and Smith agreed that the team had to break out and take the fight to the rogue. In the chaos, the dying armored hunter fell among the humans. Mandy later explained that it had spoken to her through scraps of mimicked human speech, told her about hunting the killer and asked her to shoot it, which she did. It had also given her its glowing mask to guide the team to its space pod, which carried a beacon that could summon a Predator mothership. They found the rogue at the pod, working its controls.
Death Of The Rogue
Loudermilk died when the rogue drove its wrist blades through his head near the landing site. The team spread out to hem the creature in, but it snared Phillip Smith in a net, and his phosphorus grenades burned him alive and set the rogue on fire. The burning creature then impaled Graves while Mandy screamed his name. She swore to kill it, but Pulnick ordered her away and called the rogue onto himself. As it crushed him, he forced something into its jaws, and Mandy fired repeatedly into its head until it choked on green blood and collapsed dead on top of him.
Leaving The Barrens
Wounded and alone among the flames, Mandy was close to blacking out when a Predator mothership appeared and several hunters descended toward her. She pressed her pistol to her own head and refused to give them the satisfaction. She survived, and as acting commander Garvin ordered the CIA to evacuate, she walked out of the woods with the hunter's mask while a beam of light rose into the sky. Television news blamed four veterans, three men and a woman, for the Pine Barren Massacre and reported that all four had died in a forest fire during a shoot-out with federal agents. Only John Pulnick was named.
Hunting With Jaya Soames
Aboard The Durga
Mandy, her hair white, was aboard the Durga, the ship of the wealthy Predator hunter Jaya Soames, when Soames assembled a privately funded team of Predator hunters. She woke from a nightmare about the night the Bad Blood Predator slaughtered her team beside a crashed helicopter. Soames returned with three recruits, Enoch Nakai, Tyler Swain and Raphael Herrera, and introduced Mandy as another survivor who had faced a Predator in combat and lived. When Swain grabbed her, she threw him over her shoulder onto the deck, and Nakai joked that he would marry her one day.
The Raid On Kehua
The hunters sailed to the Bunting Islands, where the colony of Dr. Bunting welcomed them on Amelia Island, and then raided neighboring Kehua with a hired strike team to hunt the Exiles, castaway Predators armed with spears, clubs and wooden masks. When Herrera wounded one of the creatures, Mandy chased it through the jungle until she lost its signature. The Exile then dropped out of the trees and killed more soldiers before the team riddled it with bullets. In its camp, Nakai freed a caged old man who warned that three more of the creatures were on the island.
The other Exiles could see the soldiers despite their cooling suits, and Herrera ordered a retreat to the boats. Mandy went back for the stragglers, dropped her empty rifle and faced a lone Exile with nothing but her knife. A grenade blast knocked her down before the creature reached her. Dazed, she told Nakai that she had to die there, but he pulled her up and dragged her to the boats. Herrera was left behind, and back on the Durga Mandy attacked Swain for abandoning him. In her cabin, she told Nakai that she should have died with her team, and he asked for her help in wiping out the creatures.
Hunted On Kehua
Dr. Bunting then seized the Durga by fixing explosives to its hull, and his colonists put Mandy, Soames, Nakai, Swain and the freed prisoner ashore on Kehua as prey for a hunt of their own. Masked colonists followed them through the jungle, imitating the clicking calls of the Exiles. One masked hunter brought Mandy down and praised her spirit before the kill, but she turned his own spear on him and then killed a second attacker. Elsewhere, a real Exile killed the colonists around Soames and let her go, and Swain drove another off a ledge to save Nakai.
The Durga's helicopter raked Bunting's surviving hunters on the beach with bullets and rockets, and Mandy finished the wounded Dr. Bunting with a machete, turning his advice about being the hunter back on him. From the helicopter she wanted to kill the last Exile too, but Soames stopped her, because the creature had spared Soames and had been the islanders' prisoner just as the team had been. Soames dropped it a bag of gear from the ship's vault, and the Exile put on Yautja armor before its self-destruct counted down. As the helicopter left, Mandy congratulated Swain on his star turn.
Afghanistan
After several crew members resigned over the losses in the islands, Swain admitted that he had botched the mission, and Mandy remarked that it was a pity Herrera was not there to see his new sense of accountability. Soames then showed Mandy, Swain and Nakai a video from a secure CIA server, in which something had massacred insurgents who were trying to behead a kidnapped CIA agent in eastern Afghanistan. The team flew to Jalalabad, where Mandy complained about wearing a scarf in the heat until a companion reminded her that it was a hijab, and a cheerful driver named Malook took them toward the mountains.
The search for the Djinn Predator led the hunters to a boy named Atal, who offered to guide them to its cave. When Atal took them toward the fighting around a Stargazer black ops team, Mandy warned that the soldiers might simply have met insurgents and that the hunters could be walking into a trap. Inside the cave, the hunters found a hidden Predator ship, and Soames ordered Mandy to set charges while the others explored a trophy cave full of skulls. Swain died in the chase that followed, and at his cairn Mandy told Nakai that the hunters kept chasing the past because they were stupid.
Herrera's Return
At the home of Soames by the sea, the hunters found Herrera alive, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling, and Mandy cried out his name in disbelief. Herrera then spent his days staring at the sea while the team argued about him. When Nakai suspected that whoever had found him on Tehua had made a deal with him to spy on the hunters, Mandy told Nakai that he was the new guy and had no right to question anyone. Soames trusted Herrera but admitted that suspicion was reasonable, since Stargazer knew as much about the hunters as they knew about it.
Belize
Soames took Mandy, Nakai and Herrera to Belize, where two Predators were hunting, and introduced them to John Schaefer at a bar. Colonel Valentina Ligachev then walked in, named every member of the team and warned the hunters to stay out of her way, and Mandy answered with a threat of her own. That night, Mandy complained that the team was not equipped to fight Predators and Russian commandos at the same time. Schaefer told her to cheer up and explained that the creatures were moving unseen through the flooded caves beneath the jungle.
After a decoy shook off Ligachev's soldiers, Mandy told Nakai and Herrera to stop bickering over the Bible and focus on the mission. The hunters dived through the flooded caverns and surfaced in the Predators' trophy chamber, where Mandy found a passage that had been blasted open recently. Above a pyramid buried in a vast cavern, she joked that she loved barrel fish when Soames compared the ambush to shooting fish in a barrel. When Schaefer took Soames and Nakai to help the Russians, Mandy and Herrera held the ambush until Herrera climbed the pyramid alone after two Predators and left her to watch the base.
Personality And Traits
Mandy was a seasoned killer who claimed to have taken more lives than the rogue Predator's toll of at least fifty, and she fought with a pistol in each hand. She felt some sympathy for the young CIA agents her team cut down, and she granted the dying armored hunter's request to end its life. Her humor was dry and blunt. She mocked Swain over his sudden accountability, joked about loving barrel fish in a cavern in Belize and told Nakai that the hunters kept chasing the past because they were stupid. She had little patience for distractions and ordered her squabbling teammates to focus.
The Pine Barrens left lasting scars. In Predator: Hunters, she had nightmares about the night her team died, and on Kehua she told Nakai first that she had to die there and later that she should have died with her team. She was physically formidable, throwing Swain onto the deck of the Durga when he grabbed her and killing two of Bunting's masked hunters in close combat. Her judgment was practical. She warned that the black ops team in Afghanistan might have met insurgents rather than a Predator, and she complained that the hunters were not equipped for Predators and Russian commandos at once.
Relationships
Mandy married Robert Graves after the two deserted the CIA together, and they fought side by side in the Pine Barrens until the burning rogue impaled him in front of her. She had served for seven years with John Pulnick and Phillip Smith in the unit run by Loudermilk, and she came out of hiding to free Pulnick from CIA custody when the agency held him for the massacre. Smith joined her in deciding to break out and attack the rogue before he burned to death. Pulnick died drawing the creature away from her. Afterward, she watched the news alone at home with the mask beside her.
Among the hunters of Soames, Mandy stood by Herrera. She attacked Swain for leaving him on Kehua and made it plain that she had not forgiven him, cried out at Herrera's return and defended him against the suspicions of Nakai. At the bar after the Belize hunt, Schaefer warned the hunters that Herrera was a snitch, and Mandy objected that he had no right to talk to Herrera that way. Herrera then admitted that Nakai had been right and that he had rejoined the team under false pretenses. Nakai, for his part, dragged her out of the fight on Kehua, joked about marrying her and asked for her help against the creatures.
Behind The Scenes
Evan Dorkin wrote Predator: Bad Blood and Derek Thompson penciled it for Dark Horse Comics. Mandy first appeared at the end of Bad Blood #1, published on December 1, 1993, after Loudermilk had named the three missing agents as Graves, Smith and West. The story had first run as a three-part prologue in the Dark Horse Comics anthology, but Mandy did not appear in it. The colorists gave her red hair in the first two issues and dark hair in the final battle, and the last page showed it bleached white, the look she kept when she returned in 2017.
Chris Warner, who had co-edited Bad Blood, brought Mandy back in Predator: Hunters, which Dark Horse published from May to September 2017 with art by Francisco Ruiz Velasco. Warner kept her on the team in Predator: Hunters II, drawn by Agustin Padilla in 2018 and 2019, and in Predator: Hunters III, drawn by Brian Thies. Hunters III was planned as four issues, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted it after the second in 2020, and Dark Horse completed the story in a trade paperback that November. In the first issue of Hunters II, Mandy called Herrera by the wrong name, Hernandez.
Conclusion
Mandy Graves was a CIA killer who deserted with her husband and came out of hiding to help John Pulnick fight a rogue Predator in the Pine Barrens. She shot the dying armored hunter at its request, saw Smith, Graves and Pulnick die, and killed the rogue with repeated shots to the head before walking out of the burning woods as the only survivor of her team. Years later she joined Jaya Soames's hunters, fought the Exiles and Bunting's colonists on Kehua, hunted the Djinn in Afghanistan and waited in ambush beneath the jungles of Belize, where her loyalty to Herrera was tested.
Appearances
- Predator: Bad Blood #1-4 by Evan Dorkin and Derek Thompson (Dark Horse Comics, 1993-1994)
- Predator: Hunters by Chris Warner and Francisco Ruiz Velasco (Dark Horse Comics, 2017)
- Predator: Hunters II by Chris Warner and Agustin Padilla (Dark Horse Comics, 2018-2019)
- Predator: Hunters III by Chris Warner and Brian Thies (Dark Horse Comics, 2020)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
