Motorhead vs. Predator: Plot & Characters
Motorhead #1 is a 1995 Dark Horse Comics crossover written by D.G. Chichester and pencilled by Karl Waller, in which a Predator hunted Frank Fletcher for the alien device lodged inside his head. It was part of the Hunting the Heroes: The Predators Attack! event, which sent the hunters through four Dark Horse Heroes issues: Ghost #5, Motorhead #1, X #18 and Agents of Law #6. Set in the ruined industrial city of Steel Harbor, it launched Motorhead's ongoing series and ranks among the strangest Predator crossovers, since its hunter came for the machine rather than the man.
Plot Summary
Motorhead Meets The Posse
The story opened in fourth grade, with a young Frank Fletcher sketching a monster he called Trak-Savage while his classmates sneered that freaky Frank was hearing voices again. The narration noted that things change, and the more they remain the same, before cutting to a grown Frank standing in a gun shop in Steel Harbor, a city whose economy now revolved around gun shops and body-bag manufacturers. Inside his head, in the psychespace, the grinning, white-bearded Motor told Frank to leave the driving to him, while a beret-wearing thug at the counter demanded faster service.
The thug was Gunplay, a member of the white supremacist Posse, who shot up the shop, ranted that the mud people had soiled his race and wrapped himself in a crackling energy field. Frank tackled him through the window into the street and asked whether he had a clever name to go with his mouth, and the two traded fire with a shotgun and an assault rifle. Neither man noticed the three red lights crossing the street, as a hunter cloaked in a field of invisibility created a thousand light years from Earth watched them, and the frightened Motor retreated deeper into the psychespace, asking why this one and why now.
The Predator Arrives
Broken down into a single second, Gunplay's field caught Frank's buckshot as an alien targeting system warped into view, and the trio of lights skittered across his left eye and blew out his optic nerve. Frank let loose his final round just as the hunter fired a cannon loaded with super-hot gas and electrical fury, and the Posse's front man went up like dry kindling. Frank stared at the burning remains, asked for forgiveness and offered a silent prayer of thanks, before a flyer for the Laughing Wolf Carnival blew into his face and the shop's elderly owner declared that she wanted one of him rather than a gun.
The narration then turned to the watcher on the girders above, one of a race whose name no one could say, but whose honor, ferocity, technology and muscle were well documented and much feared. If its name could be pronounced, it might translate as Scrapyard, and Gunplay had died simply because he got between a Predator and its prey. While its brethren collected prizes of meat and bone, Scrapyard also tracked game of bits and bytes, hunting machines that crossed the line into lifeforms, and it believed such a trophy sat inside Frank Fletcher's head, waiting to be confirmed once it peeled open his skull.
The Carnival Crowd
Walking the streets with a silent Motor, Frank remembered the times Steel Harbor had served him extra helpings of excrement, from a raging hurricane named Titan to a sociopath called Mace Blitzkrieg. He also recalled the old man in the alley who had begged him to take the Motor away because it was tearing him apart. Screaming at the voice in his head to answer him, Frank stepped into the road and was hit by a truck, sending a pale passenger through the windshield, who shrugged off the injury by saying he always looked like that.
The truck belonged to the Laughing Wolf Carnival, carrying the sword swallower Jesse Benedict, the elderly driver Major Jeremiah and the pale performer Roadkill, whom Jesse said was Marvyn to close friends. While they argued about who would pay for the damage, the Motor finally spoke up and begged Frank to listen and run. The cloaked hunter was already among them, slamming the truck with a blow that Frank swore was not his doing, before it struck Frank from nowhere with a long blade and left him bleeding from his head, arm and back.
Motorhead Fights Back
Badly wounded, Frank decided that this was how it ended, with the mind going first and the body turning against him, but that he did not have to like it. Born of rage rather than strategy, his blind swing connected with the invisible hunter and knocked its mask flying, and the result was spectacular. The cloak flickered away to reveal the snarling Predator, and Jesse gasped that it had been hidden there the whole time, while Roadkill warned that their boss Laughing Wolf would want to give the freak top billing.
Frank told Jesse to get her people out, but she insisted on helping, until the hunter vanished again and he warned that it would cut them in two to get at him. The Major agreed that the man was looking out for their best interests, and Frank stood alone wrapped in the crackling red aura of the Motor, glad to have the voice back with him. He asked how they were supposed to find the thing, and the answer arrived at once as three red dots of the hunter's shoulder cannon settled on his chest, to which Frank replied that he had to ask.
The Final Duel
The plasma bolt hurled Frank high into the air while the Predator repeated, in the Major's voice, that blood was a mother to clean out of the front grill. He crashed down onto a freighter moored in the harbor, through its deck and into the chain-filled hold below, gasping that the Motor was doing a job holding him together but that he was still taking a hammering. Reality shimmered as the hunter exploded from the shadows with a fighting style invented on an alien planet, and its blades tore along Frank's spine with a gristly screech.
In the psychespace, the Motor stood over Frank in a boxing ring and warned that there was no getting up from this count, before showing him his old drawing of Trak-Savage and saying that the thing had come even farther than the Motor to get what was in his head. It begged Frank to cut it loose all the way, with no light show and no muscle pump, but he refused to give in. Outside, the hunter told him in his own voice that it saluted his compassion as diamond-hard blades caressed his flesh, and the caged Motor screamed to be let out.
Scrapyard's Fate
Whispering a plea for the Lord to forgive his weakness, Frank finally let the Motor loose, and his glowing fist melted the hunter's interstellar weaponry to slag. A snarl that the narration called inhuman ripped through the ship, though it noted that the Predator, for its part, was silent. The blast tore the freighter apart and opened a small corner of Steel Harbor onto the abyss, throwing both of them into the water with the Predator still clinging to its prey.
Frank thrashed free, shouting at the burned, half-melted creature to get off him, and Scrapyard sank beneath the waves with its ribs burned bare. Climbing onto the docks, he asked the Motor whether it was happy now, then picked up another Laughing Wolf Carnival flyer and decided to get some cotton candy and pretend, for ten sticky minutes, that he had a normal life. The story closed on Jackboot, leader of the Posse, clutching a carnival flyer with green fire burning from his eyes and promising that the deviants would learn the hard law of the Posse.
Key Characters
- Frank Fletcher, known as Motorhead, was a tattooed drifter in Steel Harbor carrying an alien device in his head, who survived the Predator's attacks and finally unleashed the Motor to destroy it.
- The Motor was the leering voice inside Frank's head, a living machine that the Predator wanted as a trophy and that melted the hunter's weapons once Frank let it loose.
- Scrapyard was the Predator, a hunter that collected machines that had crossed the line into lifeforms, and it stalked Frank cloaked before fighting him aboard a freighter in the harbor.
- Gunplay was a white supremacist member of the Posse who fought Frank in the street and was killed by the Predator's cannon.
- Jesse Benedict was a sword swallower with the Laughing Wolf Carnival, who offered to help Frank fight the hunter after his mask came off.
- Jackboot was the leader of the Posse, seen at the end vowing to punish the carnival's performers.
Behind The Scenes
The credits name D.G. Chichester as writer, Karl Waller as penciller, Tim Bradstreet as inker, James Sinclair as colorist, Clem Robins as letterer, Greg Vest as editor and Scott Tice as designer, with a cover by Simon Bisley. The indicia dates the issue August 1995 and credits Chris Warner as Motorhead's creator, and the 22-page story is titled Hunting Party. Dark Horse's own August checklist in the back of the issue listed it as shipping on August 29, and the Motorhead series ran six issues before ending in January 1996, without ever being reprinted in a trade collection.
A Dark Horse Source promotion inside the issue described the event as four self-contained stories across Agents of Law #6, Ghost #5, Motorhead #1 and X #18, and promised readers that Motorhead's new series might be short-lived. The comic is unusual for giving its Predator a name, Scrapyard, and a motive beyond skulls, since it hunted living machines as a trophy. The hunter also mimicked voices throughout, repeating the words of Frank and the Major back at him, a habit carried over from the 1987 film.
Conclusion
Motorhead #1 turned the first issue of a superhero series into a Predator hunt, pitting a cloaked collector of living machines against a drifter who would rather keep his power locked away. The hunter killed a Posse gunman, wounded Frank in front of the Laughing Wolf Carnival and nearly gutted him aboard a freighter, until Frank gave in and let the Motor burn it down. The script mixes the violence with dark humor, from the hunter repeating the Major's line about blood on the front grill to Frank's cotton candy ending, which sets it apart from the other Predator comics of the event.
External Sources
- Motorhead #1 on Dark Horse
- Motorhead #1 on the Grand Comics Database
- Motorhead #1 on Comic Vine
- Motorhead #1 on League of Comic Geeks
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers | Hunting The Heroes Predators Attack
