Predator: Bad Blood Comic: Plot, Characters & Lore

Predator: Bad Blood is a four-issue Predator comic from Dark Horse Comics, written by Evan Dorkin, drawn by Derek Thompson and published from December 1993 to June 1994 after a three-part prologue in the Dark Horse Comics anthology. A rogue hunter that had butchered its own kind crashed in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and slaughtered a paintball party. Former CIA operative John Pulnick, framed for the killings, broke out of custody with three renegade agents to hunt the creature, while his old boss Claude Loudermilk and an armored Predator sent after the bad blood joined the chase.

Plot Summary

Crash In The Pine Barrens

The story began in the Dark Horse Comics anthology with a morning talk show on a New Jersey radio station, where the host interviewed the author of a book about American serial killers. While the guests discussed Ted Bundy and other murderers, a red, organic spaceship flew past the Moon with a lone Predator aboard. Its trophy chamber held hanging bodies and skulls, and the hunter inside was spattered with green blood. A squadron of blue ships flown by armored hunters chased the red craft toward Earth and shot it down.

The burning ship came down in the woods shortly before seven in the morning, while the radio host warned listeners about spree killers. At the Body Count paintball field in the barrens, a young employee named Chris Hudson heard the crash as static on his radio without knowing what it was. The prologue cut back and forth between the talk show and the field. It set the radio's list of human killers against the creature that climbed out of a swamp nearby, a towering figure in spiked armor that waded through the water toward the trees.

Body Count Paintball

The owner of the field, John Pulnick, left Chris in charge for the day while a group of New York lawyers arrived for their twice-yearly game. The clients turned up in designer camouflage with custom paint guns, including a rented AK-47 model and a Japanese minigun that fired thousands of rounds per minute. Chris and the referee Greg explained the rules of capture the flag, with a one-hour limit and referees in the woods. The lawyers bickered from the moment they arrived, and one of them introduced herself as a personal injury lawyer before the teams headed out to the field.

Greg spent the opening minutes getting splattered by players who ignored his calls, while Chris followed the action over the radio from the office. A lawyer named Arnie sprayed the woods with his minigun and mocked the others as they dropped out. Something unseen was moving through the trees, and a yellow shimmer struck down one of the players. Two clients stopped for a smoke and complained about the referee, and a moment later one of them was hit in the head and killed. The Predator worked its way through the rest of the party, and Greg radioed Chris that there was blood everywhere.

Chris Hudson's Escape

Chris grabbed a knife and ran into the woods with John's dogs, Duke and Medusa, and found bodies scattered between the trees, one of them hoisted into the branches. A gunshot finally exposed the attacker, a towering Predator in red, bloody armor with spikes, skulls hanging from its belt, wrist blades and a glowing blue blade. As it closed in, it repeated the lawyers' words back in their own voices, mocking their complaints about a little paint. Chris faced it with nothing but his knife, and he shouted at the creature to come and kill him.

The dogs attacked the Predator and bought Chris a few seconds before the hunter cut them down, and he sprinted back toward his motorcycle. He got the Harley-Davidson started and tore away with the creature behind him, but he crashed into the field's parking sign and hurt his ribs. When the Predator tried to vanish, its cloak sparked and failed, and Chris guessed that the paint covering it had jammed the device. He restarted the bike, shouted an insult at the hunter and rode off toward the road, thanking his country for building the machine.

Chris reached the road just as a green pickup truck came around the bend, and it hit him at full speed. The Predator killed the two young men in the cab through the windshield, then lifted the injured Chris off the ground by his hair. Broken but defiant, he taunted the creature that an American truck had caught him before it could, and he spat in its face. The hunter tore his head off and roared over the body. Captions from a state tourism advertisement welcoming visitors to New Jersey ran across the final panels of the prologue.

A Federal Crime Scene

The first issue of the miniseries opened at noon, as radio news reported a hostage standoff in Gainesville, Florida. John Pulnick was stuck in a traffic jam on his way back to the field, complaining that Chris had never fixed his truck. When a carload of young people honked and jeered behind him, he fired a paint gun at their car and splattered them. He reflected that a few years earlier those rounds would have been real bullets. Another radio story described an elderly woman who had set her husband on fire as John drove on toward the barrens.

At the paintball grounds, police were already waiting behind crime scene tape. John introduced himself as the owner and asked for Sheriff Potts or Deputy Kelso, but the officers told him nothing could be settled until state troopers and forensic teams arrived. Instead, a helicopter landed in the clearing, and a voice from it ordered everyone to stand still because the grounds were now a federal crime scene. John realized that the people in charge were not local police, and that whatever had happened at his field had drawn the attention of Washington.

Men in dark suits climbed out of the helicopter, and their leader introduced himself to the sheriff as an FBI agent named Claude Loudermilk. His team reported their arrival to Langley and ordered a search for a target and its vehicle, details that pointed to the CIA. John knew Loudermilk from his past and was horrified to see him there. When John insisted that something was wrong, Loudermilk told his aide Garvin to clear the area and ordered John cuffed and held for questioning. John broke away from the officers before they could grab him.

The Death Of Sheriff Potts

John ducked under the police tape and ran into the forest, confident that nobody knew the barrens better than he did. He soon found the lawyers' mutilated bodies hanging in the trees and lying in pools of blood. Even after Beirut, Afghanistan and Croatia, he had never seen anything like it. He found Duke and Medusa decapitated near Chris's knife, and he guessed that Loudermilk's agents were tied to the killings. Then he came upon a huge weapon decorated with a skull and driven deep into a tree, and he tried to pull it free but could not move it.

The Predator uncloaked behind John, seized him and threw him aside. As it stood over the bodies, he saw Chris's head hanging from its belt among the other trophies. John fled while police officers called after him through the woods, urging him to come back and explain himself to the federal agents. The creature turned on them instead. It cut down the elderly Sheriff Potts while a deputy fired at it, and the screaming carried back to Loudermilk's men by the cars, who remarked on how long it went on and made no move to help.

John stumbled out of the trees and told Loudermilk that something in the woods had killed Potts. Loudermilk calmly replied that he believed him, because his people knew exactly what was out there. John grabbed a gun from his truck, which Loudermilk pointed out was only a paint gun, and drove off. Loudermilk let him go and reported to Langley that John had confirmed the target. He called in a full unit with vans and helicopters, detained the civilian witnesses and had agents phone Deputy Richard Kelso, posing as the FBI.

Deputy Kelso

John drove to the house of his friend Rich Kelso, who met him at the door with a pistol. A television news report already named John M. Pulnick as the suspect in the massacre, and Kelso explained that the FBI had warned him John might come. John insisted that the agents were really CIA and that he was being framed for fifty deaths. He showed Kelso a braided trophy he had torn from the creature before it killed Potts. Kelso knocked him out, but when armed agents arrived and took the deputy's gun as a safety measure, he asked to see their badges.

Loudermilk's captions explained that the target could be anywhere in 1,700 square miles of pine barrens, but that it would return to its vehicle. A search craft soon found a crashed white pod in the woods. Elsewhere, two hooded agents joked that the killer was a serial murderer from Mars. The unmasked Predator loomed behind them with two severed heads in its hands and repeated their words in their own voices. At the command center, Kelso learned that two agents named Miller and Ng had been found dead while John lay strapped to a bed, and he argued that his friend could not have killed them.

The Hospital Breakout

John woke up strapped to a bed in a medical center guarded by the CIA. Loudermilk visited him and admitted that they had known each other for seven years, which in the CIA counted as seven lifetimes. He revealed that Chris Hudson had been a CIA plant, placed at the field months earlier to watch for three former agents, Graves, Smith and West. All three had served in John's unit before they went AWOL. The agency had let John retire in the hope that the runaways would contact him, but in three years they never had.

When John demanded to know what the creature was, Loudermilk said that he was hunting a hunter from somewhere far away. He compared it to a hillbilly on a weekend drive to shoot deer, except that this one carried energy weapons, camouflage technology and a spacecraft. His people had detected its craft at 7 a.m. and pinpointed it when Potts reported the massacre, and he planned to send John to Langley. John asked where the missing agents were, and a voice answered from right behind Loudermilk.

Robert Graves pressed a pistol to Loudermilk's head as Phillip Smith and a red-haired woman burst into the room with automatic weapons. Kelso was their inside man, and he joked that John owed him a quarter for the phone call that brought them. The deputy admitted that he had not believed the braid came from a monster until they overheard Loudermilk's explanation, and he wanted to stop the killing before more people died. The issue closed on the rogue Predator at a perch of skulls and the armored hunter walking through the woods with a severed head.

John's Old Unit

The second issue opened with agents dying at a CIA checkpoint in the woods while the command staff searched for their leader. They found Loudermilk handcuffed to a hospital bed with a bleeding forehead, and he berated Garvin because three people and a small-town deputy had slipped John out of a building full of agents in an ambulance. With the visitor still loose and five fugitives in the woods, Loudermilk called it a war on two fronts. He ordered a search-and-destroy mission against Pulnick, insisting that he knew these people.

Loudermilk predicted that John would go into the barrens to hunt the creature rather than run. In a van they had switched for the ambulance, John assured Kelso that the agents would never find them in woods he knew far better. He introduced his old team, who had spent seven years killing America's enemies for Loudermilk. Phillip Smith wore a red cap and fatigues and took a liking to Kelso's Tommy gun. Robert Graves came next, followed by Mandy West, who corrected him that she was now Mandy Graves, since the two had married after going AWOL.

John explained that the creature had killed friends of his and Kelso's, and that Loudermilk called it a hunter from another planet that preyed on humans. Smith declared that it would die as long as his trigger finger worked, and the vote to kill it was unanimous. When Kelso pointed out that it had already killed at least fifty people, Mandy replied that she had killed more than that herself. Graves added that none of them was afraid to die, and the five set off into the Pine Barrens.

Ambush At The Stream

A CIA patrol crossed the barrens at night in strange weather that left their temperature sensors useless and their radios dead. They found blood in a stream moments before the unmasked Predator, wearing a necklace of skulls and severed heads, ambushed them. It crushed one agent's head and cut down several more as the others opened fire. One agent's shot set the creature on fire. The burning hunter plunged into the stream to put out the flames, then rose from the water with a roar and finished off the patrol.

After four hours of driving, John's team continued on foot, wishing they had brought high explosives. John described villages of Pineys who lived in shacks without electricity, and the legend of the Jersey Devil, a cursed child born in the barrens who flew away and ate children. One of the others wondered whether the legend might be their creature. When Kelso asked how they would ever find one killer in so much forest, John answered that they would not need to, because it would find them first.

The Crashed Ship

Near midnight, a CIA team found the rogue's spacecraft crash-landed in the marsh of Sector Ten. The hull showed weapon damage, and inside lay at least half a dozen dead Predators, disembowelled, dismembered and partly eaten, all killed before the crash. The team concluded that their target had preyed on its own species. An agent named Dietrich touched a flight recorder that showed pursuit ships shooting the craft down, which meant it had been destroyed by its own kind. An alarm sounded, someone remembered that these ships had been booby-trapped before, and the craft exploded.

John's team heard the blast from miles away. Graves warned that the barrens were dry enough to burn like kindling, and Smith called fire a cleanser sent by God. Elsewhere, the white-armored Predator walked through the smoke, while the unmasked rogue crouched over a skull beside an overturned purple car. A bored CIA patrol nearby, out after two in the morning, complained about fast food, missed television and cigarettes until one of the agents heard something moving in the trees above them.

The Second Predator

Shots rang out, and a body fell from the treetops in front of John's team. Kelso recognized the corpse of Sheriff Potts, and the group fired blindly into the branches. Before they could regroup, armed CIA agents emerged from the woods and surrounded them, ordering John to surrender because he was outnumbered. John told Kelso to watch the rear and the others to pick targets. Then a spear struck one agent through the neck, and the Predator dropped among the agents and slaughtered them, leaving a bloody throwing disc on the ground.

John told Smith to stay down while the panicked agents fired wildly, and he refused to let the team join the fight. Then one of the team spotted another creature. The white-armored Predator arrived with a spear and attacked the rogue, and the two hunters tore into each other among the agents. The unmasked rogue leapt on the newcomer with its wrist blades and began to win. When Kelso asked what was happening, John admitted he had no idea, but guessed that for now they were rooting for the losing side.

Smith opened fire to even the odds, and the rogue leapt away while Graves and Mandy poured bullets after it. In the CIA operations room, Garvin reported that agents had encountered the visitor and that there were now two of them. Loudermilk ordered a helicopter and decided to go into the barrens himself, complaining that the situation had spun out of control. The second issue closed with the armored hunter standing among the dead agents as Mandy and Graves aimed their guns at it.

The Hunter Spares John

The third issue opened with the armored hunter pinning John on his back, its bloodied spear point at his face, while Mandy and Graves took aim. John asked them to calm down because he did not believe the creature wanted to kill him. He told Mandy to lower her weapons, reasoning that he would already be dead if it wanted him dead. The hunter stepped off him and walked away, and John told the others to let it go since they had no fight with this one.

Mandy marveled at how something so hellish could move so gracefully. Smith had a bleeding head wound, and John believed that the armored creature was hunting the same killer and might even finish it for them. Only then did Mandy notice that someone was missing. Kelso had been separated from the group and captured by surviving agents, who thought about shooting him but decided to hold him as a bargaining chip, and they radioed for a helicopter to lift him out.

While the agents waited for the helicopter, the rogue Predator grabbed one of them from behind. It slaughtered the rest of the group as they shouted at each other not to fire. Kelso fled through the woods, convinced that the situation was hopeless, until the creature killed the last agent and he was alone. He picked up a dead agent's gun and fired several shots into the hunter before it seized him. John later regretted sending him off alone, and the scene ended with the deputy's severed head hanging from the rogue's trophy belt.

Following The Green Blood

Graves found two trails of green alien blood but no sign of Kelso. Smith, his head now bandaged, monitored the CIA radio and heard that the second creature had thrown the agency into confusion and that more troops and helicopters were on the way. Loudermilk followed the same trail from his helicopter, joking that the killer had angered the folks back home. High in a tree, the rogue treated its wounded hand with a device from its kit, while the armored hunter bled in the branches of another tree.

John told the team that they did not need to worry about the armored one. Smith disagreed, warning that it might come back with a rifle and a six-pack to hunt humans for sport, and he called the creatures an entire race of killers. John replied that Smith was hardly one to talk. Nearby, a group of Pineys around a campfire complained that the helicopters had spooked the animals, and one of them called drunk hunters who did not eat what they shot murderers, unaware that the rogue Predator loomed over them in the dark.

Firefight In The Barrens

Lost in the barrens, the team traded jokes about the drugs they had enjoyed in the agency until one of them warned that a large force of Loudermilk's men was closing in. Helicopters swept the woods with searchlights, and Mandy opened fire. Smith offered to throw his white phosphorus grenades. Over a loudspeaker, Loudermilk told John that this was the end of the line. John ordered his team to fight freestyle, and Smith cheered that it would be a turkey shoot as the firefight began.

Mandy fought with a pistol in each hand while Graves cut through the agents beside her, and she admitted feeling a little sorry for the young men they were shooting. John's narration ran over the battle. This was not the way he wanted it, with people dying for no good reason, and he recalled that same endless killing as the reason he had left the agency and the others had run. He blamed Loudermilk for turning their lives into kill or be killed with no end in sight.

The Predator Duel

Across several wordless pages, the armored hunter and the rogue fought each other among the shacks of a Piney settlement. They traded spear thrusts, throwing discs, wrist blade slashes and shots from their shoulder cannons, and both bled green. John's narration noted that the whole disaster came from monsters from space choosing New Jersey to settle their score, and that nobody wanted to die there. The hunter stabbed the rogue, but the rogue struck back and began to overpower it, while Loudermilk radioed John that it was time to end this.

The final issue opened with the team pinned down by helicopter fire while the rogue stood over the beaten hunter. Loudermilk had told his men to flush the team out because he had bigger fish to fry. John shouted at him to drop the standoff and come down to fight like a man instead of settling personal grudges with other people's blood. The helicopter answered with gunfire. Below, the rogue pinned the armored Predator to the ground, its jaws dripping green blood as it tore at the wounded hunter.

An agent switched radio frequencies to block John's voice as the two creatures fought on. Mandy and Smith agreed that they had to break out of the encirclement and take the fight to the rogue themselves rather than wait to be picked off. The team charged out of cover, and the agents shouted to stop one of them from firing a rocket launcher. John urged his friends on, and they plunged straight into the battle between the two hunters as the rogue lunged at them.

Fire In Sector Six

The fighting had set the woods ablaze, and Loudermilk decided that the fire mattered more than the standoff. He sent a helicopter flown by Perry over the blaze in Sector Six. A pair of Pineys watched the flames from the ground as Perry reported that the target appeared to be dead. Seconds later something smashed through his windshield, and the helicopter exploded. Furious, Loudermilk ordered every unit to the crash site and demanded that the creatures be caught at once, while the team scattered through the burning trees.

In the chaos the armored hunter fell among the humans. Mandy later told the others that the dying creature had spoken to her through scraps of mimicked human speech, showed her where the killer was heading and asked her to shoot it, which she did. She came back carrying its glowing mask, which guided them to the hunter's space pod. The pod carried a homing beacon that could call a mothership down to Earth, and the team found the rogue there, working the controls to summon a ride home.

Death At The Landing Site

A foreign transmission scrambled the CIA radios as Loudermilk's men searched for the pod. They reached the landing site in a ravine, where the rogue ambushed them from the trees and attacked a helicopter. It slaughtered the agents on the ground, and a bloodied Loudermilk faced it alone, telling the creature to get it over with. The rogue drove its wrist blades through his head. Nearby, John's team watched a helicopter go down in a fireball, and when one of them asked whether the blast had killed the creature, John admitted that he did not think so.

The team spread out to hem the rogue in, but Phil Smith moved too close with his rocket launcher. The creature fired a net that snared him, and the phosphorus grenades he carried ignited. Smith burned in front of his friends, and the blast set the rogue on fire as well. Still burning, the creature turned on Robert Graves and impaled him while Mandy screamed his name. She swore to kill it, but John ordered her to get away and called the creature to come at him instead.

John confronted the rogue, accusing it of never having enough after Chris, Potts, Kelso and now his friends, and calling every human just a trophy to it. The creature stabbed him and repeated his words back in his own voice. Broken and dying, John told it that if it wanted a trophy, it could have one, and forced something into its jaws. The rogue crushed him. Mandy fired repeatedly into its head, and the creature choked, spilled green blood and collapsed dead on top of John among the flames.

The Pine Barren Massacre

Wounded and alone in the burning woods, Mandy felt close to blacking out from the pain. Then a Predator mothership appeared overhead, and several hunters descended toward her. She asked bitterly whether they could not stand to see anyone left alive or simply let her burn to death. She pressed her pistol to her own head and refused to give them the satisfaction. At CIA command, a monitor flatlined, and an officer reported that the operation was over because their superiors had pulled the plug.

Acting Commander Garvin ordered a code-blue evacuation while a clean-up team from Langley prepared to whitewash the affair. Mandy walked out of the woods carrying the hunter's mask as a beam of light rose into the sky. Later, television news blamed four military veterans, three men and a woman, for the record-setting murder spree, reporting that all four had died in a forest fire during a shoot-out with federal authorities. Only John Pulnick of Stone Hill River was named. Mandy, her hair bleached white, watched the report at home with the Predator mask beside her.

Key Characters

• John Pulnick was the former CIA operative who owned the Body Count paintball field, was framed for the massacre and led his old unit against the rogue, dying as he forced a final trophy into its jaws.
• Mandy Graves, born Mandy West, was the AWOL agent who married Robert Graves, shot the dying armored hunter at its request, killed the rogue and was the only member of the team to survive.
• Robert Graves was Mandy's husband and John's former teammate, who led the hospital breakout and was impaled by the burning rogue at the landing site.
• Phillip Smith was the third AWOL agent, a hothead who called the creatures a race of killers and burned to death when the rogue's net set off his phosphorus grenades.
• Rich Kelso was the sheriff's deputy and John's friend, who knocked him out, then helped free him and died fighting the rogue alone.
• Claude Loudermilk was the CIA commander who posed as an FBI agent, framed John and hunted both the creature and his old agents before the rogue killed him.
• Chris Hudson was John's young employee and a secret CIA plant, who escaped the paintball massacre on his Harley until a truck hit him and the rogue took his head.
• Sheriff Potts was the elderly local sheriff, killed by the rogue in the woods, whose corpse it later dropped on John's team from the treetops.
• Garvin was Loudermilk's aide, who became acting commander after his death and ordered the evacuation and the cover-up.
• The rogue Predator was a hunter that had killed and eaten other Predators aboard its ship, and its own kind shot it down over New Jersey before it slaughtered dozens of people in the barrens.
• The armored hunter, later called the Enforcer Predator, was the white-armored Predator sent after the rogue, who spared John, lost their duel and asked Mandy to end its life.

Behind The Scenes

Dark Horse first ran the story as a three-part prologue titled Bad Blood in Dark Horse Comics #12 to #14, from August to October 1993, and the four-issue miniseries followed from December 1993 to June 1994. Evan Dorkin wrote the script, two years after he had penciled Predator: Big Game for writer John Arcudi. Derek Thompson penciled the series and painted its covers, signing the first one in 1993. Chris Warner inked the first two issues, Keith Aiken inked the third, and Aiken and Thompson split the inks on the fourth.

Chris Chalenor colored the series and Pat Brosseau lettered it. Warner and John Weeks edited the first two issues, and Edward Martin III took over for the last two, while Scott Tice designed the books and the logo. Dark Horse's solicitation for the first issue promised a slaughterhouse in the Pine Barrens, an ex-CIA operative accused of the killings and a second Predator determined to stop the rogue. Mandy Graves returned more than twenty years later in Predator: Hunters, which Dark Horse published in 2017.

Editions

The prologue ran in Dark Horse Comics #12, #13 and #14 on August 1, September 1 and October 1, 1993, at $2.50 per issue. The miniseries followed with #1 on December 1, 1993, #2 on February 1, 1994, #3 on May 1 and #4 on June 1. Each issue was a 36-page comic priced at $2.50 in the United States, with 24 story pages and a painted cover by Derek Thompson. The Canadian price was $3.15 for the first issue and $3.40 for the remaining three.

Dark Horse collected the miniseries together with the prologue in Predator Omnibus Volume 3 on June 11, 2008, a 344-page paperback in a six-by-nine-inch format priced at $24.99, which also featured work by Mark Schultz and Gene Colan. Marvel reprinted the series and the prologue in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 on December 28, 2022, a hardcover priced at $125 with a cover by Iban Coello. That book placed Bad Blood alongside Big Game, Predator: Cold War and Predator: Dark River.

Conclusion

Predator: Bad Blood turned the hunter of the films into a murderer that even its own people wanted dead, and set it loose in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The rogue had eaten its own kind before it ever reached Earth, and in the woods it killed lawyers, police, agents and friends with no sign of the code that guided the hunter sent after it. That second Predator spared John when it had the chance, while the humans chasing the rogue proved almost as ruthless as their prey.

Dorkin built the story around John Pulnick and the renegade agents of his old unit, people who had killed for the CIA and wanted out. Loudermilk's agency hunted them as hard as it hunted the creature, and by the end nearly everyone was dead, from Chris and Kelso to Loudermilk himself. Only Mandy Graves walked away, carrying a Predator mask, while the official story blamed four veterans for the slaughter and buried the truth about what had happened in the barrens.

External Sources

• Predator: Bad Blood #1 at Dark Horse
• Predator: Bad Blood #4 at Dark Horse
• Dark Horse Comics #12 at Dark Horse
• Predator Omnibus Volume 3 at Dark Horse
• Predator: Bad Blood series at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator: Bad Blood #3 at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator: Bad Blood #4 at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 at Marvel

---

Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore