Predator: Badlands Prequel: Dek's Earlier Hunt Explained
Predator: Badlands (2025) #1 was Marvel's official prequel to Predator: Badlands, released in November 2025 alongside Dan Trachtenberg's film. Ethan Sacks wrote it, Elvin Ching drew it, and the story was developed with input from the director. It followed a younger Dek and his brother Kwei on a retrieval mission ordered by Njohrr, sending Dek alone into a derelict alien ship that had crashed on the moon roughly ten thousand years earlier.
Mission To Pelkonen IV
The comic opened on a moon of Pelkonen IV, with Dek and Kwei on the ground and the derelict ship crashed between trees and foliage ahead of them. Njohrr had brought them there aboard a Yautja ship and stayed on board while the brothers went down to the surface. Their job was to pull a piece of technology out of the wreck. It sounded straightforward on paper. Kwei was the experienced hunter and the son their father trusted; Dek was the smaller brother still trying to earn a place in the clan. The run was meant to test Dek alone before the bigger trials in the movie, so Kwei stayed behind on the moon while Dek boarded the wreck.
Inside The Ten-Thousand-Year-Old Wreck
Inside, the ship was still running. Sealed sections opened on their own, systems flickered back to life, and the corridors held the remains of a crew that had died long before modern Yautja technology existed. Dek pushed deeper looking for the part Njohrr wanted, but the vessel's central intelligence. With no backup inside the hull, he had to lean on speed and improvisation. First, Dek had to battle local insects that swarmed him, but he managed to break free.
The security logs made things worse. Recorded footage showed Yautja boarding the ship in the distant past and cutting through the alien crew. That was visual proof of a hunt that predated every other dated encounter in the expanded timeline. If those records were accurate, this wreck held the earliest known Yautja hunt on record, roughly ten thousand years before the comic's present day.
Dek Vs. The Yautja Killer
The ship answered the lone intruder with a robotic hunter built to kill Yautja. The ship's AI called it the Yautja Killer, a tall machine with the broad silhouette of a Predator, but fully mechanical. Dek was outmatched on paper, but he used whatever gear he had left to stay in the fight while Kwei waited outside on the moon's surface.
During the fight, the ship's AI and the Yautja Killer realized the ship's crew were long dead, and fighting on would be pointless. The wreck then triggered a self-destruct. Dek had his prize in hand, but dropped it when escaping the ship at the last moment. Dek got out with the mission unfinished and battered from the fight inside, rejoining Kwei on the surface before they had to face Njohrr back on their ship.
Njohrr's Disappointment
Njohrr had been waiting on the ship the whole time, and he did not hold back when Dek and Kwei returned. Dek came back empty-handed, and Njohrr treated the failure as proof that he was weak and not worth respecting next to Kwei. Kwei stepped in to shield his brother from the worst of it, the same loyalty that later pushed him to help Dek escape Njohrr's execution order in the film. The one-shot ends on that humiliation, which helps explain why Dek showed up in Predator: Badlands already desperate to prove himself on Genna.
Connection To Badlands
The comic fills the gap between Dek's life on Yautja Prime and the opening trials of the movie. It shows the bond between the brothers, puts Njohrr's cruelty on the page, and makes clear that Dek could fight when cornered even without Kwei's size or standing in the clan. If you watch the film after reading this, Dek flinching at Njohrr's approval and the weight of Kwei's death both land harder.
It also skips over several things the movie only hints at. There is no explanation for how Dek lost his fang, how he once saved Kwei's life, or where the toy-like object on Kwei's ship came from. Any of those would have fit naturally inside an alien wreck full of old cargo. Still, for a one-shot, it does enough setup work: the rift with Njohrr, Kwei's loyalty, and Dek's resourcefulness even when his father refuses to notice it.
Predator Timeline Connections
The prequel takes place a few months or maybe a few years before Predator: Badlands; the story itself never pins down the exact gap. Dek's broken fang is already there, so that injury predates this mission. The derelict itself crashed about ten thousand years before the comic's events, yet its archives still held security footage of Yautja cutting through the Pelkonen IV alien crew. That makes the Pelkonen IV wreck the earliest documented Yautja hunt in the expanded timeline, well before colonial-era stories like Prey or the ancient Earth hunts in Predator: Killer of Killers.
Read against the film, the dates get wild. The Predator: Badlands timeline places the movie after all of the Alien films, including Alien: Resurrection in 2381, likely somewhere in the 25th century. If Badlands sits around 2500, the hunt recorded inside the wreck lands roughly around 7500 BC. That is the deepest chronological anchor for Yautja activity in the combined Alien and Predator chronology.
The Yautja Killer
The comic's main threat was the Yautja Killer, a fully robotic hunter deployed by the derelict ship's AI. It looked a lot like the Predator Killer suit from the end of The Predator (2018), with the same heavy plating, same Predator-shaped profile, and the same basic idea of human-built armor turned against Yautja hunters. It was bigger, though, and ran on its own with no pilot inside.
In The Predator, the suit was meant as a gift to humanity, brought to Earth by the Fugitive Predator to help humans fight the Upgrade Predator. By the time humans opened the pod at the end of the film, the Upgrade was already dead, so the suit never saw use in that fight. Predator: Hunting Grounds later revealed through Sean Keyes' lore tapes that the Predator Killer was only a flawed prototype with many problems. It was vulnerable to small arms fire, ran out of power quickly, and never got deployed against Yautja in the field.
The Yautja Killer in the Badlands prequel was older, hostile from the start, and built to wipe out intruding Predators. Like the Predator Killer, it also failed to finish the job. The suit never fought a Yautja, and the robotic hunter failed to kill Dek before the ship blew itself apart.
The Pelkonen IV Species
The Pelkonen IV aliens resemble the four-armed tribals Ahab fought in Fire and Stone. The victims in the security footage were not humans. They belonged to an unnamed alien species tied to the Pelkonen IV wreck, described in more detail in our guide to other species that Yautja hunt. These beings looked humanoid but had four arms, carried Pulse Rifle-like firearms, and wore mask-like headgear that resembled Yautja bio-masks. By the time Dek entered the ship, the crew was long dead, yet the vessel's AI still treated any intruder as a threat to its former masters.
That made the prequel important for Predator lore beyond Dek's backstory. Most fans think of humans and Xenomorphs as the default Yautja prey, but the hunt on this wreck showed that pattern going back millennia against other intelligent species. Other notable examples include the colossal Engineers, the insectoid River Ghosts dropped onto the Game Preserve Planet, and the ancient Amengi, who once enslaved the early Hish before the Yautja turned the tables.
Conclusion
Predator: Badlands (2025) #1 is a short read, but it packs in a fair amount of lore for a one-shot. Dek and Kwei's relationship, Njohrr's cruelty, the Pelkonen IV aliens, the earliest dated Yautja hunt on record, and a callback to the Predator Killer idea through the ship's robotic defender. That is a lot for a single issue. It does not answer every question the movie raises, but if you want official context on Dek's exile and how he fights under pressure, this is still the most direct source.
External Sources
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