Predators: Beating the Bullet: Plot & Lore
Predators: Beating the Bullet is Dark Horse Comics' official adaptation of Predators (2010), written by Paul Tobin from the screenplay by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, and pencilled by Victor Drujiniu. Tony Kordos, David Rivera, and Jordi Tarragona inked the interiors, Cirque Studios colored the story, Nate Piekos lettered it, and Scott Allie, Sierra Hahn, Freddye Lins, and John Schork edited the July 2010 one-shot. The comic follows IDF sniper Isabelle from a raid in Guatemala onto the Game Preserve Planet, where she and mercenary Royce face the Super Predators. Among Dark Horse Predator comics, it stands beside Predator: Welcome to the Jungle and Predators: A Predatory Life as the film-side chapter told from Isabelle's point of view.
Plot Summary
Peten Jungle
In the Peten jungle of Guatemala, Isabelle tracked ex-Kaibil soldier Alvaro Otti for four days with her teammates while Otti trafficked drugs and women for the Lord's Resistance Army. From cover she fired into his camp, cut down guards around a truck of bound captives, and slid into the clearing as more soldiers answered the shots. Return fire drove her past the truck and into the trees, and two men left the huts to chase her through the brush.
Isabelle knew the camp layout from days of watching, yet the volume of gunfire told her that Otti's men had more rifles ready than her team had counted on. She ran with her sniper rifle across her body, called for her partners over the radio, and heard only static as the two pursuers closed the gap behind her. The chase pulled her away from the freed women and from the huts where Bollo and Abe were still fighting.
The Jacket
Deep in the trees Isabelle hung her jacket on a branch, screamed once as a decoy, and waited while the two soldiers found the empty coat on the roots. One of them asked why her jacket was there at all, and she shot both men with her pistol before either could raise a rifle. She left the coat where it lay and ran back toward Otti's camp to rejoin her team.
She reached the huts too late to save Bollo and Abe, found the freed women huddled against a wall, and watched Bollo fall with a wound through his chest. Isabelle raised her pistol at a threat she could not see, and a hunter took her from the ground before she could fire again. Her next clear memory was open sky and a parachute on her back.
Drop Onto The Game Preserve
Isabelle woke in freefall over an unknown jungle, and her chute opened on its own before she hit the canopy of the Game Preserve Planet. She cut free of the harness in the trees, checked her rifle and sidearm, and found no radio contact with anyone she had known in Guatemala. The heat, the light, and the plant life around her did not match the Peten she had just left.
On the ground she moved with care until she heard other voices in the brush and raised her rifle on the first figures she saw. Mercenary Royce, cartel enforcer Cuchillo, and Spetsnaz soldier Nikolai were already arguing about where they had landed and why none of them remembered a plane. Isabelle held the muzzle on them until they talked her down, then admitted that she had woken in freefall the same way they had.
Joining The Others
The circle grew as death-row inmate Stans, RUF soldier Mombasa, Yakuza enforcer Hanzo, and doctor Edwin walked out of the trees under Royce's lead. Isabelle asked Royce whether he remembered a plane, and he answered that he had woken in freefall, the same as she had. Royce named each of them by background and treated the freefall landings as a selection of killers rather than a rescue.
Isabelle broke up a fight between Stans and Mombasa, stayed close to unarmed Edwin in the denser brush, and argued that the group should move as one when Royce walked ahead alone. She read the heat and the terrain as wrong for Earth, and Royce read her accent and kit as IDF. None of them had a map, a radio net, or a reason to trust the strangers beside them, yet the shared freefall was enough to hold the line for a while.
Traps
On the march the group found deadfalls and trip lines cut for larger prey than any animal they knew. A heavy log swung out of the trees on white ropes, and Edwin and Mombasa scrambled clear as wood and cord tore through the path where they had stood. Someone shouted that it was a trap, and the whole line broke into a run until the swinging weight hung still again.
Isabelle saw that the triggers were set for upright walkers and that the builders had used local timber with care. Royce treated the deadfalls as proof that someone was already hunting on the ground, not as random jungle hazards. The group tightened spacing after that and watched the canopy as hard as the trail under their boots.
Caught In The Trap
A later snare took Isabelle cleanly, wrapping her in a black hunter net against a trunk while a large Predator stepped into view above her. She forced herself to move slowly toward the gun under her kit and to look like prey that was only squirming, because she had already learned that these hunters preferred a fight. Off in the brush someone called her name, and she held still enough to buy the seconds she needed.
The net and the creature above her confirmed that the preserve's hunters used tools and judgment, not only claws and teeth, and Isabelle filed that lesson with the rest of the raid. Isabelle reached the pistol without drawing a killing blow, then the moment broke and she got free of the mesh before the hunter finished her. She rejoined the others with a clear memory of spotted skin, dark armor, and a mask that watched her the way a sniper watches a lane.
Hell-Hounds
After the alien skyline showed worlds that were not Earth's, spiked hell-hounds hit the group in the open. Cuchillo emptied both submachine guns into the first leaping beast while Royce, Mombasa, and the others poured fire into the pack that followed. Isabelle ran to cover unarmed Edwin when her rifle ran dry, then put her pistol to her own head rather than let a hound tear her apart.
A whistle called the pack back before the kill, the work of the Tracker who handled the dogs for the Super Predators. Royce named the place a game preserve and treated the hounds as a flush rather than the main hunt. Soon afterward the group heard Cuchillo cry for help from a clearing, Mombasa recognized the wounded-bait trick, and Isabelle fired what she thought was a mercy shot only to hear the same voice call again as a hunter mimicked the dead man.
The Hunting Camp
Following the hounds' tracks, the group reached a hunters' camp and found a smaller Predator bound to a carved pillar, the Crucified Predator held by the larger Super Predators. Royce asked what the hell the thing was, Hanzo raised both pistols, and Isabelle recognized the species from a classified report. She shouted that the hunters were invisible and that the others should watch for footprints in the dirt.
Royce fired into the ground to raise a dust cloud that outlined cloaked forms around the camp. Mombasa died in the first exchange of plasma and gunfire, and the survivors ran for the cliff edge beyond the clearing. The bound hunter on the pillar stayed where it was, proof that more than one clan used the preserve and that the larger hunters took trophies from their own kind as well as from humans.
Into The Waterfall
The chase ended at a sheer cliff where jungle met open air and the drop below ran farther than any of them could judge. Royce and the others looked over the edge while Isabelle weighed the fall against the hunters at their backs. Someone swore at the height, and the group took the only path left and jumped toward the river and the waterfall below.
On the bank afterward the survivors accused Royce of using them as bait at the camp, and Isabelle pointed her rifle at him when he treated their lives as tools for his own escape. Royce answered that they now knew there was more than one hunter, that the hunters used projectile and energy weapons and cloaks, and that they were heavier than they looked. He pressed her on what she already knew about the creatures, and she began the story of Guatemala.
Archuletta And The Bomb Site
Isabelle told the group about a classified 1987 debriefing in which special-operations survivor Dutch had beaten an invisible hunter, the Jungle Hunter, by hiding his heat under mud. Years later she and her spotter, Isaac Archuletta, took a rebel-hunting mission in Guatemala so she could test that report on the ground. They found the crater left by the hunter's self-destruct, and Isabelle felt watched in the trees while Archuletta dismissed the feeling.
Rebels caught Archuletta soon afterward, and Isabelle watched through her scope as one of them shot him in the head. She did not fire, because more than twenty men stood between her and any chance of getting him out alive. She blamed herself for sending the best spotter she had ever known to look for invisible things, and she carried that guilt onto the preserve.
Meeting Noland
Deeper in the jungle the survivors met scavenger Noland, who had lived for seasons on the preserve and whose earlier years there were already staged in Welcome to the Jungle with Navy SEAL Drake. He came out of the dark in a weathered Predator mask with a scavenged energy weapon raised, and Isabelle held her ground while he decided whether they were prey or company. Noland lowered the muzzle once he spoke, then led them toward the cliffs where he had made his home.
He told them he had survived by hiding, scavenging, and never joining a straight fight with a live hunter if he could avoid it. Royce listened for routes, weapons, and any way off the planet, while the others watched the trees for the Super Predators that had already taken Cuchillo and Mombasa. Noland's mask and kit were proof that someone could live for years on the preserve if he stripped the dead and stayed out of the open.
Noland's Camp
Noland lived in the cliffs inside an unfathomably massive drill that somebody or something had once used to bore into the rock. His home was a metal box in the tunnels with gear everywhere, guns, armor, and anything he had found useful after long seasons as a scavenger. He showed the group scavenged hunter equipment and said he had never killed a Predator himself, only stripped one the Super Predators had already finished.
The drill tunnels gave the survivors a roof and a place to breathe, yet Noland's welcome had a price. When he tried to poison the group for their weapons, Royce fired inside the hideout to draw the hunters in and force a way out. The shot turned the camp from shelter into a funnel, and the Super Predators closed on the tunnels as the humans ran for the exits.
Stans Dies
In the fighting that followed the drill, death-row inmate Stans jumped onto a Predator's back and drove a blade into its chest. He shouted his own name as neon green blood sprayed from the wound and told the hunter he had killed forty-two people across three states. Isabelle saw him cling to the creature while the rest of the line ran for cover in the dark trees.
Stans continued screaming for the hunter to say his name even as the fight turned against him. The others left him there because stopping would have finished them too, and the narration of the escape marks that they went while he held the Predator. His stand bought the survivors a few more meters of jungle and ended his part of the freefall group for good.
Hanzo Fights Tracker
The survivors pushed through swamp water to mask scent and heat, then through a field of tall grass with the hunters still behind them. Hanzo stopped in that grass, nodded at Isabelle, and planted his feet with the katana at his side. She looked back once, saw that he would not follow, and ran on with Royce while Hanzo waited for the Tracker.
Hanzo's choice cut the group again and left a trained swordsman between the survivors and the dog-handler who had flushed them with hell-hounds. Isabelle did not see the whole duel, only the decision and the empty path behind her after she left. The Tracker hunt closed on that field, and Hanzo did not rejoin the march toward the camp.
Edwin's Betrayal
After the grass field only a few of the freefall group remained on their feet, and doctor Edwin stayed close to Isabelle as if he were still the civilian she had shielded. He paralyzed her with a neurotoxin when she was alone with him, cut and tasted her skin, and told her he belonged among the prey the hunters had chosen. The soft voice and medical kit had hidden a killer who saw the preserve as a place that finally fit him.
Royce found what Edwin had done and turned the trap back on the doctor instead of leaving Isabelle for the Super Predators. Edwin's betrayal stripped away the last fiction that everyone in the freefall group wanted the others alive. Isabelle fought the toxin while Royce set the ground for a fight with the clan leader that had driven the hunt from the start.
Fight With The Berserker
Royce faced the Berserker in the burning camp with a scavenged axe while fire tore through the clearing behind them. He struck the spotted Super Predator hard enough to spray neon green blood across his vest and face, and the impact drove the hunter off balance in the smoke. Isabelle recovered enough from the toxin to put a rifle round into the Berserker during that fight and give Royce the opening he needed.
The Berserker had led the preserve hunt, dragged prey back toward the camp, and outlasted traps, hounds, and the deaths of Stans and Hanzo. Royce finished the clan leader with the axe after Isabelle's shot, and the fire around them turned the hunting ground into a pyre. No mud camouflage covered Royce in this version of the fight, only the axe, the rifle support, and the burning camp.
Finale
When the Berserker was down, Royce and Isabelle walked away from the fire with his arm across her shoulders and the scavenged axe left in the dirt beside the hunter's severed head. Royce said they survive and they go on, and nothing more, and Isabelle took that answer as clean enough after Guatemala and the preserve. The preserve around them remained active, yet the Super Predator who had led this hunt was dead at their feet.
Of the freefall group that had met in the trees, only Royce and Isabelle were still on their feet at the end of Beating the Bullet. Cuchillo, Mombasa, Nikolai, Stans, Hanzo, and Edwin were gone, Noland's drill was no longer shelter, and the Crucified Predator's camp had burned behind them. The adaptation closes on the two survivors moving through the wreckage with no grand plan beyond staying alive on a world that was still a hunt.
Key Characters
- Isabelle was an IDF sniper taken from Alvaro Otti's camp in Guatemala. She carried the Archuletta guilt into the preserve, warned the group about cloaked hunters, and lived to help Royce kill the Berserker.
- Royce was an American mercenary who led the freefall survivors, used the others as bait at the hunting camp, drew the hunters onto Noland's hideout, and killed the Berserker in the final fight.
- Isaac Archuletta was Isabelle's spotter on the Guatemala rebel mission. Rebels executed him while she watched through her scope near the Jungle Hunter bomb site.
- Noland was an Air Cavalry scavenger who hid in an abandoned drill, stripped dead hunters for gear, and tried to poison the group before Royce brought the Super Predators down on the hideout.
- Stans was a death-row inmate who leapt onto a Predator and stabbed it during the escape from Noland's camp, buying the others time at the cost of his own life.
- Hanzo was a Yakuza enforcer who stopped in the tall grass with his katana and stayed behind to fight the Tracker while Isabelle and Royce ran on.
- Edwin was the doctor who paralyzed Isabelle with a neurotoxin and revealed himself as a killer who belonged among the chosen prey.
- The Berserker was the Super Predator who led the preserve hunt, dragged Isabelle and Edwin back toward the camp, and died under Royce's axe after Isabelle's rifle shot.
- The Crucified Predator was the smaller hunter bound at the Super Predators' camp, the first clear proof for the group that more than one clan hunted on the preserve.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Predators: Beating the Bullet as a July 2010 one-shot timed to the theatrical release of Predators, with the listed street date of July 14, 2010. Paul Tobin wrote the adaptation from the Litvak and Finch screenplay, Victor Drujiniu pencilled it, Tony Kordos, David Rivera, and Jordi Tarragona inked it, Cirque Studios colored it, and Nate Piekos lettered it under Scott Allie, Sierra Hahn, Freddye Lins, and John Schork. The story ran as a single long Isabelle-point-of-view adaptation rather than as weekly chapter comics, and its interior title banner reads Beating the Bullet. Dark Horse also sold the work under film-adaptation branding beside the Welcome to the Jungle weekly issues and the A Predatory Life strips.
Dark Horse collected the Predators film comics in a trade paperback in October 2010 that gathered the adaptation with the related prequel and sequel material. After Marvel took the Predator comics license, the Tobin and Drujiniu story returned in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 in May 2024 beside Homeworld, Captive, Nemesis, Demon's Gold, Xenogenesis, Welcome to the Jungle, A Predatory Life, and the later Hunters trilogy. The omnibus pages used for this overview run from the Predators Film Adaptation section open through the Berserker's death and the sequel teaser.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse timed Beating the Bullet for July 2010 so shops could sell the official film adaptation in the same season as Robert Rodriguez's Predators release and the June weekly prequel comics. Tobin's script held to Isabelle's point of view and added the Peten raid, the Archuletta execution, and the bomb-site search that the film only sketched in dialogue. Drujiniu's likenesses followed the cast, and the editorial team of Scott Allie and Sierra Hahn shipped the one-shot under Mike Richardson's Dark Horse banner with the same Predators branding as Welcome to the Jungle. The original trade packaging used Twentieth Century Fox film art, while later Fear is Reborn trade stock used Victor Drujiniu cover art with Royce and a Super Predator.
The comic differs from the film in several grounded ways: the hell-hounds strike sooner after the alien skyline, Hanzo fights with two pistols before the katana stand, Noland uses poison gas instead of smoke, Edwin cuts and tastes Isabelle's skin, and Royce faces the Berserker without the mud camouflage of the movie finale. It also omits the River Ghost encounter and has the group meet Noland in the jungle instead. Those changes stay inside Isabelle's narration and do not rewrite the preserve's hunters or the Super Predator clan that Welcome to the Jungle and A Predatory Life had already staged around Drake, Noland, and Royce.
Conclusion
Predators: Beating the Bullet is the July 2010 Dark Horse Predators film adaptation by Paul Tobin and Victor Drujiniu, with inks by Tony Kordos, David Rivera, and Jordi Tarragona, colors by Cirque Studios, and letters by Nate Piekos. It follows Isabelle from Alvaro Otti's Guatemalan camp and the jacket decoy through the Game Preserve freefall, the traps and hell-hounds, the Crucified Predator's camp, the Archuletta flashback, Noland's drill, and the deaths of Stans and Hanzo to Royce's axe fight with the Berserker. The adaptation ends with Isabelle and Royce still alive on the preserve after the Super Predator leader falls.
External Sources
- Predators (Film Adaptation) at Dark Horse Comics
- Predators Film Adaptation at Comic Vine
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 at Dark Horse Comics
Tag Categories: Predator Comics
