Predator: Big Game Comic: Plot, Characters & Lore
Predator: Big Game is a four-issue Predator comic from Dark Horse Comics, written by John Arcudi, penciled by Evan Dorkin and published from March to June 1991. It followed Corporal Enoch Nakai, a Navajo soldier at an army base in Cibola County, New Mexico, after a hunter crashed nearby and the army seized its ship. The creature reminded Nakai of the witches from his grandfather's stories. After the hunter wiped out his base, a sheriff and an entire search party, Nakai tracked it alone into the lava fields of El Malpais.
Plot Summary
Cibola County
The story opened over Cibola County, New Mexico, a quiet landscape of scrub and mesas that the narration compared to a painting by Frederic Remington. A herd of javelinas foraged in the dark until something flew low over their heads with a loud rush of air, scattering the animals into the brush. The town of Grants and its airport lay not far to the north, but nobody there noticed the object. When the javelinas returned to the spot, one of them was blasted apart by a sudden bolt of energy.
A strange pod rested in the grass where the craft had come down. The full-page splash that followed showed the Big Game Predator standing over the herd under the moon, holding the bloody carcass of a javelina in one hand. The narration observed that things there were as normal as they would ever be again. The Predator had not come to New Mexico to hide. Its first kill in the county was an animal, but the opening made it clear that the hunter would soon move on to bigger game.
Cole Army Base
North across the plains stood Cole Army Base, less than an hour from lights out. Corporal Enoch Nakai asked his sergeant about a three-day pass that he had requested a month earlier, but the request was refused because he had anti-aircraft duty the next day. The sergeant told him to resubmit it and called him a cagey little punk. Nakai had hoped to see Alda, his girlfriend, who worked at a diner and had not seen him in months. Back in the barracks, his buddies called lights out.
His friend, Private Dietl, a blond soldier who called him Nava-ho Joe, kept a bottle of bourbon hidden in his footlocker. Dietl asked whether all Indians were like Nakai, who never seemed to grit his teeth, and joked that he would get an ulcer. The next morning, both men were hungover on a tracked anti-aircraft vehicle out on the prairie. Nakai explained that the land spoke to him through smells, and that an unfamiliar smell meant danger. Dietl, the city boy of the pair, admitted that he could not smell anything at all.
The Adilgashii
Nakai soon caught a weird odor like sweat, strange during a long drought, and then he heard someone moving in the trees. A cloaked Predator crouched in the branches above them, almost invisible. Dietl looked up and insisted that there was nothing there. Seconds later, a bolt of plasma struck Dietl and killed him on the spot. Nakai ran for his life, shouting that it was an adilgashii, just as his grandfather had described it, a witch that appeared as a shimmer in the air before it struck.
Nakai flagged down a jeep driven by a red-haired soldier who had been sent to fetch the colonel's vehicles. He refused to return to the anti-aircraft post and wondered what he could tell anyone, since saying that he had seen a witch would only get him laughed at. He told the driver that they were out investigating a bogey and climbed aboard. The Navajo legend of the witch gave Nakai a name for the killer, but it gave him no idea of how to fight it.
The Captured Ship
At the foot of the mountains, the colonel's survey team had found something far more important to the army than a missing soldier. A helicopter crane was lifting the hunter's saucer-shaped ship onto a flatbed truck while soldiers watched. Colonel Athelry called the find splendid. Sergeant Coates demanded to know what Nakai was doing there, but the corporal asked to speak with the colonel on a matter of extreme urgency. Coates explained that the craft was a foreign surveillance aircraft and accused Nakai of abandoning his post.
Nakai answered that he might have encountered the occupant, and that it was no spy. Later, the colonel told him to keep the story to himself and to stay with the men guarding the ship, since the pilot might try to retrieve it. Coates promised to send men for Dietl's body. Athelry privately remarked that Navajos barely spoke anyway. Radar had shown a craft the size of a sparrow, and only its speed had given it away. The army now had the ship, and the hunter still roamed the hills outside Cole.
Clowes And Lee
Before sundown, Coates sent two soldiers, Clowes and Lee, to recover the body. The narration described them as frontiersmen and hunters who were confident in their skills. They followed a trail of blood into the hills and found Dietl skinned and hanging from a tree. While they stared at the body, the Predator moved in behind them. A blade slid out with a sharp sound, and Clowes screamed as one of its wrist blades was driven through his chest from behind, killing him before he could raise his rifle.
Lee was hit by a plasma blast but survived long enough to open fire with his M16, shouting at the creature to show its face. When nothing appeared, he fled toward the base, desperate to warn the others. He never made it. The hunter hurled a spear that impaled him from behind, pinning him where he fell with his name tag still visible on his uniform. At Cole, a soldier named Kroft heard distant shouting while he smoked outside, and he decided that he had better put out his cigarette and go back inside.
The Barracks
In the barracks that night, the other soldiers taunted Nakai about his story. One mocked his strong, silent Navajo act, and another suggested that he had scalped Dietl himself. Nakai punched him. The others welcomed the fight and told the Chief to show them how he handled a real challenge. The narration treated the barracks as another kind of hunting ground, where Nakai found no more understanding among his fellow soldiers than he had found from the colonel. His friend was dead, and the base treated him as a liar or a suspect.
Nakai beat two of the soldiers before Sergeant Coates burst in and demanded to know what was going on. He ordered Nakai to come with him at once. Rather than a punishment, the corporal received a meeting in a storage closet with the colonel, who told him that everything he heard was strictly classified. Tests on the captured ship had proven that it was not a surveillance craft at all. The army had finally started to believe him, although the colonel had no intention of letting the truth leave Cole.
Three-Day Pass
The colonel explained that the craft was a hostile combat vessel and that Nakai had indeed run into its operator. The fact that it had come so close raised serious questions about the base's defenses. Without its ship, the colonel doubted that the pilot posed much threat to Cole, but he expected it to be anxious to eliminate the only person who could recognize it. Coates and the colonel had decided that Nakai should take a leave. His three-day pass had been pushed through, and the army would drive him to the nearest bus stop.
At 4:42 in the morning, a jeep took Nakai toward the 5:07 bus to La Barca de Oro. The driver remarked that it was weird how the colonel had suddenly approved his pass, and Nakai agreed. From a tree outside the base, the hunter watched them leave and repeated the words in a perfect imitation of a human voice. A full-page splash showed the Predator crouched among the branches with skulls hung around it. The captions asked whether the pilot realized that its craft had been seized and what it could possibly do about it. A beeping device on its wrist answered.
Cole Destroyed
At 6:38 that morning, the ship rested on a gantry inside a hangar at Cole. The officers discussed Nakai, now in the private sector, and agreed that nobody would believe his story. A doctor reported that the radioactivity on the hull indicated deep space travel but had dissipated. Coates realized that he had forgotten all about the report from Clowes and Lee, who had never returned from the hills. Then a light began flashing on the ship, and a technician warned the colonel that they might have a problem.
The hunter had triggered its self-destruct from a distance. The first issue ended with a full-page splash of a mushroom cloud rising over the plains as the explosion obliterated Cole Army Base, along with Colonel Athelry, Sergeant Coates and the soldiers who had mocked Nakai. Only the colonel's decision to send Nakai away had saved his life. The army had tried to keep the hunter's existence secret, and instead it lost an entire base in a single morning. The Predator remained free in the hills without its ship.
Ben's Saloon
The second issue opened at Ben's Saloon in Agate, New Mexico, a town between the Zuni and Ramah reservations that offered the only place around to get drunk. The locals were talking about a big explosion that morning to the southeast and guessed that Cole had been testing a missile. Nakai slumped at the bar with a bottle of Jack Daniel's, too drunk to follow the conversation. Shortly before one o'clock, Alda arrived and told him that it was time to go home with her.
A local named Butch and his friends wondered aloud whether the explosion had been nuclear, then turned their attention to Nakai and taunted him as Chief. Nakai tried to start a fight but fell flat on the floor before he could throw a punch, and the crash drew laughter from the bar. One of the men remarked that the boyfriend was finally ready to leave. Alda took him away. Nakai still had no idea that the explosion they had heard that morning had wiped out his base and every friend he had left at Cole.
The Sheep Ranch
On a reservation ranch nearby, a herder named Dan brought in his flock with his old father and young son. They had sent out 12 sheep and only 10 had come back, and Dan guessed that a puma was responsible. The old man found the bloody carcass of one of the missing animals. The family had no reason to suspect anything stranger, since mountain lions had always taken livestock in the hills. Then something heavy landed on the roof of the sheep shed with a loud crunch, and the men looked up.
A full-page splash showed the Predator crouched on the roof among the bloody carcasses of the missing sheep, torn open and scattered across the boards. Its messy feeding left no doubt about what had killed the flock. The old man quietly told the boy to go and fetch his father's rifle. The hunter had already destroyed Cole Army Base without a fight, and now it had found a lone family far from any help. The panel ended the scene before Dan could reach for a weapon, leaving the family's fate for later in the issue.
Grandfather And Brother
Asleep at Alda's place, Nakai dreamed of his youth. In the dream, a young Nakai drank whiskey with his friends until his grandfather smashed the bottle and declared that there would be no whiskey under his roof. The old man told him that half-breed was a white man's term. He could belong to the Belagana, the white people, or to the Diné, the People, but he could not belong to both. The memory carried the weight of the choice that Nakai had been trying to avoid for most of his life.
The dream then turned into a nightmare. His dead father and the skeletal figure of his mother appeared with a special visitor, and they told him to say hello to his brother, a glowing ghost of the child who had been stillborn. Nakai woke screaming. He told Alda that his mother had died in the same birth. Alda made him promise not to drink while he stayed with her, and when he begged her to have pity on him and called her woman, she reminded him that her name was Alda.
The Sheriff
Alda accused Nakai of self-pity, reminding him that his grandfather had raised him after his father abandoned him. Then a television bulletin advised Cibola County residents to stay indoors and reported that a nuclear explosion had destroyed Cole at 7:04 that morning, with no survivors. In the crowded streets, the local sheriff asked Nakai for help, since he was investigating a double murder on the reservation. Nakai felt that his duty lay with his base, while Alda pointed out that the army already believed he was dead.
At the ranch, the sheriff and his deputy, Floyd, found Dan's widow sobbing. The boy told them that blue fire had taken his father's head. Floyd had never seen wounds like these, since the flesh was cauterized. Then a whirring weapon wrapped around the deputy and electrocuted him with a crackle of energy, one of the hunter's electrified bolas. The sheriff fired blindly, and his shots made the hunter's cloak spark and fail. The Predator appeared with a roar, laser sights settled on the lawman, and a plasma blast killed him.
The Campfire
At an army roadblock, Nakai told a trooper that he had been stationed at Cole, but nobody was allowed through. He called Alda from a phone booth and learned that the sheriff and his deputy had been killed. Realizing that someone was killing people with blue fire, he told her to get out of town, hitch down Highway 36 to Rosalita's and take the car across the border into Arizona. Nakai set off on foot across the prairie that night, toward the crater where his base had stood and the army that could help him kill it.
On the way, he spotted a campfire. The Predator crouched beside it with its trophies, including the sheriff's skull wearing his hat and sunglasses, and its mask removed. Nakai dislodged a rock, and the creature turned. He hid and hoped that it could not see through stone, but its thermal vision scanned the darkness. Then a mountain lion leaped onto the hunter. The fight with the cat ended with plasma blasts that killed the lion, while Nakai escaped as more shots tore into the ground around him.
Colonel Trench
Near dawn, Nakai reached an army camp on the rim of the crater left by the blast. Two sentries, Figueras and his bespectacled buddy, drank coffee and talked about the atomic crater while Nakai slipped past them. In the command tent, Colonel Trench and Major Amblin puzzled over the evidence. Geiger counters showed surprisingly low readings at ground zero, yet aerial photographs indicated a nuclear weapon. Nakai stepped forward and begged the colonel's pardon, and military police leveled their guns and ordered him into the light with his hands up.
Nakai identified himself as Corporal Enoch Nakai, stationed at Cole until the day before. He warned the colonel that the blast was the least of their problems. The second issue ended with a full-page splash of the Predator walking alone through the night, carrying a net bag full of human skulls over its shoulder. The image summed up what the army faced. The officers worried about a nuclear incident, while the real danger was a lone hunter collecting the heads of anyone it found across Cibola County.
The Ghost Town
The third issue returned to Agate, a town of roughly seven hundred people that had been emptied by the evacuation. A man in glasses drove through in a red car, with newspapers about the blast on the seat beside him, and wondered what had happened to the local yokels. Without warning, the Predator leaped onto his hood. The driver screamed in disbelief and wondered what kind of animal it was. The car swerved and crashed into a storefront, and the man was thrown through the windshield into the wreckage.
The driver died in the crash. The hunter stood over the body and extended its blades to claim another trophy. Before it could finish, a voice called out that it had just bagged its last trophy. Nakai had been waiting with the army in the empty town. He stood in a jeep holding a bazooka and announced that it was his turn. A soldier told him that the weapon was ready to fire, and Nakai pulled the trigger. The rocket struck the Predator in an explosion that tore apart the storefront around it.
The Bazooka
The soldiers moved in while the creature was down. The narration reflected that Nakai had been born and raised a hunter among the Navajo, and that by grandstanding he had warned his prey and lost the chance for an accurate first strike. A good hunter knew better, since nothing was more dangerous than a wounded animal. The Predator rose and threw its spear, killing the driver of the jeep. The vehicle crashed, and soldiers asked whether the corporal was okay as he shouted at them to kill the thing.
The troops fired at the leaping Predator until Major Amblin ordered them to hold their fire, warning that such action got civilians killed. Nakai admitted that he had started it with the bazooka. Colonel Trench said that he understood, since Nakai had lost friends when his base was destroyed. The creature had fled east-northeast across the prairie. Of course they would pursue, but Trench ordered Nakai to stay in town as part of the occupying force, where the colonel could keep an eye on him. Amblin led the pursuit.
The Night Patrol
That night, Amblin's troops fanned out across the desert at 20-meter intervals, certain that the creature was hurt and that they could catch it. Each man wore infrared goggles, and they followed a trail of the monster's blood that they had tracked for half an hour. Lieutenant Mayhew noticed that the trail stopped abruptly and wondered why it would end there. He called out to Corales that this definitely qualified as something funny. The hunter lunged out of the darkness and killed him before he could raise his rifle.
Corales heard the call and shouted to ask whether Mayhew had found something. A voice answered with the dead lieutenant's words, asking what he wanted, and Corales told him to quit yanking his chain. The narration observed that infrared vision usually gave such soldiers an edge at night. This time, the hunter stood over both bodies holding one of their M16 rifles. The captions noted that military technology had outsmarted itself, since the goggles that helped the soldiers see in the dark also made everything else look like hell.
Monster Slayer
In Agate, Nakai met Dan Tilden, a soldier who greeted him as a red brother and explained that he was Zuni rather than Navajo. Tilden told him that his father had wished he had taken the Jesus road instead of joining the army. Nakai said that he had been raised by his grandfather. As Tilden kept talking, Nakai stopped listening, because he was thinking of a day three years earlier. The narration called it a day like any other, and also a day like no other, when he visited his grandfather's hogan.
Nakai had come to tell his grandfather something important, but the old man had something to show him first. In a sand painting on the floor of the hogan, he pointed to Nayenezgani, the Monster Slayer, one of the Hero Twins and an important figure in the Night Way. Without him, the old man explained, nobody could dispel the adilgashii or the evil they brought. They were in the fourth day of a long chant for banishing witches. He asked Nakai not to take what he was about to hear as an insult.
The Stolen Rifle
Nakai remembered telling his grandfather that he had thought about his teachings before going to the recruitment office, and that being Navajo was not a matter of blood but of how he acted. He would always be Navajo in his heart. The old man answered that a yataali, a medicine man, needed the help of Nayenezgani to succeed, and he asked whether Nakai truly knew what he claimed to know. Back in Agate, Tilden asked why the creature had not used its ray gun when the soldiers attacked it.
Nakai realized that the hunter kept its weapons at a camp, and he rushed to warn Trench. The colonel refused to recall fourteen of his best men and promised only to send an advance scout. Nakai took a jeep and drove off. Ten miles away, Amblin spotted a figure on a ridge and asked whether it was Corales, and a voice answered yes. He sent Corales and Mayhew ahead to the lava flows. A soldier heard wheezing and the click of a rifle, thought that it was Mayhew, and died when the hunter fired a stolen M16 into him.
The Gunship
The soldiers realized that the creature had one of their guns and had killed Mayhew and Corales. Amblin ordered Corporal Marks to get the colonel on the radio, declaring that they were all through playing army. When Nakai arrived and told the major that they all had to get out at once, Amblin ordered Sergeant Wallace to arrest him for stealing army property. Nakai warned that the creature was more dangerous than the major believed. At 4:18 in the morning, an attack helicopter locked onto the hunter among the rocks.
The gunship fired a salvo of rockets, and an explosion engulfed the hunter. Amblin told Nakai that it was all done. Then a soldier shouted for the major to look, and a plasma blast destroyed the helicopter. A full-page splash showed the Predator roaring amid the flames before it slaughtered the troops. Amblin went looking for Nakai, shouting his name, and a plasma bolt tore through his chest. The issue ended with the field covered in dead soldiers, the major gasping Nakai's name as he died and Nakai hiding in the grass.
El Malpais
The final issue opened fifteen thousand years earlier, when volcanic eruptions spread lava across about two hundred square miles of northern New Mexico. The Spanish named the region El Malpais, the bad country. The Navajo name described the place where the blood of the Big Enemy God had clotted. In the myth, the Hero Twins destroyed the monster gods that preyed on humanity, and while one twin distracted a giant, Monster Slayer pierced its heart with an arrow. The giant's black blood hardened into a sea of stone.
Nakai stood on that stone with an M60 machine gun as the sun rose, and he admitted that he had no more excuses. He would have died the night before if he had not run for cover, yet a voice inside him whispered that he was a coward. His radio was out, the vehicles were shot up and help lay more than ten miles away, but he would rather be the hunter. The ground cracked beneath him, and he fell through the roof of a lava bubble before climbing out to find an island of jungle surrounded by lava.
The Camp
Through his binoculars, Nakai spotted vultures circling the island, a pocket of land that the lava had never covered. He found a carrion pit with the hunter's bio-mask among the remains, and then the camp itself, its trees hung with skulls. The Predator lay among the vultures, looking comfortable, as if it had decided that it had wiped out every enemy the night before. Nakai found the camp exactly where he had predicted, with its trophies on display. Maybe, he thought, Alda had been right and luck was on his side.
In Agate, Colonel Trench had gone more than four hours without word from his men. He put a sergeant in charge, promised to call every hour and authorized an air strike at coordinates in his radio log if he missed two calls in a row. Trench chose to lead a relief force in a tank named Melinda, judging that a helicopter would be faster but less safe after what had happened to the Apache. He admitted that he had sent the soldiers on what he thought was a milk run, and he had to bring them home.
The Booby Trap
Nakai crept into the jungle, a surreal sight in the middle of the prairie, though it made sense as the only fertile land for miles. The stench of the carrion pit filled the whole valley. He stepped into a snare, which swung a log studded with spikes into him, and he screamed as the spikes tore into his arm. The noise woke the Predator, which rose from among the vultures with a roar. Nakai cursed himself for not guessing that the creature would booby-trap the perimeter of its camp.
With his arm bleeding, Nakai grabbed the M60 as the unmasked Predator charged. He fired a long burst at the hunter as it leaped through the trees, and an explosion followed, yet Nakai doubted that the creature was gone. He could not see or hear it, and the stench of the pit masked any smell. Then he heard wheezing. The Predator dropped from a tree on top of him and grabbed the machine gun. A branch cracked under their combined weight, and both fighters crashed to the ground amid falling timber.
Fire On The Island
Nakai ran across the lava with his arm in a sling and only a pistol left. He could not understand why the hunter had not killed him when it had the chance, and he wondered whether it had been taking a nap. It was clearly playing cat and mouse with him. Nakai thought it pathetic that Monster Slayer had killed the Great Enemy God on that very spot while he was running scared from one little monster. Then again, he remembered, Monster Slayer had help, and he racked his brain for a plan.
He finally understood that the creature had not been sleeping but recovering, since the fall from the tree had hurt it. Wounded, exhausted and probably weighing a ton, the hunter would suffer from any fall, and the sixty-foot drop inside a lava bubble would make a very effective trap. Nakai needed a way to lure the gargoyle up to the surface. Using a lighter that he had taken from Major Amblin, he set the jungle island on fire. A plasma shot answered from the smoke, and Nakai waited for his prey.
The Lava Bubble
The Predator emerged from the burning jungle firing plasma bolts, and Nakai wondered whether its gun ever ran out of ammunition. He taunted the creature as a fat, ugly lizard that climbed like an old woman and led it across the lava toward the thin crust. When he reached the spot, Nakai dived across it, and the hunter leaped after him. The crust gave way beneath its weight, and the Predator plunged into the hole. Nakai waited at the edge with his pistol, watching the opening.
The hunter was not finished. It burst out of the hole with a roar and knocked Nakai to the ground, sending his pistol skidding across the rock. Wheezing and bleeding from its wounds, the creature stood over him and extended its wrist blades for the kill. Then gunfire struck the Predator from the direction of the valley. Nakai's first thought was that the colonel had arrived. It was his own M60, since the fire had reached the ammunition belt and ignited the gunpowder in the shells, sending rounds into the hunter.
Ask Him
Nakai grabbed his pistol and decided that his luck had held out. The only question left was his aim. He fired three shots into the wounded creature, and the duel ended on the lava where Monster Slayer had killed the giant in the Navajo legend. Soon afterward, but much too late, Colonel Trench arrived with his soldiers and the tank. They found the bodies of Amblin's men scattered across the rock, and a soldier asked why the creature had cut off all of their heads.
Trench answered that only a savage could answer that question. A close-up showed the dead hunter's eyes staring blankly. Then Nakai stepped forward, his arm bandaged and his face battered, holding up the hunter's severed head by its dreadlocks. He told the colonel to go ahead and ask him. The story ended with the Navajo soldier whom the army had dismissed standing as the only survivor of the hunt, with the head of the Predator as proof of what he had done at El Malpais.
Key Characters
- Enoch Nakai was the Navajo corporal at Cole Army Base who survived the destruction of his base, tracked the hunter to El Malpais and took its head.
- The Predator was the lone hunter that crashed in Cibola County, destroyed Cole by triggering its captured ship and slaughtered soldiers and civilians across the county.
- Dietl was Nakai's friend at Cole, a blond private who kept bourbon in his footlocker and became the hunter's first human victim.
- Alda was Nakai's girlfriend in Agate, who took him home from Ben's Saloon and made him promise to stop drinking.
- Nakai's grandfather was the old Navajo who raised him, warned him about the adilgashii and taught him about Monster Slayer.
- Colonel Athelry and Sergeant Coates were the officers at Cole who seized the hunter's ship, sent Nakai away on leave and died when it exploded.
- Colonel Trench was the commander of the relief force in Agate, who kept Nakai in town and arrived at El Malpais after the duel.
- Major Amblin was the officer who led the pursuit, ordered Nakai's arrest and died when the hunter destroyed his command.
- Dan Tilden was the Zuni soldier in Agate whose question about the hunter's weapons led Nakai to realize that it had a camp.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse published Predator: Big Game monthly from March to June 1991, each issue a 36-page comic priced at $2.50 with bound-in trading cards and a letters page titled Prey Tell. John Arcudi wrote all four issues, Evan Dorkin penciled them, Armando Gil inked them, Julia Lacquement colored them and Kurt Hathaway lettered them. Diana Schutz edited the series, and Chris Warner drew all four covers. Arcudi and Gil had already worked together on Predator: God's Truth, which Dark Horse promoted as a preview of the new series.
Arcudi built the story around Navajo belief, with the adilgashii witches, the Night Way chant and the myth of the Hero Twins and the giant whose blood formed El Malpais. Dark Horse's solicitation for the first issue described Nakai and his army buddy Dietl on a recon patrol in the American Southwest, and each issue carried a 24-page story. Julia Lacquement also colored Chris Warner's cover for the fourth issue. In 1999, Sandy Schofield, the pen name of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, adapted the story as the novel Predator: Big Game.
Editions
Dark Horse collected all four issues in the Predator: Big Game trade paperback on August 1, 1992, priced at $14.95 with a cover by Den Beauvais. The same year, Hethke reprinted the comic in German across issues 8 and 9 of its Predator series. In February 2008, Dark Horse included the story in Predator Omnibus Vol. 2, a 6-by-9-inch paperback edited by Chris Warner. That volume also gathered Predator: God's Truth, Predator: Race War and Blood on Two-Witch Mesa, making Big Game one of seven Predator stories in the book.
Marvel reprinted the series in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 on December 28, 2022, a $125 hardcover with a cover by Iban Coello. Edited by Jeff Youngquist, the book was the first volume of Marvel's reprints of the original Dark Horse Predator comics. It placed Big Game alongside Predator: Concrete Jungle, the Predator 2 comic, Predator: Cold War and Predator: Bad Blood. The omnibus also reprinted Blood on Two-Witch Mesa, so the 1994 prequel about the same hunter shared a volume with Nakai's hunt.
Conclusion
Predator: Big Game moved the hunt from city streets to the deserts of New Mexico and gave it a hero whose culture already had a name for the creature. Nakai began the story as a drunk soldier who doubted himself and ended it holding the hunter's head. The army lost a base, a sheriff and an entire search party by refusing to listen to him. Evan Dorkin's art shifted from hard-edged action to the dream sequences and legends of the Navajo without losing the pace of the hunt.
Arcudi rooted the hunt in the myth of the Hero Twins, casting Nakai's duel on the lava of El Malpais as an echo of Monster Slayer killing the giant whose blood had formed the rock. His struggle to belong to either the Belagana or the Diné gave the action a personal stake, and his victory came from his knowledge of the land rather than the army's firepower. Blood on Two-Witch Mesa later revealed that the same hunter had clashed with Nakai's great-grandfather in 1919. Nakai himself returned in Predator: Hunters, recruited as a veteran who had cut off a hunter's head.
External Sources
- Predator: Big Game #1 at Dark Horse
- Predator: Big Game TPB at Dark Horse
- Predator: Big Game #1 at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: Big Game #2 at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: Big Game #3 at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: Big Game #4 at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 at Marvel
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
