Predator: Cold War Comic: Plot, Characters & Lore

Predator: Cold War is a four-issue Predator comic from Dark Horse Comics, written by Mark Verheiden, penciled by Ron Randall and published from September to December 1991. It followed New York detective Schaefer from Predator: Concrete Jungle after a party of hunters landed near a Soviet oil field in Siberia. The army forced him onto a secret team sent to steal their technology, and he ended up fighting beside Lieutenant Ligachev, a Soviet officer who had lost her men to the creatures. Both governments wanted the alien ship, while the two allies on the ice only wanted the hunters dead.

Plot Summary

Northern Siberia

The story opened in northern Siberia in 1990, narrated by Lieutenant Ligachev, a young Soviet officer. Her captions described the barren taiga, dead reindeer lying in the snow and ancient microorganisms frozen in the ice. A native hunter carrying a spear crossed the frozen plain until a burst of red energy struck him down, and nobody saw where it came from. At Pumping Station 12 of the Assyma Oil Field, the seismologist Sobchak picked up a disturbance near the pipeline along with a burst of radiation, and he reported both readings to the young lieutenant.

Ligachev was two months into her first command, posted to Assyma by General Ponomarenko with a guard unit made up of young conscripts. She led a truck patrol across the ice to check the area that Sobchak had flagged, with a soldier named Salnikov at the wheel. On the open plain, the patrol found the herder Taro skinned and hanging from a pole, with footprints melted into the ice around the body. One of the soldiers sensed heat nearby and turned toward it, and a plasma bolt hit him in the face before he could warn the others.

The First Patrol

A full-page splash showed the Predator in teal armor, its spear in hand, looming over the fallen soldier. The rest of the squad opened fire on an enemy that they could barely see, since the hunter moved among them under its cloak. Private Starostin was killed, and Ligachev was knocked down and wounded. Lying in shock in the snow, she watched the creature kill a young soldier named Mikhail and tear out his skull and spine as a trophy. She could do nothing to save him, and the hunter left her alive among the bodies of her men.

Taro's people found Ligachev after the burning truck drew them across the ice, and she turned out to be the only survivor of the patrol. In Moscow, a tribunal of senior officers reviewed the loss of her entire squad, and one of them called her promotion a mistake. Rather than dismiss her, her superiors decided to send her back to Assyma. Ponomarenko treated the posting as a punishment, and Ligachev spent the days before her return thinking about the young men she had left behind.

Heat Over The Bering Strait

At the National Military Command Center in Washington, Colonel Meeters and his staff spotted a huge heat source on Soviet infrared imagery. One analyst remarked that he had not seen so much heat since Chernobyl. Meeters suspected that the Soviets were assembling a first strike force near the Bering Strait, and he openly doubted the new spirit of glasnost. The readings came from the same frozen region where Ligachev's patrol had died, but the Americans could only read them through the logic of the arms race, and nobody in the room imagined that the source might not be Soviet at all.

At the officers' club in the Pentagon, Major General Philips waited at a table by himself. The narration explained that he worked in army intelligence and was rumored to have had a hand in the business in New York the previous summer. He had been waiting six months for a particular phone call, and that night the call finally came for him. Philips had appeared in Concrete Jungle, and his interest in the heat signature set the American side of the story in motion.

Bluecreek

In Bluecreek, Oregon, the former New York detective Rasche dreamed that the hunters had returned. In the nightmare, he grabbed a Predator by its mask, determined that this time he would not feel as powerless as he had the last time. The dream struck during a visit to the dentist, and Rasche woke with Dr. Krelmore locked in a hammerlock. He had quit the NYPD and become the sheriff of the small town five months earlier, hoping to leave the freaks of the city behind him. The events in New York still followed him across the country.

Rasche recalled that the aliens had blown down half of Sixth Avenue the year before and that most people had already forgotten about it. He could not forget, and neither could his old partner. Rasche had begged him to move to Oregon as his deputy, but the detective only laughed. His brother, Dutch, had gone missing after his own encounter with the creatures in Central America, and the government had covered it up. Rasche suspected that Schaefer had stayed in New York so that he would always have someone to take his anger out on.

The Wire

In his precinct office, under a framed photograph of Dutch, Detective Schaefer received a visit from Smithers, an agent sent by the army. Smithers explained that there had been an incident and that Schaefer's expertise would be invaluable, and he offered to clear the detective's status with his chief. Schaefer refused, telling him that the Schaefer brothers had already put in their time, and he threatened the agent. After Smithers left, the detective wrote down the names Philips and Smithers, planning to track both men down and ask about Dutch on his own terms.

Soon afterward, Schaefer went undercover in a loud Hawaiian shirt on a wired drug bust, with a colleague named Rawlings listening on the wire. His target was Baby, a white-haired dealer who ran her business out of a kitchenware shop. Schaefer had spent months building the case against her, and the bust was supposed to close it. Inside the store, gunmen suddenly burst in and opened fire, and Baby drew a gun of her own. She already knew that the man in front of her was a detective, and the meeting turned into a shootout.

Shootout At The Kitchenware Shop

Baby had known about the wire all along. In the shootout that followed, a bullet grazed Schaefer's face, leaving blood running down his cheek. He brawled with one of her thugs, a blond man in a vest, beat him with a frying pan while cracking a joke about drugs and the brain, and threw him out through the window. When Baby opened up on him with a submachine gun, Schaefer toppled a shelf onto her and placed her under arrest. Moments later, a shot from outside the shop killed her in his arms.

The shooters were Smithers and a team of agents in suits, who dismissed the dead woman as one less drug dealer. Schaefer was furious, since he had tracked Baby for months and she could have given him names, dates and suppliers. When the agents tackled him, he called them worse than the dealers he hunted. One of them drove a syringe into his neck and sedated him. The army had wrecked his case in a single afternoon, and the detective who had refused to help it was now its prisoner.

They Are Back

Schaefer woke aboard an army helicopter over New York at night, facing Major General Philips and Smithers. When he pointed out that kidnapping was illegal, Philips replied that some things transcended the laws of men. Smithers read from his file, which recorded that Schaefer had been granted American citizenship in 1975, spoke English, French and Russian, joined the NYPD in 1978 and made detective in 1986. Philips mocked him as a renaissance man, then explained that the detective had been brought in only because he was essential to national security. The hunters were back.

In Moscow, Ligachev waited for her return to Siberia, which General Ponomarenko regarded as a fitting punishment. At Assyma, the station chief, Galyshev, argued with Sobchak over the frightened workers, who had started talking about a strike. Galyshev punched the seismologist and warned that something out there was watching and waiting for them. The first issue ended with a full-page splash of a group of Predators standing on an ice ridge above the oil derricks. The men of Assyma had no idea how many hunters were waiting in the dark.

The Hunters' Ship

The second issue opened with Ligachev boarding a Soviet transport plane with fresh troops, reflecting on fear and the primal nature of the enemy. Inside the hunters' ship, a vessel with a golden, organic interior, a Predator gripped a mechanism that dripped green fluid. Ligachev's captions explained that the men of Assyma had restored her belief in human decency. The creatures, by contrast, were superior in strength, size and technology, and they took pleasure in killing. She wondered why they had chosen her people.

Another hunter handled a trophy skull and smashed a piece of equipment aboard the ship. Others gathered in a long hall, one of them armed with a glaive, while the narration dwelt on their bloodlust. Outside, the craft rested on the ice not far from the Assyma derricks, close enough for the hunters to reach the station on foot. The art showed at least three Predators aboard the ship. The scenes inside the vessel were drawn in golden tones that set the alien world apart from the blue and white of the Siberian ice outside.

Devils On The Ice

During a storm at Assyma, a dog tender chased his loose sled dogs out across the ice until something struck him down. A large panel showed an armored Predator with a glaive standing over the bleeding man and a dead dog, with two more hunters behind it. The tender, Sergei, staggered back into the station and warned the workers that there were devils on the ice. Seconds later, a spinning disc smashed through the wall of the building. The men inside had no weapons and no soldiers to protect them.

An explosion tore open the station, and the Predators stormed in and began killing the workers. One man reached the alarm before he died. Sobchak reported that the radiation readings had gone off the scale as the attackers closed in. Galyshev grabbed AK rifles from a cabinet and handed them out, hoping that the workers could slow the hunters down until the military replacements arrived. The oil workers had never trained for combat, but they followed their station chief into the depths of the facility to fight for their lives.

The Steam Plant

The armed workers found their comrades hanging skinned inside the steam plant, and Galyshev led them in. The hunters were waiting among the pipes. Galyshev realized that the creatures had come for the heat of the plant, but a plasma bolt killed him before he could act on the discovery. A large panel showed a Predator raising its glaive in the steam while another moved in behind it. The station chief who had warned his men that something was watching them became one of the first to die in the plant.

The Predators slaughtered the armed workers one after another. One of the hunters caught a man in a net, while the others cut down the rest with blades and plasma fire. The last worker was impaled on a glaive as a hunter stood amid the flames of the burning plant. By the end of the attack, Assyma had been overrun, and the friends who had welcomed Ligachev to the station were dead. The massacre left the field empty except for the bodies, which the hunters strung up as trophies.

The United Nations

At the United Nations in New York, the American ambassador, Ridgely, was only days away from signing a disarmament agreement when the Siberian radiation counts came in. Convinced that the Soviets were placing nuclear weapons off the coast of Alaska, he stormed into the Soviet ambassador's office with the press behind him. Television news reported the incident between Ridgely and the Soviet ambassador, Dereyanko. The heat from Assyma had turned into a diplomatic crisis, and neither side knew what was really happening on the ice.

At the command center, Colonel Meeters told General Mavis that the spectral analysis from the Department of Energy did not match missiles. Mavis grabbed him and explained that the hot spots were something the weapons people wanted a closer look at, reminding him of New York. He planned to send a special team under Philips to bring something back, made up of men who officially never existed. In a helicopter, Philips offered Schaefer information about Dutch in exchange for his help. The detective joked about Godzilla movies and said that he would think about it.

The Firing Range

On a training range, Philips's team blasted away at plywood cutouts shaped like Predators. Philips boasted that the men were the elite of the elite, drawn from all three services, but Schaefer only remarked that they were wasting plywood. He had always known that the creatures would return, and the narration mentioned an incident in New Mexico, the subject of Predator: Big Game, that the brass had kept him away from. Schaefer agreed to do his part, not for Philips or the brass, but for Dutch.

He then tore the arm off a cutout and threw it at a soldier named Wilcox, knocking him down, and disarmed him bare-handed when he drew a gun. At the briefing, Philips cited Schaefer's experience in New York and his fluent Russian, and Captain Lynch was told to brief him by morning. A sergeant called him a second-rate gumshoe, and Lassen showed off heated snow suits and modified rifles built for extreme cold. Schaefer mocked the gear as toys and warned the squad that technology would not save them from what they were about to face.

The Drop

In Bluecreek, Rasche read that the American ambassador had broken down a door at the Soviet mission, and he realized that Schaefer had never called him back. He phoned his old precinct, where Officer Weston told him that Schaefer's squad had been wiped out in a drug sting gone bad and that the detective had disappeared. A note on his desk named Philips and Smithers. Rasche's wife, Shari, understood when he decided to go, although the mayor of the town of about 1,700 people was less forgiving. Rasche flew to New York.

A converted stealth plane crossed into Soviet airspace with the team aboard in cold weather gear. Schaefer joked that he had forgotten to set his VCR for his soap opera before the men jumped. After the landing, the team reported in under the call sign Cold War One. Wilcox had come down on his head, and the sergeant announced that he was through taking abuse from Schaefer until Philips ordered them to stop. Their target was the Soviet refining facility at Assyma, about two kilometers away, where the surface radioactivity was significant.

Assyma Station

The team entered the wrecked station at Assyma, and Schaefer joked that it looked like the home of the Addams Family. Pivots of reinforced steel had been cut through, and skinned bodies hung inside the buildings. Schaefer recognized the work at once and told the others that the hunters had bagged some new trophies. Before the soldiers could search further, shots rang out from the darkness. The Americans had walked into the station after the hunters had finished with it, but they were not the only humans who had come to look.

Soviet troops under Ligachev surrounded and arrested the American team. Schaefer told her in Russian that her comrades were dead, and she remarked that she was impressed that he spoke her language. She promised to kill him last. The second issue ended with the view through a Predator's thermal vision, showing the Soviet soldiers and their American prisoners as glowing shapes inside the ruined station. The two rival forces were busy with each other while the Predators watched them both.

Lieutenant Ligachev

The third issue opened with a flashback to Ligachev's arrival at Assyma near the end of the Siberian summer, when Superintendent Galyshev welcomed her. The workers were hostile at first, believing that the soldiers had been sent to spy on them, until a worker named Anatoli invited her to his table. Soccer games with the oil workers followed, and that was how she wanted to remember them. In the present, she ordered Sergeant Yashin to bring everyone inside and deliver the big American to her.

Schaefer told her that the bodies hanging downstairs were not American work and that the creatures would be back. Her men found Sobchak alive with frostbitten feet, and before he died he explained that the radiation had moved with the attackers. He had tracked it with perimeter beacons to a base about seven kilometers away, down a natural canyon. Schaefer showed the dying man no sympathy, and Ligachev asked what kind of man he was. Ponomarenko then ordered an immediate attack. When Ligachev objected, he put the ambitious Yashin in charge of the first patrol and left her with the prisoners. She accused Yashin of using every chance to undercut her command.

Rasche And Smithers

In New York, Rasche traced Smithers through the police computer and learned that he was an army colonel with ties to the CIA, working under Philips from a station in Midtown Manhattan. Rasche signed in at the building and wrote that he had come to kick some ass. He barged into the agent's office, tied Smithers to his chair with a phone cord and held a gun on him. Then he demanded to know what had happened to Detective Schaefer. The agent warned him that assaulting a federal officer was a felony.

Rasche learned that his friend had been sent to Siberia. He realized that the missile story on CNN had been fabricated to cover another monster hunt, and that both superpowers were risking a world war for alien technology. He also wondered what had made his old partner so bitter. Rasche went straight to the Soviet mission and demanded to see the ambassador, announcing that he knew about Siberia and the American team. A Soviet official told the guards to send the policeman through, and Rasche walked into the middle of the crisis.

The Breakout

At the station, Schaefer drank vodka with Ligachev, and the two discussed Yashin, a sergeant who lived for blood. He described the American dream with cynicism, arguing that nobody cared and that soldiers were only numbers. He explained that the creatures fought for fun, and that in New York, the only thing that had saved him was a summer rainstorm. Ligachev was shocked by his bitterness. Meanwhile, the Predators waited in an ice cave, one of them holding a glaive.

An explosion on the lower deck gave the American prisoners their chance, and they escaped, leaving their guards dead while Lynch went for the satellite uplink. When Ligachev held Schaefer at gunpoint, he grabbed her rifle, but he left with her rather than his own team. In the firefight, the heated American suits split at the seams and the rifle bolts froze at minus 78, and a soldier named Rogers was killed. Yashin's Soviets won, and Ligachev proposed that she and Schaefer go after the ship themselves. Schaefer admitted that he had underestimated her, and the two set off alone toward the Trench of Death.

The Trench Of Death

Schaefer and Ligachev climbed through the ice canyon toward the spot where Sobchak had placed the source of the radiation. Yashin followed them, intending to kill the lieutenant. Before he could reach her, a plasma bolt from a hidden hunter killed him. The Soviet soldiers blamed Ligachev and the American for the death of their sergeant. The canyon walls rose high on either side, leaving the soldiers little room to spread out. Then they discovered that they were the ones being hunted, as the creatures moved in on the squad in the narrow trench.

A full-height panel showed a Predator leaping down on the soldiers from above. It slaughtered the Soviet squad with a net, a disc and its glaive. The soldiers who had chased Ligachev into the trench died in seconds, and none of their rifles slowed the hunter down. The massacre left Schaefer and Ligachev alone with the creature in the ice. The hunter that had guarded the approach to the ship now turned its attention to the two humans who remained.

Remember Me

Ligachev and Schaefer argued about whether he cared about anything at all. Then he tackled the hunter and asked whether it remembered him. He pinned it, ripped off its mask and punched it, joking that at least New York had hot dogs between fights, while Siberia had nothing to offer. The creature's telescoping spear drove through his thigh, and its wrist blades cut across his scalp as he complained about his ruined haircut. Schaefer headbutted the unmasked Predator, and it recognized him from New York.

Ligachev shot the hunter dead at point-blank range with her AK. Schaefer, bleeding from a deep gash across his head, judged that it had only been a sentry and that the rest of the hunters were seven kilometers away, just as Sobchak's map had shown. He added that its friends would not be happy and that this suited him fine. The third issue ended with the two survivors standing over the body of the Predator, with nothing between them and the hunters' base except the trench.

The Melting Canyon

In Washington, a cable from the Soviet Premier threatened war if Americans had crossed the border, and the President wanted the mission terminated once he heard about Philips and Schaefer. Philips had commandeered a Soviet transmitter, and Mavis ordered the operation shut down. After his confrontation at the Soviet mission, Rasche flew 14 hours to Siberia with the Soviet ambassador. At the airfield, General Ponomarenko told him that Ligachev's performance had been a disappointment and that he intended to relieve her of command.

Schaefer, bleeding from his head wound, climbed the ice canyon with Ligachev as the walls began to melt around them. The temperature rose to about 60 degrees, so they stripped down to their underclothes and kept going. At the bottom of a melted crater, they found the hunters' ship. Ligachev's captions called the American an enigma, a bitter man who had stayed when he had a thousand chances to leave. She wondered whether the devils were all that Schaefer had left to fight for.

A Going-Away Present

At Assyma, Soviet guards searched for the one American who had stayed hidden after the escape, the old general Philips. He had tapped the station's communications and beat two guards senseless with a rifle butt. His base told him that NORAD had tracked a Soviet transport carrying a senior official and that the Soviets threatened full retaliation. He was ordered to gather his men, avoid the aliens and let their ship leave unhindered, so that the Soviets would not get the technology either.

Philips freed his team and told them that they had to stop Schaefer before he started a third world war. Out on the ice, Schaefer checked the C-4 in his pack and a supply of Teflon-coated depleted uranium rounds that could punch through plate steel. Then the ice gave way, and the two of them slid down onto the hull of the ship, deciding to leave the hunters a going-away present. Ponomarenko's troops followed a trail of dead Soviets toward the ship, and Rasche arrived at the airstrip as the general ordered the technology secured at any cost.

Go Home

Inside the ship, an organic red interior that Schaefer called a madhouse, Ligachev found a pump part with Cyrillic markings from the refinery. Schaefer realized that the crashed ship had needed a pit stop, and that the hunters had raided Assyma for spare parts. Ligachev understood that her friends had been slaughtered for machinery, and she smashed the alien equipment in grief. Schaefer restrained her so that they could plant the explosives. Then an unmasked Predator stepped out of the shadows to meet them.

The Predator lifted Schaefer off the ground by his throat, knocked Ligachev aside and repeated the human words telling him to go home. Schaefer cursed it, answered that he was home and drove a blade into the creature before throwing it off. He demanded to know why the hunters kept coming to Earth instead of Mars, Jupiter or the Dog Star. Two more hunters stepped into the chamber before he could finish the wounded one. The detective had found the hunters, but he had found more of them than he could fight alone.

Two More Hunters

One of the new arrivals fired its shoulder plasma cannon at Schaefer, and the second slashed his face with its wrist blades. The hunters caught him in a net, but Ligachev opened fire with her AK and the depleted uranium rounds, shooting the net off him. One of the creatures fell under her fire, and Schaefer, badly cut, praised her shooting. She credited American technology and her own aim. The pair then held the C-4 detonator over a wounded Predator, and Schaefer declared that he was tired of games.

Before he could finish it, a shot from a laser rifle struck the detonator. Wilcox and Philips had tracked the pair to the ship, under orders to let the vessel lift off without interference. Wilcox carried the laser sniper rifle that had made the shot. Schaefer told the general that the government had taken everything that ever meant anything to him, including his job, his home and his brother. For the first time, Ligachev understood the source of his bitterness. Schaefer refused to accept that the hunters would simply fly away after the massacre at Assyma.

Rasche's Shot

When Schaefer lunged at Philips anyway, Wilcox shot him in the back, paying him back for the humiliation on the firing range. The wounded Predator laughed and walked back to its ship. Wilcox then lined up a head shot on the fallen detective, announcing that this one was for himself, but a gunshot cut him down first. Rasche had arrived with General Ponomarenko and a Russian army unit, and the general informed the Americans that they were trespassing. Surrounded by Soviet troops in the snow, Philips and his men surrendered.

As the ship's engines fired up, Ligachev shared the detective's despair. Schaefer, badly wounded, crawled through the snow until Rasche reached him and joked that they had to stop meeting like this. When Schaefer asked how and why he had come, Rasche answered that good friends were hard to find, and the narration said that Schaefer had at last found his peace. Ligachev set the timer on the C-4, and when Ponomarenko ordered her to stop and claimed the ship for the Soviet Union, she kicked the charge into its engine.

Driving An Import

The ship lifted off, and the blast of its engines threw Ligachev across the snow. Rasche shielded the wounded Schaefer from the blast as the vessel climbed out of the crater. On the detonator, the timer reached zero. A full-page panel showed the vessel exploding in the sky above Siberia, destroying the ship and the hunters still aboard it. Schaefer raised his fist, cheered and joked that this was what came of driving an import. Rasche looked on beside him as a trail of fire fell from the explosion toward the ice.

Ponomarenko warned Ligachev that there would be hearings and inquiries. She answered that she looked forward to them, since neither government would want the incident reported. The general had lost the ship that he had ordered secured at any cost. Schaefer remarked that the kid learned fast and suggested that the NYPD might find a place for her if the Soviets did not want her. When Rasche joked that he had thought Schaefer liked her, Schaefer admitted that he did. The story ended with Ligachev's narration, which observed that there was more to the world than empty struggle.

Key Characters

• Schaefer was the bitter New York detective and brother of Dutch whom the army forced onto a secret team in Siberia, where he fought the hunters alongside Ligachev.
• Lieutenant Ligachev was the young Soviet officer who lost her patrol and the men of Assyma to the hunters, captured the American team and destroyed the ship.
• Rasche was Schaefer's former partner, now the sheriff of Bluecreek, Oregon, who tracked his friend to Siberia and shot Wilcox to save his life.
• Major General Philips was the army intelligence officer who abducted Schaefer, led the secret mission and later tried to stop him under orders to let the ship leave.
• Smithers was the army colonel who tried to recruit Schaefer, had Baby shot and was later tied to his own chair by Rasche.
• Wilcox was the soldier whom Schaefer humiliated on the firing range, who shot the detective in the back and was shot down by Rasche.
• General Ponomarenko was Ligachev's superior, who sent her back to Assyma as a punishment and tried to claim the alien ship for the Soviet Union.
• Galyshev was the station chief at Assyma, who armed his workers against the hunters and died in the steam plant.
• Sobchak was the seismologist who detected the radiation, survived the massacre with frozen feet and mapped the route to the hunters' base before he died.
• Sergeant Yashin was Ligachev's ambitious sergeant, who won the firefight against the Americans and was killed by a hunter while pursuing her.
• The Predators were a party of hunters whose crashed ship landed near Assyma, where they raided the refinery for parts and skinned the workers as trophies.

Behind The Scenes

Dark Horse published Predator: Cold War monthly from September to December 1991, each issue a 36-page comic priced at $2.50 with a painted cover by Brian Stelfreeze. Placed side by side, his covers for the last three issues formed one continuous painting. Mark Verheiden wrote all four issues, Ron Randall penciled them, Steve Mitchell inked them and Chris Chalenor and Rachelle Menashe colored them. Keith Bayne lettered the first issue and Clem Robins lettered the remaining three, while Randy Stradley edited the series. Dark Horse's solicitation for the first issue summed up Schaefer's attitude to the Siberian landing as letting the Russians worry about the hunters.

The series was Verheiden's direct sequel to his first Predator story, which had introduced Schaefer, Rasche and Philips, and Randall had already penciled part of that series with Chris Warner. Verheiden and Randall returned to Schaefer in Predator: Dark River in 1996. Nathan Archer, a pen name of Lawrence Watt-Evans, adapted the story as the 1997 Bantam novel Predator: Cold War, which spelled the lieutenant's name Ligacheva. Ligachev herself returned as a Russian colonel in Predator: Hunters III, published by Dark Horse in 2020.

Editions

Dark Horse International first serialized the story in Britain in eight parts in Aliens magazine, Vol. 2 #1 to #8, from July 1992 to early 1993. Dark Horse collected all four issues in the Predator: Cold War trade paperback on May 25, 1993, a 116-page book priced at $13.95 with a cover by Ray Lago. In August 2007, the story appeared in Predator Omnibus Vol. 1, a 436-page book priced at $24.95 and edited by Chris Warner. That volume placed Cold War between Concrete Jungle and Dark River, and it also gathered The Bloody Sands of Time and several shorter Predator stories from the Dark Horse Comics anthology.

For the film's thirtieth anniversary, Dark Horse reprinted the series in the oversized hardcover Predator: The Original Comics Series, subtitled Concrete Jungle and Other Stories, on June 14, 2017. The 308-page book measured 8 by 12 inches, cost $49.99 and held Concrete Jungle and Dark River. The three stories returned in Predator: The Essential Comics Volume 1, a 336-page paperback released on December 12, 2018. Marvel reprinted the series in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 on December 28, 2022, a hardcover with a cover by Iban Coello and a direct market variant by Chris Warner. It placed Cold War alongside the Predator 2 comic, Big Game and Dark River.

Conclusion

Predator: Cold War moved Schaefer from the streets of New York to the ice of Siberia and turned the superpower standoff of the period into the backdrop for a hunt. Both governments read the heat on their screens as a weapon and then risked a war to steal the technology behind it, while the hunters treated an oil station full of workers as a source of heat and spare parts. The story's real enemies were the secrecy and ambition on both sides, which cost Ligachev her men and Schaefer his brother.

Verheiden built the story around two people who had lost everything to the creatures and to their own governments. Schaefer began the series as a bitter detective with nothing left but his anger over Dutch, and he ended it wounded in the snow, saved by a friend who had crossed the world to find him. Ligachev learned to defy her general, and her decision to destroy the ship denied the alien technology to both sides. In the Predator timeline, the hunt took place in 1990, a year after the battle in New York.

External Sources

• Predator: Cold War #1 at Dark Horse
• Predator: The Original Comics Series HC at Dark Horse
• Predator: Cold War #2 at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator: Cold War #3 at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator: Cold War TPB at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator Omnibus Vol. 1 at the Grand Comics Database
• Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 at Marvel

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