Predator: Concrete Jungle is the first Predator comic from Dark Horse Comics, a four-issue series written by Mark Verheiden and published simply as Predator between June 1989 and March 1990. It moved the hunt from the jungle of Predator to New York City during a record heat wave, where a homicide detective named Schaefer, the brother of Dutch Schaefer, found gangsters and executives skinned and hung. His search for the killers and for his missing brother led him to Colombia and back, and it ended with a fleet of hunters fighting a war in the streets of Manhattan.
Plot Summary
The Heat Wave
The story was told by Detective Rasche, a homicide cop who worked the streets of New York with his partner Schaefer. That summer, the city was suffering through a brutal heat wave, and tempers rose with the temperature. The two detectives handled a shooting on the Lower East Side, and Rasche wished that they were still working narcotics, where they had both been happier. In those days, Schaefer had once thrown a district chief of the Medellin cartel off a roof. At night, Schaefer stared up at the stars and told his partner that something about them looked different that summer.
Heat shimmered over the city, and the summer was even hotter than 1987 had been. Whenever it was that hot there was trouble, and the partners were handling two or three homicides a shift. At the Lower East Side scene, uniformed officers led out a bloodied gunman who later explained that he had snapped when his wife put on back-to-back reruns of Green Acres. The move to homicide had come after the Medellin affair put both detectives on the hit list of every dealer in town, and their captain had transferred them before one of the dealers could kill them. Rasche got through the nights on coffee from a local bakery.
The Gang Summit
Across the city, two gang leaders met for peace talks. Lamb, a bespectacled boss in a yellow suit, proposed a merger so that their crews could stand together against the Colombians, while the scarred, bald Carr wanted a fight in which the winner took everything. Before the argument was settled, a red triangle of laser light found one of the gangsters, and a blast cut him down. Carr assumed that the Colombians had come for them, and both crews opened fire through the windows at an enemy that none of them could see.
Outside, a Predator clung to the wall of the building. Wrapped in its cloak, it climbed along the brickwork almost invisibly while the gangsters emptied their guns into the night. The red triangle had come from the targeting laser of its shoulder cannon. When the shooting stopped, Carr turned on Lamb and threatened him over the failed treaty. Then the hunter came in through the window, and the peace talks between the two crews of New York gangsters turned into a massacre that no one inside the building was meant to survive.
Lamb's Slaughterhouse
Schaefer and Rasche were driving through the city when Schaefer said that New York did not feel right. A report of shots fired at the corner of Beekman and Water Street sent them to Lamb's building, where a uniformed officer told them to keep out until Captain McComb arrived. A body crashed from a window onto a police car. Schaefer ignored the order and forced his way inside, and Rasche followed his partner into Lamb's turf as screaming echoed down the stairwell from the floors above.
Inside, the detectives found members of both gangs hanging upside down from the ceiling, skinned like meat in a butcher's shop. Half of the dead belonged to Carr and the rest to Lamb, who had been shot through the head. Rasche thought of the nightmares he had suffered as a child. Carr had survived by hiding, and he blamed the police for the slaughter, believing that Schaefer had done it. He fired at the detectives and escaped down the fire escape, while Schaefer sensed that something else was still out there in the dark.
The Subway Massacre
McComb arrived with a heavily armed team and was furious that Schaefer had entered the building. He told the detectives that the case was bigger than both of them and ordered them to stay out of it, and Schaefer suspected that the captain was hiding something. Soon afterward, the hunter struck a subway train in Midtown. A car full of executives was chatting about business when the Predator attacked, and the express pulled into the station with its windows kicked in from the outside and its passengers dead.
Rasche was at home with his wife, Shari, who wanted to move to Alaska, when Schaefer came to tell him about the attack. Rasche was eight years from his pension and had been Schaefer's partner for six years, yet he knew almost nothing about his family beyond a brother mentioned once. At the station, the detectives learned that the victims had been network vice presidents, bankers, stockbrokers and corporate lawyers. Like the gangsters in Lamb's building, many of the dead had been carrying guns, and the bodies had been hung in the same way as the Lamb and Carr crews.
The General
McComb ordered the detectives out of the station, but an Army general with two stars stepped in and said that Schaefer might be useful if he was anything like his brother. Schaefer had not known that the general knew Dutch. Over drinks in a bar, the officer said that Dutch had saved his life more than once, and that their meeting was off the record. He told Schaefer to drop the case and back away, because the killers liked the heat and the sport, and they would be gone in two or three weeks.
The general explained that Dutch had worked in covert operations and was last heard of leading a squad into Central America, after which he had disappeared. Schaefer refused to let it go. He and Rasche returned to Lamb's headquarters, where the forensic team had found nothing, and Schaefer kicked open the chained door. The killer had attacked his city, his subway and perhaps his brother, he said, and he told Rasche to wait outside while he went into the blood-spattered rooms alone.
Face To Face
In the empty room, Schaefer felt the hunter before he saw it. The Predator dropped its cloak, and the detective fired, but the creature smashed his gun hand and towered over him as he knelt on the floor. Schaefer fought back with everything he had. The hunter raked his face with its claws, but he grabbed a board and struck its mask from its head, exposing the alien face of the Predator beneath. The creature answered with a phrase it had copied from the gangsters, repeated in its own strange voice.
The unmasked hunter kicked Schaefer through the window, and he fell five floors toward the alley below. He grabbed at the clotheslines strung between the buildings, which broke his fall, and he landed in a pile of garbage. When Rasche found him, Schaefer was clutching the creature's mask and joked that he had stolen its hat, though he claimed to the others that he had slipped. Rasche hid the mask in his jacket before the ambulance arrived, knowing that Schaefer had run into something big and meant to deal with it alone.
Tagged
At the hospital, a doctor questioned Rasche about a strange wound on the side of Schaefer's neck, which no fall from a building could explain. That night, Rasche told Shari about the general, whose name was Philips. Then Schaefer appeared at his door in a hospital gown, having walked out of the ward and taken a cab. In front of Shari and the couple's two sons, he showed his partner the device that had been planted in his neck. The hunter had tagged him like an animal, and Schaefer swore that he would find it.
The next day, the partners set out to trace Philips, convinced that he was hiding something about Dutch. McComb told them that the crime scenes had been sealed by the government. Schaefer smashed the captain's telephone and threatened him until McComb admitted that Philips was some kind of Army freelancer working outside official channels, and that he knew nothing more. With the police closed to him, Schaefer remembered that Dutch's last phone call had mentioned a rescue mission near the Colombian border, and he decided to follow his brother's trail south.
Into Colombia
At the airport, Schaefer told Rasche to get Shari and the boys out of the city. He flew to Colombia, and in a bar in Riosucio he hired a guide who claimed to have served in reconnaissance for the American military. Schaefer explained that he was looking for Americans who had vanished across the border three years earlier. An old friend in the DEA supplied him with weapons, and the two men set out on horseback across the jungle, with Schaefer aware that the cartel had its own reasons to want him dead.
On the fourth day, they found an abandoned guerrilla camp littered with shell casings, which Schaefer thought smelled like one of Dutch's operations. On the fifth day, the jungle changed, and local people told them that the sun had once appeared at midnight. Then they reached a vast crater of standing water ringed by flattened trees, the site of the blast that had ended the hunt in the first film. It was the mark of a Predator's self-destruct, and it told Schaefer that his brother had come this way before he disappeared.
The Jungle Duel
That night, Schaefer remembered hunting deer with Dutch as boys in the woods behind their father's cabin, where the local boys killed for fun instead of need. Nearby, a Predator touched its wrist gauntlet, and the device in Schaefer's neck burned with pain. He knew that the hunter had followed him from New York. He armed himself with a fully automatic shotgun that fired six rounds a second and sent the guide away. Plasma blasts tore through the trees, and Schaefer answered by firing into the jungle.
The Predator ambushed him and kicked him to the ground, and Schaefer finally saw the shimmer of its cloak, which looked like heat waves rising from a street. It explained how the creature had moved through New York unseen. Then he noticed the glowing blood dripping from its arm, proof that his shotgun had hit it, and he reasoned that anything that bled could die. Schaefer drove his knife into the creature's leg in his brother's name and ran for the horses, but the wounded hunter chased him to the edge of a river gorge.
On the cliff, the Predator beat Schaefer down, and he mocked its dreadlocks even as it overpowered him. With his last strength, he kicked the hunter over the edge and reminded it of New York. The creature fell into the gorge and was impaled on a broken branch. Schaefer returned to camp with its gear and found that the guide now spoke perfect English. The man radioed a contact as Decoy Niner, and at a command center, Philips learned that Schaefer had survived and killed the hunter, then ordered a full combat alert and a call to the President.
Ships Over Manhattan
Back in New York, Rasche worked late at the precinct with a stack of thirty or forty unsolved murders, while a rerun played on a television whose reception had gone bad. Scientists blamed the interference on sunspots. Out of curiosity, he put on the Predator's mask. Through its vision, he saw what no one else in the city could, a fleet of cloaked Predator ships hovering over Manhattan among the skyscrapers. The killings had not been the work of a single hunter, and the heat had drawn a whole party of them to the city.
Rasche took the mask to McComb and told him that dozens or even hundreds of the creatures were out there. The captain accused him of withholding evidence and ordered him held in a cell pending a departmental review. Rasche fled with the mask to take the case to McComb's superiors, but agents who claimed to be IRS accountants seized him and the mask and took him out of the precinct house. With his partner gone, Rasche had become a prisoner of the same people who were hiding the truth from New York.
Eschevera's Prisoner
In Colombia, the guide told Schaefer that he was not supposed to have killed the hunter. Schaefer realized that he had been set up from the moment he left New York, and he asked whether Dutch had been a volunteer too. The guide held him at gunpoint and said that they were six hours from a rendezvous with the general. Before he could say more, an unseen gunman shot him dead. Gunmen with MAC-10s and Chinese assault rifles closed in, sent by Eschevera, a Medellin trafficker who wanted Schaefer alive.
Some time before, Eschevera had offered Schaefer and Rasche a million dollars to back off during a meeting in the rooftop garden of a Manhattan brownstone. Schaefer had thrown him off the roof, and Eschevera survived the three-story fall and declined to press charges. Now Schaefer was tied to a chair in his compound with coat hanger wire, while Eschevera, on crutches with his leg in a cast, left his man Paolo to torture the prisoner with a power saw. Schaefer broke the chair apart, overpowered Paolo with the wire and got free.
The Compound Burns
Schaefer planned to slip into the jungle and make his way to Bogota, but Eschevera kept a private army of more than a hundred men. Then the Predators struck the compound. The hunter he had killed had friends, and this time the creatures were not hunting for sport. They tore through the drug lord's soldiers as anti-aircraft guns fired into the night, and Schaefer ran through the chaos with bullets and plasma flying around him. The cartel had built the compound to stand against police and rivals, but its defenses meant nothing to the hunters.
Eschevera lay on the ground beside his crutches and assumed that Schaefer's people had followed him. A Predator killed him with a plasma blast. Schaefer realized that he had been followed into South America, but not only by his own side. The lead hunter strode through the burning compound with skulls hanging from its belt and its cannon on its shoulder, surrounded by other Predators. Their revenge on the Medellin cartel had only begun, and the creatures went on to tear apart the drug empire that Eschevera had built.
The Cavalry
In the jungle, the device in Schaefer's neck burned again. Cartel gunmen caught up with him, meaning to put his head on a post. He beat them and told them that the things hunting them were not human and did not care about cocaine. All he wanted, he said, was a cheeseburger. Then soldiers cut down the last of the gunmen, and Philips arrived with troops and a helicopter, ordering Schaefer to come with him if he wanted to live. Schaefer had little choice but to accept the rescue, and he left the jungle of Colombia with the man who had sent him there.
From the screams behind him, Schaefer guessed that the creatures had begun to enjoy themselves at the compound and that it was only a matter of time before they turned on him. With Eschevera dead, the cartel's men in the jungle had hoped to win favor with the Medellin bosses by killing him. As he ran with the soldiers, fires lit the trees while the hunters tore down Eschevera's drug empire piece by piece. Schaefer joked that he would recommend them for departmental citations if he knew where to pin the medals, but Philips warned that the creatures cared nothing for the cartel and wanted only him.
Rasche Breaks Out
Rasche was held in a hotel room by the general's agents. Listening to their phone calls, he learned that Schaefer was due in six hours and that the agents planned to fly him by helicopter to the Pan Am Building and make a delivery. Rasche understood that the government meant to hand his partner over to the creatures. He fought the agents, threw one of them through a door, took back the mask and a gun and escaped, with nine o'clock as his deadline.
He went straight to the property room of his precinct. There, he took the heavy weapons that a detective named Salvati had seized from a Jamaican gang the month before, and he carried the assault rifles out of the station. He had spent years following the rules and counting the days to his pension. Now he was on his way to the roof of a Midtown skyscraper with impounded police firepower to save his partner from the people who were supposed to protect him.
The Delivery
Philips flew Schaefer out of Colombia on a private jet and took him on by helicopter. On the way, he explained that the creatures had been coming to Earth for centuries, always in the heat. Stories of aliens and ancient astronauts were true, he said, and the hunters had driven the dinosaurs to extinction. Their hunts had mostly been confined to hot countries in South America and Africa, but the greenhouse effect might have drawn them north. He did not know what had happened to Dutch, but the creatures seemed to like the Schaefer brothers.
Schaefer realized that Philips was handing him over to the hunters. The general argued that hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake, since one of the creatures exploding in the city, like the blast in the jungle, would destroy New York. It was his answer to dealing with the hunters, and Schaefer refused to be the price. He knocked Philips out, held the pilot at gunpoint and burst onto the heliport of the Pan Am Building with an assault rifle and a pistol, the Chrysler Building rising behind him.
An Alliance With Carr
Rasche reached the roof loaded with firepower, disarmed the general's men and got Schaefer away, leaving Philips behind. The partners hid in a rented storage space on the Lower East Side where Rasche had stockpiled the impounded weapons, and Schaefer watched cartoons on a portable television, identifying with the hunted animals. Rasche argued that the two of them were outgunned and that fighting alone would be suicide. With federal agents and McComb's police after them, Schaefer decided to recruit help from the streets.
He found Carr, who opened fire the moment he walked in. The two men fought under a spray of water until Schaefer convinced the gang leader that the police had not killed his men and that something worse than any human had done it. The Predator had been tracking Carr since the massacre, and it burst in and seized him by his braid. Schaefer fought it as it fired its plasma caster, and when it was about to finish him, Rasche fired a police rocket launcher into the building from outside.
The blast blew the hunter apart. Carr asked whether it was over, and Rasche, thinking of an old Carpenters song, told him that it had only just begun. Predator ships drifted across the sky, and Schaefer picked up the dead hunter's damaged mask and counted two of the creatures down. Another blast ripped through the building as they ran, and three Predators appeared on the street. Through the mask, Schaefer watched a ship fire on the buildings, and Carr, who wanted payback for his men, offered to raise an army if Schaefer supplied the guns.
The Gang Army
On Sunday, the heat wave began to break, and dark clouds gathered over the city. Carr's building in the South Bronx had been reduced to gravel. From a deli phone, using Rasche's calling card, Carr called his contacts and went to convince his friends, while Rasche worried about arming street gangs. Schaefer reflected that technology had distanced people from the beast inside them, and that the hunt kept that beast alive. Carr returned with an army of gang members, ready to fight the creatures that had killed his crew.
Schaefer briefed the gangs. The creatures were invisible except through the mask, so the fighters had to aim at the shimmer, and when a mouthy gangster talked back, Schaefer punched him. The plan was to lure the hunters out, since they did not know that a human could see them. Through the mask, Schaefer spotted a ship approaching. A rocket struck it, and the craft exploded over Midtown in a ball of fire. For the first time, the humans of New York had struck back at the fleet.
Battle In Midtown
The gangs fought the cloaked hunters through the streets, past storefronts advertising Sunday sales. Rasche looked at a photo of his wife and sons and felt the fear rise. McComb arrived with a police cordon, declared the area sealed and gave them ten seconds to surrender. Schaefer told him that he had no idea what he was dealing with, and McComb answered that Schaefer had lost his mind. Then the device in Schaefer's neck flared, and a large ship descended onto the street, turning the standoff into open war.
The ship opened fire, blowing apart cars and police officers, and Schaefer feared that the creatures would bring down half the city. A Predator in gold armor slaughtered the police while the gang members fired at it. McComb was killed. A blast struck Schaefer and smashed the mask, leaving him blind to the cloaked hunters, and Rasche was hit by a plasma bolt. Philips arrived with soldiers, explaining that Washington had wanted to negotiate, but his contingency plan was an air strike, with Army gunships closing in over Macy's.
Without the mask, Schaefer needed another way to see the enemy, and he found it in the water. He had the fire hydrants opened, and the spray shorted the hunters' cloaks and revealed them in the street, exposing one of the Predator weaknesses that the gangs could use. Carr joked that all the creatures had needed was a bath. With Philips warning that the helicopters were thirty seconds away, Schaefer clubbed one Predator for ruining his Sunday, and Carr blasted another in the name of the Yankees.
The Summer Rain
Rasche lay wounded and bleeding as the gunships came up Fifth Avenue. He thought about the beast that lived in all people. A Predator lifted Schaefer off the ground, and then something exploded. Lightning split the sky and rain began to fall, and the summer was over. The hunter holding Schaefer let out a laugh copied from humans, and Rasche understood that the showdown had become a free-for-all that no one could control. The heat that had brought the creatures to New York was gone, washed away by the storm.
From the pavement, Rasche wondered why his partner fought at all, since Schaefer had no love for the city, his job or even its people. He asked himself whether anyone would care once it was over, or whether the people of the city would simply turn back to their televisions, pleased that the reception had finally cleared. Then he remembered what Schaefer had said about the hunt keeping the beast alive, and he decided that this war was Schaefer's own way of doing the same. As the cool rain soaked the streets of Midtown, something about the hunters seemed to change.
Hunting Season Ends
The Predators gathered at their landed ship in the rain. One of them took hold of Schaefer and cut the tracking device out of his neck, ending the hunt that had marked him in Lamb's building. The hunters boarded and the ship lifted away. Schaefer told Philips to call off his helicopters, because the situation had gotten out of hand, there was no sport left in it and the hunters were going home. Like the cartoon animals he had watched, Schaefer said, the hunting season was over, and he would see them next year.
In the aftermath, much of Midtown had been leveled, and Philips remarked that New York would never be the same. Schaefer answered that this was not necessarily a bad thing. Rasche, wounded but alive, planned to resign the moment he qualified for his pension and take Shari and the boys anywhere except New York. Schaefer walked out of the ruins with his arm around his partner, but the trail of his brother had gone as cold as it had been at the start of the summer.
Key Characters
- Detective Schaefer was the New York homicide detective and brother of Dutch who was tagged by a Predator, killed it in a Colombian gorge, escaped the general's plan to hand him over and led the gangs against the fleet. Later stories named him John.
- Rasche was Schaefer's partner and the story's narrator. He found the cloaked ships through the stolen mask, broke out of federal custody, rescued Schaefer from the Pan Am Building and was wounded in the battle in Midtown.
- General Philips was the Army general who had served with Dutch. He ran the secret effort to manage the hunters and planned to hand Schaefer over to them.
- Captain McComb was the police captain who kept the detectives off the case, held Rasche for withholding evidence and was killed when the ship landed.
- Carr was the gang leader who survived the massacre at Lamb's building and later raised a gang army to fight the hunters beside Schaefer.
- Lamb was the gang boss in the yellow suit who proposed the merger and was killed in the first massacre.
- Eschevera was the Medellin trafficker whom Schaefer had once thrown off a roof. He captured Schaefer in Colombia and was killed when the Predators attacked his compound.
- Paolo was Eschevera's man who was left to torture Schaefer with a power saw.
- Shari was Rasche's wife, who wanted to move away from New York with their two sons.
- Decoy Niner was the guide who led Schaefer to the crater and was revealed as a plant working for the general. He was shot dead by Eschevera's gunmen.
- Dutch Schaefer was mentioned as the missing brother who had led a squad into Central America and never returned.
- The Predators included the hunter that lost its mask to Schaefer in New York and died in the Colombian gorge, the hunter that tracked Carr and was blown apart by Rasche's rocket, the gold-armored Predator that slaughtered the police and the pack that left New York at the end of the summer.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse published Predator #1 in June 1989 at a cover price of $2.25, and the first issue went to a second printing in September 1989. The remaining issues followed in October and November 1989 and March 1990. Mark Verheiden wrote all four issues, and Chris Warner penciled the series and drew its covers, with Ron Randall joining him on the third and fourth issues. Inks came from Sam de la Rosa, Warner, Randall and Randy Emberlin, while Chris Chalenor colored the story and David Jackson and Jim Massara lettered it under editor Randy Stradley.
The original comics carried no subtitle. When Lawrence Watt-Evans adapted the story as Nathan Archer's 1995 novel Predator: Concrete Jungle, Kurt Busiek suggested the title to keep the book apart from the film novelization, and later printings of the comic took the same name. Watt-Evans also recalled that he could not use the comic's subway massacre, because Predator 2 had used a similar scene without credit. The 2005 video game Predator: Concrete Jungle shared only the title with Verheiden's story of Detective Schaefer.
Dark Horse first collected the four issues in a 1990 trade paperback, and Marvel reprinted them at the start of Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 on December 28, 2022. Verheiden continued Schaefer's story in the sequel Predator: Cold War, later adapted as a novel, and concluded it in Predator: Dark River, and Chris Warner brought the detective back decades later in Predator: Hunters III, which gave him the first name John. The series opened the long run of Dark Horse Predator comics whose hunts were later placed across the Predator timeline, and it remained the first appearance of Schaefer in any Predator story.
Conclusion
Predator: Concrete Jungle took the hunter out of the jungle and into a sweltering New York, giving Dutch's brother his own war against the creatures. Mark Verheiden's story mixed police drama with government conspiracy, sending Schaefer from Lamb's slaughterhouse to a Colombian crater and back to a Midtown battle that became one of the largest Predator attacks on Earth. Rasche, Carr and a gang army fought beside him until the rain broke the heat, and Schaefer watched the hunters leave, expecting them back the following year.
The story also widened the lore of the first film. Through Philips, it revealed that the hunters had visited Earth for centuries, always in the heat, and that their hunts had usually stayed in the hot countries near the equator. It gave Schaefer a tracking tag in his neck, a stolen mask that exposed the cloaked fleet and a flood of hydrant water that shorted the creatures' cloaks. With its leveled Midtown, its promise of another hunting season and a hero who returned in Predator: Cold War and later stories, the comic gave Dark Horse a foundation for its long run of Predator stories.
External Sources
- Predator #1 at Dark Horse
- Predator #4 at Dark Horse
- Predator (1989) series at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 at Marvel
- Lawrence Watt-Evans on adapting the comic
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
