Predator: Day of the Hunter was the first story in Marvel's Predator comics, published as Predator (2022) #1-6 from August 2022 to January 2023 and collected in April 2023. Written by Ed Brisson and drawn by Kev Walker, it followed Theta Nedra Berwick, a human Predator hunter who had spent fifteen years killing Yautja while she searched for the three-mandibled Predator that killed her parents aboard the Astar ship Sandpiper in 2041. In 2056 her search led her to the ice planet Tusket, where two more Predators, the crew of an Astar Industries recon ship and her own drinking nearly ended the hunt.
Plot Summary
The Hunt On XI4432-8
In 2056, Theta fought and killed a Predator on the planet XI4432-8. When she examined its face, she found that it still had all four mandibles, which meant it was not the Predator she was looking for, and she cursed the wasted fight. Her narration described years of hunting these killers and her hope that they woke in a cold sweat from nightmares about her. During the fight on XI4432-8 she lost her ax, a loss that turned out to matter later on another planet.
The small purple natives of XI4432-8 had been attacked for days by a Predator that slaughtered their fathers, brothers and sons. Theta approached them and said she had come to help, but they saw the Predator mask hanging from her belt and fired red energy weapons at her. She retreated to her ship, the Sandpiper, where its computer Sandy said it was sorry that this had not been the right Predator. Theta had once believed that the hunter who killed her family was an anomaly, but she had come to accept that the universe produced an endless supply of monsters.
The Sandpiper Massacre
Fifteen years earlier, in 2041, young Theta lived with her parents at a settlement on the planet Damara, where the Astar Industries research ship Sandpiper was stationed. She had read every book in the ship's library, gave a frog the Latin-style name Damara Lithobates viridis cauda, and was scolded by her parents for wandering outside the settlement. When a Predator attacked, her father was killed by a plasma bolt to the head while the crew fired their rifles into the trees. Her mother, Francesca Berwick, brought Theta back aboard the Sandpiper and told her to hide while Sandy flew the ship on autopilot.
The Predator followed them onto the ship and lifted Francesca off the floor by her throat. She accused it of killing her husband and coming after her daughter, then slashed at its face and cut off one of its tusks in a spray of green blood. The wound was fatal for Francesca, not the Predator, and as she was dying she told Sandy to get her daughter away once the creature was off the ship. Her last words told Theta that both of her parents loved her, and Theta apologized to her. The comic later called the killer a three-mandibled Predator, which the story implied came from the tusk Francesca cut away.
Crash Landing On Tusket
Back in 2056, Theta studied the red, egg-shaped data drives she took from the Predators she killed. The drives held their travel logs, and she had learned that when a hunter died, another Predator took over its ten-year hunting route within a year. The route she was following matched one used by a Predator killed on September 17, 2053, which had visited six planets. Her ship was failing, with its gravitational stabilizers at 23.57 percent and less than eight days of food on board. Sandy suggested Port Medway, an Astar Industries outpost on the ice planet Tusket that was being shut down.
Going to an Astar Industries outpost was risky, because the Sandpiper was technically company property and Theta was an outlaw. Six months earlier she had blasted her way out of an Astar junkyard when the workers there tried to seize Sandy for a reward. As they approached Tusket, the stabilizers failed, and Sandy shut itself down after choosing a clearing about 100 miles south of the outpost. Theta, who admitted that she crashed in seven out of every eight landing simulations, brought the ship down hard. Once Sandy was restored, they worked out that the repairs needed two stabilizer cores and two outer solar array panels from Port Medway.
Theta set out across Tusket on foot with eight days of food for the 106-mile trek, which she expected to take anywhere from a week to four weeks. Over the first eleven days she crossed fields of ice spires and passed a huge frozen ribcage, reflecting that she had been hunting Predators for 15 years. She shot a horned, four-eyed beast with her energy rifle and cooked the meat over a fire. That night she had a nightmare in which her mother turned into a Predator and accused Theta of getting her parents killed, and she woke alone in the snow.
A group of alien scavengers riding a yellow Astar hoverbike ambushed Theta and shot her in the shoulder. She killed two of them and spared the remaining two, one of whom was injured and one of whom was named Crug. She left them bandages and the rest of the meat because they had only been trying to survive, but she warned them that she would kill them if they followed her. The scavengers had found the hoverbike at the Port Medway outpost, and Theta took it for herself. Riding the bike, she reached Port Medway far sooner than she could have done on foot.
Port Medway
At Port Medway, Theta began collecting the solar panels she needed while Sandy joked over the radio about her stealing a whole ship. She then found the outpost's last two Astar employees gutted and hung, and she realized that a Predator had been there recently, even though Tusket did not appear in any of Sandy's records as a hunting ground. Camera footage showed the Predator, and Theta recognized the weapon in its hand as the ax she had lost on XI4432-8. The hunter had followed her from that planet.
The Predator ambushed Theta in an office while she had no armor, and she blamed herself for more innocent deaths. She escaped by crashing through a window and ran for the hoverbike while the Predator fired its shoulder cannon at her. Reaching a parked craft, she triggered an emergency engine burn, and the blast killed the Predator behind it. Theta recovered her ax and then collected the parts, food, military rations and bottles of Astar Industries Old Timey flavored drinking spirits she found at the outpost.
Sandy picked up an Astar ship answering the outpost's signal, 12 to 15 hours away. Theta cut down the two murdered employees and placed them in a freezer for the arriving crew, took the black box from the Predator's ship and destroyed the ship. She loaded the hoverbike into the Sandpiper and replaced the old gravitational stabilizer while drinking, ignoring Sandy's objections. Sandy reminded her that in fifteen years she had killed 23 Predators. Data from the black box listed Port Medway, Port Parrsboro, Port Baddeck and a fourth site, and Theta concluded that the Predators had identified the Sandpiper as an Astar ship and were searching each outpost for her.
Battle Over Tusket
Before Theta could warn Astar, two Predator ships that had avoided radar with stealth technology opened fire on the Sandpiper. She had never seen two Predators hunt together and had assumed they were territorial. Handing control to Sandy, she climbed out through the top hatch and fired a mounted launcher at the attackers, destroying one of the ships in a huge explosion. She had Sandy mark the location so they could return later and see whether enough of the hunter was left to identify, but she feared that more Predators were on their way.
The second ship disappeared from view until Sandy found it directly below them, and its fire damaged the Sandpiper so badly that the shields could take little more. Theta ordered Sandy to land and to prepare her Predator armor. Sandy warned that her blood alcohol level was 0.05 and that her judgment and fighting would be impaired. Theta believed the Predator wanted a fight on the ground rather than shooting them down, and she feared that if they were shot down she would die on Tusket without ever finding the three-mandibled Predator who killed her parents.
Theta faced the armored Predator on the rocky ground with her ax, aware that fighting half drunk was a mistake. Sandy swept in at her signal and knocked the hunter down, but it broke through Theta's guard, tore away her mask and nearly killed her with its wrist blades. She stabbed it in the eye, and as it screamed, a squad of Astar Industries soldiers riddled it with gunfire. Looking at its face, Theta saw that it was not her parents' killer. The soldiers ordered her to put her hands behind her head and carried her onto their ship.
Prisoner Of The Turnstone
The soldiers came from the Turnstone, an Astar Industries recon ship on Tusket, and their commander wanted to know why the young woman was flying one of the company's missing ships. Theta woke restrained in the ship's medical bay, where Captain Ferrier explained that Astar had lost contact with the Sandpiper on Damara in 2041. A rescue crew had found only corpses, and fifteen years later the ship had turned up in Theta's hands. The hoverbike she took carried an Astar tracking device, and the soldiers had almost killed her because her armor made her look like a Predator.
Senior science officer Paolo Silva boarded the Sandpiper, stared in amazement at its Predator trophy wall and got around its security by forcing an Astar system update with a master control code. The ship's logs from December 20, 2041, revealed that the prisoner was Theta Nedra Berwick, the daughter of Francesca and Hugo Berwick. Ferrier told Theta that the Sandpiper had only been meant for a single return trip, yet she had taken it halfway across the galaxy. He added that Astar would take the ship and everything aboard it back to Earth, which Theta begged him not to do because the ship had been her home for her entire life.
Ferrier explained that the space exploration market was crowded and that Astar needed every scrap of research to avoid being swallowed by larger companies. Under the contract her parents signed before she was born, any research done with Astar equipment belonged to the company, including Theta's own knowledge of how she survived for fifteen years. In exchange, Astar would not charge her with stealing company property. Theta was locked in cell C-8, where Paolo brought her food and told her that Predators had fascinated him for years and that company files described encounters going back to the 1700s.
Theta warned Paolo that more Predators were coming for her and would not stop until she was dead, although he noted that on Earth they had only appeared during heat waves or in hot climates. When he said Astar had ordered him to bring her in, she stabbed him in the face with a fork and took him hostage, threatening to drive it into his carotid artery. She knocked down the guard and forced Paolo toward the Sandpiper, but Ferrier and his soldiers blocked the corridor, and the captain warned that he would shoot her to protect his crew.
Attack On The Turnstone
Before the standoff ended, Ferrier's radio filled with reports of a breach, and a Predator began killing soldiers in the F wing of the Turnstone. Theta told Ferrier that the hunter would not stop until everyone on the ship was dead and offered to help. Paolo backed her, pointing out that she had fought at least twenty Predators, and Theta corrected the count to 26. Ferrier agreed but warned that he would kill her himself if she used his crew's deaths to escape. They chose the cargo bay as a trap because it had only one entrance from inside the ship.
Ferrier ordered all personnel to the cargo bay with their weapons ready while the Predator kept killing the crew on its way there. Theta, wearing her armor, offered herself as bait to draw the hunter through the doors so that the soldiers on the upper level could open fire. The Predator stopped short and turned away, and a Predator drone with spider legs crawled into the bay instead. Theta shouted for everyone to run moments before a huge explosion tore through the Turnstone and killed many of the soldiers. Ferrier blamed Theta for leading the Predators to his crew and struck her.
The Three-Mandibled Predator
The Predator returned through the burning wreckage and killed Ferrier, then overpowered Theta, who apologized to her mother and father for failing them. When the hunter removed its mask, she recognized the Predator that had killed her father and murdered her mother in front of her in 2041. Paolo opened fire on it with a rifle, and Theta drew its attention back to herself, shouting that she was the one who had been killing its kind just to find it.
Theta attacked with plasma fire and blades, telling the Predator that she had spent fifteen years tracking its kind from planet to planet and following the trail of their dead and the lives they destroyed. She finished it by driving a blade through its body. Covered in its green blood, she told Paolo that there were more Predators out there, perhaps hundreds, thousands or millions, and that they were still hunting. She promised to find them and kill all of them, and the story ended with Theta and Paolo walking away from the dead hunter on Tusket.
Key Characters
- Theta Nedra Berwick was the only survivor of the Predator attack on the Sandpiper crew in 2041. She spent fifteen years hunting Predators with the ship's computer, wore armor taken from her kills and killed the three-mandibled Predator after the attack on the Turnstone.
- Sandy was the Sandpiper's computer, which Theta called the last thing she had left of her parents. It flew the ship, kept count of her kills and warned her against fighting drunk.
- Francesca Berwick was Theta's mother. She cut a tusk from the Predator's face before it killed her aboard the Sandpiper.
- Hugo Berwick was Theta's father, who was killed by a plasma bolt on Damara at the start of the attack.
- Paolo Silva was the senior science officer of the Turnstone and had studied Predator records for years. Theta took him hostage, but he backed her when the Predator boarded and was with her after the final fight.
- Captain Ferrier commanded the Turnstone and planned to take the Sandpiper and its research to Earth for Astar Industries. The three-mandibled Predator killed him.
- Crug was one of the alien scavengers who ambushed Theta on Tusket on an Astar hoverbike they had found at Port Medway. Theta spared him and the other survivor.
- The Three-Mandibled Predator killed Theta's parents in 2041 and lost a tusk to Francesca's blade. Theta killed it fifteen years later on Tusket.
- The Port Medway Predator murdered the outpost's last two employees and carried the ax Theta lost on XI4432-8. It was killed by the blast of an engine burn.
- The Tusket Predator was the armored hunter that fought the drunk Theta on the ground. Astar soldiers finished it after she stabbed it in the eye.
Behind The Scenes
Predator #1 went on sale on August 10, 2022, and the following issues came out on September 14, October 19, November 2 and December 7, 2022, with the sixth issue on January 11, 2023. Ed Brisson wrote the series, and Kev Walker penciled and inked it, with colors by Frank D'Armata and letters by VC's Clayton Cowles. Leinil Francis Yu drew the main covers with colorist Sunny Gho. Marvel collected the six issues as Predator by Ed Brisson Vol. 1: Day of the Hunter on April 19, 2023, with variant covers by artists including David Finch, Peach Momoko, Skottie Young, Stan Sakai and Greg Land.
Before the launch, Brisson told CBR that Theta had been hunting Predators for about fifteen years and was following the hunting routes the Predators used to return to their hunting grounds. The collection opened with a short timeline of the films, from 1987 onward, before moving to the future setting of the story. Theta's story continued in Predator: The Preserve in 2023, which took her to the Game Preserve Planet, and later in Predator: The Last Hunt alongside Paolo Silva.
Conclusion
Predator: Day of the Hunter is the six-issue Marvel series by Ed Brisson and Kev Walker that introduced Theta Berwick, published from 2022 to 2023. It follows her from the Predator attack that killed her parents in 2041 to 2056, when a damaged ship, a crash on the ice planet Tusket and a run of Predator attacks leave her a prisoner of the Astar Industries ship Turnstone. The story ends with Theta killing the three-mandibled Predator that murdered her parents and promising, with Paolo Silva beside her, to hunt down the rest of its kind.
External Sources
- Predator by Ed Brisson Vol. 1: Day of the Hunter at Marvel
- Predator (2022) #1 at Marvel
- Predator (2022) on the Grand Comics Database
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
