Predator: Demon's Gold: Comic Overview

Published: Dark Horse Presents #137 (November 1998)
Collected: Predator Omnibus Vol. 4 (September 2008), Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 (May 2024)
Script: Ron Marz
Art: Claudio Castellini
Letters: Gary Kato
Title Illustration: Dan Norton with Digital Broome
Cover: Dan Norton (with Digital Broome)
Editor: Randy Stradley
Assistant Editor: Terry Waldron
Format: Eight-page black-and-white short story in an anthology issue
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Setting: The Llanganati Mountains, South America, during World War II

Predator: Demon's Gold is an eight-page black-and-white Predator short story written by Ron Marz and drawn by Claudio Castellini. Dark Horse Comics published it in Dark Horse Presents #137, on sale November 11, 1998, with lettering by Gary Kato. It is set in the Llanganati Mountains of South America during World War II, where Nazi soldiers forced a local boy to lead them to a hidden Inca treasure and met a Predator that guarded the cave. It is one of the Dark Horse Predator comics that place a Yautja hunt on Earth in the twentieth century.

Story Summary

Bad Men In The Llanganati

A bound boy stands before a giant carved skull cave while a Nazi soldier with a swastika armband holds him, from Predator: Demon's Gold

An old man later told how, when he was still a boy, Nazi soldiers came to his land in South America and burned his village. They killed his family and bound his hands, then marched him into the high Llanganati Mountains in search of silver and gold. The men who led the column wore swastika armbands and peaked caps, and they forced the boy to show them the secret his village had kept for generations. They promised that he would live if he took them to the hiding place.

The boy guided them to a mountain entrance carved as a vast stone skull, with the open mouth serving as the mouth of a cave. He stood small before that doorway while the soldiers loomed over him and ordered him forward. The narration of the comic is his memory of that day, told years afterward when he was already an old man. At the time he was only a frightened child who believed their promise.

Sweat Of The Sun, Tears Of The Moon

A Nazi officer snarls as a Predator's clawed hand reaches into frame, beside panels of soldiers threatening a praying boy, from Predator: Demon's Gold

Inside the cave the boy showed them the treasure his people called the Sweat of the Sun, Tears of the Moon, the ransom of Atahualpa hidden from Pizarro centuries earlier. The soldiers moved among Inca stone carvings and piles of gold that had been left untouched since the days of the conquistadors. The boy understood later that the men wanted the gold to pay for their war, but at the time he understood nothing of their language. Their leader spoke in a harsh tongue while a clawed hand, unseen by the soldiers, already reached toward them in the dark.

Once they had seen the gold, the Nazis meant to kill the boy despite their promise. A soldier pointed a pistol at him while he knelt and prayed to the Inca gods for deliverance. The comic shows the Predator only as a cloaked outline and a reaching hand at this stage, standing behind the child as he prayed. His prayer was answered when the hunter began to kill the men who had brought him there.

Melting Out Of The Shadows

A cloaked Predator with a spear stands behind a Nazi officer with a swastika armband as other soldiers aim their guns in the rocks

The first sign of the attack was a soldier shot through the head as the boy watched in shock. The remaining Nazis scrambled among the rocks beside the carved stone faces, pointing their submachine guns into the dark and shouting that the killer had come from nowhere. A Predator then melted out of the shadows behind one of them, still under its cloak, and held a long bladed spear. The boy later remembered the hunter as a demon that answered his prayer.

The cloaked Predator moved through the unit before the soldiers could form a defense. One officer gripped his MP 40 and looked over his shoulder without seeing the spear raised at his back. The narration called the attacker the Demon, and that name runs through the rest of the story as the boy's word for the Yautja. The hunt had begun in the treasure cave the Nazis had come so far to find.

A Terrible Wrath

A masked Predator drives a spear through the chest of a Nazi soldier with a swastika armband in a mountain cave

The Predator drove its spear through a Nazi soldier's chest and lifted him off the ground as blood sprayed across the rocks. It wore a bio-mask, mesh armor and a shoulder-mounted plasma caster, and a necklace of small skulls hung on its chest. The boy later said that the sight of the hunter was not meant for the eyes of men, and that its gaze burned red while its wrath was a terrible thing to behold. Soldiers fell one after another as it swung a blade and impaled others on its spear.

The men who had butchered the boy's village were, in his words, ripe corn before the harvest blade of the Demon. The Predator lifted their leader by the throat as the officer fired a pistol wildly into the air, then tore off its bio-mask so that the dying men glimpsed its true face. It threw bodies aside and fired its plasma caster until only the leader remained among the gold. The boy watched the massacre from the shadows of the cave and survived only because the hunter chose not to take him.

Der Reichtum

An unmasked Predator roars while holding up a severed human head with the spine still attached, from Predator: Demon's Gold

The last Nazi clutched at the gold and saw his death looming over him. He cried Der Reichtum, German for the treasure, and then said nothing more as the Predator's wrist blades finished him. The hunter took his head with the spine still attached as a trophy, held it high and roared. It then repeated the officer's last words, saying Der Reichtum back into the cave, and years later the boy learned that the phrase meant the treasure.

When the yellow eye of the Predator finally fell on the boy, he believed it would demand his life as one more sacrifice for protecting the Sweat and Tears. It raised a blade, then turned away, carried the trophy and its spear back into the skull mouth of the cave, and vanished under its cloak. The boy untied the ropes from his wrists among the bodies and lived. As an old man he still refused to say where the treasure lay, and said that he would take that secret with him to his own death.

Characters

The Predator was the hunter the boy called the Demon. It cloaked itself in the treasure cave, killed the Nazi unit with spear, blades and plasma caster, took the leader's head and spared the child.
The narrator was a local boy whose village the Nazis burned. He guided them to the Inca gold, prayed for deliverance, survived the massacre and as an old man kept the treasure's location secret.
The Nazi leader commanded the unit that sought the gold to fund Germany's war. He ordered the boy's death, clutched the treasure as he died and spoke the words Der Reichtum before the Predator took his head.
The other Nazi soldiers marched the boy into the mountains, entered the skull cave and were killed when the Predator melted out of the shadows.

Behind The Scenes

Dark Horse Comics published Predator: Demon's Gold in Dark Horse Presents #137, an anthology issue on sale November 11, 1998. The Predator story ran eight black-and-white pages beside the conclusion of Mark Verheiden and Ron Randall's The Ark and a chapter of Steven T. Seagle and Stefano Gaudiano's My Vagabond Days. Ron Marz wrote the story, Claudio Castellini penciled and inked it, and Gary Kato lettered it. Randy Stradley edited the issue with Terry Waldron as assistant editor, and Dan Norton drew the Predator cover with colors by Digital Broome.

The omnibus title page credits Dan Norton again for the title illustration with Digital Broome, and Castellini's art is dense black-and-white work with heavy stippling and cross-hatching. The story sits among other comic accounts of Predators in World War 2, placing a Yautja hunt against Nazi soldiers in South America rather than on a European battlefield. The treasure plot uses the real legend of Atahualpa's ransom and the Llanganati Mountains, framed as Inca gold the Nazis wanted for their war. The boy's narration treats the Predator as a demon that answered a prayer and then returned to the cave that had given it birth.

Reprints

Dark Horse reprinted the story in Predator Omnibus Vol. 4 in September 2008, together with Predator: Primal, Predator: Nemesis, Predator: Homeworld, Predator: Xenogenesis, Predator: Hell Come a Walkin' and Predator: Captive. After Marvel acquired the Predator comics license, the story appeared again in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 in May 2024. Both collections keep Castellini's black-and-white pages, and the Dark Horse omnibus prints Norton's title illustration ahead of the story. The short length and anthology origin match other Dark Horse Presents Predator pieces such as Predator: No Beast So Fierce.

The Predator In Yautja Lore

The Predator of Demon's Gold hunted armed soldiers in a mountain treasure cave and left the unarmed child alive, a choice that fits the wider Predator honor code of taking worthy prey. It used a cloak, a spear, wrist blades and a plasma caster, and it removed its mask during the fight so the last men saw its face. After killing the leader it took his head and spine as a trophy and mimicked his final German words about the treasure. The boy who witnessed the hunt kept the gold hidden for the rest of his life, so the cave remained a guarded secret long after the Yautja had gone.

Conclusion

Predator: Demon's Gold is an eight-page 1998 Dark Horse Presents story by Ron Marz and Claudio Castellini, with a Dan Norton cover on Dark Horse Presents #137. It follows a boy in the Llanganati Mountains who was forced to lead Nazi soldiers to Inca gold called the Sweat of the Sun, Tears of the Moon. A Predator killed the unit, took the leader's head after he cried Der Reichtum, spared the child and vanished back into the skull cave, and the boy grew old without revealing where the treasure lay.