Predator: God's Truth: Plot, Characters & Lore
Predator: God's Truth is an eight-page black and white Predator comic by John Arcudi and Rob Walton, first printed without a subtitle in Dark Horse Presents #46 in November 1990. Set in the Everglades in 1926, it followed three prison guards and their hounds as they tracked an escaped convict through a moonlit swamp. A hunter from another world was stalking all of them, and the only man who walked out of the marsh told the story decades later to his grandchild, insisting that every word of it was true.
Plot Summary
The Glades
The story was told by an old man to his grandchild, and he admitted at the start that he did not expect to be believed. He had already described his three years at Big Cypress Penitentiary, so he went straight to the night in August 1926 when everything happened. The Glades, he recalled, were bigger than the whole state of Delaware. Under a full moon, an escaped convict waded through the black water between the cypress trees. He begged the Lord not to let the guards catch him and send him back to the prison, while the barking of hounds grew louder behind him.
A Hunter In The Trees
The prisoner wore a numbered shirt and had been running for hours. He insisted that one mistake should not cost a man the rest of his life, and he swore that he would rather die than go back to Big Cypress. When the hounds bayed again, he fled deeper into the swamp. He never noticed the Predator crouched high in a tree above him, its mask turned toward the chase below. The hunter had found its prey in the Everglades, but it held back and watched, letting the convict and the men behind him come deeper into its territory.
Three Guards
Three guards followed the trail with rifles, lanterns and a pack of hounds. The youngest, Sherman, complained that the chase was hardly fair, since they had dogs and guns while the convict had nothing. Their leader, an older man in a wide-brimmed hat who turned out to be the storyteller himself, told him that it was not a game. He reminded Sherman that the prisoner had slipped away from them for almost three hours. Then the hounds began to howl and thrash in the water, and the third guard, who handled the dogs, shouted at them to find out what had come over the pack in the Glades.
The Frightened Hounds
The dogs yelped and splashed in a panic, and none of the guards could tell what had frightened them. One guessed that they had smelled an alligator, while another doubted that the hounds could smell anything at all over the marsh gas. The handler said that he would bring them back and told the other two to go ahead without him. As he waded off alone, his companions noticed a smell like something had died, and one complained that the night was even hotter than 1923 had been. The narrator added that the temperature had passed 95 degrees regularly that summer.
The Dog Handler
Searching among the cypress roots, the handler called out to his dogs, Buddy and Chuck, coaxing them to come back to him. Instead, the hunter found him. The Predator, now without its mask, struck him so hard that his hat flew from his head, then seized him by the throat and lifted him off the ground. Its mottled face and tusks were inches from the guard's face as it growled at him. He was the first of the three guards to die in the swamp, and the other two walked on without knowing what had happened to him or to the hounds he had gone to find.
The Guards Split Up
Tired of waiting for the dogs, the leader decided that he and Sherman would have to split up and search different sides of the swamp. Sherman liked the idea and said that it would make things more interesting. The older guard snapped that this was no game, and he pointed out that Sherman had been too young to fight in Europe in 1918. Perhaps that was why shooting a man still sounded like fun to him, he said, but he swore from experience that it was not. He ordered the young man to move on and warned him not to fire his rifle without a very good reason.
Something In The Water
Alone in waist-deep water with his lantern and rifle, Sherman muttered about how much he hated the job and the abuse he took from his boss. He was tired of hearing about the war, and he thought that someone should tell the older man that the war had ended in 1918, eight years earlier. The pay, he decided, was not worth the complaining. Then he heard a noise. The water in front of him burst open, and the unmasked Predator rose out of the swamp with a roar, its gauntlets and shoulder cannon dripping as it towered over the terrified young guard.
The Snare
Some distance away, the leader heard a shot and cursed Sherman for firing his rifle. Then a doubt crept in, because it had sounded as though a second weapon had gone off at the same moment, and he could not see how that was possible. While he puzzled over it, he stepped into a snare hidden in the undergrowth. The rope snapped tight and yanked him into the air, and his rifle and lantern tumbled to the ground. The veteran of Europe was left hanging upside down from a tree, helpless, as a hand reached out of the darkness toward his fallen gear.
The Convict's Revenge
The hand belonged to the convict, who had set the trap himself and admitted that he never expected it to work. The guard accused him of shooting Sherman, but the prisoner said that the two young guards had probably shot each other, since they were dumb enough. He was delighted to find that the rifle was loaded. Looking up at the man who had hunted him all night, he said that he wanted to learn whether killing a man was as much fun as his father had claimed. Before the runaway from Big Cypress could pull the trigger, a blast tore into him from behind and threw him to the ground.
Face To Face
Hanging helplessly, the guard watched the Predator step out of the brush with its mask held at its side. For a couple of minutes, the hunter stared at him and he stared back, completely at its mercy. Then the creature spoke in a borrowed human voice, repeating Sherman's complaint from earlier that night about there being little sport in the hunt. The hunters had shown the same trick of copying human speech in the 1987 film Predator. The alien took hold of the convict's body by the leg and dragged it away into the swamp, leaving the guard alive in the snare.
God's Truth
It took the guard a long time to work himself loose from the snare, and when he did, he ran out of the swamp without looking back. He quit his job at Big Cypress the very next day. No one believed his account at the time, and he told his grandchild that he did not expect to be believed now either. The last panel returned to his sweating face as he hung upside down in the trap, while the old man repeated the phrase that gave the story its title. Whatever anyone else thought, he swore that it was God's Truth.
Key Characters
- The Predator was the unnamed hunter that stalked the convict and the guards through the Everglades. It killed the dog handler, ambushed Sherman, shot the convict and spared the trapped leader.
- The lead guard was the unnamed veteran of the First World War who led the search and narrated the story as an old man. He was caught in the convict's snare, survived his encounter with the hunter and quit his job the next day.
- Sherman was the young guard who thought the chase lacked sport. The Predator rose out of the water in front of him, and the hunter later repeated his words.
- The dog handler was the third guard, who went after the hounds Buddy and Chuck and became the Predator's first victim.
- The convict was the escaped prisoner from Big Cypress Penitentiary who set the snare, took the leader's rifle and was killed by the Predator before he could fire.
Behind The Scenes
The story first appeared in Dark Horse Presents #46, an anthology issue dated November 1990 that sold for $1.95 and also carried Crash Ryan by Ron Harris and Bacchus by Eddie Campbell and Wes Kublick. It ran under the plain title Predator, and the subtitle God's Truth, taken from the narrator's first and last captions, was added in later reprints. John Arcudi wrote the eight pages, Rob Walton penciled and lettered them, Armando Gil inked them and Randy Stradley edited the issue. Dave Dorman and Lurene Haines painted the cover, which showed a blood-spattered Predator with a spear and wrist blades.
Dark Horse promoted the short as a taste of Arcudi's upcoming Predator series with Evan Dorkin, which began in March 1991 as Predator: Big Game, with Gil again on inks, and was later adapted as the novel Predator: Big Game. Arcudi returned to the hunters years later with Predator: Prey To The Heavens. Dark Horse reprinted the short in Predator Omnibus Vol. 2 in February 2008, and Marvel collected it in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 in December 2022, between Predator: Concrete Jungle and the comic adaptation of Predator 2. Its setting placed it in the 1920s of the Predator timeline, long before the events of the films.
Conclusion
Predator: God's Truth packed a complete hunt into eight black and white pages and moved the hunters to the swamps of the Everglades decades before the films. John Arcudi framed it as a tall tale told by a grandfather, and its twist came from the convict who turned hunter at the end, only to be cut down by a far better one. By sparing the helpless guard and taking the armed man instead, the Predator acted in line with its honor code, and the last witness from Big Cypress was left with a story that nobody believed.
External Sources
- Dark Horse Presents #46 at Dark Horse
- Dark Horse Presents #46 at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 at Marvel
- Predator: God's Truth at Xenopedia
- Dark Horse Presents #46 at The Hunted
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
