Predator: Kindred: Comic Overview

Published: December 1996 to March 1997, four issues
Collected: Predator: Kindred (December 1997), Predator Omnibus Vol. 3 (June 2008), Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 (December 2022)
Script: Jason R. Lamb and Scott Tolson
Pencils: Brian O'Connell (#1-2), Roger Petersen (#3-4)
Inks: Bruce Patterson
Colors: Dave Nestelle
Letters: Steve Dutro
Cover: Igor Kordey (painted)
Editor: Phil Amara
Format: Four 36-page issues with 24-page stories
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Setting: Fleener Creek, Oregon, 1843, 1958 and the present day

Predator: Kindred is a four-issue Predator comic series written by Jason R. Lamb and Scott Tolson, published by Dark Horse Comics from December 1996 to March 1997. Brian O'Connell and Roger Petersen penciled it and Igor Kordey painted the covers. It is set in Fleener Creek, Oregon, where Buddy Wilcox, who saw a Predator kill his father in the woods in 1958, faced the same hunter decades later alongside the local sheriff and an escaped serial killer. It is one of the Dark Horse Predator comics set on Earth.

Story Summary

Fleener Creek, 1958

A Predator holding a bloodied smart disc stands over the body of Buddy Wilcox's father in the Oregon woods in 1958

In 1958, a young boy named Buddy Wilcox went camping with his strict father in the woods outside Fleener Creek, Oregon. His father scolded him for reading a horror comic by the campfire and complained that the boy would never grow up to be a man. When a noise came from the brush, the father took his rifle and went to look for what he thought was a coyote or some other animal. A Predator was waiting for him in the trees, and it cut him down with a smart disc while his son watched from the edge of the camp.

Buddy Wilcox And The Town

Decades later, Buddy Wilcox was a mechanic at Melvin's Garage in Fleener Creek, a Vietnam veteran married to Brenda, with two young children named Peter and Lynne. The town was policed by Sheriff Kelly Mathis, the daughter of the retired sheriff Ted Mathis, and her two deputies, Fred Hollis and Mike Sunderson. Peggy, who worked at the garage, was regularly beaten by her husband Rod Dennison, and Buddy comforted her after one of his attacks. Rod later caught Buddy alone, accused him of having an affair with Peggy and beat him while mocking him as a war hero.

At the same time, a television report covered the case of the Condo Killers, James McCutcheon and his accomplices Robert Hendricks, Wade Grimm and Brian Douglas. The four men had killed 22 people, among them a federal agent named Moody, but were found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to the Haddison Institute. Before the transfer, McCutcheon was questioned by two FBI agents, Felder and Houston, who had taken the death of their colleague personally. The report ended with the convicts on their way to the institute, while Hollis and Sunderson left town for a hunting trip at Red Ridge.

The Condo Killers Escape

The Predator looming over the convicts' camp with a spear raised, its eyes glowing red behind its mask

On the road to the institute, agents Felder and Houston stopped the prison van in the woods, intending to execute the four prisoners and report a failed escape. One prisoner was shot, but the others overpowered the guard Eddie and killed him and both agents, and Bobby shot the escort officer. The convicts took the agents' clothes and fled into the forest, where they came across the deputies' hunting camp and shot Hollis and Sunderson to take their truck. While they were busy, a Predator ship arrived over the Earth, and the hunter came down into the same forest near Red Ridge, armed with a long spear.

The Massacre At Red Ridge

The Predator extending its bloodied wrist blades over a wounded convict at the Red Ridge camp

The next morning, James McCutcheon, known as Jimmy, preached to Bobby and the others at the camp about nature, killing and the instinct to hunt. The Predator attacked in the middle of his sermon and killed Bobby, Grimm and the convict who had taken Hollis's hat, using its spear, its smart disc and its wrist blades. Jimmy ran from the camp covered in blood and met Kelly on the road. He told her he was Mr. Felder, an FBI agent, and claimed that a man in a Halloween mask had murdered his friends.

Sheriff Kelly Mathis found the bloody campsite and the hat of her deputy, and Mayor Frank Talbot brought a group of armed townsmen to help with the search. The men found human skulls hanging in a tree, and the sheriff locked the man she knew as Felder in a cell at the station while Doc Busick was called to examine him. In the cell, Jimmy said that the killer had come down from the sky like an angel. The searchers still believed they were looking for a human murderer or a bear.

The Death Of Rod Dennison

The Predator holding the bleeding Rod Dennison by the throat outside his trailer at night

That night Rod Dennison came home to his trailer and attacked Peggy with a knife, telling her he should have killed her long before. The Predator appeared out of the dark, wounded him with its shoulder cannon and seized him by the throat. It killed him with its smart disc, cut off his head and skinned the body. Peggy survived the attack and told Kelly what she had seen, and the next day Rod's body was found hung up in the woods in the same way as the Predator's other kills.

The Skull Tree

The Predator crouched among the branches of a tree hung with human skulls and bones

Jimmy McCutcheon began to hallucinate his dead accomplices in his cell and vowed to kill everyone in town and give the sheriff's head to the Predator as a gift. Kelly deputized her father Ted, and the townsmen began to talk about the skull tree, the missing deputies and the old killing in the woods. Kelly went to question Buddy, because the town's older men remembered that his father had died the same way in 1958. At the time the town had blamed the death on a bear, and the case had been known ever since as the Wilcox killing.

Buddy's Confession

Buddy told Kelly the truth about 1958. On his ninth birthday he had wished for his father to die, and that night he watched the Predator butcher him beside the campfire. The hunter took the man's skull and spared the boy, who stayed in the woods until a party of hunters found him three days later. Buddy had believed ever since that his wish had killed his father, and he had never told anyone what he had seen. Kelly realized that the same creature had come back to Fleener Creek, and that Buddy was the only person in town who had faced it and lived.

The Attack On The Sheriff's Station

The Predator crashing down through the roof of the Fleener Creek sheriff's station amid falling debris

A crowd of armed townsmen gathered at the sheriff's station, convinced that Buddy was the killer and demanding that Kelly arrest him. The argument ended when the Predator crashed through the roof and killed several of the men, including George. It broke Ted's ribs and injured Mayor Frank Talbot before leaving the station as suddenly as it had come. In the confusion Jimmy escaped from his cell, groped the unconscious sheriff and walked out into the night, promising that he would be back.

Brenda had already taken the children to stay with a friend named Janine in Hamilton. Buddy went home alone and opened a room in his basement that he had kept hidden from his family. It was a shrine to killing, with clippings of murders, a suit of samurai armor, pots of war paint and a spear. Buddy had spent years preparing for the return of the creature that killed his father, and he now decided to go into the woods and hunt it himself.

Elias Fleener And Red Ridge

The Predator climbing down a tall tree above the forest at Red Ridge

A prologue set in 1843 told how the town got its name. Elias Samuel Fleener, a mapmaker, led a party of prospectors along the Oregon Trail and tried to buy land from a Native village near Red Ridge. When the villagers refused to sell the land of their fathers, Fleener and his men massacred every man, woman and child in the village. Their bodies were left at the bottom of the deep lake below the ridge, and Fleener moved away and never returned to the place that later took his name.

The Offering In The Woods

The Predator rising behind Jimmy McCutcheon in the forest as he raises a knife

Back in the present, Kelly found the file on James McCutcheon and recognized the man who had called himself Felder. Against her father's wishes she went into the woods alone with a shotgun. Buddy put on homemade Predator armor with wrist blades and a mask, and Brenda, who had returned home, begged him to stop and threatened to leave him. In the forest, Jimmy found the Predator's hanging trophies, and Kelly caught up with him and placed him under arrest.

Before she could take him back, the Predator and Buddy both arrived. Jimmy welcomed the hunter as a brother and offered it the sheriff as a sacrifice, treating the creature as the god of his own preaching. The Predator carried the skull of Buddy's father, and Buddy attacked it as soon as he saw it. During the struggle Jimmy grabbed a gun and shot Kelly in the shoulder, leaving her bleeding on the ground while the two hunters circled each other among the trees.

Buddy Against The Predator

The Predator in black armor clashes with Buddy Wilcox, who wears a makeshift helmet and loincloth and swings a machete, against a red streaked background with skulls

Buddy Wilcox fought the Predator with his blades, and the hunter wounded him badly. It mimicked the voice of his dead father, repeating the old promise to make a man out of him, and the words stopped Buddy for a moment as he remembered the night at the campfire. Buddy cut the creature and drew its yellow blood, and the Predator broke off the fight. Meanwhile Jimmy dragged the wounded Kelly into the lake, and the Predator walked away to its ship and left Earth while Jimmy begged it not to leave him.

The Death Of Jimmy McCutcheon

The white Predator ship roars away over the lake as Buddy Wilcox in war paint and the McCutcheon pair stand by the water, with a shouting Jimmy McCutcheon in the foreground and an inset of a startled man asking what the hell

With the Predator gone, Buddy caught Jimmy at the water's edge and drove his wrist blades through his head, dedicating the kill to his father. Kelly emptied her revolver into the body. Three weeks later she still had nerve damage in her hand, and FBI Director Timothy Gray announced that McCutcheon, three others and several agents had died in a botched escape near Portland. Buddy burned the hidden room, Brenda agreed to try again, and in the rain he buried his father's skull and said goodbye to him.

Characters

Buddy Wilcox was a Fleener Creek mechanic and Vietnam veteran who had watched the Predator kill his father in 1958. He fought it in homemade armor and killed Jimmy McCutcheon.
Kelly Mathis was the sheriff of Fleener Creek and the daughter of the former sheriff. She arrested McCutcheon in the woods and was shot in the shoulder by him.
James McCutcheon, called Jimmy, was the leader of the Condo Killers. He posed as agent Felder, worshipped the Predator and was killed by Buddy.
The Predator was the hunter who killed Buddy's father in 1958 and returned decades later. It killed the convicts, Rod Dennison and several townsmen before leaving Earth.
Ted Mathis was the retired sheriff and Kelly's father. He was deputized and had his ribs broken in the station attack.
Brenda Wilcox was Buddy's wife and the mother of Peter and Lynne.
Peggy Dennison worked at the garage and survived her husband's knife attack.
Rod Dennison was Peggy's abusive husband. The Predator killed and skinned him.
Robert Hendricks, Wade Grimm and Brian Douglas were McCutcheon's accomplices. Bobby and Grimm died in the massacre at Red Ridge.
Felder and Houston were FBI agents who planned to execute the convicts and were killed by them.
Frank Talbot was the mayor of Fleener Creek, injured in the station attack.
Elias Samuel Fleener was the 1843 mapmaker whose men massacred a Native village at Red Ridge.

Behind The Scenes

Jason R. Lamb and Scott Tolson wrote the series for Dark Horse Comics. Brian O'Connell penciled the first two issues and Roger Petersen the last two, while Bruce Patterson inked all four, so the art changed hands halfway through the story. Dave Nestelle colored the series, Steve Dutro lettered it and Phil Amara edited it, with Harald Graham as designer. Igor Kordey painted all four covers, giving each issue a fully painted image in contrast to the inked and colored interior pages. The final issue closed with a dedication to Thomas K. Tolson, Thomas R. Lamb and Herbert Bandy Jr.

The Kindred #4 painting had a further life in NECA's Ultimate Elder: The Golden Angel figure, which shipped in January 2019. Its window box used Kordey's art on the front, and one of its three heads wore the mask from the painting, so the toy mixed the Golden Angel of Predator: 1718 with the Kindred hunter. The mix-up began with an omnibus placing the Kindred cover before the 1718 story, which led many readers to take the bronze bird-like bio-mask for the Golden Angel's own. The figure was built on the Ultimate Jungle Hunter body and came with a sword, a flintlock, a smart disc and a shoulder cannon.

Editions

Dark Horse Comics published Predator: Kindred as a four-issue series cover-dated December 1996 to March 1997. The first issue went on sale on December 18, 1996, followed by the second on January 15, 1997, the third on February 19 and the fourth on March 19. Each issue had 36 pages, of which 24 carried the story. Dark Horse then collected the four issues in a Predator: Kindred trade paperback in December 1997, which kept the story together in a single volume for readers who had missed the monthly run.

Each of the original issues carried one of Igor Kordey's painted covers. The first showed a Predator holding a human skull, the second a Predator lifting a severed head before a full moon, the third a Predator behind bars and the fourth a Predator in bronze armor among red leaves. Predator Omnibus Vol. 2 later printed the fourth painting ahead of the 1718 story rather than with Kindred, so the same painting became the cover image of a different story in that collection. This placement was the source of the later confusion between the two hunters.

The series itself was reprinted in Predator Omnibus Vol. 3 in June 2008, alongside Predator: Bad Blood, Predator: Strange Roux and Predator: Hell & Hot Water. After Marvel acquired the license, it appeared in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 1 in December 2022, together with Predator: Dark River. That edition printed each of Kordey's four paintings on its own page ahead of the matching issue, without the original logos, so the covers appeared again in their intended order.

The Predator In Yautja Lore

The Predator in bronze armor stands among dark trees before a full moon on Igor Kordey's painted cover of Predator: Kindred #2

The Predator of Kindred hunted across two generations of one family, killing Buddy's father in 1958 and returning to the same woods decades later with his skull. It hung its kills in the trees, skinned Rod Dennison and kept skulls as trophies, much like the displays in Predator trophy rooms. It used a spear, a smart disc, wrist blades and a shoulder cannon, and arrived and left in a Predator ship. Like other hunters it copied human voices, using the voice of Buddy's father to taunt him during the final fight.

The hunter attacked convicts, an abusive husband and armed men, and it let the wounded sheriff and the unarmed boy live, choices that follow the Predator honor code. Buddy Wilcox is one of the human Predators of the franchise, a man who armed himself like the creature to face it. Jimmy McCutcheon's worship of the hunter as a god adds to the story's view of relations between humans and Predators. Its 1843, 1958 and present-day scenes give it three places on the Predator timeline.

Conclusion

Predator: Kindred is a four-issue 1996 to 1997 Dark Horse series by Jason R. Lamb and Scott Tolson, drawn by Brian O'Connell and Roger Petersen, with painted covers by Igor Kordey. It follows Buddy Wilcox, Sheriff Kelly Mathis and the escaped killer Jimmy McCutcheon as the Predator that killed Buddy's father in 1958 returned to Fleener Creek, Oregon. Buddy wounded the hunter while wearing homemade armor, the Predator left Earth with its trophies, and Buddy killed McCutcheon before finally burying his father's skull.