Predator: The Last Hunt was the third story in Marvel's Predator comics by Ed Brisson, published as a four-issue series from February to May 2024 and collected in October 2024. Drawn by Francesco Manna, it followed Theta Berwick, the human Predator hunter from Predator: Day of the Hunter and Predator: The Preserve, on her search for the place where the hunters kept their human prey. In 2068 she and Paolo Silva found a wrecked supply ship, a camp of stranded survivors led by John Schaefer and finally a trap laid by a Super Predator.
Plot Summary
A Hunter On Mabou
On the jungle world of Mabou in 2066, a Predator in spiked silver armor came down beside the wreck of a huge ship that lay tangled in the roots of the forest. Spined, long-jawed beasts rushed out of the trees at it, and the hunter cut them down one after another without slowing its march toward the wreck. When the last of them lay dead, it walked into the broken hull and found a control panel deep inside. The Predator pressed a single red button on the panel, turned back toward its own ship and left the planet as quietly as it had come.
Nobody on Mabou knew what the hunter had done, and for two years nothing seemed to come of it. The red button had switched on a beacon, and the signal it sent out would later draw Theta Berwick across space to the wreck. Survivors of the crash were living in the jungle around the ship, but they saw the hunter only from a distance and were glad to watch it go. John Schaefer later admitted that they had no idea what it wanted, and that they had taken it for a scout sent ahead of a salvage crew that never arrived.
Theta And Paolo On Tantallon
Two years later, in 2068, Theta and Paolo Silva landed on the planet Tantallon in the Predator armor they had taken from past kills, Theta in gold and Paolo in silver. The horned natives of the planet took them for real Predators, and when Theta dug a red device out of the ground near a group of bodies, the natives attacked. Paolo shot one of them, and the pair escaped on the gold Yautja bikes they had brought with them. Aboard their ship, the Sandpiper, Paolo studied the device and found that it was a tracking beacon picking up a distress signal from somewhere far away.
The find was the first real lead in 5 years of searching, and it had been 27 years since a Predator had killed Theta's parents. Theta was now 40 years old, carried a prosthetic arm and admitted that she feared ending up as one more trophy on a hunter's wall. Paolo handed her a small injector filled with a poison that he had made from a plant found near West River Station, strong enough to kill everything within a kilometer. Theta decided that if a Predator ever beat her, she would use it on herself, so that the hunter lost both its honorable kill and its trophy.
The Wreck On Mabou
The signal led them to Mabou, where they found an enormous Predator transport ship lying in the roots, larger than any Theta had ever seen. Theta pressed the same red button inside and opened a chamber that had clearly been broken from the inside by something that wanted out. Deeper in, they reached a huge hall filled with stasis chambers and understood that the wreck was the supply ship for the Predators' hunting grounds. For six years they had known that the hunters were keeping people in stasis for decades, and here at last was the proof.
Many of the chambers held only skeletons, and the dust on the controls told Theta that nobody had touched them for at least two or three years. Near the hall they found a dead Predator with a spear driven through its body, the first one Theta had seen in half a decade, and someone else had already taken the kill. She tore the hunter's mask loose before they left, unaware that a dark shape was watching them walk back to the Sandpiper. Paolo wanted to return and catalog every chamber, since the people lost there had been nothing more than gaming stock to the Predators.
Their ship computer, Sandy, cross-referenced the travel logs in the wreck's black box and found two planets in its records. One was the Predators' gaming preserve that Theta already knew, and the other was a world missing from every database, which Theta took to be the site of their stasis farms. She hoped that it might even be the home planet of the Yautja, while Paolo urged caution and asked for time to document the dead. Theta agreed, and that night the Sandpiper's sensors woke them with a perimeter alarm and a single trespasser that Sandy could not identify, though it was not a Predator.
John Schaefer Arrives
Someone knocked on the closed ramp of the ship and promised that he was friendly and had come in peace, so Theta had Sandy open it. Outside stood a blond man in a Hawaiian shirt, who introduced himself as John Schaefer and grinned up at the armored pair. He told them that he had about fifty people out in the jungle who were hoping that someone could get them off the planet. He added that it would be even better if they had some cold beers on board, and he led Theta and Paolo back to a camp of tents and fires in the forest.
At the camp John explained that he had been tracking one of the hunters across a jungle in Thailand and had then woken up inside one of their ships. The ship had crashed on Mabou, and the malfunction had broken his stasis pod open while the badly injured Predator pilot was still alive. The pilot attacked in the cargo hold, but John grabbed a spear and drove it through the creature, which explained the dead hunter Theta had found. He then worked out how to free the others from their pods, but they also released alien specimens by mistake, and the group fell from about 300 people to only 53.
About a month after they woke, a huge Predator arrived and cut through the creatures they set loose on it before it boarded the wreck. They expected it to destroy the ship along with their only food supply, since the stasis chambers kept alien meat fresh, but it simply left again. John then told Theta why he hunted Predators at all, since his brother Dutch had gone missing in Guatemala in 1987. After he met one of the creatures in New York, he spent years tracking them, and he had searched the wreck for a week hoping to find his brother in a pod.
The Road To Glenelg
Theta told the survivors that the Predators had been kidnapping people for eighty or ninety years and releasing them on preserve planets so that the hunters could hone their skills. John found it strange that the wreck had been sending a distress signal for so long, and Theta also felt that the whole trail was far too easy. A survivor named Alejandro demanded that she fly everyone home and tried to take the ship, but Theta knocked him down, and Sen pulled a gun before John calmed everyone. Theta promised to call her friend Awja, who worked with the O.W.L.F., once she knew how many people needed rescue.
The black box showed that the crashed ship had been flying to a stasis farm on the planet Glenelg, about a week's flight away. John offered to gather volunteers, and many of the survivors were happy to strike back at the creatures that had taken them from their lives on Earth. A woman named Licia promised Theta that she would keep the rougher members of the crew under control during the trip. The Sandpiper carried the whole group to Glenelg, a rocky world under three moons, where Theta ordered Sandy into cloak mode before the crew marched out and climbed through the jagged mountains toward the farm.
The Empty Stasis Farm
The farm was a vast golden structure rising out of the rocks, built in the angular style of Yautja architecture and silent from the outside. Theta and Paolo told the others to wait for a signal and went in alone in their armor, while John admitted to Licia that he still hoped to find Dutch inside. Licia told him that his brother was not there and that he knew it, and John agreed that she was probably right. He said that he could still hold on to that hope a little longer, and he waited with the rest of the volunteers as the two hunters vanished into the building.
Inside stood tens of thousands of stasis chambers in endless rows, and Paolo wondered how so many people could have been taken without anyone noticing. Theta answered that people had always disappeared during wars, and that the Predators had been doing this for decades or longer. Every chamber they opened was empty, and Theta realized that the hunters had moved the stasis farm long ago, which was why the place had no guards at all. Then a small spider drone crawled out of the dark with a blinking red light, and Theta saw that it carried a bomb before shouting at Paolo to run.
The Trap Springs
The blast threw Theta and Paolo out of the building, and the volunteers outside watched the farm erupt into flame. Theta understood that the beacon, the tracker and the black box had all been left for them on purpose, and that the Predators had wanted them to follow the trail. Out of the fire stepped a towering hunter in silver armor with glowing red eyes, the Super Predator that had been waiting for them on Glenelg. Theta later said that the whole thing had been a trap and that she had walked her people straight into it, and the hunter answered with a long roar.
The survivors still believed that they had the advantage, and one of them shouted that they outnumbered the creature twenty to one. Within seconds a hunter's blade cut down the man who had said it, and the volunteers opened fire with everything they had brought from Mabou. Their bullets did little against the hunter's armor, and it moved through the crowd killing anyone who came close enough to touch it. John could only swear as the battle turned against them, while Theta and Paolo, still dazed from the explosion, tried to reach the fighting in time.
Slaughter On Glenelg
Alejandro called the others cowards for standing around and charged the hunter with a pistol in each hand. John shouted at him to fall back, but Alejandro kept firing, and the Predator stabbed through several volunteers before it turned on him. He bragged that this was how to deal with the creature, walking straight up to it before it could react, and the hunter drove its blade through his head. The volunteers who tried to help him fell one after another, and the Predator roared over a field of bodies as the survivors scattered into the rocks of Glenelg.
Spined Hell Hounds then poured out of the smoke and ran down the survivors who were still trying to escape, and one of them killed a boar hunter from the camp. John argued with Theta about what to do next, and Paolo set off for the Sandpiper, which lay about ten kilometers away in cloak mode. Sen was killed by the cloaked hunter as the group broke apart, and Licia shot a hound before a plasma blast struck her down. Theta finally stood face to face with the Super Predator, and the creature watched calmly while she killed a hound that had knocked John to the ground.
Paolo fought his way through the hounds, stabbing one of them and taking its head before he reached the edge of the canyon. A plasma blast knocked Theta's knife out of her hand, leaving her unarmed in front of the hunter, while Paolo called Sandy to bring the ship to him. The Sandpiper never came, and Paolo saw it burning in the distance, destroyed by the Predators before anyone could escape. Theta told herself that after 25 years of fighting these creatures she could not go out like this, and then the battle on Glenelg went dark around her.
The Unknown Planet
Theta woke inside a stasis pod aboard the hunter's ship, in a room filled with hundreds of chambers, and saw John frozen in one of them. She realized that the Predator had simply added her to its collection, but her pod opened and she found her armor laid out for her. She put it on, a door slid open, and she stepped out onto an unknown planet covered in bones and twisted trees. There Paolo and John hung in chains from tall pillars beside a wall of bio-mask trophies taken from earlier kills, and Paolo told her that a hound had caught him before he reached the Sandpiper.
The Super Predator walked out of the mist to meet her, holding a long knife in one hand and wearing a blade on the other arm. It had healed her wounds while she slept in stasis because it wanted a fair fight against the human who hunted its kind, with John and Paolo as the prize. Theta told it that she had killed 32 of them and was not afraid of one more. The duel that followed was brutal, and the hunter stabbed Theta and tore away her prosthetic arm before John broke free and tackled the creature to give her a chance.
The Last Hunt
Beaten and bleeding, Theta used the poison capsule that Paolo had designed for the day a hunter got the better of her. Instead of taking it herself, she got it into the Super Predator, and the toxin worked its way through the creature's body until it choked up bright green blood. Theta watched it suffer and thought for a moment about leaving it to writhe in pain, but she decided that she was no monster and took its head with a single stroke instead. She then cut Paolo down from his chains while John caught his friend and helped him stand.
Theta told the others that the hunter's ship held hundreds of stasis chambers and that the people inside were the ones they had been looking for all along. With the Sandpiper gone, the only way off the planet was the Predator ship itself, and John agreed to try to fly it. Paolo asked whether she was sure, and Theta reminded him that they had spent years searching for these people and had finally found them. The story closed with Theta alive, carrying the Super Predator's head, and with the three of them setting out to bring the captives home, ending with the promise The End... For Now.
Key Characters
- Theta Berwick was the human hunter who had followed Predators since they killed her parents. She found the Mabou wreck, led the survivors to Glenelg and killed the Super Predator in a duel.
- Paolo Silva was Theta's partner aboard the Sandpiper. He designed the poison capsule, wanted to catalog the dead on the supply ship and was taken captive after the Glenelg massacre.
- John Schaefer was the brother of Dutch Schaefer. He woke after the supply ship crashed on Mabou, speared its pilot, led the survivors for two years and agreed to fly the Predator ship home.
- Alejandro was a hot-headed survivor who wanted to seize the Sandpiper. He was killed on Glenelg with a blade through the head.
- Sen and Licia were survivors who joined the volunteers to Glenelg. Sen was killed by the cloaked hunter and Licia was struck down by a plasma blast.
- Sandy was the Sandpiper's computer, which decoded the black box logs and was lost when the ship burned.
- The Super Predator was the silver-armored hunter who switched on the beacon, laid the trap on Glenelg and captured Theta for a one-on-one duel.
Behind The Scenes
Predator: The Last Hunt #1 went on sale on February 21, 2024, and the series ended with its fourth issue on May 22, 2024, after the third came out on April 24. Ed Brisson wrote all four issues and Francesco Manna drew them, with colors by Erick Arciniega and lettering by VC's Clayton Cowles under editor Sarah Brunstad. Cory Smith drew the main covers with colors by Rachelle Rosenberg, while variant covers came from Francesco Manna, Sergio Dávila, Paco Medina, Declan Shalvey, Paolo Villanelli and Justin Mason, among others.
Marvel collected the four issues as Predator by Ed Brisson Vol. 3: The Last Hunt, a 112-page trade paperback released on October 15, 2024. The story tied Theta's trilogy back to the films by revealing John Schaefer as the brother of Dutch from Predator, who had gone missing in Guatemala in 1987. The supply ship and its stasis chambers expanded on the hunting preserve from the previous series, and the final page left room for further stories with the words The End... For Now, as Theta, Paolo and John set off to free the captives.
Conclusion
Predator: The Last Hunt is the four-issue Marvel series by Ed Brisson and Francesco Manna, published in 2024, that brought Theta Berwick's search for the humans held in stasis to an end. It follows Theta and Paolo from a wrecked supply ship on Mabou to a burning trap on Glenelg, where a Super Predator slaughtered the survivors who came with them. The story ends with Theta killing the hunter in a duel on an unknown planet and setting out with Paolo Silva and John Schaefer to bring hundreds of captives home aboard the Predator's own ship.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Predator Lore
