Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter

By , Founder & Editor, covering Alien vs. Predator since 2001

Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter is a two-issue crossover plotted by Jim Shooter, scripted by John Ostrander, and drawn by Lee Weeks, with covers by Barry Windsor-Smith. Dark Horse Comics published it with Valiant, beginning in November 1992 and ending in May 1993. A Yautja hunter came to North Am, the continent-wide city of the year 4001, for an X-O helmet that Hartwig and his marines had taken from its people's ship in 3999. By then Hartwig was a general who hunted with a club of upper-level hunters, and the Predator's hunt for him drew in Magnus, a man raised to fight rogue robots, and Leeja, the President's daughter.

Plot Summary

Hunters On Mining Colony NA-622

Colonel Hartwig and his marines among the skulls in the trophy room of the Predator ship they brought down on Terra Mining Colony NA-622

On April 10, 3999, human marines and their robots fought a band of Predators at Terra Mining Colony NA-622. One wounded marine was left among his dead squadmates and wrecked robots, searching for an attacker he could not see. His robot located the cloaked Predator on top of a crate, and the marine shot and wounded it, but the hunter answered with a bladed disc and killed him. The robot treated the death as a failure of its prime directive, and the Predator held up the man's skull and spine as a trophy.

The marines were led by Colonel Hartwig. His Alpha team located and disabled the aliens' vessel at a heavy cost. There had been only five of the creatures, and the marines believed they would have lost without the heavy guns of the Manning, their ship in orbit above the colony. Hartwig led his men through its trophy room, which was hung with skulls, one of them the long skull of an adult Xenomorph, and he told a young marine that the creatures had been hunters. When his units tried to lift the wreck into orbit with a magnetic lock, it exploded. Hartwig guessed that one surviving Predator had set off its auto-destruct, and that hunter walked away from the blast.

The Gun Club In The Goph Levels

On June 2, 4001, a silver freewill robot ran for her life through the Goph lev, the lowest level of North Am, the city that covered the continent. She was being chased by hunters on hover sleds: General Hartwig, Ms. Trent, and Senator Church. They preferred freewill robots to ordinary robots because they gave better sport. The hunts were illegal, and the hunters knew that they would lose their positions if they were caught, but the robot was meant to end up on the trophy shelf of another member, Squire Schnupp.

Before Schnupp could shoot, Magnus broke both of his guns. Schnupp's robots tried to hold him, and Magnus, who had been trained since childhood to fight rogue robots, smashed them while his tunic soaked up their energy blasts. As he held Schnupp, the other hunters shot their own member from a bridge to keep him quiet. The freewill robot explained that she was one of Tekla's robots from Synanon and had come to North Am on a goodwill mission. Schnupp and his friends had kidnapped her, fitted her with a device that cut her off from other robots, and turned her loose to be hunted.

Before he died, Schnupp told Magnus about the gun club and gave him the address of its lodge, unit 42063 on level 42 of the Yale sector in the upper levels. Magnus broke into the lodge, a room full of mounted animal heads, and smashed open a display case. Inside was the club's grand trophy, a domed blue helmet. Magnus could not understand why the hunters would kill one of their own to protect it.

The X-O Helmet

At Ms. Trent's home in the Milespires, the upper levels of the city, the gun club met that evening, joined by Church's companion Poochie. Trent knew that Schnupp had sent Magnus to the lodge and that the helmet could be traced back to the general. Magnus had been living in voluntary exile among the Gophs and was out of favor with the authorities. General Hartwig decided that the club would hunt and kill Magnus and get the trophy back.

At the same time, the North Am Space Defense Center picked up an intruder ship with no identification and sent an interceptor after it. The interceptor brought the alien ship into its docking bay and reported strange readings for the lifeforms aboard. Then it turned back toward North Am at full speed, stopped answering calls, and crashed in the Lake Ontario sector. Rescuers found the crew dead inside. They had all been skinned, and some had their skulls and backbones removed.

Magnus took the helmet to Leeja, a councilmember and the daughter of the President, who was trying to reform North Am from inside the system. He asked her to look into Schnupp's friends, since a report to the authorities would be buried. Leeja had empathic powers, and she sensed that the helmet was alive and watching them. When Hartwig received the report of the skinned interceptor crew, he ordered the area sealed and every human and police robot unit sent to it, then told his friends that the alert gave them the diversion they needed to go after Magnus.

Battle At Magnus's Home

Magnus left the helmet with Leeja so she could probe it with her powers. She learned that it was part of an X-O, and it was trying to warn her when the Predator crashed through her window. The hunter smashed her servant robot T-4-2 and repeated her words back to her in her own voice. Leeja hit it with a floor lamp, got away with the helmet, and ran to find Magnus.

The gun club was waiting outside Magnus's home on the Goph lev with a squad of armed robots. V'ril Trent claimed that Magnus had once been attracted to her, but the others had heard that she tried to blackmail him and that he turned the tables on her. Hartwig planned to take Magnus alive and probe his mind if the helmet did not turn up. When Leeja arrived with it, Trent offered to kill them both, but Hartwig saw something else coming and recognized it after all the years since NA-622. He told the others to settle back and watch.

Through the helmet, Leeja learned that the creature had killed the X-O's host and that the X-O was its trophy. The Predator told Magnus to get a weapon, and Magnus answered that he was a weapon. The hunter watched him through its heat vision, threw him through a wall, and hit him with a plasma bolt. Hartwig held Leeja back, since he wanted the creature to kill Magnus first so that the helmet could then bait a trap for it. The Predator caught Magnus in a net, pinned him against a fence, and readied its disc.

Poochie wanted to kill something, and she fired at the Predator's back against orders. She missed, and the hunter turned on the gun club. It killed Poochie with its smart disc and then threw a spear through Senator Church. Trent ordered the robots to open fire, and their shots also struck Magnus. His tunic absorbed the blast and burned through the net, and he broke free.

Hartwig knew they did not have the firepower to win, so he took the X-O helmet and ran while Trent held the Predator's attention. The hunter used its cloak, Trent switched her robots to infrared, and the Predator destroyed them anyway. It killed Trent with a blast from its shoulder cannon. Leeja lay still on the ground and Magnus was buried in rubble, and the Predator left them both as poor sport and went after Hartwig instead.

The Chase Through North Am

Magnus dug himself out and found that Leeja had only pretended to be dead. Hartwig was not among the bodies, and the helmet was gone. On the Goph lev, a group of Gophs stopped Hartwig and demanded everything he carried. He opened fire, and the cloaked Predator arrived during the gunfight, killed one of the Gophs, and sent the rest running.

Magnus and Leeja went to Professor Talltree in the Milespires. He had found old files on the creature in the city's main brain, filed under Predator. The species had visited Earth several times to hunt humans for sport under elaborate rules, and it carried a returning disc, a lance, a shoulder cannon linked to its sight, and a wrist gauntlet with claws. The only way to stop it was to kill it. If it was defeated it might destroy itself with a low-yield nuclear device, so Magnus would have to disable the self-destruct on its gauntlet, which also controlled its light-bending cloak, before the hunter could use it.

Talltree explained that the Predator lived by a strict code. It guarded the trophies of its hunts, the X-O helmet had been stolen from its collection by Hartwig, and it would not hunt the helpless or the unworthy, which was why it had spared Leeja. Magnus did not want to kill it. Raised by his robot mentor 1-A to defend North Am, he now had to save Hartwig, who stood for everything he hated in the city, from a warrior he sympathized with. Talltree warned him that the Predator would hunt again once Hartwig was dead, and that the Gophs would give it better sport than the people of the Milespires.

Through her link with the helmet, Leeja could follow Hartwig. He forced his way into an anti-gravity shaft to reach the upper levels, and the Predator threw its lance into the shaft's control box. The shaft failed, and the people inside fell, while Hartwig hung on and called for help. Leeja and Magnus followed in a flying police robot, PR85, which had the Predator on infrared, and the main brain ordered every police robot in the area to take it.

Magnus jumped out to go after the hunter on foot, and the Predator shot the flyer out of the sky with Leeja still aboard. Surrounded by police robots, it adjusted its gauntlet to bend infrared light as well, and the robots lost track of it. Leeja survived the crash but was too hurt to concentrate on the helmet, so Magnus lost the trail. Hartwig ran for an armory to find a weapon, but the Predator caught up with him first.

Magnus Against The Predator

Magnus jabbing the unmasked Predator in the eyes after breaking its weapons

Magnus arrived before the Predator could finish Hartwig and kicked it away from him. He smashed the controls on its gauntlet, knocked off its mask, and tore away its shoulder cannon. With the hunter's weapons gone, Magnus told it that the two of them were the weapons now. The unmasked Predator accepted the fight but went after Hartwig first. It called him a thief who had never won its trophy fairly, and when Hartwig ran, it threw its lance through him and killed him.

Magnus tried to stop the killing and told the Predator it was pointless. The hunter answered that killing decided who was strong, and it slashed him with the wristblades he had overlooked. It beat Magnus badly while Leeja begged it to stop, until Magnus broke the blades. Then he jabbed the Predator in the eyes and blinded it.

The blind hunter could not see where to strike, and Magnus broke its spine with one blow. He told it that he was sorry, but he had to stop it, and the choice was to cripple it or kill it. Killing it would have made him like the Predator and like Hartwig, and he refused. While they fought, North Am space defense had tracked an unidentified craft taking off from the Lake Ontario site where the interceptor had crashed, and tried to reach Hartwig about it.

The Predator Clan

A horde of Predators with spears gathering around their crippled hunter as Magnus tells Leeja to run

A ship that was not from North Am set down in the Milespires, and a horde of Predators came out of it. Magnus told Leeja to run, but the hunters were not interested in them. A Predator in a red cape knelt beside the crippled hunter, who accepted the end of the game. His clan then drove their spears into him.

Leeja understood that he had lost by their rules, and that they still treated him with more honor in death than North Am gave most of its people while they lived. The caped Predator held out a gold ring marked with an X to Magnus, telling him that the spoils went to the victor. Magnus refused the trophy and threw the ring away, shouting that he was not like them and did not need a trophy. Leeja told him he was something better, and the two of them left to see the medical robots.

Key Characters

The caped Predator offering Magnus a gold ring as Leeja watches, with the clan returning to its ship above them
  • Magnus was a man raised by the robot 1-A to defend North Am against rogue robots, living in exile on the Goph lev. He found the X-O helmet in the gun club's lodge, crippled the Predator with his bare hands rather than kill it, and threw away the ring its clan offered him.
  • Leeja was a North Am councilmember, the President's daughter, and Magnus's lover. Her empathic link with the helmet told her what it was and let her track Hartwig through the city. The Predator spared her as poor sport, and she survived the crash of the police flyer.
  • The Predator came to North Am for the X-O helmet that Hartwig had taken from its people's trophy room. It killed the interceptor crew, Poochie, Church, Trent, and Hartwig before Magnus blinded it and broke its spine, and its own clan finished it with spears.
  • General Hartwig had led the marines who brought down the Predator ship on NA-622 as a colonel in 3999. The helmet became the gun club's grand trophy. He ran with it when the Predator attacked the club, and was killed by the hunter's thrown lance.
  • V'ril Trent, Senator Church, and Poochie were the rest of the gun club. Poochie, Church's companion, drew the Predator's attention by firing against orders and died by its disc, Church was speared, and Trent was killed by its shoulder cannon.
  • Squire Schnupp was the gun club member who meant to keep the freewill robot as a trophy. His fellow hunters shot him while Magnus held him, and he lived long enough to give Magnus the lodge's address.
  • Professor Talltree found the main brain's files on the Predators and told Magnus how the species hunted, what weapons it carried, and how its self-destruct device worked.

Editions

Dark Horse Comics published Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter as a two-issue series with Valiant, whose logo shares the first cover. Issue one, Sport, is dated November 1992, and the Dark Horse listing credits it to Jim Shooter and John Ostrander, artist Lee Weeks, colorist Maurice Fontenot, letterer John Costanza, and editors Mike Richardson and Bob Layton. Issue two, Spoils, credits Shooter with the plot and Ostrander with the dialogue, with art by Weeks, letters by Pat Brosseau, colors by Rachel Menashe, and Richardson as editor. Barry Windsor-Smith drew both covers.

The second issue's indicia is dated 1993 and says it was printed in Canada, and the issue is listed as a May 1993 release, although the Dark Horse website gives it a 1992 date. Its inside cover carries a black and white pinup of Magnus and the Predator drawn by Lee Weeks in 1992. Dark Horse collected both issues as the Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter trade paperback on October 1, 1994, with a new painted cover by Dave Dorman.

Behind The Scenes

Magnus walking toward the Predator after tearing away its shoulder cannon

Magnus, Robot Fighter began at Gold Key in the 1960s, and Valiant revived him in 1991, which is why the indicia credits Western Publishing and Valiant's parent company, Voyager Communications. Jim Shooter had launched Valiant and its Magnus revival before he left the company in 1992. It was Dark Horse's second Predator crossover with another publisher's hero, after Batman versus Predator. The Dark Horse solicitation called the trophy the X-O Manowar helmet, after Valiant's series about a living alien armor, although the comic itself only calls it an X-O.

The comic uses the vocabulary of the Magnus series, including North Am, the Goph levels, the Milespires, freewill robots, and the slang word "flooj," and it brings in V'ril Trent and Professor Talltree from earlier Magnus comics. Leeja's surname is lettered as Crane in her one caption, although the character is Leeja Clane in the Magnus comics. Set in 4001, it is the furthest point in the Predator timeline. None of the Predators is named in the story.

Conclusion

Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter is Jim Shooter, John Ostrander, and Lee Weeks's two-issue Dark Horse and Valiant crossover, published in 1992 and 1993. It begins with Colonel Hartwig's marines taking a Predator ship on a mining colony in 3999 and follows one hunter to North Am two years later as it tracks the stolen X-O helmet through Hartwig's gun club. Magnus broke the hunter's weapons, blinded it, and crippled it after it killed Hartwig. Its clan executed it, and Magnus threw away the ring they offered him as a trophy.

External Sources

Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers