Predator: Welcome to the Jungle: Plot & Lore
Predator: Welcome to the Jungle is the official Dark Horse Comics prequel to Predators (2010), written by Marc Andreyko and pencilled by Guilherme Balbi. Jose Verissimo inked the interiors, Garry Henderson colored the story, Nate Piekos lettered it, and Paul Lee painted the covers for the four weekly issues that shipped in June 2010. It follows Navy SEAL Drake as his team is lifted from an Afghanistan raid onto the Game Preserve Planet, where scavenger Noland has already lived for years among the hunters. Among Dark Horse Predator comics, it sets up the film's first corpse, Noland's habits, and the Super Predators who finish Drake before Royce's group arrives.
Plot Summary
Raid In Afghanistan
In the mountains of Afghanistan, Navy SEAL Drake led a small team onto a ridge above a lit cabin and called the mark when their lasers found the windows. The unit planned a quiet descent on the target rather than a long negotiation, and one of the men asked whether they had the right place before they slid down the scree toward the valley. Inside and around the cabin the raid turned into a gunfight, and a suicide bomber closed on the team with a vest ready to blow. The mission that had begun as a conventional strike ended in a white flash that should have killed every man on site.
Drake and his SEALs did not wake in the wreckage of that cabin. The blast that should have finished them instead marked the moment they left Earth for a hunt they had never volunteered for. What followed had nothing to do with the terrorist cell they had come to clear. The next place they opened their eyes was the canopy of the Game Preserve Planet.
Fall Into The Jungle
Drake and his men came to in freefall over a green canopy, with parachutes strapped to their backs and no aircraft in sight. They punched through the trees, landed hard, and tried to form up while asking who had moved them and why the sky looked wrong. Names from the squad, including Redmond, Sanderson, and the others, answered a roll call that already felt like a war game gone wrong. The jungle answered with heat, humidity, and the first cuts from an unseen hunter.
The drop put them on the same preserve that would later hold Royce and the film group, years before that arrival. Drake buried friends, forced the survivors to stay focused, and learned that whatever hunted them treated humans as sport rather than soldiers in a war. Conventional tactics bought him hours, not safety. Alone in the green, he still looked for a way to hit back.
Death Of The SEALs
Early in the drop, Redmond argued that the whole squad had already died in Afghanistan and that the jungle might be a hallucination or a Taliban gas trick. He counted on his fingers and demanded to know who still thought he was being paranoid, then froze when three red targeting dots locked onto his face in a triangle. The hunter's laser found him before the team could answer. That kill opened the season on Drake's SEALs.
One by one the rest of the squad fell to plasma fire, snares, and close work until only Drake still walked. The three-dot sight that marked Redmond became the signature of a hunt the men never trained for. Drake stopped hoping for extraction and started hunting for whoever left those lights. The preserve gave him no radio and no way home.
Noland's Blade
Fleeing another hunter, Drake ran into Noland, a long-term survivor dressed in scavenged mesh, skull trophies, and stolen gear that made him look like one of the aliens at first glance. Drake took him for the killer of his team and closed to fight, while Noland answered with a raised serrated blade and a demand for one reason not to finish him on the spot. A real Predator broke up the standoff before either man killed the other, and Noland nearly claimed that kill until Drake spoiled the ambush. The two humans left the clearing as uneasy allies rather than as corpse and trophy.
Noland had lived on the preserve for years by avoiding fair fights and stripping dead hunters for tools. He led Drake toward shelter and warned that the aliens dropped people, animals, and worse for sport, learning with every kill. Drake pushed for a plan to hit back at the hunters, and Noland refused to trade a hard-won hiding place for a suicide raid. That argument followed them toward the trees that hid Noland's camp.
Drill In The Cliff
Noland led Drake through the canopy to a cliff face that held a tall white alien drill set into the rock like a mining tower. Drake joked about being lost until the metal walls rose out of the green and left him staring. Noland said they had arrived, and Drake admitted the preserve had already outdone every strange thing he had seen since the drop. The site held scavenged gear, weapons, and proof that someone had lived there a long time.
The cliff drill was not human gear and had not been left empty by chance. Noland used the chambers inside as home and armory, a place to hide from cloaks and plasma while each hunt ran its course. Drake looked at the rooms as a base he could fight from, while Noland treated them as a hole he could still crawl back into when the trees turned against him. That gap in goals followed them into the dark below.
Hideout And Lost Years
Inside the cluttered hideout, Noland showed Drake scavenged medals and dog tags while both men named their pasts. Drake said he had been Special Forces in Afghanistan. Noland answered that he had been Air Cavalry when the Soviets were still there, and Drake asked how long the older man had been trapped. Noland had lived long enough to stop counting years and to stockpile whatever fell from the sky with the next drop of prey. The tags proved Earth still fed the preserve without knowing it.
Drake described waking already in freefall after a mission gone bad, and Noland said the same snatch had taken him mid-operation years earlier. The hideout talk made clear that drops from Earth were routine for the hunters and rare for anyone who survived them. Drake still talked about payback, and Noland answered with the shorter goal of lasting one more night on the preserve. Neither man trusted the other fully, yet both needed the other for the next move.
Left Alive For No Sport
Noland told how a hunter once stood over him when he was too broken for sport, then walked away into the trees while he screamed for the kill. He had lived after that by training, stolen meat, and payback plans that never quite emptied the jungle. The code that spared him also taught him never to offer the aliens a clean, fair fight if he could help it. Drake heard the warning and still pushed for a trap that would draw blood.
After that night, Noland would help Drake hurt one hunter and still refuse to die for a SEAL's pride. He had learned that the aliens left broken prey alone when the sport was gone, and he built his rules around that fact. Drake called the caution cowardice and continued pushing for a cleaner fight. The next days on the preserve put both approaches under the same trees.
Insectoid Ambush
When Drake stole a smart disc and left alone, the jungle answered with more than Yautja. A giant blue insectoid rose over him in the rain, hissing as he froze on the ground and understood too late that the preserve stocked more than one kind of monster. Noland caught up to reclaim the weapon and drag Drake back from a fight he could not win alone. The lesson stuck harder than any lecture in the hideout.
The insectoid showed that the planet was a managed range rather than empty wilderness. Drake had treated the jungle like a battlefield he could clear, and the bug knocked that idea down in a single clearing. Noland was angrier about the stolen disc than about the creature itself, because another soldier had left cover and nearly died for a trophy weapon. They went back to planning a single, smaller kill.
Hike Under The Sun
Drake and Noland crossed open grass under a brutal sun while Drake asked if the older man was fit for the fight ahead. Noland said he was fine, though the hike and the heat were already wearing him down, and the two argued about grief, water, and when a battle was over. Above and behind them, a cloaked hunter already tracked their heat and logged their path on a wrist computer. The hike was never private.
The Falconer stalked from the trees while the men talked like soldiers on a long patrol, with Super Predators already active on the preserve. Drake still argued that surprise and courage could tip a trap, and Noland answered that the hunters adapted faster than wounded prey could recover. Their truce held through the hike, with no shade left once they crossed the open grass. The sun gave them no cover at all.
Green Blood And Broken Mask
Working together at last, Drake and Noland put a hunter into spikes and close combat until neon green blood ran down a cracked bio-mask. Drake finished the smash with a blow that dropped the Yautja and left it broken enough to bind. Noland wanted the captive dead at once, calling it a rabid dog that should be put down rather than held as a pet. Drake wanted bait that would draw more of the clan into a fight he thought he could win.
Green blood on the mask was proof that prey could hurt a hunter on the preserve. Drake wanted the wounded Predator left alive as bait, and Noland wanted it killed before the blood and noise called cousins out of the trees. Their argument over the captive split them again at the edge of that win. Drake stayed to build the cage, and Noland left rather than wait beside a live Yautja.
The Vine Cage
Drake locked the wounded Predator in a dome of vines and timber at the base of a heavy tree, with green blood on the hunter and counterweights hanging from the limbs. He built crude traps from stakes, vines, and jungle trash while the captive watched every move and waited. Holding a live Yautja as bait put him in the same danger that fills other captive Predator stories, only without a lab dome or a research staff. He trusted spikes and pits more than Noland's caution.
The caged hunter was supposed to draw the clan into Drake's kill zone. Instead it marked his position for something worse than a single Jungle Hunter. Noland refused to die beside a SEAL who would not leave well enough alone. Night fell on a trap that had already been seen.
Cloaked Hunters
Cloaked Super Predators found the trap line before Drake could spring it cleanly. Three shimmering outlines moved through the blue night jungle while he woke to the sound of a broken branch and tried to turn bait into an ambush. Three cloaked Super Predators had not come to free a lesser cousin. They had come to burn the captive and claim the human who built the cage.
Drake's ambush lasted only minutes. Plasma and cloaks shredded the stakes he had spent hours setting around the vine dome. The Super Predators burned the captive and the trap line instead of meeting him as an equal challenger. He was already wounded when the last of them closed in.
Unmasked Challenge
The Berserker removed its bio-mask and faced Drake with green blood on its hide, holding the mask in one hand while wrist blades and a plasmacaster stayed ready. Drake spat defiance and asked whether the hunter was as sadistic as humans, then dared it to finish the job. The unmasked challenge was not mercy. It was a hunter savoring the end of prey that had dared to cage one of its kind. Noland watched from cover and did not step into that circle.
The Berserker was a Super Predator, a different caste from the lesser hunter in the vine cage. Drake had hurt a lesser Yautja and drawn the attention of the Super Predators who ran this range. He was too hurt to win a stand-up fight, and he still spat defiance into the unmasked hunter's face. The Berserker raised the caster and fired.
Berserker Finishes Drake
A plasmacaster blast put Drake on the ground, and the unmasked Berserker stood over him roaring while Noland watched from a high branch and did not intervene. Drake's last words reached for Noland's warning as the SEAL bled out under the trees. Noland stayed in cover and left the body where the later film group would find it. The Super Predators continued the hunt.
Sometime afterward, Royce and the others dropped for the film hunt came across Drake's corpse on the same preserve without knowing his name. Noland was still alive in the jungle when that later group crossed his path. The prequel leaves Drake dead under the trees and Noland still scavenging when the next drop arrives. The weekly issues gave the film's opening dead American a name, a team, and a reason Noland would not fight the hunters in the open.
Key Characters
- Drake was a U.S. Navy SEAL pulled from an Afghanistan raid onto the Game Preserve Planet. He lost his team to the hunters, forced an alliance with Noland, caged a Predator as bait, and died under the Berserker's plasmacaster.
- Noland was a long-term scavenger and former Air Cavalry soldier who had survived for years by stripping fallen hunters and avoiding open war. A Predator once left him alive because he was too broken for sport, and he later watched Drake die from a tree rather than join a lost fight.
- Redmond, Sanderson, and the rest of Drake's SEAL team were the first casualties of the drop, picked off until only Drake remained.
- The Super Predators destroyed Drake's captive, and the Berserker finished the SEAL. The Falconer had stalked Drake's SEALs earlier in the preserve hunt.
- Royce appears at the close when his group finds Drake's body, tying the comic to the movie's opening stretch on the preserve.
Editions
Dark Horse Comics published Predators as four weekly full-color issues in June 2010, with Marc Andreyko on the Welcome to the Jungle script, Guilherme Balbi on pencils, Jose Verissimo on inks, Garry Henderson on colors, and Nate Piekos on letters. Paul Lee covered the books, and Scott Allie, Sierra Hahn, Freddye Lins, and John Schork edited the line under Mike Richardson's Dark Horse banner. Issue #1 reached shops on June 9, 2010, at $2.99, and the remaining three issues followed week by week through the month as the official prequel to Robert Rodriguez's Predators film. Each floppy also carried backup strips by David Lapham and Gabriel Guzman later collected as A Predatory Life, a Royce story separate from Welcome to the Jungle.
Dark Horse collected the Predators comics in a trade paperback in October 2010 that gathered Welcome to the Jungle beside the related film tie-in material. After Marvel took the Predator comics license, the Andreyko and Balbi story returned in Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 in May 2024, the hardcover that also reprints Homeworld, Captive, Nemesis, Demon's Gold, Xenogenesis, and the later Hunters trilogy. The omnibus pages used for this overview run from the Predators #1 cover through the lead-in to the movie adaptation.
Behind The Scenes
Dark Horse timed Predators as a weekly June 2010 event ahead of the July theatrical release of Predators, billing Welcome to the Jungle as the official comic prequel. Marc Andreyko made his Dark Horse Predator debut on the A-story while David Lapham handled the Royce backups, and Guilherme Balbi's interiors carried the preserve's jungle palette that later readers would recognize from the film's world. Paul Lee's covers put Laurence Fishburne's Noland and Adrien Brody's Royce beside a Predator mask under the official-prequel banner, even though Royce's comic spotlight lived mainly in the backup strip. Scott Allie and Sierra Hahn led the editorial team that shipped all four issues in a single month.
The comic names Drake as the dead American soldier Royce's group finds early in the film and shows why Noland distrusts open war against the hunters. It also shows the Super Predators destroying a lesser Yautja and the Berserker claiming Drake before the movie's opening stretch on the preserve. Retailers received the book as a short-run movie bridge rather than as a long Dark Horse ongoing, and the story's later life has been through the 2010 trade and the 2024 Original Years Omnibus reprint. Robert Rodriguez appeared on the solicitation as producer partner for the tie-in push.
Conclusion
Predator: Welcome to the Jungle is the June 2010 Dark Horse Predators prequel by Marc Andreyko and Guilherme Balbi, with inks by Jose Verissimo, colors by Garry Henderson, letters by Nate Piekos, and covers by Paul Lee. It follows Drake from an Afghanistan raid to the Game Preserve Planet, through Noland's scavenger rules and a caged hunter, to the Berserker's finishing shot. The SEAL dies where the film will later begin, and Noland stays in the trees until the next drop of prey arrives.
External Sources
- Predators #1 at Dark Horse Comics
- Predators (Dark Horse, 2010) at the Grand Comics Database
- Predator: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2 at Dark Horse Comics
Tag Categories: Predator Comics
