Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator
Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator is a two-issue crossover written by Mark Schultz and painted by Ariel Olivetti. DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics published it in 2007. Superman and Batman followed hunter activity into the Andes, where a Predator clan had lived since a ship crashed during the last ice age. The hunters kept Xenomorphs in breeding chambers under a volcano. Superman tried to move the colony off Earth. Batman worked through their records, their champion, and the nest.
Plot Summary
Early Encounters
Before the volcano story, Batman had already been finding Yautja under cities, including Gotham, where they were watching how humans lived. At a Kaiser metal plant he saw cloaked hunters break up a criminal deal, strike, and withdraw. Elsewhere, Superman and John Henry Irons checked a site running technology that did not belong on Earth, and hunters fired on Superman before they pulled back. Batman followed those traces to one home: the crater of a volcano in the Andes that had started erupting again.
In Metropolis, the Daily Planet sent Clark Kent to the same mountains to report on that eruption. Lois Lane invited herself along and called the trip a vacation, because she wanted time with her husband. Clark used the assignment so he could reach the crater as a reporter. The paper expected a science team at the volcano. Lois and Clark did not know a hunting settlement was living in the crater.
The Peruvian Expedition
At the volcano, Clark and Lois found dead people and hunters, not researchers. A separate armed party came in by helicopter and tried to fight the clan on the ground. That party was killed. Batman was already there and treated the helicopter assault as a wasted attack. Lois was separated from Clark during the trip. The people with her came under attack, and the hunters took her captive. Superman went into the caves after her while the eruption and the Xenomorphs threatened everyone still outside.
On the snow the hunters closed in with weapons the expedition did not have. Superman stopped that attack and saved a person they had marked, including a fight with a hunter who carried an unusual spear. He and Batman then worked out that this was not an invasion. The clan was stranded. Their ship had crashed about 14,000 years earlier, and the people in the crater were the descendants, looking for a way off Earth.
The Underground Colony
Batman fell into the volcanic complex, met Xenomorphs, and was pulled out by hunters who then held him as a prisoner. They brought him before the clan's champion, a huge arena fighter later compared with the Gladiator Predator. Batman challenged him and used a defibrillator as a weapon. He beat the larger fighter, and after that the clan would deal with him. The caverns held weapons, communications gear, and machinery the hunters had kept working for many generations.
Deeper in the same caves, Batman met adult Xenomorphs that the clan kept as quarry. He could not walk through them the way Superman could. He used armor, weapons, and careful movement, and one creature still got close enough to grab him. The breeding chambers were deliberate. The hunts were how the clan tested its warriors, and a breakout would have put the region around the erupting volcano in danger.
The settlement included families, with Yautja children living among the warriors. Their records tied the ancestors to a voyage toward a world near Arcturus. A Predator ship had been forced down during the last ice age, and the damaged hull could not climb out of Earth's gravity. The surface was too cold, so the survivors moved into the dormant volcano and stayed. When the volcano became active again, hunting parties went out under cities and to places like the Kaiser plant, which is where Batman and Superman first met them.
The Evacuation Plan
In the second issue, Superman brought the Fortress of Solitude to the volcano Viejo Abuelo to take both the hunters and the Xenomorphs off the mountain. Batman had been keeping the clan calm inside the crater. Superman treated them as violent and still worth moving, and he started sending them into the Fortress for the trip back to their home star system. He sent Batman and Lois Lane in with them, then flew back down into Viejo Abuelo to find the nest. He asked the Terrestrial Defense Initiative for an hour before they fired. That agency already feared his off-world birth would make him take the clan's side, and it had missiles aimed at the volcano.
Conflict At The Fortress
Inside the Fortress the hunters floated in zero gravity, and so did Batman and Lois. Kelex and the Superman robots were part of that crew. The weightless rooms convinced the hunters they had been led into a trap, and they attacked Batman and Lois. Down in the volcano, Superman found the nest, froze the eggs with his arctic breath, and gathered them in a net. He put the net aboard the Predator ship, flew that ship out of Viejo Abuelo, and docked it beside the Fortress.
A Xenomorph Queen was still loose, and she attacked Batman while hunters were still fighting him. He had hypodermics loaded for both. The drug dropped the hunters. The needle would not go through the Queen's shell. Superman caught up and drove the hypodermic into her mouth, and the drug took her down. Hunters who were still awake remained in the Fortress. Superman flooded the sphere with gas and knocked them out.
Departure From Earth
The Terrestrial Defense Initiative did not wait out the hour. It launched heat-seeking nuclear missiles at the Fortress of Solitude. Batman piloted the Fortress, and Superman pushed it beyond Earth's atmosphere, out of the missiles' reach. They loaded the unconscious hunters back onto their own ship and sent that ship toward the clan's home planet, the world near Arcturus named in the ship's records. Viejo Abuelo, and the settlement the clan had held there since the ice age, stayed behind.
Key Characters
- Superman / Clark Kent covered the Peruvian assignment, fought the hunters, froze the eggs, and moved the colony off Earth.
- Batman / Bruce Wayne entered the caverns, beat the colony champion, kept the clan calm, and piloted the Fortress of Solitude clear of the missiles.
- Lois Lane traveled with Clark, was taken by the hunters, and was attacked with Batman in the Fortress when the zero-gravity rooms looked like a trap.
- The Andes clan descended from hunters stranded about 14,000 years earlier. They kept families, a champion, and a Xenomorph nest under the volcano.
- The Xenomorph Queen attacked during the evacuation. Sedative would not enter through her hide, and Superman dosed her through the mouth.
Editions
Issue 1 went on sale on January 10, 2007. DC listed it as a 48-page color comic, with Mark Schultz writing, Ariel Olivetti painting and coloring, and Todd Klein lettering. DC described Olivetti's pages as computer-generated painted art. The second issue followed in February. The collected graphic novel shipped on May 23, 2007, at 112 pages, and it held the two issues in one volume.
Behind The Scenes
Mark Schultz wrote and drew the creator-owned comic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs in the 1980s. Marvel Comics Entertainment later acquired that series, and CBS ran it as a Saturday-morning animated show from 1993 to 1994. By the time he wrote Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator, he had already worked in the licensed lines, including Predator: Hell & Hot Water and Aliens: Apocalypse – The Destroying Angels.
Conclusion
Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator is Mark Schultz and Ariel Olivetti's 2007 miniseries for DC and Dark Horse. It follows Superman and Batman to the volcano Viejo Abuelo, where a Predator clan had lived since an ice-age crash and kept a Xenomorph nest. Superman moved the clan into the Fortress of Solitude, froze the eggs, and pushed the Fortress beyond a nuclear missile strike. The hunters left on their own ship for the world near Arcturus.
External Sources
Tag Categories: Avp Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers