Superman vs. Predator: Comic Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: May to July 2000
Writer: David Michelinie
Art: Alex Maleev
Colors: Matt Hollingsworth
Lettering: Bill Oakley
Cover: Alex Maleev, colored by Matt Hollingsworth
Publisher: DC Comics, with Dark Horse Comics
Format: Three-issue prestige format miniseries, collected in 2001
Setting: A Central American jungle, a hidden Mayan fortress and Metropolis

Superman vs. Predator is a three-issue crossover written by David Michelinie and drawn by Alex Maleev, published by DC Comics with Dark Horse Comics between May and July 2000. A S.T.A.R. Labs expedition found a derelict alien ship in the jungles of Central America, and the virus it carried left Superman sick and weak just as a Predator arrived and mercenaries working for the scientist Solomon Ward took the ship's technology for a plan to purge the human race. It was the Man of Steel's first meeting with the hunters, and it became one of the best-known Predator crossovers.

Plot Summary

The S.T.A.R. Labs Expedition

The story opened in La Jungla de las Sombras in Central America, where a S.T.A.R. Labs expedition was chasing rumors through one of the least explored places on the planet. The team included the xenobiologist Dr. Casey Trabor, the project physicist Marla, an older scientist and a local guide named Machu, who cut the way forward with a machete while the others complained about the heat and the insects. Deep in the jungle they found what they had come for, an overgrown spacecraft that had been sitting under the vines for a long time, and when Machu hacked through the vines around it, he uncovered a pile of human skulls.

Meanwhile in Metropolis, Superman stopped a gang of thieves who had hijacked an armored car carrying plutonium across a bridge, catching their van before one of them could threaten the city with the canister. Back at the Daily Planet, Clark Kent and Lois Lane heard that S.T.A.R. Labs had found something in Central America and wanted Superman to take a look. Lois talked Perry White into lending her the Planet's Learjet for an exclusive, while Superman flew south on his own after a request that came through Professor Hamilton at S.T.A.R. Labs.

Superman Explores The Ship

Superman holding the alien device after its micro-burst, as the S.T.A.R. Labs expedition looks up at him in Superman vs. Predator

At the camp, Superman used his X-ray vision on the derelict and saw a device wired to the engine pods that might be a self-destruct trigger, so he pulled the hatch open by hand rather than cut through the hull. The moment the seal broke, a micro-burst of sound too compressed for human hearing hit him like an electronic shriek inside his head, and an energy burst flashed at the breach. Far out in space, an alien hand pressed a button aboard a ship that picked up the signal, and a craft broke away and headed toward Earth.

Superman explored the craft and told the scientists that everything inside seemed benign, but before they could study it, a band of mercenaries opened fire on the camp. Their leader was the British soldier Nigel Skane, and Superman found that his vision was flickering and his strength was fading as Skane's rocket knocked him down. He used his heat vision on a fuel tank to cover an escape into the jungle with Machu and Marla, while the rest of the team was captured and Skane reported to his employer, Mr. Ward, that Superman was dead.

Prisoners Of The Mercenaries

Skane leading the captives into Solomon Ward's control room under the mountain in Superman vs. Predator

Trabor guessed that the ship carried a virus that was harmless to its pilot and to humans but attacked Kryptonian physiology, a kind of War of the Worlds syndrome, and that a cure might still be aboard. On the trail Machu stopped at an old, fused pit and told a local legend of a secret war fought by foreign soldiers years earlier, when a devil warrior dropped from the sky to hunt the hunters and took trophies of blood and bone. In the legend a single soldier beat the monster, which called fire down from hell to consume its own body, and Trabor realized the hellfire was a self-destruct and that a broken wire had kept the jungle ship from blowing.

Lois arrived in a chartered helicopter that Skane shot down with a missile, and the weakened Superman barely managed to fly up and save it before the mercenaries captured the whole group and chained him. Out in the darkness, a cloaked Predator had arrived and was watching them, unseen by everyone. Skane marched the prisoners through Mayan carvings to a hidden cavern where, he explained, the Mayans had fled a few hundred years earlier and built a fortress under a triple canopy that blocked aerial surveillance, with a pyramid at its heart.

Solomon Ward's Better Tomorrow

The Predator decloaking with bloody wristblades after killing Ward's men at the alien ship in Superman vs. Predator

The man waiting inside was Solomon Ward, an elderly scientist whose organization, Better Tomorrow, wanted to remove the elements it believed held humanity back from its potential. His machine at the top of the pyramid would blast bioengineered isotopes into the atmosphere and seed the clouds, so that the rain would carry a mutagen into the planet's water supply. A taped test showed a subject with a genetic defect dying after drinking the treated water while a healthy researcher drank the same water and felt nothing, and Ward named spina bifida, dwarfism and Down's syndrome among the conditions he meant to wipe out in a single generation.

Lois called him a monster to his face, refused his offer to narrate a documentary about the project, and the prisoners went to the cells while Superman collapsed in his chains. Ward explained that devices taken from the alien ship were helping his team bring the machine online ahead of schedule, and that an energy pod removed from the craft would power its generator. The mercenaries he sent back to strip the ship never returned, because the Predator cut them down there with its wristblades before decloaking over the bodies.

The Ship Self-Destructs

The Predator firing its shoulder cannon at Superman beside the alien ship in Superman vs. Predator

In the second issue, Trabor picked the locks with a hairpin, Lois helped ambush a guard for his keys and gun, and the prisoners slipped out into the jungle. Superman went back alone to the derelict to look for a cure while the others headed for safety, and at the clearing he found shredded fatigues and three fresh skulls where Ward's guards had stood. A booby trap blew up in his face, and then the Predator stepped out beside the ship, retracting its gun and extending its blades as if to fight him by hand.

Superman punched it, and the hunter answered with its shoulder cannon, so he tried to lure it into the cramped ship where the blaster would be less effective. Instead the Predator ran, and inside the ship Superman saw alien symbols changing on a console in sequence, a countdown, before he flew out a moment ahead of the blast. He realized that the monster had not come to take the ship but to destroy it, and with it went the cure he had come for, one of the comic's Predator self-destructs.

Skane's men found him in the crater and he beat them anyway, throwing a jeep at one of them, but the fight left him weaker than ever, and the cure he had risked everything for was gone. From the trees the Predator watched him on a holographic display and mimicked a voice it had recorded, asking him if the sniffles had got him down. It was the first of many times the hunter used the words of its prey against them through the rest of the series.

Marla's Betrayal

The Predator watching from the dark at the entrance to Ward's mountain stronghold in Superman vs. Predator

While the escapees hid in the jungle, Marla fired a rifle to draw the mercenaries to her and was brought back to the cavern, where it turned out she was Dr. Marla Rollins and had no wish to be rescued. She told Ward that the advancement of the human race outweighed any unpleasantness, and he welcomed her aboard just as his team was struggling to get the alien energy pod working in the generator. Her intuitive logic solved it by reversing the ion flow, and the pod came alive, giving Ward the power his machine had been missing.

Superman returned to the fortress, blasted the mercenaries' communications dish and took out the guards at the cave entrance, while Lois reached the radio room and found nobody answering. Skane caught her there, but Lois had grown up on army bases with a military father, and she fought back with pepper spray until he was knocked out. Superman then attacked Ward's guards, and Ward ordered his men not to damage the energy pod and to kill the prisoners, so Superman broke off the fight and flew to the cells.

The Motor Pool Massacre

The Predator seizing one of Ward's mercenaries in the motor pool in Superman vs. Predator

The guards were about to shoot the prisoners when Superman shielded them with his own body, and in his weakened state the bullets stung him. He bent the bars, disarmed the guards and led everyone out, though he could barely stand, and the plan became to reach the military and call in an airstrike on the mountain. Skane, meanwhile, had worked out that the destroyed communications array looked like the sabotage of a trained soldier and suspected that Superman had a partner.

He found the real culprit in the motor pool, where the Predator threw its smart disc and tore through his men while repeating their words back to them in their own voices. The hunter blew up a fuel tanker with its shoulder cannon and burst through the blast door, leaving Skane with the certainty that it would be back. Inside, Marla attached the biogenic payload to the feed valve, Ward told her to proceed, and a beam fired into the sky from the mountain while Superman and his group were still a day's march from the nearest village.

Seeing the beam, Superman knew they were too late to bring help in time, because the seeding would begin within hours. He sent Lois and the others on toward the village and turned back to the mountain alone, telling them that win or lose, he was going to try, even though he could barely stand after the fight at the cells. Back at its own ship, the Predator chose its weapons for the final hunt, guided by a warrior's code in which survival was an option but failure was not.

Casey Trabor's Confession

A Predator attacking an American military camp in the desert during Casey Trabor's memory in Superman vs. Predator

In the third issue, Trabor caught up with Superman after refusing to stay safe, saying shame was tougher to live with than fear, and the two of them slipped into the fortress through a utility conduit. In the radio room Trabor admitted that he had been in this kind of situation before, as a member of an elite black-budget military team sent into Iraq to look into rumors of a demon attacking isolated pockets of troops. He fractured his tibia on the first day, and that night the creature killed eleven of the best soldiers the U.S. ever produced in less than a minute.

The monster saw the injured Trabor and turned away, and he guessed that it had judged him not worthy of its time. He crawled to Afghanistan, barely alive, and resigned his commission the day he got back to the States, which explained why he knew so much about the hunters without having any physical evidence. Trabor suspected that this Predator had been sent to retrieve or remove the jungle ship because it had failed to self-destruct when it was supposed to, and Superman went on alone while Trabor stayed behind.

Skane's Last Fight

The Predator slashing Superman with a blade in Superman vs. Predator

Skane caught Trabor and used him as bait, but the Predator came for Skane instead, and the mercenary challenged it to put away its high-tech weapons and fight him by a warrior's code. It cut him with a blade, he kicked it down and went for the kill with his knife, and then its wristblades shot out and finished him. At the top of the pyramid, Marla activated the program with a remote and declared that a new age was beginning, while Ward's mercenaries fled and left him alone with his machine.

Inside, the scientist Himmel told Superman that the controls were at the generator outside, and that breaking the machine would only release the mutagen into the atmosphere. The Predator then found Superman, who caught its returning disc in solid stone, took a blast from the shoulder cannon and fired his heat vision into its mask with everything he had left. The hunter answered with a blade across his body, and the bleeding Superman thought that it was going to kill him and that he hoped Lois would not have to write his obituary.

Outside, Trabor confronted Marla and told her he was seeing the real her for the first time, and when she offered herself to him he knocked her out with a punch. He carried her away from the pyramid and later told Superman that he had taken Marla to the jungle, out of reach of the explosion that was coming, which ended her part in Ward's plan. Back at the pyramid, Ward had been abandoned by his own mercenaries and was still calling for Skane, unaware that the Predator had already killed him.

An Uneasy Alliance

Superman and Casey Trabor releasing the Predator from a cell in Superman vs. Predator

Unable to win on strength, Superman used strategy and punched the ancient wall beside him until the roof of the Mayan ruin came down on the Predator. He dug himself out, dragged the pinned hunter from the rubble and locked it in a cell, bending the bars shut since he had no time to look for a key. Trabor arrived and pointed out that the seeding machine was active, that Marla could not stop it, and that the only one with even a chance of doing so was the creature Superman had just tossed into a cell.

Trabor reminded him that the monster hunted humans, but if the machine was not shut down, hundreds of thousands would die, and Superman made what the narration called an impossible decision. He bent the bars open again, and for a moment the Kryptonian, the human and the hunter stared at each other in silence before they reached an understanding, one of the rarer Predator team-ups with humans and their allies. At the generator pit, Ward drove a jeep into Superman and swore nobody would stop his project, and the Predator's disc killed him in his seat.

The Mountain Explodes

The Predator's self-destruct explosion inside the mountain at the end of Superman vs. Predator

The seeding beam fired, and Trabor feared that they were too late, but the Predator keyed its wrist computer and Superman recognized the beeping from the alien ship just before it blew up. Superman guessed that the creature had decided destroying the machine was the only way to keep evidence of its race out of human hands, and it stayed with the generator while Superman and Trabor escaped. They ran for the tunnel, Superman sick with the virus and Trabor feeling the familiar surge of fear, and behind them the self-destruct tore the mountain apart.

In a smaller cavern miles away, the automated destruct circuits aboard the hunter's ship destroyed it as well. Outside, the mountain had collapsed into a crater and Ward's mutagen had been vaporized with it, and all the creature left behind was a vial of liquid that might be a cure or a final bullet. Superman reasoned that the alien had been vicious but never devious, drank it, and Trabor could only watch and wonder what it was like to be that brave.

Days later in Metropolis, Superman told Lois that he had begun improving as soon as he swallowed the liquid and was almost back to full strength. She was puzzled that the monster that almost killed him had saved his life in the end, and he guessed that it thought he was a worthy opponent, part of its sense of honor. When she asked what would happen if there were others out there, the story ended with Superman staring up at the stars and wondering the same thing.

Key Characters

Superman / Clark Kent caught an alien virus from the jungle ship, fought the Predator while barely able to stand, and freed it to stop Ward's machine.
The Predator destroyed the derelict, hunted Ward's mercenaries, killed Skane and Ward, and blew up the mountain with itself inside.
Lois Lane flew to Central America for an exclusive, refused to speak for Ward and fought off Skane in the radio room.
Dr. Casey Trabor was the S.T.A.R. Labs xenobiologist who had survived a Predator attack in Iraq as a soldier.
Solomon Ward was the scientist behind Better Tomorrow, who planned to seed the world's rain with a genetic mutagen.
Dr. Marla Rollins was the expedition's physicist, who defected to Ward and got his alien energy pod working.
Nigel Skane led Ward's mercenaries and died fighting the Predator hand to hand.
Machu was the expedition's guide, who told the legend of the devil warrior.

Editions

DC Comics released the three issues in the prestige format between May and July 2000, each cover marked as one book of three, with Dark Horse Comics credited on the covers next to DC's logo. Alex Maleev drew all three covers, the first showing Superman and the Predator falling together locked in a struggle. The series was collected as the Superman vs. Predator trade paperback in September 2001, reusing Maleev's cover for the first issue, and DC listed it at 141 pages.

The Predators came back to the DC Universe within a year in JLA vs. Predator, in which cloned hunters went after the whole Justice League, Superman included, with each clone built to match the powers of one of the heroes. Superman met the hunters a third time, together with Batman and the Xenomorphs, in Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator in 2007. His history with the Predators across all of these comics is covered in Predator vs. Superman, which also weighs how the two would match up.

Behind The Scenes

David Michelinie was a veteran superhero writer best known for his long runs on Iron Man and The Amazing Spider-Man, and he had also written Superman for DC. His story keeps Superman weak for almost the entire series, which makes the fight with the Predator closer than a healthy Man of Steel would ever allow. The book also gives the hunter a sense of honor that matches the movies, from ignoring the wounded Trabor in Iraq to leaving a cure for an opponent it respected.

Alex Maleev drew the series with heavy shadows and muted jungle colors by Matt Hollingsworth, a darker look than most Superman comics of the time. Maleev went on to draw a long run of Daredevil with Brian Michael Bendis shortly after this crossover, and the same gritty style is already visible here. Superman vs. Predator followed the Batman crossovers with the hunters and came five years after Superman first fought the Xenomorphs in Superman/Aliens, making it part of a busy period of Predator crossovers.

Conclusion

Superman vs. Predator is David Michelinie and Alex Maleev's 2000 miniseries that put a weakened Man of Steel up against a lone hunter in the jungles of Central America. It moved from a derelict alien ship and a mercenary camp to Solomon Ward's hidden Mayan fortress, where Superman had to free the Predator to stop a mutagen meant to cleanse the human race. Its ending, with the hunter blowing up the mountain and leaving Superman a cure, gave the creature more honor than villainy. It is a slow and grim superhero story, but it remains the best-known solo meeting between Superman and the Predators.