Tarzan vs. Predator at the Earth's Core

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

Tarzan vs. Predator at the Earth's Core is a four-issue crossover written by Walter Simonson and drawn by Lee Weeks. Dark Horse Comics published it from January to June 1996. A band of Yautja hunters came to Pellucidar, the world inside the hollow Earth, and killed its animals and people for trophies. Tarzan went down through the polar opening with Jane, his Waziri warriors, and an American expedition, and found that the emperor David Innes had been overthrown by a ruler under the spell of the Ancient of Days, an old Mahar who traded captives to the Predators.

Plot Summary

The Call From Pellucidar

The airship O-220 flying over sauropods in Pellucidar, in a flashback to the expedition that went to rescue David Innes

The comic opened in the Arctic after the Titanic sank in 1912 and the International Ice Patrol was set up to track icebergs. During a warm summer, the crew of an Ice Patrol ship watched a glowing object fall from the sky beside a huge iceberg, and one man said it was like the sun falling. The captain ordered them to brace for the shock wave, but the object vanished with no explosion, and he told Mr. Hardesty to signal their position home.

On his estate in Africa, Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, was with Jane and Muviro of the Waziri when his Gridley Wave radio picked up a call from Abner Perry in Pellucidar. Perry said that animals had been slaughtered there, and people too for about two months, that the Sagoths were in revolt, and that the emperor David Innes had vanished through treachery, before the message broke off with a cry for help. Muviro remembered the earlier O-220 expedition to rescue Innes, from which the Waziri had been lucky to escape alive.

A plane soon landed with Herrington Sneftly, a special envoy for the President of the United States who had made his fortune in machine parts. He said a maneuverable object had been tracked for over ten weeks with no impact, explosion, or trace, that Army intelligence suspected the Germans, and that he blamed the Bolshevik Russians. The British were helping to mount a secret expedition over the North Pole, and their government had insisted that Tarzan be asked to join it. Tarzan, Jane, Muviro, and the Waziri flew north with Sneftly in transport planes full of American soldiers, and Tarzan told him the timing of the sighting, so soon before the troubles at the Earth's core began, was too coincidental. Near the object's estimated position they found a long gouge in the ice with bits of metal along its line, and beyond the polar opening the compass went wild and the stars gave way to a sun that never moved.

The Massacre At Base Camp

The expedition found the bones of huge slaughtered animals and set up a base camp in an open field a few miles back. Sneftly took charge of the camp and its perimeter while Jane helped organize it, and Muviro's brother's son Kintu stayed behind to protect her. Tarzan, Muviro, and the Waziri went looking for the slaughterhouse and found that the animals had been butchered for their heads, not for meat. They found human remains, then a headless soldier from the perimeter guard, and Tarzan caught an alien scent heading toward the camp.

At the camp, the soldiers were dead and still warm, their heads cut off and their bodies gutted, with few spent shells around them. Kintu lay dead with his spear, and Tarzan read the green blood around him as the blood of his enemies, meaning Kintu had not died easily. Unlike the soldiers, Kintu had not been mutilated, and his killers had laid him out with his spear as a mark of respect. Half a mile away, scorched trees and the smell of hot metal showed where an aerial craft had landed. Half the soldiers were missing, taken captive along with Jane and Sneftly.

The Waziri cremated Kintu, hid the planes and the remaining weapons, and set out for the kingdom of Sari, where Innes and Perry lived. On the way, Pellucidarian men dropped a net over them, saying the emperor would reward them, and Tarzan told Muviro not to struggle. Jane was being held gagged in a camp of domes ringed by energy pylons that fried a flying reptile. There one of the hunters pulled out an army captain, handed him a rifle from an ammunition crate, and opened the barrier so the soldiers could run into the jungle to be hunted.

Gridley's Court In Sari

In the imperial capital, Jason Gridley told Tarzan that David Innes was dead and that he was now emperor, with Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram, as his queen and Sagoths as his bodyguards. Innes's wife Dian the Beautiful served them as a slave, and Gridley sent Tarzan and his friends to the quarries. Tarzan broke free, told Muviro to be strong because he would return for them, and warned Gridley that his life was the surety for his comrades. As he ran down an unguarded hallway he caught a scent, and a cloaked Predator knocked him out. Gridley decided Tarzan was too dangerous to live and told him that David Innes's fate would be his. The Sagoths bound him to a stake in a glade, and the Predators gathered around him.

Tarzan As Quarry

Two T-Rexes charging the Predators in the jungle after the hunters dropped the bound Tarzan

One of the hunters carried Tarzan through the jungle on its shoulder until two T-Rexes attacked the party and he was dropped. A shoulder cannon killed the first rex, and the second seized a hunter in its jaws until an explosion went off in its mouth. Another Predator finished it with its wristblades, then hit Tarzan when he woke up growling and knocked him out with gas. The hunters took the rex's skull, part of their long history of hunting dinosaurs.

Tarzan woke in a boneyard of skulls among the beheaded bodies of the expedition's soldiers. A Predator blade had been driven through a skull beside him, and his own knife had been left with it. He worked out that the creatures killed for sport, that the skulls on their belts were trophies, and that he was their new quarry. A rock he threw was stopped by a force field, which cordoned off a stretch of jungle as a stocked killing ground, and a beam from a hovering ship lowered a single hunter into it.

Tarzan sharpened a stick into a spear while the hunter tracked his heat signature, cloaked, and opened fire with its targeting lasers. The hunter then walked into a spring-pole trap that drove the blade into the wrist gauntlet on its arm, and Tarzan leapt onto it shouting "Bundolo!" He stabbed it in the throat, gave the victory cry of a bull ape, and took off its mask. Looking at its face, he called it the face of evil.

Sneftly's Bargain

In the dungeons beneath Innes's old palace, Gridley questioned a Waziri prisoner about why Tarzan had come back. When the prisoner refused to talk, Jana drew back a curtain to show him his fate, and he screamed. At the Predator camp, two hunters flew out and returned with the body of the one Tarzan had killed. Jane told the captive soldiers that the hunters were taking men into the jungle beyond the boundary to hunt them to death, and that the dead hunter had been gutted the way Tarzan killed, so there was still hope.

Sneftly called the hunters over, drew Tarzan in the dirt, and pointed at Jane as his woman and their bait, begging them to let him live. When Jane called him a traitor, he slapped her to show his sincerity. One Predator mimicked his words "kill Tarzan," and the hunters took him aboard their craft while the rest went after Tarzan.

In Sari, Sneftly was put in a cell with Abner Perry, who had been jailed after he was caught trying to radio the surface world. Sneftly told Perry that the gold double eagles in his money belt would buy his freedom, then struck the old man down and called the Sagoth guard in, saying Perry had keeled over. He strangled the guard with the belt and slipped away into the passages beneath the imperial palace.

The Dead City

Following the curve of the barrier, Tarzan reached a dead city of ruins on the edge of a cliff, where the hunters found him again. He carried the dead hunter's weapons, including a grenade, and threw it at the craft that landed in the ruins. The blast left, by his count, one down and two to go, and the survivors answered with plasma fire that blew apart his tower. When he threw a second grenade, a hunter leapt down beside him and put its targeting lasers on him, but a trapdoor opened beneath Tarzan and he fell through it as the grenade went off.

In the basement below he came face to face with David Innes. Innes explained that he had led an expedition to find the source of the slaughter, but Sagoths had ambushed it, killed his men, and staked him out for the creatures. One hunter had stalked him through the ruins until the rock of the cliff face broke and it fell to its death. Innes had hung his bloodied shirt at the cliff edge so the others thought he was dead, and he had been hiding in the culverts and tunnels ever since, unable to get past the cordon. Tarzan told him Gridley now ruled with Jana and the Sagoths, and that Dian was alive but kept as a slave.

In the palace, a green, clawed creature told Gridley it was finished with the Waziri prisoner and had him brought Dian as a delicacy, while Gridley and Jana celebrated. Back in the ruins, a hunter fired its shoulder cannon at a running figure, and Innes dropped a huge stone block on it from above. Tarzan called it the last hunter. Innes explained it had not known there were two of them and had taken him for Tarzan. Tarzan took the dead hunter's shoulder cannon and its grenades.

The Predator Camp

Tarzan holding Jane's scarf in the Predators' trophy dome, with skulls hanging around him and David Innes beside him

Hunters waited at the gate of the perimeter, and Innes fired the captured cannon at them, breaching the barrier. Tarzan said the hunters at the gate had joined their companions in a creature Valhalla. The domes beyond were nearly empty, with dozens of tracks showing that the rest were out hunting, and Tarzan found Jane's scent, a day or two old.

In a dome full of skulls, a trophy room, Tarzan found Jane's scarf hung as a trophy. A Predator outside opened fire, and Tarzan seized it, shouting "Die, killer of women!" and smashed its head with a rock until Innes told him it was dead. He tied Jane's scarf around his head and vowed not to take it off until he had slain every last one of the Predators. Innes wanted to return to Sari and restore its rightful emperor.

In the palace, Sneftly slipped past the patrols to the Gridley Wave radio near Perry's quarters and sent a Mayday from Pellucidar that was answered by a man named Ed in California. Before he could finish his message for the Department of the Army, he broke off and said instead that everything was fine and that no one else needed to be sent. A huge, green, winged reptile told him it had found him just in time and led him into the shadows.

The Ancient Of Days

A Sagoth threw Jomo, the Waziri Gridley had questioned, into the cell with Muviro and the others. He told Muviro that he had betrayed them under a terrible magic, then threw a knife he had palmed from a guard into the Sagoth's back. The Waziri broke out and nearly killed Tarzan and Innes in a dark corridor before they recognized them, then freed Perry. Jomo led them to the royal chambers, where the Waziri posed as a Sagoth escort with a prisoner and took Gridley, Jana, and Dian.

When Tarzan slapped them awake, Gridley said he had gone looking for Jana and found her in a cave with an ancient creature whose eyes compelled him, and he remembered nothing after that. Innes saw their dilated pupils and realized all three had been enthralled by a Mahar. Perry explained that the Mahars were intelligent reptiles descended from the rhamphorhynchi who had once ruled Pellucidar, and that Innes had broken their empire without destroying them all. A passage behind a curtain led down to the creature's lair, and the party swam through water full of human and Sagoth skulls and the helmets of the American soldiers.

They reached the feeding pool, where a great Mahar waited on a dais with Sagoths and thipdars, its pterodactyl bodyguards. Tarzan threw his knife into one of the reptiles, and the party killed everything in the pool except the big one. Innes wrapped a cloth over the Mahar's eyes before it could finish speaking, telling it its day was over.

In a back passage they found Sneftly hanging by his wrists, his blood dripping into a bowl. Before he died, he said he had been questioned and bled to feed the old one, and that he had overheard the guards talk about the Mahar's pact with the Predators. The Mahar supplied the hunters with humans and Sagoths, the hunters also hunted dinosaurs, and they took no Mahars because they found no sport in them. The Mahar used the Predators to frighten the people back under her control, but she also feared them and planned to overwhelm them with empires of slaves. Sneftly admitted he had sacrificed Jane to get to the radio and failed to reach Washington, and he died without knowing where she was.

Speaking through Tar-kag, her Sagoth servant, the blindfolded Mahar said that the woman had been taken at the camp and given to the hunters, and that she might yet be alive. She named herself the Ancient of Days, the oldest and most powerful of the Mahar race, who had come to take back what had been stolen. The blindfold did not stop her. She took Tarzan, Gridley, and the others under her spell, and Innes realized only her death would free them. Then Jane walked in dressed in Pellucidarian finery. The Mahar said she had let Gridley rule so that she could see Innes, the slayer of her kin, dead, and that Tarzan would lead Pellucidar against the Predators with the wife she had bought back for him. She proclaimed Tarzan and Jane emperor and empress of Pellucidar.

Emperor Tarzan

In Sari, Tarzan and Jane held court for the Mahar, while Innes was yoked, chained, and carried through the empire as a warning to anyone who opposed "my allies, the great Mahars." Tarzan spared Muviro and sent the Waziri to lead the Sagoths to the planes and bring back the guns, saying they had forsworn the surface world. Muviro agreed only when he was told the alternative was being given to the Mahar, and Tarzan ordered him to show the Sagoths a feast when he was done. The Mahar judged Gridley and Jana useful tools and meant to make Tarzan and Jane's children puppet emperors of her race for all time.

At the planes, Jomo and Bokele uncrated carbines and pistols and loaded them. Muviro told the Sagoth leader Ga-thok that the Mahar queen had rewarded the Sagoths by devouring their brothers, whose bones lay in secret dungeons beneath the palace. Ga-thok called him a liar and lunged, and Muviro shot him dead with a pistol. The Sagoth Shast said he would kill Muviro himself if it was a lie, but when the party slipped into the palace and saw Sagoth bones in the feeding pool, the Sagoths called for the Mahar's death.

The Mahar had Gridley and Jana walk into the pool for her first feast on living flesh in many years, a ceremony for the passing of the scepter from one dynasty to another. The Sagoths charged with Shast at their head, and the Mahar called on Tarzan to kill them. Jomo was told to hold Jane while the Waziri piled onto Tarzan, and the Sagoths clubbed the Mahar until she sank and died in the pool, crying for Tarzan to help her.

Free of the spell, Tarzan said that the Mahar's hold had been beyond resisting but that he had stayed a little aware. She had learned of the guns from him, believing they would help her against the Predators, while he had prayed they would make the Waziri masters of the Sagoths. Shast offered to kill Innes and make Muviro king, but Tarzan lifted David Innes up and presented him as the one true emperor of Pellucidar. Innes reminded them that the Predators remained, and a Sagoth who had traded prisoners with them said he could find their metal ship. Tarzan pointed out that the hunters were invisible but not scentless, and that the Sagoths were now their allies.

The Stampede

Tarzan and the Waziri riding horned dinosaurs into the Predator ship as the stampede rammed it

In the deep jungle, a hunter turned its targeting lasers on a T-Rex, and the Waziri opened fire. The hunter evaded their rifles but not the keen senses of the Sagoths, whose spears killed it, and a Waziri said that Kintu and the dead soldiers would be avenged. The remaining hunters found the body, then followed a column of smoke to their camp, where the domes were burning and two headless Predators in armor hung from the trees.

The survivors gathered at their large ship near a cliff edge, where a leader with a gold medallion directed them as the ground began to shake. A stampede of horned dinosaurs broke out of the jungle, with Tarzan riding one and shouting "For the Emperor! For David Innes!" and Muviro riding another and shouting for Kintu, his brother's son. The ship's guns hit one of the animals and threw its Waziri rider. Tarzan, with the leader's targeting lasers on his chest, told it that it was too late and that it could kill him but its fate was sealed. The leader fired its wrist cannon, the stampede rammed the ship and pushed it over the cliff, and it exploded below.

After the burials, Muviro told Tarzan that he could not have saved the dead, and Tarzan said they would take Kintu home. He said that at the end one of the hunters had him in its sights and did not fire, choosing to let him live as it was about to die. Innes suggested it had been saluting a better hunter, while Perry thought its batteries might have run out and hoped the hunters would stay home now that Pellucidar was free. Innes bid Tarzan farewell, and the plane flew out over Pellucidar.

Key Characters

Predators with the captured Tarzan behind them, above a T-Rex holding one of the hunters in its jaws
  • Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, came to Pellucidar after Abner Perry's radio call. He killed hunters with a knife, a grenade, and a rock, fell under the Mahar's spell as her puppet emperor, and led the stampede that drove the Predator ship over the cliff.
  • Jane was taken from the base camp by the Predators, betrayed to them by Sneftly, and later bought back by the Mahar to rule beside Tarzan. She survived and flew home with him.
  • Muviro led the Waziri. His brother's son Kintu was killed at the base camp. He turned the Sagoths against the Mahar by shooting their leader Ga-thok, and he rode in the stampede.
  • Kintu stayed to guard Jane and died fighting the hunters, who left green blood around him and laid him out with his spear. The Waziri cremated him, and Tarzan promised to take him home.
  • Jomo was the Waziri prisoner questioned in the dungeons under the Mahar's magic. He freed his comrades with a stolen knife and held Jane during the fight in the feeding pool.
  • Herrington Sneftly was the American President's envoy. He offered Jane to the hunters as bait, struck down Abner Perry to escape, and was bled to death to feed the Mahar after he failed to radio Washington.
  • David Innes was the emperor of Pellucidar. He survived the hunt by faking his death, killed a hunter with a dropped stone block, blindfolded the Mahar, and was restored as emperor.
  • Jason Gridley and Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram, ruled Sari as emperor and queen while enthralled by the Mahar, who later meant to feed on them. Dian the Beautiful, Innes's wife, was kept as their slave.
  • Abner Perry sent the call that brought Tarzan to Pellucidar, was jailed for it, and survived Sneftly's attack.
  • The Ancient of Days was the oldest and most powerful of the Mahars. She traded captives to the Predators, enthralled Gridley, Jana, and Tarzan, and was clubbed to death by the Sagoths in her own feeding pool.
  • The Predators were never named. They hunted dinosaurs and men inside a force field cordon, and their leader wore a gold medallion and went over the cliff with the ship.

Editions

Dark Horse Comics published Tarzan vs. Predator at the Earth's Core as four issues dated January, February, March, and June 1996. The issues are titled Worlds Within Worlds, The Killing Ground, The Ancient of Days, and The Law of the Jungle. Walter Simonson wrote the series, Lee Weeks drew it and its covers, and Perry McNamee colored it, with design by Tice & Fuentes. Pat Brosseau lettered the first issue and Vickie Williams the other three, and Mike Richardson edited the series, joined by Peet Janes from the second issue.

The indicia of the fourth issue gives its full date as June 18, 1996, and the first and fourth issues say they were printed in Canada. The first issue's inside cover carries the credits and a short prose prologue. Dark Horse collected the series as the Tarzan vs. Predator at the Earth's Core trade paperback on October 8, 1997, edited by Lynn Adair and with a new cover by Kilian Plunkett.

Behind The Scenes

Tarzan and Pellucidar were both created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose name appears above the title on the covers. A footnote in the first issue points to Burroughs' novel Tarzan at the Earth's Core, where Tarzan went to Pellucidar with the O-220 expedition that Muviro remembered. The prologue on the first issue's inside cover follows on from Tarzan's fight with a beast from Pellucidar worshipped in the lost city of Ur, after which the caves toward the inner world were too hot and cold for him to cross. Jason Gridley, Jana, Dian, Abner Perry, the Sagoths, the thipdars, and the Mahars all come from the Pellucidar books.

Walter Simonson drew the first Alien comic, Alien: The Illustrated Story, in 1979. Lee Weeks had already drawn a Yautja for Dark Horse in Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter, and the series is one of the publisher's Predator crossovers. The Dark Horse solicitation for the last issue called the Ancient of Days the last of her kind, although Perry says in the comic that Innes did not destroy all the Mahars. None of the Predators is named in the story.

Conclusion

Tarzan vs. Predator at the Earth's Core is Walter Simonson and Lee Weeks's four-issue Dark Horse crossover from 1996. It follows Tarzan from Abner Perry's radio call to Pellucidar, where Predators hunted men and dinosaurs with captives supplied by the Mahar called the Ancient of Days. Tarzan killed hunters on their own killing ground, fell under the Mahar's spell, and was freed when the Sagoths killed her. The comic ends with a stampede of horned dinosaurs driving the Predator ship over a cliff and David Innes restored as emperor.

External Sources

Tag Categories: Predator Comics | Alien And Predator Crossovers