Is it just me, or is this one of the greatest pieces of maggotridden excrement that Dark Horse has ever published under the PREDATOR title? This pile of toxic dung, which ought to have been one of the greatest licensed-comic juggernauts in history, is instead a pervadingly cheesy, silly, underwritten, mindbogglingly awful bastard sludge.

I'll start with the problem I feel the strongest about: MEL RUBI! I dug his art in the "Pursuit" story in the mostly crappy collection of AVP-"short-stories" awhile back. I liked his work on "PREDATOR: XENOGENESIS" (it fit the garishly "comic-bookish" feel of the story). But I was tiring of him on AVP: XENOGENESIS, and the news that he would be doing AvPvT sent a shudder down my back. Now... that shudder have been justified. This bozo should be doing some kiddie-friendly Marvel-book, and NOT a book about an alien badass who skins USSCM marines alive as his chief recreational activity. His drawings are garish, overblown, unreservedly unrealistic, and totally lacking in anything even remotely resembling TEXTURE or ATHMOSPHERE.

The thing that really clinched it for me and made my disapproval of Rubi transmute into outright hate was the Predator ship seen early in AvPvT issue 1.
After the second issue cemented my fears about the woeful qualities of this series (second issue story summary: Predator gets killed without a fight by Terminator, Terminator is revealed to have INDESCRIBABLY CHEESY, half-explained "extra powers," Call and Ripley escape, Terminator somehow creates a second model and goes to another space-station, Predators board Call and Ripley's ship (by TELEPORTATION, no less. What is this, STAR TREK? Predators kidnap Ripley).

The third issue fares no better. More awful dialogue. More bad drawings. One thing that made me grit my teeth while reading it was that Schulz, as in most of his comics, takes ample time to plug his "save the environment" theme again. That might not have hurt if it was done with more elegance, instead of Schulz' ham-handed, feeble attempts at grandiose prose. And get this -- I swear to God there's a panel (the first one of her during the red-lit Predator ritual) of Ripley where she appears to be rolling her eyes!

Oh yeah, and the Predators are depicted as interstellar bushmen again. I never liked painting the Predators as having a primitive culture the way the AvP books and recent comics have (I much more liked the first two PREDATOR books by Nathan Archer, which had a far more intelligent, not to mention realistic treatment of the Predators). But then, that's just my opinion.

The fourth, and mercifully last issue shows that the Predators have once again gotten their asses kicked (y'know, I've always wondered if Dark Horse introduced more Predators just so that they could kill them off more easily) at the hands of the Terminator "hybrids." And once more the art (chiefly a big opening panel of a skinless hybrid) reminds me of something out of an old Carl Barks issue of DONALD DUCK. And this is supposed to be a horror-comic? In fact, I took the time to compare with some DONALD books I found at a friend's john. The results made me want to cry. Hard.

There's another monumental problem with this series that I've waited too long to bring up: two of the title characters are nearly NONEXISTENT IN THE ENTIRE COMIC. Save for those imprisoned in "stasis-tubes," the Aliens don't show up until the LAST ISSUE! And apart from the lame "Trollenberg" in the first issue, we only get a single glimpse of a "straight" Terminator once in the entire series (during Call's flashback to the Skynet war. By the way, does anyone else think it's monumentally odd that not one of the characters in AvPvT have never even heard of SkyNet, even though it nearly WIPED OUT THE HUMAN RACE a few centuries earlier???).

The Predators are the only ones who have a satisfying amount of time in the series. That might be cause for celebration if it wasn't for the incredibly shabby treatment of the character/s by Schulz and Ruby (not to mention the colorist. Predators with GREEN skin and PURPLE armor?).

So Ripley and the Predators are getting their asses kicked. What do they do? They turn loose the experimental Aliens. Turns out that, despite being half Alien, these new "Terminators" have somehow still managed to stay vulnerable to their acid blood (????). So that gives the good guys a breather. But gul-durn it, wouldn't you know? The station blows up. And in case you were wondering where Call and co. are through all of this, well, they don't get to do anything. They come. They gawk. Call gets a bad conscience. Then they leave.

And then the series makes its final, monumental mistake. IT KILLS OFF RIPLEY. Those assholes over at Dark Horse Comics finally get their paws on the Ripley character again... and they kill her off. I'm tempted to think it's because they don't want a decent writer near her. Christ. Reminds me of Bela Lugosi dying with PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE as his swan song. Here's hoping Mark Schulz survives this one. Hopefully it's just a fluke (but what a fluke!).

Before doing this review, I checked by Dark Horse's homepage, wondering if there's some new PREDATOR series coming out that might be able to rinse my mouth of the bad taste this monstrosity has left there. There is no PREDATOR coming up, but there is an ALIENS crossover. With GREEN LANTERN. Yeah,you read that right. And from reading the feature coverage and author interview...

The future looks fucking bleak indeed.

By: Mark Schultz & Mel Rubi & Mark Lipka