In the Racks and Stacks series, Cody discusses the comic books he has been reading.
Since December 31, 2009, The Walt Disney Company has owned Marvel Comics – so when Disney acquired the 20th Century Fox film studio in 2019, it gave Marvel the chance to publish comic books inspired by 20th Century properties like Alien and Predator. But before that happened, those comic book rights were in the hands of the publishing company Dark Horse Comics for a long time, stretching back to the 1980s. In fact, Dark Horse started publishing Predator comic books just two years after the first movie was released, before it had even received a cinematic sequel.
When Predator 2 reached theatres in 1990, Dark Horse was there to bring fans a comic book adaptation of the script by the sibling duo of Jim and John Thomas. The team assigned to craft the adaptation consisted of writer Franz Henkel, penciler Dan Barry, inker Randy Emberlin, colorist Lurene Haines, and letterer Gail Beckett. They did a cool job with it, and leafing through this two-issue adaptation in 2026 really made me wish I had added this to my collection as soon as it was released in 1990, because I would have absolutely loved this back then. I still enjoyed it now, but when I was a kid (I was only 6 when Predator 2 was released, but I was already a massive fan of the first movie) I always thought it was awesome to have a comic book version of a movie I enjoyed. I read the comic book adaptations of Arachnophobia and The Rocketeer over and over, and I would have done the same with this Predator 2 book.
Henkel did a fine job of paring the script of the 108 minute movie down into two issues. Some of the hierarchy among the characters, who work in the LAPD, gets convoluted to follow, but that’s irrelevant to the story. Just go with the flow.
That setting is Los Angeles, in the slightly dystopian slightly futuristic year of 1997, when the city is being battered by a heat wave and crime is running rampant in the streets. As the film begins, it is immediately established that there is war being waged in this "asphalt jungle" between members of rival drug cartels, Colombians on one side and Jamaicans on the other with the LAPD caught in the middle. Bullets fly, people are killed, vehicles explode... and our new hero is introduced. That’s Lieutenant Mike R. Harrigan, one of those movie cops who doesn't play by the rules and doesn't seem to have any life outside of his job. When his fellow officers don't know what to do to resolve a situation, Harrigan will handle it by doing something crazy but heroic.
Harrigan almost single-handedly stops a battle between the cops and members of the Colombian cartel, with the new Predator (an alien being who literally came to Earth to hunt humans, collecting their skulls as trophies) showing up on the scene to wipe out the ones Harrigan doesn't take down. How someone could kill all those men and disappear presents quite a mystery for Harrigan and his co-workers Danny Archuleta, Leona Cantrell, and Jerry Lambert to investigate. That naked corpse hanging from the rafters is especially baffling. For a moment, Harrigan thinks he sees something - the Predator with its invisibility cloaking engaged - but brushes it off.
Later that same day, the Predator kills members of the Jamaican cartel - members who have busted into the apartment of a Colombian, sent by their leader King Willie to kill the man and perform a voodoo ritual. The Predator continues racking up kills in L.A., whittling down the cartels and the police force, killing some of Harrigan's friends, but it stays true to the rules set up the first time around that said the Predator will not kill anyone who isn't armed. Add another exception: it also won't kill someone who's pregnant, which is how Leona manages to survive a massacre on a subway train.
While all of this is going on, Harrigan finds himself butting heads with Peter Keyes, head of a federal task force that claims to be in town to investigate the cartels. They're obviously not - they're in town because they have been hoping to catch up with one of these aliens ever since the incident in Central America when one wiped out a team of mercenaries before setting off a bomb that decimated hundreds of city blocks worth of jungle. (The events of the first movie.) Keyes and his lackeys have the bright idea that they'll be able to incapacitate the Predator with liquid nitrogen when he stops by a slaughterhouse to feed on the beef. They end up just being another group of people for the Predator to massacre, leaving it up to Harrigan to handle this problem all by himself.
Henkel gets us through the meat of the story in the first issue, which ends with the Predator killing King Willie, so that the second issue can primarily consist of action sequences: the subway massacre, the attack on the Feds, and the climactic battle between Harrigan and the Predator. It’s a really good time, even if the comic book is missing one of the most memorable moments and lines in the film (a line delivered by an old lady to Harrigan after she gets a glimpse of the Predator).
I wasn’t entirely sold on the artwork here, particularly in some panels where the faces of the characters looked a bit off and some other panels where Barry and Emberlin made the Predator look more like a bulky robot than a helmet-wearing alien, but it gets the story across, and I understand. The Predator isn't a simple creature to draw. It's not like I could do any better! (Or even near as good.)
And Barry, Emberlin, Haines certainly know how to splash a bloodbath across the page. While the language has been cleaned up considerably for the comic book (there’s one “shit” and no F-bombs), this is still not a book that was intended for young readers, as much as I wish I would have had a copy when I was 6 or 7. There’s some nudity (a bare butt here, a woman’s nipples there) and a whole lot of bloodshed.
Having this in my collection in 1990 would have been awesome, but the Predator 2 comic book was still entertaining in 2026. One element I would like to point out in closing is the fact that Harrigan narrates the story in this adaptation, and I loved the look of the letters in his narration blocks. That, to me, is the ideal presentation of text in a comic book. So kudos to Gail Beckett for the lettering perfection!
Note: Marvel Comics will not be covered in Racks and Stacks articles, as they have their own article series.
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