Reading Marvel - Predator: Badlands

Cody is endeavoring to read his way through Marvel's entire publishing history. Let's see if he can do it!

This time, a prequel to a Predator movie.

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, Predator, and Planet of the Apes. They have been telling original stories set in the universes of those franchises, and of course they’ve also had the 20th Century characters crossover with Marvel characters in limited series like Aliens vs. Avengers, Aliens vs. Captain America, Predator vs. Wolverine, Predator vs. Black Panther, Predator vs. Spider-Man, and Predator Kills the Marvel Universe. When the film Predator: Badlands was released at the end of 2025, Marvel also took the opportunity to release a one-shot comic book that serves as a prequel to the film – much to the pleasure of the film’s writer/director Dan Trachtenberg, who had wanted to be a comic book artist but had to turn to film when he realized he didn’t have sufficient drawing skills.

Predator: Badlands was the first film in the Predator franchise to focus on a Yautja, a member of that alien species that likes to hunt things like humans and xenomorphs, as the protagonist. That “predator” was Dek, who is being trained by his brother Kwei to be a hunter when we’re introduced to the character. As Trachtenberg says in his one-page foreword in this prequel comic, “there are many things fueling the relationship between the brothers and their ruthless father,” and this comic gives a little slice of their back story.

In the first pages, we’re shown that a ship carrying a species of alien that spoke a language called K’Shorrik crashed. The occupants sealed themselves in cryotubes and the ship went into hibernation mode. 10,000 years later, Dek’s father tests him by sending him on a mission to retrieve a power core from the downed ship. Dek figures this is just a boring waste of time, some kind of treasure hunt… but the mission stops being boring for him when the ship’s defense system activates. 

First, it unleashes a weaponized drone on him. No problem. Then, he’s swarmed by mechanical insects. That’s annoying. The true challenge comes when the system forms a hulking, mechanical version of a Yautja to fight Dek with… something that really made me think of the futuristic slasher sequel Jason X, in which hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees gets destroyed, then the nanotechnology in the space ship he’s riding on forms an enhanced, cybernetic new body for him, turning him into “Uber Jason.” So the final action sequence in this comic book is basically a Yautja fighting an Uber Yautja.

Written by Ethan Sacks and featuring lively, entertaining art from the team of penciler Elvin Ching, inker Dren Junior, colorist Junacho Velez, and letterer Clayton Cowles, the Predator: Badlands comic book is short and simple. It's a quick, action-packed read that doesn’t add anything that was truly essential to the Badlands story, but it’s fun to see a bit of extra action with Dek.