A New Breed Of Violence In ‘Archie Vs Predator’
by Scott Redmond
A whole new vision for the long-running film series centered on game hunting aliens is about to grace movie theaters. That’s right, Predator: Badlands is here and it’s the first film in the series to center a Yautja (the name of the species) as a protagonist.
Before joining a teenage Yautja on their first cinematic hunt, let us flash back to a time when a teenage Yautja set their sights on a group of iconic human teenagers. Yes, we’re here to wax poetic about the time a Predator encountered the iconic teenagers who call the idyllic city of Riverdale home: Archie Vs Predator.
It is the first entry in a two-series crossover that brought the iconic characters face-to-face in 2015. The four-issue series was written by Alex de Campi with art from Fernando Ruiz, Rich Koslowski, Jason Millet, and John Workman.
Mashups of this kind are no stranger in the realm of comics. In fact, the Predator has taken on quite a number of comic book icons at this point. (So too has their cinematic alien horror foe the Xenomorphs.) Taking famous film characters and tossing them into comic book crossovers has given us a veritable cornucopia of variety across the decades.
What starts off as a normal all-expenses paid trip to a Coast Rican resort courtesy of Jughead’s potato chip hunger (totally normal!) takes quite a turn. Naturally that turn includes lots of blood and death as the Predator quickly makes themselves known.
Artistically, Ruiz and company do a stupendous job of really hammering home the classic Archie feeling. He adds just enough wider comic book style to it in order to make the rest fit — whimsical but rough enough to make the brutal moments really stick.
Seeing the Archie cast be put into more adult and less than idyllic situations was a big desire in the 2010s. This was the era that saw the rise of things like Afterlife With Archie, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and the fully rebooted Archie series and its fellows like Jughead.
Even the Predator bits find a way to easily skirt the line between humorous and gruesome. Predator vision is full of emoji’s as it watches the teenagers, and the first two Riverdale victims demise is horrifying but poetic justice.
There is a nostalgic authentic-ness to the characters, as if they stepped right out of the pages of the past or the myriad of digests spotted on magazine racks. Really channeling them well is something de Campi makes look simple. That’s not to mention the solid plotting and planning that goes into how this creature would come to be. Every bit of Archie lore or character depth gets pulled into play at some capacity.
Kevin Keller’s dad, the military general, being the lore drop source about Predators was a solid choice. There are walls of text here, but Workman gives them the right little push to not feel overwhelming at any point. It’s chock full of emotional depth and personality quirks to bounce off one another smooth as can be.
Everything about this series just really feels overall fun with a serious edge, as one would expect. Plenty of familiar characters meet their demise, so there are stakes for the story, including some pretty big swings near the end which lead into the sequel series that takes on a whole other atmosphere.
Hell, we get a warped version of the hyper-masculine fist clasp muscle flex that is iconic from the first Predator film. That alone makes things so worth it.
If you’re looking for something fun to pair with the upcoming cinematic entry in this science fiction classic series, have I got the entry for you. Absolutely, check this one out.
