So Much for So Little

I know I’m skipping around a bit. Dark Horse made a lot of crossover comics back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, having fun crossing over any property they could with xenomorphs or Predators, and sometimes both. Beyond Superman/Aliens, Green Lantern Versus Aliens, and Superman vs. Predator, there were also some pretty wild and out there combos like Tarzan versus Predator: At the Earth’s Core, three Batman vs. Predator comics, a couple of Witchblade/Alien/Darkness/Predator comics, Judge Dredd vs. Aliens, and more. Dark Horse, in effect, went hog wild and didn’t look back.

Not all of these comics were good. In fact, I’d argue all of them were trash, but some were at least enjoyable trash. For every decent comic, like Green Lantern Versus Aliens there was a Superman vs. Predator that absolutely squandered its concept. The whole point of these was to have fun, since these were comics’ titans getting smashed together like action figures, but it’s clear not every writer on these stories got the message. And I would argue Superman and Batman Versus Aliens and Predator is another comic that clearly falls on the line of “not fun, just in it for the paycheck” style of writing.

Created in 2007, long after the big glut of these comics had come and gone, the book was written by Mark Schultz, pencilled, inked, and colored by Ariel Olivetti, and lettered by Todd Klein, with covers by Ariel Olivetti. Stylistically, the book has clear art, which is well detailed and nicely shaded, a far cry from the terrible art on Superman vs. Predator. But that’s about the only place where I can say the book really succeeds. While Olivetti did solid work on the art, Schultz absolutely dropped the ball on the story.

Although maybe, in fairness, there was no way to make this story work. It’s a comic book crossing over four titans that has to try and give fair time to each of them, and on that front the book really suffers. While SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s. and BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. come across okay here, the creatures of the Aliens v PredatorOriginally two separate franchises, the Alien and Predator series came together first in a series of comics and video games before, finally, Fox Studios merged them together is the Alien v Predator film franchise. franchise suffer greatly. There’s just not enough time to give all these characters their due in two issues that was meant to close the book on all the previous crossovers between the two heroes, the two monsters, and any other team-ups from the DC universe that tied in as well. It’s overstuffed and, because of that, it under delivers, straining under the weight of everything it has to do. Creating a good book in just two issues was an impossible task.

Not that the story does itself any favors. It starts with an improbable set up – a group of Predators have somehow been trapped on Earth for fourteen thousand years, living in the crater of a seemingly dormant volcano, only to start spreading across the globe when the volcano kicks back into life – and then never really finds time or pace to invest in any of the characters, the setting, or the situation. Instead of taking breaths, the book compounds more and more improbability onto the story until you feel the writing itself strain as it tries to do anything with where Schultz has written himself. It’s just bad.

Clark Kent is called down to the mountains of South American to write about a volcano that has suddenly become active. Thinking she doesn’t get to spend enough time with her husband, Lois invites herself along, calling it something of a “vacation” for the two of us (which is really stupid because who vacations near an active volcano). But when the two reporters get on the scene they discover not a team of scientists studying the volcano but a bunch of dead bodies, and Predators. Meanwhile, Batman has been finding Predators all around the world, deep under cities, studying human civilization. Surmising that there are Predators on the planet, he follows them back to the home near the active volcano.

Together, Superman and Batman figure out that these aren’t Predators that come to Earth as part of an invasion force. Instead they’re refugees, aliens stranded on the planet millennia before, simply looking for a way to get home. The two heroes devise a plan to use Superman’s Fortress of Solitude (which is now, someone, a sphere that stores its own pocket dimension) and the robots within to fix the Predator ship and get them out above the gravity well of Earth so they can fly home to their planet somewhere out around Arcturus. And that plan would work really well if it weren’t for the xenomorph eggs the Predators have… and if Earth defense organization wasn’t hellbent on nuking the whole volcanic site from orbit.

There are any number of problems with this book, and it’s hard to actually read the story without noticing all the many and varied flaws. For starters, Lois has no reason to be on this adventure. Yes, she has appeared in many of the previous Superman crossovers with these alien creatures, but she doesn’t actually do anything in the book. She’s not helpful to the heroes, and she also doesn’t even act as a damsel in distress. She’s here because she was in the other books (shades of Alexandra Cabot in Josie and the Pussycats) but the book could have excised her and lost nothing. Either make her essential to the story or don’t include her at all so that we can have more time for everything else going on.

Issue two is that these are and aren’t Predators. They might be of the same species but they don’t have the same honor code, they don’t use the Predator tech, in all respects they’re simply aggressive hunters that look a lot like monsters we already know. Calling them “Predators” really oversells just what we’re actually getting in this book, and I’m sure a lot of Predator fans would have been pissed off about this. Maybe not as much as the Aliens fans, since the xenomorphs have next to nothing to do with the story and barely show up at all except as a kind of contractual obligation for a few pages, but still. These monsters are not treated well.

Since we’re on the topic of the Predators, are they trapped at the crater or are they spreading out around Earth? The book has it both ways. First Batman finds them in Gotham and then says he found traces of them at other places, but then he goes to the crater and they’re all right there. In fact, by having them all there the book can conveniently put them all on their ship when Superman fixes it and ship them off to outer space as if the whole problem is solved. But what about all the other Predators that Batman found? The book essentially drops that whole idea and says, “nope, just kidding. This is all of them.”

And the solution to send them into space is to repair their ship, a ship that has been dead and sitting for fourteen thousand years. The book never even thinks twice about this, but that ship should not work anymore, let alone the fact that these Predators, the ones that descended from the original pilots of that ship, would have no clue how to fly it. Sure, Batman (somehow) sets the auto-pilot to take them back to their planet, but who’s going to land the thing? Someone has to, right? That or Batman just killed a whole crew of creatures, which feels very out of character for him.

End of the day, the biggest issue with the book is that its story doesn’t really work for any of the characters involved. Superman flies around a lot but barely does more than bring his ship to the Predators. Batman stands around and acts as translator (because, also, he’s smart enough to figure out a language spoken by people with jaws that can unhinge down the middle, and can speak it back to them), while the Predators aren’t proper Predators and the Aliens barely show up at all. There are any number of stories I could come up with that would put all four of these titans together in a meaningful and interesting way, but after years and years of writing these crossovers apparently Dark Horse’s writers ran out of all the good ideas they had, and then some.

Superman and Batman Versus Aliens and Predator is a terrible book by almost any measure. It looks nice, but the actual story is trash. It’s so bad that I have to revise my assessment of Superman vs. Predator. That is no longer the worst of these kinds of crossovers I’ve ever read. This book beats it out handily.