Predator The Bloody Sands of Time Review

This two part comic is written by Mike Richardson and Dan Barry who also did the cover art for the comics; other artists were Chris Warner and Gail Beckett.

The story is about a team of CIA operatives named Cantrell, or Joe Bob as some call him, who was sent on a mission to terminate a major drug barren leader. Of course things messed up and the leader was killed by a predator, but because of the wounds Joe Bob gained from a fire-fight with the leader, he passed out after seeing the drug lord being slaughtered by a giant creature.

Joe Bob later woke up surrounded by another allied army team, he was arrested and sent back to a fort. He later went on trial for butchering a whole village of drug pushers, convinced he was being punished because the army was scared of the real killer, who was a predator. He asked for his lawyer to prove his innocence.

The lawyer’s name is Griggs Irving. After hearing Joe Bob’s story, Griggs is convinced he has heard other similar stories, so he then sets out to prove Joe Bob’s innocence. Griggs’s Girlfriend, Gwen, receives an old letter and an old WWI backpack from an unknown man, Gwen translates the letter that was written by a Frenchman named Jean, who fought in the 1st world war, it describes similar events to what happened to Joe Bob, with this new evidence can Griggs save Cantrell from prosecution, and what other mysteries are hidden deep inside the Frenchman’s backpack?

This comic is very interesting, the art is average for the time, but it’s the story itself that I was more interested in. After you see the first predator for the first time you never see or read from it again. The other predators that feature in the comic are readings from a letter that was given to Griggs to help prove Joe Bob’s innocence, you rarely see the predators at all in this comic, instead the story is more about the war and how Jean thought he was seeing ghosts, which were really predators hunting soldiers.

As I was reading this comic I really started to get into the sub-plot storyline, you see what the French war characters thought the predators were. At first they thought they were ghosts, and then Jean found a predator helmet that came from a dead predator. He then thought it was some kind of new Nazi gasmask and that the predators were helping the Nazis.

(SPOILER ALERT) This was all good until the letter ended and Griggs received some news that Joe Bob has killed himself and that the trial has ended, after that, Griggs pulls the predator helmet from the backpack that Frenchman Jean found during the war, and that was it, the end.

For me I think the whole WWI sub-plot should have been the main story, because the actual story about Joe Bob and Griggs ended disappointingly, they could have gone a lot further with the main story, you also never found out what became of the predator that Joe Bob saw, was it hunted and killed? Or did it return to where it came from, happy with its successful hunt? We may never know.