#669: Predator: The Pride at Nghasa
Some demons are real
Initial release: May-August 1993 (three issues)
Writer: Chuck Dixon
Artist: Enrique Alcatena
If you’re at all a fan of the Predator franchise — I am, though not nearly as much as I am Alien — you’ve probably noticed the thing that defines it most: violence. In the films, in the comics, even in the games, we see a common thread appear again and again — bloody moments of humans killing each other for one reason or another almost invariably attracts an alien hunter, drawn by the bloodshed (bonus points if the weather is hot) to do some killing of its own. And what offers more bloodshed in sweltering heat than the colonial project in Africa? So offers Chuck Dixon’s short story The Pride at Nghasa, published in the Dark Horse Comics anthology series from May to August 1993.
August, 1936. It’s a hot summer in Africa, and something has been killing people — local workers and their English supervisors — out by one of the new rail lines being laid out near Nairobi. The rail company asks a group of seasoned hunters to look into it — three rangers (two white, one black) who work for the company and a hired big game hunter, Sir James, a prancing wealthy fop with imperialist tendencies and an assumption that any black person near him is a servant at best.
The more superstitious locals believe that what haunts Nghasa Basin is a demon heralded by what local tribes call the Hunting Star — a stellar body part of no constellation that only appears in the night sky in high summer prior to a series of killings, something that has happened for centuries. While Sir James derides it as native superstition and believes the culprit to be a pride of lions lurking along the river, John Copeland (the story’s narrator and main-ish character) isn’t so quick to dismiss the old stories. He’s spent a lot of time in the bush and he’s seen some shit, things that, as he puts it, “white men have no name for.”
Despite being spread across three whole issues of an anthology comic, the story is pretty short — it feels like a single-issue story, and it probably was before being split up. Chuck Dixon — who you might know better as the guy who shepherded much of the Batman family through the 90s — writes the script here, ambiguous and very rooted in a kind of old-school horror. Enrique Alcatena’s moody pencils are stark with shadow and menace. His Yautja is squat, with murderous eyes; his humans are gaunt and tall.
As a short story, The Pride at Nghasa isn’t the most compelling epic. But it doesn’t need to be; it’s a dark tale out of the pulps, another bloody brick to build a mythos with. Dark Horse’s take on the Xenoverse has long been far more interesting to me than anything anybody else has done, including Alien Resurrection, which was overly French for being a dry run for Firefly; or the insipid Alien vs. Predator film duology, which started off bad and finished so mind-numbingly awfully that it of course was the perfect distillation of the worst of Bush-era filmmaking.
These days you can find the story in the first Dark Horse Predator Omnibus, which includes the flagship story Concrete Jungle (later adapted into a novel) among a few others. It’s a good look back at a franchise that, like a lot of big-name 80s sci-fi and action franchises, has kind of fallen by the wayside underneath a flood of superhero flicks and increasingly-ropey children’s programming (that Minecraft movie is by all accounts an abomination) but at one time had a lot of potential. The Pride at Nghasa doesn’t really go anywhere, but that’s okay, as it illustrates its central point perfectly: there’s a lot that we just don’t know.
