Marvel’s Latest Predator Crossover Turns Spider-Man into the World’s Greatest Detective

Spider-Man's impending encounter with the Predator is turning him into New York City's Dark Knight.

In a preview for Marvel Comics' Predator versus Spider-Man #1, fans get a glimpse at a gruesome crime scene, the latest in a long string of murders carried out by what appears to be a ritualistic serial killer. As the detective on the scene plays the scenario through the steps out loud, a fellow crime fighter chimes in from just off-panel. Of course, by the time she turns around, the person she was talking to is long gone, having slipped out unseen to get back to slinging webs across the city skyline as he should.

Predator versus Spider-Man #1

• Written by BENJAMIN PERCY

• Art by MARCELO FERREIRA

• Inks by JAY LEISTEN

• Colors by FRANK D'ARMATA

• Main cover art by PAULO SEQUEIRA & YEN NITRO

• Variant covers by GREG LAND, PEPE LARRAZ & MARTE GRACIA, RYAN BROWN, MARCELO FERREIRA, HUMBERTO RAMOS, and TYLER KIRKHAM

The alien Predators (or Yautja) fans know and love first appeared in director John McTiernan's 1987 sci-fi action-horror film Predator. Following breakout success at the box office with its first outing, the Predator franchise spawned a full-fledged multimedia franchisethat currently consists of five (soon to be seven) stand-alone feature films, two feature film crossovers with the Alien franchise, and countless pieces of tie-in merchandise. The Predator franchise has also established a strong foothold in the realm of comics, which has only been expanded since Marvel took control of the property in that regard.

In 2022, Marvel Comics published the first of three Predator limited series starring Theta Berwick, an unlikely hero orphaned by the eponymous alien hunters and raised in large part by the sentient AI on board her spacecraft, the Sandpiper. These three miniseries charted Theta's tragic origins, her journey across the cosmos in search of revenge, and how the Yautja as a whole responded to becoming prey on a grand scale for presumably the first time in their entire history. Marvel Comics also gave the Yautja warriors an entry into one of the publisher's most beloved anthology formats with Predator: Black, White & Blood, which will run for two issues later this summer.

Predator versus Spider-Man is the latest in what is now a trio of crossover comics featuring iconic Marvel Comics superheroes pitted against the infamous Predators. The first of these was Predator versus Wolverine by writer Benjamin Percy and artists Ken Lashley, Greg Land, and Andrea Di Vito, which ran for four issues in 2023.

In 2024, the four-issue Predator versus Black Panther miniseries from Percy and artists Chris Allen and Sean Damien Hill arrived on shelves. Rather than introducing the Yautja to the primary Marvel Universe, these crossover stories take place in the reality of Earth-7642, which is the official designation for the Multiversal reality in which characters from Marvel, DC, Dynamite, and a plethora of other publishers exist simultaneously.

Predator versus Spider-Man #1 is available April 23 from Marvel Comics.

Source: Marvel Comics