Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and sixty-fourth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Predator II came up with the idea behind the Predators possibly fighting the Xenomorphs from Alien.

STATUS:

False

In January 1992, Batman #475 came out, featuring the first appearance of Gotham City Police officer Renee Montoya. In September of 1992, the Batman Animated Series debuted, featuring Montoya as a regular supporting character. Naturally, fans would assume that the cartoon adapted the comic book, but it was actually the other way around, and the cartoon show created the character and the comic book writers were told to incorporate the character into the comics as a preemptive tie-in with the cartoon.

That sort of thing comes up all of the time and it has been the basis for a number of Comic Book Legends Revealed over the years and guess what? It's the basis of this one, too! I know, I know, you're all quite shocked by this turn of events.

In 1990's Predator II...

there is a scene where we see a Xenomorph skull on the trophy wall of the Predator...

As noted in a few places, like on Reddit, this was "Historically, this was the first ever hint at a crossover between Alien and Predator, preceeding the Dark Horse comics of the same name."

Dark Horse Comics had the Aliens meet the Predators in a three-part storyline culminating in their actual meeting in Dark Horse Presents #36...

Chris Warner did the cover and Randy Stradley, Phill Norwood and Karl Story did the story inside...

Which led to the first Aliens vs. Predator comic book series...

All of this came out before Predator II, but, as noted above, it is difficult to determine the order of these things, as films often have a much longer production schedule, so something that could have been invented for a film could come out in a comic book first (an interesting recent example of production schedules causing confusion is when Taylor Swift's music video for "Lover" came out before Kasey Musgraves' Christmas Special for Amazon, despite Musgraves' special being filmed first, making it now look like Musgraves was copying the idea for the "Lover" music video).

So there are plenty of folks who still credit Predator II.

Well, Chris Warner resolved that in a great interview with Ernie Estrella at SyFiWire:

"Estrella: As one of the key creatives with Randy Stradley who came up with the idea of Alien vs. Predator, what was it about that project that captured everyone's imagination? Did it all stem from that scene in Predator 2?

Warner: We came up with AVP long before the scene in Predator 2 you’re referring to. In fact, I’m credited as being the first person to suggest the Aliens vs. Predator team-up. It’s a pretty obvious idea. When you say, “Ali vs. Frazier, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Aliens vs. Predator,” the ideas just exploded. You hear the adage, ‘It almost wrote itself.' Well, it almost wrote itself."

So there ya go!

Now, this doesn't mean that the folks behind Predator II were actually following Dark Horse' lead. It might have been a case of parallel thinking. Just noting that it WASN'T a case of the film getting there first and the comics following the film's lead.

 

In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Was Disney's Bonkers originally going to be a Roger Rabbit TV series?