All My Macho Eighties Dreams: A Guest Post from Benjamin Percy
We’ve been fans of Benjamin Percy’s since his story collection, Refresh, Refresh; his literary werewolf novel, Red Moon, was a Discover pick back in the day. It’s been a thrill to see his work for Marvel on iconic characters like Wolverine, Teen Titans, Green Arrow, and Ghost Rider, along with X-Force, and we asked Ben to riff on the journey that led him to writing this newest graphic novel for an exclusive guest post. You can preorder our exclusive edition of Predator vs Wolverine here.
He writes:
Why hadn’t this story already been written? These two snarling, tech-enhanced, bad-tempered hunters have always been destined for a collision course, and I can’t believe my luck, getting to be the one to tell their story.
I don’t want to say I was born to write Predator vs Wolverine…but I have been waiting since the third grade. This is when I read myself to sleep every night with the tall, dog-eared stack of X-Men comics beside my bed. And this is when I watched a VHS cassette of Predator over and over and over again at my buddy’s house. (Every neighborhood has a kid in it whose parents let them watch rated-R movies; thanks, Travis.)
I moved around a lot as a kid, and in 1987, I was living in Oahu. My street ran up against a valley tangled with jungle. My friends and I would greasepaint camo onto our faces and arm ourselves with Nerf guns and head out into the vines and shadows below. There was a waterfall that dropped into a pool that became a river. We used to leap from the top of the waterfall, plunging into the pool below, and then hide on the muddy banks, waiting for the Predator to follow.
As for Wolverine, I’ve been reading him my whole life and writing either the audio drama or the comics series for Marvel since 2017. As a hairy, grumpy, smelly, broad-shouldered, short-legged loner who lives in the frozen north and likes to chomp on cigars and drink whiskey…working with Logan has always felt like channeling a thinly veiled autobiography.
Yeah, these two titans had always been battling for control of my imagination. So when I saw the headline about Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, I immediately reached out to C.B. Cebulski, the editor in chief of Marvel. “Please, please, please give me Predator vs Wolverine,” I said, and he said something like, “LOL,” and I said something like, “No, seriously,” and he said something like, “Maybe one day.”
It couldn’t happen right away. He was adamant about that. Marvel didn’t want to rush introducing the yautja (nerd translation: predators) to the 616 (nerd translation: the Marvel universe). They were going to kick things off by launching Predator titles that took place far away from Captain America and Hulk and Black Widow. Totally understandable. But I was not dissuaded. I set a reminder on my calendar to bother C.B. in three months. The answer was still no. So I set another reminder, and another reminder, and another reminder—and finally the answer was yes. Which meant all my macho eighties dreams were coming true.
The dumb version of the story would have been: they fight. And I didn’t want to do the dumb version. When I looked at Wolverine’s long, fragmented history, I saw a unique opportunity. He’s had many identities—as James, Logan, Weapon X, and Wolverine—and he’s lived in many places—Canada, Japan, Madripoor, New York, Krakoa. What if—in that varied range of experience—one of the consistent through-lines was this: The Predator is his greatest enemy.
So the story takes place in multiple timelines—a century-spanning, mayhem-packed narrative that builds into a lasting, dreadful rivalry.
I’ve never had so much fun writing comics.
Benjamin Percy is the author of seven novels—most recently, The Sky Vault (William Morrow, 2023)—three story collections, and a book of essays, Thrill Me, that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. He currently writes Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics. His honors include a McKnight fellowship, an NEA fellowship, the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast, a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories.
