There are ideas that are simply organic together, like peanut butter and jelly, manual transmissions and the Porsche 911, chips and salsa. It was somehow natural that when the alien hunters from 1987's Predator and the nightmarish aliens from ALIEN and ALIENS were paired together. But in the years since we first got to read about them in the pages of Dark Horse Comics, this wonderfully evil idea has been twisted in a perverse shell of it's former self.
Some of us fans of the ALIENS and Predator universes got lucky, we got to experience the Dark Horse Comics adaptation of these dark science fiction universes before Hollywood completely fucked them up with their abortion of films depicting the war between the Xenomorphs and the Yautja races.Back in 1989, Dark Horse Comics was forging the continuing path for these two alien races and their involvement with humans through separate comic series, and then in 1989, in DHP#34 combining them BEFORE the Predator 2 film. Then in 1990, we got the full limited series of five issues, and it was brilliant, becoming one of the best comics of 1990. This is the work that Hollywood should used for the AVP film without a doubt. Maybe we will see this AVP in the future if the universe has any sense of justice.
The Plot of the 1990 ALIENS vs. PREDATORS Limited Series

Here the comic shows the younger hunters struggle on the jungle world, and the warrior/hunter ritual of breaking a certain Xenomorph finger, using the acid to tattoo themselves with the clan mark.
Already, the reader is hooked on the well-written dialog of Tom and Scott, while visually learning of the Yautja culture and their role with the Xenomorphs.
Broken Tusk, or Dachande in his own tongue, led the hunting expedition to Ryushi. This world was naturally an atmospheric standard world, but suffers under 19 hours of brutal sunlight from twin suns, making Ryushi extremely hot and desert-like, appearing to be akin to the rocky deserts of Arizona and Utah. The planet has been only settled for four years with a population of 115 centered around the only major settlement, Prosperity Wells, and ranches. One species attached humans to Ryushi, the Rhynth. These massive beast are a cross between Cows and Rhinos, and the reason behind the billions that the Chigusa Corporation invested. Rhynth are viewed as the answer to Earth's problems of feeding its population with real protein, and these interstellar ranchers are looking to turn a massive profit with the first shipment of these animals back to Earth via the cargo ship on its way. The small settlement is in the middle of a power change, the previous corporate administrator is leading and being replaced by the icy Machiko Noguchi. While the humans agree over profit margins, the eggs arrive and free-range Rhynth locate them. Days later,the Yautja hunting party led by Dachande arrives as well as the human cargo tug Lector.

What happened to Machiko Noguchi?

The Historical Context of this comic
At the time DHC was publishing these comics, there were two giant comic companies, Marvel and DC, and in the middle were smaller publishers like Comico, Dark Horse, NOW, and others, but, Marvel and DC would have never touched or put these alien species together in legendary combat. This pairing and the fashion that the writers handled it, caused Dark Horse Comics to leap beyond their original titles and characters, granting them some great buzz to their work and allowing them to survive the downsizing in comic publishers in the mid-1990's. I know that I became a lifetime fan of Dark Horse because of their work in the ALIENS and Predator universe, and rejected the watered down mainstream comics of Marvel and DC. After films, like ALIEN 3 and Predator 2, we fans knew that majority of the time, DHC's work was lightyears better than the shit Hollywood was slinging (if they could have only done better with the Terminator comics!). Now, while matching up characters in a crossover was nothing new in comics, it had never been done like before AVP. Before Dark Horse Comics fused the identity of these two different films ETs, they were never connected in a canon source, some fans talk about it, including me, then after, matching two different foes became sickening common, like Terminator vs. Robocop. Ugh.
Why is this a classic?

In the years after this 1990 limited series, seventeen other AVP comic series were put out, only a few were any good, and the steer amount of titles degraded the entire AVP universe. Even now, when I reread the original 1990 series, I was struck how great the story really was, and how it is unlike anything in the rest of the AVP universe, even the direct followup comics.
Unlike most of the other comics and video games, this AVP title incorporates all three factions in the inter-species war, developing different sides to each. On one hand, we see a different human colony that IS NOT patterned after LV426, nor not governed over by the Wyland-Yutani Corporation, and not a Colonial Marine in sight. Instead we get the settlers and ranchers of this dust-ball of a world who are there for raising and selling a native species for food, which was more original thinking than the other AVP titles later. Within the Predator-hunter side, we see their culture struggling with the addition of high technology into their hunting, their pathological addiction to hunting the Xenomorphs, and despite being a highly advanced civilization, these aliens are still divided tribal lines that fracture their society. I admit that the Xenomorphs are underdeveloped here, but the Dark Horse series just prior to AVP have most readers at the time all the depth they needed. The 1990 AVP series showed the badass Xenomorphs containted and forced to serve at the whim of the hunters.
The standing of this original series is helped by when older fans,like me, were horrified at the treatment of the ALIENS and Predator universe by Hollywood. Causing most of us to openly wondered why the original Dark Horse comics were not followed.
We are still wondering and waiting.
Is AVP Military Science-Fiction?
One of my friends told me that AVP is not true MSF, at least, not without the addition of the Colonial Marines. I disagree. While the original 1990 limited series did not involve the Colonial Marines, it involve a military organization: the Yautja hunters. These alien hunters are the typical military structure that we have on Earth now, but it was similar to military-like organizations that the Europeans encountered in America and in parts of Africa.
