179. Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children

September 2007: We're just going to have to do something about this Betelgeusian menace, friends. Not content with fanning the flames of lustful women and corrupting children's minds with the first story of Stone Island in the summer of 2006, the pornographer from Quaxxan is back with even more pulchritude and full-frontal male nudity in the second. Twice. The first time, it's on a dead fellow, again. Boys, you don't want to star in Stone Island, because the odds are pretty good that you're either going to suffer the body horror nastiness of having your outsides elongated and turned into some long-beaked killing machine, or you're going to die and be stripped naked, all your secrets revealed by Simon Davis's elegant painting. Well, as elegant as you can be with your entrails ripped out. This is a nasty, ugly, visceral comic book, and, five episodes into story two, following up the pair of murdered-and-stripped fellahs in the first tale, we're at our first dead and flaccid cast member. (Intentional.)

At that point, we've already seen off this beautiful cover by Frazer Irving, who, last I checked, was still enjoying the nice paychecks from doing trademark protection work for DC and Marvel. He is notable for being one of the artists to contribute to the last Marvel Comic that I bought, a black and white one-off anthology called The Mystic Hands of Dr. Strange in 2010. Inside, it's his final-to-date job for the House of Tharg, pinch-hitting for Arthur Ranson on the fourth adventure for John Wagner's Button Man. Sadly, the cover art here is the best thing about the story, which is by far the weakest of the series, and totally unnecessary.

"The Hitman's Daughter" makes the baffling decision to reduce Harry Exton to a supporting character in his own strip. It's about the very skilled and highly-trained Adele Cotter, who's in her late teens or early twenties. About fifteen years previously, her father, one of the gun-toting fighters in The Game, had been killed by a few other players while Adele hid silently in a closet. Harry Ex was apparently one of the four men who came to murder her old man.

Irving's work is, sad to say, far below his usual standard, the beauty of that front cover notwithstanding. Apparently, he was invited to contribute as Ranson's health and eyesight had been fading, leading the much-loved creator to retirement. That fantastic series of interconnected Anderson: Psi-Division stories from 2004-2006 ("Half-Life" / "WMD" / "Lock-In" / "City of Dead" / "Lucid") seems to be Ranson's final major work. There are certainly elements of greatness in Irving's artwork, and, if anybody had to step in for Ranson, then Irving was a good choice, but much of his work here feels quite rushed. Episode twelve, in particular, is full of very heavy black lines and "mushy" faces, as though the dreaded deadline doom was looming. The big, climactic gunfight in an abandoned shopping mall is confused and disorienting. It honestly doesn't feel like Irving mapped out his environment before dumping his characters into it. Worst of all, the previous three stories had such incredibly memorable, thrilling endings, and this one is completely forgettable. I had honestly forgotten how it concludes until rereading it.

There's still a lot to like about 2000 AD during this summer run. There's a series of very good Judge Dredd episodes, and, as mentioned last time, Caballistics Inc. and The ABC Warriors, which are both huge fun. This second story of Stone Island, on the other hand, seems pretty pointless and forgettable, despite the presence of another dead naked man, and then we get to the final episode in prog 1559 and... oh, my.

The other dead men in the story were so dead and so ravaged that their nudity was incidental. Something's sort of different when the dead man is a reanimated corpse, walking around all blue and purple and striding around in the altogther. And unlike another blue-purple reanimated corpse with incredible powers in an old comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Simon Davis puts considerably more detail into this fellow's altogether than the two little squiggles that Gibbons drew. Kind of a mixed message when we all want to see more kids reading 2000 AD and the audience to grow, and at the same time the comic provides parents with a reason to, as some British newspapers say, "ban this sick filth."


Good God, man, cover yourself with some word balloons or something. Why, Tharg, why, indeed.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:

The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 2 (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Button Man: The Hitman's Daughter (Volume Four, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Stone Island: The Complete Stone Island (2000 AD's Online Shop)



That's all from Thrillpowered Thursday for now! I'll be back in October for more, and in the meantime, pop over to the Hipster Dad's Bookshelf for the next few Tuesdays for reviews of more recent 2000 AD stories and collected editions for your shelves.

169. Fraser's Back in Town. (well, actually, he's in New York City...)

November 2006: On the cover of this week's prog, 1513, is something which is, I believe, unique. With the exception of two one-off Tharg's Future Shocks, the only ongoing series for 2000 AD to which Arthur Ranson has contributed any artwork have been written by John Wagner or Alan Grant. This cover for The Red Seas marks his only contribution to anybody else's ongoing project. It's kind of a shame, when you think about it. Wouldn't a Ranson-illustrated Devlin Waugh look interesting?

Inside, Red Seas is again Steve Yeowell drawing Ian Edginton's scripts, and it is another installment that sees the action shift away from Jack Dancer and the pirates during their adventures in Earth's underworld to see what the supporting cast is up to. In this five-part story, the heroes' ally, the presumed-dead Sir Isaac Newton, looks up Julius's estranged father, the renowned composer and pianist Chevalier Augustus. They get involved in a problem with shapechanging Roman werewolves in London. I love how every time I mention the plot of a Red Seas story, it sounds like I'm just making something up. There's just no way a series this fun ever really got printed, is there?

The real big news, however, is that Nikolai Dante has reached the end of that long pirate adventure and is back in Imperial Russia, which is now firmly under the thumb of Tsar Vladimir as the Romanovs have been destroyed, killed or dispersed. Lulu, of course, remains at large, acting as a terrorist somewhere in Europe, and Arkady has been adopted as a ward of Vladimir's court, but all the others are believed to be dead. Well, okay, the audience knows that the brutal Konstantin is in the weird body armor and acting as Vlad's Lord Protector, but none of the protagonists do.

As this story opens in prog 1511, the tsar's forces overwhelm the last of Sagawa's resistance, rescue Dante, and make him an offer he can't refuse: act as Vlad's public agent and investigate forces suspected to be disloyal to the imperial throne. The weird techno-aliens who gave the Romanovs their weapons crests are believed to be active in our reality, for starters. In return, Vlad won't blow Nikolai's mother and her fleet out of the water. Our hero gets to dress well again, and charm his beloved Jena all over again.

The panels above have always felt to me like they have an additional meaning. I really love the artwork of Simon Fraser, who co-created the series with Robbie Morrison in 1997, but he had been absent for quite some time from the comic. His most recent episodes had been in 2000 and 2002, and I don't think I'm stepping on anybody's toes when I say that "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Romanov Job" were far from his best work. There's a very good reason for this; Fraser's wife works for the United Nations and, in the first part of the last decade, she was doing important work in impoverished areas in Africa. Fraser left comics for a few years while accompanying her on, let's be fair, much more important business, many thousands of miles from the nearest Dick Blick art supply store. Her career brought the couple to New York City in the summer of 2006, and Fraser found a studio there, allowing him to resume his work in comics.

Dante's pirate days - the middle chunk of the soon-concluding saga - always felt like the heaviest part of the series. John Burns did a terrific job - actually, there are certainly places where he worked wonders - but even with the more lighthearted segments of this phase, there's still that undercurrent of very bleak danger. More precisely, I'm thinking about stories like 2005's "Primal Screams," the sort-of Meltdown Man tribute with the jungle animal-people and Lauren spending almost the entire story topless and in a g-string, and "How could you believe me...," with its rollicking double-page opening spread, the characters chasing each other around the ridiculous lettering like a good Saturday morning cartoon. Morrison certainly made an effort to lighten the mood, but it's never much more than a detour from the lingering threat underneath all the antics: Dante has to betray his mother and deliver her to Sagawa, or Sagawa will murder two hostage children who love him. That mood permeates this period, and it's with a huge sigh of relief that the series abandons the Pacific and returns home to Russia.

2007 will prove to be a very big year for Dante, with 26 episodes appearing in the comic. Fraser and Burns alternate on art duties, and Tharg takes advantage of having two artists working in tandem and commissions more of this strip than any other but Judge Dredd from 2006-2010. It really feels like the artists are competing with each other, each inspired by the other's work to do better themselves. This will occasionally produce jawdropping moments, especially an amazing double-page spread of the city that opens a critical eleven-part story, "Amerika," in 2008. But I'm getting ahead of myself. More on that some other time.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Chiaroscuro: The Complete Chiaroscuro (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine 303, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: Origins (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar (Volume Seven, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, two major new series debut in the year-end Prog 2007: Kingdom and Stickleback. I'll need to take a short break but the blog'll be back in two weeks. See you then!

145. What Grant Was Writing

December 2004: While new names like Steve Roberts, Dom Reardon and Boo Cook have been blowing readers away at 2000 AD this year, over at the sister Judge Dredd Megazine, veterans have been getting all the assignments. There are five new strips in this issue, and the newest creator working on them is Colin MacNeil, whose first Judge Dredd episode came about fifteen years previously. True, there is a Simping Detective text story by newcomer Si Spurrier, illustrated by Frazer Irving, but the strips are all by veterans. There's a Devlin Waugh one-off by John Smith and MacNeil, and four strips written or co-written by old hands John Wagner and Alan Grant, with art by John Higgins, Robin Smith, Arthur Ranson and John Ridgway. Along with other text features and reprints of Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, it's a terrific comic, but not one with much room for new talent.

Ridgway is among the artists rotating on Grant's Young Middenface, a strip that's probably completely impenetrable to new readers. They're prequel adventures of a supporting character in Strontium Dog, somebody who has not been seen in "the present" for more than five years at this point. Wagner and Ezquerra had not reintroduced Middenface McNulty to the pages of their revived Strontium Dog adventures at the time this story was printed, and so these Young Middenface chronicles, which vary wildly in tone from broad and bawdy comedy to the action melodrama of this story, "Killoden," are really fan service for longtime readers. They're very well-told and well-drawn, but with Grant writing these and Anderson: Psi Division and, over in the weekly, Robo-Hunter, you can't help but wish that no matter how good these stories are, you'd prefer Alan Grant working on a property a little more fresh.

Judge Anderson, for example, reflects that she's pushing fifty in the opening episode of "Lock-In," which sees her returning to service after her last couple of psychic-plane adventures. Wow, it's been a really long and strange trip for Cass at this point. In the late nineties, her strip had been a recurring feature in 2000 AD under David Bishop and Andy Diggle's editorships. In 2001, a ten-part story, "R*Evolution," had appeared to instant reader derision that lasts to this day. (Just last month, one of my friends at the 2000 AD message board who goes by the handle "The Cosh" referred to this story as, simply, "Stupid Monkeys." Everybody knew which one he meant and everybody shuddered.) In the summer of 2002, John Wagner had Judge Death get Anderson out of his way, putting her into a coma in the celebrated "My Name is Death" six-parter. Frankly, Anderson had been so non-thrilling for so long, and that story was so damned amazing, that nobody really minded this once-loved character being sidelined.

Obviously, when Alan Grant returned to the character, he had a lot of work to do to make her seem vital and important again. He accomplished this in a really fantastic series of interlocking adventures, all drawn by Ranson, that cover 24 episodes stretching from Meg 214 in January '04 to Meg 241 in February '06. These have not received the attention that I believe that they should, and have yet to be reprinted. (Cass's reprints are, happily, continuing, with the second volume of The Psi-Files phonebooks planned for next February. This will cover all the episodes from 1990 to early 1995. We're getting there!)

Anyway, "Lock-In" is the third of five stories in Grant and Ranson's epic, and it really digs into how weird and how fragile and failing Psi Division really is. The story began with Cass unable to free herself from the coma, thanks to a series of psychic mind-traps left behind by Judge Death and his freaky "sisters," the inhuman Phobia and Nausea. Since her superiors didn't get the message that she needed to be left alone to prevent a virus from leaving her mind should it become conscious again, they send a team of agents and operatives onto the astral plane to revive her. Absolutely nothing goes right, readers learn just how unpleasantly creepy certain departments of Psi Division are - I didn't know what an extispist was until I read "WMD," the second of the five stories - and supporting characters meet gruesome ends and crippling fates all over the place. By the time Cass is brought out of the coma, you start to wonder whether she'd prefer a quiet retirement.



I might be mistaken, but I believe that this 24-episode, 208-page arc storyline was Ranson's last comic work before he retired. I suppose that it will get collected in the Psi-Files phonebooks eventually, but it's a real epic, overlooked by many readers at the time, and deserves a nice, hardback library edition on its own. I am really, really enjoying rereading it. Sure, The Simping Detective and Cursed Earth Koburn got all the attention among Meg stories at the time - and deservedly so; they're great - but I think this saga will be reevaluated in time.

Suggesting that the editor might have been leaning on Alan Grant's considerable talents a wee bit too much in '04, he's also at work co-writing the fourth adventure for The Bogie Man. One fine day, somebody's going to give this creator-owned property a nice and prestige reprint and I'll be incredibly happy. I'll refer readers who'd like a little more background to Wikipedia to learn more, but basically, Grant, John Wagner and Robin Smith did one story for John Brown Publishing in 1989-1991, a second story which was finished for Atomeka Press in 1993 and a third story which appeared in the pages of Toxic! before the second story was completed. "Return to Casablanca" is the first Bogie Man tale in eleven years.

If you're not familiar with the character, he's a very dangerous, escaped mental patient named Francis Forbes Clunie, who believes that he's an amalgam of all the tough, leading characters played in films by Humphrey Bogart. He turns every bit of information he receives into something from the fiction of that actor's iconic films, but his gun is loaded with real bullets.



So the character is basically a tabula rasa, to be dropped into other characters' criminal adventures and wreak holy hell onto them. I mean, you might well be a criminal mastermind with schemes to use your white slavery ring to force eastern European immigrants to make shortbread for you, and you might well be prepared for any possible eventuality, but you're not likely to factor Clunie into your scheme. It's a demented, hilarious, utterly ridiculous series, with the completely unpredictable Bogie Man usually crashing into the more baffling segments of Scottish culture - Americans, go watch "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" to see what I mean - and emerging unscathed and barely ruffled.

A supporting player from an earlier story called Rab McNab turns up again in this one. He's a devilish parody of those safe, 1970s teatime entertainers allegedly popular with housewives of the day - think Rolf Harris singing "Please Release Me" in a Scottish accent - who is desperately trying to hold onto his career and his sobriety while everything around him spirals out of control, bad guys are shooting up the place and Clunes is, obliviously, punching the daylights out of everybody. This poor guy. Man, I love this series.

Stories from this issue are available for purchase in the following collected editions:

Well, here's a surprise. The only thing in this issue to have been reprinted so far is the Simping Detective text story, in : The Complete Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop)



Next time, the present collides with the past! I'll be temporarily derailing this reread format for one week for a quick look back at John Smith's Indigo Prime as this amazing series returns to present-day 2000 AD with a new adventure. Normal service, such as it is, will be resumed on the 15th!

140. The Megazine Takes it Eazy

June 2004: Well, here's an entry that I can tell is going to be a little frustrating to write. There's so much that I want to say in the next two entries, and get up on a couple of pet hobby horses of mine, but instead I have this utterly flawless issue of Judge Dredd Megazine to discuss. Wow. Reading this again reminds me of how utterly perfect a comic it was during this period. It's a big, thick chunk of a book with a pile of features and some classic black and white reprints (Charley's War and The Helltrekkers) backing up five downright excellent new stories.

On the cover, it's the return of Judge Koburn in his own series, Cursed Earth Koburn. He'd previously appeared as a guest star in a two-part Judge Dredd adventure. Writer Gordon Rennie did this several times, introducing new characters like Johnny Woo and Bato Loco as spotlight-stealing guest stars in Dredd, usually pulling the rug out from under the ostensible lead or otherwise looking much more fun, before they moved out to their own strip. Hey, it works for television spinoffs.

Koburn, of course, is a Dreddworld remodeling of the classic Major Eazy, a delightful World War Two strip by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra that ran in Battle Picture Weekly in the late seventies. One run of the series was set in North Africa and another in Italy, and it featured a laconic, droopy tactical genius who routinely bettered the Nazis and the fascists by way of being an independent thinker who fought his way, never panicked and never hurried. He was visually modeled on the actor James Coburn, and apart from stick-up-their-rears children who weren't in on the joke and wrote unintentionally hilarious letters to Battle complaining that it was a jolly poor rum show to suggest that the disgraceful, unshaven, disrespectful Eazy should have such luck.

Naturally, a character like Eazy is going to have all kinds of fun making the judges of Mega-City one look like idiots. Too much fun, as it turns out, which is why he's a circuit judge bringing law to the lawless of the Cursed Earth wasteland. Here, he's free to drink, brawl, smoke, have girlfriends in every frontier town and occasionally be tasked with cleaning up some city problem in the desert.



And tool around in his great big car. Or hover-ship thingy, whatever. So, teamed with a young stick-up-her-rear Mega-City judge named Bonaventura in this series by Rennie and Ezquerra, he brings law to the lawless and has a ball doing it. The series tackles darker drama with a grain or two less success than it does comedy - the most recent story, featuring an indestructible monster killing everything in the Cursed Earth, felt a little stale - but most of the time, it's terrific fun. Koburn has been resting since his most recent appearance in 2006, but will be returning to the Megazine in 2012.

There's a lot more of interest in this issue. Old hands Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson are putting the comatose Anderson: Psi Division through hell and introducing an incredibly neat set of supporting characters, fleshing out the judges' very weird department of psychics, pyrokines, telekinetics and witches. Somehow Grant is able to make this believable and compelling.

Pat Mills and Simon Davis are collaborating on Black Siddha, which is really neat. Mills has gone on the record many, many times about how much he dislikes superheroes, but when he does them here, the results are really fun. Black Siddha is an Indian superhero operating in London, featuring a young, put-upon lead who really, really doesn't want either the great power or the great responsibility thrust upon him. This impacts his karma-based superpowers and leaves him vulnerable at awful moments.

Surprisingly, this isn't actually a comedy, but it's written with a much, much lighter touch than most of the Guv'nor's work during this period. I think it's a complete trip, a sometimes smutty Bollywood action romp through criminal gangs and reincarnation that plays out very well. There have been three Black Siddha adventures so far, and while it has yet to be collected and the character is currently resting, I certainly hope that we will see him again.

The Simping Detective by Simon Spurrier and Frazer Irving is continuing a celebrated run of stories. Jack Point, a wally squad judge who poses deep undercover as a private investigator, is one of the best characters to emerge during this period. He gets to indulge in all the vices that Koburn enjoys, but he never gets to take much enjoyment from them. He's constantly riding a knife-edge, about to be busted by either the judges' "SJS" internal affairs unit or sent to certain death by a corrupt sector chief. The series is lovely, dense and complex, and Point's ability to think on his feet and manage spiraling chaos is really entertaining.

But it's Judge Dredd who beats even this tough competition of excellent strips. This time out, in the first episode of "Six," written by John Wagner and drawn by Chris Weston. It's an investigation into the work of a serial killer, obviously following in the footsteps of the David Fincher film Se7en, but it takes a fantastic new twist as readers gradually realize that the killer is actually our old, illiterate, super-genius friend PJ Maybe...



Maybe was last seen in a trio of one-episode stories in 2002, where it was revealed that he had engineered a fantastic breakout from the prison where he'd been sent almost a decade earlier. By the time the judges have any idea that he had gone, Maybe had already left the city, established a new identity in Ciudad Baranquilla and then faked his death, leaving his heart behind as evidence. Since the judges never found his many millions tucked away, he was able to live in unimaginable comfort.

Except, well, killers have that urge. Now accompanied by a sexbot called Inga, real estate mogul Pedro Martinez returns to Mega-City One to take care of some old grudges. Time in the sun hasn't dulled Maybe's senses. The story is inventive and the killings are gleefully sick, and once the judges find out what's going on in the concluding episode, the peripheral bodycount gets pretty enormous.

I think I can safely bet that nobody reading this story had any idea how Maybe's story would play out. Wagner probably didn't, either. It's a great example of what I was talking about last time, how Wagner puts so many pieces into play in his stories that subplots naturally arise from all over his world and weave into things. I'm sure it might make Judge Dredd a denser comic for newcomers these days, since there is just so much going on, and an occasional pain in the rear to collect in book form - lost in the nevertheless quite readable Complete P.J. Maybe collection is the reality that the stories unfold over the course of about twenty years - but man, the payoff is amazing. This is terrific stuff.

Stories from this Megazine are reprinted in the following editions:

Cursed Earth Koburn: The Carlos Ezquerra Collection (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: The Complete P.J. Maybe (Amazon UK).
The Simping Detective: The Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop).

Next time, a little change of pace, as my own personal daydream of what it might like to be Tharg runs up against a reality exemplified by Bec & Kawl and The ABC Warriors. See you in seven, friends!

104. Saying Hello

It's certainly fair to suggest that this little blog of mine does more than a fair share of cheerleading. As a loyal Squaxx dek Thargo, I genuinely believe that 2000 AD is the Galaxy's Greatest Comic. But that's not to suggest that I think it's perfect. Even in the midst of the magazine's great return to hyperquality over the last eleven years or so, there have been periodic hiccups in the quality of the series within its covers, and weeks of turgid pacing where none of the creators on its pages seems to be firing on all cylinders. The last quarter of 2001 is one of those dull periods, when only Judge Dredd seems to be flying the flag high. During the last few months of 2001, Dredd is sharing space with a number of space-filling one-off Future Shocks, some wildly inconsistent Sinister Dexter shorts, and two absolute dogs which ramp up the boredom circuits for ten weeks: Steve Moore and Staz Johnson's Killer and a well-meaning mess of an Anderson: Psi Division case by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson. That's Killer spotlighted on the cover of prog 1266 (Oct. 2001), and I think it's a nice, moody piece by Jock.

Since returning to 2000 AD in 1999, Steve Moore contributed one misfire after another, and Killer, or "Filler" as fans quickly tagged it, was the dullest yet. It's another case of what I've hinted at in other entries about this period. The serial is all plot and no character. The lead character is called Madoc Blade (really), and he's a former gladiator in a far-future, alien-packed world where death is around every corner and nobody likes squishy, fleshy humans. It's almost as though, reflecting upon how many fans complained that his earlier Red Fang was too confusing, with too many twists and turns and subplots, Moore responded by scripting something that would have fit right in a 1981 prog during a short break from Return to Armageddon or something.

Actually, Moore does one very weird trick in Killer that's worth mentioning, just because it's so strange. Episodes two and three consist of a lengthy flashback in which Madoc, retired from the arena and drinking himself to death, is uncovered and is telling the story of his ugly past as a fight-or-die slave to his new benefactor. The cliffhanger comes right in the middle of his story. In the flashback. Fifteen years previously, a weirdo alien judge sentences him to death by combat, and the climax becomes "How did Madoc get out of this?" I honestly can't recall another example of a cliffhanger flashback, and with good reason. Well, at least Johnson's art, inked beautifully by David Roach, is very nice, and he came up with some appropriately weird alien thugs and monsters.



Likewise, Arthur Ranson's artwork on the Judge Anderson ten-parter "R*Evolution" is really wonderful. He devised some terrific imagery for the scenes in which Anderson goes onto the psychic plane to investigate the super-rich magnate Vernon D'Arque, a former Mega-citizen who now lives on an asteroid somewhere in space and who has merged his mind with six other citizens. Justice Department gets involved when one of the minds within the D'Arque-gestalt sends a psychic confession to an old, unsolved murder.

One problem with this story - and I say this as one of Alan Grant's biggest fans - is that readers never really understand exactly what the heck a gestalt mind is. Grant sort of takes it as written that D'Arque has come up with a stunning advance in evolution, even though it's later shown to be the product of alien technology, but never pauses to even explain what all this means to a human who's elected to merge minds with D'Arque. It's such a bizarre, outre concept that it stops the whole story in its tracks, asking "Wait a minute; why would anybody do this to themselves?" Grant never answers. We get clear-as-the-nose-on-yer-face hints that there's a dark side to life in the gestalt, but by the time our Cassandra wakes up in somebody else's mind, or something, the script has become so confused that Ranson's art simply can't salvage it anymore.

Honestly, this period is pretty disappointing, but it's not all bad. With another four-part scrap between Judge Dredd and the mysterious justice killer, Armon Gill, running at this time, the prog's just about worth it for that alone. Yet the Future Shocks are really only "shocking" if you're under ten, and Sinister Dexter is almost consistently on autopilot...



Oh, wait.

Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but Sinister Dexter's finest hour didn't come with one of their epic male bonding melodramas, nor with one of those episodes which turned everything upside down and unexpectedly killed a major supporting player. It's "I Say Hello," a curious little five-pager by Dan Abnett and Marc Pingriff which centers on the doorman of a posh hotspot in Downlode.



I can't tell you why I think "I Say Hello" is so amazing, or pull apart just how it works as well as it does. Really, this blog's going to get awfully boring if I keep mentioning how Sin Dex should've ended ages beforehand, how it reached a natural conclusion with "Eurocrash" and so on, but every once in a while, Abnett and his artists do something unexpectedly eye-opening. Here, there's such a wonderful twist, not within the plot, but with convention and presentation that you can't help but be charmed. It's a classic.

Having said that, let's dive back into the Sinister Dexter's recent past and the new collected edition of "Eurocrash." Like "I Say Hello," this is a straight-up Sin Dex classic. The collection starts with a couple of short stories and then dives right in to the exceptional, epic-length storyline in which crime queenpin Demi Octavo's hold over her city slips out from under her, leading to blood in the streets. By the time it's over, the balance of power in Downlode is changed forever, and Sinister and Dexter go their separate ways, each determined to ferret out the mysterious parties behind the carnage, and to never see each other again.

Which makes it incredibly hard to understand why, when you turn the page, the deadly duo are working together as a team.

Rebellion's line of reprints is easily the best in the industry right now. They do a laudable job 49 times out of 50, picking great material and presenting it in a standout format, on glossy paper, with matte-finish covers and typically some very nice extras. Well, their skimpy little creator biography paragraphs could use a little work, but otherwise it's a terrific reprint line. That's what makes this book so darned hard to understand. For some utterly baffling reason, the collection skips over twenty-four freaking episodes of the series.

As screw-ups go, this one ranks up there. The whole phase of the series when it was retitled Downlode Tales is excised, as well as two one-offs that ran alongside Eurocrash's earliest episodes and set up characters who would reappear within the bigger epic. What you got in those 24 episodes, apart from some very nice artwork by Simon Davis, Greg Staples and Chris Weston, among others, were some critical continuing subplots, the return of Billie Octavo and the deaths of several major recurring players, including both Bunkum and Nervous Rex. Oh yeah, and the whole point, the whole payoff, of the vengeful promises of the last two pages of "Eurocrash." At least Monty Python gave us a "scene missing" screen; this book just hopes you're not reading very closely.

I've never said this about a Rebellion book before, but this is one to avoid. Do not buy this book. They should pulp every copy they can get their hands on and issue a second edition with "Lone Shark," "The Ass Kickers," "Scrubbers" and "The Whack Pack" following Eurocrash. The fifth Sin Dex collection should have "City on Fire" and "Lock and 'Lode" and then the four stories which conclude this book: "Exit Wounds," "Observations," "Mission to Mangapore" and "Life Behind Bars," and probably a couple of other episodes after them. Otherwise, neither this nor the next book are worth purchasing. Speaking as a huge fan of the publisher and a pretty big fan of Sin Dex, I wish I didn't have to say that.

Next time, maybe we can get a last ray of sunshine in before Thrillpowered Thursday takes its summer break...?

95. Molly Eyre Makes the Scene

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

In March 2001, we're coming to the end of this year's first batch of series launches. On the cover of prog 1231, Kevin Walker offers a not-entirely satisfying cover (does his head look malformed to you, too?) for the third book of John Wagner and Arthur Ranson's Button Man. I've sort of put off writing about this, hoping for a little more inspiration, and I'm afraid I can't really find the enthusiasm to do it justice. It's another terrific story, and shouldn't be discounted. In the previous storyline, our hero Harry Exton had extorted his freedom from the senator who had been sponsoring his activity in the Killing Game, but a few years later, the senator has passed away and the remaining operatives controlling the game have decided to take out the loose end that is Harry. They're at least a little bit aware that Harry is among the most dangerous killers on the planet, but even he can't evade thirteen trained assassins closing in on him, can he? Especially when, as he zig-zags from Montana to Chicago and back, he doesn't realize he's being tracked?

About two-thirds of the way through the story, Harry figures out how he is being tracked. Now, this story will be available in a nice collected edition this coming June, and telling you how he realizes what's happening, and how he disposes of the tracer, will spoil a really wonderful scene. Take my word for it, though: anybody who claims they read that scene without wincing is pulling your leg. It's made worse by Ranson deciding to show the sequence by cramming about twenty panels onto the page, so there's an awful lot which you can't look away from.



Now usually, if there's a Future Shock one-off in any given prog, it's rarely going to be the most interesting thing in the issue. There are exceptions, sure, and lately there have been a pair of pleasant surprises for readers. Over the last year or so, Matt Brooker, under the pen name D'Israeli, had contributed coloring to a few stories. Back in January, when I turned the spotlight on the first series of Pussyfoot 5, I mentioned "...the coloring, by the usually reliable D'Israeli, does not flatter Raynor's work at all. Events in every location seem balanced by exactly the same lighting, a harsh wash of reds and yellows, like the characters are all at a '70s disco." About a week after I wrote that, the collected edition of Pussyfoot 5's eleven episodes was released as the freebie bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine # 282, and D'Israeli also had some unflattering thoughts about his coloring. As he detailed on his blog, he was pretty unhappy with the work and the results himself, and it led to editor Andy Diggle letting him know that he wouldn't be sending any more coloring jobs his way, but offering him the chance to pitch some Future Shocks instead.

The first of these came in 2000's prog 1207, and two more one-offs followed in 2001, with the scripts credited to "Molly Eyre" (say it aloud), a psuedonym that fooled at least one American reader into thinking that it was nice to see female talent at the Command Module again for the first time in ages. The first one was okay, but the two that appear in progs 1229 and 1231 are just wonderfully fun. D'Israeli gave himself the opportunity to draw a menagerie of silly aliens and situations in a pair of very fast-paced farces. The first one takes place in a single room with a cast that keeps growing, and the second spans decades and galaxies in a high-concept story about a man's future self giving him the keys to universal domination. These are incredibly fun comics! Sadly, these Future Shocks have not yet been collected anywhere, so you'll need to track down these progs to see them.



Next time, it's all-out war, in more ways than one, as the ABC Warriors return. Plus a look at the new collected edition of the Judge Dredd epic "The Pit." See you in seven, fellow Earthlets!

94. The Empire of Sleep

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

January 2001: Prog 1226 features this terrific Frazer Irving cover of Charles Fort and Arthur Conan Doyle beating the daylights out a horde of twisted zombies controlled by cultists who worship some tentacled deity on the other side of life, and who have decided Harry Houdini's explorations into the realm of unconsciousness have brought him too close to the terrible truth of their dark and evil plans. So they send H.P. Lovecraft to earn the others' trust and lead them all into a trap which will result in the end of life on earth. Yeah, you read that right. Necronauts, a nine-part serial illustrated by Irving and written by Gordon Rennie, is a shotgun blast of wild, high concept coolness. Fort carries a cricket bat to smack around the baddies, and Doyle carries around a medical kit full of lethal brews.

Necronauts is Irving's first series after only a couple of one-offs in the past few months. He's made a huge impact on the readership and the fandom, where he's been participating for some time. Irving once joked that he'd stalked and killed a certain "Gaze into the fist of Dredd"-illustrating art droid in order to prove his loyalty to 2000 AD. The joke is duly hung around his neck, worn well into the ground, and by the time of the first Dreddcon in December, people are threatening to wear "Irving Killed Bolland" T-shirts.

Fandom has become very entertaining at this time, with a number of creators, including Rennie, Irving, John Smith and Simon Fraser, as well as present and previous editors Andy Diggle and David Bishop, regularly contributing to the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup. Of course, by this time, spam is beginning to overwhelm all the newsgroups, and some professionals will conclude in time that there are certain segments of "fandom" that make this kind of casual interaction untenable.

Diggle in particular will have an ongoing dispute with a Ukranian reader living in Germany who seems to read Judge Dredd just to complain about the series' moral philosophy, and what she sees as John Wagner's skewed "view of good and evil," particularly in light of the recent eight-part "Sector House" story which centered on Judge Rico. Diggle is not many weeks away from a huge disagreement with one of his chief contributors, compared to which his newsgroup debates with this reader are probably not that important, but it's worth noting, as the argument of "everybody else vs. this one reader in Germany" raged for months, it was within a susequent thread of her complaints that Diggle would eventually announce his resigning the post of editor.



Apart from Necronauts, there's some really good stuff in the prog. Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser have teamed up on a Judge Dredd one-off that celebrates the work of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes, and Dan Abnett and Simon Davis are wrapping up a four-part Sinister Dexter adventure called "The Man in the Ion Mask." In a spin-off from the earlier Mercy Heights, John Tomlinson and Kevin Walker are wrapping up the first four-part story of Tor Cyan, the genetically-engineered, blue-skinned, mohawked fellow who's a bit like Rogue Trooper. This is notable for showing off, for the first time, the style Walker has been using for the last several years, with lots of heavy colors, solid lines and minimal fussiness in the inking. Compared to his detail-heavy work on The Balls Brothers and his earlier, painted work on ABC Warriors, this latest style is quite surprising, although that shouldn't be taken to mean it looks anything other than fantastic.

Also this issue, John Wagner and Arthur Ranson bring us the third book of Button Man. More on this fantastic story in next week's installment.



Necronauts was released by Rebellion as a collected edition in one of their earlier formats in 1993. I've said before that everybody should sell their home for a copy, and I stand by that assessment. This third book of Button Man is due for a collected edition in June. Entitled "Killer Killer," there's a listing on Amazon, although it was not solicited by Diamond in their April catalog. The Sinister Dexter story should find a new home in the forthcoming collection "Magic Bullets," due in the autumn. The Dredd and Tor Cyan stories have not been collected.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Ramone took his fourth bullet in the previous prog's third episode of "The Man in the Ion Mask." It was a hit to the right shoulder. Finnigan still has a commanding lead with ten confirmed hits.

In other news, while Rebellion tends to focus on releasing collections from more recent properties or big name characters, every so often they do head back to the comic's early days and surprise everybody with a great book full of thrillpower from the past. Such is the case with this new edition of The VCs. This is the original run of 32 episodes from 1979-1980. Most of the installments are written by Gerry Finley-Day, with a couple of fill-ins by Steve MacManus. The art is principally by Cam Kennedy, who contributed the cover, and Garry Leach. Mike McMahon drew the first episode and John Richardson the last five, but everything between them is by Kennedy or Leach. Probably nobody finds that as interesting as I do.

Anyway, The VCs is a pretty standard war story, just dressed up with aliens and spaceships in it. There's the green rookie, disliked by his new crew, and ugly enemies you can neither understand nor sympathize with, and trapped-behind-enemy-lines stories, and callous officers who probably interact with our heroes more than any other company in the military. That's not to say it's at all bad, but I reread this while continuing a once-a-week reread of Battle Picture Weekly produced during the same 1979-80 period and darned if this series couldn't have been flawlessly slotted into that comic. If you enjoy this style of comic storytelling, then The VCs will certainly please you, even if it's only rarely eye-opening.

Actually, I should probably qualify that: if you're coming to this from an American background, there's a lot more to this than simply "another war comic." I grew up reading DC's Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank, and later Marvel's G.I. Joe, with their casts of unkillable regular characters. Compared to these, British war comics are a complete revelation, with surprising fatalities among the cast. Any new reader coming to this collection will probably be pretty surprised by this story as it progresses.

There were 32 episodes of The VCs, but this is a pretty slim book, since the episodes were an unusually short 3-4 pages a week. It runs a little light on extras, since there were so few from the period. The strip was spotlighted on 2000 AD's cover only once, and there was a single star scan of the lead cast a few weeks after it finished, and those are included, but there are no other contributions from the period from any of the creators. In lieu of blank pages filling up too much of the back, the first episode of Finley-Day's better-known future war series, Rogue Trooper is included, but honestly, I'm hard pressed to imagine anybody buying this collection who hasn't already read the first Rogue episode plenty of times already. That's not to say that I don't think potential readers are out there, and I hope you'll give it a read, just that I'm not really sure this was the best use of the pages in the back when a new interview would have been very nice.

Next time, Button Man makes everybody in the audience wince, and D'Israeli shocks the future. See you in seven!

77. It's Easy to be a Fanboy

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

Welcome back to the little ol' sub-blog at my LiveJournal, for another few weeks of looking back at the run of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic! I already know that I'll be taking a few weeks' break again at the end of the year, but, as Kermit the Frog often said, "before we go," I'd like to finish up the issues that originally saw print in 1999. Prog 1162 is a very, very good comic. I'm not completely keen on the cover, by Dylan Teague, which spotlights the imminent conclusion to the Judge Dredd epic "Doomsday Scenario" (creators this week: John Wagner and Charlie Adlard). I was also a little underwhelmed by the Pulp Sci-Fi one-off written and illustrated by Allan Bednar, but the rest of the lineup includes Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, the completely brilliant Nikolai Dante romp "The Courtship of Jena Makarov" by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and more of Devlin Waugh by John Smith and Steve Yeowell.

One thing that I can't help but experience when I reread a bunch of old comics is that occasional sense of nostalgia for the original moment. And who'd have it any other way? Of course, now we know that Devlin Waugh survived the apocalyptic events of this epic storyline and would go on to several more stories. But back in 1999, John Smith had quite a reputation for killing off or maiming his wonderful characters. The casts of Indigo Prime, The New Statesmen and Tyranny Rex had met bloody demises throughout the 1990s, so how could you fail to be concerned that Devlin would join their number with so much at stake in this adventure?

So it was with no small amount of fanboy thrill, and no small amount of fanboy terror and paranoia at the possible death of a much-loved character, that I took up an offer from the fanzine Class of '79 to interview John Smith. The interview, available online here, is, I think, quite remarkable for how much Smith was willing to talk about the background and stories behind his stories. I'm not sure how many people will, before we're all good and done with fandom, be interested in piecing together histories of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, but since Smith was so forthcoming and so full of information, this is honestly one of the better secondary sources currently available to amateur researchers.

It's also, embarassingly, a face-in-hands gushfest on the part of the obnoxious interviewer. I still stand by my conviction that the final Indigo Prime series, "Killing Time," is one of comics' most thrilling moments, and I can't wait to see what Paul at the Prog Slog has to say about it in a couple of weeks, but Jesus, what an over-the-top fanboy I was with those questions. The format was kind of unfortunate; rather than a proper e-mail interview over an evening, Class of '79 asked that I compose all of my questions quickly, and I hammered them out with the help of my girlfriend-of-the-time, Victoria, typed 'em all up at UGA's Memorial Hall computer sweatshop, mailed 'em in and never saw them again until the finished piece appeared a few months later. I don't think I ever spoke with John Munro, who added some very good questions which appeared at the end, after mine.

Well, Tom Spurgeon I am clearly not. Although I remain convinced that Tom'll find room for some British talent sometime soon, and do his peerless job of interviewing them, and not look like a complete spazz when he does, unlike certain LiveJournallers you might be reading. (Check out Tom's interview with James Kolchaka from last month if you haven't; all of Spurgeon's interviews are really fascinating reading, and a highlight of every weekend, even if I've only heard of maybe one creator in five.)

In other news, I decided to take a break from the What I Just Read feature/tag in my LiveJournal, mainly because I've grown tired of finding new things to say about my reading pile. But I did want to continue spotlighting the 2000 AD books, because many occasional readers miss the announcements elsewhere, and they are, as ever, very poorly promoted in the comic news-blog-world.

Back in '05, DC released a collection of Anderson: Psi Division which compiled the three 12-part adventures that originally appeared in 1985-87. Rebellion did not follow up on this book until recently, and they've made the curious decision to make this book an artist-focussed trade. Shamballa is a nicely satisfying chunk of a book, and it contains something like forty episodes, originally published throughout the nineties, all featuring fantastic color artwork by Arthur Ranson. It is not a complete Ranson collection; his first story, the black and white "Triad" serial, is not here, and neither is some of the more recent material from the Megazine, the stuff with the strange demon Half-Life, and Psi-Judge Shakta and Juliet November. But what is here makes for some pretty good reading. Ranson is a wonderful artist and some of these stories are very good. Well, apart from the brow-furrowing, disappointing damp squib of an ending to "Satan," a story which was very promising for many pages before petering out.

However, I can't completely get behind this book because while an incomplete Ranson collection is understandable, an incomplete Anderson collection is completely baffling. Alan Grant navigated the character through a fascinating series of stories, with character growth you certainly do not see with Judge Dredd, and there are, as a natural effect of the character-based continuity storytelling, several maddening references to the things skipped by this reprint. For example, between the incidents of "The Jesus Syndrome" and "Satan," there were three lengthy Anderson stories in the Megazine, all of which are missed in this collection but are nevertheless referenced in the stories that Ranson illustrated. The result is very piecemeal and felt very frustrating to me. Honestly, it's less of a spotlight for Ranson than it is a missed opportunity, regardless of how gorgeous the artwork is.

Next week, some serious thrill-circuit overload. Nemesis returns. Drawn by Flint.

(Originally posted December 4, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

41. Mazes and Mambo

November 1996: Prog 1018 features David Hine's Mambo on the cover. This is the third and final series about a purple-haired future cop who can turn her body into tentacled, stretchy-attack vines. I always thought it was a pretty average little series myself, probably one draft away from something really special, but it never really impressed the fanbase and is among the strips on Tharg's chopping block.

Interestingly, Mambo provides an interesting look at how different audiences will perceive a series. The Hipster Daughter, who is nine and who joined us with prog 1000, missed the first two series of Mambo and started reading this story entirely the wrong way. Now she's a bright kid - she reads three grade levels ahead and is a voracious reader - but she started Mambo with the episode where Rachel and her alien associate are on a live call-in show, discussing what happened to the planet in the second series. Watching the show is a little girl whose brother has become the latest victim of a serial killer, about which, more in a second, and she calls in to get Rachel's help. The little girl isn't seen again after the second episode because she's no longer important to the story, and this confused my daughter completely. She thought that the little girl was called Mambo and the story was about her. I didn't know what she was talking about when she asked "When is Mambo coming back?" before the story actually finished...

Mambo's probably not due a reprint any time soon, despite David Hine's great artwork. This is not merely because it was never popular, but also because it is one of the most dated stories ever seen in 2000 AD. The serial killer is actually stalking people online, and when he kills them in virtual reality wargames or other fantasy simulations, THEY DIE IN REAL LIFE. Oh, and by "online," I'm referring to the "Hypernet." Now, fair's fair, this was written twelve or thirteen years ago, when everybody had e-mail addresses which had 40 characters after the @, and when comedians told jokes about having flat tires on the information superhighway. But honestly, this still didn't really pass for all that original at the time. "Virtual reality" quickly became buzzwords for "plots to avoid," but not until after eight or ten or thirty Doctor Who New Adventures from Virgin had the TARDIS landing in some artificial computer world.

On the other hand, the kids read this particular cliffhanger completely differently than I did:



Doesn't seem like the strongest incentive to make it back to the newsagent next week, does it? Not to hear my kids tell it. This was "creepy" and "scary" and "completely awesome." So perhaps Hine confused his younger readers as to who the audience identification figure was, but he also knew exactly what sort of story developments will get 'em back next week.

The other stories in this prog are Judge Dredd in the twelve-part "Darkside" by John Smith and Paul Marshall, Rogue Trooper by Steve White, Dan Abnett and Alex Ronald, Time Flies by Garth Ennis and Philip Bond and the very interesting Mazeworld by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson. This is Grant's first new series for 2000 AD in quite a few years. He'd been writing Batman and some other titles for DC Comics, but was lured back to work with Arthur Ranson and the chance to do something creator-owned. Originally planned for the short-lived Toxic! some years previously, the series made its way to 2000 AD after five years "in development," as they say.



One downside to living in the States is that we're a couple of weeks behind getting progs and Megs. I understand that the current Megazine features the third part of a long interview with Alan Grant, where Mazeworld is discussed. It would make a great reprint choice - thirty episodes in one collection - if Rebellion can find the right deal with Grant and Ranson. As a story, it's honestly kind of dry, without any moments of humor or embracable, audience-identification characters. Yet the plotting is very solid, and Grant keeps readers guessing what will happen next. The artwork is, of course, excellent.

The hooded fellow is a condemned killer named Adam Cadman, the first in line for the noose in a future where Britain has resumed the death penalty by hanging. At the moment of his death, he reawakens in this odd, grimy fantasy world built around labyrinths, and finds he cannot remove his hood or noose, and that whenever he displays cowardice or tries to get away, he begins to choke and return to our world and his execution. So it genuinely becomes a case of "fight or die." There are three ten-episode series of Mazeworld; the second comes in 1997 and the last in 1999.

Speaking of last, stop back next week for the end of Rogue Trooper, in an installment we must surely call "Mercy Killing."

(Originally published 2/14/07 at LiveJournal.)

13. Buttoning Down

It's November 1994 and we're up to prog 914. This features the final part of Judge Dredd in "Wilderlands" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, in which everybody gets rescued and the robot judge program gets scrapped. Amazingly, in only ten weeks, the high point of prog 904's launch strips has totally evaporated, as "Wilderlands" limps to a conclusion much less interesting than the promising first part, and three of the excellent, entertaining series that launched alongside it have been replaced by lesser strips. These include Red Razors, by Mark Millar and Nigel Dobbyn, who's really giving this dumb story far more attention than it deserves. New since my last update are the final outings for Skizz and Bix Barton.

Skizz of course is best known for its original run in 1983. It was Alan Moore's first serial for the comic, and was illustrated by Jim Baikie. Moore gave Baikie his blessing to continue the story on his own in 1991, which led to a slight, but inoffensive 9-part revisiting of the characters. But while the third story is also inoffensive, it's not at all "slight." It's a mammoth, 16-part story, bloated with three plotlines that don't look like they're ever going to intersect. The stories of the characters we met in Moore's original run aren't bad, but there's this plot about some time-travelling alien hitmen with a robot that dresses like an Elvis impersonator and speaks in what's apparently a broad Birmingham accent, and it's endlessly dull and unamusing.



Bix Barton is back for his final adventure. He'd debuted in 1990 and starred in four six-part adventures, and a handful of one-offs in specials and annuals, by Pete Milligan and Jim McCarthy. This thing just smells of "inventory pages," and I say this as one of the minority of fans who actually like Bix Barton. Well, except for the art. I suppose we all have to have a "least favorite" artist, and Jim McCarthy might very well be a contender for mine.

As I say, I like Barton a lot, but it's evident that Milligan's initial enthusiasm for his character wore off very quickly. The first three series are quite fun, and there's nothing actually wrong with this one, other than the art, but it feels pretty tired, and Barton himself is sidelined for much of the action. He's a great character, but Milligan was well established in the States as a regular writer for Vertigo by this time and a Barton series hadn't appeared for more than two years, leading me to suspect this had been on the shelf for quite some time.



The standout among this lineup is certainly Button Man Book 2. If you've never read Button Man, you are really, really missing out. It's by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson, and it's about a thug and a mercenary called Harry Exton who finds employment as a hired gun for a cartel of rich "voices" who play their gunmen off against each other in violent games. But Exton is bothered by one of his competitors, who lets him know that this isn't a game you can actually quit. When Exton chooses to find out whether that's true, all kinds of hell break loose.

It appeared at the conclusion of the first book that Exton had died while killing off the "voice." But Book 2 reveals that he is instead spirited to the US and given a new chance in the American version of game with a one-year contract to a rich senator, A.J. Jacklin, under the name Harry Elmore, with funding and a "wife," Cora, who arranges things for their master. But Harry's still an uncontrollable killer, and is looking for the chinks in the game.

Halfway through this remarkable tale, Cora and Jacklin conclude that Harry's a liability, just as Harry discovers the body of the button man who'd previously been in Jacklin's employ. Up to this point in the story, it's been a very entertaining slow burn, but what follows from this turning point is pretty intense.

Button Man has been optioned for a feature film on the strength of Wagner's A History of Violence; IMDB suggests that it's meant to be released sometime in 2008, but that could mean anything. The third book of Button Man came in 2001, and the fourth will be starting in a few months, with Frazer Irving taking over art chores.

Next week: I Cannot Be a Nun!



(Originally published 6/28/07 at LiveJournal.)