174. Love Letter to Japan

April 2007: Prog 1534... Now is that a cover, or is that a cover? This amazing piece by Karl Richardson heralds the beginning of Detonator X, a ten-part serial by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell. It is, obviously, a gorgeously designed homage to 1950s drive-in sci-fi epics and their attendant, over-the-top movie posters and it just glows with its love of the genre. It also, in what was certainly not intended as a bait-and-switch, does not have much of a damn thing to do with the actual comic inside. See, while that cover speaks of a love for 1950s American trash cinema, the actual story was written from a love of 1970s Japanese cartoons. The audience for these two genres frequently overlaps, but they really aren't the same thing at all, are they? I'll tell you exactly what Detonator X feels like. It's like Ian Edginton spent his childhood playing with Popy Chogokin and Jumbo Machinder robots - they were distributed in the US by Mattel as "Shogun Warriors" and that's certainly what I spent my childhood doing - and watching Mazinger Z and Grandizer on TV every afternoon and saying "One day, I'm going to write a comic book just like that."

It's actually very weird reading an Edginton story that isn't a revisionist or subtle take on the genre where he's working. Stickleback is a very 21st Century take on Victorian detective fiction, with a criminal protagonist and a post-League of Extraordinary Gentlemen group of outlandish villains as his supporting cast upending the apparent premise of the ostensible star of the series, Valentine Bey, working in collaboration with or opposition to the criminal. The Red Seas mixes up just about every myth or legend that could possibly squeeze into a story about pirates, from krakens fighting the Colossus of Rhodes to Sir Isaac Newton fighting werewolves. The later Ampney Crucis Investigates will reinvision Lord Peter Wimsey as an action hero and send him fighting Cthulu through parallel universes. But Detonator X is just a simple love letter to the fiction that amazed Edginton's peers as kids.

And what's really weird is that Japanese writers and directors had spent the last fifteen years reconstructing and deconstructing the giant robot fiction that thrived from about 1966 to 1978 until there wasn't much left to twist into new shapes. To be clear, I'm referring to a specific genre of kids' adventure melodrama that developed around the time the Japanese TV companies started broadcasting cartoons in color. The networks started commissioning thousands of hours of gorgeously-designed and cheaply-animated kidvid nonsense, much of which was raced off from quickie pitches by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, by Go Nagai, by Shotaro Ishinomori, whose studios would then churn out tie-in comics for that country's weekly anthologies, and who would license the designs for toy companies to create, in bulk quantities, some of the greatest toys any child ever owned. The giant robot shows/comics/merchandise - Mazinger Z, Getter Robo - Starvengers, UFO Robo Gurendaiza - Grandizer - Goldorak, Fighting General Daimos, Brave Raideen, dozens of other also-rans - seemed to fade out around the time that the team superhero "sentai" live-action shows started, as did the amazingly long-lived Mobile Suit Gundam franchise.

But Gundam's run for so long that it started eating its own tail and deconstructing itself with its periodic reinventions and reboots, and comic artists and animation directors have been reviving old properties for new examination through adult and revisionist eyes for years before this silly love letter by Edginton started. Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo was relaunched in an extremely popular series of direct-to-video films by Yasuhiro Imagawa, himself a former Gundam producer/director, that placed characters from six or seven different 1960s comics into one eventually tedious "coming of age" / "hero's journey" narrative. Much of the '90s Robo production crew also worked on Big O, a short-lived TV series that adapted more Western tropes, and basically gave Bruce Wayne a giant robot. Then there was Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, a comic that ran from 1999 to 2006 (at least four years too long) and presented, as heroes, men who as kids had all been obsessed with giant robots and color live-action science fiction in their "secret society," and confront a cult leader who pretty much stole all his ideas from the bad guys in those sorts of melodramas. In other words, while there are many examples of modern fiction in Japan that use all these wacky old kids' teevee and forgettable junk comics for exactly the sort of deconstruction and genre-twisting that Edginton does so astonishingly well, given the chance, he just... writes a wacky old forgettable junk kids' comic.

It does, on the other hand, feature the deeply curious design work by Yeowell that gives us a tin can robot almost as clunky as Yokoyama's barrel-chested Gigantor, which predated the color giant robot era, and monsters that look a heck of a lot like the '90s American remake of Godzilla, leading everybody to wonder why Yeowell didn't borrow some Go Nagai comics from the actual period under the microscope. It's certainly vibrant and exciting and the action scenes move at a furious pace, but it does not in any fashion look like it should. Happily, the action scenes are often so good that it doesn't matter. In the panel above, Detonator X, lacking any weapons, just rips the arms off another giant robot and beats the hell out of a monster with them.

Detonator X also, sadly, sees Yeowell frequently not drawing any backgrounds and allowing Chris Blythe's coloring to paper over the cracks. This actually works here, since Blythe can polish anything, but his newfound shortcuts are going to set off alarm bells when The Red Seas returns later on and it looks like he ran out of ink for every page.

Speaking of deconstruction, I'd like to take a revisionist look at Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard's work on Savage. Here, the third story, "Double Yellow" is the last to be drawn by Adlard. In 2008, Patrick Goddard, who has drawn the next four "books" and, I understand, is presently at work on the forthcoming Book Eight, becomes the regular artist. He also seems to be on hand as the continuity changes completely. The Mills-Goddard Savage is still excellent and absolutely worth reading, but it's a different thing entirely from how comparatively grounded and visceral the Mills-Adlard take is. Below, just before the people of Occupied Britain rise up and get ready to throw the Volgans off their Green and Pleasant Land, our hero Bill takes out an important resistance leader who's actually a dirty Volg himself.

It goes without saying that Adlard draws the heck out of this sequence, as he does everything. The man's a genius. But at no point during his three stories does Adlard draw any robots or anybody named Howard Quartz, or anything that ties into Ro-Busters or ABC Warriors. Adlard's Savage is, outside of the Britain-under-SovietVolgan-control premise, free of fantastic elements. It's a powerful and brutal series. The second story had ended, unforgettably, with Bill killing Captain Jaksic, whom we thought for sure was going to be his ongoing nemesis, and then gunning down a dozen or more collaborators in a fancy restaurant. My God, what a comic that was.

"Double Yellow" can't top it, but it certainly tries. The previous story had ended with the revelation that Bill's brother Tom was killed by the Volg secret police, and so Bill goes out for vengeance and he genuinely doesn't care who suffers along the way. It's amazing and incredibly vibrant and at the end of this book, it really feels like his job is done, and that England's going to be okay. That's why I was so pleased that the collected edition - sadly out of print at the present, and certain to remain so for the foreseeable future as the publisher replenishes stock on Judge Dredd material in preparation for the film - compiles all three of Adlard's stories, so they function and feel like a unified and complete whole. I've reread them many times, while I'm actually not as familiar with the ones that Goddard has drawn. I'm very curious to revisit them, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, while I like and enjoy them, closer scrutiny will find me firmly believing that the Savage of Hammersteins and Blackbloods and teleporting tigers is a different continuity altogether. More on that when the reread gets us to prog 1577, and that'll be a bit down the road.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (Amazon UK)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, a few words about two artists no longer with us, Massimo Belardinelli and the always controversial John Hicklenton, as the narrative reaches the time of Belardinelli's sad death, and Hicklenton's final work for Judge Dredd Megazine. See you in seven!

155. Of Insects and Illiterates

It's July 2005, and the summer goes like this: the last few books in the failed initiative with DC have trickled to a close, the revived Doctor Who has concluded the first season of its triumphant return and seen out actor Christopher Eccleston in the lead role, fifty-two people have been killed in a series of terrorist attacks in London, and 2000 AD releases one of the most timely and politics-minded issues of its history. Much of the content is the usual high-concept SF stuff, of course, safely told in far, fanciful, futures. There's Leatherjack, detailed below, and Robo-Hunter, about which, more next time. But this week's Judge Dredd, the first of a two-part story by John Wagner and Phil Winslade, is especially timely, with Wagner railing against the increasingly paranoid mindset that seems to be in charge of the War on Terror.

By chance, I came back to this story in my reread at the same time that I read John Mortimer's penultimate Rumpole of the Bailey novel, 2006's Rumpole and the Reign of Terror. This will get the spotlight over at my Bookshelf blog on Tuesday, and they are very similar in their anger. The US and UK each shared a massive overreach in police powers in response to terrorism. In Britain, this has resulted in incarcerations without formal charge, the excuse being that to formally charge a suspect might compromise classified intelligence. While in the present day, Horace Rumpole finds himself in the legal fight of his life trying to defend a Pakistani doctor when nobody will tell him either what he has done or what evidence is against him, in the not-all-that-future-world of Mega-City One, Dredd and the judges have arrested a citizen, told him only that he's being held in connection with the recent bombings by Total War, and suggested very strongly that things will go much better for him if he just confesses. They don't tell him to what they want him to confess. Episode one ends with the hapless citizen pleading for his life and an impassive Dredd sentencing him to indefinite confinement by the rights afforded him under the Security of the City Act. It's an incredibly bleak little story, but also completely furious.

Over in Savage, meanwhile, Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard are chronicling the life of a London occupied by the Volgan nation. Mills doesn't really build up his anger and release it in targeted bursts of fury in quite the way that Wagner does; rather, it's poured out smoothly over every panel of Savage. The result is just fantastic reading.



"Out of Order" is the second story (or "Book Two") for the revived Bill Savage, brought back from obscurity and occasional editorial mocking the previous year into a taut and impressive modern thriller. It is a really exciting rollercoaster, with one hell of a lot of plot packed in. Episode one resolves the cliffhanger ending from Book One and introduces Captain Svetlana Jaksic as Savage's principal nemesis. Her abrupt demise at the close of this story really is a surprise; it looked for all the world like Mills was setting her up as a long-term villain, but she dies without ever knowing who her enemy really is. We also meet new gangs of terrorists - slash - freedom fighters, few of whom coordinate their efforts with each other, get to see the Volgans' effective-but-evil tactic of ensuring human shields for their tank convoys by tossing candy to starving children, and get a powerful human element with the introduction of Bill's brother Tom and niece Jan.

I confess that I'm a little troubled by Jan's rape in this story. This is the second time in the last few years of 2000 AD where Mills has allowed a violent act against a woman to galvanize a hesitant male into action. It was more egregious when Moloch raped and killed Niamh in Slaine, as that was the end of a long-running major character, and here it is "just" the last impetus that Tom needs to help brother Bill with his plan to get inside occupation HQ and assassinate Volgan Marshal Vashkov.

While I acknowledge the event and question its narrative value, I choose to overlook it, right or wrong, because "Out of Order" ends with three of the most stunning episodes of this long-running series. The killing of Vashkov belongs on anybody's list of great Pat Mills moments. The way that Vashkov tells Savage a story, confidently expecting that the man in front of him will choose the path of heroism and honor, only to find that he has horribly misjudged things, is completely beautiful. Savage thanks Vashkov for the information, but for a totally different reason than the Volgan expected, and responds with all the abrupt and impassive force of Tommy Lee Jones in the film version of The Fugitive when he tells Harrison Ford's character, "I don't care." Adlard draws the hell out of this sequence. The image of the feathers blown out of the pillow used to muffle the shot will stay with 2000 AD readers forever.

And all this is before the book's actual climax, when Savage takes care of Captain Jaksic and lets a restaurant of collaborators know what he thinks of them. It's a moment where Bill Savage finds that line between terrorist and freedom fighter and absolutely leaves readers with a lot to think about. This is a completely, totally brilliant comic.

While both Dredd and Savage are raising questions about today's world, Leatherjack by John Smith and Paul Marshall is wild, escapist, crazy and only tiptoes around any obvious political ideas. Smith and Marshall had, in 1993, collaborated on the very good Firekind. This story isn't quite as successful to me, in part because Marshall's artwork has evolved over time to a style that I don't enjoy quite as much. His character designs are as impressive and grotesque as ever, but he's inking with a much heavier line for starters, and the intricate and delicate alien universe of Firekind is not present here. It's a world that looks stark, too solid and, honestly, a little generic.

Leatherjack is the story of an assassin, working thousands of years in the future for a disgusting crime lord and employed to retrieve a book which unlocks human consciousness, and which is in danger of being destroyed, along with all the other books on a library planet, in a galactic war. To his credit, Smith does provide a terrific introduction. The story opens following an aging professor, who's been given access to the library planet by the great big alien bugs who run the place and are defending it from bombardment by the Spinster Empire. We meet all three sides in this conflict, and the professor would appear to have a major role to play as the action gets started. Surprisingly, however, the professor is killed in the second episode as Leatherjack takes center stage. Smith loves to mess with expectations and certainly doesn't mind killing off his supporting cast, but that really was a big surprise. I mean, even once you get past the remarkable surprise of how the professor leaves the story and the assassin enters it.

It sounds agreeably engaging, but it all somehow fails to gel. We never get to know any of the characters, and those that we do meet just seem like templates from John Smith's playbook - depraved dictators, foppish killers, observers watching from the sidelines seeing events spiral out of control and saying "no no no no." These are all things that we've seen before. Add in a climax in which an ancient, totemic power rises to wipe out the technology of the warfleets that threaten it, and the whole thing feels like a longer, shallower incarnation of the creators' earlier, excellent Firekind. And after reading this several times, I'm still not certain that the Spinster Empire, a comedic bunch of Mary Whitehouse parodies flying around in space-faring censorships, didn't wander in from an entirely different strip altogether.

Leatherjack, whether it thrills you or not, is certainly notable for one thing. Its run of eighteen consecutive weekly episodes by the same team is the longest over the decade of the 2000s. A couple of years ago, I predicted that the desire to quickly repackage successful and celebrated thrills into graphic novel form would lead to longer serials, making the book versions a little meatier and more attractive to new readers. This has not been borne out; the longest individual story since 2005's Leatherjack has been Stalag 666 in 2008.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Leatherjack: The Complete Leatherjack (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: Casino Royal (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 308, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, Hey, did somebody say Robo-Hunter? You know what that means? More scans of Samantha Slade! See you next week!

138. Bill and His Shootah

Hey! Is this thing still on?

It's been more than a year since I last wrote here, and a couple of people have said that they missed reading me, so I let the little itch settle me back into writing a bit more about 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. If you're new to this blog, basically, ages ago, I sat down and started rereading my collection at the rate of about six issues a week. By the time I got to something like 1993, I decided to rip off Paul Rainey's Prog Slog Blog and write a little each week. I let this turn from a pleasure into a chore and found myself running out of things to say, so I quit doing it.

I kept on reading, but rather than skipping this blog ahead to where I had reached at the end of June - to the issues originally published in September of '08 - I am going to re-reread and report and scan, so there's not a break in the entries.

Also, John Smith's completely brilliant series Indigo Prime is returning to the comic in about two months, and I am certainly going to want to celebrate that. Look for an article about that great series in September. Plus, of course, this is a fine week to relaunch this blog, because - and when I started the first draft of this entry, I didn't know this was coming - the 2000 AD website has just been quite spectacularly redesigned. If you have not visited the web site in a while, you should definitely swing back by, because they have done a super job upgrading it.

Anyway, you've got me for thirteen weeks. I'm committing to that much. We'll see how it goes. You'll also notice there's a Google Ad somewhere over to the side somewhere. That's new. If you enjoy Thrillpowered Thursday and see an ad that might interest you, I sure would appreciate it if you'd click it. Money's got to be pretty darn tight since my wife and I had a baby two months ago. If there are some pennies in this blog, I might can see myself writing longer.

So, onto prog 1387. This wonderful cover, by Dave Gibbons, of Bill Savage and Judge Dredd, reminds me that the summer of 2004 - that's when we received this April-dated issue in North America - was when my best buddy, the fellow who introduced me to 2000 AD, up and moved to Canada. For a few years, I'd been feeding his thrill-power habit because Diamond, the distributor that sends 2000 AD to American funnybook stores, was completely unreliable, repeatedly missed shipping dates and would occasionally claim that they were shorted and would only send one issue to a comic shop if it, in fact, ordered two. So, nothing's changed there, anyway. In other words, for quite a few years, I was ordering and paying for two copies of 2000 AD in order to guarantee delivery of at least one of them. From prog 1387, my second copies - when those second copies arrived, about eight times of ten - went to another local friend.

These days, I no longer use Diamond for 2000 AD. I was, however, very pleased to hear that they will be once again offering 2000 AD by the single issue rather than in a sealed pack, as had been the case for some lengthy time. I hear that's supposed to start at the end of this month, for the comics that will ship in October.



1387 was also notable for the debut of two great big series that are still continuing today. The seventh book of Savage is running in the current issues of 2000 AD, and a new series of Low Life is scheduled to start in just a couple of months, in prog 1750.

Savage is the story of an occupied Britain, which lost a quick-strike "war" with the eastern European Volgan Empire five years previously. It's the sequel to one of the original 2000 AD serials, Invasion, which ran from 1977-78. Our hero is Bill Savage, who lost his family to the Volgs, picked up a shotgun and has been blowing hell out of the Volgs in a long-running guerrilla war. As book one of Savage opens, Bill and other resistance leaders are executing a plan to fake his death so he can work undercover.

Written by Pat Mills and illustrated by Charlie Adlard, Savage is just a blisteringly good comic, full of realistic villains and desperate heroes. Well, there's one bit in the first series where the Guv'nor's research fails him and tank treads suddenly don't work the way they really do, but otherwise this is a really great series, and shows Mills continuing to roar back to life with some fantastic comics for 2000 AD. Several more winners would be forthcoming.

Then there's Low Life. This is less a spinoff from Judge Dredd than one of the many comics that are set in his world. The Low Life is the most crime-ridden slum in Mega-City One (this week, anyway) and the series follows a group of undercover "Wally Squad" judges. In these initial outings, scripted by Rob Williams and drawn by Henry Flint, the lead is Judge Aimee Nixon, a tough, ugly, broken-nosed, one-armed master of disguise.



In time, Nixon will cede the spotlight to her more popular co-star, the comically deranged Judge Dirty Frank, but she is really a compelling and fascinating character in these first two stories. In time, Low Life will get pretty dense with subplots and Nixon's role will take a pretty surprising turn. Most fans are anxiously awaiting its return in September.

Also appearing in this prog, there's Judge Dredd in a one-off by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy, an outer space serial called A.H.A.B. by Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson, and Chopper by Wagner, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

Chopper: Surf's Up (2000 AD's Online Shop).
Low Life: Paranoia (Amazon US)
Savage: Taking Liberties (2000 AD Online Shop).


Next week: What happens when Judge Dredd takes on the war on terror. And stop by my Bookshelf Blog tomorrow for a short review of the Mean Machine collection, "Real Mean."

130. Heroclix, part two

September 2003: Last week, I was telling you about Heroclix, the internationally-popular beat combo, errrr, that is, well-known collectible miniatures game which, in its sixth set, featured a handful of 2000 AD characters. I was also telling you about how the expansion in question was not as popular with Heroclix's players as WizKids had hoped, and that overconfident retailers had overordered the set. I also left a dangling hint that prog 1356, pictured here, is inexorably linked with Heroclix in my mind. All this tantalizing foreshadowing; you're going to be so disappointed if this turns out to be really mundane, aren't you?

Indyclix, as players called the expansion, represented an incredible missed opportunity for comic shops. Honestly, very few players could swear to be intricately familiar with all the lines represented in the game. Apart from 2000 AD, and its characters from three different series, there were pieces from Top Cow's Witchblade, Cyberforce, The Darkness and Aphrodite IX, the Crossgen series Sojourn, Sigil, The Way of the Rat and The Path, Wildstorm's Danger Girl, Dark Horse's Hellboy, Caliber/Image's Kabuki and Crusade's Shi. I think that's everybody.

Can you guess what all these series have in common that 2000 AD didn't have in 2003? That's right, a comprehensive trade program to keep their stories in print.

I was pretty active on the hcrealms site in 2003, and I was saying that any retailer worth his salt, one who actually wanted to use the interest from the game to prop up sales of his comics, would be nuts not to put together a display of all those titles and to use the captive audience of players who've arrived to compete in a tournament to talk about them. This was around the time that the phrase "team comics" was making a small murmur among the online crowds who wanted to expand the medium, and I was personally very frustrated that a good 2000 AD trade program didn't exist.

At the time, Titan had the license to most of 2000 AD's serials, and while I've normally got nothing but love for the good fellows at Titan, their 2001-03 line of reprints was really disappointing. There were a few exceptions, but most of what they released were either "Hey kids, Garth Ennis!" attempts to sell that writer's subpar Judge Dredd stories, or repackagings of the earlier 1980s Titan books. Some of the hardback collections of things like Nemesis the Warlock and "The Judge Child Quest" admittedly looked fantastic, and set the stage for their subsequent hardback lines of Dan Dare and Charley's War, but overall the line felt flimsy and halfhearted, and it was a long, long way from "comprehensive." Rebellion also had a small line of its own self-contained books, typically European-styled hardcover collections of shorter stories. They were interesting in their own right - Jamie Boardman smacking himself in the head with a Hewligan's Haircut book at a convention to demonstrate its indestructibility instantly became the stuff of legend - but didn't spotlight 2000 AD's long-running characters and ongoing serials.

So I had a neat idea. It would cost me a little bit, but I would order a small stack of 2000 ADs for the players at one store. On Monday evenings, I played with a group of people at a store in Marietta which was really not terrible, but still not quite as wonderful as a comic store should be. This place had a pretty good crowd of regulars, and so I decided, back in June, to preorder eight copies of a forthcoming prog to serve as participation prizes for the first Indy-themed game. It was impossible to tell with preorders from Diamond, but it looked like issues 1356-57 might have been scheduled to ship either the week of or the week after Indy's release, so I picked 1356 and paid for eight copies, hoping that whatever was in that prog would blow at least one person's mind enough to want to follow up.

Oh, 1356, what a disappointment you were. If you were any reader's first prog, they wouldn't knock down anybody's door to find a second.

The first problem was that horrible cover. I like Charlie Adlard a lot, and his interior work in this issue wasn't at all bad, but what to make of that cover, with a jowly Dredd on his back, uniform opened - he doesn't wear a shirt under that motorcycle leather? - and helpless?

Inside, new readers might have enjoyed two terrific ongoing stories, Leviathan by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, about which more next week, and the hilarious Strontium Dog yarn "The Tax Dodge" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, but both stories were several weeks into their run, and a little unfriendly to new readers. The Judge Dredd episode was the last part of the very underwhelming "The Satanist" by Wagner and Adlard, and it's a complete mess, easily one of Wagner's weakest multi-part stories. Dredd spends about the entire episode helplessly chained to a rock, about to be sacrificed in the Brit-Cit countryside to some demon, only to literally be saved by a bolt from the blue, as though God - or Grud - put a stop to the Devil-Rides-Out wannabe.

Sinister Dexter started a new storyline by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis in this prog, and that might have worked for new readers. Everybody likes to jump on with a first episode, right? Unfortunately, this particular first episode was not an action-packed gunfight with our heroes, but instead a lighthearted, jokey, subplot-heavy installment as everyone prepared for two of the supporting characters to get married. That left a Past Imperfect one-shot by Nigel Long, writing as "Kek-W," and Leigh Gallagher, in a very early professional job for him. The one-shot is not bad, per se, but it's about as unfriendly to American readers as can be possible. It's about Dick Barton, who maybe one in a million of us have ever heard of. That's certainly no fault of anybody's (this is a British comic), but for somebody trying to convince a room of American gamers to try this comic, it sure did add up to a colossal disappointment.

But even if it had worked with one of the eight, and people did want to see what happened next in the ongoing stories, there was still a flaw in my plan. The shop in question didn't order 2000 AD for any but its subscribers - the manager told me that he had two - so anyone hoping to see prog 1357 would not, because of Diamond not holding any overstock for reorders, be able to buy a copy easily.

At least my intentions were good, but what I really needed was the opportunity to point people to some pretty zarjaz collected editions. It would be about nine months before I got the chance, and that's a story for another day.

Speaking of collected editions, in more recent news, over at my Bookshelf blog, I reviewed last year's Anderson: Psi Division phonebook collection earlier this week. Go have a read, link to it and tell your friends!

Next week, three serials knock the readership on their backsides. Come back to hear about Leviathan, From Grace and XTNCT. See you in seven!

70. Tour of Books

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.

February 1999: Prog 1032 has a pretty lovely cover by Greg Staples announcing the new Anderson: Psi Division six-parter, even if it's interrupted by a Babylon 5 promotion with some postcards from that year's TV movie. Staples is not the artist for the new story; in fact, I don't believe that he's ever drawn Anderson other than on this cover. It is instead handled by Anderson's semi-regular artist Steve Sampson. It's not quite his swan song, as a one-shot called "Semper Vi" will appear in the spring, and then Anderson will take a lengthy break from the comic. I don't believe that Sampson has worked for 2000 AD since. (It's a little difficult to check, as Sampson does not have a Wikipedia page, although a fellow by the same name who used to coach the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club does...)

Judge Anderson is, sadly, quite poorly represented in graphic novel form. In the 1980s, Titan did a decent enough job by the standards they'd set for themselves. 64-page collections were pretty common then, and the annual 12-parters that ran in the summers of 1985, 1986 and 1987 were well-suited to that format. But as her series began more sporadic appearances, with one-offs, three-parters or longer adventures, drawn by a variety of artists, the collected editions really fell behind. There was a one-off Dredd in 1988 called "Night of the Brainstem Man," by Alan Grant and Barry Kitson which did not feature Anderson but which served as a prologue to Anderson's 1989 storyline "Helios," which cries out for a reprint, as does "Leviathan's Farewell," a critical one-shot which appeared in the 1989 Sci-Fi Special and whose ramifications are felt in a number of subsequent Anderson adventures.

But as Hamlyn got the rights to 2000 AD material in the 1990s, they released some trades which, haphazardly, just collected work by a single artist, so there's a Kevin Walker Childhood's End book and an Arthur Ranson Satan book, but not a compilation of "Postcards from the Edge," the interesting, episodic adventure with six or seven different artists.

And sadly, Rebellion seems to be following suit. While their graphic novel line is pretty amazing overall, as I will mention in just a moment, their first Anderson collection, Shamballa, is another assortment of Ranson episodes. It's more comprehensive than Hamlyn's Satan was, but it skips so many episodes that it doesn't seem like it could possibly read well, although admittedly I have not picked up my copy. I confess to being annoyed just enough that when four 2000 AD books were in my shop's box last visit and I only had enough cash for three, Shamballa was runt enough to warrant staying behind. It sure looks pretty, at least.



On the other hand, Rebellion's other lines mostly get it emphatically right. I started reading the seventh Nikolai Dante book last week and it's tremendous fun from start to finish. Rebellion have collected all the episodes, in order, and periodically found room for a little supplemental word or two from the creators or their sketchbooks. Plus, of course, the books are printed on gorgeous paper with very nice matte glossy covers and look fantastic. The image here is from the "Tour of Duty" serial, reprinted in the second Dante collection, The Great Game. "Duty" is the fourth of five short serials, written, as always, by Robbie Morrison, in which Nikolai is teamed with one of his half-brothers and sisters on some mission for the Romanovs. Simon Fraser handles art chores on the stories with Andreas and Lulu and Charlie Adlard illustrates the stories with Nastasia and Konstantin. Andy Clarke drew the first one, featuring Viktor.

"Tour of Duty," the adventure with Konstantin, is quite interesting from a production standpoint, as it is actually three separate stories run as a three-part adventure. Actually, I suppose I could get amazingly trainspotterish and tell you that the second Konstantin story was intended as a two-parter - that's the original cliffhanger above - but it was decided to run both parts so that each story would appear as a single chapter, but I think that level of trainspotter detail just makes my readers' eyes roll, so perhaps I shouldn't. Oh, too late.

Anyway, apart from Anderson and Dante, the prog also includes the concluding episode of the Judge Dredd eight-parter "The Scorpion Dance" by John Wagner and John Burns, and the continuing Sinister Dexter epic "Eurocrash" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis...



...about which, more next week.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Speaking of whom, our heroes each take a couple of wounds in parts three and four of this story. They're both very minor and almost instantly recovered from, but that still makes eight confirmed hits on Finnigan and two on Ramone.

See you in seven days!

(Originally posted October 9, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)