199. The Perfect Prog

March 2010: A slight change of style here for this week's entry. I had been planning to put prog 1674 under the spotlight and talk about just The ABC Warriors - because the episode in that issue, featuring two solid pages of Ro-Jaws insulting Mek-Quake's non-existent mother and Blackblood impatiently trying to explain to the idiot that he does not actually have a mother, is just about the funniest thing ever - and the always-excellent Stickleback, but then I read a few more issues and was struck by something in prog 1677. This comic is flawless. It is completely wonderful. Don't believe me? Check out the contents:


Judge Dredd: part four of "Tour of Duty: The Talented Mayor Ambrose" by John Wagner, John Higgins, and S.J. Hurst

At this point in the story, the action has moved back to the city from the townships, and becomes a masterpiece of intrigue and political maneuvering. Deputy Chief Judge Martin Sinfield has taken control of things by persuading Francisco to step aside for the good of his health, meaning once again a villain is in charge of Mega-City One, but he's not a ranting lunatic like Cal was. He's a much more subtle kind of bad guy, and it's interesting how so much of the reader's dislike of him boils down to "Sinfield has beaten Dredd and given him an awful assignment outside the City."

In fact, for all his villainy - and he's one of the great Dredd villains, no question - Sinfield's actual list of crimes is really quite small. The major one, of course, is using drugs to manipulate Francisco. He's used SLD 88, the drug once used to good effect by the serial killer PJ Maybe, to convince Francisco to step down. The beautiful irony is that Maybe has been masquerading as the city's incredibly popular mayor Byron Ambrose for several years, and doesn't appreciate Sinfield's new planned reforms. PJ Maybe's killed a lot of people in a lot of ways, but he's never planned this level of assassination before. This sets up several episodes of germ warfare, with Sinfield stubbornly refusing to die, and then, in his paranoia, he calls in Dredd to investigate these attempts on his life - which nobody else believes are happening, since he's just coincidentally contracting hideous diseases - just before mutant terrorists make a much more overt attempt to kill him. This leads Dredd to suspect that maybe Sinfield is not so paranoid after all... ah, but more on this in two weeks.


Zombo: part three of "Zombo's 11" by Al Ewing and Henry Flint

The first Zombo story was pretty bugnuts, but it's this one where the insanity is ratched past eleven. This time out, we get an ongoing, ear-splittingly loud supporting character based on Simon Cowell, but in this universe, he doesn't see the Susan Boyle character as a way to make a lot of money, but just another headache.


The ABC Warriors: part twelve of "The Volgan War" Bk Four by Pat Mills and Clint Langley

There's nothing quite as hilarious in this concluding episode as the two solid pages of robot mother insults mentioned earlier, but it does have Mek-Quake in a tuxedo appearing on a TV talk show, and Blackblood sending out mass thought-mails to insult everybody else. Classic.


Damnation Station: part one of "To the Dark and Empty Skies" by Al Ewing and Simon Davis

Here's the weakest thing in the comic, but anywhere else, it could be the standout. This is the first episode of a new series - fifteen episodes would appear in a scattered run over five months in 2010, and a second batch of fifteen is said to be in the works for later this year or next. It's future war and political posturing with fist-to-the-chest impact, memorable human characters, very weird aliens, introduced in a really good pilot episode that gives you a fun and flawed audience identification figure, a complex situation, and great artwork by Davis, who alternates with Boo Cook.


part one of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (and the dead left in his wake) by Rob Williams and Dom Reardon

I saved this one for last - it actually appears second in the comic - because it's just so damn jawdropping. Here's my latest wild pronouncement: No other series in the history of the comic has ever had such a perfect first episode.

Yeah, I know, me and hyperbole, but not even the first episode of Zenith, wherein Earth's only two superheroes are killed by an atom bomb dropped on Berlin in 1945, is as great as this. It is a dense and lyrical tale of a cruel killer in the Old West, beautifully written and with very detailed narrative captions, a stylistic choice that has been stupidly out of favor for far too long. These days, maybe nobody does narration in comics better than John Wagner, but darn if Williams doesn't come very close. The prose is just perfectly judged, and Reardon's minimalist artwork perfectly sparse, with a beautiful trick as the color fades away from Azrael's memory. And then the last panel twist. How in the world, I ask you, could you not demand episode two the instant you finish episode one?

Next time, Nikolai Dante says goodbye to a close friend. See you in seven!

189. England's Green and Pleasant Land

October 2008: Previously, I had mentioned that some external forces caused me, your humble chronicler, to lose track of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic for a couple of months. When I started paying attention again, I could not, for the life of me, make any sense of The ABC Warriors. At this point, we're deep into "The Volgan War," which is four separate 72-page stories, each of which is serialized as ten or twelve episodes. Now, one of many things that Matt Smith has got very right in his time as Tharg has been making sure that stories run without a deadline break between episodes. This has mainly been a thing of the past, but the third chunk of "The Volgan War" is one of those unfortunate and very rare exceptions. It runs for six weeks, takes a break for four, and returns for the last six. Worse, it's with episode six that the action shifts to explain what's been going on with the new character of Zippo.

Across the first two chunks of "The Volgan War," we've seen how each of our heroes briefly met the same special forces robot, who usually helped them out of a major jam. Chunk three - oh, all right, "Volume" Three - begins with five episodes in which Steelhorn tells his story of meeting Zippo. So with episode six, they're off to Marinaris City to rescue the guy, but first we have to jump back a few weeks to explain how he was captured, and then there's a horribly-timed break. For anybody hoping to pick up with episode seven in prog 1611, good luck to you. For three weeks, it's Zippo and some architect named Kroll who has lost his mind and decided to become a graffiti artist jumping and swinging around from girder to girder in a wild, dark city that looks like German impressionism gone crazy. We meet some new, villainous secret police who oppose them, and a telepathic commissar character, and a huge population of oppressed workers who sing a jaunty and implausibly very long anthem as the captured Zippo is lowered into molten slag and...

Okay, so in the previous chapter, I acknowledged that part of why I had no clue what was going on in ABC Warriors was because I just didn't care to read 2000 AD for a couple of months after the Stalag 666 incident. I'll even take 95% of the blame. But the rest is because Pat Mills has gone completely loopy with this story, and, for weeks, it's like a fever dream. There aren't even any ABC Warriors in it. This is absolutely an occasion where Mills' desire to write for the eventual book - or, in the case of "The Volgan War," four of the darn things instead of one big, fat phonebook - just doesn't do the weekly episodes well at all.

Mills is actually having a rough time of it in the prog. Around this time, he also has a four-part Judge Dredd story called "Birthday Boy." It's actually one of his very best scripts for the character, and a perfectly fine adventure, and it is completely ruined by the slack, uninvolved, thrill-sucking artwork by Vince Locke. He is a fine artist by any definition, and I believe we can credit him with some excellent episodes of Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre, but this story is such a disaster that it is best forgotten.


So this brings us to Ampney Crucis Investigates, an often very good series by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis that keeps feeling just a hair shy of being one of the all-time 2000 AD greats. It debuts in prog 1611 with a corker of a first episode. It's 1928, and a beautiful woman, Lady Calliope Wykes, kills her husband, who has transformed into a hideous insect creature. Meanwhile, Lord Ampney Crucis, youngest son of Lady Zuleika, awakens from a terrible nightmare. He is haunted by an incident at the Somme, twelve years previously, where he witnessed a hideous Cthulu-like beast dismembering and slaughtering soldiers. He's met by his manservant Cromwell and the game is afoot.

The apparent pitch for Crucis is "Lord Peter Wimsey as written by Lovecraft," meaning it's 50% guaranteed to catch my eye. I really, really love Dorothy L. Sayers' stories of Wimsey and his wonderful family! Unfortunately, I have no interest at all in Lovecraft's turgid prose or ideas, but I like Sayers enough for it not to matter too much. Major Wimsey returned from the Great War so badly shellshocked by the stress of ordering men to their deaths that he was invalided. Lord Crucis - I am not quite clear on the peerage etiquette here; Lord Peter explained in the novel Whose Body? that as he has an older brother, Gerald, he should not be referred to as "Lord Wimsey," but Ampney, who has at least two older siblings, goes by "Lord Crucis" - came back driven mad by the sight of the worm-beast. Both characters wear monocles as affectations and both had a fiancee call off the wedding as a result of their war experience, and then both began amateur investigations, only Lord Crucis focuses on cases with an occult aspect.


Ampney Crucis Investigates is achingly close to being one of my all-time favorites, but so many little things work against it. You can almost sense a little hesitation from Tharg in the short little run of the first story, "Vile Bodies." (You'll note, of course, that Lord Crucis's first recorded adventure recalls the name of Lord Peter's.) It's a case that would really benefit from many more pages for the character to, you know, investigate things. It feels like Tharg has just given it a short six-week slot at the end of the year, to burn it away, not really certain that readers, other than me, are all that interested in posh upper-class detectives from the throwback days of the 1920s, no matter how many Cthulus and bee-monsters are stuck in the story.

The result is a pilot that moves at the requisite rocket fuel pace, but it leaves a hell of a lot behind. Lord Crucis and Cromwell actually have a third member of their party, a chauffeur named Lorelli, who appears in only one panel of this story, and hardly at all in the subsequent adventures. The main character additionally received a stunning second injury when he met the Cthulu-thing in France: it tore his feet off. But this isn't mentioned anywhere, and only shown in passing in the second story, which would appear in 2010. One of the original plans for the character, as seen in the Simon Davis sketches that appear in this story's collected edition, was for him to have both artificial hands and feet, but only the wooden feet remained when the series began. There's just no space for the characters to breathe with so much plot compacted into so few pages.

But worse, the plot of the first story, at least, barely leaves Lord Crucis with anything to investigate, let alone deduce. This isn't detective fiction as I enjoy it; it's just a very simplistic adventure story with a monocle-wearing lead. It is a fine distraction, and gorgeously drawn, but there's just no meat to chew on. Lord Crucis doesn't work as well as an action hero as Edginton seems to wish for him to. Here, he follows exactly the same very short path of clues that even the thickest village constable should have followed, and, in the end, is rescued by a risible "old school chum" working for the government and whose climactic reappearance in the narrative is telegraphed from a mile off. Over the course of a labyrinthine 13-week story with dead ends, more characters, and many more corpses, I expect that the "Vile Bodies" that might have been, would have been a huge triumph.

I enjoyed the second and third Ampney Crucis Investigates stories somewhat more, albeit with reservations, although the all-action weirdness of the fourth story, now thrown into a parallel universe and bringing our hero into two-fisted conflict with some of those otherworldly horrors, was a massive letdown. The fifth story will begin in just one week, in Prog 2013. I have my fingers crossed for it; this is a series that I want so badly to embrace, but the darn thing keeps frustrating me.

But that's still many more chapters away. In the next installment of Thrillpowered Thursday, we'll look at Prog 2009, The Red Seas and Marauder. That'll be in January, after a few weeks of recharging, and reviewing some other House of Tharg goodies over at my Bookshelf blog. Thanks for reading, everybody!

178. General Public!

August 2007: On the cover this month is Blackblood, the treacherous and nasty ABC Warrior programmed for backstabbing, double-crossing, and evildoing. When the character was first introduced in 1979, the shtick was that he was one of the no-good evil Volgans with whom our heroic Warriors were battling, and he was shut down, abducted, and reprogrammed to fight for the allies. So as the memoir-based epic "The Volgan Wars," written by Pat Mills and drawn by Clint Langley, returns, it's natural that when Blackblood gets a chance to share one of his old war stories, it's from the other side, and a story about sending brave young hammersteins to the smelter, where they could be turned into AK-47s to help the war effort.

Back in May, I was telling you about the first chunk of this 288-page epic, and I'll refer anybody curious about its four-chunk format there to learn more. This phase of the story sees Blackblood and Deadlock telling their tales, while, in Broadband Asylum, the Volgan warlord robot Volkhan has come back to life and convinced Mek-Quake to join his new army. The segments with Blackblood are the most entertaining, thanks to a fantastic running gag that goes on for weeks and never gets old. Not programmed to understand the idioms of decadent Western speech, Blackblood thinks that the phrase "the general public" refers to a top-secret Allied commander. Torture, murder, war crimes, they all mean nothing to Blackblood, who is bound and determined to ferret out the elusive General Public.

The lineup for this summer's run of stories is a really good one, with Judge Dredd in a number of short adventures and one-offs by a variety of creators, culminating in the sequel to "Mandroid" by John Wagner and Carl Critchlow, The ABC Warriors, Stone Island for its second and final story by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis, Button Man by John Wagner and Frazer Irving, and, in its epic conclusion, Caballistics Inc. by Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon. Except we didn't know at the time that this was going to be its conclusion.

I do enjoy Caballistics, but in its most recent appearances, the individual adventures got lost in subplots. The previous "story" was called "Changelings" and ran from progs 1469-1474 and the actual storyline that dealt with changelings was about a quarter of the narrative. I think that Rennie recognized that he was juggling lots of characters and lots of continuing plots, and needed to resolve things before moving forward. Then he decided not to move forward any longer.

At 40 pages, "Ashes" is the longest Cabs story, and it sees the team dealing with the old threat of one-time Department Q member Mr. Magister, a sociopath with incredible psychic powers, and then using Magister as an unwitting ally against their benefactor Ethan Kostabi, who's been revealed to have a much darker agenda for the team than they realized.

The conclusion leaves any future stories in doubt. Dr. Jonathan Strange had been killed in the previous story, and Ness meets his end this time. Chapter and Verse are summarily dismissed and referred to as being very grievously wounded, but, bizarrely, not shown on-panel in the end. It's left unclear as to whether Kostabi was telling the truth about Verse's maiming, or whether Hannah Chapter would ever walk again, and for such a popular character to have her fate handwaved is really, really odd. It's an apocalyptic and wild conclusion, and huge fun, but Chapter and Verse deserved a little better than that.

About two months after this story ended in October, one final-to-date Cabs episode appeared in Prog 2008. It set up some new plot threads, looked in on a supporting player, and did not mention Chapter and Verse. This leaves the story in a very, very weird place as far as fans' ability to sit down and read the darn thing goes. Earlier in 2007, the second collected edition, entitled Creepshow, was released, reprinting about the second half of the series, through 2006's "Changelings." But then there are only two stories, just 50 pages, left, leaving this epic climax unreprinted. I imagine that Tharg and Gordon Rennie have at least talked about doing some more stories, and they know more than they're telling. If there is more Cabs in the pipeline, then they should get to work on the damn thing, and if not, then "Ashes" and "The Nativity" should be collected in one of those freebie floppy "graphic novels" bagged with the Megazine, and then the whole series should be re-collected in a single, large edition that will replace the existing two. They should get on that as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, for those of us who enjoyed Cabs for its weird, dark, occult stories, in 2011, Rennie took the supporting character of DI Harry Absolam and spun him off into a series of his own, kind of. Apparently set in an alternate reality where there might not have ever been a Cabs team, and where vowels don't appear in the same order, Absalom debuted in prog 1732 and there have been three stories so far. Drawn magnificently by Tiernen Trevallion, it features an aging, alcoholic London copper and his team of police spookbusters, and is so darn popular on its own that people might resent space being given over to more Cabs when we could have Harry double-dealing, drinking and demonizing instead.

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)

Next time, speaking of the general public, we'll see what they have to say about nudity in comics when Stone Island finds a way to push everybody's buttons. See you in seven days!

171. ABC Fumetti

January 2007: Good grief, didn't I just write about "The Volgan War"...? Well, it was March. Close enough. Anyway, one of the big new launches in the annual 100-page prog had been a major new ABC Warriors adventure. It's a huge 288-page epic told across four chunks of story, and although I recall that events in the third segment got a little confusing, overall it is one of writer Pat Mills' biggest triumphs. If "The Shadow Warriors" had seen Mills flexing his muscles and finally doing right by these characters after many years of subpar adventures, then this is where he raises the game.

From here, I'm going to cannibalize from an earlier review that I wrote, because I can do that sort of thing. Since Mills found success working in the French comic industry, which is based around annual "album" releases of a 64- or 80-page story, or, if you will, a yearly episode of a much larger story, he's exported the form to 2000 AD, which programs strips in weekly six-page installments. Mills' annual story is further subdivided into, say, ten or so weekly episodes.

Working in this format, Mills is able to tell incredibly long stories across several years, and Rebellion, the publisher of 2000 AD, has two prospective revenue streams for the reprints. Working in conjunction with artist Clint Langley, Mills first used the experiment to craft six 48-page episodes of Slaine. These were paired together and reprinted in three large, oversized, but thin hardbacks with an eye on the European market, where this sort of material could safely be expected to sell by the bucketload in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these countries, the hardback "album" has long been the default format for the comic medium, much in the way that monthly "floppy" superhero funnybooks from Marvel and DC are the default in the United States.

Mills and Langley's next project was "The Volgan War," and it appeared as four annual stories from 2007-2010. In it, the characters reminisce about their original days of combat before uniting, only to find some common threads in their stories, including the strange, classified appearances of a top-secret special forces flamethrower robot. As the series unfolds - and it sags a bit in the third chunk before roaring to a colossal, incredible finish - the events of the old Volgan War come back to haunt the Warriors on Mars in very unexpected ways, leaving the team permanently fragmented and new, dangerous bad guys waiting for them.

Overall, I think it's a masterpiece, and easily the best Warriors adventure since 1988's classic "Black Hole," even with some of the head-scratching events of the third volume. It works extremely well in hardback form as well. Following the precedent of the oversized Slaine books assembled with Europe in mind, Rebellion collected the four 72-page stories, beefed them up with some additional artwork by Langley and some extra design work, and released a quartet of 96-page hardbacks, where the material shined even brighter.

But I was telling you about this first quarter of the story. Well, it begins with the Warriors committing their demented member Mek-Quake to an asylum on Mars, not knowing that the place is effectively a recruiting center for violent, combat-ready machines looking for a new boss. Hammerstein, square as ever, is reminded of how he was sometimes forced to abandon his "boys" in combat in 22nd Century Europe. Langley has a ball with the scenes of robot combat and mecha-carnage. At one point, we meet giant robot mecha-Stalins called Uncle Joes, and they're revealed in a turn-the-comic-the-other-way double-page spread that serves as one tall, vertical panel. It's a deliberate callback to similar introductions of giant robots in the original series (Mad George, in prog 138) and in Book Three of Nemesis the Warlock (the giant Torque-Armada in prog 340-something).

After Hammerstein's story, and his introduction to the flamethrowing secret agent Zippo, Mongrol reports that he met Zippo just before the paratrooping accident that destroyed his original body. His tale, told across three issues, is actually an expansion of the character's first appearance, only with Lara, the cute young girl who rebuilt him, reimagined considerably from Mike McMahon's notion! McMahon's depiction of Lara in a nightdress, secretly rebuilding a robot in the dead of night, evoked candlelit, stormy potboilers, old-fashioned thrillers, and, of course, Frankenstein. Langley's Lara is a Suicide Girl. But this sequence is still amazing, just for how well Mills expanded those original four pages into something with more weight. Reading it, old fans are sure to recognize various lines and snatches of dialogue, and wonder how on earth Mills managed to stick so much information into the original comic in the first place.

And then there's Joe Pineapples' story, which is definitely one for people who like Mills best when anything goes. Working behind the Volgan lines in old Moscow and tasked to assassinate the enemy super-robot Volkhan, Joe has smuggled just enough innocuous parts in his own chassis that he can kill a civilian taxi driver robot and, using chunks of it and its GPS, pull off another of his absurd, impossible shots. Astonishingly, it's one of those very rare moments where Joe doesn't get a clean kill, and leaving town also requires Zippo's assistance. This volume of the story ends with Mek-Quake in considerable danger, and our heroes wondering whatever happened to Zippo, and some of those plot threads get picked up when it resumes in August.

While The ABC Warriors and its stablemates Kingdom and Stickleback (which I talked about last week) were getting all the attention, Rob Williams' Low Life also surfaced for a short four-week story, its only appearance in 2007. Again drawn by Simon Coleby - this would be his last work on the series to date - it is the second time that a four-part comedy has spotlighted Dirty Frank. This time out, he's teamed with another undercover Wally Squad operative, Eric Coil. This poor fellow had been infected by a mutating plot contrivance in the Cursed Earth - we'll call it "The Jim Kidd Effect" - and returned to Mega-City One with his brain intact and his body de-aged to a baby's.

It's just Coil's luck that the Wally Squad occasionally has need of somebody who can pose as a baby, like... well... actually, I'm pretty sure that this has never, ever happened before. "Baby Talk" is a definite brain-in-neutral story, just there for the laughs, which is a really good thing, because everything else in the prog at this time is either ultra-serious or tragic. In Kingdom, Gene's entire pack is dead, and in Stickleback, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey's wife and children have been killed in a house fire, so thank heaven there's something light and uncomplicated to follow. Even Judge Dredd has found the ugly beginnings of Mega-City One too much of a pain in the rear to continue unabated, and so it's taking a nine-week break from the story to run some shorter episodes, although that's probably more to do with that story's artist Carlos Ezquerra taking a long weekend and a good stretch than it is Tharg giving us a merciful break from the relentless and the grim.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Low Life: Mega-City Undercover (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Speaking of a merciful break, Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take June off, during which time I've got four 2000 AD features lined up for my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf. See you in July for a look back at the actual issue that started this blog going in 2007, and a new eight-week run of your most favoritest blog ever. Credo!

153. History's Last Record

June 2005: Have you ever had a relationship fail so awfully that it poisons everything that you experienced during that period? I have. It only happened once, and when my time on this earth is finally finished, I'm going to have strong words with somebody on the other side, because there are about seven months of my life that I want back. Nothing good came of these seven months. I have no happy memories of that girl, at all. Except this one episode of Slaine.

The love-hate relationship that I have with Slaine is pretty simple. I just do not understand why this strip is still running. Well, it seems to be on an indefinite hiatus again, and it may not return, but the editor's and writer's insistence on bringing it back, again and again, after it keeps coming to genuine, memorable conclusions leaves me completely baffled. The very best stories are the ones with endings. Slaine's story has ended. Several times. Each time it comes back after these endings, it does so weaker and less thrilling than before. And yet, Pat Mills is such an amazing writer that, even when the series is treading creative water, he's still able, every once in a while, to do something completely stunning with it.

There's a school of thought that suggests that the epic, Simon Bisley-painted "The Horned God" should have been the grand finale. Despite the fact that about the last thirty pages look like Bisley painted them in one afternoon on sheets of typing paper, with none of the lush detail of the earlier parts, I can get behind that. But then we wouldn't have had the awesome, ass-kicking reintroduction to the ultraviolence in "Demon Killer," when Slaine arrives in his future, tells Ukko, "Announce me, dwarf," and proceeds to lay down an awesome beating on a company of Roman soldiers. And there are other examples. The "all of your adopted kids are dead" moment of "The Swan Children," for instance.

But wherever Slaine should have ended, it certainly should have done so before the "Books of Invasion" cycle began, shouldn't it? This started in 2002's year-end "Prog 2003" and, forty episodes over two and a half years later, it finally finishes in issue 1442. (Well, the stickler in me points out that it is not technically five "books" of eight episodes each, because Tharg has programmed several double-part episodes along the way, and the stickler in me also points out, as I did in an earlier entry, that Mills has received some sort of a "do it your way" pass to really script in terms of 48-page episodes that just get broken down into six-or-twelve page chunks for serialization, but then again, the stickler in me has no friends.)



So anyway, "The Books of Invasion" is forty episodes long, and it has detailed Slaine and his allies' war against the Fomorians, undersea beasts who control air-breathing mammals in a nasty, parasitic relationship. It has been agonizing, humorless and trite. Niamh's death, as recounted previously, is one of the worst creative decisions that Mills has ever made, the living definition of "women in refrigerators" fantasy, done for no better reason than to turn the male lead into a brutal object of retribution. I've tried to like it, but the only moment in the whole run, before the finale, that engaged me at all came just a few weeks previously, and it was pretty short-lived. Tracking down the last of the Fomorian Sea Devils, Slaine and his fellows have been finding villages where the beasts have laid eggs under the skins of all the farmers. With no other choice, our heroes have killed hundreds of civilians along the way. Exhausted and emotionally drained, there is a brief moment where Slaine, who has killed and axed and beaten his way through more than twenty years of adventure, finally denies his catchphrase, and finds the death toll too many.

But the end...

No good will ever come of me sharing with you readers how miserable I was, and how I was denying my unhappiness in this relationship very early on. I wanted so badly for it to work that I was overlooking warning signs that astronauts can see from space. She poisoned everything, and I let her, because I was so lonely, and so scared that my children wouldn't have a stepmother.

I picked up my comics from the shop in Athens where I collected them, and went over to her house, and after a couple of hours, she started cooking supper and I sat down in her den to read.



The war is finally over, and Slaine is saying his goodbyes, after seeing Gael crowned the new High King and before leaving for good, telling his newest allies the usual heroic "look after yourselves and stand guard against evil," but he has one thing to do before he saddles up. He needs to tell Niamh a last farewell.

Clearly, I'm a sensitive guy, and I've blubbed over emotional stories many, many times before. Pixar's Up did it to me twice in one film, wretched thing. But holy freaking anna, I will never forget how I teared up at this scene. It is one of the most amazing moments in all of 2000 AD, and all forty of those episodes were worth it to get us to this point. The goodbye is the saddest thing I've ever read before Slaine leaves Niamh's ceremonial tent. The punch in the gut, silent, single panel revelation after he leaves is the meanest thing I've ever read.

And while Langley's artwork throughout the series never engaged me emotionally despite being a huge technical achievement, turning the page to see that amazing double-page spread... Now that, good readers, that was one hell of an ending. A complete, standing ovation triumph that left no doubt whatsoever why we call Mills the Guv'nor.

Me weeping and choking back tears in her den, putting down the final episode of Slaine while the air smelled of her darn good chicken and dumplings. That's the one good memory I have from that relationship. Thinking of her makes me think of this episode, and thinking of this episode makes me think of her, at which point I remember a little more, and concede that, honestly, well, all right, it was not quite as relentlessly awful as I make out.

Maybe there were one or two other okay moments.

Slaine, sadly, returned at the end of 2005 anyway for a wholly unnecessary epilogue to "Books of Invasion" to reunite with Ukko. And again in 2009-2010 for four additional, utterly pointless 24-page stories. Mentions in this blog of any of these episodes, when we come to them, will be dismissive and brief. But for one beautiful day that summer, he had the best final episode of any comic character, ever.

Next time, over to Judge Dredd Megazine as Jack Point returns!

121. By this point, it's been too many

So anyway, we were rereading 2000 AD, weren't we? Shown here is the cover of prog 1326, from February 2003. The art is by Clint Langley, who had done a good deal of work for Tharg in the nineties. He took a few years off and developed a really striking new style, full of gorgeous photo manipulation and computer-rendered landscapes and monsters. The results were sometimes controversial, with an occasional reader not wishing to see beyond the strip's ancestors in cheesy fumetti photo-comics, but I think it looks simply terrific.

On the down side, well, it's just more Slaine, isn't it? The strip marks Pat Mills' return to 2000 AD after a couple of years away, during which he created Requiem, Vampire Knight for Nickel Editions in France. Returning to the fold, as it were, he created a new series, Black Siddha, for the Megazine with Simon Davis, so he has a major new strip running in each title. I'm sure that I'll come back and talk about Siddha some other day; I think it's completely terrific and I wish there was a heck of a lot more of it. I wish I could say the same about Slaine, but I just can't. It's tired and weak and long, long past its sell-by date at this point.

By this point in the continuity, what's happened is that Slaine became the first High King of Ireland (back in "The Horned God"), he served his seven years and was ritually put to death ("Demon Killer"), he was rescued by the goddess and sent upwards through time to carry out missions for her against those awful Christians later in history (which had been foreshadowed back in "Time Killer") and he was allowed to return home and resume his position to battle the Secret Commonwealth led by his old enemy Maeb. This story, the first in a five-volume saga called "The Books of Invasion," sees all those monsters and sea demons that we could've sworn Slaine despatched almost a decade previously in strip-time (you remember, Balor the Evil-Eye and the Fomorian Sea Devils and all those guys), newly allied with a long-limbed sword-wielding beast called Moloch.

The whole thing feels like a tired old Charles Bronson revenge flick, and that's even before Moloch rapes and murders Slaine's wife Niamh. At that point, it feels like the end of comics.



Now, fair's fair, Pat Mills probably did not then, and does not now, give any kind of care for the feelings of superhero-based American fandom. With his attention focused on publishing in France, and the gleefully bizarre mindbender that is Requiem, he probably had no idea that a growing segment of female readers, taking advantage of the internet to form communities, was drawing attention to a big problem in western adventure comics.

Under the blanket charge of "women in refrigerators," Gail Simone charged that female characters in superhero fiction were, historically and increasingly, used principally as plot devices, raped, killed, maimed or depowered, in order to spur male characters into action. This proved to be a rallying point for many readers whose voices had been underrepresented in fandom (outside of LSH APAs, anyway), and drove wedges between creators and fans that, in some cases, still exist today. It became a question of whether you stood with the grouchy old men, or the radical feminists.

That Mills strides the line the way he does shouldn't be too surprising. Never mind his laudable, continuous insistence that his first wife, Angela Kincaid, always receive full credit as Slaine's co-creator, the whole of his nineties work was the definition of radical feminist, with strong central characters like Third World War's Eve, and the pagan perspectives of Finn and ABC Warriors showing chaos and Earth mother-worship triumphing over fraternal order and military discipline. On the other hand, there's nobody in comics as grouchy as the Guv'nor, and Niamh's grisly fate is nothing more a shamefully transparent plot device, set up just to give Slaine a new arch-enemy. So I guess he's both.

Well, even though Slaine is a huge disappointment, the artwork remains amazing, and, in 2005, Mills will conclude the Books of Invasion saga with a jawdropping epilogue that will leave more than one reader's thrill-circuits totally overloaded. But that's a tale for another day.

There are a couple of other major stories running at the moment. Perhaps the most important is the debut six-part adventure for Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon's Caballistics Inc., an excellent occult thriller set in the same universe as the writer's 2001 hit Necronauts.



Caballistics deals with a taskforce of paranormal troubleshooters. They are financed by a super-rich, reclusive former pop star named Ethan Kostabi, and the team has five members in their first mission, including former employees of the British government's Q Department, two gun-toting field operatives named Chapter and Verse, and a real piece of work named Ravne. When we meet him, he's enjoying the fruits of a shocking mass murder, and when the story ends, we learn he was a Nazi officer, and does not seem to have aged a day in sixty years.

The series seems to draw inspiration from everywhere, most obviously Mike Mignola's Hellboy stories, and the scripts are full of lovely in-joke references to science fiction and horror film and TV, including Quatermass and the Pit and a couple of Doctor Who serials. It's probably a little silly to imagine that this world can possibly be the same one as Doctor Who's, but robot Yeti were definitely defeated in the London Underground a few years prior to this adventure. Probably a little more recently than 1967, though, given the age of the soldiers in the tunnels!

Cabs will become a major ongoing series over the next few years, with more than fifty episodes and two collected editions. It will be very fun to reread this great series, which remains hugely popular with the fandom.

Next time, Judge Dredd battles 20th Century Fox Aliens and 22nd Century Tharg Robots! Be here!

116. Spurrier's Scrap

October 2002: A common tool in every 2000 AD editor's arsenal - nobody cares about this but me - is the use of double-length episodes to either start or finish a serial in order to clear the decks before the next launch issue of all-new stories. In prog 1312, Richard Elson gets cover duties for the double-length final part of The Scrap, a five-week serial written by Si Spurrier. It's quite a departure from the still-new script droid. Spurrier's Future Shocks had been marked by a streak of piss-taking humor in wild, SF scenarios, and the first four-week run of his first ongoing series, Bec & Kawl, had been nothing but gags in search of a scenario, but The Scrap is anything but funny. It's a dark, unaccountably heavy and very derivative "ugly future" story. Dystopia, garbage in the streets, all-business police, an artificial intelligence running things that has a hidden agenda... yes, this is derivative of a great many things, and could safely be skipped if it weren't for a couple of things in its favor. Elson's' art is terrific, and the lead character, a police officer named Maliss, is an entertaining, sympathetic hero. Outside of Marge in Fargo, she's also one of the few comic characters that I can recall who we meet when she's heavily pregnant.

While The Scrap is pretty dark and heavy, the same can't be said for Dan Abnett's Sinister Dexter, which is going through a pretty silly phase during this period. In a four-parter called "Deaky Poobar, We Hardly Knew Ye," drawn by Steve Parkhouse, our heroes return the body of a fellow gunshark to his native England and run afoul of the locals, getting in the middle of a war between the mob and the police, represented here by Inspector "Terse" and DS "Thewlis."



Things get even sillier after this. There's a one-off drawn by Mike Collins in which Finnigan falls for a ridiculous sting operation the cops have come up with, using a TV quiz show to get criminals to fess up to their deeds, and a one-off drawn by Steve Roberts in which our now on-the-lam heroes meet an old-timer who's been hiding out for thirty years. This prompts them to really get way out of town, and the next several episodes will see them going off-planet. It's been shown a time or two that the future world of Sin Dex incorporates aliens and interplanetary travel, but this will be the first time Abnett really depicts it, and it's played completely for laughs as well. Suffice it to say that when the series finally starts taking itself seriously again with the introduction of Kal Cutter in 2003, everybody will appreciate it.

So that's this run of the prog: Heavy stories that take themselves too seriously, and serious stories which are playing things for laughs. And Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper as well. Happily, better things are right around the corner.

In other news, Rebellion has released the first in a planned four-volume collection of the ongoing ABC Warriors saga "The Volgan War" by Pat Mills and Clint Langley. It's part of the company's periodic hardback line, and it is completely wild and wonderful.

Over time, the story of the Warriors has gotten a little continuity-heavy, but this volume goes out of its way to be friendly to new readers. It follows on from the 2003-06 series "The Shadow Warriors" with the decision to put their small-minded, demented member Mek-Quake into a sanitorium for some long-overdue rest, and this prompts our centuries-old robot heroes to reminisce about their earliest adventures, predating our introductions to them. It turns out there was a lot more to their backstory than we were ever told, and they're each surprised to learn that each of them crossed paths with a mysterious, flamethrowing "special forces" robot called Zippo...

"The Volgan War" really completes the long overdue resurgence of this once-classic title, which spent the 1990s a shadow of its former self. Mills has rarely been weirder or more inventive in throwing completely bizarre concepts at his readers, and while he's writing for a more mature audience than the ten year-olds who gobbled up the original series, with its bazooka-totin' robots on dinosaurs, he's still able to balance an intricate plot with high-wire ideas. So we get armies of multi-armed Hammersteins locked in combat with giant Mecha-Stalins, and taxicabs which can be converted into weapons.

But it's the artwork that drives this one out of the park. I've certainly admired all the great artists who've contributed to the series over the years, from Mike McMahon to Simon Bisley to Henry Flint, but in Clint Langley, the definitive Warriors visuals have at last been found. Langley's computer-created world is unlike anything we've seen in 2000 AD before, fully-realized, three-dimensional depictions of decaying future war battlefields populated by hundreds of rusting mechanical soldiers. In the comic, it looked pretty amazing. On the better paper in this book, the results are eye-popping.

This edition reprints the story that originally appeared in "Prog 2007" and issues 1518-1525 of the weekly, beefing it up with some extra pages - nothing too extravagant, usually just some double-page spreads - along with a long-overdue Warriors' Timeline, explaining things for new readers and clarifying some of the points that have caused some confusion in the past, along with the now-standard introduction and commentary by Mills. It's truly an amazing collection, and on the short list for the year's best book; yes, it's as good as that.

Next time, set sail on the Red Seas! See you in seven!

110. Atavar and the UOS

We're up to April 2002 now, and here on the cover of prog 1287, Nikolai Dante celebrates his recent Eagle Award win for best British comic character. This will prove to be artist Simon Fraser's farewell to the character that he co-created for the next four years. As Dante moves into his third phase, "the pirate years," it will be with John Burns as sole artist. Fraser, who will return to Dante in October 2006, is at this time residing in Africa. The series will take a number of very long rests during the third phase, especially during 2004 when writer Robbie Morrison will be engaged in writing The Authority for the Wildstorm imprint at DC Comics.

This issue sees the conclusion of an eight-part storyline called "The Romanov Job," in which Dante and his occasional sparring-and-bedpartner the Countessa work with several master criminals to heist his vanquished family's crown jewels. The other characters in the narrative are analogues of other comic characters, including Catwoman, Janus Stark and the Spider, and they are hunted down by Captain Emmanuel, the Luther Arkwright-analogue who had been introduced in a 1999 story.


Robbie Morrison really closed out this part of Dante in fine form. There's a sense of desperation in the narrative that somehow fits where the series was at the time. After the civil war, the imperial Russia of the far future is a much more dangerous place, and it's not a world where our hero can go gallivanting around pulling heists and breaking hearts like he did before things completely fell apart. When, of course, he gets stabbed in the back by somebody he should have known better to trust, Nikolai falls back on his "I'm too cool to kill" line, only to be slapped in the face by it. The story ends on a cliffhanger which won't be resolved for another nine months. It was reprinted in the sixth Dante collection, Hell and High Water, in 2008.

Elsewhere in the issue, the other stories are marking time until the next relaunch issue, prog 1289, and so there's a Steve Moore / Clint Langley Tales of Telguuth and a Future Shock by Mike Carey and John Charles to fill the page count, along with the last part of a three-episode Judge Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Paul Marshall. I believe the Telguuth installment is actually notable for being the first appearance of Langley's current style, which he has used on Slaine and The ABC Warriors over the past few years. I think we're long overdue for reading a detailed interview with Langley where he discusses how he creates these odd "fantasy Photoshop fumetti" of his. However, the most interesting strip this week, other than Dante, is the penultimate part of a serial called Atavar.

I'm very curious how I'll feel about Atavar when I finish reading the third book of the series in a few months' time. This is a really odd little story by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson in which a group of powerful-but-desperate aliens, tens of thousands of years in the future, reconstruct an atavar of the long-extinct human race in order to help them in their war against machine-creatures called UOS. No series, with the possible exception of that cosmetic warrior "Rouge Trooper," has ever been misspelled as often as Atavar. Everybody wants to call this one "Avatar," perhaps missing the point that the aliens are looking into history to find something from the past to save their species.



Atavar began in prog 1281 with one of the most unusual first episodes of any series. We see our human character awake in a strange cave system from what appears to be cryo-sleep or something and run, panicking, from the huge aliens around him. There is no dialogue. Well, nothing in English, anyway. The human's got a lot to say, but it's all "HNNN!" and "NNNNN!" and the aliens haven't upgraded him to understand their language yet. It's a bizarre little experiment, and it certainly got reader's attention, even if many of them balked at the necessity of spending five pages on it.

The other thing that's really notable about Atavar is that it comes to a spectacular twist ending. The conclusion is so darn cool that everybody reread the previous progs to see how the heck they missed something so neat. It was an ending so perfect that bringing Atavar back, twice, left a bad taste in my mouth and I honestly only just glanced at the later episodes, complaining, in that know-it-all fan way, that the pages would have been better spent on more Vanguard or Balls Brothers. I'll try to judge them more fairly when I come to prog 1329 later in the year.

Next time, those bloody students take over! Eyebrows are furrowed and knives are drawn as Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts bring us Bec & Kawl. Plus, a look at the collected edition of Heavy Metal Dredd. See you in seven!

35. Finn vs. Slaine: and only one shall continue!

June 1996: Prog 996 continues a strong lineup, with Carlos Ezquerra back at work on the John Wagner-scripted Judge Dredd story "The Pit," a Henry Flint cover announcing this week's episode of Strontium Dogs by Peter Hogan and Trevor Hairsine, a creepy Vector 13 installment by Brian Williamson and Kevin Cullen, and two ongoing series scripted by the Guv'nor, Pat Mills. (Can I do that, incidentally? Mills has earned the fandom-approved nickname "Guv'nor," but I don't know that an American can actually use that term in any other situation without looking awfully silly.)

Anyway, while Wagner and Ezquerra bring the Pit storyline towards its spectacular, explosive conclusion - one which leaves readers wondering whether any of these new Dredd castmembers will make it out of the mob war alive - Finn is also making its way towards its end, in a very unusual nine-episode story that feels a lot like a throwback to comics from the late 70s and early 80s. "Season of the Witch," on paper, is a nine-part story, but it's actually a series of loosely-related two- and three-part stories with an umbrella title, in which the magic-powered man with the machine gun goes up against four different opponents in the employ of the evil Lord Michael and his comedy Freemasons. Finn, we must recall, came during a time when Pat Mills didn't want to write believable villains, just ones with really nasty weapons.

1996 sees us past the real hump in the Guv'nor's low-quality phase of the early '90s. (It's a hump which, coincidentally or not, overlaps with the period he was co-writing Punisher 2099 with Tony Skinner for Marvel Comics. The only thing Punisher 2099 was ever good for was giving me a character to play with Nemesis and Torquemada in Heroclix on "teams my opponents will not guess the theme of" day.) Neither Finn nor Slaine are particularly bad at all, but it's just not possible to read these comics and not know that Mills has done better, before and since.



Really, the villains are the biggest problem. At no point can you believe any of them as legitimate characters, and that's the greatest failing of these strips. I guess you can argue that Finn and Slaine are playing for very high stakes - the future of Mother Earth - and consequently, the actual dramatic conflict of the comic page is not as important or as significant as getting the reader to think about the bigger themes involved. Mills has done this before, to very good effect. Of course, you know he was the author of Charley's War in Battle Picture Weekly, which was one of, if not the very best of all war comics. Periodically, Mills would show us the aging, impotent aristos and generals directing the slaughter on the battlefields, and they'd be little more than bizarre caricatures, jarringly two-dimensional when weighed against the vivid portrayals of the tommies in the trenches. Yet this choice worked because we never saw the enlisted men interacting with the toffs.

By contrast, Finn will frequently have a violent argument with some industry baron in Lord Michael's power structure, and the conflict falls completely apart. Mills gave his heroic characters a great deal of believability, but he also gave them 100% of the moral argument. This is why, say, Batman's enemies don't explain their moral reasoning in an attempt to persuade the readers' sympathies. When Finn has the owner of Big Auto Company tied to a chair, we don't need the nonsense about Big Auto having an obligation to its stockholders to increase profits by polluting the environment. It's fake, and feels forced and unnatural.

Lord Michael himself is unlike Mills' classic villains like Torquemada or the Lord Weird Slough Feg in that he is not fanatical about anything. In fact, he's oddly joyless, completely lacking positive passion for anything at all. Here's where the structure really fails for me. You can identify the main villain because he's the old, cranky, balding jerk. He has no life whatsoever, but the top witch in Finn's coven, Mandy, is full of life and energy and radiates charisma and fun. It's too obvious and too easy - wouldn't this be a more compelling strip if the main villain enjoyed his position half as much as Mandy does hers? The sexual angle is pretty clear and pretty lazy, too. Mandy represents virility and is sexually desirable, while Lord Michael is old and overweight. Imagine how much more interesting this might have been with those roles reversed?

And yet, Finn remains readable and sometimes compelling because it's so grandiose, with so many wild elements, and its plot is completely unpredictable. It is also worth noting that the entire dramatic structure of Finn reappears in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, where you've again got posh aristos in big country houses using secret handshakes and allying with aliens in complex schemes to keep humanity down, and the good guys have chaos magic and machine guns on their side. Morrison did it a dozen times better, when he had artists who could translate his scripts for us and when he wasn't fucking around in Revolutionary France anyway, but fair's fair, Finn came first.



The cardboard villain problem continues in Slaine, but there's a sense of weirdness and completely bizarre plotting in "Lord of Misrule" which makes the story stand out more as being fresh and original, and we see Mills flesh out some older ideas to much better effect. The sequence in this story where Marian is sentenced to death evokes a similar incident in the 1992 ABC Warriors story "Khronicles of Khaos," only it works much better here, as Mills is able to devote more space to it.

There is a lot more Slaine to come in the next several months - the character gets one of his longest-ever runs throughout 1996-97 as he becomes a semi-regular cast member of the comic - but Clint Langley won't be with him for the time being, although he will be used on some other series in the next few years. Langley will return to Slaine in 2003 and the Books of Invasion storyline, his artwork honed to an intriguing love-it or hate-it heavily-PhotoShopped style (I quite like it!), but other artists will handle the stories to come.

Finn, however, is shelved after this story. Thrill-Power Overload - you know, if there were more available sources, I'd reference 'em - explains that David Bishop wanted to keep Mills' energies directed down one avenue, the more popular one, while also limiting the opportunities to get on the Guv'nor's bad side. Since Bishop and his fellow former editors Alan McKenzie and Andy Diggle have all gone on the record about some frictions with Mills, I think I can understand the reasoning!

But right now, Bishop can ill-afford to spend time fighting with a freelancer about Finn. He's about to piss off a huge chunk of the Megazine's readership with some reprints. More on that next time!

(Originally published 1/3/08 at LiveJournal.)

10. Nemesis Arrives and Departs

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.

It's August 1994 and this is prog 902. Tharg had an interesting idea to release three jump-on progs over the course of five weeks and it works pretty well. Prog 900 had been given over to a 28-page John Wagner/John Higgins story with Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper teaming up. 901 started new stories, all of which quickly wrapped up before five new stories began in prog 904. This way, a short run of issues lets new readers sample quite a few recurring thrills.

For the era, it's actually not a bad lineup at all. Dredd is by Wagner and Ian Gibson, and you've also got an amusing installment of Bradley by Alan McKenzie and Simon Harrison, a fairly awful Rogue Trooper by Mark Millar (miscredited as Steve White) and Chris Weston, the first stab at Durham Red by Peter Hogan and her new regular artist Mark Harrison, and the odd return of Nemesis the Warlock by Pat Mills and Clint Langley.

Nemesis had been largely absent from the comic for the previous six years. He appeared in a one-off episode in prog 700, followed by a short and largely pointless "Nemesis and Deadlock" series five months later. Chris Weston illustrated a fabulous one-off in the 1993 Winter Special, followed by another one-off in prog 824 by Paul Staples, and that was about it.

It was clearly intended that the three episodes here should be the buildup to something larger and climactic, because the first two parts are nothing more than characters reminiscing about the story up until this point. Mills had used a similar tactic in the first episodes of the epic Slaine storyline "The Horned God. Clint Langley - who, I promise, is a million times better today than these ugly green pages from early in his career suggest - is reduced to little more than recapping the story so far.



This sequence, for instance, is a retelling of the previous Nemesis story, from 1993. You can tell that Mills is laying the groundwork for something very important, and probably, considering the great success of "The Horned God" as collected editions in Europe, putting one eye towards big nice albums full of painted green Langley artwork...

...but then nothing happens. The story doesn't resume at any point in the next few years. Langley himself is conspicuously absent for the next good while, and when Nemesis does return, it's in 1999, with astonishingly vibrant black and white artwork by Henry Flint. Today, Langley is the regular artist for Slaine and The ABC Warriors, and his current work is so weird and wonderful that I actually feel pangs of guilt about putting this old, ugly mess up for you to look at. On the other hand, I do love his take on Nemesis himself. You can tell by that cover that Nemesis is about as grotesque and slimy and nasty as a sentient being can be. No disrespect to Bryan Talbot, but his Nemesis looked like a superhero with a funny head; this guy looks as alien as can be - exactly the sort of thing Torquemada warned his population about!



This three-parter is not presently available in collected form, but a third volume of The Complete Nemesis is anticipated in December, and we're hoping it contains this story. (edit: It does! --grant, 6/5/08)

Oh, some unfinished business... in our seventh installment, I spotlighted Mike McMahon circa 1994. To our surprise, he was back with a new Dredd episode in last week's prog 1539. Singing McMahon's praises are two of his peers, Chris Weston and Lew Stringer. Check it out! I can't wait for that prog.

Next week, we pick back up the Mechanismo story in the "Wilderlands" saga.

(Originally published 6/7/07 at LiveJournal.)

6. Getting Lost With Luke Kirby

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. You can bookmark this feature and skip the rest of my Livejournal by clicking the "2000 ad" tab below.

Prog 887 was published in May 1994. Last time we had three Millars and a McKenzie, and this time it's two McKenzies and a Millar. The latter writer's Babe Race 2000 continues, as does The Clown by Igor Goldkind, who's joined by Greg Staples on art this time. Staples has other colors than brown in his palette and the result is much better looking than the previous episodes by Robert Bliss. Unfortunately, Goldkind's story has hit "head-scratching" at this point, so Staples is painting something less than engaging.

John Tomlinson, using the "Sonny Steelgrave" pseudonym that he shares with McKenzie, contributes the second half of a two-part Judge Dredd story illustrated by Clint Langley. This year, Langley has contributed some amazing computer-enhanced work on The ABC Warriors, but this is early in his career and it's frankly a big green and black mess, full of jagged edges and teeth. His signature even looks like a heavy metal logo. The script seems tailor-made to his work in the early 90s, such as Dinosty, so Tomlinson gets points for writing to his artists' strengths. Alan McKenzie, meanwhile, brings another fun Bradley adventure, this time sticking the skateboarding menace into a four-part take on The Prisoner of Zenda. Simon Harrison is the art droid for this one, meaning everybody looks like brilliantly-colored statues made from mucus.

Yes, there was some damning with faint praise in those two paragraphs. Fortunately, we've got The Journal of Luke Kirby to take up the slack.



We're coming to the end of the third Luke Kirby serial in this issue, and it's a real shame that it did not continue beyond McKenzie's departure from the comic. It was always the odd strip out: slow-paced, magical and rural, and with a protagonist as young as many readers. The initial artist was John Ridgway, but the great Steve Parkhouse has stepped in at this point, and his work is just excellent.

Originally intended as a pitch for Eagle around 1987, Luke Kirby found its way into 2000 AD instead, where there was some consternation about whether the series was right for the comic. It's set in the early 1960s and features a young boy learning the family tradition of magic and coming up against supernatural opponents. The stories are told very well, with unusual, off-setting imagery, like a depiction of one of Hell's levels being modern London, so crowded and full of miserable people that Luke can barely stand it.

Luke himself is a very strong central character. He's mostly on his own (without the strong support system of other young magicians which lets certain other superstar magicians of children's fiction accomplish anything), and comes across as a sad, lonely boy, nursing some genuine inner hurt after the deaths of some close family members. He's a very sympathetic character, and he's totally got my son hooked. Over this run, he's really enjoying Dredd, and Missionary Man over in the Meg, and Luke Kirby. Nothing else is interesting him, suggesting that spotlighting a character around the age of 10 or 11 is a pretty good idea for an anthology comic to do every once in a while.

(Incidentally, McKenzie, Ridgway and Parkhouse had worked together about ten years prior to this issue. They were the team behind the first year of Sixth Doctor stories for Marvel's Doctor Who Magazine - McKenzie as editor - before Parkhouse stepped down. McKenzie scripted the second year on his own. I don't think they ever really captured the essence of Doctor Six - grouchy, loud, antiauthoritarian and a total hero to any child who's recently been told to clean his room - but they had some neat ideas.)



Anyway, Luke Kirby's one of those annoying strips that has never been collected. Over at his website, The Story Works, McKenzie has made a similar claim to the one Grant Morrison's made over Zenith: he never formally assigned copyright on the series to the publisher, and consequently it resides with him. The corporate response - and McKenzie will understand that I'm the fan who wants reprint collections on his bookshelf and will toe the corporate line to get 'em - is that the copyright got signed over when the writers and artists cashed the paychecks. On the other hand, it's not exactly a court fight that Rebellion can really afford to lose, since the resulting negative precedent would end up costing 'em a sizeable chunk of their back catalog. That's why the copyrights, trademarks and ownerships are all signed out in legalese upfront since Rebellion bought the comic in 2000 and you don't get these sort of quibbles these days.

So since nobody wants to test those ugly legal waters, Luke Kirby sits in limbo. That's a shame, because any reader who's enjoyed Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic or that superstar magician kid would totally enjoy Luke Kirby, plus you'd get more of Parkhouse and Ridgway's great art back in print. You could do those 46 episodes in one big book or two thin ones (the first 22 episodes in one and the last 24 in the second; that would be a perfect split.), and my kid could take them to school. He'd like that, and so would yours.

Next week, I'll talk about something my kid didn't like. At ALL. But I did...

(edit: The introductory paragraphs of this article were revised on Sept. 4 2007 to clarify that the Dredd episode was scripted by John Tomlinson, and not by Alan McKenzie. In the comments of the LiveJournal entry, Mr. McKenzie offers further input on Luke Kirby's copyright situation. --Grant)

(Originally published 5/10/07 at LiveJournal.)