196. Regime Change

August 2009: For its latest summer launch prog, 2000 AD falls back on some of its most reliable and popular stories. There's no experimentation this time out, which is probably for the best. While we usually like to see a newcomer mixed in with the thrills, anything that was to launch against a lineup that includes Shakara, Kingdom, Strontium Dog and Nikolai Dante is certain to get swamped, particularly when the Judge Dredd story is the beginning of the remarkable "Tour of Duty." Boy, is this thing ever a game-changer. "Tour of Duty" is one of the most amazing long-form stories in all of Judge Dredd. It's less an epic than it is a year-long change of the rules. To understand how we got here, I need to step back and look at how John Wagner has been telling this series for some time now. The problem is, something as dense as Dredd makes it very difficult to find a starting point to the story.

See, if I go back to "Origins" to talk about the mutant issue, I still need to go back further, and further, and pick up plot threads from years and years previously. One of the beautiful things about the series is the way that Wagner leaves critically important details for much later developments in plain sight. I'm sure this has been a beast for anybody at Titan or Hamlyn or Rebellion who has been tasked with assembling collected editions and graphic novels for the character, because just about all of the big epics in the color era of the series grow from a scattering of seeds in several earlier and shorter adventures.

In a way, "The Apocalypse War" was kind of like that. The Mega-City One versus Sovs story was built up through the Luna Olympics, and the two Black Atlantic stories that Ron Smith illustrated, and finally "Block Mania," but the actual 26-part "Apocalypse War" could be read without them, especially in the 1980s, because we all understood, all too well, the fear of a US-Soviet war. I'm not entirely sure that "Tour of Duty" works anything as well as that without all the hints and fears and years of preparation, but for readers who had been following the character and all of the development, I think it works even better for the most part.

Recapping events in Mega-City One and its troubled relationship with mutants may not be strictly necessary for readers, but it is worth considering just how long this has been a key issue. This helps us realize just how much work that Wagner put into this. "Origins" had begun three years previously, and ended, in May 2007, with Dredd finally acknowledging that the city had been very, very wrong in both relying on the judge system so heavily and violating mutants' human rights. This was explored further across seven weeks that summer, in "Mutants in Mega-City One," "The Facility," and "The Secret of Mutant Camp 5" (art by Colin MacNeil, June-July 2007). Development of these issues had been delayed by the second half of the "Mandroid" story, along with various one-offs and unrelated short stories, inlcuding the first appearance of Alan Grant and David Roach's sassy witch character, but resumed in January 2008 with the seven-part "Emphatically Evil: The Life and Crimes of PJ Maybe," again with art by MacNeil, and then the five part "...Regrets," with art by Nick Dyer, in March and April, by which time there's finally some momentum toward allowing equal rights for mutants.

A comparison to the similar momentum in the read world toward allowing equal rights for homosexuals wishing to marry would probably be appropriate at this juncture.

The first mutant blocks in the city were established in prog 1600 (August 2008), amid much screaming and protest from the bigoted citizens of Mega-City One, leading to "Mutopia" by Al Ewing and Simon Fraser in November, which showed the lengths to which the citizenry would go to get the muties back out. "Backlash" by Wagner and Carl Critchlow in March and April of '09 drew all this resentment to its natural conclusion, with Dan Francisco defeating Hershey in a confidence vote for the Chief Judgeship that's pretty much exclusively about the mutant issue. Those are the major points in the story, but it's been a background issue with sprinkled resentment and mutophobia in several other episodes.

Remarkably, and oddly, there's a four month gap between Hershey's defeat and what would come next. The space is filled by the usual high-concept future crimes, ultraviolence and fun that we expect from the series, with old characters revisited and goofy fads exploding. "It Came from Bea Arthur Block" by Gordon Rennie and PJ Holden is a high point, an incredibly silly and deliberately over-the-top tale of alien hair and smug baldies. And there's sci-fi and exorcists in a great story by Ian Edginton and Dave Taylor, and a satire of prison reform using a well-meaning parallel universe of community care and pacifism by Ewing and Karl Richardson. I don't want anybody to get the idea that the series is nothing more than one endless soap opera building and building; it certainly has time and room to do everything, like it always does.

But then there's prog 1649 and "Under New Management," and good lord, that changes everything. It's Wagner and Critchlow again, and, in the densest, and saddest, six pages you've ever seen anywhere, Francisco takes office and assigns Hershey to administrative duties on a colony in outer space, and some middle management goon assigns Dredd to administrative duties out in the Cursed Earth, where the mutants will be resettled. The experiment in tolerance has failed, and the good guys have lost. Dredd and Hershey's quiet and respectful farewell scene is arguably the saddest moment in either character's history.


"Tour of Duty" does not feel like a big slam-bang epic, partially because there is no specific plot for its length. After the initial few weeks, wherein Dredd and Beeny - even his protege is swept out of the city - try to ensure that the displaced mutant citizens get a decent place to live and work, with little help from the bottom-rung judges sent out to work under his command, there's an installment about a Cursed Earth prison - slash - work farm, and then "Tour of Duty" becomes a sub-headline for all the other events that are happening.

There are crimes in the camps, and there are the usual Cursed Earth bandits and outlaws, and back in the city, there is institutional corruption, and the mayor is a serial killer. Over the next several months of the Megazine, an old villain resurfaces. In other words, it's business as usual, except that the rules have changed to reflect that fact that our heroes lost. Dredd is no longer patrolling the streets of Mega-City One. Similar to the 1995-96 epic "The Pit," previously the longest Dredd story ever, we're looking at a complete change to the status quo. Dredd's stuck in a job that he hates, and no longer perceived with much or any respect by his fellow judges, all of whom (except the loyal Beeny, and, in time, Rico as well) resent his bleeding heart getting them all assigned to this mess. This will be the way that things are, in both comics, for an entire calendar year.

I didn't leave myself much time to talk about Nikolai Dante, as I had planned to do. At this point, of course, we've learned that Nikolai and Lulu arranged for her death to be faked. His army of thieves and whores is rising up against Vlad, with the great huge battle to come in early 2010. In this story, illustrated by Paul Marshall, we see a trope of the series in which people communicate with Lulu via vid-link while she's naked, bathing, or otherwise involved in some orgy or other.


Nobody ever interrupts Lulu when she's doing anything dull like knitting, you see. This story is also notable for introducing a fellow in the Hellfire Club who's the spitting image of the old Eric Bradbury-drawn character of Cursitor Doom from the early 1970s run of Smash!. This follows a long history of comic book artists populating fictional Hellfire Clubs with familiar faces like Peter Wyngarde and Orson Welles.

Next time, away from the fiction and into the real world, as the American distributor starts ruining things for everybody. See you in a week!

168. About Baby Beeny

October 2006: While 2000 AD is running a major new story called "Origins," something smaller, but almost as important, is happening in the pages of Judge Dredd Megazine. When we last saw Ami Beeny, it was in 1996's "America: Fading of the Light," being inducted into the Academy of Law. Her return to the story as a teenager a decade later is a complete surprise. "Cadet" reunites writer John Wagner and artist Colin MacNeil, who have followed Ami's story since her mother's childhood in the 1990 story "America" that launched the Megazine. This story ties up all the loose ends from Ami's sad family history and sees her working as a very effective judge. Technically, she's still a cadet, a few years away from being given rookie status. In time, she will become a major supporting player in Dredd's story.

Since I'm a fan of detective fiction, I really enjoy watching Wagner use Dredd as a more cerebral character, working a detailed investigation and noting small details to work out the ten year-old story of the terrorist conspiracy that led to Beeny's father's death. There is a really fantastic character moment in part one, where after spending more than an hour silently going over paperwork with Beeny, Dredd says that they need to take a break and do some real judging, and they're going to go hit the streets. Since, as part of her Academy training, Cadet Beeny is actually leading this investigation, she casually says that she'd rather continue, if Dredd does not mind. It's these little character touches that really make Dredd shine so much. I hate that the Simon Bisley ultraviolence version of the character is the one that most readers in the US know; the impatient, taciturn, ruthlessly intelligent and experienced Dredd is a much more interesting one. It's this take on him that has dominated the series for years and years.

I think that it's a shame that the Complete Case Files reprint series has bogged down in the early nineties, around the point where Dredd was his least interesting, just as his profile in media and general fandom has grown in recent months. You almost wish that Rebellion could just skip forward ten or eleven books and start printing the stories from around the time PJ Maybe broke out of prison and made for South America. Dredd hasn't been Super Gun vs. Entrails for such a long time, but the evolution of the character and all these brilliant stories are, mostly, still only available in the back issues and not bookshelves.

Still providing backup to the main Dredd feature, there's Fiends of the Eastern Front by David Bishop and, again, MacNeil, and Black Siddha by Pat Mills and Simon Davis. These both end in the next issue of the Megazine, and end pretty finally. Fiends is particularly interesting. It's established that a golem is one of the few things on Earth that can destroy the vampire Constanta, and he barely escapes from their battle with his life. As the "present" of this story is established, via bookends, as being set in the late 1960s and looking back at the war, it is shown that another golem has been prepared, should Constanta ever resurface.

Black Siddha also concludes, but it is done in a curiously subtle way. It shows our hero purged of his bad karma and no longer tied to his strange, superheroic other self, set for a happily-ever-after life. Since 2000 AD stories, if indeed they do reach a proper final episode, tend to go big and memorable, the understated conclusion to this mix of Bollywood, superhero fisticuffs, and organized crime really is a surprise. In point of sad fact, this third story, "Return of the Jester," had been so uninvolving and disappointing, and so hard to follow in six-page, weirdly-edited chunks (as discussed in chapter 164), that, despite claiming to enjoy this series, I had actually tuned it out when I first read it, because Mirabai was acting like a jerk, the fight scene never ended, and I didn't understand why Siddha was having any difficulty overcoming Jester. So I figured that I would come back to it some other day, and figured that the next story would be better, and wondered for years when the heck it would return. Okay. Well, since it's done and done for good, can we have a collected edition, please?

Speaking of collected editions, Tales from the Black Museum is certainly due one. This first appeared in Meg 244 back in May, and it has racked up 24 episodes since. Under Matt Smith's editorship, it is effectively the Meg version of Tharg's Future Shocks, just one-off episodes dropped in between longer stories and series. They're usually written and drawn by the newer model droids, and typically riff on some established point of Judge Dredd continuity.

This time out, for example, we have a story written by Al Ewing (whose first Future Shock was published in 2002 and whose first 2000 AD serial, Go Machine, ran just a few months previously in '06) and drawn by Rufus Dayglo (whose first Future Shock was published in 2003 and who will finally get a big series in '08 when Tank Girl will appear in the Meg), which follows up an old comedy Alan Grant Dredd Annual story, told in verse, in which the Devil is incarcerated in Mega-City One's Iso-Block 666. Here, a criminal mastermind risks everything to get into the Devil's cell for a game of cards. It is fantastic. It's hugely funny, beautifully drawn and has a terrific twist.

"God of Gamblers" is probably my favorite Black Museum story, but it's possible that I might have overlooked one. After 24, they sort of run together, but I'm enjoying refamiliarizing myself with them as I've gone back and reread them. I maintain, however, that 24 is more than enough, the format is tired, and that they should be collected in a single volume and the format concluded in favor of something else. Honestly, I would really prefer for Smith to choose one of the huge number of Meg regulars in Dredd's universe with a too-low-to-reprint episode count - Black Atlantic or Juliet November or Bato Loco come to mind - and commission six one-off episodes, and drop them between other stories instead.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: America (only in the 2008 Rebellion edition, which is out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Fiends of the Eastern Front: The Complete Fiends of the Eastern Front (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, our long (inter)national nightmare is over. Simon Fraser returns to Nikolai Dante. See you in seven!

164. Nothing Looks Quite Right

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday, the blog where I reread my collection of 2000 AD, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, along with its sister titles, and tell you about the wonderfully fun stories that I enjoy. I try to look back at things with a little sense of history and context, and for the next eight weeks, I'll be looking at some issues that were published in the second half of 2006.

In the present day, the comic celebrated its 35th anniversary in February, and perhaps you, dear reader, might be scratching your head wondering why in the world I would schedule some down time to go dark during the festivities, particularly as it was during the 30th anniversary that I started thinking about writing about the comic, its history and fandom. I have not actually been idle, as regular readers of all the Hipster Dad blogs know; over at my Bookshelf blog, I've been featuring a 2000 AD-related review every week - eight of 'em since I last wrote here. Check 'em out, and then tell your friends, share the links and spread the word. It's always good to let your friends who don't read Tharg's Mighty Organ of Thrillpower know that it isn't only you who loves this stuff. It's how we get new readers, I'd say.

But anyway, what I do here is look at the stack of comics-to-reread and schedule issues every fifth or sixth or so along the teetering, toppling tower that might spark a thing or two that I might want to talk about. And so we come to June of 2006 and Judge Dredd Megazine # 246, which is a good point to bring up Matt Smith's editorship of this title and the teething troubles that he appeared to have settling into things. Of course, charting the history of the Meg, as David Bishop did in very great detail over the course of a series of articles that had recently concluded at the time this issue was published, shows just how schizophrenic and unpredictable the comic is. The Meg has changed focus, page count, size, number of reprint pages, you name it, every few years and, under the editorship of Alan Barnes, it had spent about three years being unmissably good. It was a solid, fantastic, hundred-page book with five new stories of about 8-12 pages in each issue, backed up with some choice reprints from the pages of both 2000 AD and Battle Picture Weekly and some excellent text features.

Unfortunately, declining sales have meant that the good times have come to an end by 2006 and, while there is still a lot to love about the Mighty Meg today, the issues of the present just don't have the breadth to compare with the Barnes model. But before we get to the strong uptick in quality that makes today's Meg a very good read, there's this mess to deal with. For starters, there's a four-part Judge Dredd story called "Regime Change." It's got a very good script by Gordon Rennie that sees Mega-City One overthrowing the corrupt leaders of the South American Ciudad Barranquilla as part of an international "peacekeeping force." Unfortunately, there's the art by Inaki Miranda and Eva de la Cruz.



Now, part of what has made Dredd such a memorable strip is the editors' willingness to let artists go off-model. Wild experimentation is what led us to the memorable imagery of, say, Kevin O'Neill and Brendan McCarthy. But that's one thing, and this refugee from muscle beach is another.

To their credit, Miranda and de la Cruz provide some excellent pacing and clean, coherent storytelling, but with wonky anatomy and easy outs-via-stereotyping and caricature, the whole story really does look crass and unpleasant. And while there is certainly a long tradition of the Judge Dredd comic strip indulging in below-the-belt racist comedy in the artwork, that is a tradition that had mostly been tamed for what seems like at least a decade before two Sino-Cit judges show up, all buck-toothed and ready to frighten us with their yellow peril. The artwork was barely floating in the first place before, with one panel, the whole thing gets torpedoed.

It's not just Dredd that looks sloppy and ridiculous, though. In Fiends of the Eastern Front, the almost-always reliable Colin MacNeil elects to letter his own artwork. Not one person on the planet is pleased with his choice of font.

Mercifully, Matt Smith steps up and puts a stop to this after three episodes. The remaining five are lettered by the long-serving Annie Parkhouse, who does not use that font. I think that there's a lesson here for all of us.

"Stalingrad," the first new comic adventure for Fiends since the original in 1980, is further hampered by its bizarre scheduling. It is running alongside the third adventure for Pat Mills and Simon Davis' Black Siddha. Both were commissioned by Barnes, but the budget crunch and loss of pages has left Smith without the space available to run them as they were produced. I believe that both were planned as six episodes of eight pages each, but Smith has only six black and white pages and six color pages for new comics other than Dredd in each issue at the time, so they each get spread over eight months.

The problem, of course, with doing that is that a comic paced as an eight-page episode loses all of its impact when, in its first month, you only get six of the pages and an abrupt ending, and then, in the second, you get two pages where the action rises to a weird climax, resolved over the third and maybe the fourth page, and then moves through the first half of the scripted second episode. A monthly episode needs at least eight pages to "breathe" properly anyway, and this inelegant solution doesn't benefit either story at all.

Having said that, I've argued (most recently over at my Bookshelf blog about ABC Warriors) that, at this point in his career, Mills is writing without concern for cliffhangers anyway. The Black Siddha story, "Return of the Jester," appears to be a single 48-page story and it might not matter how well it is divided, except that it simply doesn't have the impact, carved up the way that it is. "Stalingrad" fares even less well, as its writer, David Bishop, was certainly thinking in terms of individual episodes with specific rises and falls in each installment.

I guess another thing that happened since the last time I wrote in this blog is that Mills gave an absolutely epic three-hour interview for the ECBT2000AD guys and their podcast, and he took another swipe at this Fiends adventure. Bishop had previously been commissioned by the prose publisher Black Flame to write three or four Fiends novels that were pretty well-received, but it certainly didn't please Mills to see anybody else writing Fiends comics other than the strip's creator, Gerry Finley-Day. While the production issues - and, I'm sorry, Colin, the lettering - certainly impacted everybody's enjoyment of Fiends, Mills' comments about anybody other than a strip - any strip's - creator scripting new episodes were appreciated by Smith, who declined to commission any more stories. But he also hasn't commissioned any new Black Siddha either, leaving the story with a reasonably happy ending for its hero.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Fiends of the Eastern Front: The Complete Fiends of the Eastern Front (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, the Red Seas are underground and Rawhead and Bloodybones are in London Town. See you in seven!

150. Men With Mustaches

April 2005: Chris Weston provides the wonderful cover art for Judge Dredd Megazine 231, although sadly, he doesn't do the Dredd story inside. This is a semi-launch issue, with mostly all-new serials and stories starting in this issue, the only holdover being The Bogie Man. Now, this might seem like the most tenuous point upon which to ever hang a blog post, but I couldn't help but notice, as I was looking for decent images to scan and stories about which to write, that there sure is a lot of facial hair in this issue. Seriously. Okay, well, maybe not in Johnny Woo, the first solo story of a character introduced as a supporting player in a pair of Dredd stories some four years previously. In the three-part "A Bullet in the Head" by Gordon Rennie and PJ Holden, who is tasked to draw an insane amount of extraneous background crowding and detail and rises to the challenge, we learn that Hong Tong inspector Liu Chan Yeun is not the only policeman in the city to work both sides of the law.

There's a brand new serial starting this issue called Zancudo, and both the hero and the villain of the piece are mustached. This weird little strip crept under everybody's radar and seems sadly forgotten today. Drawn by Cam Kennedy, it's written in a very over-the-top and winking way by Simon Spurrier, and feels like a knowing, ironic throwback to comics of the 1970s. Readers familiar with the crazed, edge-of-your-seat narration in the recent, third Zombo story, which just wrapped a month ago, might know what I'm talking about. The narration seems a little misplaced for this story at first. It's set in the South America of Dredd's universe, where the mega-cities of that continent are not separated by a radioactive desert, but by an overgrown super-rain forest that takes up much of the continent's interior. The transfer of a psi-criminal goes bad when the transport crashes near the ruins of an old native city, and the heroic judge learns that there are gigantic mosquitos enslaving helpless tribesmen.

What makes this a really memorable and spectacularly fun story is how a throwaway line in part one is revealed to be something much bigger and utterly unexpected in the cliffhanger to part two. Zancudo, we learn, hilariously, is actually a sequel to an over-the-top, well-remembered 1978 2000 AD serial called Ant Wars. It really doesn't do the serial any favors in the long run; as we'll see when this blog comes to such serials as Malone, The Vort and Dead Eyes, whatever happens in the pages of the new story is almost instantly subsumed into the mythology of the larger series that connects to it. It changes from "Zancudo was a three-part story about a psychic criminal in South America, and giant mosquitos" to "Ant Wars had a sequel, 27 years later." Still, the ride getting there was a blast.



Back in action this month is Devlin Waugh in "All Hell," a six-part story by John Smith and Colin MacNeil. Have to say, Smith is repeating himself just a little this time out. We've seen this opening, with Waugh being all decadent and lazy and trying to relax but the forces of magical evil require him to stop being so selfish and get to work saving reality, at least twice before. On the other hand, once this story does get moving, it turns into one of the very best for the character, with Devlin and two battered-and-bloodied allies on the trail of three occult criminals, descending through planes of Hell on the trail of some McGuffin or other.

Actually, now that I think about it, that Indigo Prime article that I wrote a few weeks ago reminds me that Smith's done descent-into-Hell before as well, in the Fervent and Lobe story "The Issigri Variations." Heck. Nothing new under the sun, is there?

Happily, the actual story in Devlin Waugh this time out is much better than my grumbling might lead readers to believe. It's certainly better than "The Issigri Variations," anyway. Devlin's such a fun character, and the stakes feel genuinely high and dramatic, and Colin MacNeil, clearly drawing inspiration, as he always does when painting this strip, from Tom of Finland, pulls off the requisite violence and gore with expertise. It's a terrific story.

That said, suddenly everything is really in Dredd's shadow again. "The Monsterus Mashinations of PJ Maybe," by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, is a four-part story that proves really critical to Maybe's overall exploits. Really, anybody left thinking that Judge Death or Mean Machine Angel are Dredd's greatest enemies have not read the strip in a decade. Maybe's natural evolution into the series' all-time greatest villain is a joy to watch unfold.

I was a little disappointed when I first saw that Ezquerra was the artist for this installment, which is a pretty darn odd feeling for anybody to have. It's just that with the previous story, "Six," Chris Weston made a huge impact, and even surpassed Maybe's co-creator Liam Sharp as the definitive artist of the character in my book. ("Six," which originally ran in June 2004, was discussed ten chapters back in this blog.) It was a nice touch, asking Weston to provide this issue's cover; it's a subtle way of allowing one artist to pass the torch to the next.

So this time out, Dredd has taken a team of judges and diplomats to Ciudad Baranquilla - the scheduling of Zancudo was pretty appropriate, it turns out! - in the hope of smoking out Maybe, whom Dredd is certain is somewhere close, hiding out in plain sight, his face changed and using his secreted wealth to buy favors from that city's corrupt justice department. The cat and mouse game that emerges is unbelievably satisfying. Light and L in Death Note don't have a patch on these two. Maybe is a good three steps ahead of Dredd, but every so often, the judge's instincts and experience give him a critical advantage that Maybe could never have predicted.

Since the story has continued to unfold, develop and strike out in stunning new avenues every few months, I hate to say this for fear of spoiling any potentially new readers, but it's obvious that Maybe gets away in the end. This story concludes with Dredd satisfied that Maybe is dead, but he's actually wearing another stolen body - a philanthropist doctor who is heir to a great fortune - and going home to the Big Meg after far too long away. What happens next is just amazing. I can't wait to read "The Gingerbread Man" again.

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

Sadly, only the Judge Dredd story has been reprinted so far, in The Complete PJ Maybe. (Amazon UK)


Next time... well, you'll have to wait a little bit. This concludes the original, planned 13-week return of the blog, but readers have been very encouraging and kind with their notes of appreciation, and so I'll be resuming for a good few more blog posts. I'm already sketching out the next few installments and deciding what images to scan, and will be back after a short recharging break.

In the meantime, bookmark my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf during the hiatus, where, among other things, I'll be writing about The Bendatti Vendetta, Lenny Zero, and the new series of Indigo Prime, along with some Walter Mosley books and other things. Thanks for your support, and see you in November!

139. War on Terror

Now the other reason that I decided to start writing about 2000 AD again is that I figure I sort of owe it to them. I've been saying for, I don't know, ever that the main barrier to the comic's success in the American marketplace is that nobody involved with the comic has done the sort of protracted screaming at the potential audience necessary to make a hit. Ours is a culture that rewards constant advertising - surely every single person in America over the age of two knows what Coca-Cola is, but that corporation still spends more on ads every year than most of us will ever earn in our lifetime - and when you're a niche product in a world where, even for comic fans, "comic news" equals little more than "who will draw Marvel's top trademark protection comic this year," you've got to do a lot of screaming. Little blogs like mine or David Page's or Douglas Wolk's fun new Dredd Reckoning are not enough.

Fortunately, Rebellion has hired a PR man, Mike Molcher, and he's been doing a great job placing stories and getting press. There's been more talk about 2000 AD in the geek media over the last six months than in the last six years. And there certainly should be: there have been some really excellent stories in 2000 AD over the last six months. Between the conclusions of Shakara and Necrophim, the return of Pat Mills' Flesh, Mike Carroll's debut as a rotating scriptwriter on Judge Dredd and the premiere of Gordon Rennie and Tiernan Trevallion's Absalom, there has been a lot to talk about, even before we get to the "new readers start here!" fun of issue 1740. Add in the new American editions of The Horned God (in a lovely hardback, promoted extensively by Mills), Low Life (promoted through several interviews with writer Rob Williams) and Kingdom (promoted, irresistably by a doggie dish!!) and there have been many opportunities for promotion, all of them seized.

At the time this chapter is published (July 21), many of the editorial and PR droids are at San Diego Comic-Con, focal point for most of that promotional screaming. If you see them there, tell 'em that Thrillpowered Thursday sends its regards and best of luck for a successful show.

But that's the present. Back in prog 1396, there was still a lot to talk about. It's June 2004 and Andy Clarke's cover promotes a Judge Dredd thriller called "Terror," now in its second episode. America's occupation of Iraq is about a year old at this point. If you think contemporary events might be influencing the series, you're very right. It's remarkable stuff.



More than a decade earlier, writer John Wagner had introduced a terrorist organization to the world of Judge Dredd. Called "Total War," this group was one of many in the city devoted to the cause of democracy, and was willing to cause a lot of death and collateral damage in pursuit of it. Total War was introduced in the classic 1990 serial "America," but I don't believe they were mentioned again, unless perhaps in passing, since that story.

In "Terror," we follow a university lecturer named Zondra Smith who is totally in the wrong place at the wrong time. She's on the prowl and looking to meet a young man, only to get caught up in a Total War bombing. Making matters worse for herself after the carnage is over and the death toll is being counted, she's "political," and therefore trouble as far as the judges are concerned.

Painted by Colin MacNeil, "Terror" is an example of Wagner's remarkable ability to use long, multi-part serials to better effect than anybody else in the business. There's a heck of a lot going on in this eight-part story, but it's every bit as important as a building block in the ongoing Dredd saga as an adventure of its own. It will reach a conclusion, but it will also feed into a major epic that will begin in just a few months' time.

It's a good example of a Dredd story that covers most of the series' dramatic beats - action, criminal investigation using future technology, a look at the often bleak existence of citizens in the future metropolis - and rereading it, I'm reminded of how fun it is to watch Wagner unfold multi-part stories. It's a completely unpredictable adventure, and the judges' seemingly impossible task - keeping Zondra Smith alive and able to work as an informant while still protecting her from Total War - is really thrilling. There's no way to know what will happen next.

"Terror" was reprinted along with its longer follow-up epic in one nice volume from Rebellion, which you may order by following the link below. I highly recommend it.

Continuing in this issue are the same ongoing stories discussed last time, A.H.A.B. by Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson, Chopper by Wagner, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague, Low Life by Rob Williams and Henry Flint, and Savage by Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

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

Next time, over to the Megazine, as Cursed Earth Koburn kicks ass, and one of Dredd's most cunning enemies starts a new body count. See you in seven!

122. Aliens and Robots

March 2003: More than four years since Judge Dredd last crossed over with Batman, he's back in another scrap with a media franchise. This time it's Aliens, the unaccountably popular character-free badasses who've become a marketing juggernaut for 20th Century Fox and Dark Horse Comics. This publisher has been churning out a huge library of tie-in miniseries, most of which seem to have them fighting the Predators from all those other movies. The epic 16-week series is co-written by John Wagner and Andy Diggle and drawn by Henry Flint, and it's presented in a pretty interesting way: the sixteen weekly 2000 AD episodes are structured to be easily reprinted as four monthly installments by Dark Horse. That publisher also gets the rights for an American-sized trade paperback collection for our market; an oversized hardcover graphic novel will appear in England and Europe a couple of months later as part of Rebellion's new line of European-styled albums.

Well, Aliens may not be to my taste, but this is a very effective story because Wagner and Diggle never waste time building up the Aliens as anything other than big, ugly, acid-blooded grunts in the service of Mr. Bones. If you recall, he was the Undercity criminal introduced a few months earlier in the four-parter where Dredd and a retired judge find him plotting against Mega-City One from the wreckage of the old White House. We learn that Bones' gruesome, scarred appearance is the result of being sprayed in the face with Alien acid many years previously, and he's got a pretty good scheme in mind: blow a whacking huge hole in the foundation of the Hall of Justice and sic several dozen pissed-off Aliens at the judges.



Wagner and Diggle do a fantastic job making this an "entry-level" story for Dark Horse's readers unfamiliar with Judge Dredd. We meet a newly-promoted judge called Sanchez who is the audience identification character, and a squad of "Verminators" who lose a few of their number early on in the story. The build-up is slow and deliberate, and when one Alien gets loose, initially in its small, scuttling form, the Verminators are called in, and then get in trouble when they realize the creature they're looking for is a lot bigger than they thought.

The resulting story is a darn good one for middle school-aged boys, although not, perhaps, for girls. My son has been staying in Kentucky with his mother for a few months, and missing out on the reread that my daughter and I have been enjoying. She called a halt to Judge Dredd as soon as the Aliens showed up, and grumbled that she wanted to see more Durham Red instead. She did, however, tell her brother on the phone that he was missing out on Judge Dredd vs. Aliens and he about hit the ceiling. He's home for Christmas and I asked whether he'd like to catch up on the thrillpower that he'd missed out on while he has been away. He opened up prog 1300, read about one page, remembered what he heard and asked "When does Judge Dredd vs. Aliens start?"



I could be wrong, but Dark Horse's US-format collected edition does not appear to be in print anymore, but you can still get the hardcover British version from sellers in the UK. Here's the Amazon listing. The book is one of six that Rebellion released in this format towards the end of 2003.

Other stories in prog 1330, shown off with the lovely Frazer Irving wraparound cover shown at the top of the entry, are Bec & Kawl by Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts, The V.C.s by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams, Atavar by Abnett and Richard Elson and a Tales from Telguuth installment by Steve Moore and Jan Haward.

It's been a couple of years now, but I was talking once in the blog about how Rebellion really needs to bring the sprawling Mechanismo epic back into print. This was a mammoth story full of subplots and subterfuge, detailing the deterioration of Chief Judge MacGruder as she orders the development of robot judges. It seemed like a good idea at the time; with the judges' numbers seriously depleted after the high bodycounts of the "Necropolis" and "Judgement Day" epics, something needed to be done. Turns out, this wasn't it. The stories wormed their way through the pages of the weekly and the then-biweekly Judge Dredd Megazine from 1992-94, before coming to a storming conclusion in the aftermath of a 16-part story called "Wilderlands."

Back in May of '07, I suggested how Rebellion could repackage the story for bookshelves and they have done something quite similar, and very satisfactory. The new "Mechanismo" book, released in October, contains the first three serials from the storyline and deal with one robot, Number Five. These originally appeared from October 1992 to December 1993 and feature art by Colin MacNeil, Peter Doherty and Manuel Benet, with scripts by John Wagner. Although there is a great deal more of the story to come, this book ends on as satisfactory a point as is possible, and hopefully we will see MacGruder's next series of moves in a second volume in 2010.

Wagner does a terrific job in telling the story from multiple viewpoints. The focus shifts from Dredd to various robots to a hapless security clerk, and he uses his frequent Mega-City One trope of having dingbat teevee news announcers comment on the action, which is both effective and very funny. MacNeil and Doherty certainly bring their usual A-games to the party, and Manuel Benet does a laudable job for what I believe was his only assignment for the House of Tharg. It was certainly odd to see a new name dropped in the deep end for what was a critically important story, but Benet's work is pretty good, if perhaps not completely suited to Mega-City weirdness. Production of the book is mostly up to Rebellion's very high standards, but an unfortunate production error left a few erroneous credits on the spine and front cover for artists whose work does not actually appear in the book. Overall, though, a fine collection of a very good sequence of stories, and highly recommended. More, please!

Next time, we end the year and, for now, end this blog! Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take a hiatus for the first few months of 2010, but before we go, a last look at the big thrills from the spring of 2003, including The V.C.s and Caballistics Inc. See you in seven!

99. In Which Tyrannosaurs Cause a Fight

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.

May 2001: Prog 1244 features this wonderful cover by Jim Murray for the six-part series Satanus Unchained!, in which the black bull tyrannosaur first seen more than twenty years earlier in a Judge Dredd four-parter is hunted by a group of trappers and big-gamers who've come to the Cursed Earth to take their chances bringing down the planet's biggest, meanest predator. While Murray gets cover duties, the serial is actually painted by Colin MacNeil, who is perfectly suited to the gory action on the pages, as all the technology of the 22nd Century proves a poor match for a few tons of lightning-fast, hyper-smart killing power.

The serial is written by Gordon Rennie, who's quietly staked a claim at being the principal author in Cursed Earth-based tales, thanks to several years scripting Missionary Man and, recently, moving the adventures of Mean Machine out into the badlands in the pages of the Megazine. Rennie chose to script the story in a pastiche of the over-the-top narrative style of older 2000 AD storylines, effortlessly evoking early '80s Pat Mills with captions that describe Satanus's cunning thought processes and using lots of exclamation points. It works perfectly, and the finished story is just terrific. Editor Andy Diggle was quite right to have commissioned it.

Only Pat Mills did not seem to agree.



Each episode of the serial came with a byline stating that Satanus was created by Mills and artist Mike McMahon, but that didn't seem to quell Mills' aggravation that the character was used without his permission. At the time, Mills was firmly opposed to any of his characters being written by any other creator, a policy which extended to fanzines, which declined to feature fanfic with his creations. Over time, Mills' viewpoint has softened somewhat, leading to the latest issue of Zarjaz being a Mills-verse special. Diggle countered that he never considered Satanus a "Pat Mills character," but rather one of Judge Dredd's rogues gallery.

The editor and writer failed to find any agreement on the subject, and Mills, who was already unhappy with the current ABC Warriors debacle, declined to write for the comic again until after Diggle stepped down at the end of the year. He would return with a page in the 25th Anniversary issue, and the Warriors and Slaine would each return in 2003.



Also in this issue, you've got the debut of a major new villain called Armon Gill in the fantastic Dredd four-parter "The Chief Judge's Man" by John Wagner and Will Simpson, more of the ongoing "Return to Mars" storyline in ABC Warriors by Mills and Boo Cook, the second episode of a Sinister Dexter three-parter by Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke, and the second part of a serial called A Love Like Blood by John Smith and Frazer Irving. Last week I had mentioned that Diggle's "rocket-fuel" approach would sometimes result in stories that felt unfortunately chopped up and impossible to embrace. A Love Like Blood would be one of those.

You get the feeling that the serial started from a great pitch - it's Romeo and Juliet done with vampires and werewolves - but at seven episodes, it's at least five too short. Smith's high-concept plot results in some genuinely wild and wonderful ideas. I love the way that these high-tech monsters have their claws into frontline weapon technology and the latest scientific advances, and the werewolves are, amusingly, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Irving's art is simply amazing; he comes up with some great character designs for the Sangreal and Luperci families.

It's all done in far too breakneck a pace, however. It really feels like critical characterization was sacrificed in order to get the plot moving from one wild cliffhanger to the next. Our heroes - what were their names again? - meet at the end of episode two, fall in love and hit the road to avoid their families, who set all other business aside when it's learned the werewolf chicky is pregnant and must be killed immediately. She's dead at the end of part five. Who was she, again?

And here we see the problem with "rocket-fuel" storytelling. If you don't know who the characters are, then the 2000 AD classics that you wish to emulate are not going to be Dredd, Slaine and Sam Slade, but rather plot-heavy bores like Death Planet and Project Overkill. Nobody remembers anything about the leads of those old serials, either. Or much of anything else beyond the nice art.

Three of this prog's stories have since been collected. 2006's Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man reprints this first Armon Gill story and its two sequels. A Love Like Blood is included in 2007's Storming Heaven: The Frazer Irving Collection, and as noted previously, you can get all of "Return to Mars" in 2008's The ABC Warriors: The Third Element.

Before I call this entry a-finished, a special Thrillpowered Thank You to my buddy Pete, who tracked down the missing Megazines from my collection. Longtime readers know that I lost a huge chunk of my British comic library in a flood four years ago; certain issues have been very stubborn to find again. Thanks very much, Pete, and if I'm ever in Edinburgh, I owe you dinner!

Next time, in the hundredth Thrillpowered Thursday entry, you'll be full of wrong if you don't read about the new Kingdom collected edition. Plus the debut of the 100-page fourth volume of the Megazine! See you in seven, fellow Earthlets!

96. War in the Command Module

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.

March 2001: For those of you who enjoyed the cover of 1988's prog 555, here it is again, sort of, on prog 1234. John Higgins, who had not really done much work for the House of Tharg in the last couple of years, has revisited his earlier design for this launch issue which features the long-overdue return of this classic logo. Higgins had principally been working for American publishers in the late '90s before contributing the Judge Dredd one-off "Generation Killer" to prog 1212. Over the next few years, he will illustrate several very good Dredd adventures for the Megazine, and is presently the artist for the current series Greysuit. He was the subject of a feature-length interview which appeared in March's Meg # 281. Inside the issue, we've got the start of a new Judge Dredd storyline by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy, along with a Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and Steve Roberts, Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Steve Yeowell, about which more next week, and, in the ultimate example of "here comes trouble," the double-length opening episode of the long-awaited new series of The ABC Warriors by Pat Mills and Henry Flint.

It certainly looks like the intent with this storyline is to evoke the original run of the series from back in 1979. It's a 15-part black-and-white epic divided into five three-part adventures with a different artist on each block. Mills' most frequent collaborator of the period, the awesome Henry Flint, handles the first and fifth stories, and the ones between them are drawn by Boo Cook, Mike McMahon and Liam Sharpe. The story sees the Warriors stomping around the planet Mars again, apparently, thanks to the vagaries of all the time travelling they'd done earlier in their history, not very long after the original adventure. It's never really made clear whether Deadlock, last seen four months previously fighting Purity Brown in the sequel to Nemesis the Warlock in the far, far future, had that adventure prior to the three generally-linked Warriors storylines that have appeared in this decade, but since Mills operates by more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-yer-pants approach than the continuity-ticking of mainstream American books, it never really matters much.

What does matter is that this series is a well-intended, and occasionally beautifully drawn, disaster. Flint's episodes look great enough to paper over what a mess the story is, and McMahon's are wild and weird enough to distract from the confusing tale, about the resurrection of Steelhorn, he's been asked to draw, but it doesn't always work. Sharpe, who had illustrated so many excellent Dredd episodes in the years before this, tries experimenting with an unflattering style and some downright sloppy inking, and while Cook has emerged as one of the most important artistic discoveries of Andy Diggle's time as editor, he flatly was not yet ready for the big time when he penned his oddly-paced, hard-to-follow pages.



But the real problem is that "Return to Mars" (later issued by Rebellion in book form under the title "The Third Element") simply wouldn't have been anything other than one of the weaker Warriors' tales and a huge disappointment no matter who was on art duties, because the story is an abject failure. Both the writer and the editor have gone on the record about what went wrong. The two versions of David Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload are quite explicit in the ugly details. Incidentally, one reason of many not to rely solely on the wonderful bookshelf edition is that a very lengthy quote from Mills on the subject appears only in the earlier magazine serialization of the articles*.

In a nutshell, and putting it very, very lightly, Mills was not very happy with the assignment to put together what we might term an "old school" take on his characters, and Diggle wasn't very happy with the resulting scripts. Diggle also wasn't very happy to be in a position of performing rewrites on the scripts, and Mills wasn't very happy about pretty much anything that Diggle did after he uncapped the red pen. Actually, the whole sorry business is like the memorable ending of that John Ridgway-illustrated Dredd story "The Raggedy Man," which is told in storybook style and concludes by saying "They all lived happily after," except for the villain, who was killed, and except all the innocents he was terrorizing, who'd all end up dead of some Cursed Earth ailment within a week, and except for Dredd, who's seldom happy about anything.

The war of words was mostly kept from fandom's view at the time, but it certainly seems to have left very bad blood between these two for quite some time, and Diggle was sadly not quite finished inadvertantly offending Mills. More would be forthcoming, and we'll pick that up in a short while when a big, mean tyrannosaur makes his return to the comic.

In other news, in January, Rebellion released the long-awaited collection of the 1995-96 Dredd epic "The Pit." This 30-part epic, written by Wagner and illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra, Colin MacNeil, Lee Sullivan and Alex Ronald, was the subject of a Thrillpowered Thursday entry back in 2007, where I explained it as a "change in the status quo that sees Dredd assigned to new duties in one of the Meg's remote regions, where rather than doing the job of a senior street judge, he's assigned to the task of sector chief. It turns out that the Dredd formula works incredibly well as an ensemble police procedural, which was a huge surprise to everybody, including the writer."

"The Pit" is remembered, not because of an outrageous, high-concept plot like many of the big epics of the series, but because Judge Dredd lends itself astonishingly well to overlapping subplots and unique, individual judges with their own perspectives on the proceedings. It's an important story which introduced two of the more interesting recurring characters of Dredd's modern cast, Judges DeMarco and Guthrie, as well as providing further details about the criminal Frendz organization which would be an ongoing menace for the next few years. The entire cast is made up of interesting, sympathetic characters, and as events wind their way from a search for a rogue undercover "Wally Squad" judge to an all-out war with a powerful mob kingpin's forces, through a sector house full of flawed cops trying to do their jobs, it's easy to get completely caught up in events. It's a terrific story, with fabulous contributions from some great artists.

Long overdue for this new edition, "The Pit" has been unavailable for quite some time, since Hamlyn's old version went out of print, and Titan, the next company to issue collected editions, never put their own together. This is one that Rebellion should definitely keep around, and promote to new readers as a fine introduction to Judge Dredd. Whether you're new to the character or an old fan, "The Pit" is certainly a story that every bookshelf should have.

Next time, Nikolai Dante goes after babes and bloodsuckers and his writer goes after some extraneous dialogue balloons, and Mike Carey's criminally short Tharg-world career gets going. See you in seven!



*edit: I'm totally mistaken; the quote just appears a little later on in the narrative than I was expecting to find it.

91. Mutiny!

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.

Hurm, as the guy in that movie might say. I'm writing today with a small degree of consternation, as Diamond, the distributor who services North American comic shops, is apparently having one of its periodic hiccups, and several US readers are reporting that they've not received the prog or the Meg in well over a month. Nor have we received the collected editions of Kingdom or Shakara that should have arrived by now. Is this just a temporary delay, to be sorted any week now, or is this evidence of Diamond shaking down the Galaxy's Greatest as they streamline their operations and cut back? Stay tuned...

Anyway, back in November 2000, we come to prog 1218. It features a memorable cover by John Charles, an artist who did very little work for the 2000 AD titles. This was his last of five covers. It features the chaos-driven robot called Deadlock, best known as one of the ABC Warriors, who's currently starring in an eleven-week series. This bridges the final series of Nemesis the Warlock, which had concluded the previous year, and the next run of the Warriors, which would begin in a few months' time. In this story, Deadlock heads back to the planet Termight, left rudderless by the end of Torquemada's regime. Now, Nemesis and Deadlock have had a very confusing history, but what's going on here is that Deadlock is acting as the warlock's squire, ensuring that the planet descends into chaos per Nem's last wishes. His schemes are delayed, because Purity Brown, Nem's former associate and now the planet's president, has decided that a little caution in letting a universe of bizarre alien critters run rampant is a good idea, and she's slow to roll back all of Torquemada's policies. In a galaxy full of foot-eating aliens, and face-munching bananas, is that really such a bad idea?

At any rate, the script is of course by Pat Mills, and the art by Henry Flint. The two of them worked very well together in that last run of Nemesis, and this story is every bit as entertaining as that had been. It's full of twisted tunnels and wild perspective shots, strange-lookin' monsters and weirdos, alien pregnancies, soldiers wearing armor covered with words, serial-killing accountants and dimensionally-unstable gunmen. If you're looking for a shot glass of rocket fuel, this is definitely one of the best examples from the period. This story is not presently available in a collected edition, but one is planned as a bonus magazine to be bagged with a future edition of the Judge Dredd Megazine.



As wild as Deadlock is, it's not actually the most entertaining of the current crop of thrills. That award goes to the current Judge Dredd storyline, "Sector House," which is continuing an eight-week run. Written by John Wagner and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, it puts the spotlight on Judge Rico, Dredd's young clone who had been introduced earlier in the year. This is his first spotlight story since serving as Dredd's rookie.

"Sector House" is certainly a spiritual successor to late '90s stories such as "The Pit" and "Beyond the Call of Duty," in which Wagner and Ezquerra focus on a department rather than using Dredd as the lone hero. It finds drama in the tensions and underpinnings of a close-knit group of judges, chronically overworked and with very little downtime, who don't appreciate some punk from the Academy sticking his nose in where he is not welcome. "Sector House" is a terrific story, and a reprint is included in the Dredd collection Brothers of the Blood.



Also in this prog are the continuing stories of Nikolai Dante and Rain Dogs that were mentioned in last week's installment, along with a great eight-part serial by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil called Vanguard. This is a wonderful space opera which rises above its familiar premise - the cruel commander of a space battleship, obsessed with tracking down an enemy ship, overworks and brutalizes his crew to mutiny. He's cautioned about the crew's growing unrest several times along the way by his new second-in-command, Lt. Elizabeth Vanguard, but ignores her until it is too late.

Beth Vanguard is a very engaging character, and while there's nothing incredibly original about her backstory, watching events unfold is great fun, thanks to an intricately-plotted story and Colin MacNeil's wonderful artwork. In the end, the ship's commander goes too far, and after his own men are fired upon indiscriminately as they are fighting off a raiding party, the crew rebels, with Lt. Vanguard joining them. The strip has a cliffhanger ending, and the promising endnote: "End of Book One." Sadly, there was never a second run for the series, which never returned after this entertaining start.

In April of 2002, Andy Diggle responded to an inquiry I'd made on the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup about Vanguard, wondering why so many of the recent strips had been one-off serials rather than ongoing series. He stated that Vanguard had been commissioned by the previous editor, David Bishop, and "although I didn't hate it, I thought the premise was bit stale, and it wasn't really popular enough to divert Robbie and Colin away from Dante and Dredd respectively in order to produce Book 2." This is certainly a shame, as a second series would have given the story enough pages for a very nice collected edition. It has been rumored that some kind of reprint was made for someplace in Europe - it is mentioned in Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload - but the book apparently ranks among the scarcest of recent merchandise, and does not appear in the listings at the fan site Barney.

Next time, both Zenith and Bad Company return in glorious monochrome for "Prog 2001," and I'll look at last year's Mega-City Undercover collection. See you in seven, fellow Earthlets.

(March 12 2009)

36. City of the Dead, redux

July 1996: David Bishop and his editorial team (which is not a large crew) are putting the weekly in an increasingly stable and strong position when there's a new fire to be tackled. Six months previously, Bishop had moved from the Judge Dredd Megazine over to the weekly, and Tomlinson moved from the weekly to edit the now-monthly Megazine. The publishers have decided that they don't need to be paying Tomlinson's freelance rates any longer and after six monthly issues, he is gone and now Bishop has both comics to edit. If both titles were financially strong and had the full support of the publisher, this might be a really great job. It's what Matt Smith is doing today and he at least seems to enjoy it. But in the summer of 1996, 2000 AD has a big stockpile of unloved material commissioned ages previously which has to be printed, and the publisher is increasingly unhappy with the Megazine's underperformance. Sales, if I understand rightly, are below the point they were when the Dredd feature film was released a year before. The Megazine is under orders to make some money or be cancelled.

And so immediately some more commissioned material goes back in the drawer. Megazine v.3 # 19 had an advertisement that a new story for Janus: Psi Division would begin in the next issue. Judge Janus, who was created by Grant Morrison and Carlos Ezquerra, first appeared in 1993 and had shown up in a couple of stories since, most recently a 5-parter, "A New Star," in 2000 AD in February '96 by Mark Millar and Paul Johnson. Their next, and final, Janus adventure is "Faustus," which I believe was planned to run as four 12-page episodes in Meg # 20-23. Instead, Bishop decides to stop commissioning - and paying for - anything new for the time being, and use reprints to bulk up the comic and put back the time when they'll need to pay for as much new stuff in the Meg. The reprint, for now, is of the 1990 Judge Dredd epic "Necropolis." The small backlog of already commissioned material will do for now, and the format will change from five new stories per issue to three new stories and reprint material.

I'll try to take up how well this goes down in a few weeks' time, but it's worth noting that the postponed Janus storyline will eventually find a home in 2000 AD, along with several other Megazine series as the squeeze gets worse and more established Megazine series are left homeless by the crunch. It had already been announced that Judge Anderson would be returning to 2000 AD. The assumption I made is that Bishop, who'd edited her Megazine series for years anyway, wanted her at 2000 AD with him, and Tomlinson, who commissioned the Millar/Johnson Janus adventures, would be taking that character to the Meg. Now Bishop has both at 2000 AD. Guess which one gets cancelled? Some Judge Dredd stories which were planned for the Meg will get moved to the weekly, and eventually both Missionary Man and Devlin Waugh will also move there.



So the lineup this month includes 20 pages of reprints of some of the lead-in episodes to "Necropolis" by John Wagner and Ezquerra, but it still includes some very good new strips, and just because # 20 is a very visible benchmark for the beginning of the Meg's reprint period doesn't mean the comic should be written off. Far from it; it includes Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and Simon Davis, along with the first episode of a new series called Holocaust 12 written by Chris Standley and John Smith, with art by Jim Murray. I believe this strip, which concerns the suicide-team judges who get sent into disasters as a last-ditch effort and are not expected to return, has also suffered somewhat from the need for space for reprint. There's an cliffhanger which feels unusually artificial, and an oddly-lettered "next issue" tag on the last page. I think this was planned as two 12-page episodes and split into four 6-page episodes to accomodate the reprints and, again, stretch the new material out further.

Finally, there's the Dredd story, part one of "America II: Fading of the Light" by Wagner and Colin MacNeil. This is the big draw, although it suffers from sequel fatigue and isn't rated as highly by readers as the original. It is still a brilliant story and deserves a mention.

"America" was one of the five original Megazine series, back in 1990. It's the life story of America Jara and her friend, Bennett Beeny, who grew up together in the Meg. America's childhood hatred of the judges leads her, in time, to join the democratic underground, and a terrorist organization called Total War, which makes itself known periodically throughout the series. Beeny had made a huge success for himself as a singer-songwriter, but when his and Ami's paths cross one fateful night when Total War ambushes some judges, he's shot as a witness and left for dead. Beeny doesn't identify Ami when he recovers, but the gunshot takes out his throat, ending his career.

He still has enough royalties to live comfortably for the rest of his life, and when Ami returns for money, he's torn between his lifelong love for her and a need to stop the carnage. It's a remarkable story, and one which anybody who doubts Judge Dredd's standing as one of the best comics of the last thirty years should certainly read. Beeny's anguish at being torn between desire and unrequited love on one side, and fear and responsibility on the other, makes for an amazing tale, and whatever he decides is going to leave him disgusted with the decision. Dredd himself is barely present in the story, except as a menacing figure on the fiction's event horizon. You can certainly draw parallels between the structure of "America" and the Golgo 13 episodes I've been mentioning from time to time, where the focus is on the people impacted by the nominal protagonist. Seeing the character through the eyes of guest stars gives us a different perception of him. Dredd doesn't come off so well. Neither does Beeny, once you see what he does.

This first story - no sequel was planned at the time - ends with the revelation that the narrator has indeed been Beeny as we had expected, but he is wearing America's body. America had been fatally wounded in the story's climax. Beeny took custody of her body, and arranged for a brain transplant.

And that's not all he did. In the first episode of this series, we meet their daughter.



Holy crap! You think Faye Dunaway had problems in Chinatown?

"Fading of the Light" is sometimes dismissed, in part because the original series probably did not need a sequel, and in part because many readers feel that MacNeil's gorgeous painting of the original is not matched by the pen and inkwork of this run. I think it's still excellent myself, and a very worthwhile follow-up to the original.

The two "America" stories are available in a reprint volume which was issued by Titan in 2003. There's a new edition coming soon from Rebellion if you are interested - and you certainly should be - so let your local comic shop know. It should be out in March or April in the UK, and in May in the US.

Next week: There are reprints with Dark Judges in the Meg, and new episodes with Dark Judges in the prog!!

(Originally published 1/10/08 at LiveJournal.)