101. Coming Down Fast

July 2001: Prog 1253 features this nice cover by Colin Wilson. Inside, Judge Dredd is a third of the way through a twelve-part epic written by Garth Ennis, with art mostly provided by Carlos Ezquerra. He'll have to bow out briefly - the story goes that his house was being renovated and the builders were doing a fine impression of O'Reilly's men from Fawlty Towers on his roof - and episodes nine and ten will be drawn by Henry Flint, but honestly, the art doesn't seem to be as enthusiastic as the script. Ennis's return to Judge Dredd, part of a deal to reclaim the copyright on two earlier series for Fleetway, Troubled Souls and For a Few Troubles More, is a head-scratching failure. You can tell that Ennis enjoyed putting it together, but the epic is a humorless suggestion that all of 2000 AD's series share a single "multiverse" like DC Comics, and has the evil Chief Judge Cal (remember him?) of some parallel universe decide to invade our Mega-City One because he hates Dredd so much. Even weirder, he teams up with a selection of long-dead Dredd villains who managed to kill Dredd in their home dimensions (including War Marshal Kazan, Fink Angel, Murd the Oppressor and... Don Uggie Appelino of all people), and are so aggravated to learn that he's still alive in our world that they put their differences aside to come here and get the chance to kill him again.

As the boundaries between universes get messed with, we get cameo invasions by the Geeks from The VCs and Old One Eye from Flesh, while D.R. and Quinch joyride through the city and Dredd's radio picks up CB transmissions from Ace Garp. If only it were played as a wild, non-canon romp, it could have been huge fun, but Ennis scripts it with the touch of lead, and it doesn't feel quite so much like a love letter to the comic's past as a contractual obligation.



Faring a little better is the return of Durham Red by Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison. This is the second big storyline for the character in the far-future continuity that the creators established in 1999. It's much the same as the first, a big, sweeping science fiction epic with armies of humans and mutants in bloody conflict. Like the Dredd story, it's a pretty joyless affair, but at least it's not po-faced. Durham remains a likeable character, even if there are no standouts among the supporting cast and villains.

Harrison's artwork suffers from being too darn dark to distinguish anything. What we can see looks fantastic, but since he composed everything in little snatches of black, midnight blue and purple, it's pretty flat until you really look at it to see the detail. Even when Durham gets half-naked, as she tends to, she does so in a barely-lit room. You read this and wish Godolkin or somebody was wearing canary yellow, just to break up the page, or maybe have the sun come up over the battlefield. The panel below is an example of how neat the strip looks on those occasions he chooses to change things up. It's an interesting mix of scratchy pen and ink and computer-generated color patterns.



The other strips which feature in this issue are the second and final storyline for Pussyfoot 5 by John Smith, Steve Yeowell and Chris Blythe, and the second in a series of short Tor Cyan adventures by John Tomlinson and Kev Walker. Also, there's the climactic adventure in Nikolai Dante's "Tsar Wars" arc by Robbie Morrison and John Burns, about which more next time. Of these stories, only Cyan's has not been reprinted. You can buy the Dredd, the Dante and the Durham Red stories in nice Rebellion paperback collections, and the Pussyfoot 5 story was reprinted in a bagged supplement to the Megazine a few months ago.

Thrillpowered Thursday will be taking a short vacation while I get myself married and my co-readin' children take a short holiday. We'll be taking another break in July as well. But be back in three weeks to read about both the new Dante collected edition and the apocalyptic events of the epic that we are rereading. Plus the Banzai Battalion break out into their own bug-bustin' series! See you in twenty-one, fellow Earthlets!

90. From Russia With Lurve

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.

September 2000: This very funny cover by Frazer Irving (his second for the prog) heralds the return of Nikolai Dante, in the third book of the "Tsar Wars" storyline. The episode inside is by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and while it's as wonderful as usual, it has had a troubled genesis. The events in this eight-part chunk of the narrative were intended to precede the eight-part chunk that ran in the summer, but deadline troubles forced editor Andy Diggle to rearrange the two stories. So the second chunk ended with Nikolai so unbelievably ticked off with the Makarovs, and Jena in particular, that he memorably cast off his mother's name of Dante, telling the armies his name is his father's: Nikolai Romanov. This really should have set the stage for things falling completely apart in the book's climax. Despite this continuity error, driven home in the second episode where Nikolai's use of the name "Dante" is underlined, the third-as-published story is nevertheless a fine one, with Simon Fraser's welcome return to the art duties, and a brilliant climax of its own in a few weeks' time.

Speaking of Andy Diggle, there's an important addition to the Command Module around this time, an assistant editorial droid who goes by "Cyber-Matt" in the Output pages and Matt Smith in the real world. Smith will become the book's editor after Diggle departs in 2002; seven years later he is still wearing the Rosette of Sirius.

Also starting in this prog is the new thrill Rain Dogs, a ten-part one-off serial by Gordon Rennie and Colin Wilson. It is set in a flooded New York City populated by desperate scavengers, and is the story of one survivor of a flyby probe that crashed there being helped to safety by one of the locals. It's a very good story, one that works really well in the weekly format. Rennie came up with some very good, sympathetic characters, and Colin Wilson's artwork is just terrific, really making you believe in this dark world.



Rain Dogs was reprinted in a hardcover edition in the spring of 2002. This was a very curious little quickly-curtailed publishing plan. The only two books to emerge from it, at the time, were this and a similar hardcover collection of another Rennie-scripted ten-parter, Glimmer Rats, which ran in the comic a few months previously. I'm not certain whether they had printing or distribution problems or what happened, but these would be the only graphic novels to appear at the time; Rebellion would try again 18 months later with a slightly expanded line.

Other stories appearing in this prog are Deadlock by Pat Mills and Henry Flint, and Vanguard by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil, about which more information next week, along with a one-off Judge Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Peter Doherty. Wagner's been on a roll of really interesting one-offs over the last several weeks. Most memorably from today's perspective have been three stories bringing back the recurring menace P.J. Maybe, who's spent the last eight years in prison. I really love the way Wagner chose to expose Maybe's escape as something that happened months previously, right after the Doomsday Scenario epic, and that the judges only just found out about it. This gave Maybe the opportunity to get out of town and make his way to the South American mega-city called Ciudad Barranquilla, where he's had the millions he'd amassed over time locked away, and there start a brand new life. Had P.J. Maybe's story ended there, it would have been remarkably satisfying. In fact, had you purchased 2004's Extreme Edition # 2, that is where the story ends, but of course, much more would come a few years down the line...

At the time these were printed, Maybe was almost overshadowed by the villain from a different Dredd one-off, "Generation Killer," by Wagner and John Higgins. This took a very wild sci-fi premise and turned it into a really clever adventure. It's about a Mega-citizen who panics when his wife tells him that she's expecting, because of what he thinks is a family curse. It turns out that all his ancestors died right after the birth of their first child. This is because, thousands of years from now, one of their descendants commits some atrocity or other, and the legal system then decides that his crime is so great that all of his ancestors have to be punished as well, sending a time-travelling super-cop back in time to execute everybody in the line as soon as their first kid is born! Many fans hoped or thought that this would be the first appearance of a great new recurring foe for Dredd, but the Generation Killer was only seen in this one outing.

In other news, Rebellion continues to impress with their graphic novel collection. Sometimes, they announce a project which doesn't sound like the most exciting book on the shelf, but then the finished product turns out to knock your socks off. That's the case with The Complete Ro-Busters, which does exactly what it claims on the front and compiles absolutely every strip appearance of Hammerstein, Ro-Jaws and the gang from the pages of both Starlord, where the series began, and 2000 AD. The Ro-Busters, as I described 'em over at Touched by the Hand of Tharg, are "a disaster recovery crew along the lines of International Rescue from Thunderbirds, only they are staffed by a crew of robots (chief among them our lead characters Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein) and they are by no means as charitable as the Tracy boys had been. Mr. Ten Percent (so named because only ten percent of him, his brain, was human) charges for the dangerous work his droids perform."

That Ro-Busters should have developed into anything memorable is something of a miracle. The series was created by Pat Mills to fill some editorial request for something about planet-saving superheroes. Since Mills, as anybody who's read Marshal Law could figure, has never had much time for the concept of superheroes, he turned the idea on its head and decided to have the disaster squad staffed, not by noble, selfless people, but by the most expendable of characters: junked-out robots in line for the scrapheap, bought dirt-cheap by a greedy jerk in need of cheap labor to exploit.

Anyway, Ro-Busters is certainly dated, and from the outset feels very much like a comic strip for children, especially in a ridiculous story in which two people disguise themselves as robots in order to start a rebellion on board a casino in space, but it's incredibly fun! The writing did tighten up around the time it moved to 2000 AD, with an engaging mix of class comedy and homages to war comics before the wild lunacy of the final storyline, in which the doomed robots try making a break for a planet where they can be free. But before that frantic conclusion, there's a great story in which Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein are sidetracked for a tale in which one of Mr. Ten Percent's other business ventures show up. A demolition squad called the Terra-Meks, they turn out to be the villains of the piece. Four episodes of utterly gorgeous giant robot violence and mayhem, set against the backdrop of a dying coastal community and its giant robot lighthouse guardian, might be the book's high point.

The book is just tremendous fun, and if Rebellion actually missed an episode anywhere, it'll be news to me. It includes work by other writers besides Mills, including three by Alan Moore, who wrote yearly one-offs for the pages of the 2000 AD Annual in the mid-80s after the series had otherwise concluded. Artists include Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill and Carlos Pino. Every bookshelf should have one.

Next week, Deadlock wraps up the final plot threads that Nemesis had left behind, and Beth Vanguard accepts her far-too-brief commission. See you then!

(March 5, 2009)

75. Veteran's Day

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.

I had a moment of very odd coincidence when I read Judge Dredd Megazine # 57 last night. See, I should explain that while this feature appears on Thursday mornings, I do the writeup and the scanning on Wednesday afternoon, meaning that I read the featured issue on Tuesday, which of course was Veteran's Day. The Meg lineup is the same as it was the last time I stopped by; it contains a new, extra-length Dredd episode (here, part two of "Doomsday" by John Wagner and Colin Wilson), some pages of Daily Star Dredd newspaper strips by Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, and an issue of Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. And so it was, on Veteran's Day, that I read one of the most stunning episodes of that series, in which Jesse bumps into an old army buddy of his dad's in an airport bar. The vet, who was called Spaceman to John Custer's Texas, still holds onto his "FUCK COMMUNISM" lighter that the actor John Wayne had delivered to their unit on a goodwill tour to Viet Nam. Jesse still has his dad's lighter as well. It is the only thing he has of his father, who died while he was four, in events recounted in the earlier Angelville storyline. I still stand by my assessment that Preacher is just too unpleasant and too unrestrained for me to like it, and this violent installment of shit-talking soldiers won't change the mind of anybody who has written it off. However, this episode, which closes with a quote from Mark Baker's Nam, is unbelievably effective and moving, and a heartfelt tribute to all the men and women who've given time and blood for freedom.

Interestingly, around the time this issue was in production, 2000 AD's present owners at Rebellion made their first, unsuccessful, bid to buy the comic and all its intellectual properties from Fleetway. The events are recounted in Thrill-Power Overload by David Bishop, who explains that Rebellion's Jason Kingsley was, surprisingly, rebuffed in his efforts to license Strontium Dog for a video game, and so made the offer to purchase everything outright. The negotiations were carried out in secret, but Bishop and Diggle were unwittingly clued in, and encouraged Kingsley to give it another try once his effort was turned down. Perhaps even more surprising than Fleetway's reluctance to license Strontium Dog is that it's been almost ten years, and Kingsley owns the character, and yet we've got no game. Hey! Get a move on, will ya?




As for the actual Dredd content, Colin Wilson's return to action in Mega-City One has been really effective. Wilson had been among the artists in the rotation for both Dredd and Rogue Trooper in the early '80s before finding jobs with various French publishers. His best known work was for the Western series Blueberry, but Wikipedia notes that he also penned several volumes of Dans l'Ombre du Soleil. At any rate, he returned to 2000 AD for a pair of Pulp Sci-Fi one-offs before rejoining the Dredd rotation for about three years at the suggestion of assistant editor Andy Diggle, who also booked him for a few issues of The Losers in 2005. Among other work, in 2006, he illustrated that excellent Battler Britton miniseries by Garth Ennis that I enjoyed greatly.

As far as I'm concerned, any comic which gives you fifteen pages of Wilson art and twenty-odd pages of Dillon art is doing the right thing, but of course the reprints of the Dredd newspaper strip, about which I spoke at greater length in a Reprint This! feature last month, are bringing you wonderful artwork by Ian Gibson. Really, if you're going to have two-thirds of the comic reprint material, this looks like a lineup worth following, doesn't it?



And now, an appeal from your host.

Gang, I still need to track down nine issues of the Megazine - volume three # 69-77. Either the issues themselves or scans of the Dredd / DeMarco / Mean Machine episodes. These are issues I used to have, but lost when my house flooded three years ago. Can you help? I've got a giant stack of double progs, and some graphic novels, that I can swap, or PayPal you some cash... please drop me a line ASAP!

Next time, the Doomsday business continues in Mega-City One, and Devlin Waugh continues the hunt for the Herod. See you in seven days!

(November 13, 2008)