Showing posts with label frazer irving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label frazer irving. Show all posts

Thursday, August 23, 2012

179. Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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



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

Thursday, December 1, 2011

154. Mission: Avengers

June 2005: Now, man alive, that is a fantastic front cover. Frazer Irving is certainly among my favorite artists who were working with 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine during this period, and this is my favorite of all of his covers. It spotlights the return of Jack Point, the Simping Detective. At the time I'm writing this entry (November 2011), Tharg has hinted that Point might be returning in 2012, although it's questionable whether he will be drawn by Irving, who has spent years making better money drawing inferior material for American publishers.

Also at the time of writing, it's just been announced that an American company, Boom!, best known for its comics based on licensed properties, has landed the reprint rights to Steed & Mrs. Peel, the early-nineties Eclipse/Acme miniseries by Grant Morrison, Anne Caufield and Ian Gibson, and that we can expect to see this cute little adventure again in 2012. I mention this because, as you see on the front cover of this Megazine, there's an article about The Avengers this month. It is part of an occasional series of really entertaining articles called British Icons and it features writeups on the likes of Sapphire & Steel, The Tomorrow People, Desperate Dan, Sexton Blake and other such fun creations. Each installment looks at the ancillary merchandising and exploitations of the property as well as the "primary source." In the case of Sapphire & Steel, that meant a pretty in-depth look at the comic by Angus Allan and Arthur Ranson that appeared in Look-In.

The Avengers had a much more sporadic publication history as a comic strip, with short runs in several different hardback annuals and weekly papers. A part of me is incredibly curious to see these old comics - who wouldn't be, as the original show is one of the four or five best TV series of the 1960s - but I have to wonder whether the article's writer and editor didn't go out of their way to find some of the most ridiculous and uninspiring artwork, by John Canning, to illustrate the feature. Or maybe it really was an awful comic and best forgotten? Whatever the case, one thing we can all agree on is that, in a perfect and just world, The New Avengers would have generated a weekly comic by Allan and John Bolton for Look-In. Wouldn't that have been terrific?

As for Jack Point, his current adventure is called "Playing Futsie" and it is one of the wildest and most unpredictable of all of his cases. This thing runs through left turns, misdirections and plot twists at breakneck speed, and is probably my favorite Point story. "Futsie" is Mega-City slang for somebody suffering from "future shock," and it begins with Point being thrown in jail, under orders from his corrupt sector chief to find out what has caused a happily employed citizen to crack. Point was not told in advance that, by "crack," Chief Davees meant "murdered a room full of citizens with a machine gun after convincing himself they were robots."


It's another day in the studio for American radio talk show host Neal Boortz...


So this story gets going and it doesn't let up at all. It's one thing to go from zero to a hundred in a comic, but this one does it on one of those crazy curvy Italian mountain roads. By the time Point figures out that somebody is deliberately targeting citizens with jobs and doing something to drive them crazy, it's got gang fights, Point's pet raptaur, the debut of a mysterious new supporting character with her own agenda, the surprising return of Elmort DeVries' old Hunter's Club from way back in 1984, and Point totally pulling one over on Judge Dredd to wrap up this three-part case.

Incidentally, most of us thought that writer Si Spurrier was being dead clever coming up with a terrific, terrible name like Miss Anne Thropé for his new addition to the cast. One reason that I enjoy looking back at 2000 AD from a little distance is that it affords us the time to see small connections here and there that we might have missed before. I bet Spurrier had no idea that his Miss Anne Thropé wasn't the first occasionally-appearing supporting player in a comic by that name. As Mr. Kitty's Stupid Comics, a site that every one of you should be reading, pointed out just a couple of weeks ago, Dell's idiotic superhero take on Frankenstein had the same bad joke almost forty years previously. At least Spurrier acknowledges the awfulness of the joke. When Point figures it out during his ongoing first-person narration, it's a really funny and clever moment. Not many writers even try to use narrative captions to mean anything anymore, let alone use them to help define the lead character the way that Spurrier does in this series and in his other strips like Lobster Random and Numbercruncher. It's one of the reasons that I really enjoy his work so much.

Speaking of pulling one over on Dredd, holy anna, does PJ Maybe ever play our hero like a fiddle this month in the final episode of "Monsterus Mashinashuns."



So, over the course of the previous three months, we've seen Maybe, disguised as Barranquilla billionaire Pedro Montez, put several apparently-unrelated schemes and pieces into place, ranging from allowing Dredd to get a sample of his blood to sending his sexbot companion to the Cal-Hab wastes to kidnap an aging philanthropist do-gooder to attacking the Mega-City delegation with a giant robot to arranging a huge bonfire on his property for his migrant workers to burn.

What writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra come up with to tie all this together is just completely stunning. Have you ever seen the classic Mission: Impossible episode "The Mind of Stefan Miklos," written by Paul Playdon? Speaking, as I was, of the best things on TV in the 1960s, well, I wouldn't count this series among them, but this one episode stands out as one of the densest and most amazing scripts I've ever enjoyed. See, Phelps's IM team, in that episode, has to convince an agent from "the other side" (like The Avengers, Mission: Impossible was never so common or vulgar as to actually call Russians Russians) of a certain fact by allowing that agent to think that he has spotted one teeny error in their grand deception, when the teeny error is, of course, deliberate.

In this fantastic twist, Dredd is actually back in Mega-City One when he remembers that the bandaged finger that Pedro Montez waggled in front of him, illustrated in the panel above, was not the same finger that was cut when Montez broke a glass and allowed Dredd the chance at a small blood sample, wiped away with a napkin. Dredd, convinced that Maybe has finally slipped up and this time he's got him, storms back down to the estates outside of Ciudad Barranquilla with a team of Mega-City judges.

It doesn't go as planned for him, but this time he leaves absolutely convinced that Maybe has died in a bonfire, while Maybe, now using the disguise of the well-known, selfless, Byron Ambrose, heir to a mammoth fortune, makes his way back home. His story will resume about two years down the line, in 2007's "The Gingerbread Man," where it really picks up. It's absolutely delicious.

Stories from this issue are available in the following reprint editions:
The Bendatti Vendetta: The Complete Bendatti Vendetta (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd:The Complete PJ Maybe (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
The Simping Detective: The Complete Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop)



Next time, back to 2000 AD for the debut of Leatherjack and the stunning second book of Savage. See you in seven!

Thursday, July 28, 2011

140. The Megazine Takes it Eazy

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Stories from this Megazine are reprinted in the following editions:

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


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

Thursday, May 20, 2010

135. Whenever I see the word "Valkyrie," I hear Steve Winwood singing "Valerie."

February 2004: I guess that this week's entry really is proof that I'm not the same gleefully malevolent critic that I was in the early '90s, writing for the university newspaper. Once upon a time, the prospect of writing an epic, pages-long takedown of a series as misbegotten and brainless as Valkyries would have been something to look forward to, but now it's just depressing and tedious. Life is too short to waste even reading garbage like this, let alone writing about the experience. The cover art pictured here is by Frazer Irving and it is, by leagues, the best thing about the series, about which the most interesting thing I can impart is that it is the worst 2000 AD series of the past ten years, and the only one about which I can't find a single redeeming thing to say. There have been other great big steaming disappointments in the prog over the last ten years - Bison, Detonator X and the second series of The Ten-Seconders come to mind - but only Valkyries stands up as a complete waste of paper, time and talent. It really does rank down there with the worst of the early '90s misfires. Think Wire Heads bad.

Okay, so it's the last series created for the comic by Steve Moore, and it's illustrated by American artist John Lucas. It reminds me of the old story of how Michael Fleisher was once headhunted by 2000 AD on the strength of his 1970s work on The Spectre and Jonah Hex, thinking him a good fit. I suspect that Lucas, who once did a really good frame story for a special issue of Starman, one of my favorite American comics of the '90s, might have been sought out on the strength of his work on the last three issues of Codename: Knockout, a Vertigo clone of the popular Danger Girl series. He's a really good artist, and based on what Tharg saw in Codename: Knockout, he seemed like a good choice for a series about sexy space babes romping around to save the universe from some humongous new threat. Lucas can draw sexy ladies...



...unfortunately, for this series, he chose to draw incredibly ugly ones.

I don't know what the hell happened here, but basically, in a series that was crying out for Frank Cho or J. Scott Campbell to draw it, we got somebody who wanted to draw characters with all the lumpy sex appeal of cardboard boxes, and half the curves. Not that Cho or Campbell could polish this script very much, as it's basically regurgitated plot beats from the failed Rose O'Rion series and the first run of Synnamon (which had only finished about ten weeks previously!), with comedy anal probes and sex-crazed berserker men thrown in for good measure, but at least they'd have made it easy on the eyes.

That is far more than anybody needs to say about Valkyries. I feel sorry for David Page when he gets to it in his prog slog.

Oh, yeah! David's doing the prog slog now! That's the big news in 2000 AD fandom this week. Paul Rainey, who kickstarted the whole "blog about your collection" deal with his 2000 AD Prog Slog Blog in 2006, inspiring the Thrillpowered Thursday that you've been reading, has finally reached the end of the 1188 issues that he bought from somebody on eBay and has brought his enterprise to an agreeable end. But reg'lar commenter and all-around great guy David "Monarch" Page hasn't wanted the story to end there, so he's carrying on over at his own blog, Dead'll Do. This certainly gives me the impetus to keep writing and not rest on my laurels, despite periodic, necessary recharge breaks - a short one's coming up in June - because the Monarch's fewer than 200 issues behind me, and it simply wouldn't do for him to catch me.

Speaking of which, next time, it's back to the good stuff, as The Red Seas wraps up its second adventure and we meet another member of Dredd's family. See you in seven!

Thursday, April 22, 2010

131. Three Stories

October 2003: This completely excellent cover by D'Israeli is well-timed to appear here at the blog because it's a potent reminder that Leviathan, a wonderful serial that he drew, scripted by Ian Edginton, is coming back into print in Rebellion's paperback line. A hardback was released in 2006, but it's been out of print for a while. In fact, the new edition is solicited to retailers this very month in the pages of that Previews catalog that they all get. If you've never heard of Leviathan, it's set on the world's largest ocean liner some twenty years after it vanished at sea. It mixes a murder mystery with a tale of society breaking down after two decades in isolation, a population still trying to enforce the class codes of Britain in the 1920s unable to understand where they are and what happened to them. If it sounds intriguing, then you should get on the horn to your local funnybook emporium and tell 'em to order you a copy. (I should probably swing by a comic shop and get the page number, just to make it easier for you, but it's out of my way.)

At this time, 2000 AD and its sister Judge Dredd Megazine were running three particularly interesting serials. None of them were anything like any story the comics had ever seen previously, but each of them seemed to fit so well that you couldn't imagine any other comic presenting them. Leviathan was terrific, a slow-burn change of pace with an aging detective who's spent years quite justifiably raging about a life full of unfair losses. But it wasn't the only wild tale that took an incredible premise and used it for some very effective world-building.

From Grace, a five-part serial by Si Spurrier and Frazer Irving, looked at the deterioration of Kaith, leader of a tribe of winged people who share an uneasy existence with a much larger population that is wingless. The setting of the serial is never really defined; it's a low-technology, hunter-gatherer type of society. From Grace deserves more commentary than I have room for it here; it's a really fascinating look at how we define evil, and what drives people to become villains. Unlike Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, however, Kaith is never really seen to be a sympathetic character. The actions of the wingless towards his people are about as noxious as Kaith's to them. It's a spiralling mess where any leader was certain to become a monster.



That's not to dismiss the strength of the narrative, but where it really shines is in the experimental way that it unfolds. Frazer Irving really knocks this one out of the park, using different color schemes for the various times in which the story is set, and Spurrier's narration - there's a lot more of it here than in most stories - drives the memoir by moving back and forth. He also includes a pair of amazing, shocking cliffhangers to end the second and fourth installments. Nobody, nowhere, is still rooting for Kaith at the start of episode five.

On the other hand, everybody, everywhere, roots for Rptr, the star of XTNCT, a six-part serial written by Paul Cornell that was running in the Megazine at this time. Already a big-name fan made good, Cornell would later script three very good episodes of Doctor Who for TV and later still write a celebrated run of Captain Britain for Marvel Comics. It's illustrated, again, by D'Israeli and it concerns six intelligent dinosaur-esque creatures in a bizarre genetically-engineered world who have agreed to exterminate the last two hundred humans. Given the high-concept craziness, no compelling reason is given why they shouldn't.

Cornell and D'Israeli's characters are incredibly compelling, but none more so than Rptr, a small-witted psychopath who runs around at super speed tearing mammals to pieces and screaming at such volume and speed that his vowels are lost to the wind. The story is structured beautifully, with each of the six episodes focusing on one member of the cast. It remains the only comic serial I've ever seen to feature a gay triceratops in a leather vest, as well as the only comic to ever use the immortal phrase, "Kiss my scaly dinosaur arse!"

Sadly, Paul Cornell's footprint in the House of Tharg has been very small. He scripted a few series in the early '90s which weren't bad, but the weight of "worthiness" sort of hung over them, and then he worked on other projects for years before contributing XTNCT. Television soon beckoned, and while he's since returned to comics, they've been for Marvel and DC. He was announced as Superman's newest writer just last week. I'm sure those are all fine books, but I can't help but think his talents would be better served in 2000 AD than with superheroes.

All three of these stories are available as collected editions. As noted above, the new paperback version of Leviathan is in the catalog now. From Grace was reprinted in Storming Heaven: The Frazer Irving Collection and XTNCT made it into a Rebellion hardback volume. Each of them is worth looking into!

Next time, Tharg attempts to add a little spice to the comic as Synnamon debuts. See you in seven!

Thursday, December 24, 2009

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!

Thursday, September 17, 2009

112. Death's Sweet Embrace

June 2002: On the cover of prog 1294, we've got the great Henry Flint illustrating the climactic scene from a six-part Judge Death adventure which concludes this week. The story, by John Wagner and Frazer Irving, features longtime hero Cassandra Anderson trying to rush back from an assignment on the international moon station of Luna-One when she gets a psychic flash that Judge Death has somehow broken free again and has been murdering children in the Big Meg's orphanages.

It's a pretty grisly premise, and comes across amazingly well thanks to Irving's moody, black-and-white penwork. Everyone involved had decided beforehand that Judge Death had really been spoiled by the lighthearted, black comedy appearances of the 1990s, especially those Batman / Judge Dredd crossovers, and so they've decided to play this story straight and emphasize Death's genuinely evil side in a story full of atmospheric horror.

It has a remarkable conclusion in this issue: Death puts Anderson in a coma and gets away. The whole thing was a trap to put his arch-enemy in the hospital, brain-dead while he starts a new life in the Cursed Earth. He even has a new host body waiting for him, and he's last seen in a memorably terrifying conclusion, wandering around the desert that used to be Middle America in a long coat and hat, bringing his brand of final judgement to the pathetic souls eking out subsistence-level life in the small villages and communities in that lawless world. Wagner and Irving would reunite for a memorable sequel to this story in a couple of years, but if it had ended here, nobody would have begrudged Wagner for calling this the conclusion. "My Name is Death" and the follow-up, "The Wilderness Years," were released in a collected edition by Rebellion in 2007.



Also in this issue, Wagner and Kevin Walker continue the Judge Dredd epic "Sin City" that was mentioned last time, and there's a Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and David Bircham. Simon Spurrier and Shaun Bryan contribute an excellent Future Shock with a really memorable twist ending, but the big, crashing highlight of this comic, even better than the two Wagner stories, is 13 by Mike Carey and Andy Clarke.

13 is a twist-filled adventure about Joe Bulmer, a layabout and small-time crook with minor psychic abilities. After he snatches some girl's purse, he finds a small white bead which amplifies his powers to incredible, destructive levels.

Bulmer was already on the radar of an institute which purports to study paranormal events, but they take a new interest in him when his use of the bead starts causing death and mayhem. But their motives aren't all they seem, and Joe finds himself in the odd position of being the unlikely hero of the piece.



I can't mention this series without telling you about one of the coolest moments in the comic's history. When Joe was first at the research center, he briefly met a girl called Daksha. Back home, he's attacked by a strange alien "skin" which he kills by strangling it to death. Almost immediately, the police start pounding on his door, find the dead thing and haul Joe off in handcuffs.

As they're putting Joe in the back of the car, Daksha arrives, screaming some odd story about how Joe promised he'd go straight this time and how she'll wait for him, a ruse to get the police to let her past for a farewell kiss. But Joe's confusion is compounded when Daksha instead quietly tells him: "They aren't real policemen. And they're going to kill you." I love that so much!

Sadly, 13 would prove to be Mike Carey's last serial for 2000 AD, as he signed an exclusive deal with DC Comics. This had him scripting the celebrated Lucifer for Vertigo, a book I've been telling myself for years I need to read, along with a three-and-a-half year run on Hellblazer. This year, he began a new Vertigo series, The Unwritten. Clarke would draw a few more 2000 AD stories, including some Sinister Dexter adventures and the 2004 serial Snow/Tiger before also moving to DC. At the time of writing, he's currently doing a superhero series called R.E.B.E.L.S.. 13, under the amusing title Th1rt3en, was one of the last of the graphic novels to appear in the short-lived DC/Rebellion line. It's still available from DC, and absolutely worth getting a copy.

Next time, back to the Megazine, with a very neat anthology series for Durham Red, the debut of The Bendatti Vendetta and the mysterious murder of Otto Sump. See you in seven!

Thursday, August 13, 2009

107. Unknown Life Form Unknown Life Form

Here at Thrillpowered Thursday headquarters at the Hipster Pad in the 'burbs of Atlanta, we're always on the lookout for silly pronouncements and hype from our Mighty friend Tharg, alien editor of 2000 AD and lone emissary to our planet from the star-system Betelgeuse. Every so often, he'll promise or hint at a return for a favorite series that never quite makes it back, or announces a graphic novel that never arrives, but in January 2002's prog 1276, he really drops the ball when he spends the editorial column of the inside front cover's "Nerve Centre" to tell us about the forthcoming Judge Dredd movies. Yes, it turns out that seven years after the failure of the Sylvester Stallone film, a liaison has been formed with a company called Shoreline Entertainment, and they've got two scripts in hand for features entitled "Dredd Reckoning" and "Possession." So seven years after the Stallone movie, there's word of two more forthcoming, and seven years after this announcement, no such movies have been made. It is sort of frustrating the way the talents at Rebellion can make such darn fine comics but consistently find the ball dropped when they branch out into ancillary products.

For example, where, I ask again, is my drokking Strontium Dog first-person shooter? Pretending that I'm Johnny Alpha on the Frigate level of GoldenEye is not the same!

Well, I speak of darn fine comics, and you'd think that with a gorgeous panel like the one below, Storming Heaven by Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving would be the perfect example of what I'm talking about. Never let it be said that Irving can't draw the crap out of an image like this:



Unfortunately, Storming Heaven is another stunning missed opportunity, and perhaps the final example of what I've mentioned in this blog several times, where former editor Andy Diggle's "rocket fuel" approach to super-compressed storytelling in short-form serials resulted in something really unsatisfying. The concept is radical, and pure genius: basically, LSD in the sixties gave everybody who took it superpowers, and now Charles Manson has gone to war with Dr. Timothy Leary.

It is an odd experience, reading this story now, as the media remembers the Manson Family murders forty years later, and seeing archival footage of the pathetic tragedy everywhere I look online. Of course, the Manson archetype really isn't called by that name - he's "Caliban," although the use of quotes from the real person, and the use of Manson's mug shot in the background of one scene, kind of make the intentions absolutely clear.

Conceptually, Storming Heaven should have been spectacular, but it all ends up being rushed and pretty dull. The stakes are too great, the concept is too wild, and the cast is too large for this to work in an engaging way in just seven episodes. In the image above, you'll see that strangely pretentious caption - the narration throughout is quite knowingly po-faced - urging us to "remember" all these costumed heroes hurling themselves into danger, defending the city against Caliban's ugly, grimy hordes. The irony, of course, is that it's not possible to remember characters who only get a single panel's screentime and no dialogue before vanishing for two weeks, and when we're next told about them, it's a breathless account of their death via another character who is introduced only to tell the two female leads that everybody's dying. It's impossible to care about the assault on utopia, when we've only been told by an unreliable narrator that, prior to episode two, this utopia really was amazing, honestly.

I remember saying back in the day that Storming Heaven should have been a much grander, and bolder exercise, and this reread certainly reinforces my old opinion. Told across three books of ten episodes, with the assault on San Francisco coming at the end of the second, the seeds were certainly here for something downright amazing. I mean, Irving's artwork is just eyepoppingly wonderful on every page, and certainly the concept is so cool that I'm sure we readers would have loved watching Rennie do some worldbuilding to cement this utopia as a place as vibrant and interesting as, say, Mega-City One or Nu-Earth or Stickleback's London. Sadly, though, Storming Heaven was little more than a beautiful missed opportunity. It is available in a fine collected edition, however: Storming Heaven: The Frazer Irving Collection assembles this and several other Irving serials and one-offs (including A Love Like Blood and his Shaun of the Dead tie-in episodes), and it certainly is a gorgeous book.



Also appearing in this prog are a one-off Judge Dredd adventure by Rennie and Paul Marshall, a Future Shock by Richard McTighe and PJ Holden, and the continuing Bad Company serial by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. Oh, and a little something wild called Shakara...

As I was mentioning last week, two new series debuted in Prog 2002. First was Storming Heaven, but the second was an entirely different prospect, something which was altogether more promising. Oddly, however, by the end of its first series, Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint's Shakara was proving itself to be just as much of a disappointment, albeit for different reasons.

Shakara certainly looked like something amazingly new and readers had good reason to be excited about it. The story begins with the destruction of Earth and the raging, vengeful boasting of the galaxy's sole surviving human, an astronaut who was in space at the time and is now a prisoner in one of those fight-or-die sci-fi arenas. And on page four, this fellow, the guy we thought was the protagonist, gets casually murdered by one of what would prove to be a host of completely, wonderfully bizarre alien nasties. And then the killer and everybody else get slaughtered when the series' real protagonist shows up: an indestructible, utterly alien, long-limbed, spindly, mad-eyed warrior with giant freaking swords on the end of his arms who blows the almighty hell out of anybody and everybody in this violent, wild universe. His only word: the mad scream "SHAKARA!"

Well, frankly, if that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what to tell you.

Unfortunately, within a couple of episodes, Shakara had devolved into a dull bore because every installment was exactly the same. It all looked spectacular, with Flint's fantastic sense of design and desire to throw caution and convention to the wind, but it got boring really quickly. It was not an eight-part serial, but rather a collection of one-offs and two-parters, and in each one, some new, ostensibly indestructible super-nasty would do something indescribably over-the-top and evil, and then Shakara would show up, prove that he(it?) was a heck of a lot more indestructible than the super-nasty thought it was, and then open a supernova or a black hole up under under their ass and rocket away, yelling "SHAKARA!"

I was reminded very quickly of my friends in Corn Pone Flicks and their wonderful film Star Dipwads, and how the producer of some space epic couldn't understand why his audience was disappointed, because he'd given them suspense, three exciting battle scenes and the actual appearance of the protagonist, and was aggravated to learn that they wanted a plot as well.

Well, Shakara returned for two more series in 2005 and 2008, and the fourth series will be starting in 2000 AD in one week. The first three stories are all compiled in this book, and it looks like Morrison's plan was to establish something wilder and weirder from the outset, using the patchy 2002 series as a launchpad for longer, more intricate narratives which readers could really sink their teeth into. When that second story started in the summer of 2005, I know a few people's eyes rolled, but we quickly got in line, because "The Assassin" is a thunderously cool little epic which piles on one outlandish SF concept after another as a whole gang of intergalactic bad boys, any of whom could headline their own wild series, gets together to do something about this idiot screaming "SHAKARA!" and fucking with the laws of physics.

And then the third series introduces a mob of robot anti-gravity tyrannosaurs and gives some backstory to everything, and it's utterly perfect, blissfully cool and unlike anything else in comics. Long may it scream.

Next time, 2000 AD celebrates its 25th anniversary... and Pat Mills returns!

Thursday, May 7, 2009

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!

Thursday, April 2, 2009

94. The Empire of Sleep

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, March 5, 2009

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)

Thursday, February 19, 2009

88. That Table

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.

August 2000: With prog 1205, the Andy Diggle era of 2000 AD is well under way, and he's got Steve Moore as his secret weapon. Moore's principal contribution at this time is the new character Red Fang, and to be honest, it is among one of the comic's greatest missed opportunities. The pieces are all here for what could have been a 2000 AD classic. Fang is a strategist for a criminal empire in Earth's future, locked in an underworld war with other organizations, the police, and a strange alien race that looks like squids. The artwork is by Steve Yeowell, one of this blog's favorite illustrators. The characters and situations are engaging, but it all somehow fails. Hugely. Looking back on it, I think that the problem was that Moore decided to write a twelve-part serial, dumping far too many characters and a great big situation on readers' heads in one swoop. The result is incredibly convoluted and confusing, and nobody is surprised when the series is quietly retired after it wraps up in prog 1211.

If only the twelve weeks had been spent on four or five shorter stories, organically introducing supporting players and letting Red Fang deal with smaller scenarios, slowly building up to this tale of, ummm, stolen... interstellar... technological weapons stuff, then readers might have understood who the characters were, and why they should care about the major plot.

Red Fang is notable for one thing, however. Yeowell and colorist Chris Blythe conspired to decorate these crimelords' offices with some downright amazing furniture. It was a running joke in fandom for months after the series concluded that nobody wanted to see Red Fang return for a second series, but his table was welcome back anytime.

The other draws in the comic at this time are Judge Dredd (here in a one-off by John Wagner and Siku), Sinister Dexter (Dan Abnett and Nigel Raynor) and Nikolai Dante (Robbie Morrison and John Burns). But perhaps overshadowing all of them is the surprising, welcome return of Tharg's Future Shocks after an absence of several years. Previously, the format for one-offs had been used by umbrella series like Vector 13 and Pulp Sci-Fi. These accomplished many of the same goals as the Shocks - to fill space and mark time between series, to give work to aspiring creators, and to tell a good story with a twist ending - but their format imposed restrictions on the sort of stories that could be told. Certainly, a Future Shock in 2000 can be every bit as hit or miss as it was in 1980, but there's a nostalgic glee in seeing it dusted off. First up is a five-pager by Steve Moore, with art by Frazer Irving, who'd go on to become one of the comic's regular droids for the next several years. In fact, he impresses editorial so much with his debut that he's almost immediately given a Dredd episode to draw; it will run in the very next issue.

At this time, most of the stories in this prog have gone unreprinted. The Dante story was collected in the fourth book, Tsar Wars, Volume One, but none of the others have seen a second outing.

Speaking of Tharg's Future Shocks, in a nice bit of timing, we hit their return in this reread just as I finished Rebellion's new collection of several dozen classic ones. The title stretches the truth ever so slightly: rather than somebody's subjective take on the actual best one-offs from the comic, excepting the ones by Alan Moore which have already been compiled, this is a collection of episodes from four of 2000 AD's best-known writers. So it contains a pile of John Smith Shocks, a majority of Peter Milligan episodes, all but one of Grant Morrison's offerings ("Candy and the Catchman" is omitted), and everything that Neil Gaiman ever wrote for the comic.

Certainly the resulting book is uneven and choppy, but there are some real gems to be found in its pages. Grant Morrison's early attempts at channelling Alan Moore are pretty revealing, and not just from an archaeological standpoint. "The Shop That Sold Everything" is really funny, even if the end isn't so much a twist as it is an inevitability. I've also always enjoyed John Smith's "A Change of Scenery," which was the first appearance of some of his Indigo Prime characters, among many other strips in this book.

Seeing characters like Indigo Prime and Ulysses Sweet here actually makes me think that the book's only real flaw is that it didn't collect the five or six one-off adventures of Joe Black by Kelvin Gosnell from the early eighties. That's just quibbling, of course, those are outside the perview of the book, but one of the many things that did make 2000 AD interesting in the early 80s was the existence of characters who only showed up in one-offs or very short series.

Dr. Dibworthy and Abelard Snazz were compiled in the big Moore book from a couple of years ago, and it's a real shame Tharg doesn't have any characters like that today. Harry Kipling (Deceased) was kind of like that, but he hasn't shown up in two years, for some mad reason. Lately it's seemed that one-offs only ever show up to fill space after a ten-part story runs in a twelve-week slot. Maybe one day soon, Tharg will try two or three months mixing one-offs and two-parters, trying out more new creators and ideas, or maybe giving some of the supporting cast of the major series five pages of their own to shine. It seemed to work all right in the 1980s, didn't it?

Next week, there's a hole in the collection! Whatever happened to prog 1208?!