202. Other People's Heroes

August 2010: The summer of 2010 saw several major series underway, and two that I wanted to look at just a little more closely are a pair written by 2000 AD veterans Pat Mills and John Wagner. They are both revisionist looks at much older series. Savage, of course, has been giving 'em both barrels for several years now. "Crims" is Book Six of the series, written as always by Mills and drawn by Patrick Goddard. It sees Bill Savage, now using another undercover identity, getting help from several of London's criminal gangs to get the manpower and resources to infiltrate a Volgan command center. The Volgs have countered the Allies' super sci-fi robots with teleportation, and somebody needs to get in there and shut them down. As it is, Allied robots have already been pushed back out of Wales...

"Crims" is just beautifully drawn by Goddard, who piles on the detail and the ink. It is, surprisingly, a little longer than the usual Pat Mills story of late. For the previous six or seven years, Mills had been working in blocks of 60 pages broken down into ten episodes. When episode ten of this story didn't end the book -it continues for another 30 pages and wraps with part fifteen - it really surprised readers who'd become used to Mills' tropes. But the really splendid part comes with an interlude in the middle of the story.

Some of the dialogue is a little labored when Mills introduces the surviving player of a '60s rock band who, like Syd Barrett, retired into hermitage after a short time in the spotlight. Only this fellow kept his considerable record royalties to live in some peace and quiet on Eel Pie Island. He was happy to let the world think that he was another acid casualty; it was actually his girlfriend, a hippie chick who'd been linked with Brian Jones and all the big names back in the day, who had lost her mind. He retreated from the limelight and spent the next few decades engaged in research into the sort of sci-fi physics that would come in handy fighting the Volgans' teleporters. So it's a little contrived, but the human elements to the story are incredibly effective, and Goddard's artwork is just amazing. It is some of the best black and white artwork that 2000 AD has seen in years.

But the thing that really demands comment this time out is the first chunk of "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha." It's an interesting case of Wagner aping Mills' technique, and using the style that Mills had designed for his Slaine and ABC Warriors stories many years before. When this story concludes in 2014, it will be at least 40 episodes long, a huge epic that sees Johnny Alpha's revival and the second war between mutants and humanity. But before we get to that point, there's the major and controversial business of Wagner killing off the character of Feral.

Okay, so there are two things to explain before getting into this, both the factual and the fictional background of what has happened previously. I'll try to keep this reasonably simple. Feral is a character who was introduced by Alan Grant in his final Strontium Dog serial in 1990. That story concluded with Johnny Alpha's death, and Feral was one of a number of supporting players who made their way into a sequel series, Strontium Dogs, which was helmed by Garth Ennis from 1991-93, and then by Peter Hogan until its cancellation in 1996. This coincided with then-editor David Bishop letting Hogan know that his services were no longer required at 2000 AD and finishing off Hogan's final scripts for the series with the pseudonym "Alan Smithee."

Now, depending on who you ask, Strontium Dogs was either a long-winded bore of subplots that never went anywhere, whose main cast were characters not strong enough to anchor a strip of their own, dropped irregularly into the lineup as space filler until the next launch prog, or, alternately, it was one of the few things during the dark days of the early 1990s that held any promise and was written with a sense of maturity and intelligence, especially when half or more of every issue was written by Mark Millar in "explodo-vision." I say this, respectfully, because the Ennis-Hogan Strontium Dogs certainly has its fans, many of whom came to the comic during this bleak years and have stuck around. I may not be among them, but there are certainly more readers who remember Dogs fondly than there are who liked, say, Bix Barton as I did.

But one thing seems clear: John Wagner didn't seem to think much of Peter Hogan's work. He puts his opinion in mean black and white about halfway through the story. "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" is structured as though it's excerpts from an academic history of situations famous enough to warrant multiple, competing, biographies. What we're about to learn about Feral is very much at odds with the reports from previous chroniclers, and Wagner flatly dismisses the earlier work by "the notorious fantasist Ho Gan." Ouch. This won't be good.

While Ennis and Hogan's Feral was a tough, scared kid dealing with an increasingly bizarre mutation and slowly gaining the maturity and insight to become a leader, Wagner reveals him to be a coward and a bungler, who wanted to do the right thing from time to time but lacked the spine to do it. The story opens with longtime supporting player Middenface McNulty teamed with newcomer Precious Matson, who has heard from reliable sources that Johnny Alpha's skeleton was not left behind in the other dimension as depicted in "Final Solution," but rather, his body was returned to Earth by Feral. The trail eventually leads them to Feral, who is a condemned man awaiting execution on the planet of Garn.


Garn is one of those planets that really only makes sense in the context of Strontium Dog. It's a perfect mix of an oddball culture and black-as-coal comedy. The Garnians do not have noses, and consider any species that does have noses to be ungodly. They allow McNulty and Matson to visit the condemned, in deference to the renowned hero Johnny Alpha, but while they're in public, they have to wear masks that cover their offensive honkers. Feral is sentenced to die here for an act of small-scale sabotage to cover his escape from a spacecraft, but there was an accident and dozens were killed. Capital punishment on Garn is carried out by immolation: Feral is to be burned at the stake. Worse, they're fattening him up so that he'll burn cleaner. When our heroes meet him, he weighs at least three hundred pounds.

Feral is a very bitter and ugly man, not at all the person who starred in the Ennis and Hogan stories. He is willing to confirm what McNulty and Matson have already learned: he brought Johnny's body back, where it remained in some state of preservation, not decaying at all, and spread the lie that the beast that we saw in the last episode of "Final Solution" left him nothing but broken bones. Beyond that, he won't say a thing, including where Johnny's corpse is now, until McNulty and Matson spring him. The following episode sees our heroes doing exactly that, because this is an action-adventure melodrama, and we expect that sort of thing.

So Feral goes on to explain that he took Johnny's corpse to the mysterious planet Zen, where the land is in a constant state of flux and where bizarre, towering Stone Wizards - great big pillars of animated rock - are said to have the power to revive the dead or reverse the effects of evil sorcery like what killed Johnny. Feral eventually finds the Wizards, who are unimpressed with the work of the Lyran magic. They agree to revive him, but only in return for Feral's life. He declines, buries Johnny in a forest, and makes his way into the troubled life that seemed to end almost ten years later at Garn until McNulty and Matson rescued him.

And then we get the blunt stick of reality. McNulty is an alcoholic has-been and Matson is a journalist. They didn't rescue him. Of course they didn't. They staged the abduction with the assistance of the Garnian authorities to persuade Feral to talk. The execution is going on as scheduled. Ouch.


I'm not saying that Feral's fans are legion or anything, but this just plain ticked off a few people. Over the course of about four episodes, Wagner and Ezquerra completely demolished the character of Feral, declaring his earlier heroics to be unreal fictions and giving him an ignominious and pathetic end. Myself, I always thought that Feral was cut from far too close a cloth as what was trendy and kewl in American funnybooks. He was all claws and spikes and everything that every Wolverine wannabe was like in the early 90s. Still, it's a heck of a bad way to go out.

Sometimes, heroes don't get to go out either in a blaze of glory or down the happy path of retirement. Feral screwed up, often, and lots of people died, and his execution - preceded by the ritual slicing-off of his nose as one final indignity before death - is ugly and horrible. It kind of goes without saying that it is unlikely that any American superhero book would be so bold. Can you imagine a character like Hawkeye or Aquaman meeting a final fate so ugly and demeaning? Heck, you can't even imagine a character like Hawkeye or Aquaman meeting a final fate, period. They get resurrected as quickly as a new writer can flick the reset button.

Actually, the nearest thing that I can think of was a stunning 1997 issue of Starman by James Robinson and Dusty Abell, in which the criminal the Mist killed off at least four DC Comics D-listers: Crimson Fox, Ice, Amazing Man, and Blue Devil. At least one of those four seems to have stayed dead.

And on that note, we'll come back to Johnny's very controversial resurrection when the second chunk of this lengthy epic appears. More on that in chapter 212.

In the next chapter, however, 2000 AD gets its first really memorable female lead in quite some time with the debut of Rowan Morrigan in Age of the Wolf See you in seven!

108. A Night 2 Remember

I think we've reached a little landmark, of sorts. Shortly before I decided to follow in Paul's footsteps and start a 2000 AD readin' blog, I did a LiveJournal post celebrating the comic's 30th anniversary. This served as the "pilot" for the blog that you're reading today. Well, the reread has now brought us to prog 1280, the 25th anniversary, which was published in February 2002. It has this nice, funny cover by Kevin Walker and a lineup of just three stories.

First is a double-length Judge Dredd episode by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. It's called "Leaving Rowdy" and sees Dredd passing the torch, and his old apartment in Rowdy Yates Conapt, to his clone-brother Rico. It's a quiet and reflective anniversary moment, even though it ends in a hail of gunfire, as these things do. It's a really terrific story, showing that Dredd still has twinges of guilt about the death of Judge Lopez some twenty years previously, in the "Judge Child" epic. Even though Rico had been introduced already, to my mind, this story really seems to establish the tone and the feel of the many interlocking stories and subplots about Dredd and his "family" that would come over the next five years.

Bringing up the rear this issue is Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. This episode, part one of a storyline called "The Romanov Job," is pretty close to a one-off. It allows new readers a quick introduction to Nikolai, his current partner-in-crime the Countessa, and his current status as the most wanted man in the Empire. It's really great, and I'll be revisiting "The Romanov Job" in a couple of weeks.

These two stories are the best things in the comic, but it's what's between them that bears a little investigation. It's "A Night 2 Remember," the 25th anniversary "story."

The loose plot of the story, if it can even be called that, is that Tharg, his creator droids, and as many characters as can be drawn, have all gathered at London's fashionable "Ministry of Sound" nightclub for a great big party with a concert by the British techno-metal band Pitchshifter. This mirrored the real-world anniversary bash held at the club that same week. Each of the story's ten pages is handled by a different writer-artist team, and so you just have to take it on faith that there's a plot there at all. Still, the whole indulgent, smug affair is nevertheless incredibly fun, even as it teeters from nostalgic to self-reverential and all the way over to downright mean-spirited.

It starts out with Pat Mills' return to the comic, after stepping away following his disagreements with the former editor. Here, he stacks the deck in his favor by coming aboard with artist Kevin O'Neill and special guest star Marshal Law, who makes his first and thus-far only 2000 AD appearance here, beating the hell out of original 2000 AD star MACH One. The superhero-hunting Marshal has a few words with Judge Dredd before setting his sights on Zenith. Presumably, Law and Zenith settle their differences off-panel, because Zenith and his agent Eddie later have a page by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell where they contemplate their relevance in the current market, and Eddie considers taking on the dragon from Chronos Carnival as a new client.

Elsewhere, John Tomlinson and Kev Walker detail an incident in the gents' between Tor Cyan and the Balls Brothers, Mike Carey and Anthony Williams have Tharg mediate a misunderstanding between Waldo "D.R." Dobbs and Carver Hale, Robbie Morrison and Ian Gibson send Nikolai Dante on the dance floor with Halo Jones, Alan Grant and Trevor Hairsine give Hoagy from Robo-Hunter a book on "how to pick up babes" and watch him try it out on Feek the Freak while the Stix Brothers let the Helltrekkers know that they're not welcome at the party.

Meanwhile, Dan Abnett and Simon Davis have Sinister and Dexter deal with Torquemada and a very drunk Judge Death and consider Durham Red's assets (this page was my son's favorite), and Andy Diggle and Jock dispatch Anderson and Dredd - at least we think it's Dredd - to chase Pitchshifter off the stage, and make a point about editorial staff being commissioned to write their own characters.

That brings me to the most infamous pages of "A Night 2 Remember." Just as prog 500's "Tharg's Head Revisited" featured a page or two that sailed really close to the wind, Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving really raised some eyebrows with a page in which Tharg and Mek-Quake send a number of unloved fictional characters into a supernova, and then toss a couple of unloved creator droids into Mek-Quake's grinders. It's delightfully mean-spirited, and really, you can't say that the author of "The Golden Fox Rebellion" didn't have it coming.

But the one that everybody loves and remembers - and spoiling the jokes with scans would neither do them justice or be fair to you - is Garth Ennis's closing page, beautifully drawn by Dave Gibbons. In it, Tharg starts to take the opportunity to white out certain characters from 2000 AD's history in the 1970s that he's embarrassed by, only to have Ro-Jaws gleefully remind him that Tharg has a lot more to be humiliated about, a lot more recently. There are pointed digs at artists who can't meet deadlines, and writers who are all "twelve years old."

Ennis, who has always expressed public dissatisfaction with his work on the comic, skewers the heck out of himself - the Ennis creator droid rolls in and is shown to be a teeny little tractor about the size of your foot with a pint of Guinness atop it. Neither John Smith nor Mark Millar escape intact, and frankly, I've not been able to see Millar's name in print for the last seven years without hearing his little droid's deeply unflattering dialogue from this page. In the end, Tharg kicks the early 1990s to Mek-Quake and tells Bill Savage that all is forgiven, unwittingly setting the stage for Savage's return to the comic in a couple of year's time.



It's the sort of wild affair which can't happen very often, but reading it with a good knowledge of the comic's history and a playful love for its characters is a pretty darn satisfying little read. It's not very likely to be reprinted, so keep an eye out at eBay and your local thrill-merchant for a copy of this prog. Although, having said that, the forthcoming Marshal Law omnibus collection from Top Shelf will be incomplete without this one page, so hopefully Rebellion will let 'em do it. Bookmark my Reprint This! blog and I'll let you know.

Next time, Alan Barnes takes over editorial duties at the Megazine, David Bishop begins the Thrill-Power Overload feature, and the ABC Warriors return to your bookshelf, so I have a short review of the recent graphic novel collection. See you in seven!

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!

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)

58. Time of the Preacher / Long Time Gone

February 1998: While 2000 AD enjoys a face lift and some great stories including the first outing for the new-look Durham Red, along with guest artists Steve Yeowell on Sinister Dexter and Henry Flint on Nikolai Dante, the Mighty Megazine is undergoing the most radical, thus far, of its many reinventions. You may recall that the comic has had to accomodate some reprints along with new strips in order to continue, and that much of 1996-97 featured a rather fractious, combative relationship with its readers. The lengthy reprint of the Dredd adventure "Necropolis" had come to an end in vol. 3 # 35. For the next three issues, much of the page count was taken up with the three-part Predator vs. Judge Dredd, which was also published simultaneously as a three-part miniseries from Dark Horse. This proved to be among the weaker intercompany crossovers that featured Dredd, with uninspiring art by Enrique Alcatena and a surprisingly tame, beginners-level script by John Wagner. At one point early on, a perp whom Dredd has arrested protests that he has the right to a jury trial, to which Dredd has a snappy comeback. That might be considered a reasonable introduction to the judge system to those readers of Dark Horse's Predator comics who don't know the character or the concept, but honestly, the notion of anyone in Dredd's universe making such a protest when jury trials had been abolished at least thirty years previously is a bit weak.

Throughout these three issues, editor David Bishop had dropped strong hints about big changes coming to the Meg, but the revelation is nevertheless a massive surprise.



Preacher was the next project for Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon following their acclaimed run on Vertigo's Hellblazer in the early 1990s, some of which I plan to reread shortly. The series, which began in 1995, focussed on Jesse Custer, a small-town pastor who, shortly after a crisis of faith that ends with him chewing out most of his congregation while they're out at a bar, finds himself possessed by a creature called Genesis which had been imprisoned in Heaven. Genesis gives Custer the power to command absolute obedience of anyone who hears his spoken word. Custer and his associates decide to travel the country in an attempt to find God, who abandoned the throne of heaven at the moment Genesis was born, while pursued by the angel of death, the Saint of Killers, who has been assigned to kill Genesis.

I do not like Preacher. I almost like it, and I happily concede its cast of fantastic characters, especially the Saint and a bizarre, severely wounded dimwit called Arseface, are wonderful, but the story careens from one completely over-the-top episode of extreme no-holds-barred depictions of sex and violence to another with barely a pause for breath, and not an ounce of discretion or restraint. I am perhaps one of those fuddy-duddies who find situations a bit more dramatic when we're not shown every detail, and more comedic when the writer is forced to poke at convention, rather than ignoring it completely. This is probably why I just don't own very many Garth Ennis comics. Freed from restraint, his power to shock becomes, instead, the power to bore.

The Preacher reprints will run for 26 issues, covering the material (assuming Wikipedian accuracy) included in the first three (of nine) collected editions. Interestingly, I see that the fourth edition contains some Carlos Ezquerra artwork which I have not seen before; that sounds worth looking into! At any rate, there is no new material included in the Megazine's reprints, although the larger page size may be of interest to that title's fans, who'd like to see Steve Dillon's glorious artwork printed a little larger.



Along with Preacher, the new-look Meg includes a 17-page Dredd episode and one other reprint. For issues 39-41, this is Blackheart, a period crime piece by Robbie Morrison and Frank Quitely that previously appeared in a Dark Horse anthology. It will be followed by a Sin City story by Frank Miller before the slot is given over to reprints of the Daily Star's Judge Dredd newspaper strip.

As for me, this proved to be the time to stop ordering the Megazine. I have a nearly complete run of this period, almost all of which were obtained in lots for much less than the US price, which at the time was $5.99, but these are mostly issues that I picked up later. Even with the staff discount I enjoyed, this was, at the time, a real case of the value being lower than the cost. After all, I'd picked up the first three issues of Preacher back in 1995 and decided against continuing, and now I had the dubious pleasure of paying for it again at twice the US cost, in a magazine which would have fewer Dredd pages than Preacher pages. Blackheart at least had the appealing Frank Quitely artwork, but the announcement of Frank Miller reprints was what finally did me in, because I've always disliked that guy's stuff.

And so finally, after so many years of the Meg not being distributed in America, only sixteen months after I finally started getting it (with vol. 3 # 24, I believe), I said I'd had enough. Turns out there is too high a price to ask for Wagner-scripted Dredd episodes, and, for me, it was the price of Preacher.

The Hipster Children understand that Preacher is a mature-readers title and they're not to read the series. But that's okay, there's plenty of fun stuff with Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante over in the weekly to entertain them. More on those next time!

(Preacher images are © Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.)

42. Mercy Killings

December 1996: Prog 1022 is bringing the autumn-launched series to their conclusions, and many of them will not be seen again. Time Flies, Mambo and Rogue Trooper are all on the chopping block, and the next issue will see the final appearance of Robo-Hunter for seven years, as a one-off episode by Peter Hogan and Rian Hughes, submitted for the never-released 1996 Annual, is dusted down and shown off. It's not all "goodbye to old rubbish," thankfully. (And the Hogan/Hughes Robo-Hunter is absolutely wonderful, anyway!) The new thrill Mazeworld is wrapping up its first series, and John Smith and Paul Marshall's Judge Dredd twelve-parter "Darkside" continues, bridging this bunch of thrills and the next launch prog.

Rogue Trooper is finally being closed down after years of adventures which occasionally ranked as "pretty good." The character and continuity were revamped by Dave Gibbons and Will Simpson in 1990, but despite many efforts from many creators, it just never caught fire. There were periodic instances of great artwork and one amazing sequence in the summer of 1995 which saw almost the entire supporting cast killed off, but, as I wrote in the 27th entry, Rogue Trooper as a whole is simply not as thrill-powered as it should be.



The last several episodes have been co-written by Steve White and Dan Abnett and revealed that the armies of religious nutballs that Friday has been warring against are actually being manipulated by ugly aliens. So Venus Bluegenes finds out what's going on, rescues Friday, and they're out into the wild blue yonder in a stolen spaceship and are last seen plunging into a black hole. How in creation something as high-concept as this could appear boring, I couldn't tell you, but it's a dull climax and the cliffhanger remains unresolved. Of all the "whatever happened to" cliffhangers in 2000 AD's history, this one must surely rank among the least engaging. Nobody cares what becomes of Friday and Venus, and we never learn.

But there is more business with genetic infantrymen to come in the very near future...

At any rate, it's also farewell time for the much-maligned Time Flies, which everybody involved agrees is not as good as it should've been. I concede I'm pretty far in the minority, but even if Garth Ennis's script appears to be phoned in, there are still some good gags scattered throughout the nine episodes, along with some very nice art by Philip Bond and Roger Langridge. (I wonder whether the story was edited down from 12 episodes to nine. It would certainly fit with the tendency during this period for the editor to do quite a lot of rewriting and pruning to get some of this unwanted, older material burned through as fast as possible.)



Of the material from this period, "Darkside" and Time Flies have each been reprinted, in issues 10 and 19 of 2000 AD Extreme Edition. If you've never seen this title, you should certainly check it out. It's released every other month and reprints around 100 pages in an oversized format for $5.99, which is an amazing value. You can order back issues from the 2000 AD website.

Next week, there are new thrills, the last of Mark Millar's indestructible men, and a Slaine story that's better than I remembered it. See you in seven!

(Originally published 2/21/08 at LiveJournal.)