Showing posts with label greg staples. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greg staples. Show all posts

Thursday, August 6, 2009

106. Prog Packs

Welcome back! 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, about one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

Well, it's probably Friday for most of my readers in Europe by the time this gets posted, but hello and welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday anyway. Your humble, newly-unemployed blogger has been a bit crazy-busy, what with a three-thousand mile road trip, shuffling kids from their vacation to summer camp and getting ready for school, cleaning the heck out of this house and, oh yeah, looking for a new job, but the Hipster Son and I have sat down to reread the last couple of comics that the House o' Tharg released in 2001 and figured I'd give you good people something to spend a couple of minutes looking at. So today's focus is "Prog 2002," the year-end edition.

The previous two year-end books contained far more surprises and one-offs than this one. Honestly, it's a huge comedown from those, and doesn't feel anywhere as special as its predecessors. There are two Dredd episodes. One of these is the third "Slick Dickens" story. The previous two established a formula where Dredd, acting incredibly out of character and assisted by some over-the-top narration, comes up against a super-assassin, and it's revealed at the end that everything we've just read was a hack writer's crummy bestseller and the real Dredd is not amused. There's nothing new about this latest addition; John Wagner seems to enjoy writing them for the exercise of playing with the breathless pulp fiction cliches. It's a little amusing, but it's hardly special enough for a year-end prog, really.


Elsewhere, there are double-part opening episodes for the brand new thrills Storming Heaven by Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving and Shakara by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint, as well as a new run of Nikolai Dante by Morrison and Simon Fraser. Also starting this issue is Bad Company, which had been trailed with a prologue episode a year previously, by the original team of Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. There's a one-off Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams, and a complete twelve-page story called "Memento" written and drawn by Bryan Talbot, and the rest of it is pin-ups and filler material.

No wonder it feels slight; apart from the first lineup of the 2002 strips (Dredd, Dante, Bad Company and the two new thrills), all this comic gives us is an extra Dredd, a Sin Dex and a glorified Future Shock. Compare that to the previous two special progs, and you'll see what I mean.

Actually, I am doing "Memento" a disservice by selling it so short. It is certainly nice to see Talbot's work in 2000 AD after such a long absence - fourteen years since his last Nemesis the Warlock episode. It looks like he was not really prolific in comics in the 1990s, but he did show up in some Vertigo titles and had some deserved acclaim for the series The Tale of One Bad Rat. "Memento" is a dialogue-free story set in an ugly, cramped, underground future and the artwork is quite lovely.



It's interesting to speculate what might have been, had incoming editor Matt Smith found "Memento" to be more successful than he did. Obviously, 2000 AD's fans prefer to see recurring character thrills rather than one-offs, but it might have been neat to have seen an annual story like this, told by creators from outside the normal 2000 AD stable. Established writers and artists probably aren't interested in doing a five-page Future Shock, but something a little longer, like this, might have tempted a few names, and been a nice treat each December. An annual fifteen-page weird SF tale by Moebius or Makoto Yukimura or Zoran Janjetov or the woefully unsung Tim Eldred would certainly have been more interesting than the yearly comedy Sin Dex Christmas gag strip.

In other news, I wanted to follow up on the downbeat previous entry to this pulse-poundin' blog. I had been grumbling about the dimwits running Diamond Distribution, and countrywide complaints that fans' orders for 2000 AD were not being filled. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Diamond did finally ship the first of their polybagged batches of 2000 AD, containing issues 1638-1641. Unless my ears and sources have deceived me, Diamond seems to have shipped it out to every retailer that ordered it. I have not heard anyone report that they didn't get any. Let's hope this puts an end to the problems that have bewitched our ability to read the House of Tharg's releases for the past six months. The next polybagged set, containing the next five issues, should be on shelves in the next week or two.

I also wanted to mention that I found thrillpower in abundance on my recent honeymoon road trip up north. Plenty of shops order 2000 AD for the subscriber or two who asks for it, but you don't often find stores with a good selection of recent issues on the stands. So if you've been stymied by inability to receive your latest progs this year, I'd recommend you look up either Hub Comics or The Million Year Picnic, each in Boston, Massachusetts. I was extremely impressed by both stores and their wonderful staffs. MYP is just wonderful if you love small, busy, low-light bookstores like me, and Hub, which probably edges MYP just a touch with its more comfortable layout, has multiple copies of several recent Rebellion trades, so if you missed out on The VCs or the first Ace Trucking Company collection, drop 'em a line!

Next time, I'll look over the Rennie/Irving collaboration Storming Heaven and get ready for the forthcoming fourth series of Shakara with a short review of the recent graphic novel collection. See you in seven!

(Geez, this fella's been climbing quite a while, hasn't he?)

Thursday, December 25, 2008

80. Prog 2000

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.

Brian Bolland has cover duties for "Prog 2000," the first in what has become an annual series of year-end progs which mix one-off episodes of classic and recurring thrills with the first episodes of new storylines, new artwork by favorite creators, and a variety of text features. The 100-page prog is on sale for three weeks over Christmas and has become a holiday tradition. But in 1999, editor David Bishop and assistant editor Andy Diggle were not thinking about what would become a standard ten years on, but rather to do a spectacular once-in-a-lifetime issue. The lineup includes a pair of Judge Dredd tales, along with one-off episodes of ABC Warriors, Nikolai Dante, Rogue Trooper, Sinister Dexter and Slaine, along with the final episode of Nemesis the Warlock and the first episodes of new serials for the new thrill Glimmer Rats and, back in action after a nine year absence, Strontium Dog, about which more next time. It really does feel incredibly special, and everyone involved deserved congratulations for a job very well done.

The creator lineup for Prog 2000 makes this issue a must-have for any comic collection. Inside you've got brand new work from Dan Abnett, Simon Davis, Brett Ewins, Carlos Ezquerra, Simon Fraser, Dave Gibbons, Alan Grant, Mark Harrison, Cam Kennedy, Mike McMahon, Pat Mills, Robbie Morrison, Kevin O'Neill, Gordon Rennie, Greg Staples, John Tomlinson, John Wagner, Kevin Walker, Ashley Woods and Steve Yeowell. There's not a joker in the pack!

Rather than spending Christmas with a lot of writing, here are some memorable images from this special issue. See y'all next week!









(Originally posted 12/25/08 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

Thursday, November 6, 2008

74. Who Will Save the 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.

June 1999: Greg Staples' absolutely wonderful cover to prog 1149 features the long-overdue return of Devlin Waugh, following the path of his stablemates Missionary Man and Judge Anderson and making his move over from the pages of the Megazine to 2000 AD. It's the prologue episode to a really remarkable series, almost unique in 2000 AD's color era. This lengthy serial, known by the umbrella title "Sirius Rising," is by John Smith and Steve Yeowell. While it will be broken down into three separate stories, it will run without a break for six months.

It's the only time since Wagner and Ezquerra's 31-week run on the Dredd epic "Necropolis" that a writer-artist team has kept a six-month residency in the prog, and nobody since has come within spitting distance of their tenure. Other stories in this issue include the continuing Dredd storyline "The Doomsday Scenario," by John Wagner and Simon Davis and with the action now moved to the Mediterranean Free State, Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Calum Alexander Watt, Pulp Sci-Fi by Robbie Morrison and Siku, and, most importantly for future commissions, Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and guest artist John Burns, who will, in time, replace Dante's co-creator Simon Fraser as the strip's regular art droid.

For those of you that have never met Devlin Waugh, he is a paranormal investigator in Judge Dredd's world, working chiefly in the employ of the Vatican. Certainly among Smith's finest creations, one reason he works so well is that while Mega-City One is extremely well-defined, to the point that the city is almost as much of a character as Dredd himself, readers just don't know much about the Europe of the future. Actually, most of what readers know about the rest of the planet is kept to tantalizing glimpses and references, but it's clearly not all radioactive deserts surrounding totalitarian dictatorships. Smith has helped define most of the rest of Dredd's world, a place where most people have the sense to avoid the lunacy of what used to be North America.



Devlin's world is populated by bon vivants and celebrities, with both a thriving middle class and mega-cities where the unemployment figures don't make you cry. It's a world of violent occult phenomena and freaky aliens. Taking a cue from both the strange exploits of Psi-Division in the main Dredd strip and from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, it's a world of bizarre collectors of paranormal oddities and supercriminals with amazing technology. It's a world, in short, that's too weird for Judge Dredd. But you drop Waugh, a steroid-abusing gay vampire with a Terry-Thomas grin and a Noel Coward way with words, into that world with his sharp suits and fisticuffs, and you've got one of 2000 AD's best series ever. That it doesn't appear for at least thirteen weeks every year is completely criminal. In fact, Devlin has only appeared in five stories since the end of '99, with a new one apparently due sometime in 2009.

The Sirius Rising storyline was collected in the second of DC and Rebellion's two Devlin Waugh collections, Red Tide, in 2005. Unfortunately, this would be the only one of all the Rebellion books that deserves to be skipped by buyers. The best anybody can figure, the films provided to the printer featured about sixteen pages towards the end of the storyline which were some sort of preliminary or interim drafts, and are each missing about half of the word balloons!



This was reported to DC early on, but DC was already in the process of backing out of the deal after flooding the market with too many (three a month!) books with no advertising support, and evidently didn't feel the need to issue a revised, corrected edition. Since taking over production and distribution themselves, Rebellion has not redone this book either. It's a shame, but the line has close to a hundred volumes in it at the time of writing, and this is the only one that I know of that has a production error that egregious. They do a pretty good job overall!

Next time, the Doomsday business continues in Mega-City One. See you in seven days!

(Originally posted Nov. 6 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal)

Thursday, October 30, 2008

73. Time-sensitive entry

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'm afraid work caught me at a bad time this week. I would have composed an entry yesterday, but my job sent me on a site visit (at last!) to Riverdale all day yesterday, and I didn't get time to, and now I'm behind on my desk duties. For those following along, I did want to note that this prog's cover reveals the new direction for Sinister Dexter. In the wake of "Eurocrash," the title of the series is changed to Downlode Tales as the former partners work opposite sides of the law to find out who was responsible for the incidents of that epic, and the death of their friend. So Finnigan Sinister begins assembling a cadre of like-minded criminals and gun hands, but Ramone Dexter turns himself in and is commissioned to work as an advisor to a new police initiative to combat organized crime, hoping they can find whoever had the resources to pull off that event.

Next week, evil rears its beastly head! I will definitely find more time to write about the spectacular return of Devlin Waugh...

(Originally posted October 30, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

Thursday, October 9, 2008

70. Tour of Books

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.

February 1999: Prog 1032 has a pretty lovely cover by Greg Staples announcing the new Anderson: Psi Division six-parter, even if it's interrupted by a Babylon 5 promotion with some postcards from that year's TV movie. Staples is not the artist for the new story; in fact, I don't believe that he's ever drawn Anderson other than on this cover. It is instead handled by Anderson's semi-regular artist Steve Sampson. It's not quite his swan song, as a one-shot called "Semper Vi" will appear in the spring, and then Anderson will take a lengthy break from the comic. I don't believe that Sampson has worked for 2000 AD since. (It's a little difficult to check, as Sampson does not have a Wikipedia page, although a fellow by the same name who used to coach the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club does...)

Judge Anderson is, sadly, quite poorly represented in graphic novel form. In the 1980s, Titan did a decent enough job by the standards they'd set for themselves. 64-page collections were pretty common then, and the annual 12-parters that ran in the summers of 1985, 1986 and 1987 were well-suited to that format. But as her series began more sporadic appearances, with one-offs, three-parters or longer adventures, drawn by a variety of artists, the collected editions really fell behind. There was a one-off Dredd in 1988 called "Night of the Brainstem Man," by Alan Grant and Barry Kitson which did not feature Anderson but which served as a prologue to Anderson's 1989 storyline "Helios," which cries out for a reprint, as does "Leviathan's Farewell," a critical one-shot which appeared in the 1989 Sci-Fi Special and whose ramifications are felt in a number of subsequent Anderson adventures.

But as Hamlyn got the rights to 2000 AD material in the 1990s, they released some trades which, haphazardly, just collected work by a single artist, so there's a Kevin Walker Childhood's End book and an Arthur Ranson Satan book, but not a compilation of "Postcards from the Edge," the interesting, episodic adventure with six or seven different artists.

And sadly, Rebellion seems to be following suit. While their graphic novel line is pretty amazing overall, as I will mention in just a moment, their first Anderson collection, Shamballa, is another assortment of Ranson episodes. It's more comprehensive than Hamlyn's Satan was, but it skips so many episodes that it doesn't seem like it could possibly read well, although admittedly I have not picked up my copy. I confess to being annoyed just enough that when four 2000 AD books were in my shop's box last visit and I only had enough cash for three, Shamballa was runt enough to warrant staying behind. It sure looks pretty, at least.



On the other hand, Rebellion's other lines mostly get it emphatically right. I started reading the seventh Nikolai Dante book last week and it's tremendous fun from start to finish. Rebellion have collected all the episodes, in order, and periodically found room for a little supplemental word or two from the creators or their sketchbooks. Plus, of course, the books are printed on gorgeous paper with very nice matte glossy covers and look fantastic. The image here is from the "Tour of Duty" serial, reprinted in the second Dante collection, The Great Game. "Duty" is the fourth of five short serials, written, as always, by Robbie Morrison, in which Nikolai is teamed with one of his half-brothers and sisters on some mission for the Romanovs. Simon Fraser handles art chores on the stories with Andreas and Lulu and Charlie Adlard illustrates the stories with Nastasia and Konstantin. Andy Clarke drew the first one, featuring Viktor.

"Tour of Duty," the adventure with Konstantin, is quite interesting from a production standpoint, as it is actually three separate stories run as a three-part adventure. Actually, I suppose I could get amazingly trainspotterish and tell you that the second Konstantin story was intended as a two-parter - that's the original cliffhanger above - but it was decided to run both parts so that each story would appear as a single chapter, but I think that level of trainspotter detail just makes my readers' eyes roll, so perhaps I shouldn't. Oh, too late.

Anyway, apart from Anderson and Dante, the prog also includes the concluding episode of the Judge Dredd eight-parter "The Scorpion Dance" by John Wagner and John Burns, and the continuing Sinister Dexter epic "Eurocrash" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis...



...about which, more next week.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Speaking of whom, our heroes each take a couple of wounds in parts three and four of this story. They're both very minor and almost instantly recovered from, but that still makes eight confirmed hits on Finnigan and two on Ramone.

See you in seven days!

(Originally posted October 9, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

Thursday, July 17, 2008

60. Lady in Black

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.

April 1998: Well, normally I like to make these entries a little meaty, but I suppose I'm still recovering from the twin duds of the low-thrilled spring '08 lineup (only the first issue of the far better summer lineup has arrived in the US) and the disappointment of some of the more recent collections going missing again, and not arriving at my local shop. So while I'm rereading a pretty good period from ten years ago, and enjoying it a great deal, there's a certain spark missing. It's a good lineup, with Judge Dredd by John Wagner, Alex Ronald and Gary Caldwell, Slaine by Pat Mills and Steve Tappin, Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and Simon Davis, and finally Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Greg Staples - every strip a winner.

The Dredd story sees the second appearance of the Euthanasia Killer, Oola Blint. This serial killing "lady in black," under the guise of doing the Lord's work, goes door-to-door offering the personal touch as she sees citizens into the next life. Oola's husband Homer is a Justice Department auxiliary who spends evenings working as a licensed peeping tom looking at neighboring city blocks. In this story, Homer learns Oola's awful secret.

I can't claim to be a huge fan of Alex Ronald's artwork, but it is still quite good. I like the way he draws people to look very ordinary, with most of the civilian characters packing a few extra pounds they could stand to exercise off. What I like most of all about this story is that Wagner continues to script his best villains as being very intelligent, and able to work around the realities of the constant surveillance of Mega-City One and the always observant detectives in the judge system. Of course, some blind luck comes into it as well, but as Homer and Oola Blint make more appearances over the next few years, it is always done very believably.



Probably the biggest news from this prog is the first 2000 AD appearance of Missionary Man, who has been moved to the weekly since Preacher took up residence at the Megazine and squeezed everybody else out of town. Alex Ronald's going to handle the story that begins in the next episode. The one-off in this issue is designed to introduce the character to the weekly's audience. Simon Davis painted it, and it looks wonderful. Greg Staples' art on "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is also fantastic. This is a four-part story compacted into two issues and introduces Finnigan's estranged wife, Carrie Hosanna, who will make a couple more appearances a few years down the road.



Only the Sinister Dexter story has been reprinted at this time, in the book Slay Per View. I'm optimistic that we'll see Missionary Man collected some time in 2009 (see my Reprint This! feature on it here), but that's just speculation.

At any rate, I'm continuing a little vacation from this while my kids are in Louisville, Kentucky with their mom. Thrillpowered Thursday will resume in August with the debut of Pulp Sci-Fi. See you then!

Thursday, May 22, 2008

54. No sex please, we're squaxx dek Thargo

Oh, you thought last week was weird. November 1997 brings us to one of 2000 AD's most absolutely skewed moments of oddness. It's the Sex Prog, number 1066, and there on the cover, you've got Wide Open Space, looking nothing whatsoever like Jason Brashill's model of the character, enticing readers in with her enormous boobs. The comic was released in a sealed polybag, with a "Not for Sale to Children" notice on the cover. Now, over the previous twenty years, 2000 AD had been slowly maturing along with an audience that it was holding onto far longer than any publishers' wisdom would have predicted, but at its core, shouldn't this be a title which kids can read? What about my kids? Am I going to let them read it? What are we to make of this development, and how saucy and inappropriate is this prog, anyway?

Well, first in the lineup is Judge Dredd by John Wagner and Greg Staples. This might be the first episode to admit that in Mega-City One, citizens who don't want to bother with human relationships can purchase a humanoid robot called a Love Doll. These droid partners would turn up as plot elements in later storylines, and here they're shown to be every bit a target for theft as either flatscreen TVs or cars are today. The artwork is not explicit, although topless dolls - robots that look like humanoid girls - are shown in three panels. I figured this would be okay for my kids to read. I'm not going to freak out about exposed nipples in a comic, and "In the future, people can have robot boyfriends and girlfriends" is something they can understand without too much issue.

Next up is an episode of Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Siku, who joins the rotation of artists working on this series as it becomes the second regular feature, behind Dredd. (More on this development in two weeks.) The plot of this episode involves four members of the cast spending their evening looking not to spend it alone. The twist is that it's Demi Octavo who's actually planning to spend it with gunplay, while Sinister and Dexter each spend it looking for some amour. There's nothing objectionable about the artwork, apart from Siku making everyone appear to be garishly-colored rocklike polygons, and I judged this one to also be suitable for kids. Oddly, though, this story was among six or seven which were omitted from the three DC/Rebellion reprints of early Sin Dex stories. So far, with only three panels of topless robots in two episodes of story, anybody who bought this issue looking for something akin to the latest Heavy Metal was going to be deeply disappointed.

Third in the lineup is the fourth episode of A Life Less Ordinary, and it doesn't play along with the Sex Prog raison d'etre at all. The only notable thing about this episode is how unbelievably sloppy the storytelling by the otherwise reliable Steve Yeowell is. The opening panels, in which Robert learns that the "bomb" in a car's trunk is actually a bag of carrots, are very poor, but the experience is just surreal, like some odd comic adaptation of a weird dream. The really offensive bit of this strip is this: the only thing I remember about A Life Less Ordinary, which I saw at the Beechwood Cinema in Athens around this time, is the scene where Ewan MacGregor and Cameron Diaz engage in some show-stopping karaoke. That's not in the comic. The build-up to the scene is there, and then Robert wakes up with a hangover.

So 60% of the prog is child-friendly. But then we hit the final episode of Tomlinson and Brashill's Space Girls and everything falls apart. Now, I'm an understanding guy, and I can see that nine year-old girls probably were not Fleetway and editor David Bishop's target audience, but what the hell was anybody thinking here? See, grown-ups can constructively read a strip like Space Girls, understand that it does not work for many and varied reasons, accept that it was just a five-week thing to get little sidebar writeups in newspapers, and move on. But nine year-old girls are not constructive and not critical. The Hipster Daughter was enjoying this strip, even if nobody else on the planet was, and then her old man cruelly yanked the ending away from her. Now, there isn't anything in the visuals that's offensive, thanks to Brashill's discretion and self-censorship, but the "story" is about the girls, who are all clones, watching an advertising video made by the corpulent, grotesque caricature which designed them, suggesting ways in which the clones can be used for personal gratification. Look, this isn't serious stuff, and it's played for laughs, but it bombs completely, and it's not suitable material for the only person on the planet who was enjoying the strip. You remember how a few weeks ago, we were talking about the "2000 AD: It's Not for Girls" ad campaign? Well, no kidding.

Now, you're probably thinking that with two dud strips, a Sin Dex with awful art and a pretty good Dredd, this is probably a prog that can be safely labelled a failure. However, Tharg saved the best for last as Nikolai Dante returns in the prog's fifth and last slot.



Since his first appearance earlier in 1997, the Russian rogue became a big hit and his return was never in doubt. The second batch of episodes, by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser is due to begin in the next issue, but this one-off, with art by Chris Weston, comes to bat first. I got the impression that it was commissioned especially for the Sex Prog, since all there is to it is a single night's shenanigans between Dante and a bearded nun. Yeah, you read that right. She belongs to an order called the Devil's Martyrs and is "fanatically devoted" to the mad monk, Rasputin.

At his blog, Chris Weston featured an interview from 2006 which David Bishop conducted for Thrill-Power Overload. There, he states that after self-censoring the artwork down to just tits and ass, "much to my surprise, my strip turned out to be the filthiest one in the Prog." Indeed, visually, it was still a whole lot more explicit than anything else in the issue, and might have warranted the plastic bag, but it was also a heck of a lot tamer than what was published in the old Penthouse Comix, for instance.

Well, regardless of whether it was too explicit for kids or not explicit enough to justify the wrapper, the episode is a riot, and a simply great return for the character. It's also the only episode in the book to have been reprinted properly, in the first of the DC/Rebellion editions, although the Dredd episode later reappeared in an issue of the Megazine a year or so back.

So that's the Sex Prog: a curiosity more for raising eyebrows than anything else. But next week, we'll see whether politics can't cause the outrage that sex couldn't.

(Originally published 5/22/08 at LiveJournal.)

Thursday, January 17, 2008

37. Judge Death Gets Ugly and the Hipster Daughter Gets Squeamish

August 1996: As if to complement the reprints of "Necropolis" over in the Megazine, there's a new seven-part Judge Death adventure running in the weekly. This is "Dead Reckoning," by John Wagner and Greg Staples, and features Death escaping from custody again and making his way back to Deadworld to lick his wounds, only to find that thanks to a timeshift, he's back in the final days of that world's great cull of its populace, and he's soon confronted by his passsst sssself and the other Dark Judges. Death has stolen the body of an aging M-C 1 citizen, and instead of his robes of office, is wearing a dress.

It's a good lineup at this time, with Dredd supported by Slaine in Book One of "Treasures of Britain" by Pat Mills and Dermot Power, Durham Red by Peter Hogan (as Alan Smithee) and Mark Harrison, and a pair of new series which will run for about three months, throughout a number of short stories illustrated by different artists. Outlaw is a future-frontier world story by Paul Neal with art this week by Marc Wigmore, and Black Light is a modern-day thriller about a special ops team assembled by the president to hunt down rogue agencies acting without his authorization. It is written by Dan Abnett and Steve White, and art on this installment is by John Burns, who is completely suited for a contemporary conspiracy thriller and turns in some brilliant artwork. Neither series, however, gets much attention from the fans, and neither will return after these first outings, although Showtime had an option to make an Outlaw TV series for several years and never did anything with it.



As Tharg, David Bishop has picked up a very odd - for Tharg - habit of letting us know precisely what issues, six months down the line, certain thrills will be returning. Over the last couple of weeks, he's let us know that the second book of this Slaine story will begin in prog 1024, and that Sinister Dexter will be back in prog 1025. Today's Tharg likes to sneak new things on us; some things have to be revealed via Diamond Distributors' catalog of advance solicitations, but there are still occasional surprises in store for today's readers without any advance warning. I like the present style better, to be honest.

* * *

When my son started reading 2000 AD with me, at prog 800, my daughter immediately protested that she was being left out. I explained that she might be a shade too young for the comic, but that she could start when she turned nine. She reminded me after Christmas that she's nine now and wants to read with us. So since prog 1000 and meg v.3 #20 were both jump-on issues, she has settled in and now I get the enormous pleasure of having the kids talk shop, sometimes without including me in their conversations. But when I am included, it's pretty fun, too.

For example, the other night, the Hipster Son spent several minutes reading The Complete Nemesis the Warlock Vol. 2 before bed, and when I told the kids to wrap up their reading, he returned the book to the library table, mumbling just loud enough for me to hear, "If I ever have a wife, I won't put a bomb in her head."

I replied, "You only just now figured out that Torquemada's a complete freak?"

"I KNOW he's a freak, Dad, I just didn't think anybody was that crazy!"

The Hipster Daughter chimed in, asking "What are you talking about?"

"In Nemesis the Warlock, Torquemada's got a micro-bomb in his wife's skull!"

"Oh, my GOD!" she shouted.



There's actually been a fair amount of shouting. Prog 1002 featured the chemical preparation of Judge Death's latest host body, a facet of the stories which readers have understood since '82 or so. But these are stories I came to as a teenager, and I suppose it never occurred to me how outre and dark some of the fiction will appear to a youngun. Admittedly, my daughter is the most melodramatic child on the planet, but I was still amused by how over-the-top her reactions to that cliffhanger were. There were yelps and shouts and when she finally finished the issue, she brought it to me with her face frozen in an exaggerated wince and her eyes wide. "That's scaaaaaary," she explained.

"Well, Sweetie, if it's too scary, you can wait until you're a little older to read..."

"NO! NO! I want to READ!"

Addictive stuff, thrillpower!

Next time: Readers' letters. Do you think people are going to overreact spectacularly about those "Necropolis" reprints in the Meg? You bet!

(Originally published 1/17/08 at LiveJournal.)