199. The Perfect Prog

March 2010: A slight change of style here for this week's entry. I had been planning to put prog 1674 under the spotlight and talk about just The ABC Warriors - because the episode in that issue, featuring two solid pages of Ro-Jaws insulting Mek-Quake's non-existent mother and Blackblood impatiently trying to explain to the idiot that he does not actually have a mother, is just about the funniest thing ever - and the always-excellent Stickleback, but then I read a few more issues and was struck by something in prog 1677. This comic is flawless. It is completely wonderful. Don't believe me? Check out the contents:


Judge Dredd: part four of "Tour of Duty: The Talented Mayor Ambrose" by John Wagner, John Higgins, and S.J. Hurst

At this point in the story, the action has moved back to the city from the townships, and becomes a masterpiece of intrigue and political maneuvering. Deputy Chief Judge Martin Sinfield has taken control of things by persuading Francisco to step aside for the good of his health, meaning once again a villain is in charge of Mega-City One, but he's not a ranting lunatic like Cal was. He's a much more subtle kind of bad guy, and it's interesting how so much of the reader's dislike of him boils down to "Sinfield has beaten Dredd and given him an awful assignment outside the City."

In fact, for all his villainy - and he's one of the great Dredd villains, no question - Sinfield's actual list of crimes is really quite small. The major one, of course, is using drugs to manipulate Francisco. He's used SLD 88, the drug once used to good effect by the serial killer PJ Maybe, to convince Francisco to step down. The beautiful irony is that Maybe has been masquerading as the city's incredibly popular mayor Byron Ambrose for several years, and doesn't appreciate Sinfield's new planned reforms. PJ Maybe's killed a lot of people in a lot of ways, but he's never planned this level of assassination before. This sets up several episodes of germ warfare, with Sinfield stubbornly refusing to die, and then, in his paranoia, he calls in Dredd to investigate these attempts on his life - which nobody else believes are happening, since he's just coincidentally contracting hideous diseases - just before mutant terrorists make a much more overt attempt to kill him. This leads Dredd to suspect that maybe Sinfield is not so paranoid after all... ah, but more on this in two weeks.


Zombo: part three of "Zombo's 11" by Al Ewing and Henry Flint

The first Zombo story was pretty bugnuts, but it's this one where the insanity is ratched past eleven. This time out, we get an ongoing, ear-splittingly loud supporting character based on Simon Cowell, but in this universe, he doesn't see the Susan Boyle character as a way to make a lot of money, but just another headache.


The ABC Warriors: part twelve of "The Volgan War" Bk Four by Pat Mills and Clint Langley

There's nothing quite as hilarious in this concluding episode as the two solid pages of robot mother insults mentioned earlier, but it does have Mek-Quake in a tuxedo appearing on a TV talk show, and Blackblood sending out mass thought-mails to insult everybody else. Classic.


Damnation Station: part one of "To the Dark and Empty Skies" by Al Ewing and Simon Davis

Here's the weakest thing in the comic, but anywhere else, it could be the standout. This is the first episode of a new series - fifteen episodes would appear in a scattered run over five months in 2010, and a second batch of fifteen is said to be in the works for later this year or next. It's future war and political posturing with fist-to-the-chest impact, memorable human characters, very weird aliens, introduced in a really good pilot episode that gives you a fun and flawed audience identification figure, a complex situation, and great artwork by Davis, who alternates with Boo Cook.


part one of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (and the dead left in his wake) by Rob Williams and Dom Reardon

I saved this one for last - it actually appears second in the comic - because it's just so damn jawdropping. Here's my latest wild pronouncement: No other series in the history of the comic has ever had such a perfect first episode.

Yeah, I know, me and hyperbole, but not even the first episode of Zenith, wherein Earth's only two superheroes are killed by an atom bomb dropped on Berlin in 1945, is as great as this. It is a dense and lyrical tale of a cruel killer in the Old West, beautifully written and with very detailed narrative captions, a stylistic choice that has been stupidly out of favor for far too long. These days, maybe nobody does narration in comics better than John Wagner, but darn if Williams doesn't come very close. The prose is just perfectly judged, and Reardon's minimalist artwork perfectly sparse, with a beautiful trick as the color fades away from Azrael's memory. And then the last panel twist. How in the world, I ask you, could you not demand episode two the instant you finish episode one?

Next time, Nikolai Dante says goodbye to a close friend. See you in seven!

193. Suburban Horror and Interplanetary Terror

May 2009: Occasionally, you'll read people on comic book message boards referring to the early 1980s as 2000 AD's golden age. Then you'll probably, if Tharg's Street Team is doing its job, see somebody point out that the real golden age is today. There's no specific consensus on this point beyond just a general core belief that we've never had it so good, but can we put a finger on when this shift actually occurred? The smart money's on the spring of 2009. In point of fact, after I finished the first draft of this article, my esteemed fellow squaxx Colin YNWA announced that he nails it precisely with prog 1633, which saw the debut of Cradlegrave and the final episode of the Judge Dredd story "Backlash," in which the senior judges vote Hershey out of office in a stunning no-confidence referendum in favor of Dan Francisco, who will roll back the pro-mutant reforms. This story sets up the next year-and-a-bit of Dredd stories, the "Tour of Duty" arc. 1633 also has, arguably, the best cover of the period, an image by Edmund Bagwell so iconic that some hack in a film studio ripped it off three years later. But I also really love this joyfully silly Cliff Robinson piece on the cover of 1636, shown here, in which two juves are busted for the crime of turning Judge Dredd's smile upside down. It's a picture that tells a story, and it does so with glee and life, while that image heralding Cradlegrave does so with menace.

If you have not read Cradlegrave by John Smith and Edmund Bagwell before, then for the love of pete, order the collected edition. I say this despite knowing, confidently, that everybody else who has read it enjoyed it more than I did. Oh, it's completely terrific, please don't misunderstand that. I just find it so overwhelmingly unpleasant that I don't enjoy it much, but I sure do admire the almighty hell out of it all the same. What Smith accomplishes here is simply breathtaking, and anybody who missed this in weekly installments really did miss out.

To explain, this is a story set in a long, hot, cruel summer on the Ravenglade council estate in the outskirts of a major city. Here, there's a critical bit that's lost in transatlantic translation. Council estates in England are analogous to housing projects in America, but there appear to be considerable differences, and decades of sociological impact upon British readers that people over here simply aren't going to get in quite the same way. For one thing, there seem to be far more white kids in public housing in England than here, and for another, for the last fifteen years, teenagers in English public housing have been living under the shadow of what are called "Anti-social behaviour orders." These appear, to my eyes, to be generally ineffective and unbelievably broad guidelines suggesting that young poor people should not act like disagreeable layabouts, or else some magistrate court will inconvenience them, or more likely their parents, with burdensome fines. I don't mean to get all political here, especially about another nation's politics, but I think it's important to underline that these have the effect, in Cradlegrave, of turning everything that happens into a ticking time bomb that British readers will feel getting under their skin even more effectively than ours. Nobody is happy, everybody is bored, and there is a tension rippling underneath everything that's going to snap, and painfully.

Here's where I admire Smith's work on this serial so much: for weeks and weeks, nothing snaps. It's just the tension. The mind-numbing, painful, restless tension and that dense, incredibly effective and unsettling narration.


I'm pleased and awed by the amount of trust that the editor gave Smith and Bagwell for this project, because this genuinely is a series where, for weeks, nothing happens. The main character is a teen called Shane Holt, recently released from a juvenile facility for some petty and stupid arson, and all he wants when he comes home is to stay out of trouble, make his appointments with his probation officer, and make sure the family dog successfully births some puppies. Some of his friends and neighbors are selling drugs and acting stupid, and here's another brave choice I admire. It's really difficult to tell Shane, Cal, and many of the other friends and neighbors apart. Bagwell draws them as being visually very similar in face, build, and haircuts, and they all wear the same sort of hoodies and tracksuits - inexpensive, cheap conformity for teens on public money leaves them looking as menacing and identical as a platoon of Cybermen on TV.

This is not the sort of script that can be hacked out over a weekend. For this to build, week after week, the tension and paranoia and unhappiness, with no paranormal or extraterrestrial or any kind of science fiction element at all yet, it requires really meticulous construction. For example, there is a police presence after a hit-and-run incident on the estate. But the police are shown from a distance and with their backs to the reader, a deliberate choice that emphasizes that they are both outsiders and ineffective.

Of course, there is something paranormal, horrific and description-defying at Ravenglade that is impacting the narrative because it's screwing with people's behavior and responses. This revelation also takes place over the course of some really unsettling weeks, finally given a fleeting glimpse in passing in episode four. What we glimpse is outre and troubling, but it's also not anything that we can define and explain with any ease. Something is very wrong with an old lady who has lived on the estate with her quiet and unhappy husband for many years. She has... growths of some kind, and cannot get out of bed. One of the teens who comes to visit her whispers that it's some kind of cancer, but another snaps back that it isn't. They don't know why they're visiting her. They can't explain it. And things get stranger, the heat wave showing no signs of breaking.

Meanwhile, as things are slowly and with great deliberation disintegrating miserably on modern-day Earth, in the far future, things are going utterly nutballs on some lunatic death planet, and a very polite and very strange and very dead fellow called Zombo is in the middle of high-concept, turbo-charged superweirdness.


Zombo by Al Ewing and Henry Flint is... well, it's a lot of things. It's a breathless love letter to the sort of wild, over-the-top violence seen in old pulp fiction and in the early days of 2000 AD and its ancestor, Action. It's established, simply, that the story is set on a death planet onto which a passenger spaceship has crash-landed. The question for readers is not who will survive, but can the creators top themselves with a more ridiculously over-the-top death every third page or so.

With very deliberate throwback narration and dialogue and with gleefully ridiculous concepts like rivers that run in circles, flowers that eat people, and a lingering, colorful "black hole" called a Death Shadow, Zombo is pure rocket fuel in every panel. I wondered how in the world the creators would possibly come up with a second story, which they did, to great celebration in 2010, and the answer is simple: they just drop Zombo into weirder and wilder yet radically different situations each time. What happens next... well, that would be telling.

Anyway, what all this is getting at is that in the spring of 2009, Tharg's Mighty Organ was offering shot glass after shot glass of rocket fuel. Maybe in the case of Cradlegrave it was the slow burn of good Kentucky bourbon, but everything was completely wonderful.

Next time, we'll check in with what the Guv'nor was up to. See you in a week!

162. 86ed!

March 2006: In the run-up to the release of the long-awaited Rogue Trooper video game, Tharg does one of the strangest things this comic has ever done. He cancels Rogue Trooper and replaces it with a spinoff. Seriously. Oh, there's some ancillary merchandise, sure. Between October and March, Rebellion issues three graphic novels which, in conjunction with the two previously released during the DC deal, completely reprint the entire 1981-85 run written by Gerry Finley-Day. This month also sees the release of an Extreme Edition that compiles just about every annual and special episode by other writers, along with John Smith's celebrated 1989 story "Cinnabar." But precisely when you'd expect a run of new, color episodes with Rogue himself on the front cover about every other week, the character has been retired. Gordon Rennie had been in charge for a pretty good 25-episode run that was released in chunks from 2002-04. In 2005, he wrote a follow-up three-part adventure and a one-off in a very curious Winter Special full of pilot ideas for new series that don't make it to a proper commission. And finally, in the three issues prior to this one, Ian Edginton and Steve Pugh collaborated on a final three-part adventure. Until Finley-Day returned from retirement for a one-shot in December 2010, that has been the last we've seen of Rogue. Right at the point where we should have seen Mister Blue Bare Chest and his bio-chipped buddies on the cover almost every week, he's shelved in favor of a very dense, subplot-heavy, continuity-heavy series set in the same universe and featuring a similarly genetically-engineered pilot named, strangely, Rafe.

The 86ers is an outer space war adventure, set on an asteroid-based supply station called The Citadel. Its crew is a bunch of bitter jockeys and flyboys, aliens, and disgraced officers from the enemy side who've come to fight with the "Southers," historically the "good guys" in the Rogue Trooper universe. Karl Richardson is assigned to draw Gordon Rennie's scripts, but, strangely, he only does the first two episodes before PJ Holden steps in.

The series will struggle to find an audience. Tharg publishes 10 episodes across three outings in 2006, six more in 2007 and a final six in 2009, with Arthur Wyatt coming aboard as writer for the end after Rennie moves on from the medium of comics for a few years to do work with the video game industry. I'm not sure why it never gelled for me. It's possibly because I've never been all that interested in anything from Rogue's world, including Rafe's kind-of-ancestor Venus Bluegenes, but the story is too complex, and too rich with political machinations, for its own good. It is never as grandiose or engaging as Rennie's Caballistics Inc., and consequently, the same sort of character-based subplotting across similarly-scheduled irregular adventures fails completely. Each time The 86ers resurfaces, readers have to ask "Who's this guy again?"



The double-length episode in Prog 2007, for example, ends with the surprise revelation that one of Rogue's old enemies from his classic series, Colonel Kovert, is behind some of the machinations and goings-on. Even for Rennie, whose most recent Cabs story has, quite reasonably, assumed an awful lot of his audience, this is going way out on a limb. Admittedly, that 1982 story with Kovert has been reprinted something like nine times, and so longtime readers might remember the character, but for anybody who barely remembers, or doesn't at all, what is really just a minor blip in some very old continuity, this really is asking a lot. Then it would be six months before the next story, when we see what the heck the villain is doing on the Citadel.

Back in August, in chapter 141, I wrote about how disagreeable it is to have stories stopping and starting in little fits and coughs of new episodes, and The 86ers is one of the all-time worst examples of that. Read in the collected edition, this is a pretty good series, with some fun moments and very good artwork throughout, but serialized the way it was, with those deeply unhelpful gaps between stories, it really was a pain in the rear.

Speaking of pains in the rear, oh, that game. Well, it certainly looked good. I'm not much of a gamer, and was unfamiliar with what's termed "third-person shooters," in which the "camera" is behind the character on the screen. This appears to be the dominant style of adventure games over the last ten years or so, but, speaking as a potential player who's enjoyed maybe two games, period, since the release of the original Perfect Dark for the N64, this was not a game for me.

I bought a PlayStation 2 to play Katamari Damacy, and then pretty much left it to my children to enjoy. I bought the Rogue Trooper game new, found it absurdly difficult to control or move around, and finally gave up somewhere on the fourth level or something. Every so often, I'd buy a used James Bond game for the system and find them similarly next-to-impossible to maneuver, get riddled with holes while trying to remember which button did what, assuming that I realized that I was getting shot in the first place, and eventually concluded that these games were not being made for me.

While the game's introductory animation was showing off the Quartz Zone Massacre, however, I was the biggest fan of the game in the world. It really did look good, and even though Rogue is not my favorite character, there's that frisson of excitement of seeing anything from the comic adapted with such love and fervor. It looks good, and it looks right. Maybe one of these days, Rebellion will finally make that Strontium Dog first-person shooter that they should have made a million years ago, and it won't be impossible for slow old losers like me to play.



Ideally, this entry should have featured some screen shots from the video game as illustrations, but I'm of the opinion that screen shots always look pointless and unappealing. The above Henry Flint illustration from the current ABC Warriors adventure is, on the other hand, all kinds of appealing.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, it's the last Thrillpowered Thursday before a short break, and undercover judge Aimee Nixon is guest of honor at a very unusual convention in Mega-City One. See you in seven days!

161. Synnamon and Frag

February 2006: Here's a very rare example of Tharg programming a variant cover for his mighty comic. For prog 1476, there were two available: this one, with the red background, featuring the heroic ABC Warriors, and a second, with a blue background, featuring the villainous Shadow Warriors who are opposing them. For a very, very brief time, I owned both covers. See, in 2006, I was ordering two copies of each issue of 2000 AD, because the grexnix non-scrots at Diamond Distribution would so often miss an issue if a shop only ordered a single copy. If a shop ordered two, then the shop was certain to get one copy of every prog, and miss about two of the second copy every year. So I was ordering two copies and giving the extras to a friend. I thought, briefly, about keeping both versions of prog 1476, but I figured my collection wasn't as important as giving my friend the thrillpower, and so the blue copy went to him and I completely forgot about it. About five years later, he returned a big box of these extra copies, as he was moving house and didn't have the room. I sold a few on eBay, and got frustrated with some batches that did not move, and got a message from a buyer looking for a particular run, and who would pay a very handsome and welcome price for them. I sorted out his order, and realized that, for the second time, the blue-covered 1476 would be finding a new home. I suppose I'm just not meant to own it.

More than a decade before prog 1476, the nearly endless Strontium Dog story "The Final Solution" was coming under fire for taking for-freaking-ever to be told. Truthfully, it sort of had that reputation coming, as it began in prog 600 and didn't finish until a year and a half later. It ran in five separate batches of between three and seven episodes, at one point ducking out for a break of nine months. "The Shadow Warriors" sensibly avoided that sort of reputation despite taking, literally, twice as long to tell. For one thing, "The Final Solution" had every fan and reader desperate to learn what would happen next in this clearly game-changing and wild adventure, and "The Shadow Warriors" is just another long and weird ABC Warriors tale. But more importantly, writer Pat Mills had, by this point, firmly structured his stories as being told across "books." Readers understood and accepted that when we last saw this story back in prog 1405, it was the conclusion of "Book Two" of this story, and we were not going to just get little drip-feeds of episodes whenever the artist could get some pages back to the Command Module.

Back around the era of progs 600 to 700, it seemed like darn near everything was taking little breaks of a few weeks between episodes - Moon Runners, "Cinnabar," "Soft Bodies," various Rogue Trooper "Hit" stories, that second Zero story, the one on the blimp - and "The Final Solution," the one that everybody actually wanted to read, just became the poster boy for deadline-blowing artist failings. A more ordered Nerve Centre, a more structured system for telling the story with planned breaks, and greater general satisfaction with the state of play means that really, nobody at all seemed to complain about the - grief! - SEVENTY-ONE issue break before Book Three got started.

So was it worth the wait? Well, "The Shadow Warriors" is very much an over-the-top and glorious mess, full of insane ideas and loopy logic, with crazy weapons and a staccato delivery. I think it's the best ABC Warriors story since "The Black Hole" back in 1988. What might you think? Well, have a look at this image below.



See that weird pixelation on Deadlock? That's a bullet wound. He's been hit by bullets that phase in and out of alternate realities and do damage across multiple dimensions. I figure, either you think that doesn't make any sense whatever, in which case the excess of this story probably will not appeal to you, or you treat it like I do, and want Mills and Henry Flint to keep blowing your mind with downright weird and crazy stuff like this in every episode. Soon, Blackblood will be throwing banned grenades called holocusts that corrode all metal and get himself turned inside-out, and Hammerstein will have some "eggs" implanted in him that birth robot snakes that stick out holes that they eat through the sides of his head. Glorious.

1476 also sees the final episode of Synnamon as her third story, "Arc of Light" concludes. I've said my peace about this misfire previously, but "Arc of Light" really is notable for being a huge mess. To its credit, prog 1473 had given the character a magnificent cover by Dylan Teague. Should this series ever end up as one of those "graphic floppy" reprints bagged with the Megazine, that will have to be the cover. But oh, this story is such a disaster. I don't think it had a point at all other than to demonstrate, again, how nasty and unscrupulous Synnamon's big mean bosses are. The final page was so incredibly confusing that one of the writers actually waded into the cesspool that the official message board can be just to explain what in the hell David Roach drew. Basically, it looks like Missing-His-Back Boss Guy shot the poor innocent trapped-in-space dude, and then Synnamon looked all sad and teary, and then made a loud, funny noise and climbed some fancy decoration on the wall or some furniture or something, and then left a lot of broken bits over trapped-in-space dude's body and walked away. Evidently, that was her way of quitting.

I hate to say anything critical about David Roach, who's a super artist and a friend to anybody interested in the history of British comics, but when the strip's writer has to step in and explain what it is that the artist was drawing - see, the fancy decoration was the Super Secret Synnamon Space Spy Agency's insignia - then the artist has really not done the job well. It makes you wish that 2000 AD had the budget for an art editor like they did back in the IPC days, because there's no way in heck that Robin Smith would've let that get through. The evident moral from these paragraphs: It is okay if your script doesn't make much sense, just so long as the art does.

And so with Synnamon concluded after three stories over two and a half years, the doors are open for a new series. Debutting this week in a one-off prologue is one of Si Spurrier's masterpieces, Harry Kipling (Deceased).



When it comes to designing lead characters, Spurrier gets what Synnamon's writers, Colin Clayton and Chris Dows, seem to have missed. 2000 AD should be the home of very weird heroes. I can read about practically perfect space action babes with big boobs in tight leather in any number of comics, but cod-Victorian zombies with monocles, big moustaches and elephant guns and an addiction to Earl Grey can only be found in the Galaxy's Greatest. I might have gone a little overboard with my love of Spurrier's Lobster Random - wait, no, I didn't, that series is amazing - but 2006 was the year of Harry Kipling. Literally. He was only in fourteen episodes, criminally, all published in this calendar year. I don't know why I'm so nice about Spurrier's comics when he stops writing the damn things just as they're getting spectacular like he does. Then he goes and writes Silver Surfer for Marvel.

So this prologue starts with a mother telling her family the horrible story about how the father died, putting a little backstory together about how a space-faring Britannia started ruling the stars. It's a scenario not entirely unlike the Gothic Empire from Nemesis the Warlock Book Four. You've got pith helmets and aliens and steampunk all bearing down on some aggressive aliens that take advantage of the faith of the weak and feeble to pose as gods. All the time this backstory is developing, suggesting that the Neo-Britannians have come and gone, there's a violent force slowly making his way along their trail.

That's when artist Boo Cook plays a masterstroke and reveals that this is not some innocent mother and children, but rather a hideous mythological whale-god from some belief system or other, and all the various demigods beneath her. Harry Kipling is very much alive and very much of the opinion that nobody needs to believe in decrepit things like her when there's a Union Jack to be unfurled and fisticuffs to be delivered under Queensbury rules. Man alive! And we had to wait five weeks to see the next story?!

There were only six Harry Kipling stories, totalling 75 pages, and spread across 2006's issues. Rather than giving the character a consistent run of 14 weeks, Tharg tried the experiment of dropping the short adventures in throughout the year, usually following some other character's longer story. Maybe it didn't work in terms of building momentum, but it really kept everybody excited to see such a frequently recurring series. Sadly, criminally, Kipling was retired after 2006. There was one story that I remember feeling a disappointment, but there was a developing subplot about a very addictive drug being used by these false gods that showed a lot of promise. Perhaps one day, Tharg will reprint these stories in one of those "graphic floppies" as a lead-in to Kipling's long-overdue return. Particularly with Boo Cook's art looking better than ever these days, I bet a new series of Harry Kipling (Deceased) would look completely wonderful.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Only The ABC Warriors has been dusted off, in The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, after there was Rogue Trooper, there was... The 86ers! See you in seven days, friends!

157. Caught Short

September 2005: At last, the good times come coasting down for Judge Dredd Megazine. After spending the last three years going from strength to strength, diminishing sales finally force a change to the comic, and, without warning and on the eve of its fifteenth birthday, the approximately 100-page comic drops to nearer eighty a month. It's still terrific fun and good value, but, in probably the only miscalculation that Alan Barnes made during his tenure as editor, the change comes during a month where the regular lineup feels oddly thin anyway. The book has usually been featuring at least five new strips an issue along with reprints and features, but this time out, more than half of the strip content goes to a much longer than normal episode of Judge Dredd, and it's backed up by with a celebratory Simping Detective chapter by Si Spurrier and Frazer Irving, and the last part of the ongoing Devlin Waugh story, "All Hell," by John Smith and Colin MacNeil. Typically, 2000 AD's editors have used anniversary, or 100th issues, for relaunches and the first episodes of ongoing stories, and so the tone of this issue is an unexpectedly understated one. Even though nobody should logically complain about a big, 36-page Dredd story, the "only three strips" feeling is an emotional one, and, weirdly, it draws attention to the reality that the comic has lost pages to the budget.

Another reason that nobody should complain about this Judge Dredd strip is that it is completely wonderful. Written by John Wagner and with art by Henry Flint and Chris Blythe, it's called "Flood's Thirteen" and it is a fantastic caper story, an expansive 36-page look at a spectacular heist that does not go as planned, but, oh, it gets so close. Even with using a couple of splash pages, it feels so dense and detailed that a reader taking in the episode on its own might be surprised to learn that it's only 36 pages long. With the current style in American comics to write as little as possible in any given single issue, you could easily imagine the contemporary architects of superhero books needing a six-issue miniseries to tell this story.



I'm really impressed by how well Wagner structures this as a single entity on its own. I went into it expecting it to feel, as so many extra-length 2000 AD episodes do, like several smaller episodes crammed together, with cliffhanger endings every so many pages, which jars the flow when a reader knows they'll be there. (It's why removing the "NEXT PROG" and the credits from reprints never, ever actually benefits the story when read in a collected edition.) "Flood's Thirteen" doesn't feel like that at all. It flows much more naturally than even Wagner's recent multi-part triumphs in the comics, such as the recent "Terror" and "Total War," or the excellent "Mandroid," which was running in 2000 AD at the same time this was published, and, about which, more in next week's blog.

The story concerns a criminal who's released after his fifteen-year sentence is concluded, plus another three for being a probable repeat offender. He assembles some of his old gang and a host of thieves and gunmen with a grandiose plan to heist a spaceship. It's just come back from its multi-year tour of Mega-City One's colonies, full of taxes to be paid to the city, and it will be in lockdown for three or four days while Justice Department accountants audit its hold. The gang plans to replace the accountants and use a stolen teleporter to move the merchandise.

I really love reading stories like this, where the high concept is treated very seriously, and the writer looks into how such a scheme might work, where it could fail, and how the intelligent criminals would adapt to setbacks and detours. I suspect that many people who don't really know Dredd very well know that he's foremost an action hero, and also often used to make insightful political points, but the character also appeals to me as a reader because he's a superb detective with a fascinating arsenal of surveillance and gadgets at his disposal. He's flawed, certainly - PJ Maybe's triumph over Dredd just three issues prior to this is proof of that - but he's a force to be reckoned with both physically and mentally. I love how the gang's unavoidable slip-up brings Dredd to suspect something is amiss, and Dredd forces Flood into improvisation and quick thinking, but that's all before Wagner plays his master stroke. He brings in his occasional characters from the Branch Moronian cult to completely turn this thing into a disaster. Neither the judges nor the criminals could have predicted the arrival of self-lobotomized cultists with heavy artillery. It's terrific fun.

The text features in the Megazine have been essential reading for many years by this point, and probably the best of them have been David Bishop's histories of 2000 AD ("Thrill Power Overload," later expanded into an equally essential book) and Battle Picture Weekly (the much shorter, but just as fascinating "Blazing Battle Action!"). This issue sees the debut of Bishop's latest ongoing piece, a similar look at the history of the Megazine called "15 Years, Creep!" and, if I may be allowed another intrusion of my personal experience into the narrative, this sparked a wonderful memory that I have of my late father. In this issue of the comic, there are actually two chapters of this feature, which will run through Meg # 242 the following March, and the second features a look at the creation of John Smith's terrific and popular character Devlin Waugh.

I had picked up this issue from my regular thrill-merchant in Athens, probably also spending a little time with that girl whom I was dating at the time, who made her own intrusive presence felt in a chapter posted four weeks ago, and stopped by my parents' house to visit and watch a little football. Probably during halftime, or between games or something, I turned on the lamp behind my dad's recliner and decided to read the articles while my father played with his grandkids. He came back into the den some time later, by which point I was grinning ear to ear because I'd found the bit where Bishop cited that gushing, fanboy interview that I'd had with John Smith in 1999. (You can read about how foolish I felt about that right here in a Thrillpowered Thursday chapter from three years ago.)

So I explained to my dad that I had interviewed some writer he'd never heard of, for some website that he'd never heard of, either. ("You're talking about the internet, right?" he asked.) And now the writer of this magazine article had cited the interview and namechecked me to accompany a quote from Smith. "So you're in a magazine?" Dad asked. I showed him the page.

"Can you make me a copy of this?" Dad asked.

"Well, sure," I said. "I can give you a printout of the interview as well."

"And that's on the internet?" Dad said. I told him that it was, that it was for the Class of '79 site.

"No, I don't want that," he said, honestly. "Anybody can put anything on the internet. I just like seeing your name in a magazine. That means something."

So, thanks again for that, Mr. Bishop. You made my old man proud.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: The Henry Flint Collection (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The Simping Detective: The Complete Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, Judge Dredd tries to stop Nate Slaughterhouse, and Sinister Dexter have a problem similar to the one addressed in the recent chapter about Slaine, in that they reach a grand finale... and keep going. See you next week!

144. What Wagner Was Writing

November 2004: Prog 1415 reminds me of just how much I dislike the loudmouthed comic book fandom literati. This is because, while the prog has some pretty darn good stories in the form of Faces by Mindy Newell and John Higgins, Lobster Random by Si Spurrier and Carl Critchlow and Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Jack Lawrence, they're all completely blown out of the water by the two veteran series that bookend the issue. John Wagner has written both the current stories for Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog and they're both completely incredible. You know what comics were better than these in 2004? None of them. John Wagner's name should have been in lights that year. And every year. He's consistently the very best writer in all of comics. "Total War" and "Traitor To His Kind" just prove it.

So the situation in "Total War" is this: the terrorist group of that name, last seen putting things together in the recent story "Terror," has issued an ultimatum to the judges of Mega-City One. They have secreted several nuclear devices - much like the "dirty bombs" that were all over the news that year - of varying power into hiding places throughout the city. They detonate a small one, killing hundreds of thousands, to prove that they're serious, and announce that larger bombs will be going off at regular intervals until the judges hand over their power and leave the city. Simple as that.

With one caveat, this is a completely terrific story. For readers who enjoy the more cerebral, detective fiction side of Dredd, this is one of the all-time best stories. Future technologies and the oppressive city surveillance are incredibly important in this race against time to find the bombs and find the terrorists. Watching the judges, especially long-time supporting player PSU Judge Roffman, desperately working under incredible pressure for any clue and any lead, is a real treat. The dead ends are completely heartbreaking. There's a real sense of despair when so much work goes into identifying one of Total War's top men, and the arrest goes flat when the judges learn he'd killed himself hours previously.

Two-thirds of the way through the story, there's a twisting development that I did not enjoy. Perhaps Wagner had created too clever a villain, and an organization that covered its tracks too well for even the trained investigators of Justice Department to find, but the twist that brings the judges a needed break is just too convenient for my liking. On the other hand, it really didn't matter at the time. The simple appearance of an old man with an eye patch somehow, in the hands of Wagner and artist Henry Flint, turns into one amazing cliffhanger when read weekly.

There's also a very cool subplot dealing with Dredd's niece Vienna. Early on, before the terrorists' demands are made, we are introduced to another clone made from Dredd's genetic stock, but this one has suffered severe brain damage and is deteriorating quickly. The tek judges consider Dredd the clone's next of kin and ask his permission to euthanize him. Dredd replies that he's certainly not any "next of kin" and tells them not to involve him. So they involve Vienna instead. Vienna's dealing with this and keeping her uncle Joe dragged in brings the two story threads crashing together as millions try to flee the city by any means necessary. Mega-City One being what it is, everything spirals completely out of control.



As good as this Dredd serial is, I'm not sure that Johnny Alpha's latest case isn't better. "Traitor to His Kind" is a mean political thriller. Alpha is called to Earth to track down Clarkie, the King of England, who's been abducted by mutant terrorists. King Clarkie had first been introduced back in the 1980s, a fun little parody of "I Say, Jolly What"-styled upper class twits. Now, his government is quietly keeping his abduction secret, and the minister who's brought Alpha into the picture, to smoothly and discreetly rescue him, is playing a really interesting game, keeping many plates in the air.

This is a really great story that has Alpha working pretty far outside his comfort zone. I mean, it's normal that he can't really trust anybody, but this time out, the stakes are a lot higher. He's been using the wealth of his bounties to help rebuild the mutant ghettos of Milton Keynes, and is much loved by that community. But now, as gossip is filtering around that somebody has abducted the king in a bid for more rights for mutants, Alpha is on entirely the wrong side of public opinion. Add in the usual Strontium Dog tricks of a hatefully two-faced British government and previously unmentioned family members making appearances, and this one's a taut and mean winner of a story.

Honestly, I'd have bet good money on Clarkie not getting out of this one alive. The character had earlier, in the epic, controversial "Final Solution," been seen to be executed, but in these revisionist, untold tales of Strontium Dog, there was always the feeling that Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra were going to change things around in a big way. Here, they don't, although "The Final Solution" would come up for major reappraisal in 2010.



These are both absolutely excellent stories. Wagner may not be writing darn near everything like he seemed to in the 1980s, but his work is consistently of the highest quality. He's absolutely the best, most reliable craftsman in the medium of comics, and this issue provides all the evidence that I need to make that claim. Comic fans that ignore Wagner's work are doing themselves a huge disservice.

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

Judge Dredd: Total War (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, Anderson's new do and the Meg premiere of The Bogie Man get the spotlight as I look at what Wagner's frequent collaborator Alan Grant was doing. See you next week!

141. King Hell!

August 2004: You know what would be a really thankless job? Editing 2000 AD. Oh, there are perks, I suppose. You get to commission great series and work with incredibly talented creators, but you also get a fan base that is convinced that it knows better than you at every stage and constantly makes demands, I mean, offers helpful suggestions about what it wants to see in the comic. And, when you and your predecessors have spent thirty-odd years cultivating the mythology that the series are actually created by put-upon robots whipped and beaten into the service of thrillpower, it's a little difficult to explain, in character, exactly why the Alan Moore and Ian Gibson droids haven't been chained to a desk to create more Halo Jones, or why the loaning of the Grant Morrison droid to some inferior American publishers has gone on so long that we don't have more Zenith.

About which, I don't know about you squaxx, but I finally resolved a few months ago that I'm not reading any more stupid superhero trademark protection funnybooks from anybody, regardless of who writes them. Except Paul Levitz writing Legion of Super-Heroes. 2000 AD droids on Hulk comics? Not in my house. Join me, won't you? You know it makes sense.

Anyway, new episodes of Zenith and Halo Jones, by their original creators, seem to turn up most often when fans compile their fantasy "perfect prog." From there, it's anybody's guess as to what will show up next, the only other real tricky bit is deciding whether you want Strontium Dog or you want Ezquerra drawing that imaginary issue's Judge Dredd.

I mention this here because I figure that Matt Smith, the man who has been Tharg for about the last decade, has made a really strong case for being 2000 AD's best editor, but man, he does something that I have never liked, and that's not building up a solid recurring feature to run alongside Dredd in almost every issue. That's one of the reasons why fans came to love Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante in the late nineties, because David Bishop made them co-stars of the comic, with Dredd, for the better part of two solid years. Particularly with subplot-heavy series like Sin Dex, as it has evolved, and, frankly, darn near everything that Ian Edginton or Gordon Rennie has written, the whole business of a single story per year has mostly been a burden for fans to follow. I've said before, and I feel very strongly about it, that The Red Seas would have been massively improved had its hundred-plus episodes appeared over a run of about three years, and not ten.

See, if I were Tharg, I would note those series that seem to get nearly unanimous positive feedback from fans. In recent days, these would include Zombo, Ichabod Azrael and Absalom. I'd treat that initial story as a successful pilot and then sit down with the writer and see where this series is going. Then commission it, to the end. Rather than ordering a single story each year, and hoping that the writer doesn't get poached by some inferior American publisher who will take up all of his time before it's finished, I'd slot that series in for at least forty weeks a year and give it a backup artist and turn the series' lead into the next 2000 AD superstar. Johnny Alpha did not become beloved in our hearts by collecting one bounty a year, Tharg.

Ah, but there's a problem with my plan. In quite a few cases, it's completely unworkable. Many series, and many of the writers responsible for them, genuinely need time to find a footing and the maturity necessary to churn out something really workable and memorable. Take Simon Spurrier, for instance. Presently, I might groan that he's one of those droids wasting his creative energy turning out garbage for inferior American publishers when he could be writing more Lobster Random, but he wouldn't even be in that position had Tharg not given him the time to develop Bec & Kawl over several, individual, month-long batches. "Hell to Pay" is the fifth of these month-long runs, and it's a real treat. In it, Jarrod Kawl is duped into a cunning plan by Margaret Thatcher to take over the underworld.



Even if Spurrier had wanted to tell this story from the outset - contradicting my "annual appearance" claim above, Bec & Kawl usually appeared once every six months - he wouldn't have told it at all well. The earliest Bec & Kawl adventures, despite the goodwill that some fans felt towards them, just weren't very good. Since Spurrier was a fan who made it in, and since the art was so nice, and since the series was so darned different, and - this might be the important bit - it only ran for four weeks at a time, readers were mostly able to overlook the series' deficiencies, in the hopes that it would improve.

Well, I say mostly. There certainly are readers with a "kill it immediately!" mindset whenever Tharg programs a series that they don't enjoy.

Honestly, the leap in quality between the first two batches of Bec & Kawl and this one is just eye-popping. There are huge problems with the earliest stories. For one, he relies on visual humor, not just to hit a punch line, but to complete a story. Infamously, the climax to a one-off episode called "Enlightenment" (prog 1327, Feb. 2003) is the slogan written on Kawl's T-shirt. No attention is drawn to it. More than that, the pacing of the early stories is really bad. There's no getting around it, while there is a skeleton of a plot in May 2002's "The Mystical Mentalist Menace" (progs 1290-91), there is no sense of a transition between scenes or gags. The action is compressed so much that there is no feeling of the passage of time, nor a space where the story develops.

"Hell to Pay" isn't without its problems, but thank the stars that Tharg commissioned Bec & Kawl the way he did, so that Spurrier and Roberts could learn from their mistakes. It's a very funny story, but, more importantly, it's a story that readers can understand. There are conventions to the language of comics, and the buildup to this hilarious cliffhanger is one of the things that makes it work so well. It's more than just "SHOCK! Thatcher is the baddie!" but the way that we get this cliffhanger at the right point in the story - the halfway mark - and that we learn what Hell is, in terms of how Spurrier is going to use it, so that the comedy of Thatcher privatizing it actually means something. Creating a world that a reader can care about, even for the six or seven minutes one might spend reading a Bec & Kawl episode, is critical for the story to work.



World-building is something that the Guv'nor, Pat Mills, does better than darn near everybody else in comics. When Mills is on fire, as he is in Book Two of the ABC Warriors epic "The Shadow Warriors," he's throwing some completely crazy ideas at the protagonists. Some of these ideas are so offbeat as to be ridiculous - above, as drawn by Henry Flint, we see grouchy apes called Cyboons riding three-legged lizards called Trisaurs - but Mills treats all of the elements of his stories with the same respect and enthusiasm, grounding the mindblowing ideas with casual acceptance by the protagonists.

Now, the weird problem with the Guv'nor is that, unique among 2000 AD's writers, he seems to get a free pass to write his stories in either 48-page or 60-page chunks. He seems to have picked this up writing for the French market, where his publisher there releases 60-page episodes of the series Requiem and Claudia once a year. This means that Mills gets to mostly blow off the idea of cliffhangers. It's pretty rare when you get to, say, page six of episode five of a modern Mills story and get that jawdropping shock that leaves you begging for the next part. From the perspective of a reader, "Book Two of The Shadow Warriors" doesn't mean so much. It's really that "The Shadow Warriors" is a three-episode story, and the episodes are really long, and split into chunks for British serialization.

And then of course, there's the problem that, as editor of 2000 AD, Matt Smith has so darn many popular series to juggle that even if the Guv'nor wanted to run a 156-page ABC Warriors adventure across 26 consecutive weeks, there wouldn't necessarily be room for it. See, thankless job.

For the record, I'd figure the lineup for a perfect prog, considering that Nikolai Dante is coming to an end in early 2012, would include Dredd by Wagner and Ezquerra, backed by new stories for Robo-Hunter, Zenith, Stickleback and Lobster Random.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Bec & Kawl: Bloody Students (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Caballistics Inc: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: The Art of Kenny Who? (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop).

Next time, The Galaxy's Greatest and its Trouble With Girls. See you in seven, friends!

138. Bill and His Shootah

Hey! Is this thing still on?

It's been more than a year since I last wrote here, and a couple of people have said that they missed reading me, so I let the little itch settle me back into writing a bit more about 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. If you're new to this blog, basically, ages ago, I sat down and started rereading my collection at the rate of about six issues a week. By the time I got to something like 1993, I decided to rip off Paul Rainey's Prog Slog Blog and write a little each week. I let this turn from a pleasure into a chore and found myself running out of things to say, so I quit doing it.

I kept on reading, but rather than skipping this blog ahead to where I had reached at the end of June - to the issues originally published in September of '08 - I am going to re-reread and report and scan, so there's not a break in the entries.

Also, John Smith's completely brilliant series Indigo Prime is returning to the comic in about two months, and I am certainly going to want to celebrate that. Look for an article about that great series in September. Plus, of course, this is a fine week to relaunch this blog, because - and when I started the first draft of this entry, I didn't know this was coming - the 2000 AD website has just been quite spectacularly redesigned. If you have not visited the web site in a while, you should definitely swing back by, because they have done a super job upgrading it.

Anyway, you've got me for thirteen weeks. I'm committing to that much. We'll see how it goes. You'll also notice there's a Google Ad somewhere over to the side somewhere. That's new. If you enjoy Thrillpowered Thursday and see an ad that might interest you, I sure would appreciate it if you'd click it. Money's got to be pretty darn tight since my wife and I had a baby two months ago. If there are some pennies in this blog, I might can see myself writing longer.

So, onto prog 1387. This wonderful cover, by Dave Gibbons, of Bill Savage and Judge Dredd, reminds me that the summer of 2004 - that's when we received this April-dated issue in North America - was when my best buddy, the fellow who introduced me to 2000 AD, up and moved to Canada. For a few years, I'd been feeding his thrill-power habit because Diamond, the distributor that sends 2000 AD to American funnybook stores, was completely unreliable, repeatedly missed shipping dates and would occasionally claim that they were shorted and would only send one issue to a comic shop if it, in fact, ordered two. So, nothing's changed there, anyway. In other words, for quite a few years, I was ordering and paying for two copies of 2000 AD in order to guarantee delivery of at least one of them. From prog 1387, my second copies - when those second copies arrived, about eight times of ten - went to another local friend.

These days, I no longer use Diamond for 2000 AD. I was, however, very pleased to hear that they will be once again offering 2000 AD by the single issue rather than in a sealed pack, as had been the case for some lengthy time. I hear that's supposed to start at the end of this month, for the comics that will ship in October.



1387 was also notable for the debut of two great big series that are still continuing today. The seventh book of Savage is running in the current issues of 2000 AD, and a new series of Low Life is scheduled to start in just a couple of months, in prog 1750.

Savage is the story of an occupied Britain, which lost a quick-strike "war" with the eastern European Volgan Empire five years previously. It's the sequel to one of the original 2000 AD serials, Invasion, which ran from 1977-78. Our hero is Bill Savage, who lost his family to the Volgs, picked up a shotgun and has been blowing hell out of the Volgs in a long-running guerrilla war. As book one of Savage opens, Bill and other resistance leaders are executing a plan to fake his death so he can work undercover.

Written by Pat Mills and illustrated by Charlie Adlard, Savage is just a blisteringly good comic, full of realistic villains and desperate heroes. Well, there's one bit in the first series where the Guv'nor's research fails him and tank treads suddenly don't work the way they really do, but otherwise this is a really great series, and shows Mills continuing to roar back to life with some fantastic comics for 2000 AD. Several more winners would be forthcoming.

Then there's Low Life. This is less a spinoff from Judge Dredd than one of the many comics that are set in his world. The Low Life is the most crime-ridden slum in Mega-City One (this week, anyway) and the series follows a group of undercover "Wally Squad" judges. In these initial outings, scripted by Rob Williams and drawn by Henry Flint, the lead is Judge Aimee Nixon, a tough, ugly, broken-nosed, one-armed master of disguise.



In time, Nixon will cede the spotlight to her more popular co-star, the comically deranged Judge Dirty Frank, but she is really a compelling and fascinating character in these first two stories. In time, Low Life will get pretty dense with subplots and Nixon's role will take a pretty surprising turn. Most fans are anxiously awaiting its return in September.

Also appearing in this prog, there's Judge Dredd in a one-off by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy, an outer space serial called A.H.A.B. by Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson, and Chopper by Wagner, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

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


Next week: What happens when Judge Dredd takes on the war on terror. And stop by my Bookshelf Blog tomorrow for a short review of the Mean Machine collection, "Real Mean."

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!

115. Blasts from the Past

August 2002: Prog 1306 sports a cover by David Millgate for the new serial Bison. Charitably, it's not one of Tharg's better offerings. The kickboxing lady on the cover is a pretty radically redesigned version of the hero, who starts the serial as an aging, hugely-muscled detective in a near-future scenario, but thanks to some bodyswapping technology that's all the rage in the story, he's wearing the body of an untouchable crime lord's junkie daughter and she's got his. But at no point does either character look like the tough kickboxing lady that Millgate has drawn. See, when Detective Jack Bison realized that Esposito's daughter had an account on this bodychanging service, he realized he was going to have to go outside the law to take Esposito down, and planned to use his own daughter as the shooter, but didn't figure she was going to set up whomever was going to take over her body. She was strung out on heroin and such and just didn't want to deal with a weekend's withdrawal and detox. So Bison first has to kick the habit and then go kill Esposito, except he also has to deal with the daughter, who's using his body to go on a shooting rampage of her own, and...

Well, it's obviously not just the bodyswap technology that nobody thought quite all the way through; this plot is an amazingly convoluted mess. This is a nine-part story written by Colin Clayton and Chris Dows, and illustrated by Laurence Campbell and Len Townsend. I don't think any of them would disagree when I say that all four creators would do better in the future. Bison was met with howls of derision from the fan base. Looking at it now, it's perhaps a degree or two better than I remembered it, but it's still a pretty stupid comic. Yet the real disappointment is the art. Laurence Campbell would go on to much better things, particularly a 2005 serial called Breathing Space, but what we have here is just lazy, sloppy work that should have gone straight back to the artist for reworking. Check out the way he gets around drawing exit wounds here by just having people erupt in so much blood that it really looks like the men are being shot with guns that magically turn them into candles:



So is this the shock of the new in our weekly look at the future from the Galaxy's Greatest Comic? Well, believe it or not, Bison really is the most forward-looking strip in a very nostalgic run of 2000 AD this particular summer. Over in Judge Dredd, John Wagner and Colin MacNeil - now there's a man who knows how to draw exit wounds - have brought back the one-off character of Vienna Dredd, an improbable niece conceived by Pat Mills and Ian Gibson in a 1979 episode and never referred to again, as a young actress who would like her Uncle Joe to give her some trace of a family connection. Vienna becomes a very welcome addition to Dredd's supporting cast. Actually, to be honest, I'm tweaking events to make a point; Vienna's return is chronicled in progs 1300-1301. 1306 sees the end to the recurring menace of bent cop Judge Manners in a story by Wagner and Paul Marshall.

In the last blog, we looked at how Rogue Trooper, first seen in 1981, had returned. He's joined by Strontium Dog, introduced in 1978, in an eight-parter called "Roadhouse" by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. Finally there's the return of The VCs, a 1979-80 serial brought back after a 22-year break by Dan Abnett and Henry Flint.



Now the original run of The VCs (the collected edition of which I reviewed back in April) was not quite the classic that some of us squaxx consider it, but it was a solid enough tale of future war. It was a little jingoistic and repetitive, but I think it had a sense of excitement and danger lacking from many kids' comics, and the art was always fantastic. This new take? Well, there's nothing at all wrong with it, and Flint's artwork is as terrific as always, but the story never completely captivates me. There's nothing at all wrong with it, and it's a darn sight better than plenty of other comics, but it's just not one of my favorites. Anyway, this initial run lasts for just seven weeks and is the only one that Flint illustrates. The VCs will return for four more annual outings of about ten weeks each, with art by Anthony Williams.

Surprisingly, every story in prog 1306 has been reprinted. All of the Judge Manners episodes were collected in one of the free "graphic novels" bagged with an issue of the Megazine this summer. Bison was compiled in a hardcover "European-album-styled" edition by Rebellion in 2004. The VCs, Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog stories are all available in Rebellion's wonderful line of 2000 AD reprints. We'll come back to that VCs book in a month or so.

Next time, Simon Spurrier gets his second series, The Scrap, Steve Parkhouse caricatures Inspector Morse, and we look at the new hardback edition of The ABC Warriors. See you in seven!

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!

109. Thrill-Power Starts to Get Overloaded

As 2000 AD entered the year 2002, it was with a new editor, Matt Smith. There was a good deal of fandom interest in this at the time, as Smith had chosen to keep a much lower online profile than his predecessor Andy Diggle had, and many people were speculating what his tenure would be like. Less heralded then was Judge Dredd Megazine's new editor. Alan Barnes took the reins as David Bishop stepped down following such a long and commendable service, but Barnes already had a new assignment for the veteran Bishop in mind.

Barnes came to the Megazine following some time as editor of Doctor Who Magazine for Panini. Wikipedia suggests he'd been at the wheel there for the better part of four years, during the very difficult transition time of 1998-2002, when the Paul McGann TV movie failed to become a series, and he somehow managed to keep the magazine alive and very vibrant during those lean years. He seems to have succeeded by really amping up the quality of both the comic strip, which became essential reading as it transitioned to full color (and remained superior to any and all Doctor Who novels published during that period which weren't written by Lawrence Miles), and also by really bringing out the best in the magazine's feature writers. For years, the magazine's writers had been doing great work going behind the scenes of the production of the original series, but I think it was during Barnes' tenure that the quality went even higher, with incredibly interesting research, very detailed, probing interviews, and, most memorably, a lengthy, serialized memoir by the show's longest-serving producer.



Judge Dredd Megazine had only been revamped just eight months previously, taking the 100-page perfect-bound format used by the annual year-end special Progs. While readers all seemed to like the fourth volume of the comic, under Barnes and designer Graham Rolfe, the comic got another kick up the backside. As far as comics go, there initially wasn't a great deal that was actually new between the covers. The new strips in issue 9 include a very funny Dredd adventure called "Dead Lost in Mega-City One" by John Wagner and Peter Doherty which seems to be parodying some contemporary, dunderheaded British TV craze, and the ongoing Wardog by Dan Abnett, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague. They're joined by what will prove to be the final serial for the veteran Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and John Ridgway. The popular series is finally winding down at this point, and will conclude its 74-episode run in the spring.

Of course, reprints are a regular feature during this period of the Megazine. This time, six episodes are dusted off: four each from Strontium Dog ("The Kid Knee Caper" by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra) and Bad Company (the first four parts, by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy). Even these just appear a little more vibrant and interesting than the reprints of the previous few months, thanks to a very neat design choice. The current Megazine is a very different size than the old, almost-square newsprint 2000 ADs of the 1980s - it is sleeker and taller. To accomodate the reprints, they are shrunk down to the current page width, but printed on color paper, with borders above and below the comic, along with a neat little "work order" indicating that they've been retrieved from a special vault in Tharg's Command Module. In the very next issue of the Megazine, the classic thrills will be joined by reprints of Hellboy by Mike Mignola and John Byrne.



It's with this issue that we first start getting lengthy text articles filling the page count. This time there are two. One of them is a behind-the-scenes look at the newest merchandising: full-cast audio productions of 2000 AD-universe stories from the good people at Big Finish, who have been turning out their popular lines of direct-to-CD adventures of Doctor Who and other cult teevee properties for a couple of years by this point. Their 2000 AD line features several of the regular players from their repertory company, with Toby Longworth starring as Dredd, and Simon Pegg as Johnny Alpha.

It's interesting stuff, but the really impressive feature is the first in what will prove to be a quite lengthy series of articles written by outgoing editor David Bishop on the history of our favorite comic. Thrill-Power Overload, which will be revised, updated and collected into an essential book a few years down the road, was assembled from dozens of interviews and previously unseen documentation.

This first episode of the series details the conflicts that went on at the comic's original publisher IPC to get the darn thing put together, with jealous infighting between departments and unsatisfactory returns on artwork. It includes samples of never-before-seen pages, including the original splash of Invasion 1988, as it was then-called, with parachuting Soviet troops storming London, and the remarkable sight of John Probe decapitating some guy with a karate chop.

As the series continues, Bishop will interview almost every major player from the comic's lifetime (only Alan Moore, Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie will decline to go on the record), and produce a genuinely excellent, no-punches-pulled history of 2000 AD. The hardcover collected edition, published in 2007, is flatly one of the most important books about the medium to see print, and a must-have for anybody with a mind to having a serious library about comic books.

In other news, earlier this year, Rebellion released the sixth collection of The ABC Warriors. This book, "The Shadow Warriors," contains the longest of all the Warriors' adventures thus far, an epic written by their creator Pat Mills and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra and Henry Flint. It originally appeared in three "books" between 2003-06, and since I'm looking forward to rereading the original episodes as they come up in the rotation, I just skimmed over the book to get a good feel for it.

Honestly, this collection is terrific. The artwork is, of course, wonderful. Ezquerra is one of 2000 AD's best art droids and he really brings a great, dirty sensibility to the dusty sandhole of the terraformed Mars. But when Flint takes over, things somehow get even better. There's a genuine "shock of the new" feel to Flint's episodes, as our heroes' new, imaginatively-designed foes take center stage and the weirdness factor gets ramped up to ten.

Skimming this volume confirmed what I felt about it upon its release: that the Guv'nor was back in town and ready to kick ass and take names. We'll come to this point in Thrillpowered Thursday in a few months, but it's clear that Pat Mills' time away from the comic, during which he created Requiem: Vampire Knight for his French publisher, recharged his batteries to full. The 2003-model Mills was not the same droid as the one from the 1990s. Here, it's one wild idea after another, no preaching, no stagnation, just a constant escalation of mad plot devices and vibrant characters. If the previous few ABC Warriors collections had been frustrating for one political reason or another, then this is the one to get.

It's every bit as wild and excellent as it was when Ezquerra had last drawn the title in 1979, and the robots were riding on the backs of tyrannosaurs, armed with bazookas. This is that Mills - the one with the turbo-charged imagination creating physics-defying freakiness and making downright excellent comics. I strongly recommend you check this book out! (And keep an eye out for more about Requiem: Vampire Knight at my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf blog in a couple of weeks!)

Next time, Nikolai Dante hightails it out of Russia, and Dan Abnett and Richard Elson have a lot to say in Atavar! See you in seven!

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!