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.)

53. Girls Less Ordinary

In October 1997, two of the most unusual of all 2000 AD series debuted. They would both be finished before the end of the year, never to be reprinted and never to be seen again. They're called The Space Girls and A Life Less Ordinary, and they're both pretty darn lousy. This is a shame, because prog 1063 does contain some very good material. There's the first part of a fantastic Judge Dredd comedy called "Mrs. Gunderson's Little Adventure" by John Wagner and Henry Flint which is probably better than any comic you've read in the last week, a good Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and Julian Gibson, and a really creepy little Vector 13 by Abnett and Alex Ronald. So 60% of the comic's pretty great.

The UK had some pretty big pop culture exports in 1996-97. The Spice Girls released a series of hit singles, and Trainspotting, a film by the team of Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald, became one of the biggest and most imitated British movies in recent memory. The trio's next project, an odd fantasy about an heiress and her kidnapper falling in love thanks to the machinations of a pair of angels, was predicted to become another big hit. So the marketing people at Fleetway were already talking with editor David Bishop about finding some ways for 2000 AD to get some more publicity from the mainstream media when Channel Four Films asked for a meeting about a comic adaptation of A Life Less Ordinary. It's a little unfortunate that the scheduling worked out the way it did, because it meant that the eight-part comic version, which preceded the film's release by about three weeks, would run at the same time as the similarly market-led Space Girls.

That Space Girls isn't any good is no surprise, but what is odd is how utterly empty the story is. The strip was only going to run for five weeks, but the closest thing to a parody in the strip comes in the characters' wacky nicknames (such as Hyper Space and Wide Open Space). Otherwise, it's a very dull and boring affair which focusses on the villains instead of the heroines, who have nothing whatsoever to do with the world of pop music or media manipulation, two subjects which might have made the strip at least briefly memorable. The artist, Jason Brashill, had been painting episodes of Judge Dredd and Outlaw over the last couple of years. Here, he uses traditional pen and ink and the result is nowhere near as vibrant as what he'd done before. Since I often feel the reverse is true with 2000 AD artists (I believe that Clint Langley and Simon Bisley, for instance, did much better work in the 1980s and 1990s with pen and ink than paint), this may be seen as evidence of just how utterly backwards everything in Space Girls is.



I'll continue on that note next week, because there's "backwards" and then there's "upside down in the wrong dimension," which is how the Space Girls story will conclude.

John Tomlinson is listed as the writer of the series, and on the official site, David Bishop is listed as the uncredited co-writer of the first episode of Space Girls. Bishop is also listed as the writer of the Life Less Ordinary adaptation, but is not credited in the comic with it, either. Now here's a thankless job. You can't completely hold this dull, drab comic against him. Bishop had to assemble a comic script from an early shooting treatment of the movie in virtually no time at all, and then Steve Yeowell had to put the artwork together with inadequate reference of actors, costumes, locations, you name it. Turning it into a 48-page story would have been difficult enough, but with a cliffhanger every six pages?

In fact, it's been so long since I saw the film that I've forgotten practically all of its details. Without them, reading the first episode was a real chore, wading through choppy events with poor transition and even worse storytelling. It's a really bizarre experience, because neither Bishop nor Yeowell were novices when they put this strip together, and yet it feels like the disjointed work of people who'd never worked in comics and were still learning the rules. A little clue: the introductory text page with the photo of Cameron Diaz should not have been required reading to follow the comic. On that note, Steve Yeowell is a wonderful artist, and responsible for many classic thrills, but the photos that appear with each episode actually serve as a painful reminder of how much the characters do not resemble the actors who played them* and should not have been included.



Did this "marketing approach," as Bishop has sinced coined it, work? Probably not, as the "media-friendly" events in 2000 AD will end before 1998 and not be tried again. I can sort of see A Life Less Ordinary drawing in some curious readers but losing them within a week or two. However, if the Space Girls earned any readers, I'll be amazed. Hands up if you saw the name "Space Girls" and didn't think "oh, how stupid."

Next week, the wincing continues as the Space Girls meet an ignominous end.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: In prog 1062, Sinister takes his third bullet of the series, wounded in the back by a target called Lance Boyle.

*note: David Bishop, who was both editor and scriptwriter for the serial, clarified that 2000 AD didn't have the rights to the actual likenesses of the actors in question. So it was not that Yeowell "botched" the characters, as the original version of this entry stated, but that they weren't allowed to. This entry was modified on May 15 '08 to reflect the updated information.

(Originally pubished 5/15/08 at LiveJournal.)

46. Too Cool to Kill

March 1997: In the real world, the first of the two best things to ever happen, the Hipster Son's birth, is just a few weeks away. I was still living in that awesome little duplex on Park Ridge Drive in Athens, and that neighborhood didn't yet look like the end of the world, with all the grass killed under the weight of the sixteen Chevrolets parked in every single yard. In Britain, John Major is still prime minister, though the inevitable victory of Tony Blair and the Labour Party is about six weeks away. I was still crazy about trading VHS tapes of every show under the sun then, and had a British friend and contact who suggested that the Hipster Son, who was premature, couldn't wait until the 1997 General Election to be born, he just insisted on being around long enough to see the Conservatives lose. Then my boy had his first heart attack, aged three weeks. Heady times. So between birthing babies and an unbelievable health scare, having half my online friends so utterly jubilant about politics that it kept me captivated, and then dealing with some horrifying financial issues that we experienced at the time, 2000 AD was really low on the priority list. This was worsened because, for the last time (we hope), Diamond missed another run of several issues, and progs 1033-1036 never made it to my local comic shop.

So when I did resume the progs with # 1037, I'd missed the first two parts of Nikolai Dante's first adventure. And it did not matter. I was completely hooked. Now this was a thrill for the ages - one of 2000 AD's all-time best series.



Dante shouldn't be mentioned in isolation from the rest of the 20th anniversary lineup, which is very good. The strips currently running include a new Dredd epic by John Wagner under the umbrella title "The Hunting Party," with early chapters illustrated by the likes of Trevor Hairsine and Calum Alexander Watt, which features Dredd and DeMarco, whom we met in "The Pit," training some cadets in the Cursed Earth. Also appearing are a seven-part Slaine serial by Pat Mills and Nick Percival, Al's Baby by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra and the new thrill Mercy Heights by John Tomlinson and Kevin Walker, which is about a space station hospital full of weird aliens in a war zone.

Tomlinson, you may recall, had been 2000 AD's editor for a few months in 1995. Nikolai Dante had been commissioned by Tomlinson as an eight-part series, as had many of the strips during that period. When David Bishop took over in '96, he concluded that there was a lot of promise to this character, and that the story would really benefit from a longer initial run. It works tremendously well. Dante's first series ran from March to July 1997, and after resting for the summer, he then becomes a semi-regular throughout the rest of the decade. He's chalked up 216 episodes as of this writing, with a new story beginning in the current week's prog.

But who is this fellow, you ask? Well, when we meet him, Dante's been a thief and a con man, looking out for himself since his mother, a pirate, abandoned him as a child of nine or ten. This is 27th Century Russia, an empire under the heel of Tsar Vladimir, where amazing advances in technology haven't done much to improve the overwhelming poverty where most people live. Dante is a swashbuckling ladies' man, and we first meet him in bed with an imperial courtesan. After getting the better of a squad of officers, led by the first of many men of the Arbatov family that we'll meet, and getting hold of the courtesan's imperial boudoir costume, Dante makes the mistake of selling it, which allows the tsar's men to trace him.



Dante's expecting a death sentence, but what he doesn't know is that a bio-scan has revealed him to have a very strong connection to the Romanov bloodline, a powerful family which poses political challenges for the scheming Vladimir. He's pressganged by the tsar into joining the imperial Raven Corps, and sent along with the tsar's daughter Jena Makarov to investigate a crashed starship. The whole thing is a set-up; Vladimir knows that the starship belongs to the Romanovs and has been banking on Dante obtaining a Romanov Weapons Crest, a powerful weapon of alien origin which will only bond with a Romanov. In other words, it's still a death sentence: Vladimir fully intends to dissect Dante and get at that weapon.

Where it goes from here is, frankly, everywhere. As Nikolai Dante progresses, the cast and settings grow and we meet dozens of incredibly fun characters. The status quo gets dumped on its backside several times and the stakes get progressively higher. We learn that Dante's backstory already has some sad skeletons in it, and the gambles he has to take have increasingly chilling prices and repercussions.

The series was created by Robbie Morrison, who has written every episode, and Simon Fraser, the original artist, whose work is genuinely wonderful, vibrant and full of life. After the original 15-week run, Fraser still handled the bulk of the episodes presented during the series' first phase (1997-99), with periodic fill-ins by other artists, chiefly Andy Clarke and Charlie Adlard. There have been some lineup changes since then, which I'm sure we'll elaborate in time, but today, Dante's art duties are shared between Fraser and John Burns.

The sixth collection of Dante stories was recently released, so they've been chugging along putting all of this popular series in bookshelf format, but you can find these first fifteen episodes along with several others in The Romanov Dynasty, which was released in 2004 as part of the old DC/Rebellion deal. The Judge Dredd epic which is running at this time is also available in the 2006 book The Hunting Party.

Next week, Fetish concludes in the Megazine, but what you really want to see are pictures of cute girls dressed as 2000 AD characters, right? That'll save me having to find somethin' new to write about...

(Originally published 3/20/08 at LiveJournal.)

36. City of the Dead, redux

July 1996: David Bishop and his editorial team (which is not a large crew) are putting the weekly in an increasingly stable and strong position when there's a new fire to be tackled. Six months previously, Bishop had moved from the Judge Dredd Megazine over to the weekly, and Tomlinson moved from the weekly to edit the now-monthly Megazine. The publishers have decided that they don't need to be paying Tomlinson's freelance rates any longer and after six monthly issues, he is gone and now Bishop has both comics to edit. If both titles were financially strong and had the full support of the publisher, this might be a really great job. It's what Matt Smith is doing today and he at least seems to enjoy it. But in the summer of 1996, 2000 AD has a big stockpile of unloved material commissioned ages previously which has to be printed, and the publisher is increasingly unhappy with the Megazine's underperformance. Sales, if I understand rightly, are below the point they were when the Dredd feature film was released a year before. The Megazine is under orders to make some money or be cancelled.

And so immediately some more commissioned material goes back in the drawer. Megazine v.3 # 19 had an advertisement that a new story for Janus: Psi Division would begin in the next issue. Judge Janus, who was created by Grant Morrison and Carlos Ezquerra, first appeared in 1993 and had shown up in a couple of stories since, most recently a 5-parter, "A New Star," in 2000 AD in February '96 by Mark Millar and Paul Johnson. Their next, and final, Janus adventure is "Faustus," which I believe was planned to run as four 12-page episodes in Meg # 20-23. Instead, Bishop decides to stop commissioning - and paying for - anything new for the time being, and use reprints to bulk up the comic and put back the time when they'll need to pay for as much new stuff in the Meg. The reprint, for now, is of the 1990 Judge Dredd epic "Necropolis." The small backlog of already commissioned material will do for now, and the format will change from five new stories per issue to three new stories and reprint material.

I'll try to take up how well this goes down in a few weeks' time, but it's worth noting that the postponed Janus storyline will eventually find a home in 2000 AD, along with several other Megazine series as the squeeze gets worse and more established Megazine series are left homeless by the crunch. It had already been announced that Judge Anderson would be returning to 2000 AD. The assumption I made is that Bishop, who'd edited her Megazine series for years anyway, wanted her at 2000 AD with him, and Tomlinson, who commissioned the Millar/Johnson Janus adventures, would be taking that character to the Meg. Now Bishop has both at 2000 AD. Guess which one gets cancelled? Some Judge Dredd stories which were planned for the Meg will get moved to the weekly, and eventually both Missionary Man and Devlin Waugh will also move there.



So the lineup this month includes 20 pages of reprints of some of the lead-in episodes to "Necropolis" by John Wagner and Ezquerra, but it still includes some very good new strips, and just because # 20 is a very visible benchmark for the beginning of the Meg's reprint period doesn't mean the comic should be written off. Far from it; it includes Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and Simon Davis, along with the first episode of a new series called Holocaust 12 written by Chris Standley and John Smith, with art by Jim Murray. I believe this strip, which concerns the suicide-team judges who get sent into disasters as a last-ditch effort and are not expected to return, has also suffered somewhat from the need for space for reprint. There's an cliffhanger which feels unusually artificial, and an oddly-lettered "next issue" tag on the last page. I think this was planned as two 12-page episodes and split into four 6-page episodes to accomodate the reprints and, again, stretch the new material out further.

Finally, there's the Dredd story, part one of "America II: Fading of the Light" by Wagner and Colin MacNeil. This is the big draw, although it suffers from sequel fatigue and isn't rated as highly by readers as the original. It is still a brilliant story and deserves a mention.

"America" was one of the five original Megazine series, back in 1990. It's the life story of America Jara and her friend, Bennett Beeny, who grew up together in the Meg. America's childhood hatred of the judges leads her, in time, to join the democratic underground, and a terrorist organization called Total War, which makes itself known periodically throughout the series. Beeny had made a huge success for himself as a singer-songwriter, but when his and Ami's paths cross one fateful night when Total War ambushes some judges, he's shot as a witness and left for dead. Beeny doesn't identify Ami when he recovers, but the gunshot takes out his throat, ending his career.

He still has enough royalties to live comfortably for the rest of his life, and when Ami returns for money, he's torn between his lifelong love for her and a need to stop the carnage. It's a remarkable story, and one which anybody who doubts Judge Dredd's standing as one of the best comics of the last thirty years should certainly read. Beeny's anguish at being torn between desire and unrequited love on one side, and fear and responsibility on the other, makes for an amazing tale, and whatever he decides is going to leave him disgusted with the decision. Dredd himself is barely present in the story, except as a menacing figure on the fiction's event horizon. You can certainly draw parallels between the structure of "America" and the Golgo 13 episodes I've been mentioning from time to time, where the focus is on the people impacted by the nominal protagonist. Seeing the character through the eyes of guest stars gives us a different perception of him. Dredd doesn't come off so well. Neither does Beeny, once you see what he does.

This first story - no sequel was planned at the time - ends with the revelation that the narrator has indeed been Beeny as we had expected, but he is wearing America's body. America had been fatally wounded in the story's climax. Beeny took custody of her body, and arranged for a brain transplant.

And that's not all he did. In the first episode of this series, we meet their daughter.



Holy crap! You think Faye Dunaway had problems in Chinatown?

"Fading of the Light" is sometimes dismissed, in part because the original series probably did not need a sequel, and in part because many readers feel that MacNeil's gorgeous painting of the original is not matched by the pen and inkwork of this run. I think it's still excellent myself, and a very worthwhile follow-up to the original.

The two "America" stories are available in a reprint volume which was issued by Titan in 2003. There's a new edition coming soon from Rebellion if you are interested - and you certainly should be - so let your local comic shop know. It should be out in March or April in the UK, and in May in the US.

Next week: There are reprints with Dark Judges in the Meg, and new episodes with Dark Judges in the prog!!

(Originally published 1/10/08 at LiveJournal.)

33. The Hit List

April 1996: Prog 989 sees the last part of the first R.A.M. Raiders adventure. This is a notable series in one respect: detailed anecdotal evidence over the last decade has proven that I am, in fact, the only person on the entire planet who liked R.A.M. Raiders. The series was the last one that Alan McKenzie brought to 2000 AD - quite possibly the last one he did for any comic - and featured a pair of young hackers in the near future, Cody and his girlfriend Meg, who stole customers out from under bigger and better-established tech support crews. They run into very weird evidence that computers are becoming sentient. Just like my iPod, in other words. It's slight, and, if we're honest, not anywhere near as thrilling as a 2000 AD series should be. But it's a nice counterpoint to the heavier, gun-laden stories elsewhere in the prog (this time, Judge Dredd by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra, Rogue Trooper by Steve White & Steve Tappin, Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett & Charlie Gillespie and Vector 13 by Simon Furman & John Higgins).

At the end of the first R.A.M. Raiders story, there's a completely bizarre twist: Meg gets killed in an explosion and returns as a ghost that only be seen by Cody or by robots. So the story starts as a lighthearted TechGhostbusters before turning into Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). Maybe that's why it was so unpopular: it felt more like a TV series that McKenzie had failed to sell than it did a comic. He scripted two five-part stories under John Tomlinson's commision, the first with art by Calum Alexander Watt and the second by Maya Gavin. This very much falls in line with the sort of strips I was mentioning in the thirtieth entry, and could certainly have been in the regular rotation had Tomlinson remained with 2000 AD.



But David Bishop had other ideas, chiefly that these slight stories were a little long at five parts apiece. Watt had already completed art on the first, but the second was edited down from five parts to three before Maya Gavin got to draw it. Even if McKenzie had continued in the business, it's unlikely that R.A.M. Raiders would have returned. It appears that McKenzie has evidently tired of comic publishing by this point and is looking at a new career. Other early 90s names are finding other outlets in magazine illustration or jobs for American publishers. But several of their fellows find commissions drying up as Bishop looks elsewhere for ongoing 2000 AD work. Even several of the creators that he'd commissioned for the Judge Dredd Megazine become conspicuously absent over the next couple of years. I did a little tally, and whether by default or by design, the list of 2000 AD creators who will move on includes about twenty names, among them all three of R.A.M. Raiders' script and art droids.

There are some really positive changes to the comic during this period. I particularly like the tendency for longer residencies in the lineup. You could easily imagine the two R.A.M. Raiders stories, under the Richard Burton days, appearing months apart from each other. By running these and other strips in longer runs with multiple artists, readers are able to get more interested in the settings and the characters. The 10-14 week runs of Rogue or Venus Bluegenes, or Sin Dex, or some of the other series which will be launching soon, like Outlaw or Black Light or the big run of Slaine strips to come, are much more memorable than what we are unfortunately seeing in the present day, where, for example, The 86ers returns to the weekly after a year's break, with virtually no recap or reminder, and rushes through six subplot heavy weeks before vanishing again.

Further, Bishop brings to 2000 AD one of his staples from his tenure at the Megazine, the intro page. Each new storyline is preceded by a pinup page which recaps the story so far and refreshes readers' memories about the subplots - even if the series was in the previous issue! Prog 990 gives R.A.M. Raiders an intro page for its second and final story. Now, this is a strip which everybody involved has already decided will not be returning, and yet it gets the benefit of the intro page to help any first-time readers understand what they're about to read. That's a very nice idea and I wish today's Tharg would resurrect it.



Speaking of resurrections, the previous month saw a mention of one of Sinister Dexter's occasional employers, the ganglord Holy Moses Tanenbaum. In the current two-parter, we meet the criminal kingpin. A contract's been put out on him by his moll, the statuesque torch singer Demi Octavo. Finnigan has a little trouble with Holy Moses's force field, but Ramone finishes the job.

This is interesting because Sinister Dexter really never collect much of a rogue's gallery - most of the recurring antagonists are fellow gunmen and theirs is an occupation with more terminal ends than typical comic book heroes. Some of the more recent storylines have seen some shenanigans about Moses Tanenbaum "returning to life" through somewhat eyebrow-raising means (there are two: one is a clone and one comes from a parallel dimension), and the characters in the strip treat this like it's the worst thing imaginable, like Moses is, by some distance, the most menacing character in all of fiction. This remains head-scratchingly odd. Dan Abnett never made Moses into a serious threat in the first place. It's all very well for him to tell us ten years later on what a spectacular supervillain he was, and how his return is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the city of Downlode, but I've got the issues right in front of me, and he wasn't much of a villain, and his return is, thus far, unsatisfying and convoluted.

Next week: Middenface McNulty!! But more importantly... Simon Davis!!

(Originally published 12/20/07 at LiveJournal.)

28. The Pit

In December 1995, prog 970 arrives with some interesting clues about the contents of the cancelled 1996 Yearbook. The official explanation, provided in a Meg a month or so previously, is that the Nerve Centre was simply so swamped with all the new Dredd product and the line-wide relaunches that the Dredd and 2000 AD yearbooks had to be shelved. Conventional wisdom, however, suggests that you don't shelve a perennial seller. By the mid-90s, the old Christmas tradition was sagging across all lines and publishers. Since the last couple of years' offerings had moved slowly, and since the sales spike provided by the Dredd film had already ebbed, it was decided to cancel the books and use their contents in the comic. So in prog 970, there's a Nerve Centre note about two upcoming thrills: one-off episodes of Red Razors and The Journal of Luke Kirby in the next two issues. These will prove to be the final appearances for each series.

On the back covers of progs 972 and 973, there's a two-part star scan by Mick Austin, who painted the cover of the 1995 Yearbook, featuring Tharg and a number of characters: Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Luke Kirby, Red Razors, Feral, Judy Janus and Sam Slade. Prog 953 had seen a Janus: Psi Division one-off, and Feral had appeared in a Strontium Dogs episode four weeks later. Were these all cast-offs from the axed book? As for our old pal Sam Slade, the next we see of Robo-Hunter is another one-shot by Peter Hogan and Rian Hughes in December 1996.



My curiosity about the activity behind the scenes at my favorite comic is an amusing distraction, but the real story this week is the first episode of one of the all-time great Judge Dredd stories, "The Pit."

Even if you're not really familiar with Dredd, you probably have seen images here and there to know he's a big action hero on a big motorcycle. "The Pit" promises readers that it will show them Dredd as he's never been seen before... behind a desk! This is a fantastic, 30-week change in the status quo that sees Dredd assigned to new duties in one of the Meg's remote regions, where rather than doing the job of a senior street judge, he's assigned to the task of sector chief.

It turns out that the Dredd formula works incredibly well as an ensemble police procedural, which was a huge surprise to everybody, including the writer. "The Pit" was originally planned as a 14-part story, the second to involve the organized crimelords called The Frendz, but it works so incredibly well, and the new cast of characters are so popular with readers that it is expanded into a thirty-episode epic which won't conclude until the summer of 1996.

Carlos Ezquerra is the principal artist of this series. Other contributors are Colin MacNeil, Alex Ronald and Lee Sullivan.



Hamlyn issued an out-of-print collection of this series in 1997. A new edition from Rebellion has occasionally been mentioned as a possibility.

Next week, the Megazine ends its twice-monthly publishing cycle... but why?

(Originally published 11/1/07 at LiveJournal.)

22. In the Spotlight

July 1995: To coincide with the Dredd film's UK debut, prog 950 features the first major redesign since prog 555 in 1987. The cover price goes up 20p to accomodate eight extra pages. The lineup features two Dredd episodes, which will be the standard for a couple of months. One of these is a three-part "retelling" of the classic "The Return of Rico," which introduced us to Dredd's clone brother. This expanded version is by Pat Mills and Paul Johnson. The other Dredd is a one-off by John Wagner and Jason Brashill. The other strips at this time are fan favorites Slaine (by Mills, this time with gorgeous painted artwork by Greg Staples, which, like a lot of painted art from this period, isn't served well by the paper) and Rogue Trooper (in a three-part story by Steve White and Charlie Adlard).

Conspicuous by his absence is Carlos Ezquerra. In fact, he's not been seen in the prog or the Meg for eight months. He'll be back next week, but during this period, he's been working for DC Comics, first on a four-part miniseries called Bob the Galactic Bum and also on the 64-page Dredd movie adaptation. This is written by Andrew Helfer and proves that Ezquerra can indeed draw anything and make it look good, even Sylvester Stallone.

On the other hand, you know what instantly turns Carlos Ezquerra's work from just about the best in the medium to painfully mediocre? Shitty coloring like this:



Along with the "proper" strips, we've also got this thing called Urban Strike, which Fleetway told the editors to do. It's a six-part adaptation of a video game that nobody remembers. Urban Strike is loathed by the readers, who write some pretty angry letters about its inclusion. Steve White, Brian Williamson and Mick Austin try to make something of it, but it's glaringly out of place. It feels exactly like that one-page strip on the back cover of all those 70s DC Comics about Spalding basketballs, starring Dr. Julius Irving and that white guy. It looked like a comic, it was part of your comic book, but it was, inescapably, an ad. But, you know, that at least had the decency to only be one page long and drawn by Jack Davis.

As for the eight extra pages, they're used both for introduction pages for each of the new stories in the issue, to help new readers find their feet, and for film hype. With the next issue, the story count will go up to six per prog when Vector 13 begins; more on that another time.



Also bagged with the issue is a 16-page sampler of one of the books released to cash in on the film. The A to Z of Judge Dredd was written by Mike Butcher and is a pretty neat reference encyclopedia, although the publication of six or seven new Dredd installments every month dated it almost instantly. The ad above is on the back cover of the sampler and shows how all the 2000 AD titles picked up a uniform design.

Hopes were very high at Fleetway for this film to do for Dredd comics what the 1989 Batman movie did for DC's books. They sink a lot of money into hype and advertisement and plan for high earnings in the wake of expected sales growth. But the film flops, and kids can't see it anyway because the director was more interested in gory exit wounds than telling a coherent story and so the MPAA and whatever its UK equivalent is called slap an R rating on it, which means Burger King wouldn't touch it and the video game is godawful and what few toys are out there are pretty pathetic, too.

It's a shame, because the quality kickstart is definitely in the works. Some great creators like Gordon Rennie and Simon Fraser are starting to be noticed, Vector 13 and Sinister Dexter are right around the corner, and it's almost for naught, because by this time in July 1996, three of the five titles above will have been axed and a fourth is on life support.

Next week: Ride into action with the Three Amigos!

(Originally published 9/20/07 at LiveJournal.)

20. The Strange Case of the Missing Armitage

By the beginning of June 1995, volume 2 of the Megazine is winding down for its big relaunch to coincide with the Judge Dredd feature film. Similarly, the two companion reprint titles are closing down in favor of new FIRST ISSUE relaunches with new titles: The Best of 2000 AD Monthly, after 119 issues, becomes Classic 2000 AD, for instance. As 2000 AD itself is aiming more at older teens, a new, twice-monthly companion title called Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future is launched, targetting 8-12 year-olds. It's all part of the odd reality of magazine publishing in the mid-90s. Everything is controlled by marketing analysis and common sense loses out to people who spend all day writing memos about the viability of corporate synergy and redemographication in the advertising market.

2000 AD itself narrowly avoids being renumbered FIRST ISSUE along with the rest of the line; editor John Tomlinson pens a Thargnote in prog 943's output page dismissing the rumors that 949 would be the last under the old numbering, with 950 appearing instead as vol.2 # 1. This was indeed Fleetway's plan for a time, as David Bishop confirmed in in Thrill-Power Overload. I recall reading of that suggestion in the comic and being baffled that anybody would start such a bizarre rumor, little realizing that it had basis in fact.

The Megazine is burning away the last of some stockpiled stories during this period. These include the impenetrable mess that is Pandora by Jim Alexander and John Hicklenton and another installment of Si Spencer's anthology title Plagues of Necropolis. There's a black and white Dredd episode - actually the first monochrome Dredd in several years - by John Wagner and newcomer Tom Carney, and there's a Missionary Man one-off which my son thought was incredibly awesome, but I found Jon Beeston's artwork disagreeably lurid and gory, which is probably why he thought it was incredibly awesome.



The only shining light in this Meg, I'd say, is the other Dredd episode in the issue, "Whatever Happened to Bill Clinton?," which is the sequel to an episode from earlier in the spring. In this one, by Wagner and Siku, a mutant criminal named Heap Molinsky - what a great name! - has stolen some technology to do a mindswap through time with the president, and he immediately orders in some prostitutes and calls the generals to get the nukes ready.

It's fluff, of course, and the plot, such as it is, is only there to justify gags at Bill and Hillary's expense, but it's incredibly silly and very entertaining. And no, as I say all too often in this feature, it's not yet been collected. Hopefully before too long...

The genuinely bizarre thing about this issue is this note about what to expect in the following issue:



This Armitage two-parter never appears! It's the 2000 AD equivalent of Shade the Changing Man # 9 or those other DC Implosion books of the late 1970s. This would have been Kevin Cullen's last art job for the Megazine - he has a few one-shots coming to 2000 AD in the months to come - but the artwork actually goes missing, and, from what I understand, was never found.

That just about wraps it up for Armitage. The character, Dave Stone's take on a plainclothes detective in Brit-Cit, is next seen in a text story in a Judge Dredd Mega-Special, but doesn't appear in the comics again for five years. He gets a four month story and is passed over again for another three and a half years. Armitage was one of my favorites, but he's pretty much forgotten today.

In old business, I heard this week from former 2000 AD editor Alan McKenzie, who wrote to clarify that the "Sonny Steelgrave" pen-name was one shared by himself and John Tomlinson, and consequently, he shouldn't receive sole credit, or sole blame as the case may be, for the Steelgrave-penned Judge Dredd episodes. I revised the third and sixth entries of this series to note his corrections.

McKenzie also discussed his claim to the copyright of Luke Kirby, and I certainly hope, as always, that creators and publishers work out their differences to all parties' satisfaction. A periodic problem I run across when I've been researching Reprint This! are cases where rights issues are holding up certain series; it may make me look like a company man, or it may make me look even more selfish than I'd like, but really, the pipe dream I hold is to see a hell of a lot more stuff in print than what we have currently. This may come across as a frustrated "get over it and deal with each other" attitude, which might well rub a creator who feels that he has some legitimate grievances the wrong way.

Anyway, next week, we wrap up the pre-movie era, in what's certain to be a short installment, as befits the three-episode lifetime of Tracer.

(Originally published 9/6/07 at LiveJournal.)

17. That Time in London

We're back! Did you miss us? Well, I've found a place for a couple of other 2000 AD-related articles while waiting for my son to return from vacation. If you're one of my many non-Livejournal readers, you can click on the "2000 ad" tag below for more entries of note. Anyway, the reread brings us to prog 933, from March 1995. The lineup is much the same as the previous entry: Judge Dredd: "Crusade" and Harlem Heroes on the "poor" side of the fence, and Finn and Armoured Gideon on the "readable" side. Unfortunately, the kind-of readable Rogue Trooper, with the nice art by Henry Flint, has wrapped up and is replaced by a really dire Brigand Doom installment by Alan McKenzie and Dave D'Antiquis about vampire accountants. So, yeesh.

So, since I don't have much of anything nice to say about this prog, I'll point out that it is memorable to me for another reason. This was one of the issues that was available on newsstands when I was last in London. This was the trip I mentioned in the twelfth installment, when I spent a fair amount of money replacing all the subscription copies of 2000 AD which arrived in beat-up shape. The ex-Mrs. Hipster and I were in England for ten days that spring, and the faux-newspaper cover reminds me of the unusual experience of reading English newspapers.

The line on this prog's cover about Canadian model and actress Pamela Anderson reads "ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PAMELA ANDERSON INSIDE - (SOB)." While an unusual sentiment for a science fiction comic, the London tabloids that this cover evokes feature a daily photo of a young starlet on page three or page five in a state of undress totally unacceptable for American publications. We thought this was the funniest thing in the universe and bought two different papers a morning. This gave us a wide range of editorial content, all of it incredibly heavy-handed, over-the-top and reactionary. It was through these eyes that we learned of the death of two celebrities during our vacation.

First to pass, shortly before we arrived, was Ronnie Kray, who, with his brother Reggie, was in charge of an organized crime network whose legend and myth have grown in pop culture since the 1960s. Monty Python's Flying Circus parodied the Krays as "Doug and Dinsdale Piranha;" Morrissey immortalized them in song as "The Last of the Famous International Playboys." The papers were full of letters from readers about Ron's passing, most praising them as gentlemen, but others reacting with disgust to so much media attention being paid to criminals. One paper used Ron's death in prison to question whether, after 27 years, Reggie had spent enough time behind bars, his sentence not equivalent to the mere decade that "child murderers" were getting these days. In the end, Reg served another five years before being released on compassionate grounds about a month before he passed away from terminal cancer. It's one of my big regrets - and Lord, I have a few - that we didn't join the thousands lining the streets for Ronnie's funeral, just to see it. One thing's for certain, you could sense a genuine difference in the mood of the city that day. It was quieter, more sober and solemn.

A few days later, a Mexican-American pop singer from Texas named Selena was murdered by the woman who ran her fan club. This was weird. To hear the papers tell it, ALL OF AMERICA MOURNS THE LOSS of the Tejano celebrity, and EVERY MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD IN THE NATION WEEPS A SINGLE, SILENT TEAR OVER THE LOSS OF THIS MAJOR TALENT... which was news to us. I remember Deb and I read this report together, and our eyes met, heads shaking, asking "...who?" London tabloids were certainly prone to exaggeration and hyperbole. We asked around upon returning to the States; exactly two friends had heard of Selena prior to her death, and five or six others had heard she died.

Just to prove that we didn't fly to England with our brains fully screwed on - given the devastation the trip did to our finances, we learned that real quick - it didn't even occur to me for days that Judge Dredd appeared in a daily newspaper strip in the Star, and if we had any sense, we'd have been buying that as one of our two tabloids a day. Then again...



The strip was in its final, faltering days at that point. A major motion picture was months from screens, and this bilge by Carlos Pino and, yup, Mark Millar was the best they could do?

The strip started in August 1981 as a weekly six-or-seven panel story by John Wagner and Alan Grant, with art by Ron Smith. It changed over to a Monday-Friday strip, telling ongoing stories over 65 installments (13 weeks) in 1986. Ian Gibson came on board as artist in the late 80s, and then it was passed off between a variety of creative teams until the Star finally cancelled it in 1998. Most of the strips have never been republished, although some have made their way into annuals and the late-90s, reprint-heavy Megazine.

So that's British newspapers in the mid-90s for you: iffy Judge Dredd comics, topless blondes, hyperbole, occasionally news, and every once in a while, a giant annihilating robot. Maybe next Thursday, there will be more in the prog to discuss, although it's unlikely Pat Mills will have started writing believable villains by then. I mean, the story's pretty exciting and original but oh, look: comedy Freemasons!



(Originally published 8/16/07 at LiveJournal.)

14. I Cannot Be a Nun!

The reread brings us to December 1994, and both the weekly and the monthly celebrate with expanded editions. The Megazine has seven installments this time around (vol.2 # 70). The regular lineup at this point is Judge Dredd (a one-off by the Harke & Burr team of Si Spencer and Dean Ormston), Mean Machine in part eight of "Son of Mean" by John Wagner and Carl Critchlow, episode four of the Calhab Justice story "False Dawn" by Jim Alexander and Kevin Cullen, Armitage in part seven of "City of the Dead" by Dave Stone and Charles Gillespie, and Karyn: Psi Division in part four of "Concrete Sky" by John Freeman and Adrian Salmon.

These are joined by two one-off stories. One of these is the final appearance of The Creep by Spencer and Cullen, and one is Wynter, an "unsold pilot" episode for a series which never made it by Robbie Morrison and Kevin Walker. Wynter is the name of a judge in Antarctic City, where it's very cold, you see, and... yeah. Both creators are very talented gentlemen, with a number of very good comics under their belt, but the best this one-off has to offer is a premise that probably wouldn't have made it beyond the pitch if the character had a name like Smith or Jackson. On the other hand, I suppose it's only one-fourth as silly as that strip about the fellow named Rogue who struck out on his own, accompanied by the bio-chips of a guy named Helm in his hat and a guy named Bagman in his backpack and a guy called Gunnar in his rifle.



Anyway, I mentioned in episode eight that 2000 AD had an expensive TV ad campaign in the summer of 1994, and the corporate bods at Egmont Fleetway were making some pretty unrealistic advance planning for third and fourth quarter sales, based on a cartoon commercial that ran at four in the morning on a sports channel that nobody subscribed to. So while the Megazine is celebrating the end of its fifth year in pretty good shape under the editorship of David Bishop, the results at 2000 AD are pretty ugly, and editor Alan McKenzie gets made redundant, leaving assistant editor John Tomlinson thrust into the spotlight as the new Tharg for the next year.

Both McKenzie and Tomlinson amass a pretty considerable backlog of inventory strips, but I do need to correct myself on one point. It's possible that the scripts for the last Bix Barton series, mentioned last week, had been on the shelf for a while, but it turns out that the art wasn't. There's a tribute poster to Peter Cushing, who died that August, only about three months before the story started, in the background of one scene.

In the Megazine, meanwhile, the ongoing strips are solid, if not always great. The weak link is certainly Calhab Justice, which has devolved from a lighthearted story about frontier judges fighting addictions to radioactive whiskey into some mad thing about a psychic super-judge obsessed with having children and bringing about the next stage of evolution or something. Armitage is a great character slogging through a turgid scenario this time around. Karyn's story is a pretty good one, and the stark black-and-white artwork by Adrian Salmon (all solids, no shading) is really fabulous.



But it's Mean Machine which has completely been stealing the show for weeks now. This happened before: in ealy 1994, Wagner had teamed with Ian Gibson on The Taxidermist, and while several other writers had been meticulously carving out their own little Dreddworld mythology of some other region or Mega-City, Wagner delivered a brilliant, understated little comedy gem which was far more entertaining than any of the dramas in the comic.

Here teamed with Carl Critchlow, Wagner expanded on a little plot point from an old Alan Grant/Robin Smith story in an old Judge Dredd Annual. I suppose I should explain that Mean Machine Angel was one of the criminal Angel Gang, based in the Cursed Earth and a constant frustration to the lawmen of Texas City for years. Mean Machine and his brother Link were executed by Dredd on the planet Xanadu in the epic "Judge Child" storyline, but the popular character was resurrected and made unkillable by the Judge Child in a subsequent adventure, launching him as a recurring foe for our hero. Meanwhile, Grant and Smith contributed some one-offs for the annuals, set in the past when all these villains were still active. One of these introduced Mean's wife, Seven-Pound Sadie (named for the weight of the hammer she used in bank robberies), and while Sadie hit the road with the weddin' loot as soon as they was hitched, their premarital canoodlin' left them with a son, who, much to their dismay, is a simpering, goody-goody sissy.

"Son of Mean" sees the incredibly helpful young brat sent to Mega City-One for some schoolin' in the ways of being bad, but Mean has absolutely no luck turning him rotten. Eventually he remembers that he was a no-account sissy himself until Pa Angel had him fitted with an aggression dial after some brain surgery.

With a doctor or two held hostage, Mean and Mean Junior need disguises to get into a Mega-City hospital. I love this sequence. It's classic slapstick cinema, and it's paced so very well. I even love that dead guy in panel six, who is, if such a thing is possible, quite hilariously dead.

Next week, Shaky Kane returns and people get hit in the head with planets.



(Originally published 7/5/07 at LiveJournal.)

6. Getting Lost With Luke Kirby

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. You can bookmark this feature and skip the rest of my Livejournal by clicking the "2000 ad" tab below.

Prog 887 was published in May 1994. Last time we had three Millars and a McKenzie, and this time it's two McKenzies and a Millar. The latter writer's Babe Race 2000 continues, as does The Clown by Igor Goldkind, who's joined by Greg Staples on art this time. Staples has other colors than brown in his palette and the result is much better looking than the previous episodes by Robert Bliss. Unfortunately, Goldkind's story has hit "head-scratching" at this point, so Staples is painting something less than engaging.

John Tomlinson, using the "Sonny Steelgrave" pseudonym that he shares with McKenzie, contributes the second half of a two-part Judge Dredd story illustrated by Clint Langley. This year, Langley has contributed some amazing computer-enhanced work on The ABC Warriors, but this is early in his career and it's frankly a big green and black mess, full of jagged edges and teeth. His signature even looks like a heavy metal logo. The script seems tailor-made to his work in the early 90s, such as Dinosty, so Tomlinson gets points for writing to his artists' strengths. Alan McKenzie, meanwhile, brings another fun Bradley adventure, this time sticking the skateboarding menace into a four-part take on The Prisoner of Zenda. Simon Harrison is the art droid for this one, meaning everybody looks like brilliantly-colored statues made from mucus.

Yes, there was some damning with faint praise in those two paragraphs. Fortunately, we've got The Journal of Luke Kirby to take up the slack.



We're coming to the end of the third Luke Kirby serial in this issue, and it's a real shame that it did not continue beyond McKenzie's departure from the comic. It was always the odd strip out: slow-paced, magical and rural, and with a protagonist as young as many readers. The initial artist was John Ridgway, but the great Steve Parkhouse has stepped in at this point, and his work is just excellent.

Originally intended as a pitch for Eagle around 1987, Luke Kirby found its way into 2000 AD instead, where there was some consternation about whether the series was right for the comic. It's set in the early 1960s and features a young boy learning the family tradition of magic and coming up against supernatural opponents. The stories are told very well, with unusual, off-setting imagery, like a depiction of one of Hell's levels being modern London, so crowded and full of miserable people that Luke can barely stand it.

Luke himself is a very strong central character. He's mostly on his own (without the strong support system of other young magicians which lets certain other superstar magicians of children's fiction accomplish anything), and comes across as a sad, lonely boy, nursing some genuine inner hurt after the deaths of some close family members. He's a very sympathetic character, and he's totally got my son hooked. Over this run, he's really enjoying Dredd, and Missionary Man over in the Meg, and Luke Kirby. Nothing else is interesting him, suggesting that spotlighting a character around the age of 10 or 11 is a pretty good idea for an anthology comic to do every once in a while.

(Incidentally, McKenzie, Ridgway and Parkhouse had worked together about ten years prior to this issue. They were the team behind the first year of Sixth Doctor stories for Marvel's Doctor Who Magazine - McKenzie as editor - before Parkhouse stepped down. McKenzie scripted the second year on his own. I don't think they ever really captured the essence of Doctor Six - grouchy, loud, antiauthoritarian and a total hero to any child who's recently been told to clean his room - but they had some neat ideas.)



Anyway, Luke Kirby's one of those annoying strips that has never been collected. Over at his website, The Story Works, McKenzie has made a similar claim to the one Grant Morrison's made over Zenith: he never formally assigned copyright on the series to the publisher, and consequently it resides with him. The corporate response - and McKenzie will understand that I'm the fan who wants reprint collections on his bookshelf and will toe the corporate line to get 'em - is that the copyright got signed over when the writers and artists cashed the paychecks. On the other hand, it's not exactly a court fight that Rebellion can really afford to lose, since the resulting negative precedent would end up costing 'em a sizeable chunk of their back catalog. That's why the copyrights, trademarks and ownerships are all signed out in legalese upfront since Rebellion bought the comic in 2000 and you don't get these sort of quibbles these days.

So since nobody wants to test those ugly legal waters, Luke Kirby sits in limbo. That's a shame, because any reader who's enjoyed Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic or that superstar magician kid would totally enjoy Luke Kirby, plus you'd get more of Parkhouse and Ridgway's great art back in print. You could do those 46 episodes in one big book or two thin ones (the first 22 episodes in one and the last 24 in the second; that would be a perfect split.), and my kid could take them to school. He'd like that, and so would yours.

Next week, I'll talk about something my kid didn't like. At ALL. But I did...

(edit: The introductory paragraphs of this article were revised on Sept. 4 2007 to clarify that the Dredd episode was scripted by John Tomlinson, and not by Alan McKenzie. In the comments of the LiveJournal entry, Mr. McKenzie offers further input on Luke Kirby's copyright situation. --Grant)

(Originally published 5/10/07 at LiveJournal.)

Thrillpowered Thursday - 3.

Recap! 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 1994 brings us to prog 873. This is a promotional, jumping-on issue, featuring the first episodes of five stories. John Smith and Pat Mills each write one. Alan McKenzie writes or co-writes three of them, two of which are under pseudonyms. Michael Fleisher had written four 12-part Rogue Trooper stories. This is the fourth, rewritten and edited from 12 parts to 10, and split into a 2-part prologue and the eight episodes here, credited to Fleisher and "Sydney Falco." It has some nice Chris Weston art, anyway. Another of McKenzie's stories - the one on which he's pleased enough of to use his real name - is the always entertaining Journal of Luke Kirby . The third one, co-written with John Tomlinson and credited to "Sonny Steelgrave," is Judge Dredd: "The Sugar Beat," a six-parter featuring these guys, the judges of the Pan-Andes Conurb:



Oh, dear.

Stereotyping by nationality has a long history in the pages of the Galaxy's Greatest. The late Massimo Belardinelli, when he would be picked to illustrate the Tharg the Mighty in-joke strips set in the editorial office, would caricature himself as constantly eating a giant bowl of pasta, for example. Those same strips would see Alan Grant wearing a tartan tam o'shanter.

One of the greatest of all the Robo-Hunter strips was "Football Crazy," which shows the Japanese to be completely obsessed with cameras. It's so over-the-top as to be cringeworthy, but I think it works because (a) it's short, and (b) John Wagner and Alan Grant are much, much meaner to the British in this strip than they are to anybody else. In Robo-Hunter, Britain is populated by the most indolent and lazy people in the world, who only care about benefit checks and soap operas, unless it's World Cup season or a beloved stateswoman has been assassinated. If you're willing to poke lots of fun at yourself, to the point of being downright mean, then only the humorless or the stupid would take offense at the jabs at other nationalities.

Judge Dredd's world didn't arrive fully-formed. About a year into the strip, we met a few judges from other cities during the "Luna-1" storyline. There, we learned that Texas City judges stood a good chance of being called "Tex" and wearing cowboy hats, and South-Am City judges had garish moustaches and spoke English with the random insertion of words like "muchachos," and the Sov judges of East-Meg One were grim authoritarians with hammer & sickle logos on their helmets whose broken English similarly found room for the word "comrade" whenever possible, the same way the X-Man called Colossus did in Marvel Comics.

In fact, there are many similarities between these early attempts at international judges and the All-New Uncanny X-Men. You knew Wolverine was Canadian because he said "bub" and "eh," and Nightcrawler was German because he'd occasionally say "sehr gut" and Banshee was Irish because he called all the girls "wee lassie" and so on. Writers used little bits of language and small cultural bits to identify characters as coming from some other culture or nation.

As Dredd's world has continued to expand, the tendency in the strip and its spin-offs has been to turn every judge culture into a broad stereotype of the region. In several instances, the definition for the foreign mega-cities has been left in the hands of a local boy, as it were. Scotland's Jim Alexander defined the judges of calhab as wearing tartan kilts, being obsessed with clans, speaking in phonetic brogue you can barely understand and drinking radioactive whiskey. Irish writer Garth Ennis gave us the world of Murphyville, capital city of Emerald Isle, where the judges wear green, politely work their investigations about the island's tourist culture from pubs, and enjoy a diet of potatoes and Guinness. Dave Stone gave us a Brit-Cit police force which operates from the New Old Bailey, where plainsclothes officers can be certain they will not be promoted beyond the rank of detective inspector unless they belong to a certain fraternal organization. I seem to recall that Inspector Morse fella figuring that out the hard way himself once...

Playing with stereotypes to create these broad, comic backgrounds is rarely offensive, in part because we meet protagonists who are, for lack of a better word, heroic figures. The audience has a degree of sympathy and interest in Judge MacBrayne and DI Armitage, and even though Judge Joyce is mostly played for laughs as a country mouse in the big city, we still laugh with him, rather than at him.

The judges from other cultures, the ones outside the typical 2000 AD talent pool, are also usually shown with some degree of heroism. Even Mark Millar and Grant Morrison's gang from Luxor City - that's future Egypt - come out decently in their own way. Sure, you've got the appropriate stereotypes ticked (pyramids, mummies, cobras on the helmets) and while the story rapidly degenerates into yet another Millar tale of muscled toughs beating each other senseless on a conveyor belt, it still gives us what's said to be an effective judge system, a sympathetic chief judge who's a good man, and an incompetent but heroic counterpart to Dredd in the form of Judge Rameses.

But oh, boy, these guys in the Pan-Andes Conurb. McKenzie and Tomlinson have just got it in for Bolivia.



Admittedly, John Wagner started the Dreddworld trend of Central and South America being full of corrupt thugs with moustaches. Ciudad Barranquilla was introduced in a 1990 storyline as a place where bent Mega-City One judges could try and make their getaway, and it's been expanded over the years to show that there's quite a number of rich criminal refugees supporting the local economy. To be honest, there's not a lot of positive portrayals of good judges in the Barranquilla waters, either.

The Pan-Andes Conurb is, based on its depiction here, policed by the most incompetent judge force on the planet. It's filthy, it's stinking, there are flies and pack animals everywhere and the cops all look the other way. And you won't be at all surprised to learn that the chief judge (a) weighs about four hundred pounds, (b) has taco sauce all over his uniform and (c) is, like the rest of his force, in the pockets of the drug dealers.

Like I say, the broad stereotypes in Dredd's world are there for comedy, and simple, unprovocative laughs. But somehow "The Sugar Beat" feels deeply uncomfortable in a way that even Shimura, with its "A New Japanese Stereotype in Every Storyline!" approach, doesn't manage. McKenzie, who no longer works in comics, often proved himself, with Luke Kirby and with some Doctor Who strips, to be an imaginative and talented writer. But when even Mark Millar can come up with better, and more effective nation-identity comedy, and stereotypes that amuse rather than aggravate, you have to wonder whether McKenzie was entirely the wrong guy for the Dredd beat.

(edit: I had suggested that the writer had adopted the "Steelgrave" identity to mask displeasure with the work; McKenzie has since let me know that the pseudonym was used in much the same fashion as earlier 2000 AD writers, the intended tradition being that a writer should only receive one "true identity" credit in any given issue. "Steelgrave" was a joint identity for himself and John Tomlinson, who, McKenzie explains, wrote alternating episodes of the "Sugar Beat" six-parter. This entry was revised on Sept. 4 2007 to correct the credit.)

(Originally published Apr 19 2007 at LiveJournal.)