158. Lack of Background

November 2005: Over the previous two entries, I've mentioned a very highly regarded Judge Dredd story by John Wagner and Kev Walker entitled "Mandroid." It's a long way from being one of my favorite Dredd stories, but it really is an effective and triumphant look at just how badly the best intentions can go awry. If I'm honest with myself, I'd have to agree that my rotten mindset and personal unhappiness in the last half of 2005 colors my reading of it. I was in a bad place and in a bad relationship at the time, and something as downbeat and depressing as "Mandroid" certainly wasn't going to provide a nice distraction.

Over its first few episodes, the twelve-part story introduced us to Nate Slaughterhouse, a decorated war veteran who has lost more than half his body to grievous wounds and given a realistic cyborg shell. Honorably discharged with his wife, a veteran officer, and their young son, they try to start a life in Mega-City One and find the place every bit as miserable and overwhelming as a reader can imagine. It's one of the very rare occasions where Wagner doesn't play the inhuman insanity of the city for laughs; here, Mega-City One is an absolute, miserable hellhole, and Justice Department is a largely incompetent, badly understaffed agency whose presence, while mostly ineffective, is still desperately needed to maintain just a hint of order. Unfortunately for Slaughterhouse, it isn't nearly enough.

So with his wife missing and his son murdered, Slaughterhouse becomes a vigilante, enraged and driven by the judges' impotence in the face of escalating street crime and organized "legitimate" business. Dredd is there as a constant, reassuring force. "We'll get him," he says. "We always do." And this is true, but it doesn't mean anything, either. The violence of the city just keeps getting worse, as even the lethal force that the judges wield is no longer a deterrent anymore.



Slaughterhouse is a compelling and tragic figure, and Walker's art really works beautifully in this setting. I really like the style that he's been using for the past nine years or so, with stark lines, limited detail and solid colors. He's not afraid to lose figures in fog or shadow, and people stand with huge weight and menace. There's a fantastic cliffhanger where Slaughterhouse returns home to find Dredd waiting for him. The lawman is standing quietly, his gun drawn but by his side, and holding one of Slaughterhouse's overcoats. There are two bullet holes in it, shots that the vigilante took and which bounced off his steel chassis. "I've been waiting for you," Dredd says simply, and even though there's nothing more in that panel's text or narration to imply a specific tone, I read that as Dredd speaking with such human sadness.

Throughout the story, Dredd has been incredibly sympathetic and understanding. I really got the impression that Dredd honestly liked the man, and wished his city was a better place for good people like him and his family. With that one, simple sentence breaking their bond and turning them into adversaries, it is an amazingly effective cliffhanger, one that just makes readers want to put the issue away for a while before tackling the other stories.

As I've expressed before, there's occasionally a big gap between "best" and "favorite." "Mandroid" is completely brilliant, and I strongly recommend the collected edition for anybody curious about the strip. But I also offer the caveat that it's not usually like this. Mega-City One is only bearable because its misery is almost always couched in lunacy. Despite the words I've devoted to it here, "Mandroid" is just too bleak and harrowing for my liking, and I'm honestly glad when the strip ends and I can focus on other things, like Sinister Dexter's world spiraling completely out of control again.

I was rereading some earlier chapters in this blog this week and noticed how one major thing has changed in the way that I approach it. It began with me reporting my reread from the perspective of doing it with my children. Sadly, my older son has elected to live in Kentucky, and my daughter stopped reading after about a hundred issues. She was a little outraged and disappointed with how things went down in Sinister Dexter, her favorite strip. She didn't quite read this strip from the same perspective that I, or anybody else, did. She read the story as being about Demi Octavo. To her, Demi was the central character, and Ramone and Finny were just the guys that she sent out to do her job. When Demi was killed in the epic "Eurocrash," that put an end to her brief flirtation with the comic.

"And death shall have no dumb minions" feels very much like the thematic sequel to "Eurocrash," especially when things start to fall completely apart around Demi's sister Billi. Interestingly, for a while, it doesn't quite go that way. Now, "Eurocrash" was almost totally brilliant, but there was one flaw in the earlier chapters. Violating the "show, don't tell" rule, writer Dan Abnett kept asserting that Demi's hold over the city's crimelords was weakening, but only gave us some very slight evidence that this was true after making these claims. Nevertheless, it was a short hop from that claim to the godawful entropy setting in, destroying Demi's empire and leaving Ramone and Finny helpless to stop it. Demi's inevitable death is an awesome punch when it comes, but it was telegraphed from space.



This story begins with an entirely different mood. Ramone and Finny have new employment with Appelido and they seem to be in control of their destinies. Ramone and Tracy are happy together - and I'd be remiss if I did not mention that a bedroom scene with these two early in the story, painted by Simon Davis, is almost certainly the sexiest and most erotic moment to ever appear in the comic - and Downlode looks to be as stable as this erratic, dangerous city can be.

But then we learn that Billi has been placed in Appelido's organization by the police to gather evidence. Now, a big chunk of this requires some suspension of disbelief at both Downlode's laws and human behavior. Basically, since Appelido is a clone of crimelord Holy Moses Tanenbaum, and the law says that - wait for it - clones can be prosecuted for the crimes of the person from whom they're cloned, the city's planning a big sting operation to prosecute Appelido for Tanenbaum's crimes, and that's what Billi's doing on the inside. Since Tanenbaum had, years before, kept Demi as his mistress, Billi wants to avenge her late sister by killing the clone of Moses.

This is problematic. Of course, the main reason that I have come to dislike Sinister Dexter is that Abnett has overcomplicated the bejezus out of the thing, helping to confirm that a once amusing and playful diversion of the strip has turned into a narrative nightmare, but until I started thinking about it, I had enjoyed "And death shall have no dumb minions" for its surprising and powerful escalation and climax. While, in "Eurocrash," Ramone and Finny are working together very closely and things only hit that inevitable punch because they get separated, here, there's a sense that if only they could make it to the right place at the right time, they could have avoided all the carnage. Pardon my language, but an insightful friend once noted that the really great thing about the famous final episode of Blake's 7 isn't just that they all die, but that they die fucking up. It takes some bravery on the part of a writer to allow his lead characters this kind of vunerability.

So yes, things get really, really bad in this story. It looks very much like it ends with Ramone dead, Billi about to join him in the afterlife, and Finny about one gallon of gas away from either incarceration or a million bullets. Especially with the artwork by Davis at his career best - and I know that no artist appreciates the insinuation that their best work is behind them, but really, this is lush, detailed, vibrant, exciting and so many leagues superior to the latest sixty-odd, identical, orange-and-purple pages of the most recent Ampney Crucis Investigates story that it's not at all funny - and knowing just what an utter and total mess that Sinister Dexter would devolve into, it would have been best off ending here at this emotional high. It would have been ugly and messy and left unanswered questions, but with just a little tweaking to the last few pages, this could have been a memorable and amazing end.

Sure, the bad guys would have won, but this is Downlode, and our heroes are hired killers. The bad guys win in every story anyway.

Stories from this issue are available in the following reprint editions:
Judge Dredd: Mandroid (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Leatherjack: The Complete Leatherjack (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Rogue Trooper: Realpolitik (Out of Print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, "Mandroid" artist Kev Walker gets selected for the front cover of Prog 2006 and a stunning new lineup for the new year! Plus more about Sinister Dexter, because I've got more to say about it.

111. The Bloody Students

May 2002: We never see enough work by Duncan Fegredo, but here he gets the cover to prog 1290, spotlighting the debut of Bec & Kawl, one of a very small number of outright comedy series in 2000 AD. The strip was created by Si Spurrier, who finally gets his own series, the first of what will be several, after a couple of years writing Future Shocks, and artist Steve Roberts. Together, the duo will go on to create 29 episodes of the series, appearing in seven month-long appearances over a four-year period. Much as I do like Bec & Kawl, and wish it continued after it was quietly shelved in 2006, it must be said that when you read their first, two-part adventure, you have to wonder just how it ever got a commission for a second series.

"Bec & Kawl and the Mystical Mentalist Menace" is a two-parter which introduces the title characters, students at a London art college who keep crossing paths with the supernatural. Beccy Miller is an extremely grouchy goth chick in the fine arts program, and Jarrod Kawl is her stoner flatmate who dreams of being a great filmmaker. In this first story, they manage to release a demon from a cursed mirror, so they try conjuring up another demon to deal with the first. Subsequent stories will see the duo match wits with a succubus, a wonderful pastiche of virtual reality stories, the tooth fairy, the realtor of Hell, and invading aliens who look like traffic cones, all done with tongue in cheek and a pop culture reference in every panel. This first episode, for instance, won't make much sense at all if you are unfamiliar with Taxi Driver, Jurassic Park III and Ghostbusters.

But having said that, even if you know every line of those films, the first episode still doesn't make very much sense, because it's a poor, hamfisted effort on the creators' part. Steve Roberts' designs are very nice, but while he will become a very good artist quite soon, his storytelling is really very poor here. The panel transitions are incredibly awkward, particularly the shift from pages four to five, with the contents of Beccy's word balloon broken across two pages.



Spurrier doesn't help Roberts very much with a script that's just too packed with clever words and quips and not enough patient explanations of why the plot unfolds the way it does. Looking back this morning over an episode I've read at least five times, I really cannot remember why our heroes need to summon that second demon. I just have sort of a vague memory of the first demon shooting a gun at Kawl and running away. In time, notably with his masterpiece Lobster Random, Spurrier would learn that the unfolding of the plot needs to be as engaging and humorous as the movie jokes and puns, but here it's just something that happens, somehow, to set up the next couple of gags.

Fortunately, Tharg was very patient with Bec & Kawl, and after this botched first series and a still-disappointing second in early 2003, the series developed into one of my many favorites of the past decade. The complete run was compiled into a great collection by Rebellion in 2007. Bloody Students is packed with supplementary sketches and interviews, and should be essential reading for anyone who enjoys Lenore or Emily the Strange.

Also in the prog this week, there are the second episodes of two stories I'll come back to in the next Thrillpowered Thursday: 13 by Mike Carey and Andy Clarke, and Judge Death by Wagner and Frazer Irving. There's also the first part of a new Sinister Dexter storyline by Dan Abnett and Mark Pingriff called "Croak," and a genuinely fantastic new Judge Dredd epic by Wagner and Kevin Walker called "Sin City."



"Sin City" is a thirteen-part story, told across eleven weeks, in which a huge, floating pleasuredome - a giant mini-city full of casinos, brothels, bars and arenas hosting lethal sports - is given permission to dock at Mega-City One. Dredd is strongly against the idea, until Hershey lets him know that she's allowed it because a wanted terrorist has been sighted there. So a squad of Mega-City judges, and a small army of undercover officers, takes to the streets of Sin City looking for the elusive Ula Danser.

What they run into is one shock after another, with at least three take-your-breath-away cliffhangers. It's the longest Dredd story since 1999's "Doomsday" and it's one which I certainly suggest you check out. It is available as a collected edition, along with four follow-up episodes, under the name Satan's Island. It would certainly be a fine addition to your Rebellion library. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for this week's graphic novel highlight...

In April, Rebellion released the collected edition of Heavy Metal Dredd, with all twenty blood-spattered episodes of this early nineties series. It's not really essential. There have only been a pair of books in the last five years which I would advise readers skip on account of production issues. This is the first one I'd advise readers skip on account of it being completely awful.

Basically, around the time of Judgement on Gotham and Simon Bisley's brief turn in the limelight, the European metal mag Rock Power got together with Fleetway and commissioned a few Dredd episodes by Wagner, Alan Grant and Bisley. These were Dredd one-offs with the volume turned up to twelve; overcharged, simplistic, hyper-violent stories of motorcycle maniacs, testosterone-fueled beatings and over-the-top exit wounds. There's nothing subtle about them, and they're entirely subplot-free. They were designed for thirteen year-old meatheads and filled their gore-and-leather remit with abandon.

These were reprinted in England in the Judge Dredd Megazine and proved popular enough to warrant commissioning a few more episodes. Most of these were written by John Smith and painted by the likes of Colin MacNeil or John Hicklenton, who contributed this collected edition's new cover.

Rebellion does deserve some points for making this a very solid collection on its own merits. It does include all the stories in their original order, with good reproduction, full credits and an introduction by Hicklenton. However, there's very little wit or humor anywhere in these dingbat stories, and there's no reason for anybody other than completists to pick up this book. That Rebellion released this instead of a complete Stainless Steel Rat is a huge shame.

Next time, London punk Joe Bulmer investigates a psychic conspiracy in 13 and Frazer Irving schemes to make Judge Death scary again! See you in seven!

108. A Night 2 Remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

95. Molly Eyre Makes the Scene

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.

In March 2001, we're coming to the end of this year's first batch of series launches. On the cover of prog 1231, Kevin Walker offers a not-entirely satisfying cover (does his head look malformed to you, too?) for the third book of John Wagner and Arthur Ranson's Button Man. I've sort of put off writing about this, hoping for a little more inspiration, and I'm afraid I can't really find the enthusiasm to do it justice. It's another terrific story, and shouldn't be discounted. In the previous storyline, our hero Harry Exton had extorted his freedom from the senator who had been sponsoring his activity in the Killing Game, but a few years later, the senator has passed away and the remaining operatives controlling the game have decided to take out the loose end that is Harry. They're at least a little bit aware that Harry is among the most dangerous killers on the planet, but even he can't evade thirteen trained assassins closing in on him, can he? Especially when, as he zig-zags from Montana to Chicago and back, he doesn't realize he's being tracked?

About two-thirds of the way through the story, Harry figures out how he is being tracked. Now, this story will be available in a nice collected edition this coming June, and telling you how he realizes what's happening, and how he disposes of the tracer, will spoil a really wonderful scene. Take my word for it, though: anybody who claims they read that scene without wincing is pulling your leg. It's made worse by Ranson deciding to show the sequence by cramming about twenty panels onto the page, so there's an awful lot which you can't look away from.



Now usually, if there's a Future Shock one-off in any given prog, it's rarely going to be the most interesting thing in the issue. There are exceptions, sure, and lately there have been a pair of pleasant surprises for readers. Over the last year or so, Matt Brooker, under the pen name D'Israeli, had contributed coloring to a few stories. Back in January, when I turned the spotlight on the first series of Pussyfoot 5, I mentioned "...the coloring, by the usually reliable D'Israeli, does not flatter Raynor's work at all. Events in every location seem balanced by exactly the same lighting, a harsh wash of reds and yellows, like the characters are all at a '70s disco." About a week after I wrote that, the collected edition of Pussyfoot 5's eleven episodes was released as the freebie bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine # 282, and D'Israeli also had some unflattering thoughts about his coloring. As he detailed on his blog, he was pretty unhappy with the work and the results himself, and it led to editor Andy Diggle letting him know that he wouldn't be sending any more coloring jobs his way, but offering him the chance to pitch some Future Shocks instead.

The first of these came in 2000's prog 1207, and two more one-offs followed in 2001, with the scripts credited to "Molly Eyre" (say it aloud), a psuedonym that fooled at least one American reader into thinking that it was nice to see female talent at the Command Module again for the first time in ages. The first one was okay, but the two that appear in progs 1229 and 1231 are just wonderfully fun. D'Israeli gave himself the opportunity to draw a menagerie of silly aliens and situations in a pair of very fast-paced farces. The first one takes place in a single room with a cast that keeps growing, and the second spans decades and galaxies in a high-concept story about a man's future self giving him the keys to universal domination. These are incredibly fun comics! Sadly, these Future Shocks have not yet been collected anywhere, so you'll need to track down these progs to see them.



Next time, it's all-out war, in more ways than one, as the ABC Warriors return. Plus a look at the new collected edition of the Judge Dredd epic "The Pit." See you in seven, fellow Earthlets!

69. Brothers in Property Damage

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

January 1999: In the grand scheme of things, The Balls Brothers, which begins in prog 1128, is really just a minor footnote. The remarkably wild series by John Wagner and Kevin Walker runs for just eleven episodes - two short stories which are wrapped up by the summer, and never to be seen again. Comedies have always been difficult for 2000 AD to manage. On those occasions where a straight-up comedy is tried, it invariably divides the readership in two, with the ayes rarely having the last word.

Each detail of the Balls Brothers' backstory is revealed via a completely ridiculous and hilarious gag, so it's not fair to explain too much. The simple version: the superhumanly powerful and stupid Rocky and Eggy Balls are told it is time to leave the asylum where they have spent all their lives and make their way in the world. They conclude that pretty much the only thing they're any good at is fighting, so they make their muscles available as superheroes for hire, much to the dismay of costumed do-gooders like Captain Incredible, who is dismayed at the over-the-top violence that the Balls Brothers display in any given situation. Eggy, ostensibly the smarter of the duo, cannot even add up their bills without putting his finger through the calculator.

And there are Nazi jokes and superhero jokes and care-of-the-community jokes, oh, and a canary that's always flying around shitting everywhere. It's triumphant.



I could be wrong, but I think that this series is just about the only long-form example (in 2000 AD) of this art style that Kevin Walker was using at the time. He'd made his name with his lush, painted ABC Warriors stories in the 90s, but was now experimenting with pen and ink and an apparent desire to draw everything. The pages are completely full of little background detail, piles of debris and tiny sparking wires. In time, Walker would leave behind this style and adopt one reminiscent of Mike Mignola, with strong, solid colors and shadows, and so Balls Brothers, and a one-off ABC Warriors which will appear in December 1999, are probably the only examples of this style in this title. Did he use it in some of his other work, for Warhammer or whatever? I'm curious.

At any rate, editor David Bishop confirmed in 2002 on alt.comics.2000ad that Wagner felt that the series had run its course after just two stories, and that was the end of this superb comedy. But I'll tell you... somewhere, in some parallel universe, the Balls Brothers took up periodic residence as a back-cover gag strip for many years after these eleven episodes ended. And those pages are the funniest things we'll never see.



The Balls Brothers has never been reprinted, and since there are only about 55 pages of it in total, it is unlikely to be seen again. That's another reason it should have come back at least once - just one more four-parter and there would have been enough of it for a thin, 80-page graphic novel. What a missed opportunity!

Also appearing in the prog, Judge Dredd in another major continuity epic, "The Scorpion Dance" by Wagner and John Burns. This one continues the various threads of the Frendz, DeMarco and Jura Edgar subplots, all intersecting in a very good story. It was reprinted by Hamlyn in 2001 but is currently out of print. And there's Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, Pulp Sci-Fi by Dave Stone and Ben Willsher and Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. Not a dud in the deck, I'd say. 1999 started out strong.

See you in seven days!

(Originally posted Oct. 2 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

51. Witch World

August 1997 brings us to prog 1056, and this Greg Staples cover - I believe that it's an homage to some famous piece of fantasy art by Frank Frazetta - is showcasing a short-lived series called Witch World. It ran for twelve episodes which comprised four short stories and the writer, Gordon Rennie, has been known to dismiss it as a failure not worth remembering. Personally, I'm inclined to agree. It's incredibly wordy, and the words are straight out of the Cliche-o-Tron 2000. Rennie had done much better than this before - the earlier episodes of Missionary Man, for example - and he'd do much better work than this in the future, so we should probably just discreetly dismiss this effort.

And yet...

I'll set the artwork, most of which is very good, aside for the moment. I'll also note only briefly that Witch World gets as many, if not more, calls for a sequel series as many other, superior efforts from the period. Seriously, Black Light, which ran a year previously, is a better strip on practically every level, but the time's long since gone where people on the message board were hoping to see new episodes of that. And yet the usually sane Floyd Kermode, known to all squaxx dek Thargo as the fandom's most prolific letterhack, was suggesting new Witch World stories on the official message board just a week ago, and he's by no means the only one.

I think Witch World was a very interesting example of editor David Bishop's style of commissioning series from the era. It didn't seem to be very effective in actually launching new, long-running strips, because the best-known launches from the period, Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante, had been ordered by his predecessor John Tomlinson and then revised to fit Bishop's needs. Witch World, like Black Light and Outlaw before it, was commissioned to run for 12-14 weeks, with the episodes divided into 4-5 short stories, each with different artists.



It's around this time that I realized that Bishop had taken an approach from television scheduling, for example with four clearly-defined season launches a year. Each series then got an order approximate to the standard television 13 weeks. If you've ever been involved enough in cult TV fandom to put together an episode guide for, say, Ace of Wands or Taggart, then Witch World's serial format makes perfect sense. Had Witch World been considered a success by Rennie, Bishop and the audience, then it could have picked up another order for 13 weeks, and maybe even regular scheduling like Sin Dex and Dante would be receiving.

Witch World did include some very nice artwork. The four stories were illustrated by, in order, Siku, Paul Johnson, Will Simpson (a panel from his "The Anatomist" is pictured above), and finally John Burns. They all look great, and the characters of Caitlin and Prestor Jon are engaging, but I don't think it ever really clicked. That's why it was so surprising to see a solicitation last week for a collected run in the pages of a summer 2000 AD Extreme Edition. It'll be nice to be able to enjoy all the great-looking painted artwork on better paper, but otherwise there's not a lot of reason to be thrilled to see it again.

Elsewhere in the prog, we have the continuing adventures of Sinister Dexter and I Was a Teenage Tax Consultant, as mentioned last time. There's also a really good Judge Dredd four-parter by John Wagner and Kev Walker. Entitled "Fast Food," it shows Dredd investigating corruption and thrown games on the competitive eating circuit.



Stories with Mega-City One's super-obese "fattie" population rarely disappoint, and this one's absolutely a winner. What I like best is Wagner once again taking a sledgehammer to the morons who provide commentary to the action. This is a gag he's done before and he'll do again, but it never fails to please. Actually, if the commentary in that panel above sounds familiar, it's because I understand that those droning morons at Fox Sports who called the 2006 Capitol One Bowl used it as their script.

Of these stories, only the Sinister Dexter adventure is currently available in collected form. Murder 101 was the second of the three Sin Dex books compiled by DC and Rebellion during their short tenure together and it includes this twelve-parter along with some other stories from the period. Witch World will apparently be republished in a few months in the pages of 2000 AD Extreme Edition. I say "apparently" because sometimes those solicitations don't always match the contents.

Next week, a decision by Chief Judge Volt in the pages of Anderson: Psi Division sparks a debate which lasts for many years. It's the defining moment of this ill-defined character's tenure as chief judge, and you can find out more about it in seven days.

(Originally published 5/1/08 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.)