123. Get Vaped and Stay Vaped!

I'm basking in the warm, circuit-sparking glow of the four latest progs to make their way to American stores and was enjoying them so much that I quite forgot that I had business here to finish, which is a little short-sighted of me. Usually, when I select a topic for this blog, I tend towards the really big events, such as the return of Slaine, the debut of Caballistics Inc. or the crossover epic story of Judge Dredd vs. Aliens. Perhaps I have a habit of overlooking the equally important supporting stories, and the first quarter of 2003 has had quite a few, so I'd like to touch on a few of those before moving on.

Ian Gibson has cover duties for prog 1334 from April of '03, spotlighting the second series of the remade and remodelled The V.C.s. Dan Abnett is still the writer, but Anthony Williams has taken over art duties from Henry Flint. It's surprisingly, stubbornly unengaging, but Williams makes it all look pretty good. There's a collected edition of the first three series of the 2002-05 run of The V.C.s, and in the supplementary material, Abnett explained how enthusiastic he was about writing the strip. Its subsequent refusal to be really entertaining remains completely baffling.

Abnett did such a great job on so many strips in creating memorable, larger-than-life characters, but the cast of the V.C.s are just the most anonymous bunch of nobodies that 2000 AD's ever seen. There's Smith, from the original series, and the alien, who's called Keege, and... Ryx, who I think is the asshole, and the obligatory babe, whose name might be Lin-Fu, and somebody else, and I think the rival pilot might be called Veto. And I can name every member of the ABC Warriors in the order they joined, so I don't think the problem's me. Especially when these guys have their names painted on the front of their spacesuits.



Abnett had much better luck with the second series of Atavar, drawn by Richard Elson. I was very skeptical about this one, because I felt that the original should have been left as a one-off serial with a spectacular twist ending. It was a universe that simply didn't need revisiting, and this colored my view so much that I'm only now reading Atavar for the first time. And you know what? It's incredibly good stuff!

I started to write up a synopsis of what happens in the second series, only to realize that I got way too detailed, and when you're dealing with weird sci-fi concepts and beasties, such a writeup rapidly starts sounding convoluted and silly. Suffice it to say that Atavar's world is one with a dizzying array of new, utterly inhuman races like the Binoid and their sentient machines. Elson's designs for the aliens and all this technology are very interesting and he looks completely at home with whatever Abnett throws at him to draw. I suggest that readers, like me, have done this story a disservice by overlooking it the way we have. It is an interesting and vivid parallel to the similarly far-out, inhuman universe of Shakara, and there's a lot of love for the Abnett/Elson team on their more recent series Kingdom, so Tharg and his team should definitely look into putting all three Atavar stories out in a nice collected edition.

Then on the other end of the quality scale, there's Bec & Kawl by Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts, which is just coughing up blood on the pages. It's another four-week run for the comedy series. It leads with a dopey one-off whose punch line requires you to notice what is written on Kawl's T-shirt at exactly the right moment, and then there's an invasion-by-cyberspace thing guest starring a gang of mean-spirited geek stereotypes. With its third run, Bec & Kawl would develop into something memorable and charming, but at this point, you're left wondering what dirt Spurrier has on Tharg to get this mess commissioned.

What's nice, though, is that Matt Smith, in his guise as Tharg, has a pretty small number of series to pick from, and everything that I've mentioned has come back to the prog after a very short layoff. In fact, the thunderously good Caballistics Inc. by Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon starts its second series just a month after the first ended. In this one, the team moves into a new headquarters once used by a Crowley-archetype for demonic rituals, and I can remember the names of all the characters in this cast, too.

Caballistics will take another short break - only three weeks - before starting its third story. By my count, Smith is only juggling about eight or nine recurring series at this point, and deciding what to recommission in the future. Obviously, this number's going to skyrocket as a huge pile of new series begin over the next two years, and I'm sure it didn't make for a happy Command Module at the time, filling in the gaps with whatever's handy. Prog 1334, in fact, contains two space-fillers: a Future Shock and yet another of Steve Moore's interminable Tales of Telguuth. Tharg will finally run out of those turkeys at the end of '03. But what I suspect was a real headache for Smith and the droids was really to the readers' advantage: with such short gaps between ongoing series, everything seems very fresh and fun. It's much easier to enjoy a series when you don't have to wait a year between installments!

And speaking of waiting for a new installment, that is where we'll leave the story for now. I'm choosing to take a little break because I am adding another regularly-scheduled blog to my rotation, but I'd sort of like to keep the same number of weekly deadlines. If you're a regular reader, thanks for following me, and if you just have me bookmarked, I'll drop a note on the 2000 AD message board when I resume in eight or nine weeks. So I will see you again in March, when Pat Mills and Andy Diggle go at it again, as The ABC Warriors and Snow / Tiger go head to head. See you then!

109. Thrill-Power Starts to Get Overloaded

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

97. Nikolai Dante and the Strange Case of the Extra Word Balloons

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

I'm afraid it's an abbreviated entry this week, but I did want to share a little about the run of Nikolai Dante that appeared in April 2001. Here's the cover of prog 1238 by Simon Fraser, who was mostly unavailable at the time to work on the series. (This is, in part, because he was living in Tanzania at the time. Fraser is profiled this week at Graphic NYC, which you should check out.) Management had already juggled the second and third storylines in the planned five-volume "Tsar Wars" storyline to accomodate his schedule, but it was evident that he would not be free to draw the fourth when it was desired. So the plans were revised, and what were the fourth and fifth books were revised into a single, 13-part storyline, painted by John Burns, which would be coming later in the year. Bridging the third book and the one forthcoming is this short run of six episodes, illustrated by the wonderful Steve Yeowell and Chris Blythe, comprising two stories.

In a break from the heavy and melodramatic storyline of "Tsar Wars," these two stories are much lighter. "The Beguiling," inspired by the 1971 Don Siegel film The Beguiled, sees a wounded Dante recovering behind the lines at the family estate of the jealous, feuding Arbatov sisters. "Fiends" shows that present-day Romania has become a haven for vampires in the far future. These lighter tales are certainly a refreshing break from the larger war story, which is about to get unbearably messy, and feature a return of the devil-may-care Dante, silly quips and rejoinders in the face of trouble, like in the strip's earlier days.

Except Robbie Morrison apparently didn't write all those quips and rejoinders.



I think the best way to describe what happened with "The Beguiling" as an unfortunate misunderstanding. Reading David Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload, you'll find a reference to Morrison taking objection to some additional dialogue added by then-assistant editor Matt Smith. I compared the original progs to the reprint in the collected edition and noted that five word balloons were left out of the book. This was not, apparently, a problem of incomplete films being used for the graphic novel, as would happen with the 2005 release of Devlin Waugh: Red Tide (a story, coincidentally, also drawn by Yeowell), but a deliberate decision to omit the dialogue added by Smith. There's also a minor art change: the coloring of the Arbatovs' uniforms is a noticeably different shade of blue.

"Fiends" is perhaps not as wonderful as "Beguiling," but it introduces the spinoff character that never was, vampire hunter Emmanuelle Chekhov. She didn't seem to really make any impact on the fan base, but in a book as short on lead female characters as 2000 AD can be, an Emmanuelle series might have been an interesting idea, and one which might have avoided many of the cliches and stereotypes of the genre.



In other news from the period, it was announced that April that Titan Books had the license to print collected editions of 2000 AD properties again. For most of the previous decade, Hamlyn had been releasing graphic novels, typically in batches of six, twice a year. Eventually, their interest seemed to fade and fewer books were released. Before Hamlyn moved on, they did issue an extra-sized collection of the 1994 Dredd serial "Wilderlands" and its several prequel stories which remains awesomely impressive. The "Win Judge Dredd graphic novels" blurb on the cover shown above is for a competition to win their final two compilations, reprinting the 1999 "Doomsday" epic across two books.

Titan was, of course, the original home for 2000 AD collected editions. The line started in the summer of 1981 with that first, wonderful collection of Wagner and Bolland Judge Dredd stories, and eventually grew to encompass many more stories and lines from several comics, always with those distinctive black spines with the white text. I was never sure why, but Titan seemed to lose interest in all of their properties by the late eighties, not just the 2000 AD stuff. Charley's War and Jeff Hawke were phased out after only a pair of slim volumes apiece. James Bond and Modesty Blaise made it to four before they were all shelved in 1991 or so.

Regular readers of my Bookshelf and Reprint This! blogs know that most of these have since roared back to life. Frank Bellamy's Garth hasn't made it to a new edition, but otherwise, those old 48- or 64-page slimline albums have been replaced by a great range of large, beautifully-designed books. They're actually on target to finish the James Bond newspaper strip later this year with the seventeenth and final volume. But 2001 was effectively ground zero for the modern Titan, and Judge Dredd and company were integral to the company's plans. It would only last a few years before Rebellion took it over to do it in collaboration with DC, and while Titan would hit a pretty rough pothole early on, for several months, the company did issue attractive, oversized collections of classic 2000 AD storylines. The first two, released in July, were Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones and the Dredd serial "Emerald Isle." These would later be complemented with some very nice hardback editions.

Next time, It's hell on earth in Mike Carey's short-lived Carver Hale. Plus a look at the latest of the Judge Dredd Complete Case Files. See you in seven, fellow Earthlets!

90. From Russia With Lurve

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.

September 2000: This very funny cover by Frazer Irving (his second for the prog) heralds the return of Nikolai Dante, in the third book of the "Tsar Wars" storyline. The episode inside is by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and while it's as wonderful as usual, it has had a troubled genesis. The events in this eight-part chunk of the narrative were intended to precede the eight-part chunk that ran in the summer, but deadline troubles forced editor Andy Diggle to rearrange the two stories. So the second chunk ended with Nikolai so unbelievably ticked off with the Makarovs, and Jena in particular, that he memorably cast off his mother's name of Dante, telling the armies his name is his father's: Nikolai Romanov. This really should have set the stage for things falling completely apart in the book's climax. Despite this continuity error, driven home in the second episode where Nikolai's use of the name "Dante" is underlined, the third-as-published story is nevertheless a fine one, with Simon Fraser's welcome return to the art duties, and a brilliant climax of its own in a few weeks' time.

Speaking of Andy Diggle, there's an important addition to the Command Module around this time, an assistant editorial droid who goes by "Cyber-Matt" in the Output pages and Matt Smith in the real world. Smith will become the book's editor after Diggle departs in 2002; seven years later he is still wearing the Rosette of Sirius.

Also starting in this prog is the new thrill Rain Dogs, a ten-part one-off serial by Gordon Rennie and Colin Wilson. It is set in a flooded New York City populated by desperate scavengers, and is the story of one survivor of a flyby probe that crashed there being helped to safety by one of the locals. It's a very good story, one that works really well in the weekly format. Rennie came up with some very good, sympathetic characters, and Colin Wilson's artwork is just terrific, really making you believe in this dark world.



Rain Dogs was reprinted in a hardcover edition in the spring of 2002. This was a very curious little quickly-curtailed publishing plan. The only two books to emerge from it, at the time, were this and a similar hardcover collection of another Rennie-scripted ten-parter, Glimmer Rats, which ran in the comic a few months previously. I'm not certain whether they had printing or distribution problems or what happened, but these would be the only graphic novels to appear at the time; Rebellion would try again 18 months later with a slightly expanded line.

Other stories appearing in this prog are Deadlock by Pat Mills and Henry Flint, and Vanguard by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil, about which more information next week, along with a one-off Judge Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Peter Doherty. Wagner's been on a roll of really interesting one-offs over the last several weeks. Most memorably from today's perspective have been three stories bringing back the recurring menace P.J. Maybe, who's spent the last eight years in prison. I really love the way Wagner chose to expose Maybe's escape as something that happened months previously, right after the Doomsday Scenario epic, and that the judges only just found out about it. This gave Maybe the opportunity to get out of town and make his way to the South American mega-city called Ciudad Barranquilla, where he's had the millions he'd amassed over time locked away, and there start a brand new life. Had P.J. Maybe's story ended there, it would have been remarkably satisfying. In fact, had you purchased 2004's Extreme Edition # 2, that is where the story ends, but of course, much more would come a few years down the line...

At the time these were printed, Maybe was almost overshadowed by the villain from a different Dredd one-off, "Generation Killer," by Wagner and John Higgins. This took a very wild sci-fi premise and turned it into a really clever adventure. It's about a Mega-citizen who panics when his wife tells him that she's expecting, because of what he thinks is a family curse. It turns out that all his ancestors died right after the birth of their first child. This is because, thousands of years from now, one of their descendants commits some atrocity or other, and the legal system then decides that his crime is so great that all of his ancestors have to be punished as well, sending a time-travelling super-cop back in time to execute everybody in the line as soon as their first kid is born! Many fans hoped or thought that this would be the first appearance of a great new recurring foe for Dredd, but the Generation Killer was only seen in this one outing.

In other news, Rebellion continues to impress with their graphic novel collection. Sometimes, they announce a project which doesn't sound like the most exciting book on the shelf, but then the finished product turns out to knock your socks off. That's the case with The Complete Ro-Busters, which does exactly what it claims on the front and compiles absolutely every strip appearance of Hammerstein, Ro-Jaws and the gang from the pages of both Starlord, where the series began, and 2000 AD. The Ro-Busters, as I described 'em over at Touched by the Hand of Tharg, are "a disaster recovery crew along the lines of International Rescue from Thunderbirds, only they are staffed by a crew of robots (chief among them our lead characters Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein) and they are by no means as charitable as the Tracy boys had been. Mr. Ten Percent (so named because only ten percent of him, his brain, was human) charges for the dangerous work his droids perform."

That Ro-Busters should have developed into anything memorable is something of a miracle. The series was created by Pat Mills to fill some editorial request for something about planet-saving superheroes. Since Mills, as anybody who's read Marshal Law could figure, has never had much time for the concept of superheroes, he turned the idea on its head and decided to have the disaster squad staffed, not by noble, selfless people, but by the most expendable of characters: junked-out robots in line for the scrapheap, bought dirt-cheap by a greedy jerk in need of cheap labor to exploit.

Anyway, Ro-Busters is certainly dated, and from the outset feels very much like a comic strip for children, especially in a ridiculous story in which two people disguise themselves as robots in order to start a rebellion on board a casino in space, but it's incredibly fun! The writing did tighten up around the time it moved to 2000 AD, with an engaging mix of class comedy and homages to war comics before the wild lunacy of the final storyline, in which the doomed robots try making a break for a planet where they can be free. But before that frantic conclusion, there's a great story in which Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein are sidetracked for a tale in which one of Mr. Ten Percent's other business ventures show up. A demolition squad called the Terra-Meks, they turn out to be the villains of the piece. Four episodes of utterly gorgeous giant robot violence and mayhem, set against the backdrop of a dying coastal community and its giant robot lighthouse guardian, might be the book's high point.

The book is just tremendous fun, and if Rebellion actually missed an episode anywhere, it'll be news to me. It includes work by other writers besides Mills, including three by Alan Moore, who wrote yearly one-offs for the pages of the 2000 AD Annual in the mid-80s after the series had otherwise concluded. Artists include Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill and Carlos Pino. Every bookshelf should have one.

Next week, Deadlock wraps up the final plot threads that Nemesis had left behind, and Beth Vanguard accepts her far-too-brief commission. See you then!

(March 5, 2009)