131. Three Stories

October 2003: This completely excellent cover by D'Israeli is well-timed to appear here at the blog because it's a potent reminder that Leviathan, a wonderful serial that he drew, scripted by Ian Edginton, is coming back into print in Rebellion's paperback line. A hardback was released in 2006, but it's been out of print for a while. In fact, the new edition is solicited to retailers this very month in the pages of that Previews catalog that they all get. If you've never heard of Leviathan, it's set on the world's largest ocean liner some twenty years after it vanished at sea. It mixes a murder mystery with a tale of society breaking down after two decades in isolation, a population still trying to enforce the class codes of Britain in the 1920s unable to understand where they are and what happened to them. If it sounds intriguing, then you should get on the horn to your local funnybook emporium and tell 'em to order you a copy. (I should probably swing by a comic shop and get the page number, just to make it easier for you, but it's out of my way.)

At this time, 2000 AD and its sister Judge Dredd Megazine were running three particularly interesting serials. None of them were anything like any story the comics had ever seen previously, but each of them seemed to fit so well that you couldn't imagine any other comic presenting them. Leviathan was terrific, a slow-burn change of pace with an aging detective who's spent years quite justifiably raging about a life full of unfair losses. But it wasn't the only wild tale that took an incredible premise and used it for some very effective world-building.

From Grace, a five-part serial by Si Spurrier and Frazer Irving, looked at the deterioration of Kaith, leader of a tribe of winged people who share an uneasy existence with a much larger population that is wingless. The setting of the serial is never really defined; it's a low-technology, hunter-gatherer type of society. From Grace deserves more commentary than I have room for it here; it's a really fascinating look at how we define evil, and what drives people to become villains. Unlike Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, however, Kaith is never really seen to be a sympathetic character. The actions of the wingless towards his people are about as noxious as Kaith's to them. It's a spiralling mess where any leader was certain to become a monster.



That's not to dismiss the strength of the narrative, but where it really shines is in the experimental way that it unfolds. Frazer Irving really knocks this one out of the park, using different color schemes for the various times in which the story is set, and Spurrier's narration - there's a lot more of it here than in most stories - drives the memoir by moving back and forth. He also includes a pair of amazing, shocking cliffhangers to end the second and fourth installments. Nobody, nowhere, is still rooting for Kaith at the start of episode five.

On the other hand, everybody, everywhere, roots for Rptr, the star of XTNCT, a six-part serial written by Paul Cornell that was running in the Megazine at this time. Already a big-name fan made good, Cornell would later script three very good episodes of Doctor Who for TV and later still write a celebrated run of Captain Britain for Marvel Comics. It's illustrated, again, by D'Israeli and it concerns six intelligent dinosaur-esque creatures in a bizarre genetically-engineered world who have agreed to exterminate the last two hundred humans. Given the high-concept craziness, no compelling reason is given why they shouldn't.

Cornell and D'Israeli's characters are incredibly compelling, but none more so than Rptr, a small-witted psychopath who runs around at super speed tearing mammals to pieces and screaming at such volume and speed that his vowels are lost to the wind. The story is structured beautifully, with each of the six episodes focusing on one member of the cast. It remains the only comic serial I've ever seen to feature a gay triceratops in a leather vest, as well as the only comic to ever use the immortal phrase, "Kiss my scaly dinosaur arse!"

Sadly, Paul Cornell's footprint in the House of Tharg has been very small. He scripted a few series in the early '90s which weren't bad, but the weight of "worthiness" sort of hung over them, and then he worked on other projects for years before contributing XTNCT. Television soon beckoned, and while he's since returned to comics, they've been for Marvel and DC. He was announced as Superman's newest writer just last week. I'm sure those are all fine books, but I can't help but think his talents would be better served in 2000 AD than with superheroes.

All three of these stories are available as collected editions. As noted above, the new paperback version of Leviathan is in the catalog now. From Grace was reprinted in Storming Heaven: The Frazer Irving Collection and XTNCT made it into a Rebellion hardback volume. Each of them is worth looking into!

Next time, Tharg attempts to add a little spice to the comic as Synnamon debuts. See you in seven!

4. Tooth and Who

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.

Last week's episode of Doctor Who was the sweetest birthday gift that 2000 AD has received. Russell T. Davies crafted a brilliant little story simply packed with homages to our favorite comic. At one point, the Doctor, trapped in traffic in something a lot like the Hoop from Halo Jones, starts climbing down from flying car to flying car and meets a doppelganger of Max Normal, the Pinstripe Freak of Mega-City One. Add in little Who-world versions of Swifty Frisko (also from Halo Jones), the emotion-drugs from Harmony and the parliament of skeletons from Sooner or Later among others, and you've got a simply wonderful love letter, one which Davies talked up on the Doctor Who Confidential documentary that followed the episode.

Only two writers have officially worked for both the world of Tharg and the televised Doctor Who, although many have worked on the ancillary merchandise and spinoff novels and audio plays. The first of these was Paul Cornell, who scripted the 2005 episode "Father's Day" and has another story coming up in a few weeks. Cornell was one of the first writers to work on Virgin's Doctor Who New Adventures, created Bernice Summerfield, one of the best companions ever, and later scripted some of the Doctor's comic adventures in DWM.

In 1994, he penned his first series for Judge Dredd Megazine. This was Pan-African Judges, which introduces the judges of central Africa. It's also the first art job for Tharg for Siku, the pen-name of British/Nigerian artist Ajibayo Akinsiku. The first series of Pan-African Judges has its moments, but unfortunately it also has, as its villain, a white South Efrican poacher. This surprises nobody.

Cornell's next series, Deathwatch, followed in mid-1995. This was illustrated by Adrian Salmon and dealt with a Brit-Cit judge who's lost in time and ends up in Elizabethan England. His most recent series was 2003's terrific XTNCT, drawn by D'Israeli, in which six dinosaurs try to wipe out the last dozen or so humans on the planet. You need the collected edition of this like you need oxygen and a square meal.

The only other writer to work for both the TV Who and the House of Tharg has been Andrew Cartmel, who was the script editor for three seasons in the 1980s. Unfortunately, Cartmel's handful of Dredd episodes in 1996 show him with much the same problem that the TV series saw during his watch: he's a great ideas man who has trouble executing them; his construction is awkward and abrupt, and scenes transition poorly. On the other hand, Halo Jones certainly inspired and informed more than one story during Cartmel's day; it was nice that he had the chance to contribute in some fashion.

Outside of Who on TV, other 2000 AD talents have found some opportunities. Former 2000 AD/Meg editor David Bishop has probably written more stories for Sarah Jane Smith than anybody else, thanks to Big Finish's line of direct-to-CD audio plays. He also wrote the fantastic book Who Killed Kennedy under his "journalistic" alter-ego psuedonym James Stevens. And in novels, Armitage's creator Dave Stone contributed several stories to the Virgin line. The most memorable of these might have been Burning Heart, which is the closest we're likely to get to a Doctor-Judge Dredd crossover thanks to a parody called Adjudicator Craator. Another of Stone's novels, Death and Diplomacy, finds Benny and her new lover Jason menaced on the cover by a robot that looks awfully familiar...



No getting around it; that is definitely Tyranno-Mek from Ro-Busters, as designed by Dave Gibbons. Of course, Gibbons is one of the many contributors to the Doctor Who comic strip. One of the best, and certainly the longest-running of all the varied Who spinoffs, the comic has featured work from many 2000 AD talents, including John Wagner, Pat Mills, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, John Ridgway, Alan McKenzie, Robin Smith and Grant Morrison.

Wagner and Mills were actually putting 2000 AD together at the same time they offered four serials to the Doctor Who production office in 1976-77. While none of these were picked up, they did form the basis of the first four adventures in Doctor Who Weekly, and Wagner reused all the "space-trucker" CB jargon and palare he developed for the fourth story, "The Dogs of Doom," as the bizarre language in the 2000 AD strip Ace Trucking Company. Plus, Wagner and Mills wrote one of the all-time great fourth Doctor adventures, one which never appeared on TV, the classic "Star Beast":



Pat Mills stayed in touch with the production office for some time. He had a four-part adventure in various stages of development throughout the Peter Davison era, before the producer and script editor finally turned it down in 1984. The story was called "Song of the Space Whale" and apparently concerned a community which had been swallowed by some giant space creature decades earlier. One rumor suggests that it was intended to be the story which introduced the character of Turlough.

Mills doesn't seem to have done any TV scriptwriting at all, which is a shame. Then again, our Pat's as punk as they get, even sometimes railing against his own fans, so it would hardly be surprising for him to rub the stodgy old shoulders of the BBC the wrong way. (Alan Bleasdale's dramatisation of The Monocled Mutineer caused a huge government incident seventy years after the Étaples Mutiny; heaven knows what Auntie Beeb would've made of Charley's War...)

Frankly, I think Russell Davies is missing a trick by not going straight to the thrillpower source when looking for new talent. One of the major disappointments of series two was the by-the-numbers Cybermen story. Could you imagine how that might have turned out in Pat's hands? Or Gordon Rennie's? Or look at it the other way around: Steven Moffat's Who short stories and TV episodes have been innovative, original and creepy. Wouldn't you like to see him let loose on a 13-week serial in the Galaxy's Greatest?

(Cover of Death and Diplomacy by Bill Donohoe, © Virgin Books 1996. Doctor Who illustration by Dave Gibbons, © Marvel/Panini 1978. Other illustrations © Rebellion, 2008)

(Originally published 4/26/07 at LiveJournal.)