196. Regime Change

August 2009: For its latest summer launch prog, 2000 AD falls back on some of its most reliable and popular stories. There's no experimentation this time out, which is probably for the best. While we usually like to see a newcomer mixed in with the thrills, anything that was to launch against a lineup that includes Shakara, Kingdom, Strontium Dog and Nikolai Dante is certain to get swamped, particularly when the Judge Dredd story is the beginning of the remarkable "Tour of Duty." Boy, is this thing ever a game-changer. "Tour of Duty" is one of the most amazing long-form stories in all of Judge Dredd. It's less an epic than it is a year-long change of the rules. To understand how we got here, I need to step back and look at how John Wagner has been telling this series for some time now. The problem is, something as dense as Dredd makes it very difficult to find a starting point to the story.

See, if I go back to "Origins" to talk about the mutant issue, I still need to go back further, and further, and pick up plot threads from years and years previously. One of the beautiful things about the series is the way that Wagner leaves critically important details for much later developments in plain sight. I'm sure this has been a beast for anybody at Titan or Hamlyn or Rebellion who has been tasked with assembling collected editions and graphic novels for the character, because just about all of the big epics in the color era of the series grow from a scattering of seeds in several earlier and shorter adventures.

In a way, "The Apocalypse War" was kind of like that. The Mega-City One versus Sovs story was built up through the Luna Olympics, and the two Black Atlantic stories that Ron Smith illustrated, and finally "Block Mania," but the actual 26-part "Apocalypse War" could be read without them, especially in the 1980s, because we all understood, all too well, the fear of a US-Soviet war. I'm not entirely sure that "Tour of Duty" works anything as well as that without all the hints and fears and years of preparation, but for readers who had been following the character and all of the development, I think it works even better for the most part.

Recapping events in Mega-City One and its troubled relationship with mutants may not be strictly necessary for readers, but it is worth considering just how long this has been a key issue. This helps us realize just how much work that Wagner put into this. "Origins" had begun three years previously, and ended, in May 2007, with Dredd finally acknowledging that the city had been very, very wrong in both relying on the judge system so heavily and violating mutants' human rights. This was explored further across seven weeks that summer, in "Mutants in Mega-City One," "The Facility," and "The Secret of Mutant Camp 5" (art by Colin MacNeil, June-July 2007). Development of these issues had been delayed by the second half of the "Mandroid" story, along with various one-offs and unrelated short stories, inlcuding the first appearance of Alan Grant and David Roach's sassy witch character, but resumed in January 2008 with the seven-part "Emphatically Evil: The Life and Crimes of PJ Maybe," again with art by MacNeil, and then the five part "...Regrets," with art by Nick Dyer, in March and April, by which time there's finally some momentum toward allowing equal rights for mutants.

A comparison to the similar momentum in the read world toward allowing equal rights for homosexuals wishing to marry would probably be appropriate at this juncture.

The first mutant blocks in the city were established in prog 1600 (August 2008), amid much screaming and protest from the bigoted citizens of Mega-City One, leading to "Mutopia" by Al Ewing and Simon Fraser in November, which showed the lengths to which the citizenry would go to get the muties back out. "Backlash" by Wagner and Carl Critchlow in March and April of '09 drew all this resentment to its natural conclusion, with Dan Francisco defeating Hershey in a confidence vote for the Chief Judgeship that's pretty much exclusively about the mutant issue. Those are the major points in the story, but it's been a background issue with sprinkled resentment and mutophobia in several other episodes.

Remarkably, and oddly, there's a four month gap between Hershey's defeat and what would come next. The space is filled by the usual high-concept future crimes, ultraviolence and fun that we expect from the series, with old characters revisited and goofy fads exploding. "It Came from Bea Arthur Block" by Gordon Rennie and PJ Holden is a high point, an incredibly silly and deliberately over-the-top tale of alien hair and smug baldies. And there's sci-fi and exorcists in a great story by Ian Edginton and Dave Taylor, and a satire of prison reform using a well-meaning parallel universe of community care and pacifism by Ewing and Karl Richardson. I don't want anybody to get the idea that the series is nothing more than one endless soap opera building and building; it certainly has time and room to do everything, like it always does.

But then there's prog 1649 and "Under New Management," and good lord, that changes everything. It's Wagner and Critchlow again, and, in the densest, and saddest, six pages you've ever seen anywhere, Francisco takes office and assigns Hershey to administrative duties on a colony in outer space, and some middle management goon assigns Dredd to administrative duties out in the Cursed Earth, where the mutants will be resettled. The experiment in tolerance has failed, and the good guys have lost. Dredd and Hershey's quiet and respectful farewell scene is arguably the saddest moment in either character's history.


"Tour of Duty" does not feel like a big slam-bang epic, partially because there is no specific plot for its length. After the initial few weeks, wherein Dredd and Beeny - even his protege is swept out of the city - try to ensure that the displaced mutant citizens get a decent place to live and work, with little help from the bottom-rung judges sent out to work under his command, there's an installment about a Cursed Earth prison - slash - work farm, and then "Tour of Duty" becomes a sub-headline for all the other events that are happening.

There are crimes in the camps, and there are the usual Cursed Earth bandits and outlaws, and back in the city, there is institutional corruption, and the mayor is a serial killer. Over the next several months of the Megazine, an old villain resurfaces. In other words, it's business as usual, except that the rules have changed to reflect that fact that our heroes lost. Dredd is no longer patrolling the streets of Mega-City One. Similar to the 1995-96 epic "The Pit," previously the longest Dredd story ever, we're looking at a complete change to the status quo. Dredd's stuck in a job that he hates, and no longer perceived with much or any respect by his fellow judges, all of whom (except the loyal Beeny, and, in time, Rico as well) resent his bleeding heart getting them all assigned to this mess. This will be the way that things are, in both comics, for an entire calendar year.

I didn't leave myself much time to talk about Nikolai Dante, as I had planned to do. At this point, of course, we've learned that Nikolai and Lulu arranged for her death to be faked. His army of thieves and whores is rising up against Vlad, with the great huge battle to come in early 2010. In this story, illustrated by Paul Marshall, we see a trope of the series in which people communicate with Lulu via vid-link while she's naked, bathing, or otherwise involved in some orgy or other.


Nobody ever interrupts Lulu when she's doing anything dull like knitting, you see. This story is also notable for introducing a fellow in the Hellfire Club who's the spitting image of the old Eric Bradbury-drawn character of Cursitor Doom from the early 1970s run of Smash!. This follows a long history of comic book artists populating fictional Hellfire Clubs with familiar faces like Peter Wyngarde and Orson Welles.

Next time, away from the fiction and into the real world, as the American distributor starts ruining things for everybody. See you in a week!

155. Of Insects and Illiterates

It's July 2005, and the summer goes like this: the last few books in the failed initiative with DC have trickled to a close, the revived Doctor Who has concluded the first season of its triumphant return and seen out actor Christopher Eccleston in the lead role, fifty-two people have been killed in a series of terrorist attacks in London, and 2000 AD releases one of the most timely and politics-minded issues of its history. Much of the content is the usual high-concept SF stuff, of course, safely told in far, fanciful, futures. There's Leatherjack, detailed below, and Robo-Hunter, about which, more next time. But this week's Judge Dredd, the first of a two-part story by John Wagner and Phil Winslade, is especially timely, with Wagner railing against the increasingly paranoid mindset that seems to be in charge of the War on Terror.

By chance, I came back to this story in my reread at the same time that I read John Mortimer's penultimate Rumpole of the Bailey novel, 2006's Rumpole and the Reign of Terror. This will get the spotlight over at my Bookshelf blog on Tuesday, and they are very similar in their anger. The US and UK each shared a massive overreach in police powers in response to terrorism. In Britain, this has resulted in incarcerations without formal charge, the excuse being that to formally charge a suspect might compromise classified intelligence. While in the present day, Horace Rumpole finds himself in the legal fight of his life trying to defend a Pakistani doctor when nobody will tell him either what he has done or what evidence is against him, in the not-all-that-future-world of Mega-City One, Dredd and the judges have arrested a citizen, told him only that he's being held in connection with the recent bombings by Total War, and suggested very strongly that things will go much better for him if he just confesses. They don't tell him to what they want him to confess. Episode one ends with the hapless citizen pleading for his life and an impassive Dredd sentencing him to indefinite confinement by the rights afforded him under the Security of the City Act. It's an incredibly bleak little story, but also completely furious.

Over in Savage, meanwhile, Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard are chronicling the life of a London occupied by the Volgan nation. Mills doesn't really build up his anger and release it in targeted bursts of fury in quite the way that Wagner does; rather, it's poured out smoothly over every panel of Savage. The result is just fantastic reading.



"Out of Order" is the second story (or "Book Two") for the revived Bill Savage, brought back from obscurity and occasional editorial mocking the previous year into a taut and impressive modern thriller. It is a really exciting rollercoaster, with one hell of a lot of plot packed in. Episode one resolves the cliffhanger ending from Book One and introduces Captain Svetlana Jaksic as Savage's principal nemesis. Her abrupt demise at the close of this story really is a surprise; it looked for all the world like Mills was setting her up as a long-term villain, but she dies without ever knowing who her enemy really is. We also meet new gangs of terrorists - slash - freedom fighters, few of whom coordinate their efforts with each other, get to see the Volgans' effective-but-evil tactic of ensuring human shields for their tank convoys by tossing candy to starving children, and get a powerful human element with the introduction of Bill's brother Tom and niece Jan.

I confess that I'm a little troubled by Jan's rape in this story. This is the second time in the last few years of 2000 AD where Mills has allowed a violent act against a woman to galvanize a hesitant male into action. It was more egregious when Moloch raped and killed Niamh in Slaine, as that was the end of a long-running major character, and here it is "just" the last impetus that Tom needs to help brother Bill with his plan to get inside occupation HQ and assassinate Volgan Marshal Vashkov.

While I acknowledge the event and question its narrative value, I choose to overlook it, right or wrong, because "Out of Order" ends with three of the most stunning episodes of this long-running series. The killing of Vashkov belongs on anybody's list of great Pat Mills moments. The way that Vashkov tells Savage a story, confidently expecting that the man in front of him will choose the path of heroism and honor, only to find that he has horribly misjudged things, is completely beautiful. Savage thanks Vashkov for the information, but for a totally different reason than the Volgan expected, and responds with all the abrupt and impassive force of Tommy Lee Jones in the film version of The Fugitive when he tells Harrison Ford's character, "I don't care." Adlard draws the hell out of this sequence. The image of the feathers blown out of the pillow used to muffle the shot will stay with 2000 AD readers forever.

And all this is before the book's actual climax, when Savage takes care of Captain Jaksic and lets a restaurant of collaborators know what he thinks of them. It's a moment where Bill Savage finds that line between terrorist and freedom fighter and absolutely leaves readers with a lot to think about. This is a completely, totally brilliant comic.

While both Dredd and Savage are raising questions about today's world, Leatherjack by John Smith and Paul Marshall is wild, escapist, crazy and only tiptoes around any obvious political ideas. Smith and Marshall had, in 1993, collaborated on the very good Firekind. This story isn't quite as successful to me, in part because Marshall's artwork has evolved over time to a style that I don't enjoy quite as much. His character designs are as impressive and grotesque as ever, but he's inking with a much heavier line for starters, and the intricate and delicate alien universe of Firekind is not present here. It's a world that looks stark, too solid and, honestly, a little generic.

Leatherjack is the story of an assassin, working thousands of years in the future for a disgusting crime lord and employed to retrieve a book which unlocks human consciousness, and which is in danger of being destroyed, along with all the other books on a library planet, in a galactic war. To his credit, Smith does provide a terrific introduction. The story opens following an aging professor, who's been given access to the library planet by the great big alien bugs who run the place and are defending it from bombardment by the Spinster Empire. We meet all three sides in this conflict, and the professor would appear to have a major role to play as the action gets started. Surprisingly, however, the professor is killed in the second episode as Leatherjack takes center stage. Smith loves to mess with expectations and certainly doesn't mind killing off his supporting cast, but that really was a big surprise. I mean, even once you get past the remarkable surprise of how the professor leaves the story and the assassin enters it.

It sounds agreeably engaging, but it all somehow fails to gel. We never get to know any of the characters, and those that we do meet just seem like templates from John Smith's playbook - depraved dictators, foppish killers, observers watching from the sidelines seeing events spiral out of control and saying "no no no no." These are all things that we've seen before. Add in a climax in which an ancient, totemic power rises to wipe out the technology of the warfleets that threaten it, and the whole thing feels like a longer, shallower incarnation of the creators' earlier, excellent Firekind. And after reading this several times, I'm still not certain that the Spinster Empire, a comedic bunch of Mary Whitehouse parodies flying around in space-faring censorships, didn't wander in from an entirely different strip altogether.

Leatherjack, whether it thrills you or not, is certainly notable for one thing. Its run of eighteen consecutive weekly episodes by the same team is the longest over the decade of the 2000s. A couple of years ago, I predicted that the desire to quickly repackage successful and celebrated thrills into graphic novel form would lead to longer serials, making the book versions a little meatier and more attractive to new readers. This has not been borne out; the longest individual story since 2005's Leatherjack has been Stalag 666 in 2008.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Leatherjack: The Complete Leatherjack (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: Casino Royal (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 308, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, Hey, did somebody say Robo-Hunter? You know what that means? More scans of Samantha Slade! See you next week!

124. Somebody Remembers Firekind

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday, the blog that strives to do something about the shameful lack of publicity that the Galaxy's Greatest Comic manages in the world of online media. Normal service, where I'm looking at issues and stories originally published in 2003, will resume next week, but this time around, I thought I'd ease back into things by sharing with readers some of the more recent newsworthy items to refresh your mordant thrill-circuits.

On a personal note, one highlight of the last two months was being interviewed by The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon, for his Holiday series, in which twenty "of the best writers about comics" (well!) talked about "favorite, representative or just plain great... books from the ten-year period 2000-2009." Tom asked me for a shortlist of titles I thought that I could ramble on about. I suggested 2000 AD along with All-Star Superman, New X Men, Pluto and Scott Pilgrim, four titles I could happily talk about at great length, but I certainly enjoy proselytizing about the House of Tharg more than anything else, so I'm glad Tom went with that. If you missed the interview, you can read it here, but I'm certain you all have that site bookmarked and read it every day anyway, right?

I did make one point in the interview which was evidently worth following up. As I'm certain readers know, 2009 was the year where Diamond, the company that distributes 2000 AD in North America, got infected with an amazing case of incompetence. I wrote back in July about how Diamond was becoming so utterly infuriating to deal with, and honestly, the problem only got worse. Adding insult to injury, the "prog packs" of bundled, polybagged comics were not appearing in stores on the day that Diamond's publicly-viewable ship list claimed that they were. Rich Johnson, who runs the Bleeding Cool news and rumor site, asked Bill Schanes of Diamond to comment on the problem. As you can read at Rich's site, Mr. Schanes spoke more about the problem of economics and profitability than actually, you know, shipping the dang comics to stores.

I certainly appreciate somebody from Diamond going on the record about the issue - I have actually phoned Diamond on two occasions and found no satisfaction whatsoever, so props to Rich for getting somebody on the line - but Mr. Schanes didn't address the problem. The solid, indisputable fact is that I can go to Diamond's site on any given Wednesday and see what they claim will be in stores that day. On those occasions that a prog pack is listed, for example November 25, I can go to the comic store of my choice and watch as each and every box is unpacked and those comics are not in there. I have no objection at all to Diamond soliciting an "October" pack in August and not shipping it until November. I understand there's a small delay in bundling the things. What I object to is the company making a claim that they're shipping product on a certain day and then not doing it, regularly and routinely.

I really don't intend to talk about this any longer. That's because the other really nice highlight of the last two months has been going digital. I decided that, starting with the special Prog 2010, I was going to buy the comic every Wednesday from Clickwheel. Here, you can download the comic one week after its UK publication - not ten or more weeks, one - and it costs 25% less than what Diamond charges for a copy. I rearranged my budget a little and dropped some cluttering, unnecessary things from my expenses in order to justify the cost, and if I happen to see that actual, physical copies are waiting for me at the old comic store, I will happily pick them up. In the meantime, I'm saving money, bringing fewer things into the house, enjoying these terrific stories week-by-week the way they should be read, and not being all grumpy about the fact that I can't read everything that I want to see in a timely manner. No more six-week waits to see how cliffhangers get resolved around these parts, sir!

In other news, Rebellion did make a major announcement while I was away from this blog about their forthcoming book releases. Of principal interest to me, and surely all sentient lifeforms, is the July release of both The Stainless Steel Rat and Al's Baby, two titles drawn by Carlos Ezquerra which I have wanted to see reprinted for such a long time. Place your orders now, friends, and tell everybody you know. The Stainless Steel Rat, based on three novels by Harry Harrison, is 36 episodes of twist-filled, high-concept, con-artist sci-fi from the early eighties, and Al's Baby is 33 episodes of hilarious mob-comedy about a hitman who cannot convince his wife, the godfadda's dotta, to have a baby, so he's got to carry one himself to avoid a pair of concrete boots. Cross-dressing, getaway cars, first trimester cravings, high explosives, labor pains and sleeping with the fishes, it's all here and it's very funny. Spread the word!

There have been additional rumors about forthcoming books, but in the absence of a formal announcement from Rebellion, I'll save the speculation for the Reprint This! blog next week and save this space for things we can actually confirm.

The other big news of the last couple of months is that James Cameron's Avatar was released and in just a few weeks' time overtook everything else to become the highest-grossing film of all time. Some people were pretty dismissive early in the game about the film's apparently obvious inspirations - I haven't seen it myself - but the one that caught my eye was over at pop culture site heavy.com.



In a pair of well-researched and illustrated articles (here and here), writer James Edwards makes a fairly convincing case that the Cameron film relies very heavily on Firekind, a thirteen-part serial by John Smith and Paul Marshall that originally appeared in the spring of 1993, in 2000 AD progs 828-840. Whether Edwards is right or wrong about Avatar's origins, I can't say, but one thing that Edwards says does strike me: they seem near enough to totally wreck Smith and 2000 AD's chances of ever making a Firekind feature film. Like that was all that likely anyway.

Actually, what this should do is give Rebellion impetus to find a way to get Firekind back in print for people to see for themselves. The serial was collected in an Extreme Edition in 2005, but it's too short for a proper bookshelf graphic novel. So, for that matter, is Cradlegrave, a twelve-part horror serial by Smith and Edmund Bagwell that ran last year to considerable acclaim, and appearances on several critics' best-of-2009 lists. The solution's simple: package 'em together in one omnibus edition. Sure, the two serials have nothing in common besides their writer and the magazine where they first appeared, but publicity's not worth a darn unless you capitalize on it. Even just reprinting the Extreme Edition would be a case of striking when the iron is hot. How about it, Tharg?

Next time, well, I've told myself for more than a year that I'm writing too much and saying too little in these entries, but I swear I'm going to start some much shorter entries. The ABC Warriors and Snow / Tiger are scheduled head-to-head, fandom takes sides, and everybody wins, but I am going to keep commentary to a minimum. I hope. Seriously, I'm going to write a lot less and try to say a little more. See you then!