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!

83. Pussyfooting Around

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.

March 2000: The cover of prog 1185 features a wonderfully old-fashioned composition by Cliff Robinson which evokes any number of 1980s IPC comics. The little gunmen are the action figure-sized heroes of Banzai Battalion, who are this week wrapping up their second run-in with Judge Dredd in a three-part story by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy. They are actually semi-sentient pest control droids who keep finding themselves thrown into situations where human criminals become the pests they need to stamp out. Since their human owners died during the events of the recent "Doomsday Scenario," and since they keep making themselves useful, the droids are sent by Dredd to join Justice Department in some capacity, but when they reappear in their own series in 2001, they'll have to take the initiative to strike out on their own. The subsequent Banzai Battalion series will run for thirteen episodes, most of which were reprinted in a 2005 hardback by Rebellion.

Probably the most important series running at the moment is Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and John Burns. We've now left behind the initial, devil-may-care Phase One of the series and entered the period of bloody war between the Makarovs and Romanovs. Burns is the principal artist for this period, and while I personally find him not a patch on Dante's co-creator Simon Fraser, I must agree that he is well-suited to painting lavish, double-page spreads full of desperate soldiers on bloody battlefields, carving each other up against the backdrop of burned-out buildings and the misery of human suffering. Yes, this would be the point where Dante loses a lot of its magic as things get incredibly bleak in imperial Russia.

But even while the focus of the writing has moved from outlandish escapades and intrigue to the horror of war, the artwork's change of focus is similarly striking. Burns chooses not to linger on the instantly-identifiable architecture and fashion that defines Dante's world, and he eschews the grandiose camera angles, the surprising perspective and the action-oriented speed lines that Fraser has used to such great effect in the earlier episodes. Burns makes a stamp on Nikolai Dante, all right: he darn near stamps out entirely everything that made the last three years of stories so wonderful.



That sounds quite harsh, but it's not to say Burns' work is in any way poor. While there will, sadly, be one or two future Dante episodes that look like they were painted while his laundry was drying, "The Rudenshtein Irregulars" is a tour de force from start to finish, and is visually breathtaking in its own, inimitable fashion. Faced with the challenge of tearing down the beauty of the future vistas that Fraser and those artists who handled fill-ins in the first phase had created, and emphasizing the stark horror of all-out war, Burns is more than up to the challenge. It is bleak, amazing stuff.

What I'm identifying as the second phase of Dante, known informally under the agonizing pun "Tsar Wars" and available as two volumes from Rebellion (the fourth and fifth in the series), will turn out to be its most troubled period. The initial plan had been to tell this storyline in five series of eight episodes. Burns was to paint the first, third and fifth series and Fraser was to handle the second and fourth. However, Fraser was in the process of relocating to Africa when the deadlines for his first story came up, and as a result, this adventure, "Battleship Potemkin," had to be postponed until later in the year, causing some rewrites and an unfortunate continuity error. Fraser would not be available in early 2001, and the creators and editors will revise the plans for the subsequent stories, as we will see.

Also of interest this week is the first of two stories for Pussyfoot 5, an adventure series set very loosely in the Judge Dredd universe. It's actually a spinoff from the 1999 Devlin Waugh epic "Sirius Rising," where three of the five characters on the team first appeared. It's about a team of gun-toting troubleshooters employed by Vatican City to handle crazy SF-threats, and the cast includes two sexy ladies, one enormously fat guy, a weird, growly rock-like alien pet, and Mantissa, who hasn't shown up in the narrative yet. As the bulk of the action falls down to the two curvy cuties, it looks very much like the cast is about three members too large. As Dave Merrill once asked me, "What was that Dirty Pair thing that was running the other month?"



John Smith handled the script for the series, and Nigel Raynor is the artist for the first story. Raynor's not bad at all most of the time, but something about this strip completely fails to gel. Everything seems very flat and unappealing, and 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. And, to be blunt, while I am using terms like "sexy" and "curvy cuties," Raynor doesn't really succeed in bringing the cheesecake that would have made this strip memorable.

Since I'm a big fan of John Smith's universe, and since I do believe 2000 AD needs more leading ladies, I was very much prepared to like Pussyfoot 5, but the result was fairly average. On the other hand, running as it did alongside the current Slaine epic made it seem pretty spectacular by comparison, but more about that in the next installment.

The Dredd/Banzai story and the Nikolai Dante adventure are both available in reprint editions from Rebellion. A collection of Pussyfoot 5 is said to be on the horizon as a free supplement to a forthcoming issue of Judge Dredd Megazine.

Next week, an oddly all-S edition, with updates on Sinister Dexter, Slaine and Strontium Dog!