190. Vigilantes in Mega-City One

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday, the blog that dares to ask the question, "Didn't I just read that series?" For now, we're getting very, very close to the present day, and as this continues, we'll be looking at the launches of more than a couple of series that are still running. I've been asked several times over the years what I plan to do when the blog catches up to the present-day issues, and the answer might be "not get quite that far, and maybe take another long rest." But before we hit such a drastic measure, I think that first, everybody reading this should give a big round of applause to Tharg and all his droids, because 2012 was a completely awesome year of really amazing comics.

There were some pretty darn good comics running in December 2008, when "Prog 2009" was published, but there were some uneven ones as well. The annual launch issue, this time featuring a funny and wonderful cover by Carlos Ezquerra, saw the beginnings of new adventures for Strontium Dog and Greysuit, each of which we'll talk about next week, along with Marauder, a serial by Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson set in Judge Dredd's world, and the latest adventure for the crew in The Red Seas by Ian Edginton and Steve "Inkless" Yeowell.

In the present day, fans are waiting to hear when, if ever, we'll see a fifth story of Kingdom, the terrific series by Dan Abnett and Elson. Apparently, Elson's been working for Marvel, one of those inferior American publishers who pay a higher rate than the Galaxy's Greatest. I looked him up at comics.org and saw that he's spent the last couple of years drawing their superhero books. Well, he couldn't have asked for a better calling card than Marauder. It's the story of a flunked-out cadet judge who gets caught in a crossfire between three rival criminal groups. One of these is a gang of crooked judges who are in the occasional pay of yet another Mega-City kingpin, and one of these is an alien who provides Falcone with some interesting technology.

In his red-and-yellow supersuit, Falcone moves like Spider-Man with the tech of Iron Man. Many years previously, we'd seen Judge Dredd see off interfering super-vigilantes (in "Megaman" [prog 440], "Fairlyhyperman" [progs 529-530], and "Bat Mugger" [prog 585]), but these were mainly played for the quick laugh, and didn't really examine what a superhero story set in Mega-City One might really be like.


Not to dismiss or belittle Morrison here, but if I were a Marvel Comics editor, and this run of progs came across my desk, I'd have written Elson a blank check, because the artist is the star of this story. Until Kingdom, which is completely majestic, I had always ranked Elson as maybe being solid if not among my personal favorites. Tasked with an urban superhero adventure, with lots of fast action and wild camera angles, he really goes above the standard, and delivers some of the best-looking superhero pages from any publisher. Apparently, he has not drawn very much Spider-Man yet, which is an almighty shame for Spider-Man readers, because, in his weird red suit, Falcone interacts with the buildings and bridges of Mega-City One like the town is a valuable supporting character. You can easily just tune out the script and relish all the detail and attention in every panel.

This is a delight that readers of The Red Seas cannot share.

Back in 1987, Steve Yeowell had debuted in 2000 AD as the artist of Zenith, the comic's first superhero series. And he drew the almighty hell out of it. Every page of that series looked terrific, and Yeowell parlayed that success into lots of assignments for other publishers. It's one of comics' great missed opportunities that DC didn't give him the regular job of their title Starman after Tony Harris moved on. Yeowell had done some really great fill-in work for Harris in the 1990s. That job shoulda been his.

Something happened to Yeowell's work earlier in 2008. There's still a little bit to like about it. His character designs remain consistent; Captain Jack Dancer looks the same from panel to panel. At least there's that. Otherwise, either his local art supply store raised the cost of ink beyond common sense, or Yeowell's interest in and enthusiasm for drawing The Red Seas hit a wall. I peg the deterioration with episode three of the previous story, "Old Gods" in August. That's when backgrounds for his pages abruptly started vanishing, and he started taking visible shortcuts to finish things. The worst offense came with a forest depicted by way of a large blob that indicated the canopy of trees, its interior detail nothing more than fifty-odd quick squiggles that suggested individual leaves.


Nothing in "Signs and Portents" is quite that bad, but nothing suggests any interest in continuing to visualize Captain Jack's adventures either. This time out, our heroes have been abducted by Caliban, who also holds the immortal Prospero as his prisoner. Prospero, who first communicates with Capt. Dancer and his crew by way of some floating food, is privy to Dancer's recent past and run-ins with the supernatural, and has grave warnings about his future. But it looks like he won't even get that far when, in one of the most abrupt and strange cliffhangers in 2000 AD's long history, our heroes are tied up as bait for some giant animals outside Caliban's walls.

Actually, rereading it, "abrupt" is putting it lightly. It simply does not feel like an end-of-story cliffhanger, where the tensions rise and there's a build up to a "sting," leaving audiences both satisfied with what they have read and anxious to see what will happen next. Everything suddenly happens with the feel of doors slamming, including a massive cut in between our heroes being discovered and then stuck in this wild and outlandish climax. It's not done with a sense of danger or drama; in fact, it's almost played as comedy, with a surprising "The End" stuck at the bottom, above a caption promising the series would be continued. Jack's bizarre conundrum would be addressed more than a year down the line, jumping from prog 1623 to 1688.

This feeling of comedy has also infected The Red Seas more potently at this time. Now, sure, there was always a light touch in the strip - Jack's opening line to Isabella, the camp stylings of Dr. Orlando Doyle - but with the previous story, the supernatural became really whimsical. The squabbling Norse gods, with Odin depicted as a henpecked husband, were admittedly a little funny even as they reduced the impossible into wacky, but by now, the trick of turning the outre into ordinary, as shown by Prospero's manipulation of sausages, is transforming the whole series into a light, early evening comedy. At the same time, everybody is issuing dire warnings and Captain Jack is taking fantastic occult threats seriously, but the threats are pantomimes. In the story running in 2000 AD at the time of writing - said to be the finale - the crew are battling Satan, and he's so camp that he makes Doyle look subdued. And still, nobody's bought Yeowell any ink.

Next week, it's one weird concept too many for Pat Mills as he introduces... The Ginger Ninja!

169. Fraser's Back in Town. (well, actually, he's in New York City...)

November 2006: On the cover of this week's prog, 1513, is something which is, I believe, unique. With the exception of two one-off Tharg's Future Shocks, the only ongoing series for 2000 AD to which Arthur Ranson has contributed any artwork have been written by John Wagner or Alan Grant. This cover for The Red Seas marks his only contribution to anybody else's ongoing project. It's kind of a shame, when you think about it. Wouldn't a Ranson-illustrated Devlin Waugh look interesting?

Inside, Red Seas is again Steve Yeowell drawing Ian Edginton's scripts, and it is another installment that sees the action shift away from Jack Dancer and the pirates during their adventures in Earth's underworld to see what the supporting cast is up to. In this five-part story, the heroes' ally, the presumed-dead Sir Isaac Newton, looks up Julius's estranged father, the renowned composer and pianist Chevalier Augustus. They get involved in a problem with shapechanging Roman werewolves in London. I love how every time I mention the plot of a Red Seas story, it sounds like I'm just making something up. There's just no way a series this fun ever really got printed, is there?

The real big news, however, is that Nikolai Dante has reached the end of that long pirate adventure and is back in Imperial Russia, which is now firmly under the thumb of Tsar Vladimir as the Romanovs have been destroyed, killed or dispersed. Lulu, of course, remains at large, acting as a terrorist somewhere in Europe, and Arkady has been adopted as a ward of Vladimir's court, but all the others are believed to be dead. Well, okay, the audience knows that the brutal Konstantin is in the weird body armor and acting as Vlad's Lord Protector, but none of the protagonists do.

As this story opens in prog 1511, the tsar's forces overwhelm the last of Sagawa's resistance, rescue Dante, and make him an offer he can't refuse: act as Vlad's public agent and investigate forces suspected to be disloyal to the imperial throne. The weird techno-aliens who gave the Romanovs their weapons crests are believed to be active in our reality, for starters. In return, Vlad won't blow Nikolai's mother and her fleet out of the water. Our hero gets to dress well again, and charm his beloved Jena all over again.

The panels above have always felt to me like they have an additional meaning. I really love the artwork of Simon Fraser, who co-created the series with Robbie Morrison in 1997, but he had been absent for quite some time from the comic. His most recent episodes had been in 2000 and 2002, and I don't think I'm stepping on anybody's toes when I say that "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Romanov Job" were far from his best work. There's a very good reason for this; Fraser's wife works for the United Nations and, in the first part of the last decade, she was doing important work in impoverished areas in Africa. Fraser left comics for a few years while accompanying her on, let's be fair, much more important business, many thousands of miles from the nearest Dick Blick art supply store. Her career brought the couple to New York City in the summer of 2006, and Fraser found a studio there, allowing him to resume his work in comics.

Dante's pirate days - the middle chunk of the soon-concluding saga - always felt like the heaviest part of the series. John Burns did a terrific job - actually, there are certainly places where he worked wonders - but even with the more lighthearted segments of this phase, there's still that undercurrent of very bleak danger. More precisely, I'm thinking about stories like 2005's "Primal Screams," the sort-of Meltdown Man tribute with the jungle animal-people and Lauren spending almost the entire story topless and in a g-string, and "How could you believe me...," with its rollicking double-page opening spread, the characters chasing each other around the ridiculous lettering like a good Saturday morning cartoon. Morrison certainly made an effort to lighten the mood, but it's never much more than a detour from the lingering threat underneath all the antics: Dante has to betray his mother and deliver her to Sagawa, or Sagawa will murder two hostage children who love him. That mood permeates this period, and it's with a huge sigh of relief that the series abandons the Pacific and returns home to Russia.

2007 will prove to be a very big year for Dante, with 26 episodes appearing in the comic. Fraser and Burns alternate on art duties, and Tharg takes advantage of having two artists working in tandem and commissions more of this strip than any other but Judge Dredd from 2006-2010. It really feels like the artists are competing with each other, each inspired by the other's work to do better themselves. This will occasionally produce jawdropping moments, especially an amazing double-page spread of the city that opens a critical eleven-part story, "Amerika," in 2008. But I'm getting ahead of myself. More on that some other time.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Chiaroscuro: The Complete Chiaroscuro (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine 303, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: Origins (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar (Volume Seven, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, two major new series debut in the year-end Prog 2007: Kingdom and Stickleback. I'll need to take a short break but the blog'll be back in two weeks. See you then!

165. Dragged Here and Drowned Here

June 2006: While the Judge Dredd Megazine is struggling through its latest set of growing pains, 2000 AD is reliably strong. That terrific cover by Boo Cook heralds the return of Harry Kipling (Deceased) in the third of six stories that will be programmed throughout the year. Isn't that just beautiful and eye-catching? I love it to bits. Other stories this week include The VCs by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams, Judge Dredd by John Smith and Simon Fraser, and this week's focus stories, The Red Seas by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell and London Falling by Si Spurrier and Lee Garbett.

The last time I had the opportunity to write about The Red Seas was back around chapter 158, when the fourth story, "Underworld," was running, but I had other things to talk about. At this point in the series, it feels a lot like Tharg isn't giving it the chance it needs to shine. "Underworld" and this story, "The Hollow Land," form a linked, 22-episode run in which Captain Jack Dancer and his crew, allied with his considerably less immoral half-brother Alexander, have gone into an underworld beneath the earth searching for their father Simeon and a mythical eighth sea, finding a gigantic kingdom of dinosaur men with a knowledge of human warfare tactics. What I mean about "a chance to shine" is this: Tharg seems to want to rush through them. This isn't a case, as I sometimes often nitpick, of how they would read better in a 22-week slot over five months. Rather, "The Hollow Land" is set some weeks after "Underworld," and roars back from its break with a fantastic double-length opener in prog 1691 that really uses the extra pages to its advantage, letting Yeowell loose on some terrific splash pages full of dinosaurs and battle. No, the problem is that Edginton has paced and balanced his episodes quite finely, anticipating a twelve-week run, and Tharg ruins the flow by cramming in two episodes an issue for the second half of the run, so that it can be finished up in eight weeks before the all-new stories in prog 1500.

It's probably a little churlish of me to complain about 2000 AD's occasionally-troubling treatment of female characters when, in recent months, the comic has done so incredibly well with characters like Maggie Roth, Rowan Morrigan and Mariah Kiss, but while "The Hollow Land" has a lot to recommend it, the revelation that the violent dinosaur men are under the control of Jack's former sweetie Isabella really is a mess. We met Isabella in the first "Red Seas" story and she was a little troubling then. A magician, she was more powerful than any of our band of heroes (and, unfairly to Edginton, who really did take the time in "Underworld" to establish the individual characters of Dancer's crew, I still call the pirates who serve with Jack "Davy Dee, Dozy, Mick and Tich," and have no idea which is which), but she served the plot function of "sexy damsel in distress" and nothing more.

Her reappearance here seems desperate and very ill-planned, like Edginton wanted "a face from the past" to surprise Jack as a villain, and then realized that the series hadn't run long enough for anybody but Isabella to function as one. And so in Jack's absence, Isabella "got strong," which, all too often with female characters, means that she turned into a villain. Seriously, it's not like this character was designed with a great deal of nuance in the first place - Jack's first words in the narrative to her were "Get your knickers off," after all - but this feels rote and tired. For a series that's so very full of really surprising and high-concept twists - in this story, Jim gets killed by Isabella and his body revived and inhabited by an alien called Hnau, for instance - this chestnut of a plot device is a real disappointment.



But while The Red Seas may be suffering, at this point, from Edginton being so focused on the structure and the concepts that he's lost sight of original and novel characterization, the artwork is just thunderously good throughout. In "Underworld," the scripts required Yeowell to illustrate some scenes that would have challenged anybody else in the business. Most of the London-based, "above ground" material is what you'd expect for a series set in 1761 that sees "suicide bomber" dinosaur-men assassins hunting some pirates - all right, so perhaps the words "what you'd expect" don't really belong in a sentence like this - but when the plot goes underground, it gets completely wild. Yeowell is given the amazing task of drawing the gang's ship, powered by air sails and balloons, racing through gigantic, cavernous tunnels and pursued by huge, flying monsters that look like luminous jellyfish. There are certainly panels within this sequence where the visuals are so downright strange that any reader must pause to question what the heck they're actually looking at, but Yeowell pulls it off better than almost anybody else could be expected to, honestly. It's every bit as wild, in its way, as Kevin O'Neill's early '80s stories in the Terror Tube.

This continues as "The Hollow Land" reaches its climax, and we meet Hnau, the alien entity responsible for this world. Edginton's debt, one that he has certainly acknowledged, to Wells and to Burroughs, is pretty clear here. Again, Yeowell is tasked with drawing some downright bizarre imagery to illustrate the place that Hnau occupies - I dunno, in a conventional story, you'd call it a "palace" or a "fortress," and Dancer's gang would like to think of it that way, but it doesn't really work the way that they want it to - and part of me thinks that this sequence would have been more consistently comprehensible with a little color to nail down, or ground, the artwork, but Yeowell still knows enough about how to pace a scene to make elements incredibly memorable. The slow pullback to reveal Isabella's final fate, suffocating, trapped on an alien world, and about to be eaten, is a real classic.

While there were bits in The Red Seas where the artwork left me baffled, Si Spurrier's script for London Falling had me utterly lost the first time I came to it. This was a story that had me frustrated and I soon gave up. It's a short little serial, just five episodes, in which a gang of immortal boogeymen, "hiding out" as everyday Londoners, decide to follow an old boss back into the limelight after he gets his panties in a twist because nobody's scared of them anymore.



Now, Spurrier, god bless 'im, has always been a very dense writer who demands close reading from his audience just to follow the action. His work is complicated by an often unreliable first-person narration - not necessarily a bad thing - and lots of slang - again, not necessarily a problem, especially when he's dealing with the often comical "future slang" of Lobster Random - and very abrupt transitions between scenes. I think one small part of my initial problem is that Garbett is young and learning. Perhaps the color is another part of the problem? It's credited to Chris Ollis & Ruby, of whom I don't believe we see much more in 2000 AD, and it's unflatteringly solid and uniform. Whoever's to blame, the artwork doesn't give any sense of location or the passing of time. In episode two, two of the boogeymen characters are dropped off at Buckingham Palace. This is not explained in any way, in dialogue or visuals. When we see the Palace in an establishing shot two pages later, the boogeymen have changed their forms, forcing us to go back and speculate that the action in the episode's final third was carried out by the silent characters seen, briefly, in the first third.

The slang in the captions was a real nightmare for me to follow. Here are some examples from prog 1492: "first thing in the gypsy," "a boot up the aris," "two 'undred donkey," and so on. There's a lyrical bit towards the beginning about how two churches on the banks of a river got their names from giants who shared a hammer, emphasizing the feel that this is a story rooted in language and old traditions, and helps clue readers in by a very different approach than what we might expect in a comic, like establishing shots and captions that describe the location. It's complex, but there's value to it.

When I first read it, I made the mistake of suspecting that I would have an easier time following it if I knew who the characters were. I caught that these were villains from old English folklore, but I only knew of "Black Annis" from a reference in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol for DC Comics, and "Rawhead and Bloodybones" from a song by Siouxsie and the Banshees, and had never heard of "Jenny Greenteeth" or "Jack Capelthwaite" before. As it turned out, knowledge about them isn't actually necessary. All that you need to know is that they're all boogeymen. This kind of contradicts the gang's leader, Shuck, who gets all bent out of shape because nobody knows anything about them these days, though, doesn't it?

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Harry Kipling (Deceased): The Complete Harry Kipling is scheduled to be republished as a free "graphic novel" bagged with Megazine 323.

Next time, it's full frontal nudity in Stone Island!

136. Judge Dredd's in a Family Way

March 2004: Judge Dredd's supporting cast grows with another newly introduced clone in prog 1380. Inside is episode three of "Brothers of the Blood" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, in which we meet Dolman, a rookie who, like Rico before him, is a clone of Old Stony Face. However, Dolman is very much his own man, and, as the story continues, he looks forward to leaving the academy and making his own way. Rico is assigned to spend a day with him on the streets to try to shake some sense into him. He introduces him to Vienna, last seen in progs 1350-1356, who is recovering from her ordeal in Brit-Cit, and who welcomes him to the "family."

Dredd's reaction to meeting another clone is one of stoic resignation. He's known for some time that he's had a few clones working their way up the system, and that he is getting older and can't keep working the streets forever. It's in the city's best interest, after all to take advantage of such good genetic stock. But Dolman proves to be far too loose a cannon for Justice Department and makes good on his threat. Vienna sees him off at the spaceport, and the young man leaves the city. He makes a couple more appearances over the next few years, reinforcing Old Stony Face's awkward acceptance of his "family."

Returning to action in prog 1380 are Sinister Dexter and Rogue Trooper, about which more next time. These step in to replace The V.C.s and The Red Seas, which concluded its second story, "Twilight of the Idols," in prog 1379. This was the one that I found extremely frustrating, and really colors my opinion of the series as a whole. It should have been an incredibly memorable adventure, filled with harpies and djinns, Sinbad's granddaughter and the immortal Aladdin, and an awesome fight between a kraken and the Colossus of Rhodes.



Unfortunately, it's one draft away from being one of 2000 AD's greatest moments, because Captain Jack Dancer and his still incredibly anonymous crew just luck their way out of danger every week. Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell did a really good job on the story, and it's better than darn near any American superhero book, but if the hero is just handed precisely the magical items he needs to overcome whatever weird new obstacle comes his way, it's awfully hard to root for him. We prefer heroes who have to use their brains, not gadgets specially designed for each incident. Over time, Edginton and Yeowell got past this problem, and I think the series has evolved into one of 2000 AD's most wonderful series. The Red Seas will be returning to 2000 AD for its eleventh story in a couple of weeks, and everybody's really looking forward to it.

The two stories featured here have been reprinted in Rebellion trade paperbacks. Judge Dredd: Brothers of the Blood collects several stories from 1999-2004 which deal with Rico and Vienna, wrapping up with this adventure. The Red Seas: Under the Banner of King Death collects the first three adventures of this series.

Next time, the blog is about to take its summer holiday, but before we go, one last look at Durham Red and a gloriously awesome Rogue Trooper cover by Chris Weston. See you soon!

117. Yo ho ho!

November 2002: Veteran art droid Cliff Robinson is back on front cover duties for issue 1316, and isn't this a terrific image to sell a funnybook? Dredd standing side-by-side with a werewolf judge doling out the harshness. If this doesn't want to make you want to buy comic books, your blood's stopped pumping. The werewolf is Judge Prager, introduced in a story twentyish years ago bringing law to the lawless in the Undercity. Now, he's been infected, but is still fighting the good fight and, in this four-part story by John Wagner and Carl Critchlow, has made an enemy out of a mutie villain called Mr. Bones, who's operating out of the old White House. Bones gets away in the story's climax, but we will see him again in another story very soon.

Apart from Judge Prager, this run of 2000 AD feels much more up-to-date than the recent run full of old thrills from the early 1980s. Dredd and Sinister Dexter, who are enjoying a lighthearted outer space romp courtesy of Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, are the only older series in this run. They're sharing space with three brand new series. First, and most important of these, is The Red Seas by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell.

Edginton is a new droid for Tharg, but he'd actually done a great deal of work in the 1990s for companies like Crossgen. He had written a webcomic called Scarlet Traces, illustrated by D'Israeli, which had been running on a site called CoolBeansWorld, but the site's failure left the strip unfinished.


Captain Jack DANCER in the house! Damn right!

Scarlet Traces found a new home in the Megazine, which evidently got Edginton talking with editor Matt Smith about some new work. The Red Seas was the first of what will be quite a few series and serials over the last decade. With hundreds of popular, well-received episodes to his credit over the past seven years, Edginton has arguably been the most important find of Smith's era, and The Red Seas, with 74 episodes published to date, the longest-running of any of the stories that Smith has commissioned thus far.

Surprisingly, though, I'm often disappointed by The Red Seas, and wouldn't call it one of the comic's greats. Yeowell's artwork is of course lovely, with a double-page spread in the opening episode among of the most thrilling and eye-popping pieces to ever appear in 2000 AD. The series is a pirate adventure starring the devil-may-care Captain Jack Dancer and his crew. There are effectively five of them, plus a small supporting cast and, in the opening story, a fantastic villain called Dr. Orlando Doyle. Yet while the series lurches from one high-concept set piece to another, everything that should be thrilling feels somehow perfunctory. Dancer rarely has to rely on his wits to get out of bizarre scrapes and dangers, but rather luck and magical artifacts that he'd obtained a few episodes previously.

Perhaps worse is that the main cast, after all this time, remains stubbornly anonymous to me, and I had to visit Wikipedia to remember their names. It's fascinating watching Edginton come up with one wild scenario after another, from a kraken battling the Colossus of Rhodes to lizard men prowling the hollow earth, but I'm reminded of how, after just six pages of The ABC Warriors, I remembered the names Joe Pineapples and Happy Shrapnel forever, but I'm still trying to remember Billy, Tom, Jim and Julius. It's still a million times better than most any recent superhero comic, but frustratingly one or two steps away from greatness in my book.

Also in this prog, there's another new story called Asylum written by new droid Rob Williams, with Boo Cook on art duties. Cook really knocks this one right out of the park; it looks amazing. Williams will become a very important addition to the comic's lineup in a couple of years' time, but Asylum's not a particular favorite. There's also a one-off under the new umbrella of Past Imperfect, a series of alternate history one-offs (mostly) which start with the twist of something going wrong with history and try to tell what happens next in just five pages. This week's installment, in which the Japanese navy sics an atomic monster on Pearl Harbor is by Gordon Rennie, Mike Collins and Lee Townsend. Other contributors to the series include David Bishop, Si Spurrier and Adrian Bamforth.

As far as reprints, only The Red Seas and Asylum are available from this issue, in those really nice paperbacks from Rebellion. The Asylum book contains both of the nine-part stories that appeared in 2002 and 2004; the Red Seas collection, "Under the Banner of King Death," contains the series' first 24 episodes. We're overdue for a second collection, now that I think about it.

Next time, the Megazine photoshoot that I liked better'n anybody. See you in seven!