56. A Lot More Sinister Dexter

December 1997: Prog 1075 features Sinister Dexter on the cover. The art's by Siku and this week, it's the first double-dose of the gun sharks. The story, "Whack the Dinosaur" is written, as always, by Dan Abnett, and it's quite clearly a two-part episode, with a cliffhanger on page five and an oversized panel on page six, where the credits would normally go. This is going to become standard procedure through the spring of '98 as the editor deals with a temporary shortage of strips ready to go.

Honestly, I can't imagine that anybody on the planet cares about this other than me, but running the multi-part stories as double-length episodes was a real pet peeve at the time, because I'd have preferred to read the stories at the pace that Abnett scripted them. The worst offender was "Mother Lode and the Red Admiral," an eight-part adventure crammed into one month. It's become standard operating procedure at the Nerve Centre.

During this period, strips are being double-upped because prog 1078 is going to be a relaunch issue. However, the double-upping will resume in February when Vector 13 concludes and nothing is immediately ready to replace it. The series of one-offs is feeling quite tired by this point. There are still occasional gems, particularly "Time's Arrow," a very clever episode by Gordon Rennie and Patrick Woodrow that will appear in the next issue, but overall, the huge number of episodes in just two and a half years, coupled with the resentment towards the silly Men in Black, has run the series ragged, and it will be retired in February.



Also in this issue, Nikolai Dante wraps up a four-part story called "Moscow Duellists" by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. This has proven to be the major success story of '97, and is now a semi-regular strip, with another run of episodes starting up next month. Nikolai and Jena's oddball courtship hits a wonderful snag in this episode. Not knowing Jena was listening, Nikolai pays her old tutor, who is dying, a genuine and heartfelt compliment, and then goes about his business being a boorish ladies' man and taking a couple of heiresses to bed, not dreaming that Jena would actually come to his door to thank him.

That leaves Judge Dredd, and he's in the middle of a very good three-parter by John Wagner and Paul Marshall. It's called "To Die For" and deals with a serial-killing instructor robot at a medical college assembling a body for an elderly, crippled professor with whom it's fallen in love. The discovery of the various bodies is depicted with a little discretion, but the situation is grisly enough to give each of my kids the heebie-jeebies.

Next week: Better paper is ordered for Durham Red's return.

(Originally published 6/5/08 at LiveJournal.)

47. Invading the Oxford Union Society

March 1997: Megazine vol. 3 # 30 features the concluding episode of the Judge Dredd epic "Fetish" by John Smith and Siku. The third part ended with the surprise reappearance of Vatican agent Devlin Waugh after four years' absence from the pages of the Megazine. Waugh rapidly turns Dredd into a second banana in his own strip and turns a really good story into a great one. "Fetish" is included in the 2004 collection Swimming in Blood, which I highly suggest you check out. The other stories appearing in this issue are the second and final story for the Mega City-One disaster crew Holocaust 12 by Smith and Clint Langley, and the continuing adventure of the Soviet psychic The Inspectre by Jim Campbell, Kevin Walker and Andrew Currie, along with another episode of the 1990 "Necropolis" epic.

Meanwhile, as you see every spring, the charitable organization Comic Relief was doing its regular fundraising exercises. This year, one of the events was a debate held by the Oxford Union Society on the subject of "Do blondes have more fun?" Celebrity guests for the event included TV presenter Jo Guest and model Debee Ashby, whoever they are, along with 2000 AD characters Venus Bluegenes (played by Claire Smithies) and Durham Red (played by Luisa Morando). Their speeches on the subject were written by Dan Abnett, and were printed in progs 1042 and 1044. Since I'd like a little break from writing, here are some of the photos from the occasion which were printed in the comic.









Next week: Al's Baby! Henry Flint! Fewer pictures of cute girls! And more!

(Originally published 3/27/08 at LiveJournal.)

44. Fetishizing the Megazine

February 1997: Meanwhile, in the Megazine, editor David Bishop has found a sensible solution to reader complaints that there's too much reprint in their Meg. For five months, the comic was 52 pages, with 21 pages of reprints. Now, the magazine loses eight pages entirely, and the 44 page comic only contains 7 pages of reprints alongside three new stories. As I've mentioned before, there has had to be a great deal of trimming and rewriting to reformat episodes into configurations that change every few months. For example, both the final story for Janus: Psi Division and the first story for Holocaust 12 had their twelve-page episodes cut in half and run over twice as many issues as intended. But now comes a spectacular Judge Dredd adventure called "Fetish," and it's reworked in the opposite direction.

"Fetish," a moody epic which begins with four citizens murdered by a sorceror operating from somewhere in Africa, is scripted by John Smith and painted by Siku. It was planned, I believe, as seven 12-page episodes, but hammered by Bishop into five 17-page episodes. This actually works very well for the comic's lineup. Dredd is represented by a 17-page lead story and a 7-page backup feature (in this case, an episode of the 1990 Wagner/Ezquerra epic "Necropolis"), and the other strips, set elsewhere in Dredd's world and continuity, are Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and Marc Wigmore and The Inspectre by Kevin Walker, Jim Campbell and Charles Gillespie. So the comic may be a little thinner than it had been in 1996, but the lineup is nevertheless very strong.



You'll have to trust me on this, as the Megazine's current dimensions are a little larger than my scanner, but Siku's work on "Fetish" is simply excellent. He uses double-page spreads incredibly well, and occasionally divides the comic page into a series of vertical panels, rather than a number of tiers. The paper's certainly not good enough to show off his remarkable painting in the vivid colors he had in mind, but we certainly see his intent, and so I've increased the contrast a little on these scans. Mega City-One's purples and grays are contrasted sharply with the bright blues and oranges of Africa, and it looks fantastic. His pacing is really great, especially as he alternates his panel layout so effectively. Siku's anatomy is already causing a little trouble, however. His work is very stylized; above Dredd's shoulders you basically see a chin in a helmet. Siku will contribute regularly to Judge Dredd and to other series over the next seven years, and occasionally court controversy as his stylization gets a little crazy, but for now he's a solid contributor with a lot of promise.



Next time... Tharg comes back, and he's ticked off!

(Originally published 3/6/08 at LiveJournal.)

20. The Strange Case of the Missing Armitage

By the beginning of June 1995, volume 2 of the Megazine is winding down for its big relaunch to coincide with the Judge Dredd feature film. Similarly, the two companion reprint titles are closing down in favor of new FIRST ISSUE relaunches with new titles: The Best of 2000 AD Monthly, after 119 issues, becomes Classic 2000 AD, for instance. As 2000 AD itself is aiming more at older teens, a new, twice-monthly companion title called Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future is launched, targetting 8-12 year-olds. It's all part of the odd reality of magazine publishing in the mid-90s. Everything is controlled by marketing analysis and common sense loses out to people who spend all day writing memos about the viability of corporate synergy and redemographication in the advertising market.

2000 AD itself narrowly avoids being renumbered FIRST ISSUE along with the rest of the line; editor John Tomlinson pens a Thargnote in prog 943's output page dismissing the rumors that 949 would be the last under the old numbering, with 950 appearing instead as vol.2 # 1. This was indeed Fleetway's plan for a time, as David Bishop confirmed in in Thrill-Power Overload. I recall reading of that suggestion in the comic and being baffled that anybody would start such a bizarre rumor, little realizing that it had basis in fact.

The Megazine is burning away the last of some stockpiled stories during this period. These include the impenetrable mess that is Pandora by Jim Alexander and John Hicklenton and another installment of Si Spencer's anthology title Plagues of Necropolis. There's a black and white Dredd episode - actually the first monochrome Dredd in several years - by John Wagner and newcomer Tom Carney, and there's a Missionary Man one-off which my son thought was incredibly awesome, but I found Jon Beeston's artwork disagreeably lurid and gory, which is probably why he thought it was incredibly awesome.



The only shining light in this Meg, I'd say, is the other Dredd episode in the issue, "Whatever Happened to Bill Clinton?," which is the sequel to an episode from earlier in the spring. In this one, by Wagner and Siku, a mutant criminal named Heap Molinsky - what a great name! - has stolen some technology to do a mindswap through time with the president, and he immediately orders in some prostitutes and calls the generals to get the nukes ready.

It's fluff, of course, and the plot, such as it is, is only there to justify gags at Bill and Hillary's expense, but it's incredibly silly and very entertaining. And no, as I say all too often in this feature, it's not yet been collected. Hopefully before too long...

The genuinely bizarre thing about this issue is this note about what to expect in the following issue:



This Armitage two-parter never appears! It's the 2000 AD equivalent of Shade the Changing Man # 9 or those other DC Implosion books of the late 1970s. This would have been Kevin Cullen's last art job for the Megazine - he has a few one-shots coming to 2000 AD in the months to come - but the artwork actually goes missing, and, from what I understand, was never found.

That just about wraps it up for Armitage. The character, Dave Stone's take on a plainclothes detective in Brit-Cit, is next seen in a text story in a Judge Dredd Mega-Special, but doesn't appear in the comics again for five years. He gets a four month story and is passed over again for another three and a half years. Armitage was one of my favorites, but he's pretty much forgotten today.

In old business, I heard this week from former 2000 AD editor Alan McKenzie, who wrote to clarify that the "Sonny Steelgrave" pen-name was one shared by himself and John Tomlinson, and consequently, he shouldn't receive sole credit, or sole blame as the case may be, for the Steelgrave-penned Judge Dredd episodes. I revised the third and sixth entries of this series to note his corrections.

McKenzie also discussed his claim to the copyright of Luke Kirby, and I certainly hope, as always, that creators and publishers work out their differences to all parties' satisfaction. A periodic problem I run across when I've been researching Reprint This! are cases where rights issues are holding up certain series; it may make me look like a company man, or it may make me look even more selfish than I'd like, but really, the pipe dream I hold is to see a hell of a lot more stuff in print than what we have currently. This may come across as a frustrated "get over it and deal with each other" attitude, which might well rub a creator who feels that he has some legitimate grievances the wrong way.

Anyway, next week, we wrap up the pre-movie era, in what's certain to be a short installment, as befits the three-episode lifetime of Tracer.

(Originally published 9/6/07 at LiveJournal.)