171. ABC Fumetti

January 2007: Good grief, didn't I just write about "The Volgan War"...? Well, it was March. Close enough. Anyway, one of the big new launches in the annual 100-page prog had been a major new ABC Warriors adventure. It's a huge 288-page epic told across four chunks of story, and although I recall that events in the third segment got a little confusing, overall it is one of writer Pat Mills' biggest triumphs. If "The Shadow Warriors" had seen Mills flexing his muscles and finally doing right by these characters after many years of subpar adventures, then this is where he raises the game.

From here, I'm going to cannibalize from an earlier review that I wrote, because I can do that sort of thing. Since Mills found success working in the French comic industry, which is based around annual "album" releases of a 64- or 80-page story, or, if you will, a yearly episode of a much larger story, he's exported the form to 2000 AD, which programs strips in weekly six-page installments. Mills' annual story is further subdivided into, say, ten or so weekly episodes.

Working in this format, Mills is able to tell incredibly long stories across several years, and Rebellion, the publisher of 2000 AD, has two prospective revenue streams for the reprints. Working in conjunction with artist Clint Langley, Mills first used the experiment to craft six 48-page episodes of Slaine. These were paired together and reprinted in three large, oversized, but thin hardbacks with an eye on the European market, where this sort of material could safely be expected to sell by the bucketload in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these countries, the hardback "album" has long been the default format for the comic medium, much in the way that monthly "floppy" superhero funnybooks from Marvel and DC are the default in the United States.

Mills and Langley's next project was "The Volgan War," and it appeared as four annual stories from 2007-2010. In it, the characters reminisce about their original days of combat before uniting, only to find some common threads in their stories, including the strange, classified appearances of a top-secret special forces flamethrower robot. As the series unfolds - and it sags a bit in the third chunk before roaring to a colossal, incredible finish - the events of the old Volgan War come back to haunt the Warriors on Mars in very unexpected ways, leaving the team permanently fragmented and new, dangerous bad guys waiting for them.

Overall, I think it's a masterpiece, and easily the best Warriors adventure since 1988's classic "Black Hole," even with some of the head-scratching events of the third volume. It works extremely well in hardback form as well. Following the precedent of the oversized Slaine books assembled with Europe in mind, Rebellion collected the four 72-page stories, beefed them up with some additional artwork by Langley and some extra design work, and released a quartet of 96-page hardbacks, where the material shined even brighter.

But I was telling you about this first quarter of the story. Well, it begins with the Warriors committing their demented member Mek-Quake to an asylum on Mars, not knowing that the place is effectively a recruiting center for violent, combat-ready machines looking for a new boss. Hammerstein, square as ever, is reminded of how he was sometimes forced to abandon his "boys" in combat in 22nd Century Europe. Langley has a ball with the scenes of robot combat and mecha-carnage. At one point, we meet giant robot mecha-Stalins called Uncle Joes, and they're revealed in a turn-the-comic-the-other-way double-page spread that serves as one tall, vertical panel. It's a deliberate callback to similar introductions of giant robots in the original series (Mad George, in prog 138) and in Book Three of Nemesis the Warlock (the giant Torque-Armada in prog 340-something).

After Hammerstein's story, and his introduction to the flamethrowing secret agent Zippo, Mongrol reports that he met Zippo just before the paratrooping accident that destroyed his original body. His tale, told across three issues, is actually an expansion of the character's first appearance, only with Lara, the cute young girl who rebuilt him, reimagined considerably from Mike McMahon's notion! McMahon's depiction of Lara in a nightdress, secretly rebuilding a robot in the dead of night, evoked candlelit, stormy potboilers, old-fashioned thrillers, and, of course, Frankenstein. Langley's Lara is a Suicide Girl. But this sequence is still amazing, just for how well Mills expanded those original four pages into something with more weight. Reading it, old fans are sure to recognize various lines and snatches of dialogue, and wonder how on earth Mills managed to stick so much information into the original comic in the first place.

And then there's Joe Pineapples' story, which is definitely one for people who like Mills best when anything goes. Working behind the Volgan lines in old Moscow and tasked to assassinate the enemy super-robot Volkhan, Joe has smuggled just enough innocuous parts in his own chassis that he can kill a civilian taxi driver robot and, using chunks of it and its GPS, pull off another of his absurd, impossible shots. Astonishingly, it's one of those very rare moments where Joe doesn't get a clean kill, and leaving town also requires Zippo's assistance. This volume of the story ends with Mek-Quake in considerable danger, and our heroes wondering whatever happened to Zippo, and some of those plot threads get picked up when it resumes in August.

While The ABC Warriors and its stablemates Kingdom and Stickleback (which I talked about last week) were getting all the attention, Rob Williams' Low Life also surfaced for a short four-week story, its only appearance in 2007. Again drawn by Simon Coleby - this would be his last work on the series to date - it is the second time that a four-part comedy has spotlighted Dirty Frank. This time out, he's teamed with another undercover Wally Squad operative, Eric Coil. This poor fellow had been infected by a mutating plot contrivance in the Cursed Earth - we'll call it "The Jim Kidd Effect" - and returned to Mega-City One with his brain intact and his body de-aged to a baby's.

It's just Coil's luck that the Wally Squad occasionally has need of somebody who can pose as a baby, like... well... actually, I'm pretty sure that this has never, ever happened before. "Baby Talk" is a definite brain-in-neutral story, just there for the laughs, which is a really good thing, because everything else in the prog at this time is either ultra-serious or tragic. In Kingdom, Gene's entire pack is dead, and in Stickleback, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey's wife and children have been killed in a house fire, so thank heaven there's something light and uncomplicated to follow. Even Judge Dredd has found the ugly beginnings of Mega-City One too much of a pain in the rear to continue unabated, and so it's taking a nine-week break from the story to run some shorter episodes, although that's probably more to do with that story's artist Carlos Ezquerra taking a long weekend and a good stretch than it is Tharg giving us a merciful break from the relentless and the grim.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Low Life: Mega-City Undercover (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Speaking of a merciful break, Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take June off, during which time I've got four 2000 AD features lined up for my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf. See you in July for a look back at the actual issue that started this blog going in 2007, and a new eight-week run of your most favoritest blog ever. Credo!

167. Dredd Rides Into History

September 2006: Scheduling this good just can't be accidental. "Origins," a major Dredd epic that will run for 23 episodes, continuing - with a nine-week break after part 16 - until prog 1535 in May of '07, launches in this issue after nine months of hints and teases. It's got a cover by Brian Bolland, which means you know Tharg's taking this epic seriously. This classic-model droid is only brought back into service for the important things. Bolland's cover pays tribute to two important personal losses, who are given tribute names on the city blocks behind the judges. Longtime letterer Tom Frame, a friend to many who've worked on the Galaxy's Greatest, is given front-and-center treatment on the Mega-City One skyline, with former Pink Floyd vocalist Syd Barrett named on a tower behind him.

There's nothing unsatisfying about the opening episode of "Origins," but it does have that feeling of slow burn about it. Readers can tell that this is an epic that will unfold gradually, and that the hints that there is much more to Dredd's - and the city's - past than we've been told is going to keep everybody hooked while the story shakes out. In other words, this isn't a story that's going to knock anybody out in episode one in prog 1505. No, for that, there's "Cal Hamilton" and Simon Coleby, doing a Dead Man twist in episode six of Malone.

I did vow, some chapters previously, that this blog was done with Sinister Dexter, but Malone deserves a little more comment, because it's just so audacious and so unexpected and so incredibly successful. This is a remarkable fake-out, where it looks like we're following an amnesiac, well-dressed man on some future frontier planet in a noir thriller. The story had seemed a little lost and nondescript among all the wild business around it, especially Dredd, which was probably the plan all along. Amazingly, it is exactly the same twist, told exactly the same way, as The Dead Man. The writer is hiding under a pseudonym, the artist is an established talent not known for or identified with the original subject, and at the end of the penultimate episode, we learn that the protagonist is an established character from another series who has lost his memory. In prog 660, "Keef Ripley" (John Wagner) and John Ridgway showed us that the Dead Man was Judge Dredd, and this time out, "Hamilton" (Dan Abnett) and Coleby revealed that Malone was Finnigan Sinister, who vanished from Downlode one year previously, wiped his memories and had face-change surgery to avoid detection by the police or hitmen working for the crime lord Appelido. The event was hailed from the rooftops as a resounding triumph from every quarter.

Well, I say exactly, but not quite. The big difference between the two twists is that The Dead Man led into one of Dredd's most memorable and amazing adventures, "Necropolis," and Malone led into five years of slow-paced, irregularly-scheduled and incredibly frustrating and unsatisfying stories. And on that note, back to Dredd.

Like "Necropolis," "Origins" was preceded by five weeks of tone-setting episodes. In a story called "The Connection" by Wagner and Kev Walker, Dredd hunts down a pair of mutants - or is it a trio? - who successfully enter the city in order to get a mysterious box into the hands of the judges at a critical moment. Walker illustrates the story with the same moody, dark tone that he had mastered on some earlier Dredd adventures, principally the celebrated "Mandroid." There is some remarkably interesting foreshadowing, as Dredd dreams of conversations with Eustace Fargo. Decades previously, he had been the first chief judge. Dredd and his clone "brothers" had been grown from Fargo's cells, but there had always been confusion as to when this history unfolded. A fan, Robin Low, is given a "special thanks" credit on "Origins" for tracking down all of these very old, throwaway references to the past in such earlier adventures as "The Cursed Earth," "Dredd Angel" and "Oz," and coming up with an actual timeline to put Fargo's life, the emergence and establishment of the judges, and Dredd's rookie days, into an actual, linear sequence for the first time.

"The Connection" ends with the two - or is it three? - mutants dead and that box missing. Dredd, eternally unsatisfied, figures that he'll never know what the heck all this pointless running around and shooting was for and gets back to patrol duty. Unknown to him, a kid, paid fifty creds to deliver the damn box, slowly makes his way to the Grand Hall of Justice. He's silent, the box under his arm. Wagner and Walker have put an awesome, imposing weight around the proceedings. Without a word or a sound effect or a narrative caption, the weight of the final panel is impossibly ominous. This boy is going to change everything. He does. He doesn't even get a name, but all of the astonishing, world-shaking changes that have come to Dredd's world in the last six years all come from this kid.

"Origins" sets up the mutant referendum, which sets up the mutants in Mega-City One stories of 2008, which sets up "Tour of Duty" in 2009-2010, which sets up the currently-running "Day of Chaos" spectacle. I don't even know if "epic" is a big enough word to describe or explain "Day of Chaos." The unimpeachable fact of the matter is that Judge Dredd has spent the last six years being the best comic being published anywhere. It has always been great, well, mostly, but for the last several years, the only comic that I have seen that has been as good as Dredd has been Jaime Hernandez's "Love Bunglers." It's an ongoing, incredibly dense set of game-changing, daring storylines that upend the status quo and destroy reader expectations. I know that I'm preaching to the converted when I say this here at Thrillpowered Thursday, but maybe the word will get out. Nobody, in any genre, is telling continuing adventure drama in the comic medium with half the impact or success of John Wagner in Judge Dredd for the last six years. If you think that you like comics, then the collected edition of "Origins" should be on your shelf, and that's just the start. Period.

So what's in the box? Tissue from Eustace Fargo. Tissue from a living subject. This is hardly the first time that Dredd's gone into the Cursed Earth on a quest for some McGuffin or other, leading him into episodic encounters with strange settlements and ugly situations - see also "The Cursed Earth," "The Judge Child" and "The Hunting Party" - but the stakes have never been so high, nor have readers been so invested. "Origins" begins quite surprisingly slowly, with the first few episodes establishing the ugly reality of life in the wild for mutants, before the second chunk of the story finds a novel way to introduce this never-revealed backstory of Fargo and the introduction of police-with-judging powers to the city streets in the early 21st Century.

The story continues, winding its way through flashbacks and following the demands of the mysterious antagonists who seem to have Fargo's body. Along the way, readers learn a lot more than we ever knew and meet a very, very old enemy again. I'm still not entirely convinced that "Origins" is really the best kind of "new readers start here!" story that some think that it might be - I think that it just relies a little too heavily on continuity that longtime readers take for granted - but it is absolutely a triumph, and it is always a huge pleasure to reread, with a hell of an ending. If you're among the few reading this who have not read "Origins" before, then you definitely need to, and if you already know it, then it is absolutely worth a revisit.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Stone Island: The Complete Stone Island (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar (Volume Seven, 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, there's an equally important event playing out for Dredd in the Megazine as we meet Cadet Beeny! See you in seven!

163. Hitmen and Her

April 2006: That Tharg, always on top of Earth's latest trends, gives us a very silly cover blurb to herald the return of undercover judge Aimee Nixon and the rest of the Low Life gang. Aimee, seen here in all her nose-broken ugliness, is drawn by Steve Roberts. The tag line, "The Hitmen and Her," refers to a popular late-night dance music show that had been canceled fourteen years previously. The Hit Man and Her ran from 1988-92 and was hosted by Pete Waterman, one-third of that production trio that spent the late 1980s making all of Bananarama's records sound like all of Rick Astley's and Kylie Minogue's records. Thanks to "radiator" from the 2000 AD message boards for making the connection; I think I was probably not in the mood, after hearing how Waterman and his colleagues ruined Wow! in '87, to really care what the hell he was hosting on late night British TV. Well, okay, I like "I Heard a Rumour," but that was not at all a good album.

Anyway, so the current Low Life story, "Con Artist," is written by Rob Williams and drawn by Simon Coleby, and we get Tharg's obscure and terrible pun from the setting. It's held at an underground convention of hitmen in Mega-City One. After the comedy detour of 2005's "Rock and a Hard Place," which gave the popular supporting character Dirty Frank the lead role for the first time, this is back to serious business with Aimee in charge. It's a moody melodrama, and the tone is established by Coleby's art. Here, everything appears in a wash of gray.

I probably appreciate Coleby's art a lot less than anybody else reading this does. He has proven to be very popular among 2000 AD's fans, but you can't please everybody, and his work leaves me cold. I really didn't like it at all on "Rock and a Hard Place," and 2007's "Baby Talk," another comedy story with Dirty Frank in the lead, aggravated me even more. Here, though, it makes a much better match for what Williams is writing. At this stage of the series, Low Life is a serious drama about Aimee that occasionally takes detours into broad comedy and gives a different character the lead. It's a noir strip where nobody can be trusted and the lead character is haunted by violence.



Solid lines and psychedelic details, as seen to wild effect throughout the first thirteen episodes of Low Life when Henry Flint was drawing it, are not what the strip necessarily needs, and while I personally don't enjoy Coleby's work, I'm very impressed by how well he serves the story. I appreciate it, and praise it, on a technical level, but not an emotional one.

Overall, I was honestly not enjoying Low Life very much at this stage. The shift in tone as the stories switched between the two leads did not work for me. In 2009, when D'Israeli becomes the series' artist, Williams finds a new approach, putting Dirty Frank and his blinkered, damaged and occasionally hilarious psyche in charge of dramatically important and emotionally engaging cases, and the result is pure magic. The annual Low Life story of the past three years has been one of the comic's greatest successes, and it's honestly fascinating to see how this series has evolved.

However, detailing a series with qualifiers about it being technically or archaeologically interesting really is damning with faint praise. The honest fact is that I just don't like the Coleby period of Low Life and have trouble figuring out what the heck the artist is trying to draw in some shots. No, it's much more satisfying to talk about something wild and fun like Si Spurrier and Carl Critchlow's Lobster Random.



"The Agony and the Ecstacy" is the third Lobster Random adventure and it is possibly my favorite of all of them. It's terrific. Rebellion seriously needs to collect the first three stories in a book as soon as possible, because it's just a hilarious and constantly inventive series. This time out, the story opens with Lob having formed a criminal partnership with Mrs. Redd, the brain-in-a-robot from the previous story. They are happily bilking old rich dudes just after she's married them when another, much weirder gang of criminals intervenes. Their partnership severed, Lob attempts to hook up with the gang and give them a taste of what a big swindle feels like. While Lob was not responsible for Mrs. Redd's fate, she built a contingency plan into her robot body, expecting Lob to double-cross her. So he does not know that a signal has been sent to those two big and mean bounty hunters, Pinn and Hogg, from the previous story, and as soon as things get their worst, they'll be showing up.

This story has everything. I've mentioned before that one reason I love this series is that it's set in a world where the wildest and most imaginative sci-fi ideas are just thrown around casually, without any ponderous buildup or explanation. It's like being seven years old and seeing the Tattooine cantina from Star Wars for the first time and thinking "Lookit all dose ALIENS!" It's really like Si Spurrier built a cast of characters from weird, castoff parts from an old toybox. This time out, there's a sentient spray of graffiti and a sentient zoot suit among all of the other crazy-looking people. Among them is a guy with a video camera for a head. And then there's the kingpin behind the scenes.

If you've not read this before, then anybody who spoils this kingpin guy for you has done you a genuinely criminal offense. The cliffhanger where he's revealed is, flatly, one of 2000 AD's all-time finest. Top ten, easy. The shock of seeing this guy, and the casual, ridiculous one-liner that he delivers, is pure genius. With only five or six pages an episode, it can be an indulgence to use a full-page splash cliffhanger in 2000 AD, which is why creators use it very, very sporadically. It's a tool that Tharg's droids only pull out for once-in-a-lifetime reveals like this. The character is actually very clever, as well as a design tour-de-force. He's a conjoined twin, which leaves Lob baffled, because why, he asks, should anybody in this fantastic a future suffer through that. It actually gives him a remarkable tactical advantage over Lob, who is, for once, absolutely stumped as to how he'll get the better of his enemy.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Low Life: Mega-City Undercover (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, well, that'll be in March after a little break. This wraps up Thrillpowered Thursday's latest "season," but we'll be back in a few weeks' time with an amazingly off-model Dredd in South America, and an egregious misuse of the Comic Sans font. Until then, take care of yourself!

92. The Last of the Great Thrillpower Overloads?

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.

December 2000: So one year after the first, splendid hundred-page year-end prog, Tharg goes to town on a really wonderful follow-up, just cracking with excellent stories. Most of these are one-off adventures from the semi-regular series, but this issue also includes the debut episodes of two series which would be continuing in January: Necronauts by Gordon Rennie and the third series of Button Man by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson. In my opinion, the hundred pagers have not been as strong in recent years as when Tharg first began programming them, reaching their low point with the not-particularly-special "Prog 2008." Over time, this special prog has evolved into simply the comic where the first episodes of the January series begin, and it's often built around little more than double-length debut episodes and a comedy Sinister Dexter one-off. That's not to say that the hundred-pagers are ever at all bad, but compared to how packed and amazing this particular issue is, just about everything looks a little poor in comparison.

In "Prog 2001," apart from the two debut episodes mentioned above, the current crop of thrills is well-represented by one-off stories for Judge Dredd (by Wagner and Cam Kennedy), Strontium Dog (Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra), Nikolai Dante (Robbie Morrison and John Burns) and Sinister Dexter (Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke). In addition, and this is what helps make this issue so memorable, there are one-offs for a pair of much older series which have not been seen in quite some time: Zenith by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, and Bad Company by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. Plus there's "The Great Thrillpower Overload," the first in-jokey Tharg the Mighty strip since the Vector 13 editorial period came to an ignominious end; it's by Andy Diggle and Henry Flint and features goofball little cameos from a whole gaggle of 2000 AD characters, from Mean Machine Angel to the Lord Weird Slough Feg.



Each of the stories in this issue is really entertaining, without a misfire anywhere. It's a well-designed, gorgeous collection with a glossy cover, self-contained enough to be a satisfying read on its own, and with just enough loose ends to encourage readers to try out the next issue. Honestly, neither the Zenith nor the Bad Company stories are quite as good as the excellent material from their memorable late eighties heyday, but they are both pretty interesting. The Bad Company tale sets up a new situation for Kano that would be explored in a six-part series that would appear in about a year's time, while Zenith's tale is a wild epilogue to that character's superhero adventures. It starts with a pop starlet, later revealed to be Britney Spears, phoning the police to report she's been assaulted, and before it's done, we learn that Tony Blair is nothing more than Peter St. John's puppet, that the pocket universe where Zenith and St. John's enemies have been imprisoned has achieved sentience, and that Mad Mental Robot Archie is just all kinds of disturbed.

For those of us who enjoy combing through Morrison's works looking for nascent versions of themes he would later revisit, the idea of a "little" universe gaining sentience and wishing to interact with our own would see further exploration in his DC maxiseries Seven Soldiers in 2005-06. The Zenith episode would prove to be Grant Morrison's last contribution to 2000 AD to date. Within a few months' time, Titan Books would once again obtain the license to make new 2000 AD collected editions, and planned a new Zenith book. It was solicited in the August 2001 Previews, but was never released to stores, as the printing of the volume actually set up the current legal impasse over the character's ownership, and has also prevented any potential new work by Morrison for Rebellion.

In other news, I ordered one of the recentish 2000 AD trade collections which Diamond should have sent to my shop in the spring of 2008. They didn't, and a reorder also fumbled, claiming that it was no longer available, so I finally broke down and ordered Mega-City Undercover from Amazon UK. It's a very good book, and I'm glad I finally own it, but it must be said that this is a peculiar little collection by Rebellion's standards. It's effectively the first volume of Rob Williams' Low Life, a Dreddworld series about a pair of undercover judges which began in 2004's prog 1387. However, the book actually begins with the five episodes of Lenny Zero, a similar series by Andy Diggle and Jock which first appeared in the Megazine in 2000-2002, and which was prematurely curtailed when the creators signed exclusive contracts with DC Comics.

Despite the nice attraction of having all of Lenny Zero's appearances in one place, it is certainly Low Life which is the selling point of the book. This has been one of the more successful of the recent semiregular series. At the time I'm writing this, the eighth Low Life story, "Creation," is currently running in the prog. The first six of them, totalling 29 episodes, appear in this book.

One thing that makes Low Life so interesting is that it's a "dual-lead" strip. Some of the stories focus on the passionate, liberal Judge Aimee Nixon, and others on the very deep-cover, hopelessly insane Dirty Frank, who somehow manages to work as an effective judge despite having lost his mind some years previously. Usually, the Nixon stories tend to take a more serious approach, while Dirty Frank's are played with a much lighter tone. The characters were created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint, who drew the first 13 episodes in the book. The remaining episodes were drawn by Simon Coleby and first appeared in 2005-07.

Since I'm just now finishing the year 2000 in my reread and would prefer to read these stories in their original context when I reach that period in a few months' time, I only gave the Mega-City Undercover book a brief scan to confirm the quality and contents. The reproduction is fantastic and it includes introductory pages by Diggle and Williams as well as a nice new cover by Jock. After an initial moment of eyebrow-furrowing over Rebellion's choice to use an umbrella approach to collect the stories, I decided I actually prefer this format to issuing a Low Life-only book. Certainly with only one new story a year, it will be some time before we ever see a second collection, but who knows, perhaps Diggle and Jock will return to Lenny Zero before too much longer and future tales of that ne'er-do-well can also be included.

Speaking of "collections which Diamond should have sent to my shop," the distributor is claiming that we can expect to see both Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files volume 12 and Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein in US stores this week. If that's the case, there should be some serious thrill-circuit overload coming my way and you'll hear about it soon. On the other hand, Diamond has yet to provide the previously-announced first volumes of Kingdom and Shakara, which we should've seen in February. What's going on, Memphis?!

Next time, more details about this mysterious Necronauts strip I mentioned in passing above. What strange secrets link Charles Fort and Harry Houdini?

30. Everybody Just Wants to Have Guns

It's January 1996, and we're coming down to the very end of John Tomlinson's tenure. The handoff to David Bishop has already come, but it has not been announced in the prog yet, and I've got something else to look at in the next installment, so this is a good point to stop and re-evaluate. Conventional wisdom suggests that Bishop was the one who turned 2000 AD around from the early 1990s pre-movie doldrums, but this prog suggests that things were already moving in the right direction. The lineup this time is the continuing story of Judge Dredd in "The Pit" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra - clearly the best thing going in the comic - with reasonable support provided by four other thrills, none of which are really bad, even if they've been mostly forgotten over time. These are Venus Bluegenes, a spinoff from Rogue Trooper by Dan Abnett and Simon Coleby, Flesh, by Abnett, Steve White and Gary Erskine, Kid CyBorg by "Kek-W" (Nigel Long) and Jim McCarthy, and Darkness Visible by Nick Abadzis and John Ridgway.

Of the strips, Kid CyBorg is very much the weak link, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, Jim McCarthy's art really fails the material, and looks so unappealing that it's no wonder readers gave it the thumbs-down. McCarthy had been associated with unpopular strips throughout the early 90s, including Bix Barton (which I liked) and The Grudge-Father (which nobody did), and so I imagine people just tuned this one out completely. It also simply looks as though the printers fumbled the ball with it, like his coloring choices just got swallowed by the paper, and so while Kid CyBorg's art is actually streets ahead of his other work, the strip looks flat, unfocussed and, when weighed against Ezquerra, Ridgway and Erskine in the same comic, decidedly amateurish. Long' s script is pretty good, and I was surprised to learn that all the elements are there for a memorable, classic 2000 AD character, but with art this ugly, nobody wanted to read it in the first place, let alone see the kid again.


This isn't poor scanning; it looks this muddy on paper, too.

Flesh was created by Pat Mills and was one of the original 2000 AD series. This is a seven-part story called "Chronocide," and sees the put-upon hero of the original run, Earl Regan, conscripted back to work for the Trans-Time Corporation. (Regan only appeared in Flesh Book One. That book's villain, Claw Carver, reappeared in 1978's Book Two. Flesh was rested until prog 800, when Pat Mills resurrected the concept with none of the original characters in "The Legend of Shamana.") Interestingly, "Chronocide" takes place in two time periods - Regan is dealing with one group of terrorists 80 million years ago and other characters are fighting the same gang in the Cenozoic. It's a solid story, with fine artwork. Incidentally, Gary Erskine's the new artist for Virgin's seven-part Dan Dare comic, which'll be in stores soon.

Nick Abadzis's Darkness Visible also features a character who might have returned had Bishop commissioned another series. This was a five-part story about a PI named Alec Perry, whose missing persons investigation has him crossing paths with a really dangerous cult. It's a scenario that would have played equally well in DC's Hellblazer, and Abadzis's script does a good job making readers care about the character and keeping us guessing where the plot would go. Abadzis didn't have a very long 2000 AD career - he did have some Vector 13 episodes in 1996, but no other series - but he resurfaced earlier this year with the critically acclaimed graphic novel Laika. The art is very, very good. It's always nice to see John Ridgway in the prog.



And then there's Venus Bluegenes, who gets off to as okay a start as a Rogue Trooper spinoff can. But you know, that's not a terrible lineup of heroes. Venus and Earl Regan pre-existed this run, but these stories are treated as effectively pilots for the characters. 2000 AD works best when its recurring series spotlight a heroic character - even an anti-hero like Nemesis - on some kind of ongoing storyline. I think you see this in Tomlinson's later Tor Cyan series; the editor clearly knew what sort of ongoing series 2000 AD needed and commissioned the right kinds of strips during his short tenure. Clearly none of them succeeded, but they're a huge step in the right direction. David Bishop would inherit a couple more of these strips, including R.A.M. Raiders, which runs in the spring of '96, and Sinister Dexter, which would prove to be Tomlinson's most lasting commission to the comic.

Sinister Dexter will take the spotlight next time, but that won't be for another three weeks. As I've mentioned, I'm sharing the reread with my son, and he's going to spend a long Thanksgiving holiday with his mother in Kentucky. Normal service will resume in December!

(Originally published 11/15/07 at LiveJournal.)