May 2010: A month before this issue, prog 1685, was published, Nikolai Dante returned in a six-part story by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser that changed absolutely everything and in a big, mean, incredibly cruel way. Certainly, the Nikolai Dante series had never shied away from giving readers dramatic deaths along with huge changes in the direction of the stories, but "Heroes Be Damned" and its follow-up, "A Farewell to Arms" are on another level. You've got to go back more than 400 progs, to 2001's "Romanov Empire" to see such a stunning game-changer as this one. The really sad thing? The previous story, which finished in prog 1675, looked like it was concluding the whole dirty war business and finally bringing an end to the action-adventure story. Dante's army of thieves and whores had triumphed, and Vladimir's generals turned on him, forcing him into unconditional surrender. Abruptly and wildly, the war was over, and only the many loose ends remained. So "Heroes Be Damned" began in prog 1679 with the big imperial marriage of Viktor and Galya, and a huge, happy, state affair to give the unfortunate, war-beaten citizens of future Russia something to smile about at last. The first episode is an agreeably long eight pages, and finishes with Dante going out into the tide to meet Jena, and propose to her. She accepts, they embrace, and the really sad thing is we could've ended it right there, on that happy ending, but there was much more to come, very little of it at all happy.In episode two, Nikolai and Lulu debate what to do with Vlad. She's in favor of just killing him outright, but he and the rest of the allies who have a country and an empire to rule want to do so with a public show of grace and good will. In front of a huge crowd, they offer Vlad a chance at exile rather than a show trial, but Arkady steps forward and starts making decisions. Nikolai Dante reminds Arkady of his position: he has no status in the new provisional government and no say in these matters, but Arkady screws absolutely everything up: he reveals that he's Dimitri. All those years ago, when it looked like Dimitri had died and Arkady had been taken in as a ward of Vladimir, Dimitri had actually used his weapon crest and downloaded his consciousness into his son's body. All this time, he'd been masquerading as Arkady. Readers had known that something was up (most notably in "The Chaperone," progs 1560-64), but this revelation counts as one of 2000 AD's all-time greatest shock cliffhangers.
In episode three, after a short flashback depicting Arkady's death at the Winter Palace years previously, the carnage starts. Dimitri has lost his mind and indiscriminately begins killing. Dozens of bystanders and soldiers at the trial are killed, and hundreds more are grievously wounded, including Elena. Then, in parts four and five, the supporting cast begins to go down. Galya, Papa Yeltsin, and Jocasta are all killed, with Vladimir doing the right damn thing for once in his life and making a heroic attempt to save Jocasta's life.
Being a supporting player in Nikolai Dante means having a bullseye on your back from your first on panel appearance.
Nikolai recovers from the beating he suffered in part three to make a last-ditch effort to save Jena, who's Dimitri's new target, except that he intends not to murder her, but, in classic mustache-twirling bad guy fashion, to break her to his will and force her to wed him. Nikolai puts up a terrific fight and would have won had Dimitri not had a weapons crest, and, specifically, one that can override and shut down any of the others. The story ends with Dante's arm on fire...
"A Farewell to Arms" is a double-length episode that ranks as one of my favorites in the comic's long history. It's the saddest thing in the world. Dante is having a dream. It's a very vivid dream in which he spends a little swashbuckling time with his long-dead love Eloise, and with his hellraiser brother Andreas. He knows that it's not real, but what the hell, he's having a ball. And when he finds a beautiful woman in need of some dashing derring-do, he rushes to her rescue and kicks some bad guy ass, despite not being sure that he knows who she is.
Oh, my GOD. It is so sad. I'm tearing up just remembering it.
It's all history now, so we can talk about it without worrying about spoilers too much, but man alive, was I ever furious with one of my fellow readers who decided to start a message board thread about great 2000 AD deaths about two days after print subscribers got their copy and before the digital version was released.
The hallucination was the crest, giving Dante one last chance to spend a little "reality" with the people he cared about the most before talking to him "in person" for the first time and telling him goodbye. It is so goddamn amazingly horribly sad. It is like Toy Molto has been dead for hours sad. It is almost on the level of "Hazel, you've been feeling very tired" sad.
All of the deaths in Nikolai Dante meant something on some level, but seeing an end to this prickly, weird, disjointed relationship between Dante and his weapons crest after thirteen years of snark and exasperation and silliness is absolutely heartbreaking. When he wakes up in a battlefield hospital next to Elena some days later, surrounded, shockingly, by hundreds of badly wounded survivors, looks at his arm and sees only a blackened, scarred shape where the crest once was, it's like the headbutt after the gut punch. It's one of the rawest and most shocking things ever, and it leaves readers thunderstruck, wondering how in the world our hero can come back from this disaster.
Next time... Mega-City Justice. "Tour of Duty" comes to an end and it's completely phenomenal. See you in seven!
July 2008: As I create these articles, I often find myself overlooking Judge Dredd, planning in advance to highlight one of the other stories running. "The Edgar File," a major seven-part story by John Wagner and Patrick Goddard, however, demands everybody's attention. Even as Wagner has solidified his skills writing police procedurals and giving Dredd a meticulous and detailed approach to investigation, this one really is a standout. It makes you wish Rebellion would skip ahead in their Case Files to Volume 35 or whatever it will take to start getting big, complete collections of the modern series in print, so that those foolish non-scrots who still haven't caught on can have their minds more easily blown.
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?
December 2002: Veteran art droid Cliff Robinson gets cover duties for the first issue of the stunningly neat new look Megazine. A year and a half after its last successful format change, it has now settled into what must surely be the best incarnation yet, and since the Meg starts getting smaller a few years down the road, I think this is the very best version of the Meg. This being a special Christmas edition, it's a shade different from what will follow, but basically, it's 100 pages long and comes bagged with a supplement that reprints the classic 1980 serial Fiends of the Eastern Front by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra. With the reprint confined to the separate supplement, the Meg itself is mostly all-new material this time. A Devlin Waugh text adventure from an old Dredd Yearbook is dusted off, but everything else inside is new.
We're up to April 2002 now, and here on the cover of prog 1287, Nikolai Dante celebrates his recent Eagle Award win for best British comic character. This will prove to be artist Simon Fraser's farewell to the character that he co-created for the next four years. As Dante moves into his third phase, "the pirate years," it will be with John Burns as sole artist. Fraser, who will return to Dante in October 2006, is at this time residing in Africa. The series will take a number of very long rests during the third phase, especially during 2004 when writer Robbie Morrison will be engaged in writing The Authority for the Wildstorm imprint at DC Comics.
Prog 1261, published in September '01, sees the end of two of the current major storylines. Both the Dredd epic "Helter Skelter" and the second Durham Red serial, "The Vermin Stars," reach their final episodes. They're both completely overshadowed by the eye-popping events in Nikolai Dante, discussed last time, but the Durham Red story, with a spotlight cover by Ben Willsher, is memorable for the interesting way it seems to turn its back completely on the character. When Durham was resurrected by Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison a couple of years previously, it looked like she was set to be a regularly-featured character. Yet after that initial serial, there was a one-off episode, and then this lengthy layoff before this storyline, which ends with her supposed death and a poetic narrative epilogue which seals her fate, that even if she had survived the explosive events thousands of years in Earth's future, she was never heard from again. That was certainly a surprise to readers.
In August 2001, we come to prog 1257 and the welcome return of Ian Gibson to cover art duties. After their last appearance more than a year previously (covered here 
I'm afraid it's an abbreviated entry this week, but I did want to share a little about the run of Nikolai Dante that appeared in April 2001. Here's the cover of prog 1238 by Simon Fraser, who was mostly unavailable at the time to work on the series. (This is, in part, because he was living in Tanzania at the time. Fraser is profiled this week at 
September 2000: This very funny cover by Frazer Irving (his second for the prog) heralds the return of Nikolai Dante, in the third book of the "Tsar Wars" storyline. The episode inside is by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and while it's as wonderful as usual, it has had a troubled genesis. The events in this eight-part chunk of the narrative were intended to precede the eight-part chunk that ran in the summer, but deadline troubles forced editor Andy Diggle to rearrange the two stories. So the second chunk ended with Nikolai so unbelievably ticked off with the Makarovs, and Jena in particular, that he memorably cast off his mother's name of Dante, telling the armies his name is his father's: Nikolai Romanov. This really should have set the stage for things falling completely apart in the book's climax. Despite this continuity error, driven home in the second episode where Nikolai's use of the name "Dante" is underlined, the third-as-published story is nevertheless a fine one, with Simon Fraser's welcome return to the art duties, and a brilliant climax of its own in a few weeks' time.
Brian Bolland has cover duties for "Prog 2000," the first in what has become an annual series of year-end progs which mix one-off episodes of classic and recurring thrills with the first episodes of new storylines, new artwork by favorite creators, and a variety of text features. The 100-page prog is on sale for three weeks over Christmas and has become a holiday tradition. But in 1999, editor David Bishop and assistant editor Andy Diggle were not thinking about what would become a standard ten years on, but rather to do a spectacular once-in-a-lifetime issue. The lineup includes a pair of Judge Dredd tales, along with one-off episodes of ABC Warriors, Nikolai Dante, Rogue Trooper, Sinister Dexter and Slaine, along with the final episode of Nemesis the Warlock and the first episodes of new serials for the new thrill Glimmer Rats and, back in action after a nine year absence, Strontium Dog, about which more next time. It really does feel incredibly special, and everyone involved deserved congratulations for a job very well done.
As 1999 comes to an end, and all the big epic storylines from the last several weeks start wrapping things up, I see that I have been a little lax in mentioning the big developments in the two better-known semi-regular series from the period. I've mentioned in passing that there's a terrific epic going on in the pages of Nikolai Dante but haven't paused to let you know what it was. As of November 1999 (prog 1170, represented here by this funny Jason Brashill Devlin Waugh cover), our hero is about two-thirds of the way through the epic "Courtship of Jena Makarov" story. This brilliant story represents the close of the first of Dante's four storytelling phases, and was reprinted by Rebellion in the third Dante collection. Here, the mighty houses of Romanov and Makarov finally find an excuse to go to all-out war with each other, as Jena is abducted by a third party. Her supposed suitor Mikhail Deriabin plans to manouver himself into a position of power alongside whichever house wins the war. That it will decimate Russia is irrelevant to anybody involved; it never matters to the people with power. Not even family matters to them.
You'd never know it from Marc Wigmore's completely inappropriate artwork (below), but this issue of 2000 AD features the most harrowing, intense and ugly of all the Sinister Dexter stories. Like Wagner and his fellow writers do with Dredd, Dan Abnett uses Sinister Dexter's very flexible format to tell stories in a variety of styles, from melodrama to comedy, and the editors who've been in charge of the series almost always match just the right artist to the strip. Prog 1105 features the third episode of a remarkably bleak story called "Slay Per View," in which Ramone Dexter is suffering horrible nightmares where he is stalking and murdering women, who are found dead the next day at the hands of a serial killer. Convinced that he is acting out these murders while asleep, Dex elects to kill himself, and the second episode ends with a breathtaking cliffhanger: Dex putting a revolver in his mouth.
It's sort of male nature, I suppose, to create best-of lists, or arrange things into definitive orders of favorites. Women tend not to do this. I suppose Pat Mills might consider this as more evidence for the male=order, female=chaos theory. But oddly, I never really thought about who my favorite artists were until about three years ago. As you do, I was filling out a profile on a singles site and was asked who my three favorite artists were. Well, with all due respect to people who are hung in galleries, my mind was on comics and went straight to 2000 AD, and there wasn't any hesitation. My three favorite artists are Carlos Ezquerra, Simon Fraser and Ian Gibson.
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.
March 1997: In the real world, the first of the two best things to ever happen, the Hipster Son's birth, is just a few weeks away. I was still living in that awesome little duplex on Park Ridge Drive in Athens, and that neighborhood didn't yet look like the end of the world, with all the grass killed under the weight of the sixteen Chevrolets parked in every single yard. In Britain, John Major is still prime minister, though the inevitable victory of Tony Blair and the Labour Party is about six weeks away. I was still crazy about trading VHS tapes of every show under the sun then, and had a British friend and contact who suggested that the Hipster Son, who was premature, couldn't wait until the 1997 General Election to be born, he just insisted on being around long enough to see the Conservatives lose. Then my boy had his first heart attack, aged three weeks. Heady times. So between birthing babies and an unbelievable health scare, having half my online friends so utterly jubilant about politics that it kept me captivated, and then dealing with some horrifying financial issues that we experienced at the time, 2000 AD was really low on the priority list. This was worsened because, for the last time (we hope), Diamond missed another run of several issues, and progs 1033-1036 never made it to my local comic shop.
