135. Whenever I see the word "Valkyrie," I hear Steve Winwood singing "Valerie."

February 2004: I guess that this week's entry really is proof that I'm not the same gleefully malevolent critic that I was in the early '90s, writing for the university newspaper. Once upon a time, the prospect of writing an epic, pages-long takedown of a series as misbegotten and brainless as Valkyries would have been something to look forward to, but now it's just depressing and tedious. Life is too short to waste even reading garbage like this, let alone writing about the experience. The cover art pictured here is by Frazer Irving and it is, by leagues, the best thing about the series, about which the most interesting thing I can impart is that it is the worst 2000 AD series of the past ten years, and the only one about which I can't find a single redeeming thing to say. There have been other great big steaming disappointments in the prog over the last ten years - Bison, Detonator X and the second series of The Ten-Seconders come to mind - but only Valkyries stands up as a complete waste of paper, time and talent. It really does rank down there with the worst of the early '90s misfires. Think Wire Heads bad.

Okay, so it's the last series created for the comic by Steve Moore, and it's illustrated by American artist John Lucas. It reminds me of the old story of how Michael Fleisher was once headhunted by 2000 AD on the strength of his 1970s work on The Spectre and Jonah Hex, thinking him a good fit. I suspect that Lucas, who once did a really good frame story for a special issue of Starman, one of my favorite American comics of the '90s, might have been sought out on the strength of his work on the last three issues of Codename: Knockout, a Vertigo clone of the popular Danger Girl series. He's a really good artist, and based on what Tharg saw in Codename: Knockout, he seemed like a good choice for a series about sexy space babes romping around to save the universe from some humongous new threat. Lucas can draw sexy ladies...



...unfortunately, for this series, he chose to draw incredibly ugly ones.

I don't know what the hell happened here, but basically, in a series that was crying out for Frank Cho or J. Scott Campbell to draw it, we got somebody who wanted to draw characters with all the lumpy sex appeal of cardboard boxes, and half the curves. Not that Cho or Campbell could polish this script very much, as it's basically regurgitated plot beats from the failed Rose O'Rion series and the first run of Synnamon (which had only finished about ten weeks previously!), with comedy anal probes and sex-crazed berserker men thrown in for good measure, but at least they'd have made it easy on the eyes.

That is far more than anybody needs to say about Valkyries. I feel sorry for David Page when he gets to it in his prog slog.

Oh, yeah! David's doing the prog slog now! That's the big news in 2000 AD fandom this week. Paul Rainey, who kickstarted the whole "blog about your collection" deal with his 2000 AD Prog Slog Blog in 2006, inspiring the Thrillpowered Thursday that you've been reading, has finally reached the end of the 1188 issues that he bought from somebody on eBay and has brought his enterprise to an agreeable end. But reg'lar commenter and all-around great guy David "Monarch" Page hasn't wanted the story to end there, so he's carrying on over at his own blog, Dead'll Do. This certainly gives me the impetus to keep writing and not rest on my laurels, despite periodic, necessary recharge breaks - a short one's coming up in June - because the Monarch's fewer than 200 issues behind me, and it simply wouldn't do for him to catch me.

Speaking of which, next time, it's back to the good stuff, as The Red Seas wraps up its second adventure and we meet another member of Dredd's family. See you in seven!

104. Saying Hello

It's certainly fair to suggest that this little blog of mine does more than a fair share of cheerleading. As a loyal Squaxx dek Thargo, I genuinely believe that 2000 AD is the Galaxy's Greatest Comic. But that's not to suggest that I think it's perfect. Even in the midst of the magazine's great return to hyperquality over the last eleven years or so, there have been periodic hiccups in the quality of the series within its covers, and weeks of turgid pacing where none of the creators on its pages seems to be firing on all cylinders. The last quarter of 2001 is one of those dull periods, when only Judge Dredd seems to be flying the flag high. During the last few months of 2001, Dredd is sharing space with a number of space-filling one-off Future Shocks, some wildly inconsistent Sinister Dexter shorts, and two absolute dogs which ramp up the boredom circuits for ten weeks: Steve Moore and Staz Johnson's Killer and a well-meaning mess of an Anderson: Psi Division case by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson. That's Killer spotlighted on the cover of prog 1266 (Oct. 2001), and I think it's a nice, moody piece by Jock.

Since returning to 2000 AD in 1999, Steve Moore contributed one misfire after another, and Killer, or "Filler" as fans quickly tagged it, was the dullest yet. It's another case of what I've hinted at in other entries about this period. The serial is all plot and no character. The lead character is called Madoc Blade (really), and he's a former gladiator in a far-future, alien-packed world where death is around every corner and nobody likes squishy, fleshy humans. It's almost as though, reflecting upon how many fans complained that his earlier Red Fang was too confusing, with too many twists and turns and subplots, Moore responded by scripting something that would have fit right in a 1981 prog during a short break from Return to Armageddon or something.

Actually, Moore does one very weird trick in Killer that's worth mentioning, just because it's so strange. Episodes two and three consist of a lengthy flashback in which Madoc, retired from the arena and drinking himself to death, is uncovered and is telling the story of his ugly past as a fight-or-die slave to his new benefactor. The cliffhanger comes right in the middle of his story. In the flashback. Fifteen years previously, a weirdo alien judge sentences him to death by combat, and the climax becomes "How did Madoc get out of this?" I honestly can't recall another example of a cliffhanger flashback, and with good reason. Well, at least Johnson's art, inked beautifully by David Roach, is very nice, and he came up with some appropriately weird alien thugs and monsters.



Likewise, Arthur Ranson's artwork on the Judge Anderson ten-parter "R*Evolution" is really wonderful. He devised some terrific imagery for the scenes in which Anderson goes onto the psychic plane to investigate the super-rich magnate Vernon D'Arque, a former Mega-citizen who now lives on an asteroid somewhere in space and who has merged his mind with six other citizens. Justice Department gets involved when one of the minds within the D'Arque-gestalt sends a psychic confession to an old, unsolved murder.

One problem with this story - and I say this as one of Alan Grant's biggest fans - is that readers never really understand exactly what the heck a gestalt mind is. Grant sort of takes it as written that D'Arque has come up with a stunning advance in evolution, even though it's later shown to be the product of alien technology, but never pauses to even explain what all this means to a human who's elected to merge minds with D'Arque. It's such a bizarre, outre concept that it stops the whole story in its tracks, asking "Wait a minute; why would anybody do this to themselves?" Grant never answers. We get clear-as-the-nose-on-yer-face hints that there's a dark side to life in the gestalt, but by the time our Cassandra wakes up in somebody else's mind, or something, the script has become so confused that Ranson's art simply can't salvage it anymore.

Honestly, this period is pretty disappointing, but it's not all bad. With another four-part scrap between Judge Dredd and the mysterious justice killer, Armon Gill, running at this time, the prog's just about worth it for that alone. Yet the Future Shocks are really only "shocking" if you're under ten, and Sinister Dexter is almost consistently on autopilot...



Oh, wait.

Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but Sinister Dexter's finest hour didn't come with one of their epic male bonding melodramas, nor with one of those episodes which turned everything upside down and unexpectedly killed a major supporting player. It's "I Say Hello," a curious little five-pager by Dan Abnett and Marc Pingriff which centers on the doorman of a posh hotspot in Downlode.



I can't tell you why I think "I Say Hello" is so amazing, or pull apart just how it works as well as it does. Really, this blog's going to get awfully boring if I keep mentioning how Sin Dex should've ended ages beforehand, how it reached a natural conclusion with "Eurocrash" and so on, but every once in a while, Abnett and his artists do something unexpectedly eye-opening. Here, there's such a wonderful twist, not within the plot, but with convention and presentation that you can't help but be charmed. It's a classic.

Having said that, let's dive back into the Sinister Dexter's recent past and the new collected edition of "Eurocrash." Like "I Say Hello," this is a straight-up Sin Dex classic. The collection starts with a couple of short stories and then dives right in to the exceptional, epic-length storyline in which crime queenpin Demi Octavo's hold over her city slips out from under her, leading to blood in the streets. By the time it's over, the balance of power in Downlode is changed forever, and Sinister and Dexter go their separate ways, each determined to ferret out the mysterious parties behind the carnage, and to never see each other again.

Which makes it incredibly hard to understand why, when you turn the page, the deadly duo are working together as a team.

Rebellion's line of reprints is easily the best in the industry right now. They do a laudable job 49 times out of 50, picking great material and presenting it in a standout format, on glossy paper, with matte-finish covers and typically some very nice extras. Well, their skimpy little creator biography paragraphs could use a little work, but otherwise it's a terrific reprint line. That's what makes this book so darned hard to understand. For some utterly baffling reason, the collection skips over twenty-four freaking episodes of the series.

As screw-ups go, this one ranks up there. The whole phase of the series when it was retitled Downlode Tales is excised, as well as two one-offs that ran alongside Eurocrash's earliest episodes and set up characters who would reappear within the bigger epic. What you got in those 24 episodes, apart from some very nice artwork by Simon Davis, Greg Staples and Chris Weston, among others, were some critical continuing subplots, the return of Billie Octavo and the deaths of several major recurring players, including both Bunkum and Nervous Rex. Oh yeah, and the whole point, the whole payoff, of the vengeful promises of the last two pages of "Eurocrash." At least Monty Python gave us a "scene missing" screen; this book just hopes you're not reading very closely.

I've never said this about a Rebellion book before, but this is one to avoid. Do not buy this book. They should pulp every copy they can get their hands on and issue a second edition with "Lone Shark," "The Ass Kickers," "Scrubbers" and "The Whack Pack" following Eurocrash. The fifth Sin Dex collection should have "City on Fire" and "Lock and 'Lode" and then the four stories which conclude this book: "Exit Wounds," "Observations," "Mission to Mangapore" and "Life Behind Bars," and probably a couple of other episodes after them. Otherwise, neither this nor the next book are worth purchasing. Speaking as a huge fan of the publisher and a pretty big fan of Sin Dex, I wish I didn't have to say that.

Next time, maybe we can get a last ray of sunshine in before Thrillpowered Thursday takes its summer break...?

88. That Table

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.

August 2000: With prog 1205, the Andy Diggle era of 2000 AD is well under way, and he's got Steve Moore as his secret weapon. Moore's principal contribution at this time is the new character Red Fang, and to be honest, it is among one of the comic's greatest missed opportunities. The pieces are all here for what could have been a 2000 AD classic. Fang is a strategist for a criminal empire in Earth's future, locked in an underworld war with other organizations, the police, and a strange alien race that looks like squids. The artwork is by Steve Yeowell, one of this blog's favorite illustrators. The characters and situations are engaging, but it all somehow fails. Hugely. Looking back on it, I think that the problem was that Moore decided to write a twelve-part serial, dumping far too many characters and a great big situation on readers' heads in one swoop. The result is incredibly convoluted and confusing, and nobody is surprised when the series is quietly retired after it wraps up in prog 1211.

If only the twelve weeks had been spent on four or five shorter stories, organically introducing supporting players and letting Red Fang deal with smaller scenarios, slowly building up to this tale of, ummm, stolen... interstellar... technological weapons stuff, then readers might have understood who the characters were, and why they should care about the major plot.

Red Fang is notable for one thing, however. Yeowell and colorist Chris Blythe conspired to decorate these crimelords' offices with some downright amazing furniture. It was a running joke in fandom for months after the series concluded that nobody wanted to see Red Fang return for a second series, but his table was welcome back anytime.

The other draws in the comic at this time are Judge Dredd (here in a one-off by John Wagner and Siku), Sinister Dexter (Dan Abnett and Nigel Raynor) and Nikolai Dante (Robbie Morrison and John Burns). But perhaps overshadowing all of them is the surprising, welcome return of Tharg's Future Shocks after an absence of several years. Previously, the format for one-offs had been used by umbrella series like Vector 13 and Pulp Sci-Fi. These accomplished many of the same goals as the Shocks - to fill space and mark time between series, to give work to aspiring creators, and to tell a good story with a twist ending - but their format imposed restrictions on the sort of stories that could be told. Certainly, a Future Shock in 2000 can be every bit as hit or miss as it was in 1980, but there's a nostalgic glee in seeing it dusted off. First up is a five-pager by Steve Moore, with art by Frazer Irving, who'd go on to become one of the comic's regular droids for the next several years. In fact, he impresses editorial so much with his debut that he's almost immediately given a Dredd episode to draw; it will run in the very next issue.

At this time, most of the stories in this prog have gone unreprinted. The Dante story was collected in the fourth book, Tsar Wars, Volume One, but none of the others have seen a second outing.

Speaking of Tharg's Future Shocks, in a nice bit of timing, we hit their return in this reread just as I finished Rebellion's new collection of several dozen classic ones. The title stretches the truth ever so slightly: rather than somebody's subjective take on the actual best one-offs from the comic, excepting the ones by Alan Moore which have already been compiled, this is a collection of episodes from four of 2000 AD's best-known writers. So it contains a pile of John Smith Shocks, a majority of Peter Milligan episodes, all but one of Grant Morrison's offerings ("Candy and the Catchman" is omitted), and everything that Neil Gaiman ever wrote for the comic.

Certainly the resulting book is uneven and choppy, but there are some real gems to be found in its pages. Grant Morrison's early attempts at channelling Alan Moore are pretty revealing, and not just from an archaeological standpoint. "The Shop That Sold Everything" is really funny, even if the end isn't so much a twist as it is an inevitability. I've also always enjoyed John Smith's "A Change of Scenery," which was the first appearance of some of his Indigo Prime characters, among many other strips in this book.

Seeing characters like Indigo Prime and Ulysses Sweet here actually makes me think that the book's only real flaw is that it didn't collect the five or six one-off adventures of Joe Black by Kelvin Gosnell from the early eighties. That's just quibbling, of course, those are outside the perview of the book, but one of the many things that did make 2000 AD interesting in the early 80s was the existence of characters who only showed up in one-offs or very short series.

Dr. Dibworthy and Abelard Snazz were compiled in the big Moore book from a couple of years ago, and it's a real shame Tharg doesn't have any characters like that today. Harry Kipling (Deceased) was kind of like that, but he hasn't shown up in two years, for some mad reason. Lately it's seemed that one-offs only ever show up to fill space after a ten-part story runs in a twelve-week slot. Maybe one day soon, Tharg will try two or three months mixing one-offs and two-parters, trying out more new creators and ideas, or maybe giving some of the supporting cast of the major series five pages of their own to shine. It seemed to work all right in the 1980s, didn't it?

Next week, there's a hole in the collection! Whatever happened to prog 1208?!

86. Fungus Fever

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.

June 2000: Prog 1196's deliciously ugly cover by Cliff Robinson features the final fate of Brit-Cit Judge Stark. Stark had appeared as a supporting character in two earlier Judge Dredd storylines and was brought in as an undercover agent in the four-part "Judge Dredd and the Shirley Temple of Doom" to bust a protection racket. Unfortunately, he and his partner are contaminated with Grubb's Disease, an incurable fungus which drives you mad and leaves mushrooms growing out of your body. Grubb's was initially depicted, with gleeful, black humor, by Carlos Ezquerra back in the early 80s, as one of a number of fantastic maladies which future citizens could find infection from in any given prog. Compared to jigsaw disease or the one that turns you into a spider, Grubb's is at least over quickly.

On this story, writer John Wagner is paired with newcomer Jock on art chores. He had drawn part two of the epic "Dead Ringer" story for the Megazine just a couple of months previously and was quickly drafted for work on the weekly. Jock takes Dredd's nickname "Old Stoney Face" literally, and draws the lawman as though he was carved from rock. His work is just exceptional, with wild camera angles and amazing perspective shots. Jock relishes the challenge of drawing huge expanses of the future city, with bizarre, giant buildings crammed in as far as you can see. His time as a regular in the Dredd art rotation will only be a couple of years long, but he makes an enormous impact.

Other than Jock, there is another new name in this prog's credits worth mentioning. Almost new, anyway: for 2000 AD, Steve Moore had only contributed a handful of Future Shocks and a Dan Dare story about twenty years previously before assistant editor Andy Diggle had tracked him down. Most of Moore's comic work had been for Marvel UK, where he'd scripted the adventures of Doctor Who for a memorable run, and for the anthology Warrior, where he'd written all kinds of things. He'd created the memorable characters of Axel Pressbutton and Abslom Daak before devoting his attention to his work at Fortean Times.



I don't recall specifically whether Diggle ever said outright that he was hoping he could persuade Moore to write more Pressbutton stories for 2000 AD, or whether that was just fan speculation on the old newsgroup. Alas, we were not so lucky. Moore remained with 2000 AD for about five years, creating some one-off serials and a variety of single episode shorts. Many of these were grouped under a very weird anthology called Tales of Telguuth. This was quite unlike any other 2000 AD anthology in that they were all scripted by Moore with art from a number of other creators, and they were all set on the same planet. Telguuth was a strange, medieval planet where dozens of sorcerors were conspiring with dozens of powerful demons and were invariably hoist on their own petard after five or fifteen pages.

One or two Telguuth installments were pretty amusing, once you could get your eyes and tongue around all the names of people and places that were five consonant-filled syllables long anyway. But the repetitive plots and lack of recurring characters dragged it down, and Moore certainly missed a trick in never allowing readers any reason to think that the stories were actually set on the same planet. We only ever had Tharg's word that was the case.

Apart from Dredd and Telguuth, the prog features more from Sinister Dexter, still fighting things out in Mangapore, by Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke, along with the continuing Slaine epic by Pat Mills and David Bircham. Rounding things out is Strontium Dog by Wagner and Ezquerra. This last one is the only story in the prog to have been reprinted in a bookshelf format, although "...the Shirley Temple of Doom" was collected in the "free graphic novel" reprint comic called Judge Dredd: The Jock Collection that was bagged with the Megazine about six months back.



Speaking of reprints, in other news, I finally tracked down a copy of the third Slaine collection a few months ago. This, The King, was one that Diamond never saw fit to deliver to my local comic shop, along with Mega-City Undercover, which was released the same week. Fortunately, I found a copy at The Great Escape in Nashville in November. This is a really spectacular shop, worth driving a hundred miles out of your way to visit. The book reprints close to forty episodes which originally saw print between 1985 and 1988.

Much as Pat Mills has a story to tell, the star of the book is Glenn Fabry, who illustrated about half the episodes. When these episodes originally ran, it felt like there was one delay after another pushing back new Slaine stories. Fabry drew just a handful of the pages in the "Tomb of Terror" storyline, a 15-part diversion from Mills' ongoing goal of reuniting the warrior with his tribe. The bulk of "Tomb" was illustrated by David Pugh, and was accompanied by a pencil-and-dice role-playing supplement with each new episode. The RPG pages, with artwork by Garry Leach, are included as a bonus feature in the back, making this one of the cutest little extras that Rebellion has presented.

After "Tomb," there was a break of about nine months before Mike Collins and Mark Farmer took on art chores for a seven week, Zodiac-related serial. Then Fabry got the reins for the twelve-part "Slaine the King," which originally ran in two chunks over five months. Ever behind on his deadlines, and probably deep in debt with his local Dick Blick for all the ink he was using, Fabry's amazing work was worth the wait at the time and just looks better on these pages. The definitive Slaine artist is probably McMahon to me, but Fabry's a very close second.

It was originally thought that Fabry would be illustrating the classic "Horned God," to appear in the standard black-and-white with a color centerspread, shortly after the completion of the Judge Dredd epic "Oz" wrapped up in 1988. As 2000 AD changed paper size and increased its color pages, it was eventually decided that Simon Bisley would paint the epic instead. A little more than a year after the conclusion of "Slaine the King," four last black and white Fabry episodes appeared as a teaser strip and a three-part miniseries. These served as a taster prelude for the forthcoming "Horned God."

Around the same time, Mills and Fabry collaborated on a color newspaper strip called Scatha which was truncated by The News on Sunday's imminent failure. You can read more about that and see some sample episodes over at Bear Alley. Fabry also contributed a color pin-up of Slaine's enemy Megrim as a taster for his unproduced color epic which ran on the back cover of prog 524. It might have been frustrating twenty years ago waiting for each new storyline to get going, but it really resulted in some great comics. Even if you don't like the character of Slaine, this book is certainly recommended for Fabry's glorious artwork. Hopefully Diamond will treat your store better than mine and get you a copy quickly!

Next week, the weekly gets a new size and Dig-L becomes the Man from Quaxxan.

(Originally posted 2/5/09 at Hipsterdad's LJ.)