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!

174. Love Letter to Japan

April 2007: Prog 1534... Now is that a cover, or is that a cover? This amazing piece by Karl Richardson heralds the beginning of Detonator X, a ten-part serial by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell. It is, obviously, a gorgeously designed homage to 1950s drive-in sci-fi epics and their attendant, over-the-top movie posters and it just glows with its love of the genre. It also, in what was certainly not intended as a bait-and-switch, does not have much of a damn thing to do with the actual comic inside. See, while that cover speaks of a love for 1950s American trash cinema, the actual story was written from a love of 1970s Japanese cartoons. The audience for these two genres frequently overlaps, but they really aren't the same thing at all, are they? I'll tell you exactly what Detonator X feels like. It's like Ian Edginton spent his childhood playing with Popy Chogokin and Jumbo Machinder robots - they were distributed in the US by Mattel as "Shogun Warriors" and that's certainly what I spent my childhood doing - and watching Mazinger Z and Grandizer on TV every afternoon and saying "One day, I'm going to write a comic book just like that."

It's actually very weird reading an Edginton story that isn't a revisionist or subtle take on the genre where he's working. Stickleback is a very 21st Century take on Victorian detective fiction, with a criminal protagonist and a post-League of Extraordinary Gentlemen group of outlandish villains as his supporting cast upending the apparent premise of the ostensible star of the series, Valentine Bey, working in collaboration with or opposition to the criminal. The Red Seas mixes up just about every myth or legend that could possibly squeeze into a story about pirates, from krakens fighting the Colossus of Rhodes to Sir Isaac Newton fighting werewolves. The later Ampney Crucis Investigates will reinvision Lord Peter Wimsey as an action hero and send him fighting Cthulu through parallel universes. But Detonator X is just a simple love letter to the fiction that amazed Edginton's peers as kids.

And what's really weird is that Japanese writers and directors had spent the last fifteen years reconstructing and deconstructing the giant robot fiction that thrived from about 1966 to 1978 until there wasn't much left to twist into new shapes. To be clear, I'm referring to a specific genre of kids' adventure melodrama that developed around the time the Japanese TV companies started broadcasting cartoons in color. The networks started commissioning thousands of hours of gorgeously-designed and cheaply-animated kidvid nonsense, much of which was raced off from quickie pitches by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, by Go Nagai, by Shotaro Ishinomori, whose studios would then churn out tie-in comics for that country's weekly anthologies, and who would license the designs for toy companies to create, in bulk quantities, some of the greatest toys any child ever owned. The giant robot shows/comics/merchandise - Mazinger Z, Getter Robo - Starvengers, UFO Robo Gurendaiza - Grandizer - Goldorak, Fighting General Daimos, Brave Raideen, dozens of other also-rans - seemed to fade out around the time that the team superhero "sentai" live-action shows started, as did the amazingly long-lived Mobile Suit Gundam franchise.

But Gundam's run for so long that it started eating its own tail and deconstructing itself with its periodic reinventions and reboots, and comic artists and animation directors have been reviving old properties for new examination through adult and revisionist eyes for years before this silly love letter by Edginton started. Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo was relaunched in an extremely popular series of direct-to-video films by Yasuhiro Imagawa, himself a former Gundam producer/director, that placed characters from six or seven different 1960s comics into one eventually tedious "coming of age" / "hero's journey" narrative. Much of the '90s Robo production crew also worked on Big O, a short-lived TV series that adapted more Western tropes, and basically gave Bruce Wayne a giant robot. Then there was Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, a comic that ran from 1999 to 2006 (at least four years too long) and presented, as heroes, men who as kids had all been obsessed with giant robots and color live-action science fiction in their "secret society," and confront a cult leader who pretty much stole all his ideas from the bad guys in those sorts of melodramas. In other words, while there are many examples of modern fiction in Japan that use all these wacky old kids' teevee and forgettable junk comics for exactly the sort of deconstruction and genre-twisting that Edginton does so astonishingly well, given the chance, he just... writes a wacky old forgettable junk kids' comic.

It does, on the other hand, feature the deeply curious design work by Yeowell that gives us a tin can robot almost as clunky as Yokoyama's barrel-chested Gigantor, which predated the color giant robot era, and monsters that look a heck of a lot like the '90s American remake of Godzilla, leading everybody to wonder why Yeowell didn't borrow some Go Nagai comics from the actual period under the microscope. It's certainly vibrant and exciting and the action scenes move at a furious pace, but it does not in any fashion look like it should. Happily, the action scenes are often so good that it doesn't matter. In the panel above, Detonator X, lacking any weapons, just rips the arms off another giant robot and beats the hell out of a monster with them.

Detonator X also, sadly, sees Yeowell frequently not drawing any backgrounds and allowing Chris Blythe's coloring to paper over the cracks. This actually works here, since Blythe can polish anything, but his newfound shortcuts are going to set off alarm bells when The Red Seas returns later on and it looks like he ran out of ink for every page.

Speaking of deconstruction, I'd like to take a revisionist look at Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard's work on Savage. Here, the third story, "Double Yellow" is the last to be drawn by Adlard. In 2008, Patrick Goddard, who has drawn the next four "books" and, I understand, is presently at work on the forthcoming Book Eight, becomes the regular artist. He also seems to be on hand as the continuity changes completely. The Mills-Goddard Savage is still excellent and absolutely worth reading, but it's a different thing entirely from how comparatively grounded and visceral the Mills-Adlard take is. Below, just before the people of Occupied Britain rise up and get ready to throw the Volgans off their Green and Pleasant Land, our hero Bill takes out an important resistance leader who's actually a dirty Volg himself.

It goes without saying that Adlard draws the heck out of this sequence, as he does everything. The man's a genius. But at no point during his three stories does Adlard draw any robots or anybody named Howard Quartz, or anything that ties into Ro-Busters or ABC Warriors. Adlard's Savage is, outside of the Britain-under-SovietVolgan-control premise, free of fantastic elements. It's a powerful and brutal series. The second story had ended, unforgettably, with Bill killing Captain Jaksic, whom we thought for sure was going to be his ongoing nemesis, and then gunning down a dozen or more collaborators in a fancy restaurant. My God, what a comic that was.

"Double Yellow" can't top it, but it certainly tries. The previous story had ended with the revelation that Bill's brother Tom was killed by the Volg secret police, and so Bill goes out for vengeance and he genuinely doesn't care who suffers along the way. It's amazing and incredibly vibrant and at the end of this book, it really feels like his job is done, and that England's going to be okay. That's why I was so pleased that the collected edition - sadly out of print at the present, and certain to remain so for the foreseeable future as the publisher replenishes stock on Judge Dredd material in preparation for the film - compiles all three of Adlard's stories, so they function and feel like a unified and complete whole. I've reread them many times, while I'm actually not as familiar with the ones that Goddard has drawn. I'm very curious to revisit them, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, while I like and enjoy them, closer scrutiny will find me firmly believing that the Savage of Hammersteins and Blackbloods and teleporting tigers is a different continuity altogether. More on that when the reread gets us to prog 1577, and that'll be a bit down the road.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (Amazon UK)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, a few words about two artists no longer with us, Massimo Belardinelli and the always controversial John Hicklenton, as the narrative reaches the time of Belardinelli's sad death, and Hicklenton's final work for Judge Dredd Megazine. See you in seven!

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!

118. In the Flesh

November 2002: With no small amount of rejoicing, editor Alan Barnes finally brings all this business of multiple volumes for the Judge Dredd Megazine to a long overdue end. This is the eighteenth, and last, issue of Megazine volume four, and the 200th overall. The next issue, which we'll come to next time, will be formally labelled issue # 201. Mercifully, the simple numbering convention will continue from that point to the present. On the cover, it's Durham Red, as depicted by a model named Anna Edwards. This cover, it must be agreed, doesn't go over well with most fans, to which I say, yeah, whatever. This is a fantastic cover! I guess I understand fandom's reluctance to embrace it; even the editorial evokes the two Nemesis the Warlock photostories from 1987 with a self-aware shudder, never mind all those awful photo-comics that infested the early '80s Eagle. For my money, Anna is sexy and gorgeous and, for about the ten minutes it took to read the first twenty pages of this issue, she is, to me, the definitive Durham Red, completely eclipsing any previous depiction of the character.

Then Mark Harrison, who's been painting her exploits for the last few years, clears his throat politely and shows everybody who's the boss:



As you may recall from earlier installments, Dan Abnett has been scripting a series called "The Scarlet Apocrypha," in which seven different artists provide their take on the character in a variety of genres. Earlier, we've seen Steve Kyte placing her in an anime pastiche, Carlos Ezquerra revisiting the 1980 serial Fiends of the Eastern Front, and John Burns doing the character as the central figure in a Dario Argento horror film among others.

Mark Harrison brings us a world where Durham Red is a character from a long-running series of sci-fi feature films, and where the actresses who have played her are regulars on the SF memorabilia con circuit. Masterfully, he takes Abnett's cute little script and turns it into something amazingly neat by illustrating it as a Mad pastiche in the style of that legendary member of the Gang of Idiots, Mort Drucker.

This is one of my favorite 2000 AD one-offs ever. It's not just that the constant barrage of background gags really works, or that the myopic viewpoints of the hapless teens at the cons is so very true. Amusingly, they seem to love each and every one of the actresses who played Durham Red in the movies, but a replacement actor for Godolkin is dismissed as being as pathetic as the "fake" Travis in the second series of Blake's 7.



There's just a feeling of really audacious experimentation in doing this strip this way at all. Each of the previous artists had contributed some great work, and it was very enjoyable to read, but almost all of it was still somewhere within 2000 AD's admittedly broad style. Even an experimenting Ezquerra, like when he discovered filters and computer coloring in 1994 or thereabouts, is still very much Ezquerra. But this is just radically different stuff for 2000 AD, and the sort of risk-taking that I'd love to see more often. It's also very nice that Harrison had the chance to pay homage to Drucker, an early influence on the artist when he started out. As I've said previously, it's occasionally been evident in his work before: that incredibly sexy Durham Red on the cover of prog 1111 has unmistakable Mort Drucker cheekbones. The episode was reprinted with the other Scarlet Apocrypha installments in the third of Rebellion's Durham Red books, The Empty Suns.

There's actually some non-Red material in this issue as well. In it, all of the ongoing series reach their final episodes, clearing the decks for the new stories that begin in Meg 201, which I'll come back to next week. So it's goodbye to The Bendatti Vendetta, Scarlet Traces, Young Middenface and a very good Judge Dredd storyline that was illustrated by John Ridgway. 2000 AD's brief flirtation with photo covers quickly ended, although an outtake from this session will be pulled into service a year or so later when Durham Red returns to the weekly, which is a real shame, as we never had the fun of seeing an actor dress up as Devlin Waugh.

Back in the summer, Rebellion issued the thirteenth in their series of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files. This reprints all the Dredd episodes that originally appeared in 2000 AD from March 1989 to January 1990 in one very nice package. Most of them are in full color, although these originally saw print back when 2000 AD only had a single color episode each week out of five stories. For ten weeks in the period, the Slaine storyline "The Horned God" got the color slot, kicking Dredd to the front of the comic in black and white. So now you know, it's been twenty years since Dredd was a black and white comic. Lotta pages under the bridge in all that time!

The first of those episodes is the classic "In the Bath," in which Dredd reflects on his battered and bruised body while trying to enjoy one of his rare moments of scheduled downtime, only to find he still can't escape the crazy, ultraviolent city for even a few moments of peace and quiet. The episode, by John Wagner and Jim Baikie, was instantly praised as a classic, expertly mixing quiet pathos with absurdist comedy.

Most of the book is written by Wagner. By this point, he and Alan Grant were working individually, and Grant doesn't contribute quite as many episodes as before, but he does bring some real gems, best among them "A Family Affair." This is a really mean-spirited, hilarious look at things spiraling way out of control when Dredd goes to inform some citizens that a family member was killed in a police shooting. Steve Yeowell paints the episode, and there's a two-panel moment when someone realizes exactly which policeman did the shooting which is the funniest thing ever. Yeowell's third series of Zenith was running about the same time, and it's very interesting to see him apply the same style, but with color.

There are no major storylines or epics in this collection, but Wagner does touch on some earlier threads that carry on from earlier volumes. At this stage, there are still comparatively few recurring characters in the series, but Anderson and Hershey show up again briefly, and we have a return for the disturbed Judge Kurten, now in his new base of operations south of the border, along with Rookie Judge Kraken, who will become a major player in the fourteenth book.

There is a small, unfortunate printing error in this edition. The Colin MacNeil-painted "Dead Juve's Curve" repeats an error from its original printing and has a couple of pages out of order. It's an unfortunate hiccup, but one easily overlooked among so much really good material. Don't let the number 13 on the book deter you if you're new to Dredd: this is a perfectly fine starting point for new readers, and it might do you well to begin here before the apocalyptic events of the volume which comes next...

When we return, it's the biggest Megazine yet, with the debut of Family by Rob Williams and Simon Fraser!

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!

113. American Ugly

July 2002: In the pages of the Megazine, the new editor Alan Barnes has been shaking the heck outta everything, with tremendously fun results. One very positive change has been increasing the frequency from monthly to every fourth week, so there's an extra issue published each year, a schedule which remains in place today. There's a stronger relationship between the Meg and the prog than ever before, as, for the first time, non-Dredd series have been crossing over into the Meg's pages. Currently running is a really fascinating and fun anthology series featuring the vampire mutant Durham Red, but it's not quite the same Red we've been following in her far-future sci-fi epics in 2000 AD. In "The Scarlet Apocrypha," writer Dan Abnett has been placing the character, or analogues of her at any rate, in a variety of different scenarios and time periods, each illustrated by a different artist. John Burns kicked things off in the previous issue, with a suggestion of what Durham Red might have been like as a Dario Argento horror film, and in this issue (# 13), we get Steve Yeowell doing a neat little alternate history set in the 1890s, with Aubrey Beardsley and the Montgolfier Brothers.

Future installments will see Frazer Irving doing a medieval Japanese adventure and Steve Kyte doing one inspired by more modern Japanese fiction, along with longtime Modesty Blaise artist Enric Romero pitting Durham against Dracula, and Carlos Ezquerra bringing us a strange sequel to the classic Fiends of the Eastern Front. And then there's the grand finale later in the year, but more about that another time.



But the 2000 AD connection doesn't end there. Much of the editorial pages are given over to news about the forthcoming return of the original Rogue Trooper, which we'll look at next time. It's here that we get the first confirmation that Rebellion are working on a Rogue Trooper video game. At this point, it's still years away, and the company's Dredd vs. Death game has yet to be released, but it helps stoke a little excitement among the fan base.

The garish cover, a highlight of which is displayed above so you can get a better look at it, announces the return of the ugly craze to the pages of Judge Dredd. Otto Sump was introduced in the early 1980s as Mega-City One's ugliest man, and the successful entrepreneur made several return appearances in short comedy tales, all illustrated by Ron Smith. The character was retired about fifteen years before this two-part story, a Citizen Kane homage drawn by John Higgins.

"Citizen Sump" is just terrific, a moody and sad little melodrama which isn't simply a parody of that greatest of American films, but also an interesting detective procedural which sees Dredd working a cop beat trying to solve a locked room murder. Everybody has different perceptions of the hapless Otto, but everybody remembers him as one of the Meg's sweetest citizens. In his original appearances, there was a running gag with Sump always greeting Dredd as "my old pal," much to Dredd's disinterest. It turns out that Sump was like that to absolutely everybody, just a genuinely sweet and loving man.

But turning the Kane homage on its head is the revelation of Sump's last words, particularly in view of the way Otto never lost his truly good nature. Kane, of course, let his millions turn him into a near-psychotic recluse, and died a miserable and pathetic figure. The judges never learn what Sump's last word means, and the staggeringly brilliant revelation shows that Sump was every bit as wistful and nostalgic for his lost childhood as Kane was, even after spending his wealthy life loving his fellow citizens and making the best of the odd karmic turn of events that made him deformed, shunned, wealthy and successful.

Frankly, this script is one of Wagner's all-time finest. It's an absolute triumph, and deserves to be seen by anybody who loves comics. It's not yet been reprinted, so try and track down volume four, issues 12-13 of the Megazine. You won't be disappointed.

If that wasn't enough, the Megazine has finally found a perfect place for artist John Burns. Most of his previous work for the House of Tharg has been on Judge Dredd or Nikolai Dante, but to my mind, the best example of Burns being ideally chosen for art duties came with the little-remembered Black Light from 1996. I only mentioned this strip in passing back in the 37th installment, but it was an X Files-inspired, modern-day techno thriller with government conspiracies and tough heroes with guns. It's a strip which really should have returned for at least one second series and been collected in a graphic novel while the iron was hot. Anyway, in this issue, Burns has teamed up with writer Robbie Morrison for The Bendatti Vendetta. This first episode has all the appearance of the most exciting pre-credits sequences of any action film from the seventies. We don't know who the characters are, but some people have slipped into some mob boss's party and caused almighty havoc, with fisticuffs and bullets flying every which way.

I say this is perfectly suited for Burns because I perceive him, rightly or wrongly, as an artist most comfortable in the modern age. No matter how well he paints Dredd or Dante, something about his work on those strips never completely gels for me, particularly in conveying a sense of place. His Mega-City One is rarely more than dark alleyways, and his future Russia is often just bombed-out war zones. But The Bendatti Vendetta is clearly set in the humdrum of our world, and when Burns brings this to life, it's vastly more vivid and exciting. Well, it's less our world than our recent history - it doesn't appear that Burns has updated his reference material in many years, but since the violent iconography within the script screams "seventies action film," it doesn't matter, he's still exactly right for the artwork. Put another way, I keep expecting Ian Hendry and Britt Ekland to make supporting appearances.

There's unfortunately not very many episodes of this series, not enough for a good collection for people to marvel at its coolness. Following this six-part adventure, it returned for a pair of three-part stories and was last seen in 2005. It's a shame that Morrison and Burns never collaborated on one last story to put the total page count over 100 so we could get a nice graphic novel out of it.

And that's all for now. Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take a short little break. As readers of my LJ saw, my family's suffered another house flood, and while my collection was happily safe, we're all sort of scattered right now, without much time or space for reading. When we resume in a few weeks, it'll be to look back in the weekly prog for issue # 1300, when both the original Rogue Trooper and VCs make long-overdue returns. What's with all the nostalgia?

108. A Night 2 Remember

I think we've reached a little landmark, of sorts. Shortly before I decided to follow in Paul's footsteps and start a 2000 AD readin' blog, I did a LiveJournal post celebrating the comic's 30th anniversary. This served as the "pilot" for the blog that you're reading today. Well, the reread has now brought us to prog 1280, the 25th anniversary, which was published in February 2002. It has this nice, funny cover by Kevin Walker and a lineup of just three stories.

First is a double-length Judge Dredd episode by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. It's called "Leaving Rowdy" and sees Dredd passing the torch, and his old apartment in Rowdy Yates Conapt, to his clone-brother Rico. It's a quiet and reflective anniversary moment, even though it ends in a hail of gunfire, as these things do. It's a really terrific story, showing that Dredd still has twinges of guilt about the death of Judge Lopez some twenty years previously, in the "Judge Child" epic. Even though Rico had been introduced already, to my mind, this story really seems to establish the tone and the feel of the many interlocking stories and subplots about Dredd and his "family" that would come over the next five years.

Bringing up the rear this issue is Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. This episode, part one of a storyline called "The Romanov Job," is pretty close to a one-off. It allows new readers a quick introduction to Nikolai, his current partner-in-crime the Countessa, and his current status as the most wanted man in the Empire. It's really great, and I'll be revisiting "The Romanov Job" in a couple of weeks.

These two stories are the best things in the comic, but it's what's between them that bears a little investigation. It's "A Night 2 Remember," the 25th anniversary "story."

The loose plot of the story, if it can even be called that, is that Tharg, his creator droids, and as many characters as can be drawn, have all gathered at London's fashionable "Ministry of Sound" nightclub for a great big party with a concert by the British techno-metal band Pitchshifter. This mirrored the real-world anniversary bash held at the club that same week. Each of the story's ten pages is handled by a different writer-artist team, and so you just have to take it on faith that there's a plot there at all. Still, the whole indulgent, smug affair is nevertheless incredibly fun, even as it teeters from nostalgic to self-reverential and all the way over to downright mean-spirited.

It starts out with Pat Mills' return to the comic, after stepping away following his disagreements with the former editor. Here, he stacks the deck in his favor by coming aboard with artist Kevin O'Neill and special guest star Marshal Law, who makes his first and thus-far only 2000 AD appearance here, beating the hell out of original 2000 AD star MACH One. The superhero-hunting Marshal has a few words with Judge Dredd before setting his sights on Zenith. Presumably, Law and Zenith settle their differences off-panel, because Zenith and his agent Eddie later have a page by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell where they contemplate their relevance in the current market, and Eddie considers taking on the dragon from Chronos Carnival as a new client.

Elsewhere, John Tomlinson and Kev Walker detail an incident in the gents' between Tor Cyan and the Balls Brothers, Mike Carey and Anthony Williams have Tharg mediate a misunderstanding between Waldo "D.R." Dobbs and Carver Hale, Robbie Morrison and Ian Gibson send Nikolai Dante on the dance floor with Halo Jones, Alan Grant and Trevor Hairsine give Hoagy from Robo-Hunter a book on "how to pick up babes" and watch him try it out on Feek the Freak while the Stix Brothers let the Helltrekkers know that they're not welcome at the party.

Meanwhile, Dan Abnett and Simon Davis have Sinister and Dexter deal with Torquemada and a very drunk Judge Death and consider Durham Red's assets (this page was my son's favorite), and Andy Diggle and Jock dispatch Anderson and Dredd - at least we think it's Dredd - to chase Pitchshifter off the stage, and make a point about editorial staff being commissioned to write their own characters.

That brings me to the most infamous pages of "A Night 2 Remember." Just as prog 500's "Tharg's Head Revisited" featured a page or two that sailed really close to the wind, Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving really raised some eyebrows with a page in which Tharg and Mek-Quake send a number of unloved fictional characters into a supernova, and then toss a couple of unloved creator droids into Mek-Quake's grinders. It's delightfully mean-spirited, and really, you can't say that the author of "The Golden Fox Rebellion" didn't have it coming.

But the one that everybody loves and remembers - and spoiling the jokes with scans would neither do them justice or be fair to you - is Garth Ennis's closing page, beautifully drawn by Dave Gibbons. In it, Tharg starts to take the opportunity to white out certain characters from 2000 AD's history in the 1970s that he's embarrassed by, only to have Ro-Jaws gleefully remind him that Tharg has a lot more to be humiliated about, a lot more recently. There are pointed digs at artists who can't meet deadlines, and writers who are all "twelve years old."

Ennis, who has always expressed public dissatisfaction with his work on the comic, skewers the heck out of himself - the Ennis creator droid rolls in and is shown to be a teeny little tractor about the size of your foot with a pint of Guinness atop it. Neither John Smith nor Mark Millar escape intact, and frankly, I've not been able to see Millar's name in print for the last seven years without hearing his little droid's deeply unflattering dialogue from this page. In the end, Tharg kicks the early 1990s to Mek-Quake and tells Bill Savage that all is forgiven, unwittingly setting the stage for Savage's return to the comic in a couple of year's time.



It's the sort of wild affair which can't happen very often, but reading it with a good knowledge of the comic's history and a playful love for its characters is a pretty darn satisfying little read. It's not very likely to be reprinted, so keep an eye out at eBay and your local thrill-merchant for a copy of this prog. Although, having said that, the forthcoming Marshal Law omnibus collection from Top Shelf will be incomplete without this one page, so hopefully Rebellion will let 'em do it. Bookmark my Reprint This! blog and I'll let you know.

Next time, Alan Barnes takes over editorial duties at the Megazine, David Bishop begins the Thrill-Power Overload feature, and the ABC Warriors return to your bookshelf, so I have a short review of the recent graphic novel collection. See you in seven!

97. Nikolai Dante and the Strange Case of the Extra Word Balloons

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.

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 Graphic NYC, which you should check out.) Management had already juggled the second and third storylines in the planned five-volume "Tsar Wars" storyline to accomodate his schedule, but it was evident that he would not be free to draw the fourth when it was desired. So the plans were revised, and what were the fourth and fifth books were revised into a single, 13-part storyline, painted by John Burns, which would be coming later in the year. Bridging the third book and the one forthcoming is this short run of six episodes, illustrated by the wonderful Steve Yeowell and Chris Blythe, comprising two stories.

In a break from the heavy and melodramatic storyline of "Tsar Wars," these two stories are much lighter. "The Beguiling," inspired by the 1971 Don Siegel film The Beguiled, sees a wounded Dante recovering behind the lines at the family estate of the jealous, feuding Arbatov sisters. "Fiends" shows that present-day Romania has become a haven for vampires in the far future. These lighter tales are certainly a refreshing break from the larger war story, which is about to get unbearably messy, and feature a return of the devil-may-care Dante, silly quips and rejoinders in the face of trouble, like in the strip's earlier days.

Except Robbie Morrison apparently didn't write all those quips and rejoinders.



I think the best way to describe what happened with "The Beguiling" as an unfortunate misunderstanding. Reading David Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload, you'll find a reference to Morrison taking objection to some additional dialogue added by then-assistant editor Matt Smith. I compared the original progs to the reprint in the collected edition and noted that five word balloons were left out of the book. This was not, apparently, a problem of incomplete films being used for the graphic novel, as would happen with the 2005 release of Devlin Waugh: Red Tide (a story, coincidentally, also drawn by Yeowell), but a deliberate decision to omit the dialogue added by Smith. There's also a minor art change: the coloring of the Arbatovs' uniforms is a noticeably different shade of blue.

"Fiends" is perhaps not as wonderful as "Beguiling," but it introduces the spinoff character that never was, vampire hunter Emmanuelle Chekhov. She didn't seem to really make any impact on the fan base, but in a book as short on lead female characters as 2000 AD can be, an Emmanuelle series might have been an interesting idea, and one which might have avoided many of the cliches and stereotypes of the genre.



In other news from the period, it was announced that April that Titan Books had the license to print collected editions of 2000 AD properties again. For most of the previous decade, Hamlyn had been releasing graphic novels, typically in batches of six, twice a year. Eventually, their interest seemed to fade and fewer books were released. Before Hamlyn moved on, they did issue an extra-sized collection of the 1994 Dredd serial "Wilderlands" and its several prequel stories which remains awesomely impressive. The "Win Judge Dredd graphic novels" blurb on the cover shown above is for a competition to win their final two compilations, reprinting the 1999 "Doomsday" epic across two books.

Titan was, of course, the original home for 2000 AD collected editions. The line started in the summer of 1981 with that first, wonderful collection of Wagner and Bolland Judge Dredd stories, and eventually grew to encompass many more stories and lines from several comics, always with those distinctive black spines with the white text. I was never sure why, but Titan seemed to lose interest in all of their properties by the late eighties, not just the 2000 AD stuff. Charley's War and Jeff Hawke were phased out after only a pair of slim volumes apiece. James Bond and Modesty Blaise made it to four before they were all shelved in 1991 or so.

Regular readers of my Bookshelf and Reprint This! blogs know that most of these have since roared back to life. Frank Bellamy's Garth hasn't made it to a new edition, but otherwise, those old 48- or 64-page slimline albums have been replaced by a great range of large, beautifully-designed books. They're actually on target to finish the James Bond newspaper strip later this year with the seventeenth and final volume. But 2001 was effectively ground zero for the modern Titan, and Judge Dredd and company were integral to the company's plans. It would only last a few years before Rebellion took it over to do it in collaboration with DC, and while Titan would hit a pretty rough pothole early on, for several months, the company did issue attractive, oversized collections of classic 2000 AD storylines. The first two, released in July, were Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones and the Dredd serial "Emerald Isle." These would later be complemented with some very nice hardback editions.

Next time, It's hell on earth in Mike Carey's short-lived Carver Hale. Plus a look at the latest of the Judge Dredd Complete Case Files. See you in seven, fellow Earthlets!

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?

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?!

85. Out of My Mind on Dope and Umpty

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.

May 2000: Meanwhile, over at the Megazine, some very interesting things have happened. Andy Diggle is now the editor of this publication, while also working as assistant editor on the weekly, and he's beginning to put his own, inventive stamp on things. Much of Diggle's perspective on what 2000 AD should be would later be summed up with his expression "a shot glass of rocket fuel," about which, more another time. What it means in practice is keeping one eye trained on what the comic did best in its 1980s heyday, and how they did it as well as they did. There's plenty of room for nostalgia under Diggle's watch, but principally nostalgia for the fast-paced storytelling style that made early 2000 AD so memorable, and not necessarily for old characters. There will be a few old faces and names showing up again over the next couple of years, but the emphasis will be on new series and storylines, and when classic thrills are resurrected, it will, arguably, be done with a little more attention to detail and respect than some of the second-rate comebacks from the early 90s. Although you might want to watch this space; there'll be a riproaring argument about that point regarding a certain big, mean tyrannosaur in due course.

As editor, Diggle brought an end to Preacher's two-year tenure in the Megazine's pages. After reprinting that comic's first 25 issues (up to the finale of the Masada storyline), the Megazine was resized and now matches the dimensions of 2000 AD during the 1980s. This is to accomodate the new reprint feature: the classic Strontium Dog serial "Journey Into Hell." This adventure first appeared in the weekly in progs 104-118 and had never been reprinted, since the films had been lost, and shooting from the printed pages was not considered an option. Finding the films was motivation to give the serial a fresh airing, and a well-timed one, since Johnny Alpha had a new story running in 2000 AD.



Interestingly, "Journey Into Hell" proved to be a unique challenge for Diggle, who was doing double-duty as the Megazine's designer. Each episode is five pages long, with a double-page opening spread, so there's an ad forced into the space between each of the three episodes reprinted in each of five issues. Journey Into Hell has been reprinted in collected editions twice since this appearance, in 2004's Strontium Dog: The Early Cases and 2006's Strontium Dog: Search/Destroy Agency Files 01, proving itself a layout headache for further designers.

The Strontium Dog reprint is teamed up with two new episodes each month. These are a 12-page color episode of Judge Dredd and a 10-page black-and-white episode from one of the Megazine's supporting characters. This format will stay in place for about a year and a half before the Megazine makes a radical upgrade in the summer of 2001. Currently, the second strip is a new case for Armitage, making his first appearance in about five years, in a new four-part story by Dave Stone and Steve Yeowell. The debt owed to Inspector Morse is made very clear in this episode, part of which takes place in Brit-Cit's "Colin Dexter Block." This isn't actually Yeowell's strongest work, and compared to, say, Zenith, it looks like he's being very tightfisted with the black ink, but he still does layouts like nobody's business, and effortlessly proves what a fantastic storyteller he is.



Judge Dredd, meanwhile, is about halfway through a seven-month storyline called "Dead Ringer" which is the spiritual descendant of classic tales like "The Judge Child" and "The Mega-Rackets," with several events and incidents from those stories briefly revisited in a lunatic romp. The story starts with an assassination attempt on a European diplomat, who is critically wounded. The Mega-City judges will do anything to cover their butts, and when they find that one of their citizens is from the same clone stock as the diplomat, they send Dredd to pick him up to engage in a little subterfuge. Unfortunately, the citizen panics, bolts, ends up on a Helltrek out of town, is picked up by stookie glanders, sold to alien slavers and is last seen on a planet full of umpty addicts, with Dredd all the while in patience-ending pursuit. If you recognize the references in the previous sentence, then John Wagner's script is just for you, readers of classic 1980s Dredd who will recognize the strip's iconography and background. In an interesting experiment, each of the seven episodes is drawn by a different artist, including Duncan Fegredo, Simon Coleby and Wayne Reynolds. The second part provided the first Judge Dredd episode for the Scottish artist Jock, who would go on to contribute several more Dredd stories and some iconic cover images over the next couple of years before decamping with Diggle to work for Vertigo in 2003.

Next week, one of those Jock stories I just mentioned. It's mushroom mania in the Shirley Temple of Doom, plus classic Slaine from back when Glenn Fabry was putting more ink on the page than any twelve other artists.

(Originally posted 1/29/09 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

80. Prog 2000

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.

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.

The creator lineup for Prog 2000 makes this issue a must-have for any comic collection. Inside you've got brand new work from Dan Abnett, Simon Davis, Brett Ewins, Carlos Ezquerra, Simon Fraser, Dave Gibbons, Alan Grant, Mark Harrison, Cam Kennedy, Mike McMahon, Pat Mills, Robbie Morrison, Kevin O'Neill, Gordon Rennie, Greg Staples, John Tomlinson, John Wagner, Kevin Walker, Ashley Woods and Steve Yeowell. There's not a joker in the pack!

Rather than spending Christmas with a lot of writing, here are some memorable images from this special issue. See y'all next week!









(Originally posted 12/25/08 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

77. It's Easy to be a Fanboy

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.

Welcome back to the little ol' sub-blog at my LiveJournal, for another few weeks of looking back at the run of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic! I already know that I'll be taking a few weeks' break again at the end of the year, but, as Kermit the Frog often said, "before we go," I'd like to finish up the issues that originally saw print in 1999. Prog 1162 is a very, very good comic. I'm not completely keen on the cover, by Dylan Teague, which spotlights the imminent conclusion to the Judge Dredd epic "Doomsday Scenario" (creators this week: John Wagner and Charlie Adlard). I was also a little underwhelmed by the Pulp Sci-Fi one-off written and illustrated by Allan Bednar, but the rest of the lineup includes Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, the completely brilliant Nikolai Dante romp "The Courtship of Jena Makarov" by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and more of Devlin Waugh by John Smith and Steve Yeowell.

One thing that I can't help but experience when I reread a bunch of old comics is that occasional sense of nostalgia for the original moment. And who'd have it any other way? Of course, now we know that Devlin Waugh survived the apocalyptic events of this epic storyline and would go on to several more stories. But back in 1999, John Smith had quite a reputation for killing off or maiming his wonderful characters. The casts of Indigo Prime, The New Statesmen and Tyranny Rex had met bloody demises throughout the 1990s, so how could you fail to be concerned that Devlin would join their number with so much at stake in this adventure?

So it was with no small amount of fanboy thrill, and no small amount of fanboy terror and paranoia at the possible death of a much-loved character, that I took up an offer from the fanzine Class of '79 to interview John Smith. The interview, available online here, is, I think, quite remarkable for how much Smith was willing to talk about the background and stories behind his stories. I'm not sure how many people will, before we're all good and done with fandom, be interested in piecing together histories of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, but since Smith was so forthcoming and so full of information, this is honestly one of the better secondary sources currently available to amateur researchers.

It's also, embarassingly, a face-in-hands gushfest on the part of the obnoxious interviewer. I still stand by my conviction that the final Indigo Prime series, "Killing Time," is one of comics' most thrilling moments, and I can't wait to see what Paul at the Prog Slog has to say about it in a couple of weeks, but Jesus, what an over-the-top fanboy I was with those questions. The format was kind of unfortunate; rather than a proper e-mail interview over an evening, Class of '79 asked that I compose all of my questions quickly, and I hammered them out with the help of my girlfriend-of-the-time, Victoria, typed 'em all up at UGA's Memorial Hall computer sweatshop, mailed 'em in and never saw them again until the finished piece appeared a few months later. I don't think I ever spoke with John Munro, who added some very good questions which appeared at the end, after mine.

Well, Tom Spurgeon I am clearly not. Although I remain convinced that Tom'll find room for some British talent sometime soon, and do his peerless job of interviewing them, and not look like a complete spazz when he does, unlike certain LiveJournallers you might be reading. (Check out Tom's interview with James Kolchaka from last month if you haven't; all of Spurgeon's interviews are really fascinating reading, and a highlight of every weekend, even if I've only heard of maybe one creator in five.)

In other news, I decided to take a break from the What I Just Read feature/tag in my LiveJournal, mainly because I've grown tired of finding new things to say about my reading pile. But I did want to continue spotlighting the 2000 AD books, because many occasional readers miss the announcements elsewhere, and they are, as ever, very poorly promoted in the comic news-blog-world.

Back in '05, DC released a collection of Anderson: Psi Division which compiled the three 12-part adventures that originally appeared in 1985-87. Rebellion did not follow up on this book until recently, and they've made the curious decision to make this book an artist-focussed trade. Shamballa is a nicely satisfying chunk of a book, and it contains something like forty episodes, originally published throughout the nineties, all featuring fantastic color artwork by Arthur Ranson. It is not a complete Ranson collection; his first story, the black and white "Triad" serial, is not here, and neither is some of the more recent material from the Megazine, the stuff with the strange demon Half-Life, and Psi-Judge Shakta and Juliet November. But what is here makes for some pretty good reading. Ranson is a wonderful artist and some of these stories are very good. Well, apart from the brow-furrowing, disappointing damp squib of an ending to "Satan," a story which was very promising for many pages before petering out.

However, I can't completely get behind this book because while an incomplete Ranson collection is understandable, an incomplete Anderson collection is completely baffling. Alan Grant navigated the character through a fascinating series of stories, with character growth you certainly do not see with Judge Dredd, and there are, as a natural effect of the character-based continuity storytelling, several maddening references to the things skipped by this reprint. For example, between the incidents of "The Jesus Syndrome" and "Satan," there were three lengthy Anderson stories in the Megazine, all of which are missed in this collection but are nevertheless referenced in the stories that Ranson illustrated. The result is very piecemeal and felt very frustrating to me. Honestly, it's less of a spotlight for Ranson than it is a missed opportunity, regardless of how gorgeous the artwork is.

Next week, some serious thrill-circuit overload. Nemesis returns. Drawn by Flint.

(Originally posted December 4, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)