202. Other People's Heroes

August 2010: The summer of 2010 saw several major series underway, and two that I wanted to look at just a little more closely are a pair written by 2000 AD veterans Pat Mills and John Wagner. They are both revisionist looks at much older series. Savage, of course, has been giving 'em both barrels for several years now. "Crims" is Book Six of the series, written as always by Mills and drawn by Patrick Goddard. It sees Bill Savage, now using another undercover identity, getting help from several of London's criminal gangs to get the manpower and resources to infiltrate a Volgan command center. The Volgs have countered the Allies' super sci-fi robots with teleportation, and somebody needs to get in there and shut them down. As it is, Allied robots have already been pushed back out of Wales...

"Crims" is just beautifully drawn by Goddard, who piles on the detail and the ink. It is, surprisingly, a little longer than the usual Pat Mills story of late. For the previous six or seven years, Mills had been working in blocks of 60 pages broken down into ten episodes. When episode ten of this story didn't end the book -it continues for another 30 pages and wraps with part fifteen - it really surprised readers who'd become used to Mills' tropes. But the really splendid part comes with an interlude in the middle of the story.

Some of the dialogue is a little labored when Mills introduces the surviving player of a '60s rock band who, like Syd Barrett, retired into hermitage after a short time in the spotlight. Only this fellow kept his considerable record royalties to live in some peace and quiet on Eel Pie Island. He was happy to let the world think that he was another acid casualty; it was actually his girlfriend, a hippie chick who'd been linked with Brian Jones and all the big names back in the day, who had lost her mind. He retreated from the limelight and spent the next few decades engaged in research into the sort of sci-fi physics that would come in handy fighting the Volgans' teleporters. So it's a little contrived, but the human elements to the story are incredibly effective, and Goddard's artwork is just amazing. It is some of the best black and white artwork that 2000 AD has seen in years.

But the thing that really demands comment this time out is the first chunk of "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha." It's an interesting case of Wagner aping Mills' technique, and using the style that Mills had designed for his Slaine and ABC Warriors stories many years before. When this story concludes in 2014, it will be at least 40 episodes long, a huge epic that sees Johnny Alpha's revival and the second war between mutants and humanity. But before we get to that point, there's the major and controversial business of Wagner killing off the character of Feral.

Okay, so there are two things to explain before getting into this, both the factual and the fictional background of what has happened previously. I'll try to keep this reasonably simple. Feral is a character who was introduced by Alan Grant in his final Strontium Dog serial in 1990. That story concluded with Johnny Alpha's death, and Feral was one of a number of supporting players who made their way into a sequel series, Strontium Dogs, which was helmed by Garth Ennis from 1991-93, and then by Peter Hogan until its cancellation in 1996. This coincided with then-editor David Bishop letting Hogan know that his services were no longer required at 2000 AD and finishing off Hogan's final scripts for the series with the pseudonym "Alan Smithee."

Now, depending on who you ask, Strontium Dogs was either a long-winded bore of subplots that never went anywhere, whose main cast were characters not strong enough to anchor a strip of their own, dropped irregularly into the lineup as space filler until the next launch prog, or, alternately, it was one of the few things during the dark days of the early 1990s that held any promise and was written with a sense of maturity and intelligence, especially when half or more of every issue was written by Mark Millar in "explodo-vision." I say this, respectfully, because the Ennis-Hogan Strontium Dogs certainly has its fans, many of whom came to the comic during this bleak years and have stuck around. I may not be among them, but there are certainly more readers who remember Dogs fondly than there are who liked, say, Bix Barton as I did.

But one thing seems clear: John Wagner didn't seem to think much of Peter Hogan's work. He puts his opinion in mean black and white about halfway through the story. "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" is structured as though it's excerpts from an academic history of situations famous enough to warrant multiple, competing, biographies. What we're about to learn about Feral is very much at odds with the reports from previous chroniclers, and Wagner flatly dismisses the earlier work by "the notorious fantasist Ho Gan." Ouch. This won't be good.

While Ennis and Hogan's Feral was a tough, scared kid dealing with an increasingly bizarre mutation and slowly gaining the maturity and insight to become a leader, Wagner reveals him to be a coward and a bungler, who wanted to do the right thing from time to time but lacked the spine to do it. The story opens with longtime supporting player Middenface McNulty teamed with newcomer Precious Matson, who has heard from reliable sources that Johnny Alpha's skeleton was not left behind in the other dimension as depicted in "Final Solution," but rather, his body was returned to Earth by Feral. The trail eventually leads them to Feral, who is a condemned man awaiting execution on the planet of Garn.


Garn is one of those planets that really only makes sense in the context of Strontium Dog. It's a perfect mix of an oddball culture and black-as-coal comedy. The Garnians do not have noses, and consider any species that does have noses to be ungodly. They allow McNulty and Matson to visit the condemned, in deference to the renowned hero Johnny Alpha, but while they're in public, they have to wear masks that cover their offensive honkers. Feral is sentenced to die here for an act of small-scale sabotage to cover his escape from a spacecraft, but there was an accident and dozens were killed. Capital punishment on Garn is carried out by immolation: Feral is to be burned at the stake. Worse, they're fattening him up so that he'll burn cleaner. When our heroes meet him, he weighs at least three hundred pounds.

Feral is a very bitter and ugly man, not at all the person who starred in the Ennis and Hogan stories. He is willing to confirm what McNulty and Matson have already learned: he brought Johnny's body back, where it remained in some state of preservation, not decaying at all, and spread the lie that the beast that we saw in the last episode of "Final Solution" left him nothing but broken bones. Beyond that, he won't say a thing, including where Johnny's corpse is now, until McNulty and Matson spring him. The following episode sees our heroes doing exactly that, because this is an action-adventure melodrama, and we expect that sort of thing.

So Feral goes on to explain that he took Johnny's corpse to the mysterious planet Zen, where the land is in a constant state of flux and where bizarre, towering Stone Wizards - great big pillars of animated rock - are said to have the power to revive the dead or reverse the effects of evil sorcery like what killed Johnny. Feral eventually finds the Wizards, who are unimpressed with the work of the Lyran magic. They agree to revive him, but only in return for Feral's life. He declines, buries Johnny in a forest, and makes his way into the troubled life that seemed to end almost ten years later at Garn until McNulty and Matson rescued him.

And then we get the blunt stick of reality. McNulty is an alcoholic has-been and Matson is a journalist. They didn't rescue him. Of course they didn't. They staged the abduction with the assistance of the Garnian authorities to persuade Feral to talk. The execution is going on as scheduled. Ouch.


I'm not saying that Feral's fans are legion or anything, but this just plain ticked off a few people. Over the course of about four episodes, Wagner and Ezquerra completely demolished the character of Feral, declaring his earlier heroics to be unreal fictions and giving him an ignominious and pathetic end. Myself, I always thought that Feral was cut from far too close a cloth as what was trendy and kewl in American funnybooks. He was all claws and spikes and everything that every Wolverine wannabe was like in the early 90s. Still, it's a heck of a bad way to go out.

Sometimes, heroes don't get to go out either in a blaze of glory or down the happy path of retirement. Feral screwed up, often, and lots of people died, and his execution - preceded by the ritual slicing-off of his nose as one final indignity before death - is ugly and horrible. It kind of goes without saying that it is unlikely that any American superhero book would be so bold. Can you imagine a character like Hawkeye or Aquaman meeting a final fate so ugly and demeaning? Heck, you can't even imagine a character like Hawkeye or Aquaman meeting a final fate, period. They get resurrected as quickly as a new writer can flick the reset button.

Actually, the nearest thing that I can think of was a stunning 1997 issue of Starman by James Robinson and Dusty Abell, in which the criminal the Mist killed off at least four DC Comics D-listers: Crimson Fox, Ice, Amazing Man, and Blue Devil. At least one of those four seems to have stayed dead.

And on that note, we'll come back to Johnny's very controversial resurrection when the second chunk of this lengthy epic appears. More on that in chapter 212.

In the next chapter, however, 2000 AD gets its first really memorable female lead in quite some time with the debut of Rowan Morrigan in Age of the Wolf See you in seven!

191. The Ginger Ninja

February 2009: In previous installments of this blog, I'd sort of glossed over Greysuit, a super-spy thriller by Pat Mills and John Higgins. It launched in the same issue as Defoe in the summer of 2007, and was immediately overshadowed by it. When you seem to wait around forever for a new Mills series and then two show up at once, they'll always be compared to each other, and Defoe is just so darn terrific that not very much is going to come out very well head-to-head.

But Greysuit isn't without its charms, and nobody can deny the huge, visceral pleasure of looking at Higgins' artwork. He and Mills discussed making this series visually realistic, and showing that when superpowered people slug somebody with a fist traveling about just under the speed of sound, it's going to destroy their victim's face. Mills has gone on the record many times as hating superhero comics, but this desire for something like authenticity actually dates back to late 1976, and Greysuit's antecedent, MACH One. This was one of 2000 AD's original five stories, a rip-off - slash - cash-in of television's very popular Six Million Dollar Man. This TV series featured a superpowered spy occasionally toppling corrupt governments and battling UFOs and Bigfoot, but usually he just drove around Burbank wearing a turtleneck looking for counterfeiters, because that was easier on the budget.

When MACH One was developed, a "pilot episode" was drawn for the 2000 AD ashcan that, in one panel, showed its hero, John Probe, decapitating a soldier with a karate chop. This over-the-top violence was toned down considerably before publication, but when Greysuit started thirty years later, Mills finally got to indulge. In this spy epic, the agents are all pumped up on brain chemicals that give them amazing reaction time and they can punch through walls, so when some meathead Afghan policeman or hired bodyguard gets in John Blake's way, that man's going to have his jaw broken into twelve pieces. Instantly, just as Colin MacNeil became the go-to artist for amazing exit wounds, John Higgins got the reputation as the man you want to have drawing your superpowered thug breaking skulls, leaving teeth flying and skin and muscles ripped by shattering bone. It had been a long time since 2000 AD artwork really made us do double-takes, but this did it.

But it was the script in the second story that prompted a double-take, because after John Blake has gone rogue and starts targeting a government-shielded pedophile ring, one of them calls in an agent from another department to defend himself. And suddenly, the story goes really loopy.


Here's the funny thing: I missed this completely. Every so often, I just don't pay as much attention to my thrillpower as I should, and, I guess when this run of issues showed up in the US in April, I was just focusing on Strontium Dog - and the wedding I'd have the next month - and not letting details of the other strips sink in. So when "the Ginger Ninja" debuted, to howls of derision and mockery from fans, I quietly agreed that it was a silly name, and figured that Mills was making a flat reference to some British comedian or media figure or something, but never caught on. Years later, some friends explained to me that this wasn't some crack about Chris Evans or a DJ, but just a premise that doesn't make any sense whatever. He... well, he masks himself so that he doesn't appear to have a head...? and that makes him... invisible...?

We love Mills, of course, he's the guv'nor, and it's nice to say that even when he bombs, he doesn't bore. Greysuit was filed away after this second story, but a third is anticipated later this year.

Meanwhile, Strontium Dog was kicking all kinds of ass. After doing several stories with Johnny Alpha and Wulf set somewhere in their partnership, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra turned the clock back to the earliest days of Johnny's career, before he met Wulf, and when he was still recognized by mutants as a hero of the war, and not a mean bounty hunter. "Blood Moon" is the first of two Strontium Dog adventures to see print in 2009, and, at thirteen parts, one of the longest stories for the character in quite some time. It's also completely wonderful.


I like the structure of "Blood Moon" a great deal. It starts with four episodes set during the earliest days of the war, when a younger Johnny Alpha first meets Colonel Moon. He's a really strange figure, sort of a glam rock messiah terrorist. Some years previously, Ezquerra had painted a two-part Judge Dredd story that featured a goth criminal gang and not quite got the look of the villains right. They looked like fat kids in the KISS Army and not Nephilim obsessives. But the design of Col. Blood Moon is completely perfect. You can't look at the guy without singing "Gotta make way for homo superior."

Moon's terrorist ways and no-compromise law set him at odds with the mutant generals from the outset. Moon wanted extermination of the norms, not co-existence. Since he refused to be represented by the Mutant Army, he was a wanted war criminal, not party to the terms of the armistice, and his mystique carried on into the setting of the strip. Most people believed he was dead, killed in the war, but every so often, a terrorist assault on humans would be carried out in his name. It's like Ziggy Stardust crossed with Osama bin Laden, and completely compelling.

Part of the fun is seeing all these old faces from previous Strontium Dog adventures again. Evans the Fist and Blubberlips had been killed off in the 1980s, as had all three Stix brothers, who appear in cameo in this story along with a previously-unseen cousin, every bit as ugly. But there's room for new characters as well. In this story, we meet Precious Matson, a very young and very pretty mutant journalist. She has three breasts, infuriating other reporters because she has an unfair advantage in getting stories over their ugly mugs. Precious would be reincorporated into Stronty continuity in 2010, when we begin, at long last, the first stories set after 1990's apocalyptic "Final Solution." And what a tale that will be.

"Blood Moon" is also notable for being the first story to feature Ezquerra being assisted on art duties by his son, Hector. He will be his father's regular inker for the next three and a half years, and, if I may be so bold, they'll be three and a half years of some of his very best artwork. We don't like to talk about the reality of our creative heroes getting older, but Carlos's eyes, in 2009, are not quite what they were, and, in 2011, he'll rest for several months, recuperating from major surgery. Since he's been working without Hector for the last year or so, his inking has become much heavier, as though he's trying out yet another new style. The change in inking that came when Hector came on board also a surprising development in style, and attracted a great deal of commentary. I think the art's absolutely terrific, the whole story's a fun triumph, and it's available in a collected edition with the follow-up, "Mork Whisperer." Definitely check those out.

Next time, it's D'Israeli on Low Life, mutants in Mega-City One, and the dazzling debut of Dandridge!

160. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

January 2006: The year begins with a pretty strong lineup of four popular returning series and one new thrill, a fairly typical breakdown of stories for a relaunch period. Judge Dredd is investigating a serial killer in a six-part story by John Wagner and Patrick Goddard, and Slaine is at work in a carnival-set storyline only notable for the appropriation of a Bob Dylan lyric as the cliffhanger to the penultimate episode. The Dredd story is reliable and engaging, but it's the other three stories that catch my eye this time out.

The Ten-Seconders is written by Rob Williams and illustrated by Mark Harrison. It's set in a grim future, where pockets of surviving humans manage a meager existence in the wake of the planet's devastation. Some years before, a "family" of powerful aliens arrived, affecting the appearance of angelic superheroes. They were hailed as saviors, but turned on the world and left it a wreck. The series, therefore, explores a possible future in the wake of the sort of carnage depicted in previous iterations of this kind of story, such as Alan Moore's Marvelman or Grant Morrison's Zenith. The color, the fighting and the mayhem is all in the past, and the gray, miserable present is all that small outposts of survivors have left to them.

The series, for one crafted to avoid the "hook" of watching the superbeings betray the planet and destroy it, is nevertheless written very effectively. It is one of the most promising series to emerge in the mid-2000s, and that's despite some surprisingly ineffective art by Mark Harrison which threatens to sink the whole thing. Normally a very reliable and engaging artist, Harrison's work here doesn't move me at all. Perhaps he's guilty of overthinking things, but while it's certain that a world this devastated would exist in a permanent state of clouds and darkness, it's no fun looking at page after page of battleship gray backgrounds. Men no longer able to reliably find disposable razors probably would have trouble shaving, but it doesn't help readers determine who is who, when, in a main cast of four, three of them are older fellows in fatigues with full facial hair. So it's the story of Beardie, Beardie, Welsh Beardie and Teenage Girl in Ball Cap.

Occasionally, we cut to see what the aliens are up to, and Harrison's panel compositions are bizarre, to say the least. Throughout the story, nobody is posed in a conventional way, and the "camera" is never at the same point that any other comic artist would consider placing it. It is a huge challenge to follow, and things will get much more difficult when the second story, in 2008, sees three separate artists assigned to it.



Still, despite all the many problems with the art, readers who persevered found something exciting and different within. Given an artist more inclined to follow expectations and play this safe, this might be better remembered, and not quite so much the near-miss that it's considered.

Running alongside it is an extremely interesting six-part Caballistics Inc. adventure. "Changelings," by the regular team of Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon, sees the writer feeling very confident that his readers are ready to follow along without question, and he quite safely throws the expectations of narrative right out the window. For fans who have been around since the beginning, knowing the characters and the subplots, this is business as usual, if more frenetic than some earlier adventures. I accepted all the goings-on without question, and it was not until I sat down and looked at it before I realized just how weird the structure of the story is.

Take this week's episode. It moves through four separate scenes with different sets of characters with just a single caption. Not a "Meanwhile, back in London..." and not even a "Meanwhile," just abrupt transitions from one place to another, expecting the readers have read the previous episodes carefully. Anybody coming to this as their first episode of Cabs would be hopelessly lost. And that's an overused cliche, but I mean that on a slightly different level than usual. This week's episode, as it jumps from scene to scene, does not even have a single narrative clue or establishing shot to allow readers to understand that the incidents are happening in different places.

Over the course of the story's 30 pages - and I use "story" pretty darn loosely, as it's really more "a chunk of narrative time where various subplots are recounted and expanded somewhat" - we catch flashbacks to 4000 BC, 1672 and 1922, and see members of the team kill a rakshasa. Chapter and Verse meet a little girl who sends them on a quest into the underworld kingdom of fairies, Ravne shows Jenny "his etchings" and we see that he's got the supporting player, Mr. Slater, in a tank of some kind, Dr. Brand finds clues that their benefactor Ethan Kostabi is many hundreds of years old, and then, in one of the comic's all-time classic cliffhangers, he gets pushed to his death in the London Underground, brutally murdered by his teammate Ness for as-yet-undisclosed reasons. Over the last two pages, the long-imprisoned Magister, a character introduced a year and a bit previously, is seen to have escaped his island prison. Now, the first of these two pages is pretty striking and the last is absolutely glorious, but at no point does the script pause even a breath to explain who this character is. Strangely enough, this will be the last appearance of the series for more than a year, as it takes a very disagreeable hiatus until late 2007.

The Ten-Seconders, with its unconventional artwork and after-the-fall premise, is challenging to anybody who tries it. Caballistics Inc. , with its unconventional script, is challenging to anybody who comes to it fresh. From the perspective of knowing the characters, the Cabs "story," despite giving no quarter at all to its audience, is certainly terrific, and only has one flaw: the plots do not appear to proceed across the same length of time. There is, for example, a necessarily large gap in time between the death of Dr. Brand and the questioning, by Inspector Absolam, of Ravne and Jennifer about his death. This gap is not matched at all by the concurrent plotline with Chapter and Verse and the fairies, which continues as though everything else in the story was happening at the same time. This is a common danger to comics that I don't think writers ever even notice while they're constructing them. David Anthony Kraft, writing Marvel's Defenders, did this once in the 1970s, where a single fifteen minute chase-and-fight scene between Valkyrie and Lunatik in New York City was taking place just one "meanwhile" caption away from the B-plot in Russia, which stretched over the course of several days. Suffice it to say that once a reader notices this, it's not possible to ignore.



So these are two stories that I enjoy in spite of the obstacles thrown up by the creators. On the other hand, there is Strontium Dog, which is lovely, conventional and the great gag this time is that the characters don't look quite right. Working on a planet where the natives don't have hair, Johnny Alpha and Wulf have to go bald to fit in.

Their previous adventure, "Traitor to His Kind," was a mean, downbeat and serious political thriller. This, however, is one of the lighter Strontium Dog adventures. Assisted by a big fellow bounty hunter whose mutation is thick, white, Womble-like all-over body hair - he's one of the occasionally-appearing Fuzz family - they've tracked a criminal with the trademark-tweaking nickname of The Plastic Man to a planet where he's waiting out a statute of limitations, and where Fuzzy is wanted on multiple counts of bigamy. His hair has had the native girls swooning, but the local police take monogamy very, very seriously on this world, particularly when hirsute fellows come to town and woo princesses.

While the death of Dr. Brand proved to be among the most stunning dramatic cliffhangers in 2000 AD's history, Johnny and Wulf losing their hair, and Wulf's trademark bushy beard, is certainly one of the funniest. Prog 2006 had run the first two (produced) episodes as a single, double-part installment, and that's how that chunk of the story ended, with our heroes shorn and shaven and ready for action. I'd like to think that Carlos Ezquerra had to pause for a few moments and spend a little more time with his sketchbook than usual figuring out what Wulf actually looked like under the beard. It's terrific.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Caballistics Inc.: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Slaine: The Books of Invasions Vol. 3 (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor to His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, before there was Zombo, there was... Harry Kipling (Deceased)! See you in seven days, friends!

145. What Grant Was Writing

December 2004: While new names like Steve Roberts, Dom Reardon and Boo Cook have been blowing readers away at 2000 AD this year, over at the sister Judge Dredd Megazine, veterans have been getting all the assignments. There are five new strips in this issue, and the newest creator working on them is Colin MacNeil, whose first Judge Dredd episode came about fifteen years previously. True, there is a Simping Detective text story by newcomer Si Spurrier, illustrated by Frazer Irving, but the strips are all by veterans. There's a Devlin Waugh one-off by John Smith and MacNeil, and four strips written or co-written by old hands John Wagner and Alan Grant, with art by John Higgins, Robin Smith, Arthur Ranson and John Ridgway. Along with other text features and reprints of Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, it's a terrific comic, but not one with much room for new talent.

Ridgway is among the artists rotating on Grant's Young Middenface, a strip that's probably completely impenetrable to new readers. They're prequel adventures of a supporting character in Strontium Dog, somebody who has not been seen in "the present" for more than five years at this point. Wagner and Ezquerra had not reintroduced Middenface McNulty to the pages of their revived Strontium Dog adventures at the time this story was printed, and so these Young Middenface chronicles, which vary wildly in tone from broad and bawdy comedy to the action melodrama of this story, "Killoden," are really fan service for longtime readers. They're very well-told and well-drawn, but with Grant writing these and Anderson: Psi Division and, over in the weekly, Robo-Hunter, you can't help but wish that no matter how good these stories are, you'd prefer Alan Grant working on a property a little more fresh.

Judge Anderson, for example, reflects that she's pushing fifty in the opening episode of "Lock-In," which sees her returning to service after her last couple of psychic-plane adventures. Wow, it's been a really long and strange trip for Cass at this point. In the late nineties, her strip had been a recurring feature in 2000 AD under David Bishop and Andy Diggle's editorships. In 2001, a ten-part story, "R*Evolution," had appeared to instant reader derision that lasts to this day. (Just last month, one of my friends at the 2000 AD message board who goes by the handle "The Cosh" referred to this story as, simply, "Stupid Monkeys." Everybody knew which one he meant and everybody shuddered.) In the summer of 2002, John Wagner had Judge Death get Anderson out of his way, putting her into a coma in the celebrated "My Name is Death" six-parter. Frankly, Anderson had been so non-thrilling for so long, and that story was so damned amazing, that nobody really minded this once-loved character being sidelined.

Obviously, when Alan Grant returned to the character, he had a lot of work to do to make her seem vital and important again. He accomplished this in a really fantastic series of interlocking adventures, all drawn by Ranson, that cover 24 episodes stretching from Meg 214 in January '04 to Meg 241 in February '06. These have not received the attention that I believe that they should, and have yet to be reprinted. (Cass's reprints are, happily, continuing, with the second volume of The Psi-Files phonebooks planned for next February. This will cover all the episodes from 1990 to early 1995. We're getting there!)

Anyway, "Lock-In" is the third of five stories in Grant and Ranson's epic, and it really digs into how weird and how fragile and failing Psi Division really is. The story began with Cass unable to free herself from the coma, thanks to a series of psychic mind-traps left behind by Judge Death and his freaky "sisters," the inhuman Phobia and Nausea. Since her superiors didn't get the message that she needed to be left alone to prevent a virus from leaving her mind should it become conscious again, they send a team of agents and operatives onto the astral plane to revive her. Absolutely nothing goes right, readers learn just how unpleasantly creepy certain departments of Psi Division are - I didn't know what an extispist was until I read "WMD," the second of the five stories - and supporting characters meet gruesome ends and crippling fates all over the place. By the time Cass is brought out of the coma, you start to wonder whether she'd prefer a quiet retirement.



I might be mistaken, but I believe that this 24-episode, 208-page arc storyline was Ranson's last comic work before he retired. I suppose that it will get collected in the Psi-Files phonebooks eventually, but it's a real epic, overlooked by many readers at the time, and deserves a nice, hardback library edition on its own. I am really, really enjoying rereading it. Sure, The Simping Detective and Cursed Earth Koburn got all the attention among Meg stories at the time - and deservedly so; they're great - but I think this saga will be reevaluated in time.

Suggesting that the editor might have been leaning on Alan Grant's considerable talents a wee bit too much in '04, he's also at work co-writing the fourth adventure for The Bogie Man. One fine day, somebody's going to give this creator-owned property a nice and prestige reprint and I'll be incredibly happy. I'll refer readers who'd like a little more background to Wikipedia to learn more, but basically, Grant, John Wagner and Robin Smith did one story for John Brown Publishing in 1989-1991, a second story which was finished for Atomeka Press in 1993 and a third story which appeared in the pages of Toxic! before the second story was completed. "Return to Casablanca" is the first Bogie Man tale in eleven years.

If you're not familiar with the character, he's a very dangerous, escaped mental patient named Francis Forbes Clunie, who believes that he's an amalgam of all the tough, leading characters played in films by Humphrey Bogart. He turns every bit of information he receives into something from the fiction of that actor's iconic films, but his gun is loaded with real bullets.



So the character is basically a tabula rasa, to be dropped into other characters' criminal adventures and wreak holy hell onto them. I mean, you might well be a criminal mastermind with schemes to use your white slavery ring to force eastern European immigrants to make shortbread for you, and you might well be prepared for any possible eventuality, but you're not likely to factor Clunie into your scheme. It's a demented, hilarious, utterly ridiculous series, with the completely unpredictable Bogie Man usually crashing into the more baffling segments of Scottish culture - Americans, go watch "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" to see what I mean - and emerging unscathed and barely ruffled.

A supporting player from an earlier story called Rab McNab turns up again in this one. He's a devilish parody of those safe, 1970s teatime entertainers allegedly popular with housewives of the day - think Rolf Harris singing "Please Release Me" in a Scottish accent - who is desperately trying to hold onto his career and his sobriety while everything around him spirals out of control, bad guys are shooting up the place and Clunes is, obliviously, punching the daylights out of everybody. This poor guy. Man, I love this series.

Stories from this issue are available for purchase in the following collected editions:

Well, here's a surprise. The only thing in this issue to have been reprinted so far is the Simping Detective text story, in : The Complete Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop)



Next time, the present collides with the past! I'll be temporarily derailing this reread format for one week for a quick look back at John Smith's Indigo Prime as this amazing series returns to present-day 2000 AD with a new adventure. Normal service, such as it is, will be resumed on the 15th!

144. What Wagner Was Writing

November 2004: Prog 1415 reminds me of just how much I dislike the loudmouthed comic book fandom literati. This is because, while the prog has some pretty darn good stories in the form of Faces by Mindy Newell and John Higgins, Lobster Random by Si Spurrier and Carl Critchlow and Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Jack Lawrence, they're all completely blown out of the water by the two veteran series that bookend the issue. John Wagner has written both the current stories for Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog and they're both completely incredible. You know what comics were better than these in 2004? None of them. John Wagner's name should have been in lights that year. And every year. He's consistently the very best writer in all of comics. "Total War" and "Traitor To His Kind" just prove it.

So the situation in "Total War" is this: the terrorist group of that name, last seen putting things together in the recent story "Terror," has issued an ultimatum to the judges of Mega-City One. They have secreted several nuclear devices - much like the "dirty bombs" that were all over the news that year - of varying power into hiding places throughout the city. They detonate a small one, killing hundreds of thousands, to prove that they're serious, and announce that larger bombs will be going off at regular intervals until the judges hand over their power and leave the city. Simple as that.

With one caveat, this is a completely terrific story. For readers who enjoy the more cerebral, detective fiction side of Dredd, this is one of the all-time best stories. Future technologies and the oppressive city surveillance are incredibly important in this race against time to find the bombs and find the terrorists. Watching the judges, especially long-time supporting player PSU Judge Roffman, desperately working under incredible pressure for any clue and any lead, is a real treat. The dead ends are completely heartbreaking. There's a real sense of despair when so much work goes into identifying one of Total War's top men, and the arrest goes flat when the judges learn he'd killed himself hours previously.

Two-thirds of the way through the story, there's a twisting development that I did not enjoy. Perhaps Wagner had created too clever a villain, and an organization that covered its tracks too well for even the trained investigators of Justice Department to find, but the twist that brings the judges a needed break is just too convenient for my liking. On the other hand, it really didn't matter at the time. The simple appearance of an old man with an eye patch somehow, in the hands of Wagner and artist Henry Flint, turns into one amazing cliffhanger when read weekly.

There's also a very cool subplot dealing with Dredd's niece Vienna. Early on, before the terrorists' demands are made, we are introduced to another clone made from Dredd's genetic stock, but this one has suffered severe brain damage and is deteriorating quickly. The tek judges consider Dredd the clone's next of kin and ask his permission to euthanize him. Dredd replies that he's certainly not any "next of kin" and tells them not to involve him. So they involve Vienna instead. Vienna's dealing with this and keeping her uncle Joe dragged in brings the two story threads crashing together as millions try to flee the city by any means necessary. Mega-City One being what it is, everything spirals completely out of control.



As good as this Dredd serial is, I'm not sure that Johnny Alpha's latest case isn't better. "Traitor to His Kind" is a mean political thriller. Alpha is called to Earth to track down Clarkie, the King of England, who's been abducted by mutant terrorists. King Clarkie had first been introduced back in the 1980s, a fun little parody of "I Say, Jolly What"-styled upper class twits. Now, his government is quietly keeping his abduction secret, and the minister who's brought Alpha into the picture, to smoothly and discreetly rescue him, is playing a really interesting game, keeping many plates in the air.

This is a really great story that has Alpha working pretty far outside his comfort zone. I mean, it's normal that he can't really trust anybody, but this time out, the stakes are a lot higher. He's been using the wealth of his bounties to help rebuild the mutant ghettos of Milton Keynes, and is much loved by that community. But now, as gossip is filtering around that somebody has abducted the king in a bid for more rights for mutants, Alpha is on entirely the wrong side of public opinion. Add in the usual Strontium Dog tricks of a hatefully two-faced British government and previously unmentioned family members making appearances, and this one's a taut and mean winner of a story.

Honestly, I'd have bet good money on Clarkie not getting out of this one alive. The character had earlier, in the epic, controversial "Final Solution," been seen to be executed, but in these revisionist, untold tales of Strontium Dog, there was always the feeling that Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra were going to change things around in a big way. Here, they don't, although "The Final Solution" would come up for major reappraisal in 2010.



These are both absolutely excellent stories. Wagner may not be writing darn near everything like he seemed to in the 1980s, but his work is consistently of the highest quality. He's absolutely the best, most reliable craftsman in the medium of comics, and this issue provides all the evidence that I need to make that claim. Comic fans that ignore Wagner's work are doing themselves a huge disservice.

Stories from this issue are available for purchase in the following collected editions:

Judge Dredd: Total War (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, Anderson's new do and the Meg premiere of The Bogie Man get the spotlight as I look at what Wagner's frequent collaborator Alan Grant was doing. See you next week!

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.)

84. The Commonwealth That Wasn't Secret Enough

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.

April 2000: Sinister Dexter are on the cover of prog 1190. It's a very silly piece by Greg Staples which uses word balloons for just about the first time in living memory. The story inside is part two of "Mission to Mangapore" by Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke, and it continues the long investigation into the criminals that were behind the carnage of the epic "Eurocrash" storyline which appeared about a year previously, and reintroduces Finnigan's estranged wife Carrie Hosanna as being in the employ of the series' latest underworld kingpin. Sinister Dexter has a long history of playing with puns and stereotypes in its multi-ethnic, European cast, and this is the first time it's really played with Japanese stereotypes. It hits the expected targets, including yakuza and ninjas and rock gardens and five-mile-high buildings and a liquid metal Terminator II-type robot killer which chooses to hang out in the shape of a big-eyed schoolgirl, but it's all a bit predictable and dry, really. Clarke has a really hard time adjusting his style, which is gorgeously realistic and natural, to accomodate Polly, who's supposed to be some sort of generic "anime" stereotype. She looks deeply out of place. My feeling at the time, and it's echoed as I reread it, is that Ray and Finny aren't enough out of their element, that Abnett didn't make Mangapore as bizarre as it could have been. Obviously the island-city has that name for comedy identification reasons, but "manga" doesn't mean "just another Japanese thing" to me, it means "comics." It's a shame that this world wasn't populated by a culture as obsessed with comics as Downlode is by hitmen and kingpins. Maybe it's just me, but while "Mission to Mangapore" isn't a bad story, it's really just any other Sin Dex adventure, albeit one with ninjas in it. File them off and the story could've been set in Downlode.

On the other hand, the current adventure of Pat Mills' Slaine is utterly unlike any other Slaine adventure previously published, because it is jawdroppingly awful. No kidding, friends, this is the one that nobody can stand.

The story is called "The Secret Commonwealth," and it is four months of eyekicking artwork burying what might have been an interesting plot somewhere. It earned the instant derision of fandom when it first appeared, and my kids immediately cried foul when they saw it. David Bircham is the art droid responsible for this mess, and I have previously said an unkind thing or two about his artwork in previous installments of Thrillpowered Thursday.



I think what amazes me most about "Commonwealth" is that the style Bircham uses here is a quantum leap backwards for him. No, I did not like his work in Vector 13 or that chunk towards the end of "The Hunting Party" storyline in Judge Dredd or the Sin Dex adventure "Smoke and Mirrors," but apart from some obvious problems in pacing and how the characters on the page relate to each other, I would say that those were still evidence of a skilled professional using a style that I simply didn't enjoy looking at. "Commonwealth," with its bargain-basement heavy metal airbrush appearance, looks like it predates those stories by years.

What really strikes me is that "Smoke and Mirrors" at least evoked its island setting with a consistent use of greens and browns in the pallets, and full backgrounds of trees and local color. "Secret Commonwealth," as befits something that looks like the night security guard was doodling in between six-hour recreations of Iron Maiden's "Eddie" in a Crimean War uniform, mostly doesn't have backgrounds at all, just vast expanses of white separating the characters. Seventeen weeks of this was enough to sour the readership on Slaine for ages, and once this turkey ends in prog 1199, it would be the last we'd see of the character for two and a half years.

Lest my negativity bring you down too much, the other three stories in this prog were good. John Smith and Simon Davis teamed up for a Judge Dredd episode, Nikolai Dante concluded the magnificent "The Rudinshtein Irregulars," and there was a fun one-off by Andrew Ness and Siku called "Space Dust." Ness was a regular on alt.comics.2000ad and everybody had high hopes for him landing a series commission, but this has proved to be his only 2000 AD work so far. Haven't seen Andrew around the message boards and forums in some time; I hope he's doing well.



In other news, Rebellion has continued its series of Strontium Dog collections with The Kreeler Conspiracy. This follows up the five-volume "Search/Destroy Agency Files" which reprinted the entirety of the original run of the series. This book, unnumbered on its spine, reprints three of the first four adventures from the revived series. It starts with the titular "Kreeler Conspiracy" (mentioned here in Thrillpowered Thursday a couple of weeks ago) and also includes the very fun serials "Roadhouse" and "The Tax Dodge." Lost in the shuffle, sadly, is the one-off adventure "The Sad Case," which originally appeared in "Prog 2001," and was presumably left behind for space reasons, and which we hope to see in a future collection.

Despite that story's absence, the book's a fun, meaty little exercise in plotting, as Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer face challenges that require them to use their wits more than their firepower. "The Tax Dodge" is especially fun, as the bounty hunting duo are faced with a representative of customs and excise on one side, and a very amusing alien race on the other. These guys, easily-offended, overcompensating loudmouths with quick tempers, are among the funniest alien species to ever appear in 2000 AD. All three stories are by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, and this book is very highly recommended!

Next week, since the Megazine entered the 2000s with another format change, I'll be looking at that. Also, Dredd gets high on drugs.

81. The Dog is Back

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.

Jan. 2000: Prog 1177 sports a cover by Mark Harrison which promotes the series Glimmer Rats by himself and Gordon Rennie. Harrison signs the image "After Frazetta," but I'm not certain which particular Frazetta piece that Harrison's homage is evoking. For my money, the cover is certainly the best thing about Glimmer Rats, a gruesome, violent war story set in an ugly, physics-defying world with a million graphic deaths around each corner. The ten-part story began in "Prog 2000" and ranks among my least favorite strips to ever appear from the House of Tharg.

Everything else in prog 1177 is considerably more memorable. There's a fun Judge Dredd one-off by Alan Grant and Jason Brashill, one of a long series of single-part stories that Grant had contributed during this period, along with the ongoing epic Missionary Man, about which more next week, by Rennie and Trevor Hairsine. The prog also features what I believe is the first 2000 AD work by the writing team of Colin Clayton and Chris Dows on a Pulp Sci-Fi one-off illustrated beautifully by Cliff Robinson. The duo's later efforts, Bison and Synnamon, would receive mixed reviews from the fan base, but this is a perfectly good old-school thrill with a pretty cute twist ending.

The most entertaining, and most important, strip in the lineup is the very welcome return of Strontium Dog, back in action after almost a decade's layoff, and handled by the strip's original creators, John Wagner and Carlos Ezqeurra.

Strontium Dog first appeared in the premiere issue of Starlord back in 1978, and appeared in most of that comic's 22 issues before it was cancelled and merged with 2000 AD. From there, the series and its lead character, the mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, became semi-regulars throughout the 1980s. Wagner initially wrote the series solo before teaming with Alan Grant for most of its celebrated run. Grant wrote the last few storylines on his own in the late 1980s. Almost all of the series was illustrated by Ezquerra, though he elected to stop working on Johnny's adventures once it was decided that the character would meet his demise in a major epic, "The Final Solution," and instead moved over to Crisis to illustrate Pat Mills' Third World War. The full run of the original Strontium Dog run is available in a series of big, chunky reprints called "Search/Destroy Agency Files," and your bookshelf looks naked without them.



Anyway, earlier in 1999, the Showtime cable network was developing TV series based on the 2000 AD properties Strontium Dog and Paul Neal's Outlaw. They came to nothing, but Wagner had assembled a pilot treatment and series bible for the proposed series, and, not wanting to waste a good thing, agreed that the time was right to bring Alpha back to action. "The Kreeler Conspiracy" is a thirteen-part expansion of Wagner's proposed pilot, and it appeared in the comic in two chunks across six months.

The story features the affectation of being the genuine history of Johnny Alpha, including "footnotes" from the historian who has compiled this dramatisation, and suggesting that the earlier series had presented legends of the bounty hunter's life. This notion would be used again in the second new story, which appeared in December 2000, before being quietly shelved in favor of a continuity-friendly approach that simply suggests the new run consists of previously untold tales of the character.

Strontium Dog has since joined the ranks of Tharg's periodic returning series. While it's not appearing anywhere as frequently as it did in its heyday, a new story appears once a year or so. At the time I'm writing this, it's on the ninth story since this comeback. It's called "Blood Moon" and it started in "Prog 2009." Honestly, I think the last one, "The Glum Affair," felt a little long, but otherwise the series is reliably inventive and imaginative, blessed with some great characters and some of comics' best artwork.



As far as reprints of this material go, Glimmer Rats was reprinted by Rebellion in a 2005 hardback that is not currently available at Amazon; Strontium Dog: The Kreeler Conspiracy just arrived in stores a few months ago. This collection will be reviewed here in a few weeks' time.

Next time, Dredd's nemesis Edgar finds a new job in Justice Department, Preacher Cain goes to Vegas, and Dredd goes to Oz in the newly-released eleventh Case Files. See you all in seven!

(Originally posted Jan. 1 2009 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

35. Finn vs. Slaine: and only one shall continue!

June 1996: Prog 996 continues a strong lineup, with Carlos Ezquerra back at work on the John Wagner-scripted Judge Dredd story "The Pit," a Henry Flint cover announcing this week's episode of Strontium Dogs by Peter Hogan and Trevor Hairsine, a creepy Vector 13 installment by Brian Williamson and Kevin Cullen, and two ongoing series scripted by the Guv'nor, Pat Mills. (Can I do that, incidentally? Mills has earned the fandom-approved nickname "Guv'nor," but I don't know that an American can actually use that term in any other situation without looking awfully silly.)

Anyway, while Wagner and Ezquerra bring the Pit storyline towards its spectacular, explosive conclusion - one which leaves readers wondering whether any of these new Dredd castmembers will make it out of the mob war alive - Finn is also making its way towards its end, in a very unusual nine-episode story that feels a lot like a throwback to comics from the late 70s and early 80s. "Season of the Witch," on paper, is a nine-part story, but it's actually a series of loosely-related two- and three-part stories with an umbrella title, in which the magic-powered man with the machine gun goes up against four different opponents in the employ of the evil Lord Michael and his comedy Freemasons. Finn, we must recall, came during a time when Pat Mills didn't want to write believable villains, just ones with really nasty weapons.

1996 sees us past the real hump in the Guv'nor's low-quality phase of the early '90s. (It's a hump which, coincidentally or not, overlaps with the period he was co-writing Punisher 2099 with Tony Skinner for Marvel Comics. The only thing Punisher 2099 was ever good for was giving me a character to play with Nemesis and Torquemada in Heroclix on "teams my opponents will not guess the theme of" day.) Neither Finn nor Slaine are particularly bad at all, but it's just not possible to read these comics and not know that Mills has done better, before and since.



Really, the villains are the biggest problem. At no point can you believe any of them as legitimate characters, and that's the greatest failing of these strips. I guess you can argue that Finn and Slaine are playing for very high stakes - the future of Mother Earth - and consequently, the actual dramatic conflict of the comic page is not as important or as significant as getting the reader to think about the bigger themes involved. Mills has done this before, to very good effect. Of course, you know he was the author of Charley's War in Battle Picture Weekly, which was one of, if not the very best of all war comics. Periodically, Mills would show us the aging, impotent aristos and generals directing the slaughter on the battlefields, and they'd be little more than bizarre caricatures, jarringly two-dimensional when weighed against the vivid portrayals of the tommies in the trenches. Yet this choice worked because we never saw the enlisted men interacting with the toffs.

By contrast, Finn will frequently have a violent argument with some industry baron in Lord Michael's power structure, and the conflict falls completely apart. Mills gave his heroic characters a great deal of believability, but he also gave them 100% of the moral argument. This is why, say, Batman's enemies don't explain their moral reasoning in an attempt to persuade the readers' sympathies. When Finn has the owner of Big Auto Company tied to a chair, we don't need the nonsense about Big Auto having an obligation to its stockholders to increase profits by polluting the environment. It's fake, and feels forced and unnatural.

Lord Michael himself is unlike Mills' classic villains like Torquemada or the Lord Weird Slough Feg in that he is not fanatical about anything. In fact, he's oddly joyless, completely lacking positive passion for anything at all. Here's where the structure really fails for me. You can identify the main villain because he's the old, cranky, balding jerk. He has no life whatsoever, but the top witch in Finn's coven, Mandy, is full of life and energy and radiates charisma and fun. It's too obvious and too easy - wouldn't this be a more compelling strip if the main villain enjoyed his position half as much as Mandy does hers? The sexual angle is pretty clear and pretty lazy, too. Mandy represents virility and is sexually desirable, while Lord Michael is old and overweight. Imagine how much more interesting this might have been with those roles reversed?

And yet, Finn remains readable and sometimes compelling because it's so grandiose, with so many wild elements, and its plot is completely unpredictable. It is also worth noting that the entire dramatic structure of Finn reappears in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, where you've again got posh aristos in big country houses using secret handshakes and allying with aliens in complex schemes to keep humanity down, and the good guys have chaos magic and machine guns on their side. Morrison did it a dozen times better, when he had artists who could translate his scripts for us and when he wasn't fucking around in Revolutionary France anyway, but fair's fair, Finn came first.



The cardboard villain problem continues in Slaine, but there's a sense of weirdness and completely bizarre plotting in "Lord of Misrule" which makes the story stand out more as being fresh and original, and we see Mills flesh out some older ideas to much better effect. The sequence in this story where Marian is sentenced to death evokes a similar incident in the 1992 ABC Warriors story "Khronicles of Khaos," only it works much better here, as Mills is able to devote more space to it.

There is a lot more Slaine to come in the next several months - the character gets one of his longest-ever runs throughout 1996-97 as he becomes a semi-regular cast member of the comic - but Clint Langley won't be with him for the time being, although he will be used on some other series in the next few years. Langley will return to Slaine in 2003 and the Books of Invasion storyline, his artwork honed to an intriguing love-it or hate-it heavily-PhotoShopped style (I quite like it!), but other artists will handle the stories to come.

Finn, however, is shelved after this story. Thrill-Power Overload - you know, if there were more available sources, I'd reference 'em - explains that David Bishop wanted to keep Mills' energies directed down one avenue, the more popular one, while also limiting the opportunities to get on the Guv'nor's bad side. Since Bishop and his fellow former editors Alan McKenzie and Andy Diggle have all gone on the record about some frictions with Mills, I think I can understand the reasoning!

But right now, Bishop can ill-afford to spend time fighting with a freelancer about Finn. He's about to piss off a huge chunk of the Megazine's readership with some reprints. More on that next time!

(Originally published 1/3/08 at LiveJournal.)

34. Simon Davis Saves the Day

May 1996: Prog 993 sports a fun little cover by the great Sean Phillips, well known among current comic readers for his work on Criminal with Ed Brubaker. That feller on the front is Middenface McNulty, one of 2000 AD's most popular second bananas, heralding the return inside of Strontium Dogs. This series is a follow-up to the original run of Strontium Dog, which concluded five years previously, and continues the stories of the supporting cast in the wake of Johnny Alpha's death. Garth Ennis wrote a few series before moving on to work for US publishers. This left the writer Peter Hogan to take up his plot threads, and he divided the characters into two separate series: the Strontium Dogs strips dealt with the Gronk, Bullmoose, Feral and a gang of mad professors, while Durham Red and Frinton Fuzz took their story into the separate Durham Red run.

The problem was, as was common during the Burton / McKenzie regimes, it was ages between stories in the weekly. A new story would arrive after being absent for five months, run for four weeks, advance its subplots a little, and vanish again. Read in one go, they aren't bad at all, but spread out over years, it was pretty tedious. Reading this run with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the next four months are going to give us a good solid run of the two series at last, this time with the S/D art chores taken up by Trevor Hairsine, but there's a remarkable giveaway of a clue in this credit box about how much more we'll be seeing of Strontium Dogs in the future:



Alan Smithee, huh? That can't be good. Indeed, as with R.A.M. Raiders, which we saw in the previous entry, an appropriate level of hype and attention, including an intro page with art by Henry Flint, is being paid to a strip which will not be returning. It's always touchy to mention a couple of creators you enjoy and respect having a professional disagreement, but you know how last time I was saying how a number of creators begin moving on from 2000 AD during this period, as David Bishop declines to commission new material from them? Peter Hogan would be one of those.

Bishop is very forthcoming in Thrill-Power Overload about how he did not handle this decision as delicately as he might have done, but his decision means the end of the road for both Hogan's Robo-Hunter, which only has a single episode left in the can at this stage, and Strontium Dogs, while Durham Red will be given to Dan Abnett. Hogan's final episodes go out under the Alan Smithee pseudonym, and that's the last we see of the Gronk and Feral, and of Durham's ongoing war against the criminal Gothking.

Hogan really didn't get the chance to contribute to 2000 AD as much as I'd have liked. His subsequent work in comics has been sporadic, but he's highly regarded for some work with Alan Moore on the Terra Obscura series for ABC/Wildstorm. Hairsine, of course, has a number of projects for the House of Tharg still to come over the next few years. Most recently, he worked with Paul Cornell for Marvel Comics on a Pete Wisdom miniseries.

This sounds like a bit of a bummer of an entry, but the weekly is still very strong right now. Judge Dredd's epic "The Pit" continues. John Wagner is still scripting; art in this week's episode is by Alex Ronald and Alan Craddock. Vector 13 offers a ghost story by Brian Williamson and John Burns, and the final series of Finn continues, by Pat Mills, Tony Skinner and Paul Staples.

But then there is Sinister Dexter, and what has started as a pretty good, entertaining series has suddenly become unmissably fantastic, because Simon Davis has joined the art team:



Geez, that's beautiful. I love his work; Davis is among my five favorite comic artists. And here's the crazy thing: I imagine Davis will be quick to say that his painting looks the best when he's got a great deal of time to work on the pages, but his first two Sin Dex episodes were done under a pretty hellish deadline, and they look great.

In an earlier entry, I explained that five more episodes of Sin Dex were commissioned with very little lead time - about two months from the order until the comics went to the printer. So two episodes went to Charlie Gillespie, who'd done three of the first eight installments, one went to Henry Flint, who had just wrapped up some Rogue Trooper stories, and the other two went to Davis. Bishop had used Davis a few times as an artist for Missionary Man while he was editor of the Megazine, and knew that Davis could be counted on to make a tough deadline.

And he makes it look effortless. Over time, quite a few artists will be tackling Sinister Dexter, but Davis will get the first two of the important, long stories, "Gunshark Vacation" and "Murder 101," in 1997. These will cement Sin Dex's popularity to the point that it will become a semi-regular feature. But more on that another time!

Oh, one other note: I half-joked on the message board this week that I should keep a running Sinister Dexter bullet count. Turns out, across the first fourteen episodes, they each only take one confirmed hit apiece, in part two of "The Eleventh Commandment." Since Anthony Williams, at this time, was filling the negative space of his panels with as many shell casings as he can reasonably draw in them, I am amazed that our heroes only take two bullets across all of these installments. (In "Family Man," Henry Flint draws Ramone clutching his forearm as if to imply he'd been hit in just one panel, but there's nothing in the script to confirm it. Isn't this a great hobby?)

Next week, I'm not sure... probably a word or two about Finn and Slaine. Take care!

(Originally published 12/27/07 at LiveJournal.)