123. Get Vaped and Stay Vaped!

I'm basking in the warm, circuit-sparking glow of the four latest progs to make their way to American stores and was enjoying them so much that I quite forgot that I had business here to finish, which is a little short-sighted of me. Usually, when I select a topic for this blog, I tend towards the really big events, such as the return of Slaine, the debut of Caballistics Inc. or the crossover epic story of Judge Dredd vs. Aliens. Perhaps I have a habit of overlooking the equally important supporting stories, and the first quarter of 2003 has had quite a few, so I'd like to touch on a few of those before moving on.

Ian Gibson has cover duties for prog 1334 from April of '03, spotlighting the second series of the remade and remodelled The V.C.s. Dan Abnett is still the writer, but Anthony Williams has taken over art duties from Henry Flint. It's surprisingly, stubbornly unengaging, but Williams makes it all look pretty good. There's a collected edition of the first three series of the 2002-05 run of The V.C.s, and in the supplementary material, Abnett explained how enthusiastic he was about writing the strip. Its subsequent refusal to be really entertaining remains completely baffling.

Abnett did such a great job on so many strips in creating memorable, larger-than-life characters, but the cast of the V.C.s are just the most anonymous bunch of nobodies that 2000 AD's ever seen. There's Smith, from the original series, and the alien, who's called Keege, and... Ryx, who I think is the asshole, and the obligatory babe, whose name might be Lin-Fu, and somebody else, and I think the rival pilot might be called Veto. And I can name every member of the ABC Warriors in the order they joined, so I don't think the problem's me. Especially when these guys have their names painted on the front of their spacesuits.



Abnett had much better luck with the second series of Atavar, drawn by Richard Elson. I was very skeptical about this one, because I felt that the original should have been left as a one-off serial with a spectacular twist ending. It was a universe that simply didn't need revisiting, and this colored my view so much that I'm only now reading Atavar for the first time. And you know what? It's incredibly good stuff!

I started to write up a synopsis of what happens in the second series, only to realize that I got way too detailed, and when you're dealing with weird sci-fi concepts and beasties, such a writeup rapidly starts sounding convoluted and silly. Suffice it to say that Atavar's world is one with a dizzying array of new, utterly inhuman races like the Binoid and their sentient machines. Elson's designs for the aliens and all this technology are very interesting and he looks completely at home with whatever Abnett throws at him to draw. I suggest that readers, like me, have done this story a disservice by overlooking it the way we have. It is an interesting and vivid parallel to the similarly far-out, inhuman universe of Shakara, and there's a lot of love for the Abnett/Elson team on their more recent series Kingdom, so Tharg and his team should definitely look into putting all three Atavar stories out in a nice collected edition.

Then on the other end of the quality scale, there's Bec & Kawl by Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts, which is just coughing up blood on the pages. It's another four-week run for the comedy series. It leads with a dopey one-off whose punch line requires you to notice what is written on Kawl's T-shirt at exactly the right moment, and then there's an invasion-by-cyberspace thing guest starring a gang of mean-spirited geek stereotypes. With its third run, Bec & Kawl would develop into something memorable and charming, but at this point, you're left wondering what dirt Spurrier has on Tharg to get this mess commissioned.

What's nice, though, is that Matt Smith, in his guise as Tharg, has a pretty small number of series to pick from, and everything that I've mentioned has come back to the prog after a very short layoff. In fact, the thunderously good Caballistics Inc. by Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon starts its second series just a month after the first ended. In this one, the team moves into a new headquarters once used by a Crowley-archetype for demonic rituals, and I can remember the names of all the characters in this cast, too.

Caballistics will take another short break - only three weeks - before starting its third story. By my count, Smith is only juggling about eight or nine recurring series at this point, and deciding what to recommission in the future. Obviously, this number's going to skyrocket as a huge pile of new series begin over the next two years, and I'm sure it didn't make for a happy Command Module at the time, filling in the gaps with whatever's handy. Prog 1334, in fact, contains two space-fillers: a Future Shock and yet another of Steve Moore's interminable Tales of Telguuth. Tharg will finally run out of those turkeys at the end of '03. But what I suspect was a real headache for Smith and the droids was really to the readers' advantage: with such short gaps between ongoing series, everything seems very fresh and fun. It's much easier to enjoy a series when you don't have to wait a year between installments!

And speaking of waiting for a new installment, that is where we'll leave the story for now. I'm choosing to take a little break because I am adding another regularly-scheduled blog to my rotation, but I'd sort of like to keep the same number of weekly deadlines. If you're a regular reader, thanks for following me, and if you just have me bookmarked, I'll drop a note on the 2000 AD message board when I resume in eight or nine weeks. So I will see you again in March, when Pat Mills and Andy Diggle go at it again, as The ABC Warriors and Snow / Tiger go head to head. See you then!

115. Blasts from the Past

August 2002: Prog 1306 sports a cover by David Millgate for the new serial Bison. Charitably, it's not one of Tharg's better offerings. The kickboxing lady on the cover is a pretty radically redesigned version of the hero, who starts the serial as an aging, hugely-muscled detective in a near-future scenario, but thanks to some bodyswapping technology that's all the rage in the story, he's wearing the body of an untouchable crime lord's junkie daughter and she's got his. But at no point does either character look like the tough kickboxing lady that Millgate has drawn. See, when Detective Jack Bison realized that Esposito's daughter had an account on this bodychanging service, he realized he was going to have to go outside the law to take Esposito down, and planned to use his own daughter as the shooter, but didn't figure she was going to set up whomever was going to take over her body. She was strung out on heroin and such and just didn't want to deal with a weekend's withdrawal and detox. So Bison first has to kick the habit and then go kill Esposito, except he also has to deal with the daughter, who's using his body to go on a shooting rampage of her own, and...

Well, it's obviously not just the bodyswap technology that nobody thought quite all the way through; this plot is an amazingly convoluted mess. This is a nine-part story written by Colin Clayton and Chris Dows, and illustrated by Laurence Campbell and Len Townsend. I don't think any of them would disagree when I say that all four creators would do better in the future. Bison was met with howls of derision from the fan base. Looking at it now, it's perhaps a degree or two better than I remembered it, but it's still a pretty stupid comic. Yet the real disappointment is the art. Laurence Campbell would go on to much better things, particularly a 2005 serial called Breathing Space, but what we have here is just lazy, sloppy work that should have gone straight back to the artist for reworking. Check out the way he gets around drawing exit wounds here by just having people erupt in so much blood that it really looks like the men are being shot with guns that magically turn them into candles:



So is this the shock of the new in our weekly look at the future from the Galaxy's Greatest Comic? Well, believe it or not, Bison really is the most forward-looking strip in a very nostalgic run of 2000 AD this particular summer. Over in Judge Dredd, John Wagner and Colin MacNeil - now there's a man who knows how to draw exit wounds - have brought back the one-off character of Vienna Dredd, an improbable niece conceived by Pat Mills and Ian Gibson in a 1979 episode and never referred to again, as a young actress who would like her Uncle Joe to give her some trace of a family connection. Vienna becomes a very welcome addition to Dredd's supporting cast. Actually, to be honest, I'm tweaking events to make a point; Vienna's return is chronicled in progs 1300-1301. 1306 sees the end to the recurring menace of bent cop Judge Manners in a story by Wagner and Paul Marshall.

In the last blog, we looked at how Rogue Trooper, first seen in 1981, had returned. He's joined by Strontium Dog, introduced in 1978, in an eight-parter called "Roadhouse" by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. Finally there's the return of The VCs, a 1979-80 serial brought back after a 22-year break by Dan Abnett and Henry Flint.



Now the original run of The VCs (the collected edition of which I reviewed back in April) was not quite the classic that some of us squaxx consider it, but it was a solid enough tale of future war. It was a little jingoistic and repetitive, but I think it had a sense of excitement and danger lacking from many kids' comics, and the art was always fantastic. This new take? Well, there's nothing at all wrong with it, and Flint's artwork is as terrific as always, but the story never completely captivates me. There's nothing at all wrong with it, and it's a darn sight better than plenty of other comics, but it's just not one of my favorites. Anyway, this initial run lasts for just seven weeks and is the only one that Flint illustrates. The VCs will return for four more annual outings of about ten weeks each, with art by Anthony Williams.

Surprisingly, every story in prog 1306 has been reprinted. All of the Judge Manners episodes were collected in one of the free "graphic novels" bagged with an issue of the Megazine this summer. Bison was compiled in a hardcover "European-album-styled" edition by Rebellion in 2004. The VCs, Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog stories are all available in Rebellion's wonderful line of 2000 AD reprints. We'll come back to that VCs book in a month or so.

Next time, Simon Spurrier gets his second series, The Scrap, Steve Parkhouse caricatures Inspector Morse, and we look at the new hardback edition of The ABC Warriors. See you in seven!

94. The Empire of Sleep

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.

January 2001: Prog 1226 features this terrific Frazer Irving cover of Charles Fort and Arthur Conan Doyle beating the daylights out a horde of twisted zombies controlled by cultists who worship some tentacled deity on the other side of life, and who have decided Harry Houdini's explorations into the realm of unconsciousness have brought him too close to the terrible truth of their dark and evil plans. So they send H.P. Lovecraft to earn the others' trust and lead them all into a trap which will result in the end of life on earth. Yeah, you read that right. Necronauts, a nine-part serial illustrated by Irving and written by Gordon Rennie, is a shotgun blast of wild, high concept coolness. Fort carries a cricket bat to smack around the baddies, and Doyle carries around a medical kit full of lethal brews.

Necronauts is Irving's first series after only a couple of one-offs in the past few months. He's made a huge impact on the readership and the fandom, where he's been participating for some time. Irving once joked that he'd stalked and killed a certain "Gaze into the fist of Dredd"-illustrating art droid in order to prove his loyalty to 2000 AD. The joke is duly hung around his neck, worn well into the ground, and by the time of the first Dreddcon in December, people are threatening to wear "Irving Killed Bolland" T-shirts.

Fandom has become very entertaining at this time, with a number of creators, including Rennie, Irving, John Smith and Simon Fraser, as well as present and previous editors Andy Diggle and David Bishop, regularly contributing to the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup. Of course, by this time, spam is beginning to overwhelm all the newsgroups, and some professionals will conclude in time that there are certain segments of "fandom" that make this kind of casual interaction untenable.

Diggle in particular will have an ongoing dispute with a Ukranian reader living in Germany who seems to read Judge Dredd just to complain about the series' moral philosophy, and what she sees as John Wagner's skewed "view of good and evil," particularly in light of the recent eight-part "Sector House" story which centered on Judge Rico. Diggle is not many weeks away from a huge disagreement with one of his chief contributors, compared to which his newsgroup debates with this reader are probably not that important, but it's worth noting, as the argument of "everybody else vs. this one reader in Germany" raged for months, it was within a susequent thread of her complaints that Diggle would eventually announce his resigning the post of editor.



Apart from Necronauts, there's some really good stuff in the prog. Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser have teamed up on a Judge Dredd one-off that celebrates the work of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes, and Dan Abnett and Simon Davis are wrapping up a four-part Sinister Dexter adventure called "The Man in the Ion Mask." In a spin-off from the earlier Mercy Heights, John Tomlinson and Kevin Walker are wrapping up the first four-part story of Tor Cyan, the genetically-engineered, blue-skinned, mohawked fellow who's a bit like Rogue Trooper. This is notable for showing off, for the first time, the style Walker has been using for the last several years, with lots of heavy colors, solid lines and minimal fussiness in the inking. Compared to his detail-heavy work on The Balls Brothers and his earlier, painted work on ABC Warriors, this latest style is quite surprising, although that shouldn't be taken to mean it looks anything other than fantastic.

Also this issue, John Wagner and Arthur Ranson bring us the third book of Button Man. More on this fantastic story in next week's installment.



Necronauts was released by Rebellion as a collected edition in one of their earlier formats in 1993. I've said before that everybody should sell their home for a copy, and I stand by that assessment. This third book of Button Man is due for a collected edition in June. Entitled "Killer Killer," there's a listing on Amazon, although it was not solicited by Diamond in their April catalog. The Sinister Dexter story should find a new home in the forthcoming collection "Magic Bullets," due in the autumn. The Dredd and Tor Cyan stories have not been collected.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Ramone took his fourth bullet in the previous prog's third episode of "The Man in the Ion Mask." It was a hit to the right shoulder. Finnigan still has a commanding lead with ten confirmed hits.

In other news, while Rebellion tends to focus on releasing collections from more recent properties or big name characters, every so often they do head back to the comic's early days and surprise everybody with a great book full of thrillpower from the past. Such is the case with this new edition of The VCs. This is the original run of 32 episodes from 1979-1980. Most of the installments are written by Gerry Finley-Day, with a couple of fill-ins by Steve MacManus. The art is principally by Cam Kennedy, who contributed the cover, and Garry Leach. Mike McMahon drew the first episode and John Richardson the last five, but everything between them is by Kennedy or Leach. Probably nobody finds that as interesting as I do.

Anyway, The VCs is a pretty standard war story, just dressed up with aliens and spaceships in it. There's the green rookie, disliked by his new crew, and ugly enemies you can neither understand nor sympathize with, and trapped-behind-enemy-lines stories, and callous officers who probably interact with our heroes more than any other company in the military. That's not to say it's at all bad, but I reread this while continuing a once-a-week reread of Battle Picture Weekly produced during the same 1979-80 period and darned if this series couldn't have been flawlessly slotted into that comic. If you enjoy this style of comic storytelling, then The VCs will certainly please you, even if it's only rarely eye-opening.

Actually, I should probably qualify that: if you're coming to this from an American background, there's a lot more to this than simply "another war comic." I grew up reading DC's Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank, and later Marvel's G.I. Joe, with their casts of unkillable regular characters. Compared to these, British war comics are a complete revelation, with surprising fatalities among the cast. Any new reader coming to this collection will probably be pretty surprised by this story as it progresses.

There were 32 episodes of The VCs, but this is a pretty slim book, since the episodes were an unusually short 3-4 pages a week. It runs a little light on extras, since there were so few from the period. The strip was spotlighted on 2000 AD's cover only once, and there was a single star scan of the lead cast a few weeks after it finished, and those are included, but there are no other contributions from the period from any of the creators. In lieu of blank pages filling up too much of the back, the first episode of Finley-Day's better-known future war series, Rogue Trooper is included, but honestly, I'm hard pressed to imagine anybody buying this collection who hasn't already read the first Rogue episode plenty of times already. That's not to say that I don't think potential readers are out there, and I hope you'll give it a read, just that I'm not really sure this was the best use of the pages in the back when a new interview would have been very nice.

Next time, Button Man makes everybody in the audience wince, and D'Israeli shocks the future. See you in seven!