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!

107. Unknown Life Form Unknown Life Form

Here at Thrillpowered Thursday headquarters at the Hipster Pad in the 'burbs of Atlanta, we're always on the lookout for silly pronouncements and hype from our Mighty friend Tharg, alien editor of 2000 AD and lone emissary to our planet from the star-system Betelgeuse. Every so often, he'll promise or hint at a return for a favorite series that never quite makes it back, or announces a graphic novel that never arrives, but in January 2002's prog 1276, he really drops the ball when he spends the editorial column of the inside front cover's "Nerve Centre" to tell us about the forthcoming Judge Dredd movies. Yes, it turns out that seven years after the failure of the Sylvester Stallone film, a liaison has been formed with a company called Shoreline Entertainment, and they've got two scripts in hand for features entitled "Dredd Reckoning" and "Possession." So seven years after the Stallone movie, there's word of two more forthcoming, and seven years after this announcement, no such movies have been made. It is sort of frustrating the way the talents at Rebellion can make such darn fine comics but consistently find the ball dropped when they branch out into ancillary products.

For example, where, I ask again, is my drokking Strontium Dog first-person shooter? Pretending that I'm Johnny Alpha on the Frigate level of GoldenEye is not the same!

Well, I speak of darn fine comics, and you'd think that with a gorgeous panel like the one below, Storming Heaven by Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving would be the perfect example of what I'm talking about. Never let it be said that Irving can't draw the crap out of an image like this:



Unfortunately, Storming Heaven is another stunning missed opportunity, and perhaps the final example of what I've mentioned in this blog several times, where former editor Andy Diggle's "rocket fuel" approach to super-compressed storytelling in short-form serials resulted in something really unsatisfying. The concept is radical, and pure genius: basically, LSD in the sixties gave everybody who took it superpowers, and now Charles Manson has gone to war with Dr. Timothy Leary.

It is an odd experience, reading this story now, as the media remembers the Manson Family murders forty years later, and seeing archival footage of the pathetic tragedy everywhere I look online. Of course, the Manson archetype really isn't called by that name - he's "Caliban," although the use of quotes from the real person, and the use of Manson's mug shot in the background of one scene, kind of make the intentions absolutely clear.

Conceptually, Storming Heaven should have been spectacular, but it all ends up being rushed and pretty dull. The stakes are too great, the concept is too wild, and the cast is too large for this to work in an engaging way in just seven episodes. In the image above, you'll see that strangely pretentious caption - the narration throughout is quite knowingly po-faced - urging us to "remember" all these costumed heroes hurling themselves into danger, defending the city against Caliban's ugly, grimy hordes. The irony, of course, is that it's not possible to remember characters who only get a single panel's screentime and no dialogue before vanishing for two weeks, and when we're next told about them, it's a breathless account of their death via another character who is introduced only to tell the two female leads that everybody's dying. It's impossible to care about the assault on utopia, when we've only been told by an unreliable narrator that, prior to episode two, this utopia really was amazing, honestly.

I remember saying back in the day that Storming Heaven should have been a much grander, and bolder exercise, and this reread certainly reinforces my old opinion. Told across three books of ten episodes, with the assault on San Francisco coming at the end of the second, the seeds were certainly here for something downright amazing. I mean, Irving's artwork is just eyepoppingly wonderful on every page, and certainly the concept is so cool that I'm sure we readers would have loved watching Rennie do some worldbuilding to cement this utopia as a place as vibrant and interesting as, say, Mega-City One or Nu-Earth or Stickleback's London. Sadly, though, Storming Heaven was little more than a beautiful missed opportunity. It is available in a fine collected edition, however: Storming Heaven: The Frazer Irving Collection assembles this and several other Irving serials and one-offs (including A Love Like Blood and his Shaun of the Dead tie-in episodes), and it certainly is a gorgeous book.



Also appearing in this prog are a one-off Judge Dredd adventure by Rennie and Paul Marshall, a Future Shock by Richard McTighe and PJ Holden, and the continuing Bad Company serial by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. Oh, and a little something wild called Shakara...

As I was mentioning last week, two new series debuted in Prog 2002. First was Storming Heaven, but the second was an entirely different prospect, something which was altogether more promising. Oddly, however, by the end of its first series, Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint's Shakara was proving itself to be just as much of a disappointment, albeit for different reasons.

Shakara certainly looked like something amazingly new and readers had good reason to be excited about it. The story begins with the destruction of Earth and the raging, vengeful boasting of the galaxy's sole surviving human, an astronaut who was in space at the time and is now a prisoner in one of those fight-or-die sci-fi arenas. And on page four, this fellow, the guy we thought was the protagonist, gets casually murdered by one of what would prove to be a host of completely, wonderfully bizarre alien nasties. And then the killer and everybody else get slaughtered when the series' real protagonist shows up: an indestructible, utterly alien, long-limbed, spindly, mad-eyed warrior with giant freaking swords on the end of his arms who blows the almighty hell out of anybody and everybody in this violent, wild universe. His only word: the mad scream "SHAKARA!"

Well, frankly, if that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what to tell you.

Unfortunately, within a couple of episodes, Shakara had devolved into a dull bore because every installment was exactly the same. It all looked spectacular, with Flint's fantastic sense of design and desire to throw caution and convention to the wind, but it got boring really quickly. It was not an eight-part serial, but rather a collection of one-offs and two-parters, and in each one, some new, ostensibly indestructible super-nasty would do something indescribably over-the-top and evil, and then Shakara would show up, prove that he(it?) was a heck of a lot more indestructible than the super-nasty thought it was, and then open a supernova or a black hole up under under their ass and rocket away, yelling "SHAKARA!"

I was reminded very quickly of my friends in Corn Pone Flicks and their wonderful film Star Dipwads, and how the producer of some space epic couldn't understand why his audience was disappointed, because he'd given them suspense, three exciting battle scenes and the actual appearance of the protagonist, and was aggravated to learn that they wanted a plot as well.

Well, Shakara returned for two more series in 2005 and 2008, and the fourth series will be starting in 2000 AD in one week. The first three stories are all compiled in this book, and it looks like Morrison's plan was to establish something wilder and weirder from the outset, using the patchy 2002 series as a launchpad for longer, more intricate narratives which readers could really sink their teeth into. When that second story started in the summer of 2005, I know a few people's eyes rolled, but we quickly got in line, because "The Assassin" is a thunderously cool little epic which piles on one outlandish SF concept after another as a whole gang of intergalactic bad boys, any of whom could headline their own wild series, gets together to do something about this idiot screaming "SHAKARA!" and fucking with the laws of physics.

And then the third series introduces a mob of robot anti-gravity tyrannosaurs and gives some backstory to everything, and it's utterly perfect, blissfully cool and unlike anything else in comics. Long may it scream.

Next time, 2000 AD celebrates its 25th anniversary... and Pat Mills returns!

106. Prog Packs

Welcome 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, about one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

Well, it's probably Friday for most of my readers in Europe by the time this gets posted, but hello and welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday anyway. Your humble, newly-unemployed blogger has been a bit crazy-busy, what with a three-thousand mile road trip, shuffling kids from their vacation to summer camp and getting ready for school, cleaning the heck out of this house and, oh yeah, looking for a new job, but the Hipster Son and I have sat down to reread the last couple of comics that the House o' Tharg released in 2001 and figured I'd give you good people something to spend a couple of minutes looking at. So today's focus is "Prog 2002," the year-end edition.

The previous two year-end books contained far more surprises and one-offs than this one. Honestly, it's a huge comedown from those, and doesn't feel anywhere as special as its predecessors. There are two Dredd episodes. One of these is the third "Slick Dickens" story. The previous two established a formula where Dredd, acting incredibly out of character and assisted by some over-the-top narration, comes up against a super-assassin, and it's revealed at the end that everything we've just read was a hack writer's crummy bestseller and the real Dredd is not amused. There's nothing new about this latest addition; John Wagner seems to enjoy writing them for the exercise of playing with the breathless pulp fiction cliches. It's a little amusing, but it's hardly special enough for a year-end prog, really.


Elsewhere, there are double-part opening episodes for the brand new thrills Storming Heaven by Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving and Shakara by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint, as well as a new run of Nikolai Dante by Morrison and Simon Fraser. Also starting this issue is Bad Company, which had been trailed with a prologue episode a year previously, by the original team of Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. There's a one-off Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams, and a complete twelve-page story called "Memento" written and drawn by Bryan Talbot, and the rest of it is pin-ups and filler material.

No wonder it feels slight; apart from the first lineup of the 2002 strips (Dredd, Dante, Bad Company and the two new thrills), all this comic gives us is an extra Dredd, a Sin Dex and a glorified Future Shock. Compare that to the previous two special progs, and you'll see what I mean.

Actually, I am doing "Memento" a disservice by selling it so short. It is certainly nice to see Talbot's work in 2000 AD after such a long absence - fourteen years since his last Nemesis the Warlock episode. It looks like he was not really prolific in comics in the 1990s, but he did show up in some Vertigo titles and had some deserved acclaim for the series The Tale of One Bad Rat. "Memento" is a dialogue-free story set in an ugly, cramped, underground future and the artwork is quite lovely.



It's interesting to speculate what might have been, had incoming editor Matt Smith found "Memento" to be more successful than he did. Obviously, 2000 AD's fans prefer to see recurring character thrills rather than one-offs, but it might have been neat to have seen an annual story like this, told by creators from outside the normal 2000 AD stable. Established writers and artists probably aren't interested in doing a five-page Future Shock, but something a little longer, like this, might have tempted a few names, and been a nice treat each December. An annual fifteen-page weird SF tale by Moebius or Makoto Yukimura or Zoran Janjetov or the woefully unsung Tim Eldred would certainly have been more interesting than the yearly comedy Sin Dex Christmas gag strip.

In other news, I wanted to follow up on the downbeat previous entry to this pulse-poundin' blog. I had been grumbling about the dimwits running Diamond Distribution, and countrywide complaints that fans' orders for 2000 AD were not being filled. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Diamond did finally ship the first of their polybagged batches of 2000 AD, containing issues 1638-1641. Unless my ears and sources have deceived me, Diamond seems to have shipped it out to every retailer that ordered it. I have not heard anyone report that they didn't get any. Let's hope this puts an end to the problems that have bewitched our ability to read the House of Tharg's releases for the past six months. The next polybagged set, containing the next five issues, should be on shelves in the next week or two.

I also wanted to mention that I found thrillpower in abundance on my recent honeymoon road trip up north. Plenty of shops order 2000 AD for the subscriber or two who asks for it, but you don't often find stores with a good selection of recent issues on the stands. So if you've been stymied by inability to receive your latest progs this year, I'd recommend you look up either Hub Comics or The Million Year Picnic, each in Boston, Massachusetts. I was extremely impressed by both stores and their wonderful staffs. MYP is just wonderful if you love small, busy, low-light bookstores like me, and Hub, which probably edges MYP just a touch with its more comfortable layout, has multiple copies of several recent Rebellion trades, so if you missed out on The VCs or the first Ace Trucking Company collection, drop 'em a line!

Next time, I'll look over the Rennie/Irving collaboration Storming Heaven and get ready for the forthcoming fourth series of Shakara with a short review of the recent graphic novel collection. See you in seven!

(Geez, this fella's been climbing quite a while, hasn't he?)

105. State of the Thrillunion

In November 2001, we come to prog 1270 and this very nice cover by Ashley Wood, spotlighting Psi Judge Anderson. The contents are mostly the same thrill-starved batch as what I talked about last week, with a multi-part Judge Dredd story by John Wagner and Ian Gibson being by far the high point. In fact, I think I think I said all that needed to be said about this underwhelming run of stories last time, so I should find something else to talk about this week, especially since this will be the last blog for a month. So let's talk about 2009 instead.

2009 was the year when it became incredibly aggravating to be a 2000 AD fan in America.

When next I write, the big San Diego Comic-Con will have come and gone, and 2000 AD is expected to make another appearance. Theirs is typically a low-key one, just another small publisher among the hundreds of small publishers who join the mob at America's biggest show. Yet I think Tharg and the droids have had a few years to gauge the crowd and see what needs to be done to make a splash and do what's necessary to get noticed and sell the comic to the potentially enormous local audience. I have not seen it yet, but I understand that there was an editorial note in a recent issue affirming that it is high time that 2000 AD make a concerted, deliberate effort to successfully crack this country's tough market. No more relying on co-publishing tricks or partners: it's time to do the job right.

Unfortunately for 2000 AD, the market - that is, the "direct market" of comic shops which buys in their product from the monopolistic morons of Diamond Distributors - has proven itself steadfastly uninterested in 2000 AD for more than twenty years. The market is currently bloated with everything from overpriced superhero soap operas to expensive hardcover collections of anything with a grain of nostalgia attached. (Did anybody else's heart sink when they learned that the new Bloom County series from IDW was coming at fifty bucks a pop?) In this economy, Rebellion needs every possible ally in getting shops to order their stuff.

Before I get too overwhelmingly cynical, let me just point out that, when 2000 AD is firing on all cylinders, as indeed it's done all year, it is better than any other comic book. Period. Some completely fantastic stories have appeared in the title this year: Pat Mills and John Higgins' Bourne-on-amphetamines thriller Greysuit, Wagner and Ezquerra's unbelievably cool Strontium Dog epic "Blood Moon," more insane pirate action in The Red Seas by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell, Rob Williams and D'Israeli knocking it out of the park in Low Life, more jawdropping stuff in both Nikolai Dante and Judge Dredd which remain utterly essential reading, plus excellent work from newcomers Lee Carter, Al Ewing and Tony Lee, and an amazing strip in the Meg: Dan Abnett and Colin MacNeil's brilliant Insurrection. And that's just in the year's first four months.

And granted, I was awfully disappointed by that Sinister Dexter book I spoke of last time, but the reprint line, overall, is easily the best in the business.

Maybe one day we'll get to see all of it.

2009 was the year when Diamond finally, inarguably, dropped the blasted ball. They've always handled their monopolistic position with all the grace of an asthmatic walrus, but this was the year they fell completely apart, and Rebellion is one of those publishers who've really been on the receiving end of the shit taco. Some months ago, Diamond announced that they had to be more competitive, and would be dropping several titles and publishers which failed to meet minimum order requirements. Well, that's understandable, and it stinks to be a low-seller, as many well-meaning publishers who've been running afoul of the new policy have unfortunately been learning. Some forthcoming collections from Rebellion didn't make the cut, although the publisher has been disappointingly tight-lipped about it. I understand Diamond's not running a charity and don't begrudge them having to cull non-sellers in order to stay afloat.

But must they be so incredibly incompetent about it at the same time?

Earlier this year, Diamond moved their facilities to a bright and shiny new warehouse in Memphis with a super-awesome new computerized cherry-picking machinearybop which should have made delivery of product to stores more painless and efficient than ever before. Well, I think every retailer east of the Mississippi can tell you that's been a laugh. There's not a store in the country that hasn't had orders delayed or cancelled since the new system went in. For 2000 AD, the result has been a complete, unmitigated disaster. Last year, indeed for the last several years, American shops have been getting their progs two weeks behind the UK. There have been occasional hiccups, and issues that show up a month or so late, but what's happened this year has been unprecedented. The old conventional wisdom was that Diamond might occasionally hiccup with 2000 AD because they had Wolverine to ship, but this year, with shops getting X-Men spinoff miniseries in random order, even that excuse is no longer valid.

Never mind that the old two week gap is sitting right now as six, of the 21 issues published between January and May, four issues (1627-28, 1634 and 1636) have yet to arrive. The year's first issue (1617) finally showed up ten weeks after the next. Shops went two months without a single prog before seven non-consecutive issues showed up the other week. All this as Diamond attempts to transition to a new way to sell the comic in America, with four issues polybagged together. (We should know in the next week or two whether this is actually going to work. Maybe we'll get two or even more of the missing progs while we wait, but the "June 2009" pack, retailing for $18, is supposed to contain progs 1638-1641. A July 2009 pack is said to cost $22.50 for five issues, and the August 2009 pack is $18 again.)

Meanwhile, apparently low orders for earlier editions have prompted Diamond to decline a number of forthcoming graphic novels. Sadly not solicited for American stores are: the third volume of Button Man (already out in the UK), a hardcover collection of ABC Warriors: The Volgan Wars Book One, the complete black-and-white Flesh by Pat Mills, Massimo Belardinelli and others, and the first volume of Defoe, also by Mills with art by Leigh Gallagher. This is while Diamond has yet to ship three collections that they already have solicited: The 86ers and the second volumes of Ace Trucking Company and The VCs. Maybe they'll turn up in the next week or so.

And before you ask, this isn't just my retailer. I've asked around at three stores in Atlanta which carry the comic and the trades (unfortunately for subscribers only at two of the stores) along with readers in other cities and they're all in the same head-against-wall boat, all thanks to this dimwit distributor.

Fortunately, there are other options. Rebellion offers a subscription service, bypassing the direct market entirely, or you can buy the progs digitally from Clickwheel for a third less than the retail cost. I've been shelling out for occasional Clickwheel copies myself just so I can read my progs in sequence, and if the "magazine pack" solution doesn't fix things, then I'm going to go digital-only in 2010. I'd hate to lose the print copy, but Clickwheel's convenience and excellent customer service makes up for the disappointment of arriving at my comic shop (which is the freaking best in the United States and should never, ever elicit the emotion of disappointment) and finding Diamond screwed up again. On the other hand, who knows what 2010 holds? Clickwheel is indeed wonderful, but still very small, and last month's announcement of a forthcoming "iTunes for comics" called Longbox has completely sucker-punched the established Clickwheel, particularly with their plans to offer comics for only 99 cents each.

Obviously, the autumn's going to have me comparing prices between British sellers (Forbidden Planet, Amazon, etc.) to get the four or more books that Diamond does not wish to sell in the US. Maybe that's what 2010 will hold: buying the comic from Clickwheel or Longbox, and then getting print editions only of the material compiled in book form, all of it done over the internet and bypassing comic shops entirely.

That's far, far from ideal - and I'd honestly much rather give Bizarro Wuxtry my money than any other retailer in any country - but maybe, after twenty-plus years of 2000 AD scraping by with its infitesimal market share, it is time to bypass the stubborn, inefficient American direct market for something sleeker, leaner, and not beholden to the bozos at one warehouse in Memphis. Maybe it's just nostalgia and an irrational love of print editions that's keeping me wanting the print editions right now.

At any rate, while this entry seems pretty grumpy, I do wish the very best of luck to the gang at Rebellion at San Diego. I hope hundreds of new fans come back from the show with mindblowing graphic novels and things, and that they find the experience of following 2000 AD in the second half of 2009 nowhere nearly as aggravating as in the first half. It's a headache, which following comics should never, ever be, but it's worth it since 2000 AD is that damn good.

With that, we'll leave it for a month. As you know, I'm doing this reread with my kids, and they're off to the Bluegrass State for a three-week stay with their mother. Normal service will be resumed in August. Splundig vur Thrigg!

104. Saying Hello

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

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

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



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

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

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



Oh, wait.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

103. End of a Short Era

Prog 1261, published in September '01, sees the end of two of the current major storylines. Both the Dredd epic "Helter Skelter" and the second Durham Red serial, "The Vermin Stars," reach their final episodes. They're both completely overshadowed by the eye-popping events in Nikolai Dante, discussed last time, but the Durham Red story, with a spotlight cover by Ben Willsher, is memorable for the interesting way it seems to turn its back completely on the character. When Durham was resurrected by Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison a couple of years previously, it looked like she was set to be a regularly-featured character. Yet after that initial serial, there was a one-off episode, and then this lengthy layoff before this storyline, which ends with her supposed death and a poetic narrative epilogue which seals her fate, that even if she had survived the explosive events thousands of years in Earth's future, she was never heard from again. That was certainly a surprise to readers.

For many readers, Andy Diggle's resignation as editor came as a very big surprise, too. Particularly the way he announced it.

In earlier installments of this blog, I had mentioned that Diggle was a regular poster on the newsgroup alt.comics.2000ad. There, he and several of the other freelancers held court and the vibe was pretty relaxed and laid-back. But there was an ongoing frustration: regular complaints from a well-read, albeit unhappy, reader in Eastern Europe. Now it's pretty clear that Diggle's displeasure in the editor's seat had a lot more to do with going rounds with contributors, and the new owners desiring to relocate from London to Oxford, than a disgruntled fan. But it was to her that Diggle made the following announcement:

"If the editor can't re-write without causing a diplomatic incident, is shackled with a restrictive budget, and the editorial department is spread so thin that there is no time for re-writing anyway, what is he to do?

Employ the best people available. Or quit and become a writer.

So that's what I'm going to do. I have resigned as editor of 2000 AD, and from Christmas will be devoting my time to writing comics full-time - starting with "Judge Dredd Versus Aliens", which John Wagner has asked me to co-write with him. I guess he has a higher regard for my editorial skills than you do."



Since 2000 AD requires that its editors commission far in advance, there were several Diggle-ordered scripts in the pipeline which would appear throughout the year 2002, including two major new stories which would debut in December's year-end prog, and the next Strontium Dog story, which will begin in prog 1300 and, unusually, would run alongside a series called Bison which Diggle had rejected.

But that's down the line. The reaction that September was one of considerable shock and surprise that the much-liked editor was leaving after such a short tenure. Professionals and fans alike offered lots of praise for his time in the job. True, there were some misfires and disappointments, and he never found time to launch a major ongoing series, but he discovered several major new talents, and modern 2000 AD would certainly be poorer without the contributions of Boo Cook, D'Israeli, Frazer Irving, Si Spurious and others who got early work in 2000 AD's pages during his two-year run. His assistant editor, Matt Smith, would take over starting with Prog 2002, but that's getting ahead of things.

Speaking of getting ahead of things, the eighth Nikolai Dante collection was released a few months ago. This compiles all of the episodes that originally appeared in 2000 AD # 1518-1580 - 31 in total, all written by Robbie Morrison, with art by Simon Fraser and John Burns.

Maybe the old reviewing circuits are needing a little juice, because I can't come up with much better of a reason for anyone to own this other than "it's freaking Nikolai Dante, people, come on!" By this stage of the series, Dante is working as Tsar Vladimir's principal envoy and blunt instrument. We catch up with several cast members from previous installments, seeing what terrorism Dante's half-sister Lulu has been committing in the name of the Romanovs, crossing paths with his old criminal sparring partner the Countessa de Winter, and making a swath of new enemies while quietly working out some scheme of his own to get back at the tsar.

This set of episodes from what I term the fourth phase of the Dante epic (it is entering its fifth and probably final stage in current installments) is completely terrific. I think there are a few episodes where John Burns' painting is not as detailed as would be preferred, but his work on "The Tsar's Daughter," which looks into the strange death of Jena Makarov's mother many years previously, is truly remarkable. Simon Fraser is as fantastic as ever. He's teamed with colorist Gary Caldwell and the "Thieves' World" story, in particular, is vibrant and exciting. With the expected excellent reproduction from Rebellion, nice binding, gorgeous paper and matte cover, it's a far better-looking collection than practically anybody else in the industry. One of the best comics of the last decade in a package this gorgeous? Surely everybody is reading this, right?

Next week, ah, well, it looks to be something of a hiccup. Just to show we don't always spend every blog gushing about how brilliant 2000 AD is, Judge Anderson misfires, Steve Moore offers some Filler and, despite what I said above, the first Rebellion collected edition which I really think should be left on the shelf. You won't want to miss this... or maybe you do. See you in seven!

102. Pests!

Welcome back to a slightly revived and very happily married Thrillpowered Thursday! Unfortunately, during my short break from the blog, I suffered from some computer unpleasantness and am currently working without a copy of a decent version of Photoshop, so for now, there's just going to be the single image with each entry, borrowed from the Barney fan site, which hosts the old thrill data-base and cover images. And we'll only be back for a short time: just four entries and then there will be a lengthy break while my co-reading children take one vacation and my new wife and I take one in another direction. But that's later on. For now, let's pick up about where we left off.

In August 2001, we come to prog 1257 and the welcome return of Ian Gibson to cover art duties. After their last appearance more than a year previously (covered here back in January), the pint-sized pest control droids of Banzai Battalion are back in action in a new six-part story drawn by Gibson from a script by John Wagner. The resulting story is a very silly, over-the-top homage to old war comics, with the blustery, true-blue Captain Bug Stomper leading his troops on an expedition through Mega-City One that leads them to a wonderful new garden in which to fight insects. The garden, introduced more than fifteen years previously in a Sci-Fi Special as the home of citizen Martha Fitzenheimer, becomes the battleground for rival teams of robots. Wagner never quite sends the story into a messy, ridiculous spiral like he'd done in such gems as Al's Baby and Robo-Hunter, but it's still a pretty fun and goofy six week story.

You can't really use "fun" or "goofy" to describe the final storyline in Nikolai Dante's ongoing "Tsar Wars" epic, by Robbie Morrison and John Burns. After so many months of high-stakes drama and bloody war, the Romanovs looked like they were about to win and wipe out the Makarov tsar, but he's got a pretty amazing ace up his sleeve, and suddenly there's a strange, armored form on the battlefield. In one of the most stunning cliffhangers in a series known for pretty stunning cliffhangers, four of the crest-bearing Romanov siblings confront the armored man, who shrugs off their superpowered attacks and brutally kills Nastasia in front of them.

If you're on the Romanov side, then the 13-part epic goes downhill fast from there. The armored guardian, who calls himself the Lord Protector and who reveals his identity a few weeks later, sends the rest of the siblings packing just as Makarov reinforcements arrive. It's a complete rout, and the series ends with not just Nastasia, but brothers Andreas and Viktor and father Dmitri all dead, along with half of the Rudinshtein Irregulars, the Romanovs completely destroyed, and Nikolai Dante on the run again, only now in an imperial Russia dozens of times more deadly than it was when the series began, since Tsar Vladimir Makarov has a phenomenal price on Dante' head.

There are many reasons to love Nikolai Dante, as it's one of the very best ongoing comics of the last several years. One of those reasons: the creators have been completely fearless about upending the status quo and killing off the supporting cast. This was a tremendous shock to readers at the time, and co-creator Simon Fraser played along, memorably posting "MY BABIES!!!" when asked how he felt about the bloodletting among the wonderful Romanov family.

There has been much more Dante in the years since "The Romanov Empire." If you're following along in the collected editions, and you certainly should, this actually only takes us to the end of the fifth volume. The eighth was released earlier in the year, and will be reviewed next week, and the ninth is due in September. The Banzai Battalion six-parter was collected in a Rebellion hardback, along with seven other episodes which featured the characters.

Next week, Durham Red finishes up "The Vermin Stars." See you in seven!