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!

114. Going Rogue Again

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday! When last we left off, spirits were low as, for the fourth time in the last decade (and the second in my current home), I had to deal with a minor house flood. Yes, this is the same place, northern Georgia, which was screaming about a drought just a few short months ago, and which is fighting a losing battle against our neighbor states of Alabama and Florida about using too much of the Lake Lanier reservoir for drinking water in the city of Atlanta, and yet somehow I've had property damaged by floodwaters four darn times. Well, the downstairs is almost rebuilt, and we'll be installing a retaining wall in the backyard sometime soon, and I didn't lose any precious comics to this tomfoolery, and it certainly could've been a lot worse, but it did throw us off our reading schedule.

While I was away from this blog, I got the neat opportunity to talk a little bit about 2000 AD and its place in the long, fun history of British comics up at the first annual GMX convention in Nashville. I had a super time, and gave away a couple of dozen old doubled issues and a pair of collected editions from my pile of trade fodder as freebies. I think everybody had a splendid time, and I hope that next year, we can do it again.

Resuming the reread, Frazer Irving gets cover duties for July 2002's prog 1302, spotlighting the return, after almost fifteen years, of the original Rogue Trooper. Created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, Rogue was a pretty one-note character, albeit one very popular with younger readers. Since his original storyline ended in issue 393, the character's adventures continued off and on for another four years, finally reaching an end in 1988.



Shortly afterward, the series was rebooted, rethought, remodelled and was, in the end, done in under the weight of too many creators overthinking the premise and the continuity. Even the estimable John Tomlinson failed to make anything readable out of the concept, insisting on tying in the character of Tor Cyan from Mercy Heights into some convulted story about a big blobby thing spitting out demented clones of the original Rogue. Perhaps it was a metaphor.

For the latest incarnation of Rogue, newly-assigned writer Gordon Rennie was tasked with simply telling some readable stories with the original concept. Teamed with a bank of rotating artists, including Staz Johnson and David Roach on this first four-part story, Rennie went with a back-to-basics approach of relating untold stories from within the original "search for the Traitor General" framework. Rogue Trooper had very few recurring characters - that was one of its weaknesses - so Rennie created a handful of new heroes and villains to work around Rogue and his biochipped buddies. It's such a forehead-slapping obvious idea that, reading it in light of all the labored attempts to fit various reboots into a single tapestry, you're amazed it took 2000 AD so long to get it right.



Of course, having said that, Rogue Trooper remains stubbornly unengaging. With one exception, an unbearably earnest two-parter called "Lions" which is about Our Brave Soldiers, there's nothing at all wrong with Rennie's episodes, except for the unbeatable fact that nobody cares about Rogue Trooper. It's a series where the art has always been the draw, and the elements that you found engaging and exciting when you were twelve turn out to be, in the cold light of adulthood, stilted and awkward. There's also the problem of setting the series within the original "search for the Traitor General" days and trying to wring drama from it, when we already know how it will play out.

Still, Rogue Trooper is enough of a 2000 AD icon that you can't help but root for it. If the comic's going to insist on doing it, you want to see it done right. Rennie does a good job, but it really feels like Tharg's heart just isn't in it. What Rogue Trooper needed was a semi-residency, but after these 12 episodes, there's a one-off at the end of the year, then six more in 2003, six in 2004 and then, finally, three apiece in 2005 and 2006, the last three penned by a different writer. This will seem to happen a lot with Rennie's scripts for editor Matt Smith over the next five years; as with his subsequent Caballistics Inc. and The 86ers along with several Judge Dredd stories, there is an emphasis on continuing characters and subplots which is totally deflated by the enormous breaks between episodes. Since five different artists or art teams tackle this new Rogue Trooper, it can't be deadline drama; we have to assume that everybody involved really just had more important things to worry about. In that case, why bother reading it? Rennie's run was compiled in the sixth in a series of Rogue Trooper collected editions. The book, Realpolitik, was released in March of 2007.

In other news, Rebellion has recently suffered the aggravation of having some books solicited for direct-market distribution by Diamond, only to have the distributor turn around and cancel the orders. One of the books impacted by this was the collected edition of Gordon Rennie's The 86ers, released in May of this year. The book is available, therefore, to proper bookstores in Britain, and easily obtainable online, but not from local comic book shops. The series is a sequel to Rennie's run on Rogue Trooper. A few months after his last episodes of that series in 2005, we met up again with Rafe, a genetically-engineered pilot introduced as one of Rennie's new supporting cast. She's transferred to the 86th Air Support Reconnaissance Squadron and tasked with protecting supply routes to a strategically important mining planet. The series could have been an engaging mix of future war, ancient superweapons and political intrigue, but unfortunately, it never really gelled as a serial.

It's my habit to not sit down and really reread the contents of the Rebellion trades if it's a reprint of material I haven't yet come to in my Thrillpowered Thursday reread, so perhaps I'm being unfair to The 86ers when I say that other than Rafe and the briefly-seen villain Colonel Kovert, a baddie from Rogue Trooper's original run, I have no idea who any of the characters in The 86ers are. There are a lot of them, and a lot of subplots, but after the ten episodes in 2006 (published in three batches over nine months) and the six that came six months later, none of them had made an impact on me at all. Rather than slipping the series quietly under the rug after that, Tharg commissioned six wrap-up episodes earlier this year from Arthur Wyatt, in order to get enough material to warrant publishing a collected edition at all. Rennie, clearly disinterested by this point, had moved on to work for some video game company. I'm sure Wyatt did the best anybody could hope for with what he had to work with, but neither the original run a few years ago, nor a refresher that I gave myself shortly afterwards, nor a quick thumb-through of this edition to confirm what was in it has provided my memory with the name of a single character other than Rafe or Kovert.

In many ways - and this is something we will definitely come back to in Thrillpowered Thursday - The 86ers exemplifies Smith's tenure as 2000 AD editor. He's done so much that is very right during his time in the hot seat, but his biggest failing has been the reversal of the semi-residencies that were common while David Bishop was editor. Ongoing series simply need extended runs of at least 10-13 weeks every year in order to make a consistent impact, particularly if they're going to have many recurring subplots and characters. There are occasional dramatic, exciting moments in The 86ers, and the art, initially by Karl Richardson before PJ Holden takes over, is quite good throughout, but there's too much talking between characters who take forever to do anything.

As a collected edition, The 86ers is nevertheless an impressive one. Released just a few weeks after it concluded in the weekly, the book contains all 22 episodes, along with the single installment of Rogue Trooper that introduced Rafe, some of the series' original covers and sketchbook art from Richardson and Holden. It's a truly fine collection of a sadly inessential series.

Next time, More about the thrills from the summer of 2002, with notes on the revamped V.C.s and a future cop bodyswap story called Bison! See you in seven!

113. American Ugly

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

112. Death's Sweet Embrace

June 2002: On the cover of prog 1294, we've got the great Henry Flint illustrating the climactic scene from a six-part Judge Death adventure which concludes this week. The story, by John Wagner and Frazer Irving, features longtime hero Cassandra Anderson trying to rush back from an assignment on the international moon station of Luna-One when she gets a psychic flash that Judge Death has somehow broken free again and has been murdering children in the Big Meg's orphanages.

It's a pretty grisly premise, and comes across amazingly well thanks to Irving's moody, black-and-white penwork. Everyone involved had decided beforehand that Judge Death had really been spoiled by the lighthearted, black comedy appearances of the 1990s, especially those Batman / Judge Dredd crossovers, and so they've decided to play this story straight and emphasize Death's genuinely evil side in a story full of atmospheric horror.

It has a remarkable conclusion in this issue: Death puts Anderson in a coma and gets away. The whole thing was a trap to put his arch-enemy in the hospital, brain-dead while he starts a new life in the Cursed Earth. He even has a new host body waiting for him, and he's last seen in a memorably terrifying conclusion, wandering around the desert that used to be Middle America in a long coat and hat, bringing his brand of final judgement to the pathetic souls eking out subsistence-level life in the small villages and communities in that lawless world. Wagner and Irving would reunite for a memorable sequel to this story in a couple of years, but if it had ended here, nobody would have begrudged Wagner for calling this the conclusion. "My Name is Death" and the follow-up, "The Wilderness Years," were released in a collected edition by Rebellion in 2007.



Also in this issue, Wagner and Kevin Walker continue the Judge Dredd epic "Sin City" that was mentioned last time, and there's a Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and David Bircham. Simon Spurrier and Shaun Bryan contribute an excellent Future Shock with a really memorable twist ending, but the big, crashing highlight of this comic, even better than the two Wagner stories, is 13 by Mike Carey and Andy Clarke.

13 is a twist-filled adventure about Joe Bulmer, a layabout and small-time crook with minor psychic abilities. After he snatches some girl's purse, he finds a small white bead which amplifies his powers to incredible, destructive levels.

Bulmer was already on the radar of an institute which purports to study paranormal events, but they take a new interest in him when his use of the bead starts causing death and mayhem. But their motives aren't all they seem, and Joe finds himself in the odd position of being the unlikely hero of the piece.



I can't mention this series without telling you about one of the coolest moments in the comic's history. When Joe was first at the research center, he briefly met a girl called Daksha. Back home, he's attacked by a strange alien "skin" which he kills by strangling it to death. Almost immediately, the police start pounding on his door, find the dead thing and haul Joe off in handcuffs.

As they're putting Joe in the back of the car, Daksha arrives, screaming some odd story about how Joe promised he'd go straight this time and how she'll wait for him, a ruse to get the police to let her past for a farewell kiss. But Joe's confusion is compounded when Daksha instead quietly tells him: "They aren't real policemen. And they're going to kill you." I love that so much!

Sadly, 13 would prove to be Mike Carey's last serial for 2000 AD, as he signed an exclusive deal with DC Comics. This had him scripting the celebrated Lucifer for Vertigo, a book I've been telling myself for years I need to read, along with a three-and-a-half year run on Hellblazer. This year, he began a new Vertigo series, The Unwritten. Clarke would draw a few more 2000 AD stories, including some Sinister Dexter adventures and the 2004 serial Snow/Tiger before also moving to DC. At the time of writing, he's currently doing a superhero series called R.E.B.E.L.S.. 13, under the amusing title Th1rt3en, was one of the last of the graphic novels to appear in the short-lived DC/Rebellion line. It's still available from DC, and absolutely worth getting a copy.

Next time, back to the Megazine, with a very neat anthology series for Durham Red, the debut of The Bendatti Vendetta and the mysterious murder of Otto Sump. See you in seven!

111. The Bloody Students

May 2002: We never see enough work by Duncan Fegredo, but here he gets the cover to prog 1290, spotlighting the debut of Bec & Kawl, one of a very small number of outright comedy series in 2000 AD. The strip was created by Si Spurrier, who finally gets his own series, the first of what will be several, after a couple of years writing Future Shocks, and artist Steve Roberts. Together, the duo will go on to create 29 episodes of the series, appearing in seven month-long appearances over a four-year period. Much as I do like Bec & Kawl, and wish it continued after it was quietly shelved in 2006, it must be said that when you read their first, two-part adventure, you have to wonder just how it ever got a commission for a second series.

"Bec & Kawl and the Mystical Mentalist Menace" is a two-parter which introduces the title characters, students at a London art college who keep crossing paths with the supernatural. Beccy Miller is an extremely grouchy goth chick in the fine arts program, and Jarrod Kawl is her stoner flatmate who dreams of being a great filmmaker. In this first story, they manage to release a demon from a cursed mirror, so they try conjuring up another demon to deal with the first. Subsequent stories will see the duo match wits with a succubus, a wonderful pastiche of virtual reality stories, the tooth fairy, the realtor of Hell, and invading aliens who look like traffic cones, all done with tongue in cheek and a pop culture reference in every panel. This first episode, for instance, won't make much sense at all if you are unfamiliar with Taxi Driver, Jurassic Park III and Ghostbusters.

But having said that, even if you know every line of those films, the first episode still doesn't make very much sense, because it's a poor, hamfisted effort on the creators' part. Steve Roberts' designs are very nice, but while he will become a very good artist quite soon, his storytelling is really very poor here. The panel transitions are incredibly awkward, particularly the shift from pages four to five, with the contents of Beccy's word balloon broken across two pages.



Spurrier doesn't help Roberts very much with a script that's just too packed with clever words and quips and not enough patient explanations of why the plot unfolds the way it does. Looking back this morning over an episode I've read at least five times, I really cannot remember why our heroes need to summon that second demon. I just have sort of a vague memory of the first demon shooting a gun at Kawl and running away. In time, notably with his masterpiece Lobster Random, Spurrier would learn that the unfolding of the plot needs to be as engaging and humorous as the movie jokes and puns, but here it's just something that happens, somehow, to set up the next couple of gags.

Fortunately, Tharg was very patient with Bec & Kawl, and after this botched first series and a still-disappointing second in early 2003, the series developed into one of my many favorites of the past decade. The complete run was compiled into a great collection by Rebellion in 2007. Bloody Students is packed with supplementary sketches and interviews, and should be essential reading for anyone who enjoys Lenore or Emily the Strange.

Also in the prog this week, there are the second episodes of two stories I'll come back to in the next Thrillpowered Thursday: 13 by Mike Carey and Andy Clarke, and Judge Death by Wagner and Frazer Irving. There's also the first part of a new Sinister Dexter storyline by Dan Abnett and Mark Pingriff called "Croak," and a genuinely fantastic new Judge Dredd epic by Wagner and Kevin Walker called "Sin City."



"Sin City" is a thirteen-part story, told across eleven weeks, in which a huge, floating pleasuredome - a giant mini-city full of casinos, brothels, bars and arenas hosting lethal sports - is given permission to dock at Mega-City One. Dredd is strongly against the idea, until Hershey lets him know that she's allowed it because a wanted terrorist has been sighted there. So a squad of Mega-City judges, and a small army of undercover officers, takes to the streets of Sin City looking for the elusive Ula Danser.

What they run into is one shock after another, with at least three take-your-breath-away cliffhangers. It's the longest Dredd story since 1999's "Doomsday" and it's one which I certainly suggest you check out. It is available as a collected edition, along with four follow-up episodes, under the name Satan's Island. It would certainly be a fine addition to your Rebellion library. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for this week's graphic novel highlight...

In April, Rebellion released the collected edition of Heavy Metal Dredd, with all twenty blood-spattered episodes of this early nineties series. It's not really essential. There have only been a pair of books in the last five years which I would advise readers skip on account of production issues. This is the first one I'd advise readers skip on account of it being completely awful.

Basically, around the time of Judgement on Gotham and Simon Bisley's brief turn in the limelight, the European metal mag Rock Power got together with Fleetway and commissioned a few Dredd episodes by Wagner, Alan Grant and Bisley. These were Dredd one-offs with the volume turned up to twelve; overcharged, simplistic, hyper-violent stories of motorcycle maniacs, testosterone-fueled beatings and over-the-top exit wounds. There's nothing subtle about them, and they're entirely subplot-free. They were designed for thirteen year-old meatheads and filled their gore-and-leather remit with abandon.

These were reprinted in England in the Judge Dredd Megazine and proved popular enough to warrant commissioning a few more episodes. Most of these were written by John Smith and painted by the likes of Colin MacNeil or John Hicklenton, who contributed this collected edition's new cover.

Rebellion does deserve some points for making this a very solid collection on its own merits. It does include all the stories in their original order, with good reproduction, full credits and an introduction by Hicklenton. However, there's very little wit or humor anywhere in these dingbat stories, and there's no reason for anybody other than completists to pick up this book. That Rebellion released this instead of a complete Stainless Steel Rat is a huge shame.

Next time, London punk Joe Bulmer investigates a psychic conspiracy in 13 and Frazer Irving schemes to make Judge Death scary again! See you in seven!

110. Atavar and the UOS

We're up to April 2002 now, and here on the cover of prog 1287, Nikolai Dante celebrates his recent Eagle Award win for best British comic character. This will prove to be artist Simon Fraser's farewell to the character that he co-created for the next four years. As Dante moves into his third phase, "the pirate years," it will be with John Burns as sole artist. Fraser, who will return to Dante in October 2006, is at this time residing in Africa. The series will take a number of very long rests during the third phase, especially during 2004 when writer Robbie Morrison will be engaged in writing The Authority for the Wildstorm imprint at DC Comics.

This issue sees the conclusion of an eight-part storyline called "The Romanov Job," in which Dante and his occasional sparring-and-bedpartner the Countessa work with several master criminals to heist his vanquished family's crown jewels. The other characters in the narrative are analogues of other comic characters, including Catwoman, Janus Stark and the Spider, and they are hunted down by Captain Emmanuel, the Luther Arkwright-analogue who had been introduced in a 1999 story.


Robbie Morrison really closed out this part of Dante in fine form. There's a sense of desperation in the narrative that somehow fits where the series was at the time. After the civil war, the imperial Russia of the far future is a much more dangerous place, and it's not a world where our hero can go gallivanting around pulling heists and breaking hearts like he did before things completely fell apart. When, of course, he gets stabbed in the back by somebody he should have known better to trust, Nikolai falls back on his "I'm too cool to kill" line, only to be slapped in the face by it. The story ends on a cliffhanger which won't be resolved for another nine months. It was reprinted in the sixth Dante collection, Hell and High Water, in 2008.

Elsewhere in the issue, the other stories are marking time until the next relaunch issue, prog 1289, and so there's a Steve Moore / Clint Langley Tales of Telguuth and a Future Shock by Mike Carey and John Charles to fill the page count, along with the last part of a three-episode Judge Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Paul Marshall. I believe the Telguuth installment is actually notable for being the first appearance of Langley's current style, which he has used on Slaine and The ABC Warriors over the past few years. I think we're long overdue for reading a detailed interview with Langley where he discusses how he creates these odd "fantasy Photoshop fumetti" of his. However, the most interesting strip this week, other than Dante, is the penultimate part of a serial called Atavar.

I'm very curious how I'll feel about Atavar when I finish reading the third book of the series in a few months' time. This is a really odd little story by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson in which a group of powerful-but-desperate aliens, tens of thousands of years in the future, reconstruct an atavar of the long-extinct human race in order to help them in their war against machine-creatures called UOS. No series, with the possible exception of that cosmetic warrior "Rouge Trooper," has ever been misspelled as often as Atavar. Everybody wants to call this one "Avatar," perhaps missing the point that the aliens are looking into history to find something from the past to save their species.



Atavar began in prog 1281 with one of the most unusual first episodes of any series. We see our human character awake in a strange cave system from what appears to be cryo-sleep or something and run, panicking, from the huge aliens around him. There is no dialogue. Well, nothing in English, anyway. The human's got a lot to say, but it's all "HNNN!" and "NNNNN!" and the aliens haven't upgraded him to understand their language yet. It's a bizarre little experiment, and it certainly got reader's attention, even if many of them balked at the necessity of spending five pages on it.

The other thing that's really notable about Atavar is that it comes to a spectacular twist ending. The conclusion is so darn cool that everybody reread the previous progs to see how the heck they missed something so neat. It was an ending so perfect that bringing Atavar back, twice, left a bad taste in my mouth and I honestly only just glanced at the later episodes, complaining, in that know-it-all fan way, that the pages would have been better spent on more Vanguard or Balls Brothers. I'll try to judge them more fairly when I come to prog 1329 later in the year.

Next time, those bloody students take over! Eyebrows are furrowed and knives are drawn as Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts bring us Bec & Kawl. Plus, a look at the collected edition of Heavy Metal Dredd. See you in seven!

109. Thrill-Power Starts to Get Overloaded

As 2000 AD entered the year 2002, it was with a new editor, Matt Smith. There was a good deal of fandom interest in this at the time, as Smith had chosen to keep a much lower online profile than his predecessor Andy Diggle had, and many people were speculating what his tenure would be like. Less heralded then was Judge Dredd Megazine's new editor. Alan Barnes took the reins as David Bishop stepped down following such a long and commendable service, but Barnes already had a new assignment for the veteran Bishop in mind.

Barnes came to the Megazine following some time as editor of Doctor Who Magazine for Panini. Wikipedia suggests he'd been at the wheel there for the better part of four years, during the very difficult transition time of 1998-2002, when the Paul McGann TV movie failed to become a series, and he somehow managed to keep the magazine alive and very vibrant during those lean years. He seems to have succeeded by really amping up the quality of both the comic strip, which became essential reading as it transitioned to full color (and remained superior to any and all Doctor Who novels published during that period which weren't written by Lawrence Miles), and also by really bringing out the best in the magazine's feature writers. For years, the magazine's writers had been doing great work going behind the scenes of the production of the original series, but I think it was during Barnes' tenure that the quality went even higher, with incredibly interesting research, very detailed, probing interviews, and, most memorably, a lengthy, serialized memoir by the show's longest-serving producer.



Judge Dredd Megazine had only been revamped just eight months previously, taking the 100-page perfect-bound format used by the annual year-end special Progs. While readers all seemed to like the fourth volume of the comic, under Barnes and designer Graham Rolfe, the comic got another kick up the backside. As far as comics go, there initially wasn't a great deal that was actually new between the covers. The new strips in issue 9 include a very funny Dredd adventure called "Dead Lost in Mega-City One" by John Wagner and Peter Doherty which seems to be parodying some contemporary, dunderheaded British TV craze, and the ongoing Wardog by Dan Abnett, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague. They're joined by what will prove to be the final serial for the veteran Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and John Ridgway. The popular series is finally winding down at this point, and will conclude its 74-episode run in the spring.

Of course, reprints are a regular feature during this period of the Megazine. This time, six episodes are dusted off: four each from Strontium Dog ("The Kid Knee Caper" by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra) and Bad Company (the first four parts, by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy). Even these just appear a little more vibrant and interesting than the reprints of the previous few months, thanks to a very neat design choice. The current Megazine is a very different size than the old, almost-square newsprint 2000 ADs of the 1980s - it is sleeker and taller. To accomodate the reprints, they are shrunk down to the current page width, but printed on color paper, with borders above and below the comic, along with a neat little "work order" indicating that they've been retrieved from a special vault in Tharg's Command Module. In the very next issue of the Megazine, the classic thrills will be joined by reprints of Hellboy by Mike Mignola and John Byrne.



It's with this issue that we first start getting lengthy text articles filling the page count. This time there are two. One of them is a behind-the-scenes look at the newest merchandising: full-cast audio productions of 2000 AD-universe stories from the good people at Big Finish, who have been turning out their popular lines of direct-to-CD adventures of Doctor Who and other cult teevee properties for a couple of years by this point. Their 2000 AD line features several of the regular players from their repertory company, with Toby Longworth starring as Dredd, and Simon Pegg as Johnny Alpha.

It's interesting stuff, but the really impressive feature is the first in what will prove to be a quite lengthy series of articles written by outgoing editor David Bishop on the history of our favorite comic. Thrill-Power Overload, which will be revised, updated and collected into an essential book a few years down the road, was assembled from dozens of interviews and previously unseen documentation.

This first episode of the series details the conflicts that went on at the comic's original publisher IPC to get the darn thing put together, with jealous infighting between departments and unsatisfactory returns on artwork. It includes samples of never-before-seen pages, including the original splash of Invasion 1988, as it was then-called, with parachuting Soviet troops storming London, and the remarkable sight of John Probe decapitating some guy with a karate chop.

As the series continues, Bishop will interview almost every major player from the comic's lifetime (only Alan Moore, Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie will decline to go on the record), and produce a genuinely excellent, no-punches-pulled history of 2000 AD. The hardcover collected edition, published in 2007, is flatly one of the most important books about the medium to see print, and a must-have for anybody with a mind to having a serious library about comic books.

In other news, earlier this year, Rebellion released the sixth collection of The ABC Warriors. This book, "The Shadow Warriors," contains the longest of all the Warriors' adventures thus far, an epic written by their creator Pat Mills and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra and Henry Flint. It originally appeared in three "books" between 2003-06, and since I'm looking forward to rereading the original episodes as they come up in the rotation, I just skimmed over the book to get a good feel for it.

Honestly, this collection is terrific. The artwork is, of course, wonderful. Ezquerra is one of 2000 AD's best art droids and he really brings a great, dirty sensibility to the dusty sandhole of the terraformed Mars. But when Flint takes over, things somehow get even better. There's a genuine "shock of the new" feel to Flint's episodes, as our heroes' new, imaginatively-designed foes take center stage and the weirdness factor gets ramped up to ten.

Skimming this volume confirmed what I felt about it upon its release: that the Guv'nor was back in town and ready to kick ass and take names. We'll come to this point in Thrillpowered Thursday in a few months, but it's clear that Pat Mills' time away from the comic, during which he created Requiem: Vampire Knight for his French publisher, recharged his batteries to full. The 2003-model Mills was not the same droid as the one from the 1990s. Here, it's one wild idea after another, no preaching, no stagnation, just a constant escalation of mad plot devices and vibrant characters. If the previous few ABC Warriors collections had been frustrating for one political reason or another, then this is the one to get.

It's every bit as wild and excellent as it was when Ezquerra had last drawn the title in 1979, and the robots were riding on the backs of tyrannosaurs, armed with bazookas. This is that Mills - the one with the turbo-charged imagination creating physics-defying freakiness and making downright excellent comics. I strongly recommend you check this book out! (And keep an eye out for more about Requiem: Vampire Knight at my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf blog in a couple of weeks!)

Next time, Nikolai Dante hightails it out of Russia, and Dan Abnett and Richard Elson have a lot to say in Atavar! See you in seven!