190. Vigilantes in Mega-City One

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday, the blog that dares to ask the question, "Didn't I just read that series?" For now, we're getting very, very close to the present day, and as this continues, we'll be looking at the launches of more than a couple of series that are still running. I've been asked several times over the years what I plan to do when the blog catches up to the present-day issues, and the answer might be "not get quite that far, and maybe take another long rest." But before we hit such a drastic measure, I think that first, everybody reading this should give a big round of applause to Tharg and all his droids, because 2012 was a completely awesome year of really amazing comics.

There were some pretty darn good comics running in December 2008, when "Prog 2009" was published, but there were some uneven ones as well. The annual launch issue, this time featuring a funny and wonderful cover by Carlos Ezquerra, saw the beginnings of new adventures for Strontium Dog and Greysuit, each of which we'll talk about next week, along with Marauder, a serial by Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson set in Judge Dredd's world, and the latest adventure for the crew in The Red Seas by Ian Edginton and Steve "Inkless" Yeowell.

In the present day, fans are waiting to hear when, if ever, we'll see a fifth story of Kingdom, the terrific series by Dan Abnett and Elson. Apparently, Elson's been working for Marvel, one of those inferior American publishers who pay a higher rate than the Galaxy's Greatest. I looked him up at comics.org and saw that he's spent the last couple of years drawing their superhero books. Well, he couldn't have asked for a better calling card than Marauder. It's the story of a flunked-out cadet judge who gets caught in a crossfire between three rival criminal groups. One of these is a gang of crooked judges who are in the occasional pay of yet another Mega-City kingpin, and one of these is an alien who provides Falcone with some interesting technology.

In his red-and-yellow supersuit, Falcone moves like Spider-Man with the tech of Iron Man. Many years previously, we'd seen Judge Dredd see off interfering super-vigilantes (in "Megaman" [prog 440], "Fairlyhyperman" [progs 529-530], and "Bat Mugger" [prog 585]), but these were mainly played for the quick laugh, and didn't really examine what a superhero story set in Mega-City One might really be like.


Not to dismiss or belittle Morrison here, but if I were a Marvel Comics editor, and this run of progs came across my desk, I'd have written Elson a blank check, because the artist is the star of this story. Until Kingdom, which is completely majestic, I had always ranked Elson as maybe being solid if not among my personal favorites. Tasked with an urban superhero adventure, with lots of fast action and wild camera angles, he really goes above the standard, and delivers some of the best-looking superhero pages from any publisher. Apparently, he has not drawn very much Spider-Man yet, which is an almighty shame for Spider-Man readers, because, in his weird red suit, Falcone interacts with the buildings and bridges of Mega-City One like the town is a valuable supporting character. You can easily just tune out the script and relish all the detail and attention in every panel.

This is a delight that readers of The Red Seas cannot share.

Back in 1987, Steve Yeowell had debuted in 2000 AD as the artist of Zenith, the comic's first superhero series. And he drew the almighty hell out of it. Every page of that series looked terrific, and Yeowell parlayed that success into lots of assignments for other publishers. It's one of comics' great missed opportunities that DC didn't give him the regular job of their title Starman after Tony Harris moved on. Yeowell had done some really great fill-in work for Harris in the 1990s. That job shoulda been his.

Something happened to Yeowell's work earlier in 2008. There's still a little bit to like about it. His character designs remain consistent; Captain Jack Dancer looks the same from panel to panel. At least there's that. Otherwise, either his local art supply store raised the cost of ink beyond common sense, or Yeowell's interest in and enthusiasm for drawing The Red Seas hit a wall. I peg the deterioration with episode three of the previous story, "Old Gods" in August. That's when backgrounds for his pages abruptly started vanishing, and he started taking visible shortcuts to finish things. The worst offense came with a forest depicted by way of a large blob that indicated the canopy of trees, its interior detail nothing more than fifty-odd quick squiggles that suggested individual leaves.


Nothing in "Signs and Portents" is quite that bad, but nothing suggests any interest in continuing to visualize Captain Jack's adventures either. This time out, our heroes have been abducted by Caliban, who also holds the immortal Prospero as his prisoner. Prospero, who first communicates with Capt. Dancer and his crew by way of some floating food, is privy to Dancer's recent past and run-ins with the supernatural, and has grave warnings about his future. But it looks like he won't even get that far when, in one of the most abrupt and strange cliffhangers in 2000 AD's long history, our heroes are tied up as bait for some giant animals outside Caliban's walls.

Actually, rereading it, "abrupt" is putting it lightly. It simply does not feel like an end-of-story cliffhanger, where the tensions rise and there's a build up to a "sting," leaving audiences both satisfied with what they have read and anxious to see what will happen next. Everything suddenly happens with the feel of doors slamming, including a massive cut in between our heroes being discovered and then stuck in this wild and outlandish climax. It's not done with a sense of danger or drama; in fact, it's almost played as comedy, with a surprising "The End" stuck at the bottom, above a caption promising the series would be continued. Jack's bizarre conundrum would be addressed more than a year down the line, jumping from prog 1623 to 1688.

This feeling of comedy has also infected The Red Seas more potently at this time. Now, sure, there was always a light touch in the strip - Jack's opening line to Isabella, the camp stylings of Dr. Orlando Doyle - but with the previous story, the supernatural became really whimsical. The squabbling Norse gods, with Odin depicted as a henpecked husband, were admittedly a little funny even as they reduced the impossible into wacky, but by now, the trick of turning the outre into ordinary, as shown by Prospero's manipulation of sausages, is transforming the whole series into a light, early evening comedy. At the same time, everybody is issuing dire warnings and Captain Jack is taking fantastic occult threats seriously, but the threats are pantomimes. In the story running in 2000 AD at the time of writing - said to be the finale - the crew are battling Satan, and he's so camp that he makes Doyle look subdued. And still, nobody's bought Yeowell any ink.

Next week, it's one weird concept too many for Pat Mills as he introduces... The Ginger Ninja!

189. England's Green and Pleasant Land

October 2008: Previously, I had mentioned that some external forces caused me, your humble chronicler, to lose track of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic for a couple of months. When I started paying attention again, I could not, for the life of me, make any sense of The ABC Warriors. At this point, we're deep into "The Volgan War," which is four separate 72-page stories, each of which is serialized as ten or twelve episodes. Now, one of many things that Matt Smith has got very right in his time as Tharg has been making sure that stories run without a deadline break between episodes. This has mainly been a thing of the past, but the third chunk of "The Volgan War" is one of those unfortunate and very rare exceptions. It runs for six weeks, takes a break for four, and returns for the last six. Worse, it's with episode six that the action shifts to explain what's been going on with the new character of Zippo.

Across the first two chunks of "The Volgan War," we've seen how each of our heroes briefly met the same special forces robot, who usually helped them out of a major jam. Chunk three - oh, all right, "Volume" Three - begins with five episodes in which Steelhorn tells his story of meeting Zippo. So with episode six, they're off to Marinaris City to rescue the guy, but first we have to jump back a few weeks to explain how he was captured, and then there's a horribly-timed break. For anybody hoping to pick up with episode seven in prog 1611, good luck to you. For three weeks, it's Zippo and some architect named Kroll who has lost his mind and decided to become a graffiti artist jumping and swinging around from girder to girder in a wild, dark city that looks like German impressionism gone crazy. We meet some new, villainous secret police who oppose them, and a telepathic commissar character, and a huge population of oppressed workers who sing a jaunty and implausibly very long anthem as the captured Zippo is lowered into molten slag and...

Okay, so in the previous chapter, I acknowledged that part of why I had no clue what was going on in ABC Warriors was because I just didn't care to read 2000 AD for a couple of months after the Stalag 666 incident. I'll even take 95% of the blame. But the rest is because Pat Mills has gone completely loopy with this story, and, for weeks, it's like a fever dream. There aren't even any ABC Warriors in it. This is absolutely an occasion where Mills' desire to write for the eventual book - or, in the case of "The Volgan War," four of the darn things instead of one big, fat phonebook - just doesn't do the weekly episodes well at all.

Mills is actually having a rough time of it in the prog. Around this time, he also has a four-part Judge Dredd story called "Birthday Boy." It's actually one of his very best scripts for the character, and a perfectly fine adventure, and it is completely ruined by the slack, uninvolved, thrill-sucking artwork by Vince Locke. He is a fine artist by any definition, and I believe we can credit him with some excellent episodes of Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre, but this story is such a disaster that it is best forgotten.


So this brings us to Ampney Crucis Investigates, an often very good series by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis that keeps feeling just a hair shy of being one of the all-time 2000 AD greats. It debuts in prog 1611 with a corker of a first episode. It's 1928, and a beautiful woman, Lady Calliope Wykes, kills her husband, who has transformed into a hideous insect creature. Meanwhile, Lord Ampney Crucis, youngest son of Lady Zuleika, awakens from a terrible nightmare. He is haunted by an incident at the Somme, twelve years previously, where he witnessed a hideous Cthulu-like beast dismembering and slaughtering soldiers. He's met by his manservant Cromwell and the game is afoot.

The apparent pitch for Crucis is "Lord Peter Wimsey as written by Lovecraft," meaning it's 50% guaranteed to catch my eye. I really, really love Dorothy L. Sayers' stories of Wimsey and his wonderful family! Unfortunately, I have no interest at all in Lovecraft's turgid prose or ideas, but I like Sayers enough for it not to matter too much. Major Wimsey returned from the Great War so badly shellshocked by the stress of ordering men to their deaths that he was invalided. Lord Crucis - I am not quite clear on the peerage etiquette here; Lord Peter explained in the novel Whose Body? that as he has an older brother, Gerald, he should not be referred to as "Lord Wimsey," but Ampney, who has at least two older siblings, goes by "Lord Crucis" - came back driven mad by the sight of the worm-beast. Both characters wear monocles as affectations and both had a fiancee call off the wedding as a result of their war experience, and then both began amateur investigations, only Lord Crucis focuses on cases with an occult aspect.


Ampney Crucis Investigates is achingly close to being one of my all-time favorites, but so many little things work against it. You can almost sense a little hesitation from Tharg in the short little run of the first story, "Vile Bodies." (You'll note, of course, that Lord Crucis's first recorded adventure recalls the name of Lord Peter's.) It's a case that would really benefit from many more pages for the character to, you know, investigate things. It feels like Tharg has just given it a short six-week slot at the end of the year, to burn it away, not really certain that readers, other than me, are all that interested in posh upper-class detectives from the throwback days of the 1920s, no matter how many Cthulus and bee-monsters are stuck in the story.

The result is a pilot that moves at the requisite rocket fuel pace, but it leaves a hell of a lot behind. Lord Crucis and Cromwell actually have a third member of their party, a chauffeur named Lorelli, who appears in only one panel of this story, and hardly at all in the subsequent adventures. The main character additionally received a stunning second injury when he met the Cthulu-thing in France: it tore his feet off. But this isn't mentioned anywhere, and only shown in passing in the second story, which would appear in 2010. One of the original plans for the character, as seen in the Simon Davis sketches that appear in this story's collected edition, was for him to have both artificial hands and feet, but only the wooden feet remained when the series began. There's just no space for the characters to breathe with so much plot compacted into so few pages.

But worse, the plot of the first story, at least, barely leaves Lord Crucis with anything to investigate, let alone deduce. This isn't detective fiction as I enjoy it; it's just a very simplistic adventure story with a monocle-wearing lead. It is a fine distraction, and gorgeously drawn, but there's just no meat to chew on. Lord Crucis doesn't work as well as an action hero as Edginton seems to wish for him to. Here, he follows exactly the same very short path of clues that even the thickest village constable should have followed, and, in the end, is rescued by a risible "old school chum" working for the government and whose climactic reappearance in the narrative is telegraphed from a mile off. Over the course of a labyrinthine 13-week story with dead ends, more characters, and many more corpses, I expect that the "Vile Bodies" that might have been, would have been a huge triumph.

I enjoyed the second and third Ampney Crucis Investigates stories somewhat more, albeit with reservations, although the all-action weirdness of the fourth story, now thrown into a parallel universe and bringing our hero into two-fisted conflict with some of those otherworldly horrors, was a massive letdown. The fifth story will begin in just one week, in Prog 2013. I have my fingers crossed for it; this is a series that I want so badly to embrace, but the darn thing keeps frustrating me.

But that's still many more chapters away. In the next installment of Thrillpowered Thursday, we'll look at Prog 2009, The Red Seas and Marauder. That'll be in January, after a few weeks of recharging, and reviewing some other House of Tharg goodies over at my Bookshelf blog. Thanks for reading, everybody!

188. Locked Up

September 2008: Simon Parr, a long-serving production and design droid, contributes this issue's cover, which highlights a very controversial serial called Stalag 666. The serial is written by Tony Lee, and it's his first work for the House of Tharg, and it's drawn by Jon Davis-Hunt, who had previously provided the excellent artwork for Tempest in the Megazine. To say that it gets a mixed reception is the understatement of the year. Stalag 666, overall, is probably the least-loved thing to appear in the comic since Bison about six years previously.

Honestly, it's not quite that bad, but it sure isn't good. In my book, it is nowhere near as awful as its reputation suggests, but it sure does have a lot working against it. I recall that some fans were a little confused about the way that Lee managed to bypass the understood method of getting some work from Tharg by slogging through lots of one-offs and Future Shocks, instead offering up a resume of work for small publishers like Markosia and IDW, for whom he was writing Doctor Who, starting with a mini-series called "The Forgotten." I'd like to think that the ugly incident that overshadows Stalag was motivated more by the ugly jealousy of somebody who'd had no luck getting his submissions accepted than by anybody who thought that they had a beef with the serial's content. I'm talking, of course, about the letter of shit.

So here's what happened: Stalag 666 debuted with a double-length opener in prog 1600 and immediately broke one of the cardinal rules of fiction: don't tell your readers that there's a more interesting story somewhere in your world than the one which you plan to tell them. Instead of an all-action story of war between humanity and the reptilian aliens who dress and act like Nazis - and that's another problem with the serial, the villains are reptilian aliens who dress and act like Nazis - Lee chooses to tell a story about some humans desperate to escape from a cruel prison camp. It suffers from one or two problems common to 2000 AD during this period, like having far too many characters, and confusion as to who the central protagonist actually is, but really, even at the time, it was just mediocre and skippable, and nowhere near as world-ending as its detractors claimed. It actually starts off at least structured very well, with an opener that explains the world and its cruelty, and ends with the character who might be the hero arriving in the camp. After that, however, it's really talky and kind of obvious.

Jon Davis-Hunt, who had earlier been so impressive with Tempest, took a huge stumble backward with this serial. He'd recover - his work on Dandridge is a joy - but stuck drawing eighty-something pages of the same dull people in the same dull place took its toll on him. His camera angles never seem to change, and everything is delivered in the same boring medium shot. The occasional action scenes are lifeless and the very occasional moments of over-the-top gore look completely ridiculous. One reason I was reminded of, and mentioned, Bison earlier comes with an execution at the climax of episode six, where one of the characters is literally sliced in half by a single blow from the main Snake baddie, a geyser of solid burgundy splashing out of him, comically. I was reminded of the "Candlehead Eruptions" that looked so incredibly stupid and ridiculous in the later episodes of Bison.

Though we'll never know for sure what prompted it, beyond hideous mental defect, I'd like to think that, because the timeline seems to work, this amazingly dumb visual at the end of part six was the final straw for one even dumber anonymous reader, somewhere in England. This cretin took the time to find every negative review of the serial that he could, from the formal ones at the old 2000adreview.co.uk, as well as from the official site's forum, copy-n-pasted them into one document, and attached not only a vulgar letter, but also - wait for it - a generous sampling of his own shit, smeared across a page of photocopy paper. This package was duly delivered to one of Mr. Lee's previous addresses in mid-October, and forwarded along to him.

After Lee informed fandom of the event, by way of an entirely-justified rant, the story got picked up by some of the comic gossip sites. Everybody with a brain was duly offended, and the otherwise good reputation that 2000 AD fans have of being sensible, optimistic, level-headed, and encouraging adults got a black eye. It's never good to have a sociopath among your ranks, because it makes everybody look bad. The attendant noise and discussion completely overshadowed more than just the serial, but the comic itself. For a few weeks there, I know that I just wasn't interested in 2000 AD at all, since the incident just sucked the fun out of everything. I read the issues as they arrived, and I have to say that none of it stuck with me. Progs 1602 until about 1610 - bearing in mind that American comic stores were receiving these about a month late - are completely unfamiliar to me. This is why I didn't remember the exact point where Steve Yeowell lost interest in drawing backgrounds in The Red Seas - it comes in episode three of "Old Gods," as night skies become lazy cross-hatching and trees become simple squiggles - and why I wrote a letter to Tharg complaining that I couldn't understand what was happening in Book Three of the ABC Warriors epic "The Volgan War" - sorry, Green Bonce, it wasn't your fault - and why I could not for the life of me remember one dang thing about the fourth Lobster Random story.

In my defense, "The Forget-Me-Knot" - it has the same title as Emma Peel's last episode of The Avengers - really is a dense and confusing story. Lobster Random is among my favorite characters of the decade, but Simon Spurrier seems to have written this story while suffering from a fever. Even allowing for the writer's reputation of being very wordy and full of highwire sci-fi concepts, and the presence of an amnesiac leading man, this is certainly the most complex adventure for the character to date.

Having been rescued from The Vort at the end of that recent "surprise twist" serial a few weeks ago by the reporter Meridien Bless, Lobster has been formally identified. Wanted by police and security forces across the system, he's immediately targeted for execution on sight, but rescued by his old mech-lover Klik, who double-crosses him - she can't help it, she has a double-cross software patch - and delivers him to the two mercenaries who've been pestering him for years. That's when it gets weird. Bless rescues him again and returns him to The Vort, where he hopes that the planet's hallucinogenic rain can restore his lost memory. But then Bless drinks some of the same rain, and Lob starts getting her memories mixed with his.

There's a lot to like about Lob, but with the wild resurrections and heady concepts - there's a big, planet-possessing supernatural force manipulating everything to ensure its freedom - it's somehow lost its fun edge, and that great feeling it previously had that every chapter worked on its own. Once an episodic series in the very best way, it's now the sort of story that demands ongoing reader attention because everything is piling atop each other. It's good - in fact, it's very good and the best thing in the prog - but it's certainly not the Lob that we fell in love with.

It also ends in prog 1610 on a stinking big cliffhanger which everybody involved should resolve to address in 2013. Get on with it, guys!

Next time, we'll try to make some sense of The ABC Warriors, and we'll go as my Wimsey takes me as Ampney Crucis debuts.

187. Skidmarks!

August 2008: Here's one of the biggest things, potentially, to ever happen to the Judge Dredd Megazine: the irrepressible Tank Girl joins the lineup with all-new episodes. Helpfully, Meg # 275 features not only the first episode in a wild new series of Tank Girl by Alan Martin and her new artist, Rufus Dayglo, but also a new series of articles written by Ed Berridge about the history of British adult comics, which helps put the new story in some context.

Tank Girl, as a strip, debuted in 1988 in the premiere issue of Deadline, although the character had been used in flybills and promotional tat for punk groups for a while before. The creation of Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, she then became a regular player in the magazine. A heady mix of anarchic comics, left-wing politics and indie rock - one of Melody Maker's most celebrated writers, the late Steven Wells, contributed several features and interviews - Deadline is, decades on, an absolutely wild and occasionally impenetrable time capsule. It's much loved by those who were able to embrace it at the time, albeit somewhat baffling to those of us on this continent even if we were the right age to have loved it or the music that it championed. Tank Girl was the star player, and apparently the most regular feature - I have never seen a proper "database" like those that we trainspotter 2000 AD fans assembled - but other series, including Johnny Nemo by Peter Milligan and Brett Ewins, Wired World by Philip Bond, and Hugo Tate by Nick Abadzis are all well-remembered by many, although, if we're honest, I recall an article about the group Kitchens of Distinction written by "Swells" more clearly than any of the comics.

Deadline didn't survive either homegrown indie rock's breaking into the mainstream in the mid-90s or Tank Girl's debut as a remarkably poor feature film. The movie was such a bust that the backlash helped sink the comic. The movie flopped in April of 1995 and Blur had their first number one with "Country House" in August. The moment had passed, and Martin and Hewlett granted DC's Vertigo imprint.a license to publish Tank Girl. They released some poorly-received comics written by Milligan and retired the character in early '96.


Eleven years later, Tank Girl returned. Hewlett had, by this time, become a hugely successful multimedia artist, and regular collaborator with Blur's Damon Albarn, and gave Martin his blessing to continue without him. Now published by IDW, Martin hooked up with artist Ashley Wood for some mini-series adventures. But Tank Girl works best when it regularly appears in a larger context, and in shorter bursts of material. So, while the IDW releases continued as occasional mini-series, Tank Girl began a residency in Judge Dredd Megazine unlike any seen before. With a couple of single-issue breaks, she was a regular player for almost two full years.

It's difficult to say how much of Tank Girl's original success was down to Hewlett's art, but, while it may be unfair for everybody to downplay Martin's considerable, and ongoing, contribution, it's accurate to say that people do. I recall pointing out IDW's Ashley Wood-drawn Tank Girl to a group of comic-reading friends and acquaintances, and, without Hewlett, none of them were interested. True, Wood's stylized take on the character was a pretty radical departure, but conservative comic readers get their notions and hold onto them for dear life. Dayglo's version resembled Hewlett's a little more closely, and the shorter episodes, usually nine pages each month, more closely evoked the non-linear, anything-goes feel of the Deadline days.


The new Tank Girl launched with a ten-part epic called "Skidmarks" that drew inspiration from the old Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon Wacky Races and the Burt Reynolds film The Cannonball Run. It's the most straightforward, and by far the longest, of Tanky's Meg adventures. Subsequent stories, which appeared through the spring of 2010, would be shorter, much looser, and also quite controversial among readers, but more of that down the line.

I recall being both very excited and very frustrated by the launch of Tank Girl in the Meg. I won't claim to have ever been a fan of the character, though I really appreciate the nice way that Titan repackaged their series of reprint books at the same dimensions as Rebellion's line, which was very thoughtful of them. I think I'm too linear (and boring) of a reader for most of the carefree and bizarre Deadline material, no matter how much I love, for example, Philip Bond's artwork. (I would certainly like to see a Wired World collected edition prove me wrong, though.) Since I did love Rufus Dayglo's artwork, and saw such sales promise in Tanky joining the Meg, I was cautiously optimistic.

But I was incredibly disappointed when, again, Rebellion failed to capitalize on their newest star by, you know, promoting the living heck out of her. The IDW books were selling to some small audience in the States. Even if my anecdotes suggested some resistance, the books still moved, but, as 2008 ended and I began a lengthy look, incorporating several states, at comic book shops across the southeast and up north, I saw many places that sold IDW's Tank Girl but not Judge Dredd Megazine. Retailers had no idea, as per usual, that the character had new adventures here. Rebellion failed to promote it in any real way. If ever there was a time for full-page ads in the Previews catalog from Diamond Distributors, this was it. Another opportunity was lost. This would not improve for another couple of years.

Oh, yeah, and the Meg was now bagged with a "free graphic novel," usually 64 pages and printed at the same dimensions as their line of reprint books. The "Meg Floppy," as it's often called, is still going today, four years later, and seems to serve the dual purpose of gauging reader response to material that might be served by the larger bookstore market, and also getting old material scanned in and resized for the reprint world. This format - 64 pages and bagged with a reprint - has been the standard for the Meg since issue 275.

Next time, Tony Lee gets some hate mail. See you in seven days!

186. It's not who I thought it was!

July 2008: In prog 1796, a serial called The Vort wrapped up. This eight-part tale of future war on a strange planet where the laws of physics are challenging the human army had readers' suspicion circuits buzzing from about page two. There's a really strange "man of mystery," badly wounded and disfigured, his facial features obscured by hideous scar tissue, among the cast. He's called Crispy, and the main protagonist, a reporter, is determined to learn his secret.

What's more, there's the curious nature of the serial's credits. The artist is the popular and awesome D'Israeli, and the writer is listed as "G. Powell." We'd been down this road twice before. When John Wagner had written The Dead Man in 1990 as "Keef Ripley," that certainly looked like a pseudonym, but this was before any internet-based fandom could get together and speculate about it. The Dead Man established this unusual tradition to hide the identity of the hero: the writer uses a fake name, and the artist, in that case John Ridgway, is one not really known for drawing the character.

This was repeated in 2006, when "Cal Hamilton" and artist Simon Coleby collaborated on a serial called Malone, who was revealed to be Finnigan Sinister. By this time, of course, we had the internet for research and for speculation, and the actual writer, Dan Abnett, anticipated the nosy nature of fans and reused the "Hamilton" name, which he'd previously employed for some work for licensed comics such as James Bond Jr. in the 1990s. Since nobody ever knew that "Hamilton" and Abnett were one and the same, this worked perfectly,

As for "G. Powell," Tharg swore that this was a brand new droid, but nobody believed him. Speculation wasn't exactly running wild, but I had my theory, and I was pretty sure of it. I figured "Powell" had to be Arthur Wyatt. See, the writer Gordon Rennie had taken a sabbatical from 2000 AD around this time, leaving lots of dangling subplots across three separate series, to take on some better-paying work in the video game industry. It was understood that Cabbalistics Inc would be rested for the time being - a really long time being, as it has turned out - but that The 86ers would be resuming in 2009 with Wyatt as the new writer. This series, a spinoff of Rogue Trooper, had been absent for about a full year at this point. My guess was that "Powell" was putting a subplot together - the return of Rogue himself, badly wounded, amnesiac, and calling himself Crispy - and that we'd get a last-page revelation of Crispy as our blue-skinned, biochip-totin' buddy, setting up his move to the Acoma System to hook up with Rafe in the next 86ers story.

This theory made perfect sense. It even worked on the art front, because D'Israeli had never drawn Rogue Trooper before. Of course, he'd never drawn Lobster Random before, either.


Aloha! Crispy was Lobster Random and "G. Powell" was Si Spurrier. So there.

Elsewhere in the Galaxy's Greatest, Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson start a four-part Judge Dredd story in which criminals use an electromagnetic pulse to shut down a city block, with the unintentional side effect of also shutting down Dredd's bionic eyes. There's more Sinister Dexter, and the Nikolai Dante epic "Amerika" moves toward an unforgettable conclusion. For about the last two years of the series, since prog 1511, Dante has been working as Tsar Vladimir's top agent, neither trusting the other, and with good reason. Dante doesn't know that Vlad's armored "Lord Protector" is really his own half-brother Konstantin, and Vlad doesn't know that Dante's been quietly assembling "an army of thieves and whores" to lead a rebellion.

So, Dante has assembled a rough alliance in the streets of New York to repel the beachhead from the alien White Army, and Vlad sees the whole endeavor as, tactically, a big waste of time and resources, and moves his fleet in to just wipe Manhattan, and everybody in it, human and alien alike, off the face of the earth. Dante escapes in the nick of time, but it looks very much like all the people who moved onto the island from the other old boroughs at his urging have all been slaughtered. Our hero completely loses his temper, especially when Vlad and Arkady are all smug and supercilious about their awful abuses of power, and the look on Vlad's face when Dante puts his sword through the old man's stomach is a stunner.

Dante's blow is about six inches lower than it needed to be. As our hero goes down in a hail of energy blasts, he knows that he wasted the effort; Vlad is going to survive, and we poor readers will have an agonizing thirteen weeks to see what will happen to him next.


And Defoe, by Pat Mills and Leigh Gallagher, nearing the end of his second ten-part adventure, sees his subplots twist and tangle and get incredibly convoluted in the best possible way. The series does seem to have about twice as many characters as is necessary, but it's really fun. (Tharg! If you're reading, the week before this series returns for story five in 2013, please program a five page "who's who" prologue, would you? Thanks!) I really like the structure, where Titus Defoe is usually deep in the trenches, fighting zombie "reeks" at the street level, completely unaware of all the political machinations going on between Scotland Yard and various palaces and country houses.

The story brings him, briefly, in opposition to a lady of the Prussian court, a diplomat who appears to be slumming and enjoying an illegal pit fight between a brawler and a reek, before she takes her leave of the event. He's then contacted by the secret agent brother of the reporter who accompanied him in the first story, who reveals the reporter's tale about his meeting with the villains controlling the reeks, known as Mene Tekel and La Voisin, alias "Mr. Quick" and "Prussian Blue." Defoe realizes that the woman he met is certainly La Voisin, and this story ends with Defoe and Damned Jones preparing to track her down.

I really do enjoy this series despite the genuine reality that there are a heck of a lot more characters than anybody can keep up with. Wikipedia is some help, although it reveals the deaths of three of Defoe's twelve (twelve!!!) fellow zombie fighters in stories three and four. On the other hand, ten times as many things happen in sixty pages of Defoe than in sixty pages of anything else in print, so you can't complain too much. Also, the reporter and the spy? Their names are Fear-the-Lord Jones and If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Wouldst-Be-Damned Jones. How could anybody not love this comic?

Next time, don't get your knickers in a twist, Tank Girl is here!

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If you enjoy Thrillpowered Thursday, I'd really appreciate your help in spreading the word along. Perhaps the blog is getting stale, or my writing has become predictable, or we've hit the "familiarity breeds contempt" wall, or something, but readership has been noticeably dwindling over the last six months. I should probably redesign this ugly and old-fashioned thing, were the time available, that's for sure. In the meantime, if you like the blog, please tell your friends. I really would appreciate it. Thank you!

185. Amerika the Amazing

July 2008: As I create these articles, I often find myself overlooking Judge Dredd, planning in advance to highlight one of the other stories running. "The Edgar File," a major seven-part story by John Wagner and Patrick Goddard, however, demands everybody's attention. Even as Wagner has solidified his skills writing police procedurals and giving Dredd a meticulous and detailed approach to investigation, this one really is a standout. It makes you wish Rebellion would skip ahead in their Case Files to Volume 35 or whatever it will take to start getting big, complete collections of the modern series in print, so that those foolish non-scrots who still haven't caught on can have their minds more easily blown.

In this story, one of Dredd's longtime adversaries in Justice Department, the politically powerful Jura Edgar, is finally dying of cancer, and gives our hero a file with virtually no information or background. She's pulled similar stunts in the past, knowing that Dredd will, impartially, investigate whatever hints can be found in one of Edgar's secret files. This time, there's a trail of corruption that goes right up to the Council of Five, and an influential retired judge who has remained in Mega-City One as a private citizen, and a really surprising twist revelation right at the end about Edgar herself.

There are some artists who handle Wagner's police procedural side better than others. As mentioned a few chapters previously, Nick Dyer didn't really do a very good job with his first effort. That's in part because his fun and whimsical style didn't really match the downbeat and very wordy script. Patrick Goddard is a much better choice for this kind of adventure. He'd already acquitted himself with a fine Dredd procedural about a serial killer, "Your Cheating Heart," in 2006, and this is even better.


As often happens, the rest of the prog is trying to catch up to Wagner's Dredd. Pat Mills and Leigh Gallagher's Defoe is huge fun, as is a curious future war serial called The Vort by G. Powell and D'Israeli that we'll come back to next time. Sinister Dexter is here, but the real gem is a really thrilling Nikolai Dante story by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. It's called "Amerika" and it's a complete rollercoaster, full of really unpredictable and wild twists. Dante is not a strip that sticks to a status quo for very long, and this story ends the "sword of the tsar" portion of the series pretty terminally.

It's been understood for some time now that Nikolai has been working quietly to assemble underground forces against the tsar, but it all looks set to fall apart after this visit to the ugly and impoverished North American continent. New York is a decaying, overpopulated mess under brutal martial law, with hints and traces of wealth and wonder. About half the populace has bought into VR implants from the Futura Corporation just to pass the time.


This series is always at its best when Dante looks to be in way over his head, and this one's a jewel for fans who enjoy the character facing impossible odds. He's already confounded about how to protect Jena, who's still furious with him after his last dalliance with the Countessa, from militias and self-styled, super-powered "freedom fighters" - resemblances to various Marvel characters intentional - when it turns out that the White Army is involved. These are the weird extraterrestrials who've been scheming to assimilate all flesh into their techno-organic hive mind, and they've got a much larger beachhead in Amerika than anybody thought...

It's a great story, and Fraser is really on fire with his art. The story is memorable for some amazing and meticulous architecture, with the double-page spread that shows the decaying Manhattan a candidate for one of the most amazing pieces of artwork to ever appear in the comic.

Next time, another surprise twist, this time in The Vort, plus a little more about Defoe and the thunderous finale of "Amerika." Be back in a week!

184. Nobody saw this coming.

June 2008: Two chapters back, I briefly mentioned a John Smith-written serial, Dead Eyes, illustrated by Lee Carter. Rereading it, I'm not persuaded that it's an overlooked treasure. Smith is, by some distance, one of my absolute favorite writers of comics, but Dead Eyes simply isn't very compelling, in part because the early episodes of this serial are a misshapen, turgid bore about secret conspiracies, ley lines, underground civilizations, and a naughty British government. It's like somebody shook out the contents of an issue of Fortean magazine over the plot of Smith's 1993 serial Firekind.

Dead Eyes gets worse before it gets better. Our hero, Danny, meets a telepathic Neanderthal, Unthur Dak, who's been living in Cthonia, the secret underground world that the secret government shadow conspiracy wants to find. Tensions mount, bullets fly, none of it manages to be very compelling or exciting, and then, in the final episode, with the naughty military-industrial complex at the cusp of victory, Dak lets Danny know that the cavemen have a secret doomsday device, an instantly-activating fungus spore thingummyjig that will entirely wipe out humanity before Cthonia's secrets are revealed.

You may recall from Dr. Strangelove that the whole point of a doomsday device is to act as a deterrent. I was waiting for Danny to ask Unthur Dak, "Why didn't you tell the world?" He doesn't.

Anyway, not for the first time, it feels a lot like Smith wrote himself into a corner and needed his classic creations, Indigo Prime, to pull the story out of a dead end. And so, in one of the absolute greatest and most thoroughly unexpected moments in all of 2000 AD, characters from another series entirely break into the narrative of a story that has been running quite on its own for three months.


Sadly, I had this amazing moment spoiled for me by, of all people, the great artist Chris Weston! In possibly the only time in my life I've ever been aggravated with Weston, who designed the Indigo Prime operatives Max Winwood and Ishmael Cord, he was so pleased and surprised to see them back in action in his weekly subscription prog that he announced it on his blog within a day or two. I had been steadfastly avoiding spoiler threads and the like for all the media that I enjoy for years, but I certainly didn't expect that I needed to shield myself from the personal blog of an art droid who hadn't worked for 2000 AD for ages. I was livid with Weston in the manner of a spoiled toddler for about ten minutes, then I forgave him.

At any rate, the Dead Eyes finale wrapped up 2000 AD's tumultuous spring, with a chorus of voices asking when the proper Indigo Prime series that it appeared to herald would begin. The answer, sadly, was "sometime in 2011." In prog 1590, a new ten-week lineup started, featuring Nikolai Dante, The Vort, Sinister Dexter and the second story for Pat Mills' and Leigh Gallagher's Defoe.


In 2007, Mills had launched two series simultaneously. Greysuit was well received, certainly, but Defoe was by leagues the more popular of the two. In this story, "Brethren of the Night," Mills expands Defoe's supporting cast - too quickly, it could be argued - and keeps throwing a dizzying number of characters and ugly situations at readers. I enjoy how different parts of the British government, fighting hard against the zombie plague, don't really seem to know much about what the others are doing. Titus Defoe is the hero of the story, but in the corridors of Whitehall, he's simply "Newton's man." The spymasters and secret service types are fighting dozens of subtle wars and battles, and the zombie problem is just one of many.

There's a really terrific bit early in this story where Defoe and his gang meet up with Bendigo, a "gong farmer" known to them all as a champion boxer. He's sending young boys down into the sewers to farm for him, and the kids wake up a zombie nest. I love the intensity of this sequence, with the kids desperately crawling through tunnels while flaming monsters chase them down. Gallagher does terrific work throughout.

Interestingly, in the collected edition of the story (available in the first volume, 1666), some substantial relettering was done. Readers complained that some of the narrative captions, a memoir written by Mungo Gallowgrass, were not very legible. They were also done, I'd say, in a script more elegant than we should expect from the weird, vulgar Gallowgrass. I'd call him Mungo, like his friends do, but really, Gallowgrass has no friends.

Next time, Nikolai Dante goes to war in Amerika. See you in seven days!