19. Like it or Not, That Film is Coming

It's May 1995, and the publicity machine is in overdrive, getting ready for that movie. With the benefit of hindsight, we can pretty much split the history of 2000 AD into two parts: the first eighteen years, which featured some of the greatest and most thrilling comics ever done, slowly but surely sliding down the quality slope until the Sylvester Stallone-starring turkey tanked, and the twelve years since, after the radical reinvention and surgery was applied to bring the book back to its former glory days. To illustrate what I mean by the quality slope, consider the stories on offer in this issue, which features the first episodes of four new stories and the continuation, after two weeks' rest, of Pat Mills and Paul Staples' Finn. The lineup includes the long-awaited Judge Dredd epic "Goodnight Kiss" by Garth Ennis and Nick Percival, which pits the lawman against the best assassin in Europe, who'd been introduced two years previously, and the return of Strontium Dogs, by Peter Hogan and Mark Harrison, both of which pretty good.

Unfortunately, it also includes the second appearances of two very turgid and dull flops from the past couple of years, Mambo by David Hine and The Grudge-Father, with art by Jim McCarthy and a new script droid who goes by the pseudonym "Kek-W." This is Nigel Long, who will be contributing several stories over the next few years, and while his first effort is at least readable, and no worse than the first series, by Mark Millar, there is an incredible sense of treading water in this issue.

John Tomlinson was editor for too short a time to make a really solid stamp on 2000 AD, which is why his era is often lumped in with Alan McKenzie's. The long lead time necessary for a story's commission means that much of this material was commissioned by McKenzie. In fact, when David Bishop takes over in 1996, he's still running junk that Alan McKenzie okayed.



Honestly, the best you can say about Mambo and The Grudge-Father is that, with her freaky body tentacles and his bizarre teeth and fingernails, the two "heroes" follow a proud tradition of 2000 AD leads who are physically unpleasant to a surprising degree. In fact, neither of them would have looked completely out of place on those old Forbidden Planet ads that Brian Bolland designed. Unfortunately, even if the characters defied the square-jawed, big-breasted stereotypes of action heroes, their stories weren't any good.

Next week: The strange case of the missing Armitage.

(Originally published 8/30/07 at LiveJournal.)

18. Get 'em While They're Young

Annnndddd... yeesh, this isn't going very well. I think that my reread has resumed at what might be the comic's lowest point ever. Rogue Trooper, in particular, is just unreadable, with lots of blue-skinned men standing around for page after page talking about cellular breakdown. The only thing in prog 937 (April 1995) worth mentioning was, again, Finn, so let's see what's going on in the Megazine (volume 2, number 78).

Two out of five stories this time out are quite readable. Those are the Dredd story by John Wagner and Simon Davis, and part five of the Anderson: Psi Division serial "Something Wicked" by Alan Grant and Charles Gillespie. Way, way, way on the other side of the quality meter, you've got lifeless apearances by Maelstrom (Robbie Morrison & Colin MacNeil, who have each done some truly brilliant comics; this serial may be the weakest professional job from either of them), Pandora (Jim Alexander & John Hicklenton) and an EC horror homage called Plagues of Necropolis by Si Spencer and, on this outing, Jim O'Ready on art chores.

So, to sum up, across ten stories in two comics, the only three entertaining ones are those written by Pat Mills, John Wagner and Alan Grant. Not a good showing for creators who started writing comics after 1975, really. In part, you could blame the talent drain to America, where most of the 1980s wave of British talent had defected, or you could blame the editors for not finding really strong new talent, but the evidence on offer is damning regardless of the reason: these just aren't very good comics.



Wagner, however, really shines in the first part of a two-episode story about "Judge Pal," a really sinister and blackly comical idea which has resurfaced from time to time since. It turns out that Justice Department has a delightful program to encourage citizens to report crimes at an early age. This involves "The Pal's Club," in which young juves who narc on anybody get accumulated points which they can later redeem for prizes.

I love this concept; its exploitation of children's naivete is just deliciously nasty and is, of course, exactly the sort of thing you can imagine Justice Department concocting. Judge Dredd himself is barely in this story; it is a very fun little look at other departments and how the bureaucratic, bored civil servants who run the city operate, with all their tolerated vices and petty concerns blown up. One of the characters is a former street judge who couldn't hack it after all the years of training, and who now spends his days fielding calls from little kids so anxious to earn points that they'll report any "crime," regardless of legality.

The wonderful artwork is by Simon Davis, fresh from his first stint on Missionary Man. In a completely bizarre quirk, the odd, gopher-like child seen in the ad above actually looks like that in the story as well. Davis was one of the major art finds of the period; his second series of Stone Island is in the prog currently.



Next week, it's time to clear the decks before that movie begins. Has Tharg been holding back any gems in anticipation of it?

(Originally published 8/23/07 at LiveJournal.)

17. That Time in London

We're back! Did you miss us? Well, I've found a place for a couple of other 2000 AD-related articles while waiting for my son to return from vacation. If you're one of my many non-Livejournal readers, you can click on the "2000 ad" tag below for more entries of note. Anyway, the reread brings us to prog 933, from March 1995. The lineup is much the same as the previous entry: Judge Dredd: "Crusade" and Harlem Heroes on the "poor" side of the fence, and Finn and Armoured Gideon on the "readable" side. Unfortunately, the kind-of readable Rogue Trooper, with the nice art by Henry Flint, has wrapped up and is replaced by a really dire Brigand Doom installment by Alan McKenzie and Dave D'Antiquis about vampire accountants. So, yeesh.

So, since I don't have much of anything nice to say about this prog, I'll point out that it is memorable to me for another reason. This was one of the issues that was available on newsstands when I was last in London. This was the trip I mentioned in the twelfth installment, when I spent a fair amount of money replacing all the subscription copies of 2000 AD which arrived in beat-up shape. The ex-Mrs. Hipster and I were in England for ten days that spring, and the faux-newspaper cover reminds me of the unusual experience of reading English newspapers.

The line on this prog's cover about Canadian model and actress Pamela Anderson reads "ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PAMELA ANDERSON INSIDE - (SOB)." While an unusual sentiment for a science fiction comic, the London tabloids that this cover evokes feature a daily photo of a young starlet on page three or page five in a state of undress totally unacceptable for American publications. We thought this was the funniest thing in the universe and bought two different papers a morning. This gave us a wide range of editorial content, all of it incredibly heavy-handed, over-the-top and reactionary. It was through these eyes that we learned of the death of two celebrities during our vacation.

First to pass, shortly before we arrived, was Ronnie Kray, who, with his brother Reggie, was in charge of an organized crime network whose legend and myth have grown in pop culture since the 1960s. Monty Python's Flying Circus parodied the Krays as "Doug and Dinsdale Piranha;" Morrissey immortalized them in song as "The Last of the Famous International Playboys." The papers were full of letters from readers about Ron's passing, most praising them as gentlemen, but others reacting with disgust to so much media attention being paid to criminals. One paper used Ron's death in prison to question whether, after 27 years, Reggie had spent enough time behind bars, his sentence not equivalent to the mere decade that "child murderers" were getting these days. In the end, Reg served another five years before being released on compassionate grounds about a month before he passed away from terminal cancer. It's one of my big regrets - and Lord, I have a few - that we didn't join the thousands lining the streets for Ronnie's funeral, just to see it. One thing's for certain, you could sense a genuine difference in the mood of the city that day. It was quieter, more sober and solemn.

A few days later, a Mexican-American pop singer from Texas named Selena was murdered by the woman who ran her fan club. This was weird. To hear the papers tell it, ALL OF AMERICA MOURNS THE LOSS of the Tejano celebrity, and EVERY MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD IN THE NATION WEEPS A SINGLE, SILENT TEAR OVER THE LOSS OF THIS MAJOR TALENT... which was news to us. I remember Deb and I read this report together, and our eyes met, heads shaking, asking "...who?" London tabloids were certainly prone to exaggeration and hyperbole. We asked around upon returning to the States; exactly two friends had heard of Selena prior to her death, and five or six others had heard she died.

Just to prove that we didn't fly to England with our brains fully screwed on - given the devastation the trip did to our finances, we learned that real quick - it didn't even occur to me for days that Judge Dredd appeared in a daily newspaper strip in the Star, and if we had any sense, we'd have been buying that as one of our two tabloids a day. Then again...



The strip was in its final, faltering days at that point. A major motion picture was months from screens, and this bilge by Carlos Pino and, yup, Mark Millar was the best they could do?

The strip started in August 1981 as a weekly six-or-seven panel story by John Wagner and Alan Grant, with art by Ron Smith. It changed over to a Monday-Friday strip, telling ongoing stories over 65 installments (13 weeks) in 1986. Ian Gibson came on board as artist in the late 80s, and then it was passed off between a variety of creative teams until the Star finally cancelled it in 1998. Most of the strips have never been republished, although some have made their way into annuals and the late-90s, reprint-heavy Megazine.

So that's British newspapers in the mid-90s for you: iffy Judge Dredd comics, topless blondes, hyperbole, occasionally news, and every once in a while, a giant annihilating robot. Maybe next Thursday, there will be more in the prog to discuss, although it's unlikely Pat Mills will have started writing believable villains by then. I mean, the story's pretty exciting and original but oh, look: comedy Freemasons!



(Originally published 8/16/07 at LiveJournal.)

16. Crusading Nowhere

The reread brings us to another relaunch period for new readers to jump on. This is prog 929 in February 1995, but this is not a case of 2000 AD putting its best feet forward. A 20-part Finn series by Pat Mills and Paul Staples is the main attraction. Other entertaining thrills include Armoured Gideon by new editor John Tomlinson and Simon Jacob and Rogue Trooper by Steve White and Henry Flint. There's a long-shelved Harlem Heroes 12-parter by Michael Fleisher and Kev Hopgood finally making its appearance after years in the drawer. My fellow blogger AlexF has recently been dissecting this monstrosity over at Meanwhile, on the Dark Side of the Moon, so I'll not bother trying to add to his words at this time.

Alex did mention "Crusade," a ten-part Dredd adventure by Mark Millar, Grant Morrison and Mick Austin back in April, but this thing's so absurd that it demands further discussion. Except, no sooner did I begin the intended discussion before every notion of continuing was drained right out of my body by the unbelievable shittiness of the story. Crusade is a bizarre amalgamation of two previous entries in this series: the stereotypes of the world judges and the phenomenal awfulness of Mark Millar.



Urg. It hurts to look at.

In 1982, Marvel Comics had made a three-issue comic series called Contest of Champions, in which a whole bunch of superheroes are directed by cosmic players to fight each other on an around-the-world quest for various talismans. This is Mark Millar's Dreddworld version. Each of the major mega-cities sends one of their judges to a remote Antarctic outpost after a lost-in-space tek judge named Eckhart says he's found God or something and is returning to Earth.

I mean, it really doesn't matter. It's a fragile, stupid, two-dimensional nothing of a premise which serves no purpose whatsoever except to get a bunch of world judges in one place, refuse to cooperate with each other, and have a big stupid fight. Or maybe it's like Marvel's Civil War or whatever the hell they're selling this year.

Oh, and there's a really, really tough judge, too. His name is Cesare and he's from Vatican-City, and he'll be fighting Judge Dredd on a conveyor belt before this story's finished. I think they probably fall from a great height as well.



I dunno, you'd like to say that Grant Morrison had little-to-nothing to do with this, and that might be the case. It's got practically every last Mark Millar trope of the period all lined up, plus that love of superhero beat-em-ups is pretty blatant in every page. On the other hand, I think there's a silly robot mine car later on in the story which feels more like an old-school Pat Mills idea than anything else, and I can imagine Morrison cherry-picking that more easily than Millar.

This low point is as good a place as any to say that Thrillpowered Thursday is taking a short vacation. I'm rereading the issues along with my son, who came on board with prog 800 and is reading them for the first time, along with selected classic thrills. But he's going to be out of town with his mother, in Kentucky, for a few weeks. I don't want to leave the kid with too teetering a stack to tackle when he gets home, so I'll pause and start reading my pile of Battle Picture Weekly while he's gone. Normal service will be resumed August 16. Credo!

(Originally published 7/19/07 at LiveJournal.)

15. In Which Prog 924 Blows My Mind

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

This week, I am inspired to write the following:

Shaky Kane!

SHAKY KANE!

SHAKY KANE!

Normal, wordy, service may be resumed next week.

(Originally published 7/12/07 at LiveJournal.)

14. I Cannot Be a Nun!

The reread brings us to December 1994, and both the weekly and the monthly celebrate with expanded editions. The Megazine has seven installments this time around (vol.2 # 70). The regular lineup at this point is Judge Dredd (a one-off by the Harke & Burr team of Si Spencer and Dean Ormston), Mean Machine in part eight of "Son of Mean" by John Wagner and Carl Critchlow, episode four of the Calhab Justice story "False Dawn" by Jim Alexander and Kevin Cullen, Armitage in part seven of "City of the Dead" by Dave Stone and Charles Gillespie, and Karyn: Psi Division in part four of "Concrete Sky" by John Freeman and Adrian Salmon.

These are joined by two one-off stories. One of these is the final appearance of The Creep by Spencer and Cullen, and one is Wynter, an "unsold pilot" episode for a series which never made it by Robbie Morrison and Kevin Walker. Wynter is the name of a judge in Antarctic City, where it's very cold, you see, and... yeah. Both creators are very talented gentlemen, with a number of very good comics under their belt, but the best this one-off has to offer is a premise that probably wouldn't have made it beyond the pitch if the character had a name like Smith or Jackson. On the other hand, I suppose it's only one-fourth as silly as that strip about the fellow named Rogue who struck out on his own, accompanied by the bio-chips of a guy named Helm in his hat and a guy named Bagman in his backpack and a guy called Gunnar in his rifle.



Anyway, I mentioned in episode eight that 2000 AD had an expensive TV ad campaign in the summer of 1994, and the corporate bods at Egmont Fleetway were making some pretty unrealistic advance planning for third and fourth quarter sales, based on a cartoon commercial that ran at four in the morning on a sports channel that nobody subscribed to. So while the Megazine is celebrating the end of its fifth year in pretty good shape under the editorship of David Bishop, the results at 2000 AD are pretty ugly, and editor Alan McKenzie gets made redundant, leaving assistant editor John Tomlinson thrust into the spotlight as the new Tharg for the next year.

Both McKenzie and Tomlinson amass a pretty considerable backlog of inventory strips, but I do need to correct myself on one point. It's possible that the scripts for the last Bix Barton series, mentioned last week, had been on the shelf for a while, but it turns out that the art wasn't. There's a tribute poster to Peter Cushing, who died that August, only about three months before the story started, in the background of one scene.

In the Megazine, meanwhile, the ongoing strips are solid, if not always great. The weak link is certainly Calhab Justice, which has devolved from a lighthearted story about frontier judges fighting addictions to radioactive whiskey into some mad thing about a psychic super-judge obsessed with having children and bringing about the next stage of evolution or something. Armitage is a great character slogging through a turgid scenario this time around. Karyn's story is a pretty good one, and the stark black-and-white artwork by Adrian Salmon (all solids, no shading) is really fabulous.



But it's Mean Machine which has completely been stealing the show for weeks now. This happened before: in ealy 1994, Wagner had teamed with Ian Gibson on The Taxidermist, and while several other writers had been meticulously carving out their own little Dreddworld mythology of some other region or Mega-City, Wagner delivered a brilliant, understated little comedy gem which was far more entertaining than any of the dramas in the comic.

Here teamed with Carl Critchlow, Wagner expanded on a little plot point from an old Alan Grant/Robin Smith story in an old Judge Dredd Annual. I suppose I should explain that Mean Machine Angel was one of the criminal Angel Gang, based in the Cursed Earth and a constant frustration to the lawmen of Texas City for years. Mean Machine and his brother Link were executed by Dredd on the planet Xanadu in the epic "Judge Child" storyline, but the popular character was resurrected and made unkillable by the Judge Child in a subsequent adventure, launching him as a recurring foe for our hero. Meanwhile, Grant and Smith contributed some one-offs for the annuals, set in the past when all these villains were still active. One of these introduced Mean's wife, Seven-Pound Sadie (named for the weight of the hammer she used in bank robberies), and while Sadie hit the road with the weddin' loot as soon as they was hitched, their premarital canoodlin' left them with a son, who, much to their dismay, is a simpering, goody-goody sissy.

"Son of Mean" sees the incredibly helpful young brat sent to Mega City-One for some schoolin' in the ways of being bad, but Mean has absolutely no luck turning him rotten. Eventually he remembers that he was a no-account sissy himself until Pa Angel had him fitted with an aggression dial after some brain surgery.

With a doctor or two held hostage, Mean and Mean Junior need disguises to get into a Mega-City hospital. I love this sequence. It's classic slapstick cinema, and it's paced so very well. I even love that dead guy in panel six, who is, if such a thing is possible, quite hilariously dead.

Next week, Shaky Kane returns and people get hit in the head with planets.



(Originally published 7/5/07 at LiveJournal.)

13. Buttoning Down

It's November 1994 and we're up to prog 914. This features the final part of Judge Dredd in "Wilderlands" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, in which everybody gets rescued and the robot judge program gets scrapped. Amazingly, in only ten weeks, the high point of prog 904's launch strips has totally evaporated, as "Wilderlands" limps to a conclusion much less interesting than the promising first part, and three of the excellent, entertaining series that launched alongside it have been replaced by lesser strips. These include Red Razors, by Mark Millar and Nigel Dobbyn, who's really giving this dumb story far more attention than it deserves. New since my last update are the final outings for Skizz and Bix Barton.

Skizz of course is best known for its original run in 1983. It was Alan Moore's first serial for the comic, and was illustrated by Jim Baikie. Moore gave Baikie his blessing to continue the story on his own in 1991, which led to a slight, but inoffensive 9-part revisiting of the characters. But while the third story is also inoffensive, it's not at all "slight." It's a mammoth, 16-part story, bloated with three plotlines that don't look like they're ever going to intersect. The stories of the characters we met in Moore's original run aren't bad, but there's this plot about some time-travelling alien hitmen with a robot that dresses like an Elvis impersonator and speaks in what's apparently a broad Birmingham accent, and it's endlessly dull and unamusing.



Bix Barton is back for his final adventure. He'd debuted in 1990 and starred in four six-part adventures, and a handful of one-offs in specials and annuals, by Pete Milligan and Jim McCarthy. This thing just smells of "inventory pages," and I say this as one of the minority of fans who actually like Bix Barton. Well, except for the art. I suppose we all have to have a "least favorite" artist, and Jim McCarthy might very well be a contender for mine.

As I say, I like Barton a lot, but it's evident that Milligan's initial enthusiasm for his character wore off very quickly. The first three series are quite fun, and there's nothing actually wrong with this one, other than the art, but it feels pretty tired, and Barton himself is sidelined for much of the action. He's a great character, but Milligan was well established in the States as a regular writer for Vertigo by this time and a Barton series hadn't appeared for more than two years, leading me to suspect this had been on the shelf for quite some time.



The standout among this lineup is certainly Button Man Book 2. If you've never read Button Man, you are really, really missing out. It's by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson, and it's about a thug and a mercenary called Harry Exton who finds employment as a hired gun for a cartel of rich "voices" who play their gunmen off against each other in violent games. But Exton is bothered by one of his competitors, who lets him know that this isn't a game you can actually quit. When Exton chooses to find out whether that's true, all kinds of hell break loose.

It appeared at the conclusion of the first book that Exton had died while killing off the "voice." But Book 2 reveals that he is instead spirited to the US and given a new chance in the American version of game with a one-year contract to a rich senator, A.J. Jacklin, under the name Harry Elmore, with funding and a "wife," Cora, who arranges things for their master. But Harry's still an uncontrollable killer, and is looking for the chinks in the game.

Halfway through this remarkable tale, Cora and Jacklin conclude that Harry's a liability, just as Harry discovers the body of the button man who'd previously been in Jacklin's employ. Up to this point in the story, it's been a very entertaining slow burn, but what follows from this turning point is pretty intense.

Button Man has been optioned for a feature film on the strength of Wagner's A History of Violence; IMDB suggests that it's meant to be released sometime in 2008, but that could mean anything. The third book of Button Man came in 2001, and the fourth will be starting in a few months, with Frazer Irving taking over art chores.

Next week: I Cannot Be a Nun!



(Originally published 6/28/07 at LiveJournal.)