199. The Perfect Prog

March 2010: A slight change of style here for this week's entry. I had been planning to put prog 1674 under the spotlight and talk about just The ABC Warriors - because the episode in that issue, featuring two solid pages of Ro-Jaws insulting Mek-Quake's non-existent mother and Blackblood impatiently trying to explain to the idiot that he does not actually have a mother, is just about the funniest thing ever - and the always-excellent Stickleback, but then I read a few more issues and was struck by something in prog 1677. This comic is flawless. It is completely wonderful. Don't believe me? Check out the contents:


Judge Dredd: part four of "Tour of Duty: The Talented Mayor Ambrose" by John Wagner, John Higgins, and S.J. Hurst

At this point in the story, the action has moved back to the city from the townships, and becomes a masterpiece of intrigue and political maneuvering. Deputy Chief Judge Martin Sinfield has taken control of things by persuading Francisco to step aside for the good of his health, meaning once again a villain is in charge of Mega-City One, but he's not a ranting lunatic like Cal was. He's a much more subtle kind of bad guy, and it's interesting how so much of the reader's dislike of him boils down to "Sinfield has beaten Dredd and given him an awful assignment outside the City."

In fact, for all his villainy - and he's one of the great Dredd villains, no question - Sinfield's actual list of crimes is really quite small. The major one, of course, is using drugs to manipulate Francisco. He's used SLD 88, the drug once used to good effect by the serial killer PJ Maybe, to convince Francisco to step down. The beautiful irony is that Maybe has been masquerading as the city's incredibly popular mayor Byron Ambrose for several years, and doesn't appreciate Sinfield's new planned reforms. PJ Maybe's killed a lot of people in a lot of ways, but he's never planned this level of assassination before. This sets up several episodes of germ warfare, with Sinfield stubbornly refusing to die, and then, in his paranoia, he calls in Dredd to investigate these attempts on his life - which nobody else believes are happening, since he's just coincidentally contracting hideous diseases - just before mutant terrorists make a much more overt attempt to kill him. This leads Dredd to suspect that maybe Sinfield is not so paranoid after all... ah, but more on this in two weeks.


Zombo: part three of "Zombo's 11" by Al Ewing and Henry Flint

The first Zombo story was pretty bugnuts, but it's this one where the insanity is ratched past eleven. This time out, we get an ongoing, ear-splittingly loud supporting character based on Simon Cowell, but in this universe, he doesn't see the Susan Boyle character as a way to make a lot of money, but just another headache.


The ABC Warriors: part twelve of "The Volgan War" Bk Four by Pat Mills and Clint Langley

There's nothing quite as hilarious in this concluding episode as the two solid pages of robot mother insults mentioned earlier, but it does have Mek-Quake in a tuxedo appearing on a TV talk show, and Blackblood sending out mass thought-mails to insult everybody else. Classic.


Damnation Station: part one of "To the Dark and Empty Skies" by Al Ewing and Simon Davis

Here's the weakest thing in the comic, but anywhere else, it could be the standout. This is the first episode of a new series - fifteen episodes would appear in a scattered run over five months in 2010, and a second batch of fifteen is said to be in the works for later this year or next. It's future war and political posturing with fist-to-the-chest impact, memorable human characters, very weird aliens, introduced in a really good pilot episode that gives you a fun and flawed audience identification figure, a complex situation, and great artwork by Davis, who alternates with Boo Cook.


part one of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (and the dead left in his wake) by Rob Williams and Dom Reardon

I saved this one for last - it actually appears second in the comic - because it's just so damn jawdropping. Here's my latest wild pronouncement: No other series in the history of the comic has ever had such a perfect first episode.

Yeah, I know, me and hyperbole, but not even the first episode of Zenith, wherein Earth's only two superheroes are killed by an atom bomb dropped on Berlin in 1945, is as great as this. It is a dense and lyrical tale of a cruel killer in the Old West, beautifully written and with very detailed narrative captions, a stylistic choice that has been stupidly out of favor for far too long. These days, maybe nobody does narration in comics better than John Wagner, but darn if Williams doesn't come very close. The prose is just perfectly judged, and Reardon's minimalist artwork perfectly sparse, with a beautiful trick as the color fades away from Azrael's memory. And then the last panel twist. How in the world, I ask you, could you not demand episode two the instant you finish episode one?

Next time, Nikolai Dante says goodbye to a close friend. See you in seven!

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!

178. General Public!

August 2007: On the cover this month is Blackblood, the treacherous and nasty ABC Warrior programmed for backstabbing, double-crossing, and evildoing. When the character was first introduced in 1979, the shtick was that he was one of the no-good evil Volgans with whom our heroic Warriors were battling, and he was shut down, abducted, and reprogrammed to fight for the allies. So as the memoir-based epic "The Volgan Wars," written by Pat Mills and drawn by Clint Langley, returns, it's natural that when Blackblood gets a chance to share one of his old war stories, it's from the other side, and a story about sending brave young hammersteins to the smelter, where they could be turned into AK-47s to help the war effort.

Back in May, I was telling you about the first chunk of this 288-page epic, and I'll refer anybody curious about its four-chunk format there to learn more. This phase of the story sees Blackblood and Deadlock telling their tales, while, in Broadband Asylum, the Volgan warlord robot Volkhan has come back to life and convinced Mek-Quake to join his new army. The segments with Blackblood are the most entertaining, thanks to a fantastic running gag that goes on for weeks and never gets old. Not programmed to understand the idioms of decadent Western speech, Blackblood thinks that the phrase "the general public" refers to a top-secret Allied commander. Torture, murder, war crimes, they all mean nothing to Blackblood, who is bound and determined to ferret out the elusive General Public.

The lineup for this summer's run of stories is a really good one, with Judge Dredd in a number of short adventures and one-offs by a variety of creators, culminating in the sequel to "Mandroid" by John Wagner and Carl Critchlow, The ABC Warriors, Stone Island for its second and final story by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis, Button Man by John Wagner and Frazer Irving, and, in its epic conclusion, Caballistics Inc. by Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon. Except we didn't know at the time that this was going to be its conclusion.

I do enjoy Caballistics, but in its most recent appearances, the individual adventures got lost in subplots. The previous "story" was called "Changelings" and ran from progs 1469-1474 and the actual storyline that dealt with changelings was about a quarter of the narrative. I think that Rennie recognized that he was juggling lots of characters and lots of continuing plots, and needed to resolve things before moving forward. Then he decided not to move forward any longer.

At 40 pages, "Ashes" is the longest Cabs story, and it sees the team dealing with the old threat of one-time Department Q member Mr. Magister, a sociopath with incredible psychic powers, and then using Magister as an unwitting ally against their benefactor Ethan Kostabi, who's been revealed to have a much darker agenda for the team than they realized.

The conclusion leaves any future stories in doubt. Dr. Jonathan Strange had been killed in the previous story, and Ness meets his end this time. Chapter and Verse are summarily dismissed and referred to as being very grievously wounded, but, bizarrely, not shown on-panel in the end. It's left unclear as to whether Kostabi was telling the truth about Verse's maiming, or whether Hannah Chapter would ever walk again, and for such a popular character to have her fate handwaved is really, really odd. It's an apocalyptic and wild conclusion, and huge fun, but Chapter and Verse deserved a little better than that.

About two months after this story ended in October, one final-to-date Cabs episode appeared in Prog 2008. It set up some new plot threads, looked in on a supporting player, and did not mention Chapter and Verse. This leaves the story in a very, very weird place as far as fans' ability to sit down and read the darn thing goes. Earlier in 2007, the second collected edition, entitled Creepshow, was released, reprinting about the second half of the series, through 2006's "Changelings." But then there are only two stories, just 50 pages, left, leaving this epic climax unreprinted. I imagine that Tharg and Gordon Rennie have at least talked about doing some more stories, and they know more than they're telling. If there is more Cabs in the pipeline, then they should get to work on the damn thing, and if not, then "Ashes" and "The Nativity" should be collected in one of those freebie floppy "graphic novels" bagged with the Megazine, and then the whole series should be re-collected in a single, large edition that will replace the existing two. They should get on that as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, for those of us who enjoyed Cabs for its weird, dark, occult stories, in 2011, Rennie took the supporting character of DI Harry Absolam and spun him off into a series of his own, kind of. Apparently set in an alternate reality where there might not have ever been a Cabs team, and where vowels don't appear in the same order, Absalom debuted in prog 1732 and there have been three stories so far. Drawn magnificently by Tiernen Trevallion, it features an aging, alcoholic London copper and his team of police spookbusters, and is so darn popular on its own that people might resent space being given over to more Cabs when we could have Harry double-dealing, drinking and demonizing instead.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 2 (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Button Man: The Hitman's Daughter (Volume Four, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Stone Island: The Complete Stone Island (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, speaking of the general public, we'll see what they have to say about nudity in comics when Stone Island finds a way to push everybody's buttons. See you in seven days!

171. ABC Fumetti

January 2007: Good grief, didn't I just write about "The Volgan War"...? Well, it was March. Close enough. Anyway, one of the big new launches in the annual 100-page prog had been a major new ABC Warriors adventure. It's a huge 288-page epic told across four chunks of story, and although I recall that events in the third segment got a little confusing, overall it is one of writer Pat Mills' biggest triumphs. If "The Shadow Warriors" had seen Mills flexing his muscles and finally doing right by these characters after many years of subpar adventures, then this is where he raises the game.

From here, I'm going to cannibalize from an earlier review that I wrote, because I can do that sort of thing. Since Mills found success working in the French comic industry, which is based around annual "album" releases of a 64- or 80-page story, or, if you will, a yearly episode of a much larger story, he's exported the form to 2000 AD, which programs strips in weekly six-page installments. Mills' annual story is further subdivided into, say, ten or so weekly episodes.

Working in this format, Mills is able to tell incredibly long stories across several years, and Rebellion, the publisher of 2000 AD, has two prospective revenue streams for the reprints. Working in conjunction with artist Clint Langley, Mills first used the experiment to craft six 48-page episodes of Slaine. These were paired together and reprinted in three large, oversized, but thin hardbacks with an eye on the European market, where this sort of material could safely be expected to sell by the bucketload in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these countries, the hardback "album" has long been the default format for the comic medium, much in the way that monthly "floppy" superhero funnybooks from Marvel and DC are the default in the United States.

Mills and Langley's next project was "The Volgan War," and it appeared as four annual stories from 2007-2010. In it, the characters reminisce about their original days of combat before uniting, only to find some common threads in their stories, including the strange, classified appearances of a top-secret special forces flamethrower robot. As the series unfolds - and it sags a bit in the third chunk before roaring to a colossal, incredible finish - the events of the old Volgan War come back to haunt the Warriors on Mars in very unexpected ways, leaving the team permanently fragmented and new, dangerous bad guys waiting for them.

Overall, I think it's a masterpiece, and easily the best Warriors adventure since 1988's classic "Black Hole," even with some of the head-scratching events of the third volume. It works extremely well in hardback form as well. Following the precedent of the oversized Slaine books assembled with Europe in mind, Rebellion collected the four 72-page stories, beefed them up with some additional artwork by Langley and some extra design work, and released a quartet of 96-page hardbacks, where the material shined even brighter.

But I was telling you about this first quarter of the story. Well, it begins with the Warriors committing their demented member Mek-Quake to an asylum on Mars, not knowing that the place is effectively a recruiting center for violent, combat-ready machines looking for a new boss. Hammerstein, square as ever, is reminded of how he was sometimes forced to abandon his "boys" in combat in 22nd Century Europe. Langley has a ball with the scenes of robot combat and mecha-carnage. At one point, we meet giant robot mecha-Stalins called Uncle Joes, and they're revealed in a turn-the-comic-the-other-way double-page spread that serves as one tall, vertical panel. It's a deliberate callback to similar introductions of giant robots in the original series (Mad George, in prog 138) and in Book Three of Nemesis the Warlock (the giant Torque-Armada in prog 340-something).

After Hammerstein's story, and his introduction to the flamethrowing secret agent Zippo, Mongrol reports that he met Zippo just before the paratrooping accident that destroyed his original body. His tale, told across three issues, is actually an expansion of the character's first appearance, only with Lara, the cute young girl who rebuilt him, reimagined considerably from Mike McMahon's notion! McMahon's depiction of Lara in a nightdress, secretly rebuilding a robot in the dead of night, evoked candlelit, stormy potboilers, old-fashioned thrillers, and, of course, Frankenstein. Langley's Lara is a Suicide Girl. But this sequence is still amazing, just for how well Mills expanded those original four pages into something with more weight. Reading it, old fans are sure to recognize various lines and snatches of dialogue, and wonder how on earth Mills managed to stick so much information into the original comic in the first place.

And then there's Joe Pineapples' story, which is definitely one for people who like Mills best when anything goes. Working behind the Volgan lines in old Moscow and tasked to assassinate the enemy super-robot Volkhan, Joe has smuggled just enough innocuous parts in his own chassis that he can kill a civilian taxi driver robot and, using chunks of it and its GPS, pull off another of his absurd, impossible shots. Astonishingly, it's one of those very rare moments where Joe doesn't get a clean kill, and leaving town also requires Zippo's assistance. This volume of the story ends with Mek-Quake in considerable danger, and our heroes wondering whatever happened to Zippo, and some of those plot threads get picked up when it resumes in August.

While The ABC Warriors and its stablemates Kingdom and Stickleback (which I talked about last week) were getting all the attention, Rob Williams' Low Life also surfaced for a short four-week story, its only appearance in 2007. Again drawn by Simon Coleby - this would be his last work on the series to date - it is the second time that a four-part comedy has spotlighted Dirty Frank. This time out, he's teamed with another undercover Wally Squad operative, Eric Coil. This poor fellow had been infected by a mutating plot contrivance in the Cursed Earth - we'll call it "The Jim Kidd Effect" - and returned to Mega-City One with his brain intact and his body de-aged to a baby's.

It's just Coil's luck that the Wally Squad occasionally has need of somebody who can pose as a baby, like... well... actually, I'm pretty sure that this has never, ever happened before. "Baby Talk" is a definite brain-in-neutral story, just there for the laughs, which is a really good thing, because everything else in the prog at this time is either ultra-serious or tragic. In Kingdom, Gene's entire pack is dead, and in Stickleback, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey's wife and children have been killed in a house fire, so thank heaven there's something light and uncomplicated to follow. Even Judge Dredd has found the ugly beginnings of Mega-City One too much of a pain in the rear to continue unabated, and so it's taking a nine-week break from the story to run some shorter episodes, although that's probably more to do with that story's artist Carlos Ezquerra taking a long weekend and a good stretch than it is Tharg giving us a merciful break from the relentless and the grim.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Low Life: Mega-City Undercover (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Speaking of a merciful break, Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take June off, during which time I've got four 2000 AD features lined up for my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf. See you in July for a look back at the actual issue that started this blog going in 2007, and a new eight-week run of your most favoritest blog ever. Credo!

162. 86ed!

March 2006: In the run-up to the release of the long-awaited Rogue Trooper video game, Tharg does one of the strangest things this comic has ever done. He cancels Rogue Trooper and replaces it with a spinoff. Seriously. Oh, there's some ancillary merchandise, sure. Between October and March, Rebellion issues three graphic novels which, in conjunction with the two previously released during the DC deal, completely reprint the entire 1981-85 run written by Gerry Finley-Day. This month also sees the release of an Extreme Edition that compiles just about every annual and special episode by other writers, along with John Smith's celebrated 1989 story "Cinnabar." But precisely when you'd expect a run of new, color episodes with Rogue himself on the front cover about every other week, the character has been retired. Gordon Rennie had been in charge for a pretty good 25-episode run that was released in chunks from 2002-04. In 2005, he wrote a follow-up three-part adventure and a one-off in a very curious Winter Special full of pilot ideas for new series that don't make it to a proper commission. And finally, in the three issues prior to this one, Ian Edginton and Steve Pugh collaborated on a final three-part adventure. Until Finley-Day returned from retirement for a one-shot in December 2010, that has been the last we've seen of Rogue. Right at the point where we should have seen Mister Blue Bare Chest and his bio-chipped buddies on the cover almost every week, he's shelved in favor of a very dense, subplot-heavy, continuity-heavy series set in the same universe and featuring a similarly genetically-engineered pilot named, strangely, Rafe.

The 86ers is an outer space war adventure, set on an asteroid-based supply station called The Citadel. Its crew is a bunch of bitter jockeys and flyboys, aliens, and disgraced officers from the enemy side who've come to fight with the "Southers," historically the "good guys" in the Rogue Trooper universe. Karl Richardson is assigned to draw Gordon Rennie's scripts, but, strangely, he only does the first two episodes before PJ Holden steps in.

The series will struggle to find an audience. Tharg publishes 10 episodes across three outings in 2006, six more in 2007 and a final six in 2009, with Arthur Wyatt coming aboard as writer for the end after Rennie moves on from the medium of comics for a few years to do work with the video game industry. I'm not sure why it never gelled for me. It's possibly because I've never been all that interested in anything from Rogue's world, including Rafe's kind-of-ancestor Venus Bluegenes, but the story is too complex, and too rich with political machinations, for its own good. It is never as grandiose or engaging as Rennie's Caballistics Inc., and consequently, the same sort of character-based subplotting across similarly-scheduled irregular adventures fails completely. Each time The 86ers resurfaces, readers have to ask "Who's this guy again?"



The double-length episode in Prog 2007, for example, ends with the surprise revelation that one of Rogue's old enemies from his classic series, Colonel Kovert, is behind some of the machinations and goings-on. Even for Rennie, whose most recent Cabs story has, quite reasonably, assumed an awful lot of his audience, this is going way out on a limb. Admittedly, that 1982 story with Kovert has been reprinted something like nine times, and so longtime readers might remember the character, but for anybody who barely remembers, or doesn't at all, what is really just a minor blip in some very old continuity, this really is asking a lot. Then it would be six months before the next story, when we see what the heck the villain is doing on the Citadel.

Back in August, in chapter 141, I wrote about how disagreeable it is to have stories stopping and starting in little fits and coughs of new episodes, and The 86ers is one of the all-time worst examples of that. Read in the collected edition, this is a pretty good series, with some fun moments and very good artwork throughout, but serialized the way it was, with those deeply unhelpful gaps between stories, it really was a pain in the rear.

Speaking of pains in the rear, oh, that game. Well, it certainly looked good. I'm not much of a gamer, and was unfamiliar with what's termed "third-person shooters," in which the "camera" is behind the character on the screen. This appears to be the dominant style of adventure games over the last ten years or so, but, speaking as a potential player who's enjoyed maybe two games, period, since the release of the original Perfect Dark for the N64, this was not a game for me.

I bought a PlayStation 2 to play Katamari Damacy, and then pretty much left it to my children to enjoy. I bought the Rogue Trooper game new, found it absurdly difficult to control or move around, and finally gave up somewhere on the fourth level or something. Every so often, I'd buy a used James Bond game for the system and find them similarly next-to-impossible to maneuver, get riddled with holes while trying to remember which button did what, assuming that I realized that I was getting shot in the first place, and eventually concluded that these games were not being made for me.

While the game's introductory animation was showing off the Quartz Zone Massacre, however, I was the biggest fan of the game in the world. It really did look good, and even though Rogue is not my favorite character, there's that frisson of excitement of seeing anything from the comic adapted with such love and fervor. It looks good, and it looks right. Maybe one of these days, Rebellion will finally make that Strontium Dog first-person shooter that they should have made a million years ago, and it won't be impossible for slow old losers like me to play.



Ideally, this entry should have featured some screen shots from the video game as illustrations, but I'm of the opinion that screen shots always look pointless and unappealing. The above Henry Flint illustration from the current ABC Warriors adventure is, on the other hand, all kinds of appealing.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, it's the last Thrillpowered Thursday before a short break, and undercover judge Aimee Nixon is guest of honor at a very unusual convention in Mega-City One. See you in seven days!

161. Synnamon and Frag

February 2006: Here's a very rare example of Tharg programming a variant cover for his mighty comic. For prog 1476, there were two available: this one, with the red background, featuring the heroic ABC Warriors, and a second, with a blue background, featuring the villainous Shadow Warriors who are opposing them. For a very, very brief time, I owned both covers. See, in 2006, I was ordering two copies of each issue of 2000 AD, because the grexnix non-scrots at Diamond Distribution would so often miss an issue if a shop only ordered a single copy. If a shop ordered two, then the shop was certain to get one copy of every prog, and miss about two of the second copy every year. So I was ordering two copies and giving the extras to a friend. I thought, briefly, about keeping both versions of prog 1476, but I figured my collection wasn't as important as giving my friend the thrillpower, and so the blue copy went to him and I completely forgot about it. About five years later, he returned a big box of these extra copies, as he was moving house and didn't have the room. I sold a few on eBay, and got frustrated with some batches that did not move, and got a message from a buyer looking for a particular run, and who would pay a very handsome and welcome price for them. I sorted out his order, and realized that, for the second time, the blue-covered 1476 would be finding a new home. I suppose I'm just not meant to own it.

More than a decade before prog 1476, the nearly endless Strontium Dog story "The Final Solution" was coming under fire for taking for-freaking-ever to be told. Truthfully, it sort of had that reputation coming, as it began in prog 600 and didn't finish until a year and a half later. It ran in five separate batches of between three and seven episodes, at one point ducking out for a break of nine months. "The Shadow Warriors" sensibly avoided that sort of reputation despite taking, literally, twice as long to tell. For one thing, "The Final Solution" had every fan and reader desperate to learn what would happen next in this clearly game-changing and wild adventure, and "The Shadow Warriors" is just another long and weird ABC Warriors tale. But more importantly, writer Pat Mills had, by this point, firmly structured his stories as being told across "books." Readers understood and accepted that when we last saw this story back in prog 1405, it was the conclusion of "Book Two" of this story, and we were not going to just get little drip-feeds of episodes whenever the artist could get some pages back to the Command Module.

Back around the era of progs 600 to 700, it seemed like darn near everything was taking little breaks of a few weeks between episodes - Moon Runners, "Cinnabar," "Soft Bodies," various Rogue Trooper "Hit" stories, that second Zero story, the one on the blimp - and "The Final Solution," the one that everybody actually wanted to read, just became the poster boy for deadline-blowing artist failings. A more ordered Nerve Centre, a more structured system for telling the story with planned breaks, and greater general satisfaction with the state of play means that really, nobody at all seemed to complain about the - grief! - SEVENTY-ONE issue break before Book Three got started.

So was it worth the wait? Well, "The Shadow Warriors" is very much an over-the-top and glorious mess, full of insane ideas and loopy logic, with crazy weapons and a staccato delivery. I think it's the best ABC Warriors story since "The Black Hole" back in 1988. What might you think? Well, have a look at this image below.



See that weird pixelation on Deadlock? That's a bullet wound. He's been hit by bullets that phase in and out of alternate realities and do damage across multiple dimensions. I figure, either you think that doesn't make any sense whatever, in which case the excess of this story probably will not appeal to you, or you treat it like I do, and want Mills and Henry Flint to keep blowing your mind with downright weird and crazy stuff like this in every episode. Soon, Blackblood will be throwing banned grenades called holocusts that corrode all metal and get himself turned inside-out, and Hammerstein will have some "eggs" implanted in him that birth robot snakes that stick out holes that they eat through the sides of his head. Glorious.

1476 also sees the final episode of Synnamon as her third story, "Arc of Light" concludes. I've said my peace about this misfire previously, but "Arc of Light" really is notable for being a huge mess. To its credit, prog 1473 had given the character a magnificent cover by Dylan Teague. Should this series ever end up as one of those "graphic floppy" reprints bagged with the Megazine, that will have to be the cover. But oh, this story is such a disaster. I don't think it had a point at all other than to demonstrate, again, how nasty and unscrupulous Synnamon's big mean bosses are. The final page was so incredibly confusing that one of the writers actually waded into the cesspool that the official message board can be just to explain what in the hell David Roach drew. Basically, it looks like Missing-His-Back Boss Guy shot the poor innocent trapped-in-space dude, and then Synnamon looked all sad and teary, and then made a loud, funny noise and climbed some fancy decoration on the wall or some furniture or something, and then left a lot of broken bits over trapped-in-space dude's body and walked away. Evidently, that was her way of quitting.

I hate to say anything critical about David Roach, who's a super artist and a friend to anybody interested in the history of British comics, but when the strip's writer has to step in and explain what it is that the artist was drawing - see, the fancy decoration was the Super Secret Synnamon Space Spy Agency's insignia - then the artist has really not done the job well. It makes you wish that 2000 AD had the budget for an art editor like they did back in the IPC days, because there's no way in heck that Robin Smith would've let that get through. The evident moral from these paragraphs: It is okay if your script doesn't make much sense, just so long as the art does.

And so with Synnamon concluded after three stories over two and a half years, the doors are open for a new series. Debutting this week in a one-off prologue is one of Si Spurrier's masterpieces, Harry Kipling (Deceased).



When it comes to designing lead characters, Spurrier gets what Synnamon's writers, Colin Clayton and Chris Dows, seem to have missed. 2000 AD should be the home of very weird heroes. I can read about practically perfect space action babes with big boobs in tight leather in any number of comics, but cod-Victorian zombies with monocles, big moustaches and elephant guns and an addiction to Earl Grey can only be found in the Galaxy's Greatest. I might have gone a little overboard with my love of Spurrier's Lobster Random - wait, no, I didn't, that series is amazing - but 2006 was the year of Harry Kipling. Literally. He was only in fourteen episodes, criminally, all published in this calendar year. I don't know why I'm so nice about Spurrier's comics when he stops writing the damn things just as they're getting spectacular like he does. Then he goes and writes Silver Surfer for Marvel.

So this prologue starts with a mother telling her family the horrible story about how the father died, putting a little backstory together about how a space-faring Britannia started ruling the stars. It's a scenario not entirely unlike the Gothic Empire from Nemesis the Warlock Book Four. You've got pith helmets and aliens and steampunk all bearing down on some aggressive aliens that take advantage of the faith of the weak and feeble to pose as gods. All the time this backstory is developing, suggesting that the Neo-Britannians have come and gone, there's a violent force slowly making his way along their trail.

That's when artist Boo Cook plays a masterstroke and reveals that this is not some innocent mother and children, but rather a hideous mythological whale-god from some belief system or other, and all the various demigods beneath her. Harry Kipling is very much alive and very much of the opinion that nobody needs to believe in decrepit things like her when there's a Union Jack to be unfurled and fisticuffs to be delivered under Queensbury rules. Man alive! And we had to wait five weeks to see the next story?!

There were only six Harry Kipling stories, totalling 75 pages, and spread across 2006's issues. Rather than giving the character a consistent run of 14 weeks, Tharg tried the experiment of dropping the short adventures in throughout the year, usually following some other character's longer story. Maybe it didn't work in terms of building momentum, but it really kept everybody excited to see such a frequently recurring series. Sadly, criminally, Kipling was retired after 2006. There was one story that I remember feeling a disappointment, but there was a developing subplot about a very addictive drug being used by these false gods that showed a lot of promise. Perhaps one day, Tharg will reprint these stories in one of those "graphic floppies" as a lead-in to Kipling's long-overdue return. Particularly with Boo Cook's art looking better than ever these days, I bet a new series of Harry Kipling (Deceased) would look completely wonderful.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Only The ABC Warriors has been dusted off, in The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, after there was Rogue Trooper, there was... The 86ers! See you in seven days, friends!

141. King Hell!

August 2004: You know what would be a really thankless job? Editing 2000 AD. Oh, there are perks, I suppose. You get to commission great series and work with incredibly talented creators, but you also get a fan base that is convinced that it knows better than you at every stage and constantly makes demands, I mean, offers helpful suggestions about what it wants to see in the comic. And, when you and your predecessors have spent thirty-odd years cultivating the mythology that the series are actually created by put-upon robots whipped and beaten into the service of thrillpower, it's a little difficult to explain, in character, exactly why the Alan Moore and Ian Gibson droids haven't been chained to a desk to create more Halo Jones, or why the loaning of the Grant Morrison droid to some inferior American publishers has gone on so long that we don't have more Zenith.

About which, I don't know about you squaxx, but I finally resolved a few months ago that I'm not reading any more stupid superhero trademark protection funnybooks from anybody, regardless of who writes them. Except Paul Levitz writing Legion of Super-Heroes. 2000 AD droids on Hulk comics? Not in my house. Join me, won't you? You know it makes sense.

Anyway, new episodes of Zenith and Halo Jones, by their original creators, seem to turn up most often when fans compile their fantasy "perfect prog." From there, it's anybody's guess as to what will show up next, the only other real tricky bit is deciding whether you want Strontium Dog or you want Ezquerra drawing that imaginary issue's Judge Dredd.

I mention this here because I figure that Matt Smith, the man who has been Tharg for about the last decade, has made a really strong case for being 2000 AD's best editor, but man, he does something that I have never liked, and that's not building up a solid recurring feature to run alongside Dredd in almost every issue. That's one of the reasons why fans came to love Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante in the late nineties, because David Bishop made them co-stars of the comic, with Dredd, for the better part of two solid years. Particularly with subplot-heavy series like Sin Dex, as it has evolved, and, frankly, darn near everything that Ian Edginton or Gordon Rennie has written, the whole business of a single story per year has mostly been a burden for fans to follow. I've said before, and I feel very strongly about it, that The Red Seas would have been massively improved had its hundred-plus episodes appeared over a run of about three years, and not ten.

See, if I were Tharg, I would note those series that seem to get nearly unanimous positive feedback from fans. In recent days, these would include Zombo, Ichabod Azrael and Absalom. I'd treat that initial story as a successful pilot and then sit down with the writer and see where this series is going. Then commission it, to the end. Rather than ordering a single story each year, and hoping that the writer doesn't get poached by some inferior American publisher who will take up all of his time before it's finished, I'd slot that series in for at least forty weeks a year and give it a backup artist and turn the series' lead into the next 2000 AD superstar. Johnny Alpha did not become beloved in our hearts by collecting one bounty a year, Tharg.

Ah, but there's a problem with my plan. In quite a few cases, it's completely unworkable. Many series, and many of the writers responsible for them, genuinely need time to find a footing and the maturity necessary to churn out something really workable and memorable. Take Simon Spurrier, for instance. Presently, I might groan that he's one of those droids wasting his creative energy turning out garbage for inferior American publishers when he could be writing more Lobster Random, but he wouldn't even be in that position had Tharg not given him the time to develop Bec & Kawl over several, individual, month-long batches. "Hell to Pay" is the fifth of these month-long runs, and it's a real treat. In it, Jarrod Kawl is duped into a cunning plan by Margaret Thatcher to take over the underworld.



Even if Spurrier had wanted to tell this story from the outset - contradicting my "annual appearance" claim above, Bec & Kawl usually appeared once every six months - he wouldn't have told it at all well. The earliest Bec & Kawl adventures, despite the goodwill that some fans felt towards them, just weren't very good. Since Spurrier was a fan who made it in, and since the art was so nice, and since the series was so darned different, and - this might be the important bit - it only ran for four weeks at a time, readers were mostly able to overlook the series' deficiencies, in the hopes that it would improve.

Well, I say mostly. There certainly are readers with a "kill it immediately!" mindset whenever Tharg programs a series that they don't enjoy.

Honestly, the leap in quality between the first two batches of Bec & Kawl and this one is just eye-popping. There are huge problems with the earliest stories. For one, he relies on visual humor, not just to hit a punch line, but to complete a story. Infamously, the climax to a one-off episode called "Enlightenment" (prog 1327, Feb. 2003) is the slogan written on Kawl's T-shirt. No attention is drawn to it. More than that, the pacing of the early stories is really bad. There's no getting around it, while there is a skeleton of a plot in May 2002's "The Mystical Mentalist Menace" (progs 1290-91), there is no sense of a transition between scenes or gags. The action is compressed so much that there is no feeling of the passage of time, nor a space where the story develops.

"Hell to Pay" isn't without its problems, but thank the stars that Tharg commissioned Bec & Kawl the way he did, so that Spurrier and Roberts could learn from their mistakes. It's a very funny story, but, more importantly, it's a story that readers can understand. There are conventions to the language of comics, and the buildup to this hilarious cliffhanger is one of the things that makes it work so well. It's more than just "SHOCK! Thatcher is the baddie!" but the way that we get this cliffhanger at the right point in the story - the halfway mark - and that we learn what Hell is, in terms of how Spurrier is going to use it, so that the comedy of Thatcher privatizing it actually means something. Creating a world that a reader can care about, even for the six or seven minutes one might spend reading a Bec & Kawl episode, is critical for the story to work.



World-building is something that the Guv'nor, Pat Mills, does better than darn near everybody else in comics. When Mills is on fire, as he is in Book Two of the ABC Warriors epic "The Shadow Warriors," he's throwing some completely crazy ideas at the protagonists. Some of these ideas are so offbeat as to be ridiculous - above, as drawn by Henry Flint, we see grouchy apes called Cyboons riding three-legged lizards called Trisaurs - but Mills treats all of the elements of his stories with the same respect and enthusiasm, grounding the mindblowing ideas with casual acceptance by the protagonists.

Now, the weird problem with the Guv'nor is that, unique among 2000 AD's writers, he seems to get a free pass to write his stories in either 48-page or 60-page chunks. He seems to have picked this up writing for the French market, where his publisher there releases 60-page episodes of the series Requiem and Claudia once a year. This means that Mills gets to mostly blow off the idea of cliffhangers. It's pretty rare when you get to, say, page six of episode five of a modern Mills story and get that jawdropping shock that leaves you begging for the next part. From the perspective of a reader, "Book Two of The Shadow Warriors" doesn't mean so much. It's really that "The Shadow Warriors" is a three-episode story, and the episodes are really long, and split into chunks for British serialization.

And then of course, there's the problem that, as editor of 2000 AD, Matt Smith has so darn many popular series to juggle that even if the Guv'nor wanted to run a 156-page ABC Warriors adventure across 26 consecutive weeks, there wouldn't necessarily be room for it. See, thankless job.

For the record, I'd figure the lineup for a perfect prog, considering that Nikolai Dante is coming to an end in early 2012, would include Dredd by Wagner and Ezquerra, backed by new stories for Robo-Hunter, Zenith, Stickleback and Lobster Random.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Bec & Kawl: Bloody Students (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Caballistics Inc: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: The Art of Kenny Who? (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop).

Next time, The Galaxy's Greatest and its Trouble With Girls. See you in seven, friends!

125. Team Andy and Team Pat

April 2003: My reread has brought me to an interesting six-week period where two of 2000 AD's former editors, Pat Mills and Andy Diggle, had new series running at the same time. Diggle, who's not long from signing an exclusive contract with DC Comics at this point, has devised a new, contemporary-set political thriller called Snow / Tiger which is illustrated by Andy Clarke and Chris Blythe, and the Guv'nor has written a new, mammoth epic for his long-running ABC Warriors which will be told in three chunks of 48-60 pages. It's called "The Shadow Warriors," and Book One of the epic is illustrated by veteran Carlos Ezquerra. It is Mills' best work for 2000 AD for many, many years.

Did the bad feelings between Mills and Diggle inspire the Guv'nor to better things? Around this time, David Bishop is finishing the serialized first edition of Thrill-Power Overload for the Megazine, and he included a gauntlet-throwing quote from Mills in the final installment about the new work since Diggle stepped down as editor. There was a lot of side-taking in fandom at the time. For myself, Diggle was the much-loved, fandom-embracing editor who wrote me a very encouraging rejection letter for a Pulp Sci-Fi installment I proposed, and Mills was the cranky old pagan who lost the plot around 1990.

Hindsight tells a different story. Diggle had some great work ahead of him for DC, including The Losers and Adam Strange, both of which I strongly recommend you all check out, but Snow / Tiger is a derivative bore with an unbelievable bad guy and very nice art, and The Shadow Warriors is delightful, full-on, twelve-gauge lunacy. The art's the worst thing about it, and it's freakin' Ezquerra, one of the best artists in comics.

Actually, some of my dislike of the art comes from Mek-Quake's latest body. It was established decades previously that Mek-Quake collects new bodies and enjoys downloading his consciousness into each of them, but this is the only tale that sees him wearing a body best termed as "Stumpy." Either that or nobody told Ezquerra that he was supposed to be the tallest and broadest member of the team.



Readers today can judge for themselves as both stories are available in collected editions. You can read Mills' adventure in the sixth volume of ABC Warriors, and Snow / Tiger was reprinted in the freebie graphic novel bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine # 276 in 2008.

Speaking of collected editions, I decided one way to quit writing such carpal tunnel-inducing entries was to simply review any 2000 AD collections as and when they would normally come up for review at my Bookshelf blog and just link to them here. That said, in case you missed it, I reviewed last year's collection of The V.C.s by Dan Abnett, Henry Flint and Anthony Williams here.

Next time, the circuit-charming tale of cranky ol' Lobster Random begins. Be here in seven!

116. Spurrier's Scrap

October 2002: A common tool in every 2000 AD editor's arsenal - nobody cares about this but me - is the use of double-length episodes to either start or finish a serial in order to clear the decks before the next launch issue of all-new stories. In prog 1312, Richard Elson gets cover duties for the double-length final part of The Scrap, a five-week serial written by Si Spurrier. It's quite a departure from the still-new script droid. Spurrier's Future Shocks had been marked by a streak of piss-taking humor in wild, SF scenarios, and the first four-week run of his first ongoing series, Bec & Kawl, had been nothing but gags in search of a scenario, but The Scrap is anything but funny. It's a dark, unaccountably heavy and very derivative "ugly future" story. Dystopia, garbage in the streets, all-business police, an artificial intelligence running things that has a hidden agenda... yes, this is derivative of a great many things, and could safely be skipped if it weren't for a couple of things in its favor. Elson's' art is terrific, and the lead character, a police officer named Maliss, is an entertaining, sympathetic hero. Outside of Marge in Fargo, she's also one of the few comic characters that I can recall who we meet when she's heavily pregnant.

While The Scrap is pretty dark and heavy, the same can't be said for Dan Abnett's Sinister Dexter, which is going through a pretty silly phase during this period. In a four-parter called "Deaky Poobar, We Hardly Knew Ye," drawn by Steve Parkhouse, our heroes return the body of a fellow gunshark to his native England and run afoul of the locals, getting in the middle of a war between the mob and the police, represented here by Inspector "Terse" and DS "Thewlis."



Things get even sillier after this. There's a one-off drawn by Mike Collins in which Finnigan falls for a ridiculous sting operation the cops have come up with, using a TV quiz show to get criminals to fess up to their deeds, and a one-off drawn by Steve Roberts in which our now on-the-lam heroes meet an old-timer who's been hiding out for thirty years. This prompts them to really get way out of town, and the next several episodes will see them going off-planet. It's been shown a time or two that the future world of Sin Dex incorporates aliens and interplanetary travel, but this will be the first time Abnett really depicts it, and it's played completely for laughs as well. Suffice it to say that when the series finally starts taking itself seriously again with the introduction of Kal Cutter in 2003, everybody will appreciate it.

So that's this run of the prog: Heavy stories that take themselves too seriously, and serious stories which are playing things for laughs. And Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper as well. Happily, better things are right around the corner.

In other news, Rebellion has released the first in a planned four-volume collection of the ongoing ABC Warriors saga "The Volgan War" by Pat Mills and Clint Langley. It's part of the company's periodic hardback line, and it is completely wild and wonderful.

Over time, the story of the Warriors has gotten a little continuity-heavy, but this volume goes out of its way to be friendly to new readers. It follows on from the 2003-06 series "The Shadow Warriors" with the decision to put their small-minded, demented member Mek-Quake into a sanitorium for some long-overdue rest, and this prompts our centuries-old robot heroes to reminisce about their earliest adventures, predating our introductions to them. It turns out there was a lot more to their backstory than we were ever told, and they're each surprised to learn that each of them crossed paths with a mysterious, flamethrowing "special forces" robot called Zippo...

"The Volgan War" really completes the long overdue resurgence of this once-classic title, which spent the 1990s a shadow of its former self. Mills has rarely been weirder or more inventive in throwing completely bizarre concepts at his readers, and while he's writing for a more mature audience than the ten year-olds who gobbled up the original series, with its bazooka-totin' robots on dinosaurs, he's still able to balance an intricate plot with high-wire ideas. So we get armies of multi-armed Hammersteins locked in combat with giant Mecha-Stalins, and taxicabs which can be converted into weapons.

But it's the artwork that drives this one out of the park. I've certainly admired all the great artists who've contributed to the series over the years, from Mike McMahon to Simon Bisley to Henry Flint, but in Clint Langley, the definitive Warriors visuals have at last been found. Langley's computer-created world is unlike anything we've seen in 2000 AD before, fully-realized, three-dimensional depictions of decaying future war battlefields populated by hundreds of rusting mechanical soldiers. In the comic, it looked pretty amazing. On the better paper in this book, the results are eye-popping.

This edition reprints the story that originally appeared in "Prog 2007" and issues 1518-1525 of the weekly, beefing it up with some extra pages - nothing too extravagant, usually just some double-page spreads - along with a long-overdue Warriors' Timeline, explaining things for new readers and clarifying some of the points that have caused some confusion in the past, along with the now-standard introduction and commentary by Mills. It's truly an amazing collection, and on the short list for the year's best book; yes, it's as good as that.

Next time, set sail on the Red Seas! 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!

98. Twisting the Knife

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.

A downside to part-time blogging is that my occasional plans for what I'd like to talk about will sometimes smack into real-world time crunching. I had intended to write a couple of paragraphs last week about Mike Carey's short-lived series Carver Hale, but time got away from me. So I'm writing about it today, when the series isn't actually in the issue pictured on the left. Carey, who is best known as the writer of the long-running DC/Vertigo series Lucifer, only worked for 2000 AD for a short while before signing an exclusive deal with the DC people. Carver Hale was one of two series that he created, and yet another in the long list of stories I've mentioned over the last couple of years of blogging that shoulda-coulda-woulda come back as a semi-regular series. (Readers might have gotten the impression that if I was editing 2000 AD with limitless resources, then the comic would be about as thick as Shonen Jump every week. I wouldn't say that was inaccurate.) Hale was a Sarf London gunman for some criminal in the import/export business, if you take my meaning, who is gunned down by rivals. It's only after he's brought back to life that he learns that the players in this complicated game have all been making deals with various demons and squabbling beasts from other realms. Hale winds up sharing his body with one of their number, who offers to keep him alive to get vengeance on the bulletproof thugs who took him out.

Carver Hale only appeared in a single eight-part story, "Twisting the Knife," which appeared over a 14-week run. The artist Mike Perkins ran into some difficulties completing the strip, and after episode five in prog 1240, it took a six-week break before the final three parts ran. I was under the impression that the series could have returned, had Carey not found other commitments. Andy Diggle's time as editor was marked more by finding new talent, and creating more one-off serials, than developing new regular characters. "Twisting the Knife" was one of the few new storylines from the 2000-02 period which looked like it might have warranted a return visit. What we got wasn't bad, and it was later collected in a thin hardcover album for the European market, but it's truly a shame we didn't see the character again.

Well, that's what didn't appear in May 2001's prog 1242, because it was taking that six-week break I mentioned. The actual contents of the prog included a one-off Judge Dredd episode by Robbie Morrison and Colin Wilson, part two of a six-part adventure called Satanus Unchained! by Gordon Rennie and Colin MacNeil, about which more in the next installment of this blog, a Future Shock by Nigel "Kek-W" Long and Jim McCarthy, part three of a short Tale from Telguuth by Steve Moore and Carl Critchlow, and, most thrillingly, The ABC Warriors, written by Pat Mills and featuring the return of both artist Mike McMahon and the character of Steelhorn.



McMahon's wild work, which my son still does not enjoy at all, is welcome by me any time, and it's fun to see him take on some characters that he designed more than twenty years previously. I've spent ages looking over McMahon's three fantastic episodes, marvelling at how he's constructed them. Steelhorn's return, however, is a little more problematic. The character only appeared in a single episode as a near-indestructible, jewel-encrusted robot who was melted down into a burbling, liquid being called "The Mess." Since even Pat Mills couldn't do much with a character that limited, the Mess was left behind on Mars at the end of the original ABC Warriors adventure and never used again.

The current, fifteen-part "Return to Mars" arc suggests that the planet has a consciousness (called "Medusa") which has become sick and tired of all these human colonists on it, and has begun waging war against these unwelcome Earthmen. In order to give itself a voice, the Martian consciousness resurrects Steelhorn, restores him to his original form, and, possessing the robotic shell, pits him against the Warriors. It's a terrific high-concept idea, but Mills never really gives it the space it needs. Steelhorn only appears in this, the third of five stories within this arc, and the conclusion in a few weeks' time, before Medusa/Steelhorn agrees to a lasting peace with Earth and the character rejoins the team for future adventures.

Two installments ago, I explained how "Return to Mars" was handicapped by the behind-the-scenes disagreements between Mills and Diggle, but there's a secondary problem with it: it's far too short. Over the next few months of installments, I'll talk about a few other cases where Diggle's "rocket fuel" approach will result in unsatisfying short-run serials that feel like they've been chopped down from much longer epics. "Return to Mars" is the first time this happens. While it's evident that Mills was not interested in his assignment, and very unhappy with what he perceived as editorial interference, and was probably pleased just to get the dratted thing over and done with as quickly as possible, this ABC Warriors story was crying out for at least another nine or twelve episodes to explore the conflict and develop Steelhorn as a villain before concluding.

Moving on to current releases for your bookshelf, readers of this blog are certainly aware of Rebellion's wonderful series of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files, which are reprinting every episode that appeared in the weekly. With the twelfth collection, released in February, the publishers have chosen to follow the strip's lead and reprint the color episodes, which began in 1988, as they originally appeared. This does mean that the books have to be a little smaller than previously - what had been 400-page collections are now 320-page volumes on better paper - but given the choice of seeing Will Simpson's beautiful painted art or Chris Weston's earliest professional pages reproduced as muddy grayscale, Rebellion has certainly made the right choice.

Writers John Wagner and Alan Grant elected to end their successful partnership following the epic "Oz," which was reprinted in the eleventh Case File. This collection contains a final handful of their co-written stories, but from there it is mostly Wagner flying solo. Grant contributes some fine one-offs, including one that sets up a later Anderson: Psi Division storyline, along with the expected pop culture parodies. Wagner has the bulk of the action, including some wonderful, moving stories which focus on the citizens caught up in the Mega-City madness. The installments concerning the mutating Eleanor Groth, painted by Simpson, and some John Ridgway-illustrated episodes set in a nursing home where a resident suspects the staff of euthanasia, are truly fantastic. Here, again, is a book that belongs on every comic-lovers' bookshelf.

Next time, it's more Cursed Earth craziness from Gordon Rennie when Satanus the tyrannosaur returns. See you in seven!

96. War in the Command Module

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.

March 2001: For those of you who enjoyed the cover of 1988's prog 555, here it is again, sort of, on prog 1234. John Higgins, who had not really done much work for the House of Tharg in the last couple of years, has revisited his earlier design for this launch issue which features the long-overdue return of this classic logo. Higgins had principally been working for American publishers in the late '90s before contributing the Judge Dredd one-off "Generation Killer" to prog 1212. Over the next few years, he will illustrate several very good Dredd adventures for the Megazine, and is presently the artist for the current series Greysuit. He was the subject of a feature-length interview which appeared in March's Meg # 281. Inside the issue, we've got the start of a new Judge Dredd storyline by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy, along with a Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and Steve Roberts, Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Steve Yeowell, about which more next week, and, in the ultimate example of "here comes trouble," the double-length opening episode of the long-awaited new series of The ABC Warriors by Pat Mills and Henry Flint.

It certainly looks like the intent with this storyline is to evoke the original run of the series from back in 1979. It's a 15-part black-and-white epic divided into five three-part adventures with a different artist on each block. Mills' most frequent collaborator of the period, the awesome Henry Flint, handles the first and fifth stories, and the ones between them are drawn by Boo Cook, Mike McMahon and Liam Sharpe. The story sees the Warriors stomping around the planet Mars again, apparently, thanks to the vagaries of all the time travelling they'd done earlier in their history, not very long after the original adventure. It's never really made clear whether Deadlock, last seen four months previously fighting Purity Brown in the sequel to Nemesis the Warlock in the far, far future, had that adventure prior to the three generally-linked Warriors storylines that have appeared in this decade, but since Mills operates by more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-yer-pants approach than the continuity-ticking of mainstream American books, it never really matters much.

What does matter is that this series is a well-intended, and occasionally beautifully drawn, disaster. Flint's episodes look great enough to paper over what a mess the story is, and McMahon's are wild and weird enough to distract from the confusing tale, about the resurrection of Steelhorn, he's been asked to draw, but it doesn't always work. Sharpe, who had illustrated so many excellent Dredd episodes in the years before this, tries experimenting with an unflattering style and some downright sloppy inking, and while Cook has emerged as one of the most important artistic discoveries of Andy Diggle's time as editor, he flatly was not yet ready for the big time when he penned his oddly-paced, hard-to-follow pages.



But the real problem is that "Return to Mars" (later issued by Rebellion in book form under the title "The Third Element") simply wouldn't have been anything other than one of the weaker Warriors' tales and a huge disappointment no matter who was on art duties, because the story is an abject failure. Both the writer and the editor have gone on the record about what went wrong. The two versions of David Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload are quite explicit in the ugly details. Incidentally, one reason of many not to rely solely on the wonderful bookshelf edition is that a very lengthy quote from Mills on the subject appears only in the earlier magazine serialization of the articles*.

In a nutshell, and putting it very, very lightly, Mills was not very happy with the assignment to put together what we might term an "old school" take on his characters, and Diggle wasn't very happy with the resulting scripts. Diggle also wasn't very happy to be in a position of performing rewrites on the scripts, and Mills wasn't very happy about pretty much anything that Diggle did after he uncapped the red pen. Actually, the whole sorry business is like the memorable ending of that John Ridgway-illustrated Dredd story "The Raggedy Man," which is told in storybook style and concludes by saying "They all lived happily after," except for the villain, who was killed, and except all the innocents he was terrorizing, who'd all end up dead of some Cursed Earth ailment within a week, and except for Dredd, who's seldom happy about anything.

The war of words was mostly kept from fandom's view at the time, but it certainly seems to have left very bad blood between these two for quite some time, and Diggle was sadly not quite finished inadvertantly offending Mills. More would be forthcoming, and we'll pick that up in a short while when a big, mean tyrannosaur makes his return to the comic.

In other news, in January, Rebellion released the long-awaited collection of the 1995-96 Dredd epic "The Pit." This 30-part epic, written by Wagner and illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra, Colin MacNeil, Lee Sullivan and Alex Ronald, was the subject of a Thrillpowered Thursday entry back in 2007, where I explained it as a "change in the status quo that sees Dredd assigned to new duties in one of the Meg's remote regions, where rather than doing the job of a senior street judge, he's assigned to the task of sector chief. It turns out that the Dredd formula works incredibly well as an ensemble police procedural, which was a huge surprise to everybody, including the writer."

"The Pit" is remembered, not because of an outrageous, high-concept plot like many of the big epics of the series, but because Judge Dredd lends itself astonishingly well to overlapping subplots and unique, individual judges with their own perspectives on the proceedings. It's an important story which introduced two of the more interesting recurring characters of Dredd's modern cast, Judges DeMarco and Guthrie, as well as providing further details about the criminal Frendz organization which would be an ongoing menace for the next few years. The entire cast is made up of interesting, sympathetic characters, and as events wind their way from a search for a rogue undercover "Wally Squad" judge to an all-out war with a powerful mob kingpin's forces, through a sector house full of flawed cops trying to do their jobs, it's easy to get completely caught up in events. It's a terrific story, with fabulous contributions from some great artists.

Long overdue for this new edition, "The Pit" has been unavailable for quite some time, since Hamlyn's old version went out of print, and Titan, the next company to issue collected editions, never put their own together. This is one that Rebellion should definitely keep around, and promote to new readers as a fine introduction to Judge Dredd. Whether you're new to the character or an old fan, "The Pit" is certainly a story that every bookshelf should have.

Next time, Nikolai Dante goes after babes and bloodsuckers and his writer goes after some extraneous dialogue balloons, and Mike Carey's criminally short Tharg-world career gets going. See you in seven!



*edit: I'm totally mistaken; the quote just appears a little later on in the narrative than I was expecting to find it.

91. Mutiny!

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.

Hurm, as the guy in that movie might say. I'm writing today with a small degree of consternation, as Diamond, the distributor who services North American comic shops, is apparently having one of its periodic hiccups, and several US readers are reporting that they've not received the prog or the Meg in well over a month. Nor have we received the collected editions of Kingdom or Shakara that should have arrived by now. Is this just a temporary delay, to be sorted any week now, or is this evidence of Diamond shaking down the Galaxy's Greatest as they streamline their operations and cut back? Stay tuned...

Anyway, back in November 2000, we come to prog 1218. It features a memorable cover by John Charles, an artist who did very little work for the 2000 AD titles. This was his last of five covers. It features the chaos-driven robot called Deadlock, best known as one of the ABC Warriors, who's currently starring in an eleven-week series. This bridges the final series of Nemesis the Warlock, which had concluded the previous year, and the next run of the Warriors, which would begin in a few months' time. In this story, Deadlock heads back to the planet Termight, left rudderless by the end of Torquemada's regime. Now, Nemesis and Deadlock have had a very confusing history, but what's going on here is that Deadlock is acting as the warlock's squire, ensuring that the planet descends into chaos per Nem's last wishes. His schemes are delayed, because Purity Brown, Nem's former associate and now the planet's president, has decided that a little caution in letting a universe of bizarre alien critters run rampant is a good idea, and she's slow to roll back all of Torquemada's policies. In a galaxy full of foot-eating aliens, and face-munching bananas, is that really such a bad idea?

At any rate, the script is of course by Pat Mills, and the art by Henry Flint. The two of them worked very well together in that last run of Nemesis, and this story is every bit as entertaining as that had been. It's full of twisted tunnels and wild perspective shots, strange-lookin' monsters and weirdos, alien pregnancies, soldiers wearing armor covered with words, serial-killing accountants and dimensionally-unstable gunmen. If you're looking for a shot glass of rocket fuel, this is definitely one of the best examples from the period. This story is not presently available in a collected edition, but one is planned as a bonus magazine to be bagged with a future edition of the Judge Dredd Megazine.



As wild as Deadlock is, it's not actually the most entertaining of the current crop of thrills. That award goes to the current Judge Dredd storyline, "Sector House," which is continuing an eight-week run. Written by John Wagner and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, it puts the spotlight on Judge Rico, Dredd's young clone who had been introduced earlier in the year. This is his first spotlight story since serving as Dredd's rookie.

"Sector House" is certainly a spiritual successor to late '90s stories such as "The Pit" and "Beyond the Call of Duty," in which Wagner and Ezquerra focus on a department rather than using Dredd as the lone hero. It finds drama in the tensions and underpinnings of a close-knit group of judges, chronically overworked and with very little downtime, who don't appreciate some punk from the Academy sticking his nose in where he is not welcome. "Sector House" is a terrific story, and a reprint is included in the Dredd collection Brothers of the Blood.



Also in this prog are the continuing stories of Nikolai Dante and Rain Dogs that were mentioned in last week's installment, along with a great eight-part serial by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil called Vanguard. This is a wonderful space opera which rises above its familiar premise - the cruel commander of a space battleship, obsessed with tracking down an enemy ship, overworks and brutalizes his crew to mutiny. He's cautioned about the crew's growing unrest several times along the way by his new second-in-command, Lt. Elizabeth Vanguard, but ignores her until it is too late.

Beth Vanguard is a very engaging character, and while there's nothing incredibly original about her backstory, watching events unfold is great fun, thanks to an intricately-plotted story and Colin MacNeil's wonderful artwork. In the end, the ship's commander goes too far, and after his own men are fired upon indiscriminately as they are fighting off a raiding party, the crew rebels, with Lt. Vanguard joining them. The strip has a cliffhanger ending, and the promising endnote: "End of Book One." Sadly, there was never a second run for the series, which never returned after this entertaining start.

In April of 2002, Andy Diggle responded to an inquiry I'd made on the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup about Vanguard, wondering why so many of the recent strips had been one-off serials rather than ongoing series. He stated that Vanguard had been commissioned by the previous editor, David Bishop, and "although I didn't hate it, I thought the premise was bit stale, and it wasn't really popular enough to divert Robbie and Colin away from Dante and Dredd respectively in order to produce Book 2." This is certainly a shame, as a second series would have given the story enough pages for a very nice collected edition. It has been rumored that some kind of reprint was made for someplace in Europe - it is mentioned in Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload - but the book apparently ranks among the scarcest of recent merchandise, and does not appear in the listings at the fan site Barney.

Next time, both Zenith and Bad Company return in glorious monochrome for "Prog 2001," and I'll look at last year's Mega-City Undercover collection. See you in seven, fellow Earthlets.

(March 12 2009)