183. Noir on the Doc Cox

May 2008: In the previous chapter, we looked at a particularly rough patch at the House of Tharg, a period of about three months when there was nothing particularly good appearing in the pages of 2000 AD. This was a sad hiccup, and one isolated to the weekly, because Judge Dredd Megazine was really terrific at this time. Even the oft-maligned Extreme Edition reprint book was going out in style. For most of 2007, that magazine had been incredibly skippable, reprinting as it did both the agonizingly long sports saga Mean Arena across three issues, as well as the similarly-named Mean Team, a rare and massive misfire from the otherwise reliable Alan Grant, John Wagner and Massimo Belardinelli that is - somehow - on the calendar to be reprinted again in book form in 2013. But with that title closing down, soon to be supplanted by a new series of reprints in the Megazine itself after the summer, they went out in style. The final two issues, # 29 and # 30, are excellent. They collect a pile of great Ian Gibson-drawn stories, including all of the episodes - four stories! - that might have appeared in a potential never-published fourth Robo-Hunter book in the Rainbow Spine line, along with the classic shoulda-been hit character Maze Dumoir's single two-part adventure, a couple of Anderson: Psi Division stories, and two Tharg the Mighty stories from the early 1980s.

These Extreme Editions went a long way toward satisfying fans who were not pleased with how the graphic novels treated our old pal Sam Slade. While Rebellion was partnered with DC Comics, there had been two books, Verdus and Day of the Droids. The second of these suffered from that periodic DC malady of having pages printed in the wrong order. Once Rebellion started its superior line of books, a third collection, Play it Again, Sam was one of the first. It sits on the shelf, alone and unloved, the number "3" on its spine reflecting its awkward status, as the first two books were never reprinted with the Rebellion trade design, and the potential fourth book was used for the last two Extreme Editions instead. Eventually, in 2010, they'd all be replaced by two excellent phonebook-sized editions.

Meanwhile, in the world of new comics and not reprints, writer Rob Williams teams with artist Rufus Dayglo for a new Low Life adventure. This is the seventh story, and the first to appear outside 2000 AD itself. It is Dayglo's only work on the series, and one of the installments that uses Aimee Nixon as the lead character. Dirty Frank doesn't even make a background cameo appearance this time.


Low Life seems to bounce back and forth between the harder-edged, undercover noir thrillers and lighthearted romps, and "War Without Bloodshed" is firmly in the first school. It's an incredibly mean story about labor issues at one of the city's ports. Union agitators are putting the squeeze on business owners, forcing them to hire human workers instead of using robots, even for dangerously unsafe jobs. Williams hits on an incredibly interesting topic here; I don't know that the subject of organized labor in Mega-City One has ever been addressed before, except in passing, and probably tongue-in-cheek. Of course, it's all a cover for something bigger and uglier.

I have mentioned in previous installments that the artwork of Simon Coleby, who illustrated the previous several Low Life stories, never appealed to me. Holy anna, is Dayglo ever a revelation. He just nails this bleak, dark story of desperate blue-collar workers. His Aimee Nixon is ugly but commanding, a character who can blend into the shadows or dominate the action. I love his designs and his use of balance on the page. It's just a superb triumph, and while this series would, in 2009, take a quantum leap in another direction, this brief, tough detour into "On the Waterfront" territory reads like the pilot for an incredible, downbeat series that never was. Put another way, Low Life's next reinvention would instantly become a huge favorite with everybody, but this story, and the direction it pointed, was equally thrilling to me.

Another story that pointed at other things was Bob the Galactic Bum by the veterans Alan Grant, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. A version of this eight-part story had previously been published, in color, by DC Comics in 1995, although the creators retained the trademark on the characters that they devised for it, and the copyright on the story itself. Reprinting this story, and placing all of its elements firmly within the creators' purview, required a few art and lettering corrections. The original printing of Bob was set in DC's mid-90s outer space continuity, including a military superhero force called L.E.G.I.O.N., a bloodthirsty alien race called Khunds, and the incredibly popular antihero Lobo, who prominently appeared on the covers of all four issues of the miniseries.


So, with a little bit of ink and white-out, the Khunds became Guunts, and L.E.G.I.O.N.'s leader Vril Dox became Doc Cox, and, triumphantly, Lobo became a very big and very ugly woman named Asbo. That's her, uglifying the panel above, while Bob, a WC Fields-like grifter who only has a mind for himself and can think his way out of every conceivable situation, dusts himself down.

Since I have never found Lobo particularly amusing - I was just too old and boring when he was introduced, I suppose - I passed on these comics when DC first released them, despite the track record of the creators. Man alive, did I ever miss out. This is completely hilarious. It's huge fun watching Wagner and Grant design another completely bizarre feudal planet with lunatic old traditions - this one involves blindness and broccoli - and having Bob, a silver-tongued devil who manipulates the hell out of everything, skate through the proceedings bent on short-term gain and having no idea, and no concern, what havoc he is wreaking around him. Asbo, who is tracking down a lost prince of space who's been caught up in Bob's latest scheme and, naively, thinks this hobo is his guru, is similarly a gem of a creation. 2000 AD does not own the character of Asbo, but she'd be welcome in the comic anytime as far as I'm concerned.

For about a year and a half prior to this story beginning, the Megazine had printed a one-off story by a Small Press creator. This was a good way to include comic pages but keep costs down, since the rights were retained by the creators. This transitioned into the "creator-owned" slot in the comic, with Bob first up for eight issues. Bob would be followed by quite a lot of Tank Girl, about which, more soon, and then Lilly MacKenzie, American Reaper and most recently Snapshot. Some of these have been more popular than others, but honestly, I would trade most of 'em for more from Bob and Asbo. Either in separate series or on their own, they are each phenomenally fun and hilarious characters, and I would love to see them both again.

Heck, can you imagine how poor ol' Sam Slade would fare against Bob? Great god of robo-hunters, your old pal wouldn't stand a chance!

Next time, Dead Eyes ends with a triumphant surprise, and Defoe returns with guns blazing. See you in seven days!

177. Samantha Slade: The Short Goodbye

July 2007: It has been five years. I think it's time to accept it. Ian Gibson isn't coming back. Neither, in all likelihood, is Samantha Slade. This is the story of her ignoble and stupid end. It should not, honestly, have come to this.

So, to recap: in the early 2000s, Ian Gibson started drawing color pin-ups of Sam Slade's granddaughter Samantha, whom he designed. Perhaps, it was thought, there might be some interest from John Wagner in returning to the world of Robo-Hunter...? Wagner passed on the idea, but his longtime associate and former co-writer Alan Grant picked up on it, and, in December 2003, the first new Robo-Hunter story with Samantha, the first Gibson-drawn, canonical Slade story since 1985's "Farewell, My Billions," debuted. It had its fans and it had its detractors, but even the most lovelorn of us must have agreed that Gibson had turned in superior work in the past. Two follow-up stories in 2004 saw the artwork continue to divide opinion. Alan Grant's writing was solid and reliable, but Gibson was clearly not giving this his full attention. It is my contention that the subpar artwork proved the death knell for the character. Those who disliked the series frequently called out its slipshod appearance. Their arguments had merit: Gibson was not drawing backgrounds, not being in any way innovative, in short, he was phoning it in. This was very curious, since he created the character.

The fourth story, 2005's "Stim!," was a mammoth improvement. This upswing continued in 2007's "Casino Royal," as both of these featured far more intensive and considered artwork from Gibson, and not just because he remembered to include some backgrounds. The writing was solid and amusing and certainly had that old Slade spirit. It is likely, however, that readers who found the three 2003-04 stories unacceptably lazy and slapdash had their minds made up and were not prepared to reconsider the genuine improvements that Gibson had made.

"Casino Royal" ended with Samantha jailed and a new arch-enemy triumphing over her, gloating ever so briefly before dismissing her as irrelevant, from an island getaway. The bad guy had won, and our heroine was jailed, perhaps for good. But wait! It turned out that Alan Grant had a whole pile of new storylines and subplots in which to indulge. "Casino Royal" was actually to be the first in a major story arc for Samantha that would take in new characters and new settings as she globetrotted her way to revenge against the criminal Five of Spades. And so, just three months after the cliffhanging conclusion of "Casino Royal," Samantha was back in a new five-parter called "I, Jailbird."

But something was terribly, terribly wrong. Gibson was not bringing his A-game anymore. Not even his C-game.

It's fair and reasonable to say that Gibson is a, shall we say, mercurial talent. His enthusiasm comes and goes, he's curmudgeonly, grouchy, a very harsh critic of his own work, and he has spoken with considerable candor and disappointment about some of his art that failed to meet his own high standards. I consider him absolutely a genius and one of the most important and influential talents in the comic medium. And the ten pages that he bothered to draw from the 25 page script are the worst ten pages he's ever drawn. They are the absolute nadir of his work.

I am privy to a personal email between Gibson and a reader that I should not have been allowed to see, and from which I won't quote, but in it, he honestly and dismissively admitted that the script, the worst in a long series of scripts that he disliked, had bored him so much that he abandoned it, his work not even half-done, and, from the look of it, completed over the course of about an hour and a half. In the sequence above, selected for thematic continuity with the sequence below, he didn't even bother drawing the vertical stripes on Samantha's prison uniform. Shortly afterward, in one of his columns for the website Den of Geek, he made a passive-aggressive comment about how he was unhappy with his page rate, thinking it should be proportional to the always-increasing cover price of the comic. Way to burn bridges there, Gibson.

I'm not sure what offends me the most about Gibson's utter lack of professionalism here, but the inclusion of that red scarf should make any longtime reader's blood boil about how the artist approached this. You might recognize the scarf. It is Ace Garp's from the classic series Ace Trucking Company, which was written by Alan Grant and John Wagner, and drawn by the late Massimo Belardinelli, who had passed away in March. Grant added the scarf to the script in a sweet tribute to a much-loved artist, who had himself, years previously, just decided that the character would wear a sentient aviator's scarf which would be jumping around and interacting with the rest of the page without any direction from the script. I think that it was just downright thoughtful and clever of Grant to add the scarf to Samantha's world, and just have it, silently, cause a ridiculous amount of trouble as it did whatever the hell it wanted to, although here, it is used as an actual plot element and not just whatever the artist feels like having it do. (My favorite was probably when it reached behind Ace and started brushing GBH's teeth.)

Massimo Belardinelli deserved better than to have this tribute illustrated so poorly. I feel really strongly about that.

So, anyway, Grant had written another perfectly good little Samantha story, which has the lunatic and frantic pace that any good Robo-Hunter story should. Prison overcrowding has given Samantha the opportunity for very early release, and, with the "help" of a defense attorney droid who looks like Leo McKern, this incredibly violent mind-of-its-own scarf, and her two idiot assistants - rebuilt since the last story and determined to cause more trouble - Samantha ends up escaping from the Old Bailey when she was just about to be paroled, and is on the lam, bound for Calais, where she hopes to assist another new character, Trudy, who claims to be the rightful Queen of France.

Coming in to pinch-hit for Gibson is the reliable Anthony Williams. In the early nineties, when Mark Millar was writing those really bad and bloodthirsty Robo-Hunter stories that made everybody question their resolve for living, Williams was one of the six (six?!?!) artists who contributed, and did not do a bad job at all. Those were actually two really good stories, so long as you look at the pictures and don't read the word balloons. Williams is a good go-to artist, I think. He doesn't, honestly, have that unpredictable and wild edge that really defines a 2000 AD art droid as a classic model in the eyes of the fandom, but he does the job reliably and I'm always glad to see his work. That said, something is terribly, terribly wrong when anybody says "Thank God that Ian Gibson's gone and Anthony Williams is here." That is what I said.

Robo-Hunter ended with Samantha swimming the last few meters across the English Channel, a caption at the bottom of the final page promising us that she would return soon in a story called "La Revolution Robotique." Buckaroo Banzai will probably fight the World Crime League before that happens. I think that, behind the scenes, the editor was not able to resolve the differences with Gibson about his unhappiness with the script or his page rate, and Gibson has not worked for 2000 AD since. His last material to appear to date has been a pin-up of Halo Jones that appeared in prog 1550, four weeks after his last Robo-Hunter page. It was probably too late to do anything about the final episode, far too late for a rewrite, and so it was published with the "Revolution" tagline, though I suspect that all involved were glumly aware that it was very unlikely. Not to knock the really excellent and underappreciated work on Sam Slade by Peter Hogan and Rian Hughes in 1993-94, but the long, considered opinion at 2000 AD since Bishop's time as editor in '97 has been that characters should be managed by their creators. Without Gibson, there is no Samantha.

And I think that's what aggravates me the most about how Gibson handled this. Look, I'm just a loudmouthed fan with a blog and a love of the comic, and I often speak with an intemperate, downright American-volume opinion that has often resulted in comical misunderstandings between myself and more reasonable people in Europe. But seriously, folks, why the blankety-blank did Ian Gibson not pick up the telephone and actually talk to Alan Grant about what he wanted from the scripts? I do not understand this, and I never will understand this. It really breaks my heart that two of my favorite comic creators came together to put together what should have been a real 2000 AD classic for the modern day, with a much-needed female lead, and the damn thing fizzled because of such dumb reasons and a lack of communication. I don't know what the heck Gibson wanted, because as far as I can see, the scripts were on target and terrific almost all of the time, but I know how he could have addressed it. He should have picked up the phone and called Alan Grant and said "I didn't like that one, and here's why. Let's make the next one better."

It should not have ended like this. Samantha should have settled that Robotique Revolution in '08 (in a twenty-episode mega-epic, yes, indeed), and then she should have solved some lunatic problem on the Orient Express or something while making her way to the Pacific to get even with that darn playing card. Samantha should have become, and been promoted as, 2000 AD's lead female character, a woman not superhumanly beautiful or drawn cheesecake-style, a woman who didn't need a male compatriot, just mind-blowlingly aggravating robot scarves and cigars and... frog-kit-things. She was just a competent, fun character who relied on her wits and her intelligence and learned as she went, and was often in way over her head in classic comedy moments.

If you'll forgive me getting political, 2000 AD really has made great steps lately in presenting positive female characters. Maggie Roth from Angel Zero, Rowan Morrigan from Age of the Wolf, and Mariah Kiss from Indigo Prime are all examples of the character that we'd hope to see more of in the comic. They're sort of undermined a little by retrograde steps like allowing Judge Maitland, in her second appearance last month, to show off her cleavage so ridiculously, but overall, the comic is definitely making long-overdue steps on the right path. Samantha, despite her lineage as a descendant of a male lead character - that problem affects both Judge Anderson and Durham Red, also recently written by Alan Grant - pointed the way forward.

She should be here still, and even though the realist in me accepts that she's probably never coming back - five years is a long time - it's not too late. Maggie's story was told in a single serial, writer Alec Worley has explained that the third Age of the Wolf will be the last, and somehow, stupidly, Indigo Prime has not resurfaced after its TRIUMPHANT twelve-part return last year, and so who the heck knows when Mariah will be back, or whether she'll get any lead time amid all those other characters, so there is a definite gap. Anthony Williams hasn't had the opportunity for any new work since Sinister Dexter was shelved, and I would honestly welcome him as the character's permanent artist. If we ever do get to see that blasted Revolution Robotique, the only complaints would be from nonscrots, grexnixes, and people who just plain don't like girls.

The sensible among us miss Samantha. We're waiting on the shores of the continent, fearing that she's been swimming an awfully long time.

But you know... just last week, Tharg announced that The Simping Detective was coming back after a five year absence. With a new artist, too.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Defoe: 1666 (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Greysuit: Project Monarch (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter in Judge Dredd: The Ian Gibson Collection (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine 309)

Next time, oh, grouchity-grouch, I dunno, Caballistics or something, I guess. See you in seven.

173. Samantha's Finest Hour

March 2007: I wrote editor Matt Smith a letter around the time of this issue. Not Tharg, but the human who actually runs things. A "not intended for publication" letter, if you will. I just wanted to tell him thanks. See, several months before the release of this issue, prog 1530, I had filled out a personality profile on some website. Never you mind which one. I met a girl, we went out for a few months, it was all good. The profile asked me to name my top three this and my top three that, and my top three favorite artists. So I thought for a minute and typed "Ian Gibson, Carlos Ezquerra, Simon Fraser." Then I wondered whether there was ever actually an issue of 2000 AD that featured work by all three. As best as I could tell, there was not. Finally, with prog 1528 and the return of the Judge Dredd epic "Origins" after a nine-week break in the action, we had it. All three artists with pages in 2000 AD for a few weeks. I just had to say thanks. Sort of bittersweet, knowing how 2007 would play out, and what Smith clearly already knew about Gibson when he read that letter of mine. Still, issue 1530 has this amazingly nice Gibson cover of Samantha Slade looking very unhappy with events. I just love it.

For a few weeks there, Gibson was actually doing double-duty in the prog, with the last two episodes of a six-part Dredd story written by Gordon Rennie alongside the first two parts of the fifth Robo-Hunter story starring Samantha Slade. It is called "Casino Royal" and it is very much an overlooked classic. To be fair, Gibson's work doesn't quite scale the dizzy heights of the previous story. The ended-too-quickly "Stim!" featured such beautiful layouts and coloring, a palette of midnight blues and purples that showed the artist really sinking his teeth into Samantha Slade's world for the first time. "Casino Royal" doesn't quite match it, but there's only one moment that looks like Gibson's dissatisfaction bubbled to the surface: The mobster Tony Da Tongue has this girlfriend, and it looks to me like Gibson couldn't decide between making her a hideous, ugly, plastic surgery-and-too-much-makeup harridan with a va-va-voom bod, and just not drawing her head with any more care than the circle above the letter "i" in his signature. But enough about the stumble; let me wax a little about just how absolutely terrific "Casino Royal" otherwise is.

Strangely, the story appeared a few months later than it was announced. The title is, of course, a riff on the James Bond story, and Ian Gibson gets to draw caricatures of all the Bond film actors in the early episodes as background detail. According to the September 2006 issue of Previews, this story was scheduled to appear in November of that year, right as the highly-anticipated adaptation of that story, the first in the series to star Daniel Craig, would be released. But November came and went without the story, depriving us of the front cover that shoulda been: somebody definitely should have mocked up a parody of the movie poster and had that on newsagent shelves while the movie was in theaters. No explanation was ever given for the delay, but I bet we can speculate a little about it when Samantha comes back for her sixth story. Come back again in four weeks for that.

So anyway, if the only complaint about "Stim!" was that, after six weeks of hilarious buildup, writer Alan Grant ended the story too darn quickly in the seventh, then this is where he recovers in full. "Casino Royal" is a perfect five weeks long, paced just right, with just the right focus on escalating weirdness and things getting out of Samantha's hands. She has ostensibly been hired for a simple tailing job and gets admitted to a casino to watch her mark, but, back at the office, her dimwit assistants Hoagy and Stogie stumble upon the reality that she has been set up.

In the casino, we learn that, in Robo-Hunter's ridiculous future, even card games have been infiltrated by robots. The decks are made of self-shuffling cards whose memories are supposed to automatically erase between hands. Now, you may well ask what in heaven is the purpose of such an idiotic idea, but this is Robo-Hunter we're talking about, a world where lazy humans send robots out to play sports for them, and who elect them to be political leaders. Samantha is surprised when one card, the Five of Spades, somehow avoids having its memory erased, and proposes that she follow its lead and win her way to a fortune at a major Texas Hold 'Em tournament.

Samantha and the Five of Spades work together while the tournament is besieged by one distraction after another, from an assault by armed criminals, to Hoagy and Stogie sneaking in through the restroom to rescue their boss, to Tony Da Tongue's inevitable treachery. It all ends in tears, with Hoagy and Stogie apparently blown to bits and Samantha, acting very stupidly and selfishly, learning the harsh lesson about not sticking up for your friends. So desperate for a happy ending for once, she abandons those two to their fate, thinks that she's won the millions legitimately, and then finds herself arrested while the Five of Spades, who arranged the whole darn thing from the outset, vanishes, getting away with a hundred million creds.

This leads to one of the best and most wonderful gags in the entire series. The last episode is told in flashback as the conniving Five of Spades, on some beach somewhere and surrounded by sexy, shapely lady robots, effectively gets for himself the same island paradise with gorgeous gals that Samantha's grandfather, the original Sam Slade, enjoyed for so many years before his idiot assistants blew it for him. If that meta-gag's not clever enough, there's the very, very funny revelation that the Five of Spades is looking forward to being downloaded into his new body. It's just one panel, and it's a throwaway, but the Five of Spades' new body has me absolutely roaring with laughter every time. No longer content with being a measly little playing card, he's orchestrated all this so that he can enjoy life in a new body... a really big playing card.

Samantha gets the final panel, lost in some jail somewhere and swearing vengeance. "I'll get you for this if it's the last thing I ever do!" had been Grandfather Sam's last words as the mysterious island of exercise nut Dr. Droid sank beneath the waves, and Ace Garp's last words as his prison cell orbited away into space. As co-writer (with John Wagner) of those two classic moments, Grant certainly knew how to play with our happy memories of incredibly funny, larger-than-life comics, and heroes who dreamed of big things being cruelly and hilariously denied them. But what a terrific set-up this is! Samantha would be returning in a few months' time, and Grant and Gibson were clearly in sync and on fire, and the Five of Spades was established as an awesome returning villain who is much, much smarter and a lot more resourceful than our heroine. Man alive, I'll tell you, what would happen next was absolutely certain to be a gen-yoo-ine 2000 AD classic.

Little clue for the foreshadowing-impaired: it was not. But that's another story...

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (Amazon UK)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: Casino Royal (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine issue 308, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, it's giant mecha-boxes against the lizards! See you in seven!

156. Gibson Keels

August 2005: I would think that most reviewers who come to this run of progs would probably focus on the new Judge Dredd story, "Mandroid." I'll come back to it in more detail a little later on in this blog, because it really is a remarkable achievement, and one of the stories from this period to have the most success among 2000 AD's fan base. It reteams writer John Wagner with Kev Walker, the same team who had such fun with "Sin City," and it's a twelve-part epic of mood and ugliness. I've said before that Wagner is just about the best writer in comics, but he isn't always my favorite. Those are two very different concepts, I think, and "Mandroid" really illustrates just why that is true. Every so often, Wagner gets into just what it's like for a citizen to live in a nightmare like Mega-City One, without all the fun and silliness that sometimes inspires him. Two episodes into "Mandroid," the reality of such an oppressive and bleak place is driven home. By giving us a heroic protagonist, a veteran who has served his city, who was grievously wounded and now just wants to settle into civilian life with his family and try to find a little work, Wagner turns the exact same silliness like wall-scrawling and protection rackets that previously entertained us as readers into something that's not even remotely entertaining. Reading "Mandroid" with a critical eye is a masterclass in how to write an incredibly dense and vivid story, one that works on multiple levels, but it is just so overwhelmingly bleak that I can't embrace it.

No, when it comes to things to embrace, there's a new Robo-Hunter story unfolding now. It's the fourth adventure for Samantha Slade, and it is huggingly lovely and, for six weeks anyway, a perfect blend of writer and artist working in sync and giving a hundred and ten percent. "Stim!" may be popcorn compared to the heavy meat and potatoes of the rest of the issue, but it's gooey, wonderful, caramel popcorn with a bonus surprise in the container. This is a great little story and I love it to pieces.

The previous three Robo-Hunter stories over the last eighteen months had seen writer Alan Grant and artist Ian Gibson not quite working together as well as we'd have hoped. All three had very, very good scripts by Grant, but Gibson didn't seem to be quite behind him all the way. The first story was a little rushed in places, and the others really suffered from some visibly unenthusiastic artwork. But here, the artwork is just magical all the way through.



I won't claim that Gibson's still not finding some shortcuts. Where possible, he steadfastly avoids drawing backgrounds. But rather than forcing readers into a world where the colored characters are standing out against solid whites, he's really having a blast with lots of color texture all around the pages, and putting much more dimension and shape into the characters' features. Most of episode five is set in a museum at night, and the darkness is indicated with a lovely, intricate mix of purples, indigos and midnight blues curling around the panels. Samantha's face has shade around her cheekbones that give her more visual fullness than any other figure in the entire issue.

Gibson's even forcing himself into some downright complex compositions. Episode five begins with a fantastic perspective shot of Samantha scurrying around the lighting gantry that is over the museum floor, with that dopey-looking green robosaur rising up into it. When this issue was released, I tried aping that shot - I did draw a self-published comic for several years, so I'm not completely without skill - and could not make it work at all. I would suggest that reader apathy towards Samantha Slade, and bias against the admittedly subpar artwork on the previous two stories, makes people reluctant to look closely at just how fantastic a job Gibson did with "Stim!" Even with the shortcuts, this is among his very best color artwork ever, and, even in a prog with the gorgeous art of Kev Walker and, drawing Savage, the great Charlie Adlard, it's the best looking material in the issue.

So would you believe that, in a story that finally sees Ian Gibson roaring to life and delivering one hell of a great set of pages, it's the script that, for the first time, fumbles? For six episodes, "Stim!" is just fantastic fun, and doesn't need me to defend it. Samantha has been looking into robots doing some pretty ridiculous things like shoplifting and has found evidence that they are on drugs. A criminal inventor has come up with a patch that, very briefly, gives robots imagination and allows them the chance to visualize what they could desire if they had no limits on their freedom of will. The experience is so overwhelming that robots will fight against their programming and steal to finance more patches of stim. The inventor is using the proceeds of the drug sales for the usual Robo-Hunter reasons of wanting to fund a robot revolution in conjunction with an ancient relic of ealier robot advancement, a big transistorized thing called Comrade Lennon. Yes, Grant, you old hippie, we all had that Firesign Theater record, too.

For six weeks, this is classic Sam Slade business. If you love the original run and dismiss this story, you're just lying to yourself, frankly. It's every bit as good as Robo-Hunter at its best, and the artwork is a darn sight better than some earlier epics like "Day of the Droids." Deep down, you know I'm right. But then it ends in episode seven. Seven?! This thing should have run for five months! It's not that it ends badly; if we'd never seen how Sam Slade's best-laid plans go completely haywire and take ridiculous detours while the problem keeps escalating, then I guess that "Stim!" would come to a fine ending. It's just too darn abrupt, and too easy for Samantha. She suffers some inconveniences and aggravations in the first six episodes, but for a genuine classic Robo-Hunter adventure, the hero needs to be in such a soup that she needs scuba gear.

Put another way, when episode six ends, we're right at the point where the next ten weeks should see Samantha getting smooched by Clark Gable droids and having to play Monopoly for hours and arguing with robot rabbis who talk in Yiddish patois and BLAKEE PENTAX and all the other legendary left-field, wildly unpredictable lunacy that gets in the way of a Sam Slade plot. Instead, we jump to the climax. I don't care how much I love Samantha or how damn good Gibson's artwork has been for this outing, this story is missing its madness! It's very good, but it should have been amazing.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Breathing Space: The Complete Breathing Space (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 294, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: Mandroid (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Leatherjack: The Complete Leatherjack (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: Casino Royal (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 308, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Before I go, I would like to thank Tharg the Mighty and all his editorial droids for the very nice package that they sent my way...



I was listed as one of the first Earthlets to receive the inaugural great big Krill Tro Thargos for my service to the cause of the Galaxy's Greatest. I'm pleased to have been thought of so, and greatly appreciate the recognition. This is, of course, no time for complacency! Do you have any idea how many non-scrots and thrill-suckers are out there? The mind trembles.

Next time, a look back at the Megazine's 15th birthday celebration and the return of the Morons! See you next week!

147. Christmas at Tharg's

December 2004: So we come to the end of another year, and it's time for the annual year-end Christmas prog, with new storylines launching and some one-offs. Wrapped in a very silly cover by Mark Harrison - the small illustration here simply can't convey how detail-packed and ridiculous the piece actually is - this sees the first episodes of the Nikolai Dante story "Agent of Destruction" by Robbie Morrison and John Burns, Slaine in "Tara" by Pat Mills and Clint Langley, and a "future sports" story called Second City Blues by "Kek-W" (Nigel Long) and Warren Pleece, about which, more next week. Judge Dredd and Caballistics Inc. will both be part of January's lineup, but they're represented here by one-off double-length episodes rather than part of their next storyline.

Henry Flint contributes three demented and silly one-page strips under the banner of Tharg's Alien Invasions, and there are additional one-off episodes of Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, Robo-Hunter by Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, and Leviathan by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli. Not a bad lineup of strips at all, I'd say!

The Judge Dredd episode is particularly fun, as it finally brings a close to Dredd's recurring enemies Oola and Homer Blint, alias the serial-killing Angel of Mercy and her assistant. They first appeared back in prog 1050 in July of 1997. I really like the way that the Blints are treated without being blown out of proportion and made into a major threat or need for an epic. This is their sixth appearance in the strip, and they get a good send-off, but most importantly, they never dominated the story and Wagner never let their success go to his head. Judge Death and Mean Machine sold out; the Angel of Mercy kept it real.

This episode is illustrated by Andrew Currie, who seems to be Tharg's go-to guy during this period when the script calls for sexy ladies. Since Oola can no longer dress in her black veil and mourning clothes without being spotted, and since she and Homer have set up shop in Brit-Cit as propreitors of a "euthaniasm," she chooses to go the "sexy nurse" route, all curves and cleavage.

Now, I've always said that I like the way that the Judge Dredd strip allows its artists the opportunity to go wildly off-model from time to time, but Oola's new naughty Halloween costume look is matched by Homer's strange devolution. This actually put me off a little at the time, as Homer seems to shrink at least six inches and gains an overbite in Currie's hands, emphasizing how impotent and pathetic he's become as Oola has gone out to get her own serial killing kicks without him. Previously, Homer had just been comic relief, there to cause some moments of panic around his unflappable wife as the judges were closing in. Gradually, Oola has tired of him and is ready to move on. She doesn't need him - she never did - but as his devotion is rewarded with her betrayal, Currie's depiction of him becomes almost sympathetic in its mean caricature. I'd say top marks to that art droid; this simple decision to deviate from the prior models of the character really pays off.

Then there's Ian Gibson, who unaccountably decides to deviate from what we expected Samantha Slade to look like. Oh, wait, this isn't so much characters going off-model as it is Gibson phoning in his artwork and inking it with a Sharpie.



Argh. Ouch. This could start to try a fellow's patience, especially when Gibson was actually given a really good script this time out. "The Davinchy Code" is just hilarious, a really fun, short romp that successfully ticks all the necessary Robo-Hunter boxes - chaos, stupid clients, convoluted cases, big robotic thugs, Hoagy and Stogie causing property damage - while also advancing the plot and giving Samantha an office to start her career properly. But the artwork, this time out, is just plain bad, and criminally rushed. It should have been the high point of the issue, but it has to settle for being one of the best scripts. Sam's time would come, later. Her next two adventures would see the writer and the artist finally meshing perfectly and turning out something memorable and great, and not just firing on the writing side alone.

No, as much as I wish I could say that Samantha Slade is the best thing about Prog 2005, I can't. Certainly not when Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon have a freakishly amazing episode of Caballistics Inc. that flashes back to the wartime Department Q and holy shit is that a U-boat being ripped apart by a giant squid ? ? ?



This episode, "Weird War Tales," sees one of the Cabs team, the put-upon Dr. Jonathan Brand, visiting a remote Scottish island which houses an underground prison. There, a powerful psychic named Magister is under constant guard. Brand, beginning to realize that the Cabs organization is being used in some weird game between Ethan Kostabi and Solomon Ravne, and that neither of them are what they claim to be, hopes that Magister can give him some information on either.

Reardon's artwork has always reminded me of the excellent work that Mike Mignola has done for Hellboy, and that's never so clear as it is in this terrific story. It turns out that Magister was once a member of Department Q, fighting the Nazis and their "Spear of Destiny"-led charge into northern occult research with a team of paranormals, psychics and two-fisted action. I'm also reminded of "Sensitive Criminals," an amazing storyline in Grant Morrison's Invisibles that saw one of those characters learning about a team from the 1920s. In each case, the flashback, showing that the current characters are just the latest in a long line of similar heroes, somehow really makes the present-day storyline much more thrilling.

Maybe it's because the stories let readers see that yes, once upon a time, there were these other heroes, but they're all dead now that reminds us that the current team is not immortal. In fact, we aren't very far from learning just how fragile the characters in Caballistics Inc. are, but we'll come to that in a future installment. "Weird War Tales" is so good that I would not have minded if Gordon Rennie had put the series on hold for a little while so that he could step back and write some more Department Q adventures.

Stories from this issue are available for purchase in the following collected editions:

Caballistics Inc.: Creepshow (2000 AD's online shop)
Leviathan: The Complete Leviathan (2000 AD's online shop)
Nikolai Dante: Hell and High Water (2000 AD's online shop)
Robo-Hunter: The Furzt Case (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 307, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Slaine: Books of Invasions Vol. 2 (2000 AD's online shop)



Next time, more about Caballistics Inc., including an actual image of Hannah Chapter in that floor-length sheepskin jacket that I wrote about a few weeks ago, and the sports thriller Second City Blues. See you in seven!

145. What Grant Was Writing

December 2004: While new names like Steve Roberts, Dom Reardon and Boo Cook have been blowing readers away at 2000 AD this year, over at the sister Judge Dredd Megazine, veterans have been getting all the assignments. There are five new strips in this issue, and the newest creator working on them is Colin MacNeil, whose first Judge Dredd episode came about fifteen years previously. True, there is a Simping Detective text story by newcomer Si Spurrier, illustrated by Frazer Irving, but the strips are all by veterans. There's a Devlin Waugh one-off by John Smith and MacNeil, and four strips written or co-written by old hands John Wagner and Alan Grant, with art by John Higgins, Robin Smith, Arthur Ranson and John Ridgway. Along with other text features and reprints of Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, it's a terrific comic, but not one with much room for new talent.

Ridgway is among the artists rotating on Grant's Young Middenface, a strip that's probably completely impenetrable to new readers. They're prequel adventures of a supporting character in Strontium Dog, somebody who has not been seen in "the present" for more than five years at this point. Wagner and Ezquerra had not reintroduced Middenface McNulty to the pages of their revived Strontium Dog adventures at the time this story was printed, and so these Young Middenface chronicles, which vary wildly in tone from broad and bawdy comedy to the action melodrama of this story, "Killoden," are really fan service for longtime readers. They're very well-told and well-drawn, but with Grant writing these and Anderson: Psi Division and, over in the weekly, Robo-Hunter, you can't help but wish that no matter how good these stories are, you'd prefer Alan Grant working on a property a little more fresh.

Judge Anderson, for example, reflects that she's pushing fifty in the opening episode of "Lock-In," which sees her returning to service after her last couple of psychic-plane adventures. Wow, it's been a really long and strange trip for Cass at this point. In the late nineties, her strip had been a recurring feature in 2000 AD under David Bishop and Andy Diggle's editorships. In 2001, a ten-part story, "R*Evolution," had appeared to instant reader derision that lasts to this day. (Just last month, one of my friends at the 2000 AD message board who goes by the handle "The Cosh" referred to this story as, simply, "Stupid Monkeys." Everybody knew which one he meant and everybody shuddered.) In the summer of 2002, John Wagner had Judge Death get Anderson out of his way, putting her into a coma in the celebrated "My Name is Death" six-parter. Frankly, Anderson had been so non-thrilling for so long, and that story was so damned amazing, that nobody really minded this once-loved character being sidelined.

Obviously, when Alan Grant returned to the character, he had a lot of work to do to make her seem vital and important again. He accomplished this in a really fantastic series of interlocking adventures, all drawn by Ranson, that cover 24 episodes stretching from Meg 214 in January '04 to Meg 241 in February '06. These have not received the attention that I believe that they should, and have yet to be reprinted. (Cass's reprints are, happily, continuing, with the second volume of The Psi-Files phonebooks planned for next February. This will cover all the episodes from 1990 to early 1995. We're getting there!)

Anyway, "Lock-In" is the third of five stories in Grant and Ranson's epic, and it really digs into how weird and how fragile and failing Psi Division really is. The story began with Cass unable to free herself from the coma, thanks to a series of psychic mind-traps left behind by Judge Death and his freaky "sisters," the inhuman Phobia and Nausea. Since her superiors didn't get the message that she needed to be left alone to prevent a virus from leaving her mind should it become conscious again, they send a team of agents and operatives onto the astral plane to revive her. Absolutely nothing goes right, readers learn just how unpleasantly creepy certain departments of Psi Division are - I didn't know what an extispist was until I read "WMD," the second of the five stories - and supporting characters meet gruesome ends and crippling fates all over the place. By the time Cass is brought out of the coma, you start to wonder whether she'd prefer a quiet retirement.



I might be mistaken, but I believe that this 24-episode, 208-page arc storyline was Ranson's last comic work before he retired. I suppose that it will get collected in the Psi-Files phonebooks eventually, but it's a real epic, overlooked by many readers at the time, and deserves a nice, hardback library edition on its own. I am really, really enjoying rereading it. Sure, The Simping Detective and Cursed Earth Koburn got all the attention among Meg stories at the time - and deservedly so; they're great - but I think this saga will be reevaluated in time.

Suggesting that the editor might have been leaning on Alan Grant's considerable talents a wee bit too much in '04, he's also at work co-writing the fourth adventure for The Bogie Man. One fine day, somebody's going to give this creator-owned property a nice and prestige reprint and I'll be incredibly happy. I'll refer readers who'd like a little more background to Wikipedia to learn more, but basically, Grant, John Wagner and Robin Smith did one story for John Brown Publishing in 1989-1991, a second story which was finished for Atomeka Press in 1993 and a third story which appeared in the pages of Toxic! before the second story was completed. "Return to Casablanca" is the first Bogie Man tale in eleven years.

If you're not familiar with the character, he's a very dangerous, escaped mental patient named Francis Forbes Clunie, who believes that he's an amalgam of all the tough, leading characters played in films by Humphrey Bogart. He turns every bit of information he receives into something from the fiction of that actor's iconic films, but his gun is loaded with real bullets.



So the character is basically a tabula rasa, to be dropped into other characters' criminal adventures and wreak holy hell onto them. I mean, you might well be a criminal mastermind with schemes to use your white slavery ring to force eastern European immigrants to make shortbread for you, and you might well be prepared for any possible eventuality, but you're not likely to factor Clunie into your scheme. It's a demented, hilarious, utterly ridiculous series, with the completely unpredictable Bogie Man usually crashing into the more baffling segments of Scottish culture - Americans, go watch "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" to see what I mean - and emerging unscathed and barely ruffled.

A supporting player from an earlier story called Rab McNab turns up again in this one. He's a devilish parody of those safe, 1970s teatime entertainers allegedly popular with housewives of the day - think Rolf Harris singing "Please Release Me" in a Scottish accent - who is desperately trying to hold onto his career and his sobriety while everything around him spirals out of control, bad guys are shooting up the place and Clunes is, obliviously, punching the daylights out of everybody. This poor guy. Man, I love this series.

Stories from this issue are available for purchase in the following collected editions:

Well, here's a surprise. The only thing in this issue to have been reprinted so far is the Simping Detective text story, in : The Complete Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop)



Next time, the present collides with the past! I'll be temporarily derailing this reread format for one week for a quick look back at John Smith's Indigo Prime as this amazing series returns to present-day 2000 AD with a new adventure. Normal service, such as it is, will be resumed on the 15th!

142. The Trouble With Girls

September 2004: It can, quite honestly, be said that 2000 AD has had a little trouble in both attracting female readers and in presenting stories that star female leads. There's an unavoidable boys' club mentality about it. Every so often, somebody will offer a half-baked defense and name some villains or supporting characters or ensemble characters or spinoff leads (like, y'know, the girl in the picture here) as evidence that the comic isn't a complete sausage fest, but that's just studying one tree really intently and ignoring the forest. I mean really, we're coming up on thirty-five years of stories now and the successes in this field would include Halo Jones and, if you really wanted to squint, Tyranny Rex.

Various Thargs have tried, but something about the predominantly male readership and the predominantly male creative units seems, sommmmmehow, to make this a really uphill climb. Of course, letting potential female readers know that there's something in the comic with a lead that they might want to check out is a huge problem the way stories just get slotted in for a month or two these days. By the time the comic media and general geek bloggers become aware that, say, Synnamon has a new story in the prog, it's probably already finished. Four-week runs don't do anybody any good.

Well, Synnamon is perhaps a poor example; as discussed in an earlier entry, the character suffers from being completely perfect and boring and promoted on the covers as a T&A redhead. She was just a misfire right out of the gate. But it really doesn't feel like any lessons were learned from Synnamon's failure.

For example, there's the mostly wonderful Samantha Slade. I say "mostly" because I'm not completely blind to her series' faults. There's the second story, for example. Samantha first appeared in "Like a Virgin," which ran in December 2003's year-end Prog 2004 and the next three issues, published in January. She was then benched while a follow-up was considered. This was nowhere close to being long enough of a run to build any momentum, which is part of what I complained about in the previous entry. I hope that you'll agree that most of the series in 2000 AD will need a lengthy residence and some promotion to drive reader interest, or risk losing it.



If I'm completely honest with myself and not just hyping a series that I love for the sake of sounding all positive, it's no damn wonder Samantha Slade didn't set fandom alight when we had to wait eight months to see what would happen next, only to have this mess as a result. "The Furzt Case," written by Alan Grant, isn't a terrible script, and it has amusing moments, but it's obviously a script that artist Ian Gibson found uninspiring to the point of boredom. You can see his frustration early on, in the ridiculous design of three robots that are meant to look generically "anime" and wear Sailor Moon costumes. I think that Ian Gibson is one of the medium's very best artists, and he can draw the hell out of anything when he wants to. This, he doesn't want to. The art doesn't really fall off a cliff, however, until the end of episode three, when the villain of the piece, Nippon Furzt, shows up. From there, it's phoned-in, lazy, awful artwork, mostly without backgrounds. Not inspired, Gibson stopped trying. I can't defend it; the promise of the first three episodes is completely ruined by the slapdash sabotage of the finished pages.

Samantha didn't escape this unscathed. I believe that most readers were at least curious and optimistic after her first story, but she took a beating before this one was done and her reputation never recovered. I think she works terrifically as a character. She's practical, savvy, clever, makes mistakes and is genuinely fun, and I would love to see her used well by creators who are really giving their all. Happily, readers would get to see stories that fit that description when she returned. But fans are harsh and unforgiving; I suspect that many, burned by "The Furzt Case," just groaned and didn't bother.

Sharing space with Sam Slade this week is a much, much more popular female character, Hannah Chapter. She's among the ensemble cast of Caballistics Inc. and, arguably, the most popular of the team among readers. I'll say something blasphemous here, but give me a chance to explain. Hannah's popularity makes no sense whatsoever.

That's not to say that Caballistics Inc., written by Gordon Rennie and drawn by Dom Reardon, is a worse series than Robo-Hunter, far from it. Objectively, Cabs just kicks the tar out of the 2004-07 run of Robo-Hunter. It's a far better series, with consistently excellent artwork, a real sense of danger and drama, lovely, winking allusions to other horror and SF stories, and a completely unpredictable storyline that left everybody reading it utterly blindsided several times. It's a terrific strip, and Hannah Chapter is the least attractive thing about it.

I can't fault her design. I really love her floor-length sheepskin jacket (Feargal Sharkey's mum says it cost a packet) and rectangle glasses, but it's almost as though Rennie went out of his way to make the character as unappealing as possible. She's a bored, contemptuous nerd and - you'll love this - she talks too much. I'm leaving that in, no matter how misogynist that sounds, because it amuses me so. No, seriously, here's some of what I'm talking about:



And I'll cheat my own rules and add this example from another issue:



In the first case, we've got incredibly unnatural dialogue. Read it aloud and see what I mean. This is what Orson Welles was complaining about when he was reading the script for those fish fingers with the crumb-crisp coating, and he was right. In the second case, you may think oh burn! until you actually try speaking it. Actually, try using it as an insult the next time you're out at a goth club, and watch the target of your barb get bored and look away before you finish talking. Then again, she's American. Some of us have a tendency to be a little long-winded. (Ahem.)

Hannah is always like this. Finding examples is no chore. She is unfailingly surly, rude, smug, sneering, downright obnoxious and she speaks with more words-per-dialogue balloon than anybody this side of Chris Claremont. I don't care how cool that sheepskin jacket is, my heart sank whenever she showed up. Caballistics Inc. was fun because of the wild left turns in the plot and the unbelievable cliffhangers and the artwork and the Doctor Who references. Samantha Slade was fun because she was a believable, reluctant hero in way over her head, and who really would prefer to spend her time buying nice frocks. I know who I'd rather read about, and it's a shame that Grant and Gibson could never quite make Samantha's series as wild and engrossing as Hannah's. Or as popular.

At any rate, I'm sure that my opinions on these characters are not shared by everybody, but I hope I've made a case for them. One thing that I'm sure we all do agree on, however, is that 2000 AD needs to do a far better job on the gender front. The comic should definitely reach out to female talent and nurture some women writers and artists, and it should definitely make a legitimate effort to launch more than one strong female lead for an ongoing series rather than a one-off serial. None of this "testing the waters" nonsense with a six-week commission and gauging reader response. Let's have a character who is not spun off from an existing, male-led property, one who is not drawn as a sexpot, one who is flawed but whose stories are fun to read. This is long overdue, so let's see it in 2012, all right, Tharg?

Anyway, other stories in this prog include a Judge Dredd one-off by Alan Grant and Shaun Thomas, Asylum by Rob Williams and Boo Cook, and Strontium Dog by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, and reprints are available thusly:


Asylum: The Complete Asylum (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Caballistics Inc: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: The Furzt Case (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 307, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, a quick look at Asylum before I get all happy about the return of Lobster Random. Be here in seven!

140. The Megazine Takes it Eazy

June 2004: Well, here's an entry that I can tell is going to be a little frustrating to write. There's so much that I want to say in the next two entries, and get up on a couple of pet hobby horses of mine, but instead I have this utterly flawless issue of Judge Dredd Megazine to discuss. Wow. Reading this again reminds me of how utterly perfect a comic it was during this period. It's a big, thick chunk of a book with a pile of features and some classic black and white reprints (Charley's War and The Helltrekkers) backing up five downright excellent new stories.

On the cover, it's the return of Judge Koburn in his own series, Cursed Earth Koburn. He'd previously appeared as a guest star in a two-part Judge Dredd adventure. Writer Gordon Rennie did this several times, introducing new characters like Johnny Woo and Bato Loco as spotlight-stealing guest stars in Dredd, usually pulling the rug out from under the ostensible lead or otherwise looking much more fun, before they moved out to their own strip. Hey, it works for television spinoffs.

Koburn, of course, is a Dreddworld remodeling of the classic Major Eazy, a delightful World War Two strip by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra that ran in Battle Picture Weekly in the late seventies. One run of the series was set in North Africa and another in Italy, and it featured a laconic, droopy tactical genius who routinely bettered the Nazis and the fascists by way of being an independent thinker who fought his way, never panicked and never hurried. He was visually modeled on the actor James Coburn, and apart from stick-up-their-rears children who weren't in on the joke and wrote unintentionally hilarious letters to Battle complaining that it was a jolly poor rum show to suggest that the disgraceful, unshaven, disrespectful Eazy should have such luck.

Naturally, a character like Eazy is going to have all kinds of fun making the judges of Mega-City one look like idiots. Too much fun, as it turns out, which is why he's a circuit judge bringing law to the lawless of the Cursed Earth wasteland. Here, he's free to drink, brawl, smoke, have girlfriends in every frontier town and occasionally be tasked with cleaning up some city problem in the desert.



And tool around in his great big car. Or hover-ship thingy, whatever. So, teamed with a young stick-up-her-rear Mega-City judge named Bonaventura in this series by Rennie and Ezquerra, he brings law to the lawless and has a ball doing it. The series tackles darker drama with a grain or two less success than it does comedy - the most recent story, featuring an indestructible monster killing everything in the Cursed Earth, felt a little stale - but most of the time, it's terrific fun. Koburn has been resting since his most recent appearance in 2006, but will be returning to the Megazine in 2012.

There's a lot more of interest in this issue. Old hands Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson are putting the comatose Anderson: Psi Division through hell and introducing an incredibly neat set of supporting characters, fleshing out the judges' very weird department of psychics, pyrokines, telekinetics and witches. Somehow Grant is able to make this believable and compelling.

Pat Mills and Simon Davis are collaborating on Black Siddha, which is really neat. Mills has gone on the record many, many times about how much he dislikes superheroes, but when he does them here, the results are really fun. Black Siddha is an Indian superhero operating in London, featuring a young, put-upon lead who really, really doesn't want either the great power or the great responsibility thrust upon him. This impacts his karma-based superpowers and leaves him vulnerable at awful moments.

Surprisingly, this isn't actually a comedy, but it's written with a much, much lighter touch than most of the Guv'nor's work during this period. I think it's a complete trip, a sometimes smutty Bollywood action romp through criminal gangs and reincarnation that plays out very well. There have been three Black Siddha adventures so far, and while it has yet to be collected and the character is currently resting, I certainly hope that we will see him again.

The Simping Detective by Simon Spurrier and Frazer Irving is continuing a celebrated run of stories. Jack Point, a wally squad judge who poses deep undercover as a private investigator, is one of the best characters to emerge during this period. He gets to indulge in all the vices that Koburn enjoys, but he never gets to take much enjoyment from them. He's constantly riding a knife-edge, about to be busted by either the judges' "SJS" internal affairs unit or sent to certain death by a corrupt sector chief. The series is lovely, dense and complex, and Point's ability to think on his feet and manage spiraling chaos is really entertaining.

But it's Judge Dredd who beats even this tough competition of excellent strips. This time out, in the first episode of "Six," written by John Wagner and drawn by Chris Weston. It's an investigation into the work of a serial killer, obviously following in the footsteps of the David Fincher film Se7en, but it takes a fantastic new twist as readers gradually realize that the killer is actually our old, illiterate, super-genius friend PJ Maybe...



Maybe was last seen in a trio of one-episode stories in 2002, where it was revealed that he had engineered a fantastic breakout from the prison where he'd been sent almost a decade earlier. By the time the judges have any idea that he had gone, Maybe had already left the city, established a new identity in Ciudad Baranquilla and then faked his death, leaving his heart behind as evidence. Since the judges never found his many millions tucked away, he was able to live in unimaginable comfort.

Except, well, killers have that urge. Now accompanied by a sexbot called Inga, real estate mogul Pedro Martinez returns to Mega-City One to take care of some old grudges. Time in the sun hasn't dulled Maybe's senses. The story is inventive and the killings are gleefully sick, and once the judges find out what's going on in the concluding episode, the peripheral bodycount gets pretty enormous.

I think I can safely bet that nobody reading this story had any idea how Maybe's story would play out. Wagner probably didn't, either. It's a great example of what I was talking about last time, how Wagner puts so many pieces into play in his stories that subplots naturally arise from all over his world and weave into things. I'm sure it might make Judge Dredd a denser comic for newcomers these days, since there is just so much going on, and an occasional pain in the rear to collect in book form - lost in the nevertheless quite readable Complete P.J. Maybe collection is the reality that the stories unfold over the course of about twenty years - but man, the payoff is amazing. This is terrific stuff.

Stories from this Megazine are reprinted in the following editions:

Cursed Earth Koburn: The Carlos Ezquerra Collection (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: The Complete P.J. Maybe (Amazon UK).
The Simping Detective: The Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop).

Next time, a little change of pace, as my own personal daydream of what it might like to be Tharg runs up against a reality exemplified by Bec & Kawl and The ABC Warriors. See you in seven, friends!

133. I'm in love with a Gibson girl

December 2003: Buried in the bubble between Tharg's mighty hands on the cover of this year's annual prog is the announcement that Robo-Hunter returns inside. That's exciting news, even greater than the cover's artwork by the great Duncan Fegredo. Robo-Hunter last appeared in 1995, with writer Peter Hogan and artist Rian Hughes at the helm. Theirs was a terrific series, whimsical, clever, pleasantly surprising at every turn, and only suffers by comparison to the original run by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson because those three created my all-time favorite comic series. And now, Grant and Gibson have reunited to resume this popular series, as though they'd never been away. Although Samuel C. Slade himself is mostly absent from the story. Holy Joe Smith, great god of robo-hunters, what has happened to your old pal?

"Like a Virgin," the four-part opener for this new run, takes place several years after Sam finally threw his two idiot assistants out and was forced to resume his old job in New York City after they spent all his money in the last original story, "Farewell, My Billions." This new outing begins with the hopelessly idiotic Hoagy coming across his old buddy Carlos Robo-Stogie while trying to track down Sam because he's found a new case for him, both just completely, and hilariously, lacking the insight to understand that Sam never wants to see them again.

Hoagy, using a DNA tracker, finds Sam's granddaughter, the bad-tempered Samantha Slade. It takes Hoagy and Stogie most of the next two episodes to comprehend that this isn't a remarkable new disguise, and that it really is a different person. She wouldn't mind tracking the old man down herself, as he stopped sending child support payments to her mother five years previously.

With typical Robo-Hunter ridiculousness, we soon learn that Sam finally met his match five years previously at the hands of the Cockney filmmaker Rich Guy and his wife, pop star Rodonna, who have been replacing movie stars with robots, and Sam's head has been stored in a cryo-tank and stuffed into a locker at a train station. The poor guy's even lost his body now; he just can't catch a break!



All right, so let's be brutally honest and objective, fans: Samantha Slade's tenure as robo-hunter is not the greatest series of the last decade, but it is nevertheless extremely fun and very silly and a winking breath of fresh air in the wake of the much heavier dramas around it. She takes the reins for six stories of varying lengths over a three-and-a-half year run, and only the second was mildly disappointing. Other than that tale, I love this series completely, and I remain optimistic, perhaps insanely so, that Tharg will be making a surprise announcement about its return before we come to the 2007 progs in this blog and I can avoid writing anything that I don't wish to say. But the events of the most recent adventure, "I, Jailbird," are a tale for another time, and I'll be certain to devote other entries to the tremendously fun and ridiculous third and fourth stories, so there's much more gleefully goofy times ahead.

Samantha's just a terrific character. Every so often, 2000 AD's fans make some noise about the comic being too led by male heroes and guns and testosterone and people wish for some more female leads. Samantha's just perfect for what we like to see: a tough protagonist who thinks on her feet and doesn't rely on sex or firepower to solve problems like, let's face it, plenty of other comic book heroines, but who still looks good and dresses well, especially with Ian Gibson to portray her. She's the perfect lead for a 2000 AD series: sassy, flawed, determined, slightly adrift in a bizarre, yet fully-formed universe, depicted with character and gusto in a well-written strip with constant surprise and wit. Bluntly, if you'd rather see Durham Red or anybody like her in 2000 AD over Samantha, you're as wrong as wrong can be.



Anyway, there's more to say about Prog 2004 besides the debut of Samantha. There's a letter from me, for example, a really great John Wagner episode of Judge Dredd with art by Jim Murray, another one of Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving's silly one-offs, the first new Nikolai Dante episode in ten months (and last for twelve), and the first installments of new storylines for Slaine, The V.C.s and The Red Seas, which will accompany Dredd and Robo-Hunter into January 2004 as the regular lineup. It's perhaps not as amazing as some of the other year-end progs, but it's a great read all around.

Also, it's the first prog with the comic's present size. For the previous two years, it was presented in the same dimensions as an American comic, just a little larger. Now, it's in standard magazine size, an inch shorter and wider than it had been, just like the Meg has been for a little over a year. This is an extremely welcome development since, for the first time ever, both comics are printed in a size that fits in standard magazine bags with the flap closed. Any comic retailer worth its salt can take care of your storage needs for the last six-plus years of thrillpower.

Also this week, I needed to mention that over at my Bookshelf blog, you can catch my review of Defoe: 1666, the first collected edition of this Pat Mills-Leigh Gallagher series. It compiles the first two stories of this series, from 2007 and 2008. Check it out and tell your friends. Links are good. One day they might earn me a penny or two.

Next time, we catch up to the Megazine, where Chris Weston has contributed one of the comic's best covers ever. See you then!

120. Tucker Truckin'

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday! This week, a little change of pace, as the Hipster Daughter shows off Tharg's impressive little promotional gimmick this year, a 48-page minicomic that was given away to the crowds at the San Diego Comic-Con this summer, and mailed out for free to subscribers of the Galaxy's Greatest. My buddy "Proudhuff" was good enough to send me a copy for my collection, and I thought I would share it with you. It's a real shame that Rebellion had given away the full print run at SDCC; I had inquired whether there were any promotional giveaways available for the GMX panel I did in Nashville a couple of months ago and I think a couple of dozen of these would have been great for that crowd!

The comic features eight strips from a host of 2000 AD's better-known talents, from older classics to some of the newer series. It's a really nice introduction to Tharg's world, featuring a one-off Judge Dredd ("Finger of Suspicion" by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy), a classic Future Shock by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and "Reefer Madness" by Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving, along with the first episodes of the Dredd classic "Judge Death" by Wagner and Brian Bolland, Kingdom by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, Zombo by Al Ewing and Henry Flint, and the Slaine epic "The Horned God" by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley.



Each episode ends with a teeny blurb explaining where readers can go next to follow the story or the creators, and while the small size may not be ideal for the artwork - Bisley's in particular suffers - it's a terrific little promo. The last time something like this was tried, it was DC's US-comic-sized freebie, which most comic shops (at least in the Atlanta area) didn't bother to order, since retailers had to pay for them, and they got burned when the similar giveaway Humanoids comic didn't net any new sales for shops. (More about this when we come to that graphic novel line in a future installment!)

I've been saying for years that 2000 AD should participate in the annual Free Comic Book Day which Diamond sponsors each summer. A little reprint of this, with the booth information replaced by a suggestion to ask retailers to order graphic novels and get more of the story, would be a truly great thing indeed. Then again, Rebellion is quite tight-lipped about the business end of the comic, and for all I know, something even better is in the works. Fingers crossed anyway!

One problem about Rebellion's business that we do know about is that they're forced to work with a deeply inept distributor called Diamond to get their product into American comic shops and, earlier in the year, Diamond elected to cancel quite a few already-solicited books in a cost-cutting measure. Among those impacted: the second volume of Ace Trucking Company, a demented, wild comedy by John Wagner, Alan Grant and the late Massimo Belardinelli which originally ran for five years in the eighties. Fortunately, the collection is available through British bookstores and eBay sellers, and from the 2000 AD online shop, so I eventually landed a copy and was very pleased to reread these lunatic adventures.

Ace Trucking is a barely-profitable shipping company run by a motormouth called Ace Garp, who's just one dirty get-rich quick scheme away from either the big time or a very long prison sentence. In fact, he starts this book in jail, a couple of years after he and his crew were put away at the end of the first collected edition. It's set in a very weird future where few humans can be found. This gave Belardinelli the chance to design a completely alien environment and huge casts full of freaky, comical aliens, strange architecture, bizarre spaceships powering through asteroid belts and gangly-limbed space pirates whose T-shirts smoke pipes.

Belardinelli drew all but two of the sixty-odd episodes reprinted in this mammoth book. While he was recuperating from an illness, an anonymous member of the Giolitti art agency, who represented him in England, stepped in for him. Otherwise, this book is all him, and you've not had the pleasure of enjoying Belardinelli before, you should really rectify that. Almost every page looks like he was really having a ball designing this series, and just laughing himself silly with the in-jokes and weird aliens eating each other. Admittedly, towards the end it gets a little dry. The final epic serial in the book was clearly one where the writers were running out of ideas, and Belardinelli wasn't finding very much inspiration as our heroes endlessly searched across the planet Hollywood and through one parody after another in search of some treasure. Before it started its downhill slide, though, Ace Trucking really was something great.

So the entire series is available in two omnibus editions. Obviously, the first is the more consistent of the two, but the second is still full of essential moments, including Ace's recurring enemy Evil Blood, parallel universes, chicken gangsters, labor unrest, sacred worms, porcine royalty, cargo holds full of space fertilizer and contraband beetles which, when ingested, blow your mind so far out that your eyeballs play table tennis against each other. It also contains the strip's spectacular farewell epilogue, in which Ace learns just how unnecessary he actually is to his company's fortunes. You won't find this book at an American comic shop, but I highly recommend that you track down a copy from England.

Next time, we resume the reread in 2003, with the return of Slaine! See you in seven!

118. In the Flesh

November 2002: With no small amount of rejoicing, editor Alan Barnes finally brings all this business of multiple volumes for the Judge Dredd Megazine to a long overdue end. This is the eighteenth, and last, issue of Megazine volume four, and the 200th overall. The next issue, which we'll come to next time, will be formally labelled issue # 201. Mercifully, the simple numbering convention will continue from that point to the present. On the cover, it's Durham Red, as depicted by a model named Anna Edwards. This cover, it must be agreed, doesn't go over well with most fans, to which I say, yeah, whatever. This is a fantastic cover! I guess I understand fandom's reluctance to embrace it; even the editorial evokes the two Nemesis the Warlock photostories from 1987 with a self-aware shudder, never mind all those awful photo-comics that infested the early '80s Eagle. For my money, Anna is sexy and gorgeous and, for about the ten minutes it took to read the first twenty pages of this issue, she is, to me, the definitive Durham Red, completely eclipsing any previous depiction of the character.

Then Mark Harrison, who's been painting her exploits for the last few years, clears his throat politely and shows everybody who's the boss:



As you may recall from earlier installments, Dan Abnett has been scripting a series called "The Scarlet Apocrypha," in which seven different artists provide their take on the character in a variety of genres. Earlier, we've seen Steve Kyte placing her in an anime pastiche, Carlos Ezquerra revisiting the 1980 serial Fiends of the Eastern Front, and John Burns doing the character as the central figure in a Dario Argento horror film among others.

Mark Harrison brings us a world where Durham Red is a character from a long-running series of sci-fi feature films, and where the actresses who have played her are regulars on the SF memorabilia con circuit. Masterfully, he takes Abnett's cute little script and turns it into something amazingly neat by illustrating it as a Mad pastiche in the style of that legendary member of the Gang of Idiots, Mort Drucker.

This is one of my favorite 2000 AD one-offs ever. It's not just that the constant barrage of background gags really works, or that the myopic viewpoints of the hapless teens at the cons is so very true. Amusingly, they seem to love each and every one of the actresses who played Durham Red in the movies, but a replacement actor for Godolkin is dismissed as being as pathetic as the "fake" Travis in the second series of Blake's 7.



There's just a feeling of really audacious experimentation in doing this strip this way at all. Each of the previous artists had contributed some great work, and it was very enjoyable to read, but almost all of it was still somewhere within 2000 AD's admittedly broad style. Even an experimenting Ezquerra, like when he discovered filters and computer coloring in 1994 or thereabouts, is still very much Ezquerra. But this is just radically different stuff for 2000 AD, and the sort of risk-taking that I'd love to see more often. It's also very nice that Harrison had the chance to pay homage to Drucker, an early influence on the artist when he started out. As I've said previously, it's occasionally been evident in his work before: that incredibly sexy Durham Red on the cover of prog 1111 has unmistakable Mort Drucker cheekbones. The episode was reprinted with the other Scarlet Apocrypha installments in the third of Rebellion's Durham Red books, The Empty Suns.

There's actually some non-Red material in this issue as well. In it, all of the ongoing series reach their final episodes, clearing the decks for the new stories that begin in Meg 201, which I'll come back to next week. So it's goodbye to The Bendatti Vendetta, Scarlet Traces, Young Middenface and a very good Judge Dredd storyline that was illustrated by John Ridgway. 2000 AD's brief flirtation with photo covers quickly ended, although an outtake from this session will be pulled into service a year or so later when Durham Red returns to the weekly, which is a real shame, as we never had the fun of seeing an actor dress up as Devlin Waugh.

Back in the summer, Rebellion issued the thirteenth in their series of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files. This reprints all the Dredd episodes that originally appeared in 2000 AD from March 1989 to January 1990 in one very nice package. Most of them are in full color, although these originally saw print back when 2000 AD only had a single color episode each week out of five stories. For ten weeks in the period, the Slaine storyline "The Horned God" got the color slot, kicking Dredd to the front of the comic in black and white. So now you know, it's been twenty years since Dredd was a black and white comic. Lotta pages under the bridge in all that time!

The first of those episodes is the classic "In the Bath," in which Dredd reflects on his battered and bruised body while trying to enjoy one of his rare moments of scheduled downtime, only to find he still can't escape the crazy, ultraviolent city for even a few moments of peace and quiet. The episode, by John Wagner and Jim Baikie, was instantly praised as a classic, expertly mixing quiet pathos with absurdist comedy.

Most of the book is written by Wagner. By this point, he and Alan Grant were working individually, and Grant doesn't contribute quite as many episodes as before, but he does bring some real gems, best among them "A Family Affair." This is a really mean-spirited, hilarious look at things spiraling way out of control when Dredd goes to inform some citizens that a family member was killed in a police shooting. Steve Yeowell paints the episode, and there's a two-panel moment when someone realizes exactly which policeman did the shooting which is the funniest thing ever. Yeowell's third series of Zenith was running about the same time, and it's very interesting to see him apply the same style, but with color.

There are no major storylines or epics in this collection, but Wagner does touch on some earlier threads that carry on from earlier volumes. At this stage, there are still comparatively few recurring characters in the series, but Anderson and Hershey show up again briefly, and we have a return for the disturbed Judge Kurten, now in his new base of operations south of the border, along with Rookie Judge Kraken, who will become a major player in the fourteenth book.

There is a small, unfortunate printing error in this edition. The Colin MacNeil-painted "Dead Juve's Curve" repeats an error from its original printing and has a couple of pages out of order. It's an unfortunate hiccup, but one easily overlooked among so much really good material. Don't let the number 13 on the book deter you if you're new to Dredd: this is a perfectly fine starting point for new readers, and it might do you well to begin here before the apocalyptic events of the volume which comes next...

When we return, it's the biggest Megazine yet, with the debut of Family by Rob Williams and Simon Fraser!

111. The Bloody Students

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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