33. The Hit List

April 1996: Prog 989 sees the last part of the first R.A.M. Raiders adventure. This is a notable series in one respect: detailed anecdotal evidence over the last decade has proven that I am, in fact, the only person on the entire planet who liked R.A.M. Raiders. The series was the last one that Alan McKenzie brought to 2000 AD - quite possibly the last one he did for any comic - and featured a pair of young hackers in the near future, Cody and his girlfriend Meg, who stole customers out from under bigger and better-established tech support crews. They run into very weird evidence that computers are becoming sentient. Just like my iPod, in other words. It's slight, and, if we're honest, not anywhere near as thrilling as a 2000 AD series should be. But it's a nice counterpoint to the heavier, gun-laden stories elsewhere in the prog (this time, Judge Dredd by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra, Rogue Trooper by Steve White & Steve Tappin, Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett & Charlie Gillespie and Vector 13 by Simon Furman & John Higgins).

At the end of the first R.A.M. Raiders story, there's a completely bizarre twist: Meg gets killed in an explosion and returns as a ghost that only be seen by Cody or by robots. So the story starts as a lighthearted TechGhostbusters before turning into Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). Maybe that's why it was so unpopular: it felt more like a TV series that McKenzie had failed to sell than it did a comic. He scripted two five-part stories under John Tomlinson's commision, the first with art by Calum Alexander Watt and the second by Maya Gavin. This very much falls in line with the sort of strips I was mentioning in the thirtieth entry, and could certainly have been in the regular rotation had Tomlinson remained with 2000 AD.



But David Bishop had other ideas, chiefly that these slight stories were a little long at five parts apiece. Watt had already completed art on the first, but the second was edited down from five parts to three before Maya Gavin got to draw it. Even if McKenzie had continued in the business, it's unlikely that R.A.M. Raiders would have returned. It appears that McKenzie has evidently tired of comic publishing by this point and is looking at a new career. Other early 90s names are finding other outlets in magazine illustration or jobs for American publishers. But several of their fellows find commissions drying up as Bishop looks elsewhere for ongoing 2000 AD work. Even several of the creators that he'd commissioned for the Judge Dredd Megazine become conspicuously absent over the next couple of years. I did a little tally, and whether by default or by design, the list of 2000 AD creators who will move on includes about twenty names, among them all three of R.A.M. Raiders' script and art droids.

There are some really positive changes to the comic during this period. I particularly like the tendency for longer residencies in the lineup. You could easily imagine the two R.A.M. Raiders stories, under the Richard Burton days, appearing months apart from each other. By running these and other strips in longer runs with multiple artists, readers are able to get more interested in the settings and the characters. The 10-14 week runs of Rogue or Venus Bluegenes, or Sin Dex, or some of the other series which will be launching soon, like Outlaw or Black Light or the big run of Slaine strips to come, are much more memorable than what we are unfortunately seeing in the present day, where, for example, The 86ers returns to the weekly after a year's break, with virtually no recap or reminder, and rushes through six subplot heavy weeks before vanishing again.

Further, Bishop brings to 2000 AD one of his staples from his tenure at the Megazine, the intro page. Each new storyline is preceded by a pinup page which recaps the story so far and refreshes readers' memories about the subplots - even if the series was in the previous issue! Prog 990 gives R.A.M. Raiders an intro page for its second and final story. Now, this is a strip which everybody involved has already decided will not be returning, and yet it gets the benefit of the intro page to help any first-time readers understand what they're about to read. That's a very nice idea and I wish today's Tharg would resurrect it.



Speaking of resurrections, the previous month saw a mention of one of Sinister Dexter's occasional employers, the ganglord Holy Moses Tanenbaum. In the current two-parter, we meet the criminal kingpin. A contract's been put out on him by his moll, the statuesque torch singer Demi Octavo. Finnigan has a little trouble with Holy Moses's force field, but Ramone finishes the job.

This is interesting because Sinister Dexter really never collect much of a rogue's gallery - most of the recurring antagonists are fellow gunmen and theirs is an occupation with more terminal ends than typical comic book heroes. Some of the more recent storylines have seen some shenanigans about Moses Tanenbaum "returning to life" through somewhat eyebrow-raising means (there are two: one is a clone and one comes from a parallel dimension), and the characters in the strip treat this like it's the worst thing imaginable, like Moses is, by some distance, the most menacing character in all of fiction. This remains head-scratchingly odd. Dan Abnett never made Moses into a serious threat in the first place. It's all very well for him to tell us ten years later on what a spectacular supervillain he was, and how his return is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the city of Downlode, but I've got the issues right in front of me, and he wasn't much of a villain, and his return is, thus far, unsatisfying and convoluted.

Next week: Middenface McNulty!! But more importantly... Simon Davis!!

(Originally published 12/20/07 at LiveJournal.)

26. The Hondo Deal

It's November 1995, and 2000 AD is beginning a tradition of a new jump-on issue every 13-14 weeks, with all-new thrills. This will often include a one-off Dredd episode, as it lends itself more readily to a done-in-one simple introduction to the format. In prog 964, this is an episode by John Wagner and Cliff Robinson which brings back the minor character of Bishop Desmond Snodgrass and, in a very cheeky move, "outs" him as a simp. Simps are Mega City-One loonies who dress in bizarre, attention-seeking garb, and were introduced in a Robinson-illustrated story in 1987. The struggle for simp rights occasionally surfaces in Dredd as a metaphor for gay rights; this episode seems to recall a 1994 incident in which Peter Tatchell's group OutRage! outed fourteen bishops of the Church of England.

Rogue Trooper, by Steve White and Steve Tappin, also returns. It has to be said that the artwork is quite good, at least. More on this next week. Book Two of The ABC Warriors: "Hellbringer," by Pat Mills and Kevin Walker, finally kicks off more than a year after Book One concluded. "Finally!" says my son, who thinks there was far too long a gap between books... and this from a kid who's reading 5-6 issues a week! It's probably the best story in the lineup, but it will also be the last ABC Warriors story in the prog for four years. PARAsites, or possibly paraSITES, or conceivably PAINTdry by Mark Eyles and Mike Hadley, finally appears after sitting on Tharg's shelf for more than 18 months. This is a sequel to the universally-loathed 1992 series Wire Heads. The six-strip format will resume in the next issue when Vector 13 returns and this lineup will be settled in for a couple of months.



The other series beginning in this issue is a very interesting eight-part Chopper story. It's by Alan McKenzie, with art by John Higgins. I say it's "interesting" because I believe it is the last remnant of an abandoned storyline about the rebuilding of Mega-City Two, and a major global conflict. In 1992, this was one of the mega-cities wiped out in the Garth Ennis-scripted story "Judgement Day." The editorial team at the time had since been putting little pieces together in the comic about tensions between Mega-City One, Hondo City (Japan) and Sino-Cit One. These showed up in a Dredd episode by Mark Millar called "War Games" in prog 854 (Sept. 1993), along with Ennis's The Corps (progs 918-923, Jan. 1995). But as Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie, who evidently worked out the ideas along with Millar and Ennis, moved on from editorial positions, the big epic-in-the-works was quietly shelved, especially as John Wagner returned to 2000 AD in 1994 and had no interest in the idea.

From what we can piece together from the episodes that were published, Hondo City had grown to encompass the entirety of the Japanese islands, with very little room for its population. With a gigantic chunk of real estate on the west coast of North America suddenly freed after its population was overrun by zombies (see the "Judgement Day" page on Wikipedia), the Hondo City government decided to rebuild on the site, and to move a number of its citizens there. The giant rebuilding project drew hundreds of thousands of Mega-City One citizens to trek across the desert wasteland for construction jobs.



It's actually not a bad premise at all, but I wonder how McKenzie and the other writers intended to turn this curious backstory into an exciting mega-epic of destruction, the way these Dredd multi-part epics tend to go. I guess we'll never know, but I certainly enjoyed the way that other stories and serials were used as building blocks. I guess, since no major inter-city conflict emerged or another world war started, that the Japanese rebuilt Mega-City Two, moved millions of its citizens there to settle in with relocated workers from Mega-City One and Texas City, and they lived happily and peacefully without international incident. That certainly makes a change from the usual bloody Dredd mega-epic.

The Chopper story itself isn't really bad, but it's very slow, and takes forever to get going. As a character piece it works, but you sort of expect a little more action and energy from a strip about a guy who moves at 150 mph on a flying surfboard, you know?

In two weeks' time, I'll look at what actually was developed as the next mega-epic, and how remarkably different it was from its predecessors. It's called "The Pit," and I recall it being very, very much worth the wait...

(Originally published 10/18/07 at LiveJournal.)

24. From the Mixed-Up Files of the Men in Black

By September 1995, 2000 AD has settled into one of what my son would tell you is one of the comic's all-time best lineups. I would not necessarily agree, but it does contain two Judge Dredd episodes, both written by John Wagner, with art by Carlos Ezquerra and Andrew Currie. The first one is part of a major new story called "Bad Frendz." It introduces an untouchable kingpin named Nero Narcos and his supposedly charitable Frendz organization. The Frendz will prove to be the major ongoing subplots in Mega City-One for the next several years, with quite a few cases taking surprise detours when a hidden connection to the Frendz comes to light.

Also present in prog 957, as the cover indicates, is the second and final Maniac 5 serial by Mark Millar and Steve Yeowell. Well, my son likes it, anyway. There is also a one-off Strontium Dogs episode which fills in for Slaine during a week's break between two storylines. It's written by Peter Hogan, with guest art by Simon Harrison. The Journal of Luke Kirby, by Alan McKenzie and Steve Parkhouse, continues what will prove to be its last serial. This is a very interesting story called "The Old Straight Track" which focuses on ley lines and stone circles and the like. So bluntly, all the time-marking that was evident ten issues previously is totally gone. Even accepting that Maniac 5 is yet another dull indestructible supertough engaging in another boring Mark Millar beat-em-up, it certainly engages a ten year-old's thrill-circuits and proves a good counterpoint to the slower, more reflective Luke Kirby and Strontium Dogs stories.



But perhaps the most interesting bit in the comic, outside of the Wagner-Ezquerra Dredd episode, is Vector 13. This is a series of one-off five-page stories hosted and narrated by a collection of Men in Black, telling tales of bizarre fortean events, with mothmen, UFOs, ghosts, coincidences, saber-toothed tigers and weird conspiracies. They're all told with a sense of quiet sobriety, played straight but also played lightly. It's a balancing act that doesn't always work, but when it does, the results are just great.

Where the heck did this come from? 2000 AD had included occasional one-part stories since 1977, as all anthology comics occasionally did, to fill gaps between longer serials and to give new talent a chance to get some experience before tackling a larger commitment. In 2000 AD, these most often appeared under the banners Tharg's Future Shocks, Tharg's Time Twisters or Tharg's Terror Tales. Vector 13 marked the first time that the fictional hosts were in some way a participant in the events, with all of the narration from their point of view, and occasionally recounted to an audience of other Men in Black at some conference or training.

But the Men in Black? It seems so cheesy from our perspective, because the mid-90s ran nothing into the ground so firmly as secret government conspiracies. The X Files debuted on the American Fox network in September 1992, perfectly timed to build an audience ready to relive the assassination of Kennedy in a dozen 30th anniversary specials. The city of Roswell, New Mexico enjoyed newfound notoreity, some "video entrepreneur" sold Fox a "documentary" called Alien Autopsy - Fact or Fiction?, and, for at least two years, every new drama on NBC that wasn't a Law & Order spinoff had its protagonists running from the relentless pursuit of the shadowy government conspiracy obsessed with their capture. Oh, and Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones made a couple of movies that made some money.

Over the next year, Vector 13's hosts stay very busy. The Men in Black will pop into at least two more series, and that's before things get really odd in 1996... but that's getting ahead of things. For now, Vector 13 is quietly making a mark with some downright excellent little short stories, with great contributions from the likes of Shaky Kane, Dan Abnett, Nigel Long, Kevin Cullen, Sean Phillips and John Ridgway. Many more creators will have work in the series, which will run to 66 episodes, including Pat Mills, who will make a very rare excursion into the land of one-off stories in an upcoming prog. Here's another thing that Tharg should look into reprinting. The entire series could be handled in two volumes, and we'd get some really great, rare work back into print.



Next week, the comic makes an unusual move and ties elements of the comic's backstory together to match the film. Will it work?

(Originally published 10/4/07 at LiveJournal.)

20. The Strange Case of the Missing Armitage

By the beginning of June 1995, volume 2 of the Megazine is winding down for its big relaunch to coincide with the Judge Dredd feature film. Similarly, the two companion reprint titles are closing down in favor of new FIRST ISSUE relaunches with new titles: The Best of 2000 AD Monthly, after 119 issues, becomes Classic 2000 AD, for instance. As 2000 AD itself is aiming more at older teens, a new, twice-monthly companion title called Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future is launched, targetting 8-12 year-olds. It's all part of the odd reality of magazine publishing in the mid-90s. Everything is controlled by marketing analysis and common sense loses out to people who spend all day writing memos about the viability of corporate synergy and redemographication in the advertising market.

2000 AD itself narrowly avoids being renumbered FIRST ISSUE along with the rest of the line; editor John Tomlinson pens a Thargnote in prog 943's output page dismissing the rumors that 949 would be the last under the old numbering, with 950 appearing instead as vol.2 # 1. This was indeed Fleetway's plan for a time, as David Bishop confirmed in in Thrill-Power Overload. I recall reading of that suggestion in the comic and being baffled that anybody would start such a bizarre rumor, little realizing that it had basis in fact.

The Megazine is burning away the last of some stockpiled stories during this period. These include the impenetrable mess that is Pandora by Jim Alexander and John Hicklenton and another installment of Si Spencer's anthology title Plagues of Necropolis. There's a black and white Dredd episode - actually the first monochrome Dredd in several years - by John Wagner and newcomer Tom Carney, and there's a Missionary Man one-off which my son thought was incredibly awesome, but I found Jon Beeston's artwork disagreeably lurid and gory, which is probably why he thought it was incredibly awesome.



The only shining light in this Meg, I'd say, is the other Dredd episode in the issue, "Whatever Happened to Bill Clinton?," which is the sequel to an episode from earlier in the spring. In this one, by Wagner and Siku, a mutant criminal named Heap Molinsky - what a great name! - has stolen some technology to do a mindswap through time with the president, and he immediately orders in some prostitutes and calls the generals to get the nukes ready.

It's fluff, of course, and the plot, such as it is, is only there to justify gags at Bill and Hillary's expense, but it's incredibly silly and very entertaining. And no, as I say all too often in this feature, it's not yet been collected. Hopefully before too long...

The genuinely bizarre thing about this issue is this note about what to expect in the following issue:



This Armitage two-parter never appears! It's the 2000 AD equivalent of Shade the Changing Man # 9 or those other DC Implosion books of the late 1970s. This would have been Kevin Cullen's last art job for the Megazine - he has a few one-shots coming to 2000 AD in the months to come - but the artwork actually goes missing, and, from what I understand, was never found.

That just about wraps it up for Armitage. The character, Dave Stone's take on a plainclothes detective in Brit-Cit, is next seen in a text story in a Judge Dredd Mega-Special, but doesn't appear in the comics again for five years. He gets a four month story and is passed over again for another three and a half years. Armitage was one of my favorites, but he's pretty much forgotten today.

In old business, I heard this week from former 2000 AD editor Alan McKenzie, who wrote to clarify that the "Sonny Steelgrave" pen-name was one shared by himself and John Tomlinson, and consequently, he shouldn't receive sole credit, or sole blame as the case may be, for the Steelgrave-penned Judge Dredd episodes. I revised the third and sixth entries of this series to note his corrections.

McKenzie also discussed his claim to the copyright of Luke Kirby, and I certainly hope, as always, that creators and publishers work out their differences to all parties' satisfaction. A periodic problem I run across when I've been researching Reprint This! are cases where rights issues are holding up certain series; it may make me look like a company man, or it may make me look even more selfish than I'd like, but really, the pipe dream I hold is to see a hell of a lot more stuff in print than what we have currently. This may come across as a frustrated "get over it and deal with each other" attitude, which might well rub a creator who feels that he has some legitimate grievances the wrong way.

Anyway, next week, we wrap up the pre-movie era, in what's certain to be a short installment, as befits the three-episode lifetime of Tracer.

(Originally published 9/6/07 at LiveJournal.)

14. I Cannot Be a Nun!

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

6. Getting Lost With Luke Kirby

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. You can bookmark this feature and skip the rest of my Livejournal by clicking the "2000 ad" tab below.

Prog 887 was published in May 1994. Last time we had three Millars and a McKenzie, and this time it's two McKenzies and a Millar. The latter writer's Babe Race 2000 continues, as does The Clown by Igor Goldkind, who's joined by Greg Staples on art this time. Staples has other colors than brown in his palette and the result is much better looking than the previous episodes by Robert Bliss. Unfortunately, Goldkind's story has hit "head-scratching" at this point, so Staples is painting something less than engaging.

John Tomlinson, using the "Sonny Steelgrave" pseudonym that he shares with McKenzie, contributes the second half of a two-part Judge Dredd story illustrated by Clint Langley. This year, Langley has contributed some amazing computer-enhanced work on The ABC Warriors, but this is early in his career and it's frankly a big green and black mess, full of jagged edges and teeth. His signature even looks like a heavy metal logo. The script seems tailor-made to his work in the early 90s, such as Dinosty, so Tomlinson gets points for writing to his artists' strengths. Alan McKenzie, meanwhile, brings another fun Bradley adventure, this time sticking the skateboarding menace into a four-part take on The Prisoner of Zenda. Simon Harrison is the art droid for this one, meaning everybody looks like brilliantly-colored statues made from mucus.

Yes, there was some damning with faint praise in those two paragraphs. Fortunately, we've got The Journal of Luke Kirby to take up the slack.



We're coming to the end of the third Luke Kirby serial in this issue, and it's a real shame that it did not continue beyond McKenzie's departure from the comic. It was always the odd strip out: slow-paced, magical and rural, and with a protagonist as young as many readers. The initial artist was John Ridgway, but the great Steve Parkhouse has stepped in at this point, and his work is just excellent.

Originally intended as a pitch for Eagle around 1987, Luke Kirby found its way into 2000 AD instead, where there was some consternation about whether the series was right for the comic. It's set in the early 1960s and features a young boy learning the family tradition of magic and coming up against supernatural opponents. The stories are told very well, with unusual, off-setting imagery, like a depiction of one of Hell's levels being modern London, so crowded and full of miserable people that Luke can barely stand it.

Luke himself is a very strong central character. He's mostly on his own (without the strong support system of other young magicians which lets certain other superstar magicians of children's fiction accomplish anything), and comes across as a sad, lonely boy, nursing some genuine inner hurt after the deaths of some close family members. He's a very sympathetic character, and he's totally got my son hooked. Over this run, he's really enjoying Dredd, and Missionary Man over in the Meg, and Luke Kirby. Nothing else is interesting him, suggesting that spotlighting a character around the age of 10 or 11 is a pretty good idea for an anthology comic to do every once in a while.

(Incidentally, McKenzie, Ridgway and Parkhouse had worked together about ten years prior to this issue. They were the team behind the first year of Sixth Doctor stories for Marvel's Doctor Who Magazine - McKenzie as editor - before Parkhouse stepped down. McKenzie scripted the second year on his own. I don't think they ever really captured the essence of Doctor Six - grouchy, loud, antiauthoritarian and a total hero to any child who's recently been told to clean his room - but they had some neat ideas.)



Anyway, Luke Kirby's one of those annoying strips that has never been collected. Over at his website, The Story Works, McKenzie has made a similar claim to the one Grant Morrison's made over Zenith: he never formally assigned copyright on the series to the publisher, and consequently it resides with him. The corporate response - and McKenzie will understand that I'm the fan who wants reprint collections on his bookshelf and will toe the corporate line to get 'em - is that the copyright got signed over when the writers and artists cashed the paychecks. On the other hand, it's not exactly a court fight that Rebellion can really afford to lose, since the resulting negative precedent would end up costing 'em a sizeable chunk of their back catalog. That's why the copyrights, trademarks and ownerships are all signed out in legalese upfront since Rebellion bought the comic in 2000 and you don't get these sort of quibbles these days.

So since nobody wants to test those ugly legal waters, Luke Kirby sits in limbo. That's a shame, because any reader who's enjoyed Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic or that superstar magician kid would totally enjoy Luke Kirby, plus you'd get more of Parkhouse and Ridgway's great art back in print. You could do those 46 episodes in one big book or two thin ones (the first 22 episodes in one and the last 24 in the second; that would be a perfect split.), and my kid could take them to school. He'd like that, and so would yours.

Next week, I'll talk about something my kid didn't like. At ALL. But I did...

(edit: The introductory paragraphs of this article were revised on Sept. 4 2007 to clarify that the Dredd episode was scripted by John Tomlinson, and not by Alan McKenzie. In the comments of the LiveJournal entry, Mr. McKenzie offers further input on Luke Kirby's copyright situation. --Grant)

(Originally published 5/10/07 at LiveJournal.)

5. The Last Good Thing Mark Millar Wrote for 2000 AD

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.

Prog 883 was published in April 1994 and it's what's called a three-Millar prog. That's not a good sign. Judge Dredd is again written by Alan McKenzie under his "Sonny Steelgrave" pseudonym, the last of a three-parter illustrated by Mick Austin. It feels a little awkward, but it's honestly not bad. The Clown is continuing its second run, scripted by Igor Goldkind and painted with mud by Robert Bliss. This is one of those stories where the supporting cast is a million times more interesting than the star; they could have done a series about these cheesecake-obsessed cops which might have been pretty good. Then there's a story with apalling art by Jim McCarthy and a story with quite good art by Anthony Williams and a story with very, very good art by Simon Jacob. And some really horrible scripts.

If you ever get the notion I might be beating a dead horse by coming back again and again to the spectacular awfulness of Mark Millar, well, you might be right, but he brought it on himself, not merely by writing some dreadful scripts, but writing so many of them. And then they all got commissioned!

As Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie, the editors of 2000 AD during the early 90s, have declined to go on the record in recent years to discuss this period, we can only speculate what brought so much Millar to the pages. I can generally see their motives in employing him as often as they did; Millar was touted as a hot young up-and-coming talent, and his work for Crisis was not that bad, even if it lacked the subtlety and promise of his peer Garth Ennis. (And yes, even Troubled Souls has subtlety in places.)

But the difference between Millar and Ennis couldn't be more blatant. Ennis speaks with humility about his earliest series for Crisis and with regret that he didn't do a better job on his 2000 AD stories, despite the many very good scripts he contributed at the time. Millar, however, has been nothing short of dismissive, speaking with punkish contempt about the 2000 AD veterans who came before him, and making no secret of the fact that he wanted to use 2000 AD as a stepping stone to work for American comics.

What he left behind in his wake was incredibly frustrating at the time, and it reads even worse in retrospect. A typical Mark Millar story features incredibly tough main characters yelling some variation of "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" at each other, usually surrounded by the carnage and destruction of the storyline to that point, and then punching each other until the good guy wins. The supporting cast is there to provide cannon fodder for the bad guy up until that point. Here's some typical Millar dialogue from the period:



Nowhere is this more evident than in Millar's godawful take on Judge Dredd, which might have been truly called Super Dredd and the Keystone Kops. A Mega-City One judge, in Millar's hands, wouldn't last three minutes with a declawed kitten, unless the judge is Super Dredd, who can beat up anybody on account of him being Dredd, and him being the toughest one there is.

This is a particularly rough period for the comic, with one six-part storyline after another featuring either an indestructible (apart from the hand) priest (Canon Fodder) or an indestructible guy with bad teeth (The Grudge-Father) or an indestructible motorcycle mama (Babe Race 2000) or an indestructible Soviet super-judge (Frankenstein Division) or the other indestructible Soviet super-judge (Red Razors), all yelling and battering their ill-defined opponents. No wonder we loved the thoughtful and charming Luke Kirby - about which more next week - so much at the time. It's a very short hop from these incredibly stupid strips to Millar's Ultimate Captain America shouting "Do you think this A stands for France?" in Marvel Comics. And if you think that passes for clever, then you might enjoy Millar's 2000 AD work just fine.

Millar's period of omnipresence is coming to an end with this prog, meaning I'll have more positive things to write about in other entries, but I did want to share this cliffhanger with you:



I like that. Despite the fact that the robot baddie's dialogue is a pretty good example of the tough-guy yelling that's Millar all over, and despite the fact that Millar's general take on Robo-Hunter - turning a down-on-his-luck, can't-get-a-break loser into an ultraviolent, minor celebrity with his own line of scrapbook annuals for his fan club - is the most wrongheaded botchjob seen in the medium, that's a pretty clever little cliffhanger.

Tharg was in the process of transitioning Robo-Hunter from Millar to Peter Hogan when this was published, although it didn't really take and the whole period, despite Hogan's charming efforts, has since been excised from the Sam Slade canon. There were two Hogan stories prior to this, which sensibly returned Hoagy and Stogie to the lineup; they'd been mostly absent for Millar's run. "The Robotic Revenge of Dr. Robotski" was Millar's last Robo-Hunter adventure, and it's the best of his ten tales, by miles. It's still lousy, penned by a writer indifferent to anything beyond his page rate, and enlivened only by Simon Jacob's great art, full of dramatic angles and inventive use of color.

But that cliffhanger's actually pretty good. It prompted a smile, and it suggests that Millar could have been using the format for stories that were inventive rather than repetitive.

I haven't followed his post-2000 AD career very closely. I know he cowrote some stuff with Grant Morrison that was occasionally good (Aztek: The Ultimate Man, nine months on The Flash, six months on Vampirella, four months on Swamp Thing), but, left to his own devices... well, there was that fill-in on JLA with Amazo which was godawful, and that three-month "The Black Flash" story wherein the Flash defeats a foe who cannot be outrun by, errr, outrunning him.

Next week, praising something underrated.

(Originally published 5/3/07 at LiveJournal.)

Thrillpowered Thursday - 3.

Recap! 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.

February 1994 brings us to prog 873. This is a promotional, jumping-on issue, featuring the first episodes of five stories. John Smith and Pat Mills each write one. Alan McKenzie writes or co-writes three of them, two of which are under pseudonyms. Michael Fleisher had written four 12-part Rogue Trooper stories. This is the fourth, rewritten and edited from 12 parts to 10, and split into a 2-part prologue and the eight episodes here, credited to Fleisher and "Sydney Falco." It has some nice Chris Weston art, anyway. Another of McKenzie's stories - the one on which he's pleased enough of to use his real name - is the always entertaining Journal of Luke Kirby . The third one, co-written with John Tomlinson and credited to "Sonny Steelgrave," is Judge Dredd: "The Sugar Beat," a six-parter featuring these guys, the judges of the Pan-Andes Conurb:



Oh, dear.

Stereotyping by nationality has a long history in the pages of the Galaxy's Greatest. The late Massimo Belardinelli, when he would be picked to illustrate the Tharg the Mighty in-joke strips set in the editorial office, would caricature himself as constantly eating a giant bowl of pasta, for example. Those same strips would see Alan Grant wearing a tartan tam o'shanter.

One of the greatest of all the Robo-Hunter strips was "Football Crazy," which shows the Japanese to be completely obsessed with cameras. It's so over-the-top as to be cringeworthy, but I think it works because (a) it's short, and (b) John Wagner and Alan Grant are much, much meaner to the British in this strip than they are to anybody else. In Robo-Hunter, Britain is populated by the most indolent and lazy people in the world, who only care about benefit checks and soap operas, unless it's World Cup season or a beloved stateswoman has been assassinated. If you're willing to poke lots of fun at yourself, to the point of being downright mean, then only the humorless or the stupid would take offense at the jabs at other nationalities.

Judge Dredd's world didn't arrive fully-formed. About a year into the strip, we met a few judges from other cities during the "Luna-1" storyline. There, we learned that Texas City judges stood a good chance of being called "Tex" and wearing cowboy hats, and South-Am City judges had garish moustaches and spoke English with the random insertion of words like "muchachos," and the Sov judges of East-Meg One were grim authoritarians with hammer & sickle logos on their helmets whose broken English similarly found room for the word "comrade" whenever possible, the same way the X-Man called Colossus did in Marvel Comics.

In fact, there are many similarities between these early attempts at international judges and the All-New Uncanny X-Men. You knew Wolverine was Canadian because he said "bub" and "eh," and Nightcrawler was German because he'd occasionally say "sehr gut" and Banshee was Irish because he called all the girls "wee lassie" and so on. Writers used little bits of language and small cultural bits to identify characters as coming from some other culture or nation.

As Dredd's world has continued to expand, the tendency in the strip and its spin-offs has been to turn every judge culture into a broad stereotype of the region. In several instances, the definition for the foreign mega-cities has been left in the hands of a local boy, as it were. Scotland's Jim Alexander defined the judges of calhab as wearing tartan kilts, being obsessed with clans, speaking in phonetic brogue you can barely understand and drinking radioactive whiskey. Irish writer Garth Ennis gave us the world of Murphyville, capital city of Emerald Isle, where the judges wear green, politely work their investigations about the island's tourist culture from pubs, and enjoy a diet of potatoes and Guinness. Dave Stone gave us a Brit-Cit police force which operates from the New Old Bailey, where plainsclothes officers can be certain they will not be promoted beyond the rank of detective inspector unless they belong to a certain fraternal organization. I seem to recall that Inspector Morse fella figuring that out the hard way himself once...

Playing with stereotypes to create these broad, comic backgrounds is rarely offensive, in part because we meet protagonists who are, for lack of a better word, heroic figures. The audience has a degree of sympathy and interest in Judge MacBrayne and DI Armitage, and even though Judge Joyce is mostly played for laughs as a country mouse in the big city, we still laugh with him, rather than at him.

The judges from other cultures, the ones outside the typical 2000 AD talent pool, are also usually shown with some degree of heroism. Even Mark Millar and Grant Morrison's gang from Luxor City - that's future Egypt - come out decently in their own way. Sure, you've got the appropriate stereotypes ticked (pyramids, mummies, cobras on the helmets) and while the story rapidly degenerates into yet another Millar tale of muscled toughs beating each other senseless on a conveyor belt, it still gives us what's said to be an effective judge system, a sympathetic chief judge who's a good man, and an incompetent but heroic counterpart to Dredd in the form of Judge Rameses.

But oh, boy, these guys in the Pan-Andes Conurb. McKenzie and Tomlinson have just got it in for Bolivia.



Admittedly, John Wagner started the Dreddworld trend of Central and South America being full of corrupt thugs with moustaches. Ciudad Barranquilla was introduced in a 1990 storyline as a place where bent Mega-City One judges could try and make their getaway, and it's been expanded over the years to show that there's quite a number of rich criminal refugees supporting the local economy. To be honest, there's not a lot of positive portrayals of good judges in the Barranquilla waters, either.

The Pan-Andes Conurb is, based on its depiction here, policed by the most incompetent judge force on the planet. It's filthy, it's stinking, there are flies and pack animals everywhere and the cops all look the other way. And you won't be at all surprised to learn that the chief judge (a) weighs about four hundred pounds, (b) has taco sauce all over his uniform and (c) is, like the rest of his force, in the pockets of the drug dealers.

Like I say, the broad stereotypes in Dredd's world are there for comedy, and simple, unprovocative laughs. But somehow "The Sugar Beat" feels deeply uncomfortable in a way that even Shimura, with its "A New Japanese Stereotype in Every Storyline!" approach, doesn't manage. McKenzie, who no longer works in comics, often proved himself, with Luke Kirby and with some Doctor Who strips, to be an imaginative and talented writer. But when even Mark Millar can come up with better, and more effective nation-identity comedy, and stereotypes that amuse rather than aggravate, you have to wonder whether McKenzie was entirely the wrong guy for the Dredd beat.

(edit: I had suggested that the writer had adopted the "Steelgrave" identity to mask displeasure with the work; McKenzie has since let me know that the pseudonym was used in much the same fashion as earlier 2000 AD writers, the intended tradition being that a writer should only receive one "true identity" credit in any given issue. "Steelgrave" was a joint identity for himself and John Tomlinson, who, McKenzie explains, wrote alternating episodes of the "Sugar Beat" six-parter. This entry was revised on Sept. 4 2007 to correct the credit.)

(Originally published Apr 19 2007 at LiveJournal.)

Thrillpowered Thursday - 2.

Recap! 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.

Other 2000 AD-related blogs:

Paul Rainey's 2000 AD Prog Slog...
AlexF's Meanwhile, on the Dark Side of the Moon
WR Logan's La Placa Rifa

---

Well, this wasn't the most well-planned exercise I've ever embarked upon. Seven days and seven issues after my first entry and I pick up prog 868, the first issue of 1994, and it's what we call in the business world a "challenge." Part of the plan here is to persuade some of you skeptical Earthlets to try the Galaxy's Greatest, and here we hit a prog containing one of the worst Judge Dredd stories ever ("Frankenstein Division," written by Mark Millar), one of the worst Future Shocks ever (in which Santa Claus is hounded by a murderous unemployment agent, also written by Mark Millar) and an episode of one of the worst series to ever appear in any comic, ever (Mother Earth, surprisingly not written by Mark Millar but by Bernie Jaye). Normally I boast that a bad 2000 AD story is nevertheless superior to even a very good story from most publishers. When Mark Millar is involved, that simply isn't true.

To make matters worse for many readers, this prog also contains an episode of Soul Gun Warrior, which perhaps seven people on the planet enjoyed. Fortunately for you readers today, I'm one of them.



In Soul Gun Warrior, the stratosphere is haunted by the ghost of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who takes out his rage by wrecking whatever American spacecrafts come his way. Fortunately, NASA has an ally in Dr. Bob Oppenheimer, whose secret experiments in the Nevada desert have led to the creation of the Soul Gun, the only chance at sending a volunteer into the astral plane to stop Gagarin's ghost.
That's got to be the greatest concept for a comic, ever.

The Soul Gun stories - there were two, including a sequel called Soul Gun Assassin - were helmed by Shaky Kane, although informed sources suggest that the dialogue was scripted by an uncredited Alan McKenzie. As the examples here show, Kane is very much inspired by Jack Kirby. To be fair, Kane certainly inherited Kirby's eye, but he didn't inherit his linework. He gets the posing perfectly, but his brush is too heavy, and the colors are often garish. Kirby was a master of the details, especially things like hands and suit jackets. Kane gets pretty carried away with his fantastic ideas and technology and lets these details slip.



I can't help but wish there had been a little more attention paid to the details, because Kane has provided better work in other places. (Best of all has been the cover art to an issue of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol which paid homage to Kirby.) Nevertheless, the scope itself is grandiose and wonderful, and there's a feel throughout of a high-concept balancing act. Six or so years later, Andy Diggle took over as editor and espoused his "shot glass of rocket fuel" approach to the weekly episodes. I don't know that he'd agree that Kane met it - he's been conspicuously absent from 2000 AD for a good decade - but that's certainly what he was attempting, years previously.

It also features one of my favorite cliffhangers, when the Soul Gun volunteer takes his place under the giant, Kirby-inspired supertechnological - phantasmagorical machine, and a small, innocuous .38 revolver pops out to send the volunteer to the astral plane via a bullet in the head. That's great!

The Soul Gun stories have never been reprinted and are therefore sadly not available in a collected edition. Regardless of how much I like them, they remain pretty unpopular with the 2000 AD fan base, and a new edition probably wouldn't be a particularly profitable enterprise!

Next week, I'll talk about something other than a quick rundown of a story you've not heard of before. We'll look into the issue of stereotyping, and when it gets aggravating for readers. Back in seven!

(Originally published 4/12/07 at LiveJournal.)