125. Team Andy and Team Pat

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

122. Aliens and Robots

March 2003: More than four years since Judge Dredd last crossed over with Batman, he's back in another scrap with a media franchise. This time it's Aliens, the unaccountably popular character-free badasses who've become a marketing juggernaut for 20th Century Fox and Dark Horse Comics. This publisher has been churning out a huge library of tie-in miniseries, most of which seem to have them fighting the Predators from all those other movies. The epic 16-week series is co-written by John Wagner and Andy Diggle and drawn by Henry Flint, and it's presented in a pretty interesting way: the sixteen weekly 2000 AD episodes are structured to be easily reprinted as four monthly installments by Dark Horse. That publisher also gets the rights for an American-sized trade paperback collection for our market; an oversized hardcover graphic novel will appear in England and Europe a couple of months later as part of Rebellion's new line of European-styled albums.

Well, Aliens may not be to my taste, but this is a very effective story because Wagner and Diggle never waste time building up the Aliens as anything other than big, ugly, acid-blooded grunts in the service of Mr. Bones. If you recall, he was the Undercity criminal introduced a few months earlier in the four-parter where Dredd and a retired judge find him plotting against Mega-City One from the wreckage of the old White House. We learn that Bones' gruesome, scarred appearance is the result of being sprayed in the face with Alien acid many years previously, and he's got a pretty good scheme in mind: blow a whacking huge hole in the foundation of the Hall of Justice and sic several dozen pissed-off Aliens at the judges.



Wagner and Diggle do a fantastic job making this an "entry-level" story for Dark Horse's readers unfamiliar with Judge Dredd. We meet a newly-promoted judge called Sanchez who is the audience identification character, and a squad of "Verminators" who lose a few of their number early on in the story. The build-up is slow and deliberate, and when one Alien gets loose, initially in its small, scuttling form, the Verminators are called in, and then get in trouble when they realize the creature they're looking for is a lot bigger than they thought.

The resulting story is a darn good one for middle school-aged boys, although not, perhaps, for girls. My son has been staying in Kentucky with his mother for a few months, and missing out on the reread that my daughter and I have been enjoying. She called a halt to Judge Dredd as soon as the Aliens showed up, and grumbled that she wanted to see more Durham Red instead. She did, however, tell her brother on the phone that he was missing out on Judge Dredd vs. Aliens and he about hit the ceiling. He's home for Christmas and I asked whether he'd like to catch up on the thrillpower that he'd missed out on while he has been away. He opened up prog 1300, read about one page, remembered what he heard and asked "When does Judge Dredd vs. Aliens start?"



I could be wrong, but Dark Horse's US-format collected edition does not appear to be in print anymore, but you can still get the hardcover British version from sellers in the UK. Here's the Amazon listing. The book is one of six that Rebellion released in this format towards the end of 2003.

Other stories in prog 1330, shown off with the lovely Frazer Irving wraparound cover shown at the top of the entry, are Bec & Kawl by Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts, The V.C.s by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams, Atavar by Abnett and Richard Elson and a Tales from Telguuth installment by Steve Moore and Jan Haward.

It's been a couple of years now, but I was talking once in the blog about how Rebellion really needs to bring the sprawling Mechanismo epic back into print. This was a mammoth story full of subplots and subterfuge, detailing the deterioration of Chief Judge MacGruder as she orders the development of robot judges. It seemed like a good idea at the time; with the judges' numbers seriously depleted after the high bodycounts of the "Necropolis" and "Judgement Day" epics, something needed to be done. Turns out, this wasn't it. The stories wormed their way through the pages of the weekly and the then-biweekly Judge Dredd Megazine from 1992-94, before coming to a storming conclusion in the aftermath of a 16-part story called "Wilderlands."

Back in May of '07, I suggested how Rebellion could repackage the story for bookshelves and they have done something quite similar, and very satisfactory. The new "Mechanismo" book, released in October, contains the first three serials from the storyline and deal with one robot, Number Five. These originally appeared from October 1992 to December 1993 and feature art by Colin MacNeil, Peter Doherty and Manuel Benet, with scripts by John Wagner. Although there is a great deal more of the story to come, this book ends on as satisfactory a point as is possible, and hopefully we will see MacGruder's next series of moves in a second volume in 2010.

Wagner does a terrific job in telling the story from multiple viewpoints. The focus shifts from Dredd to various robots to a hapless security clerk, and he uses his frequent Mega-City One trope of having dingbat teevee news announcers comment on the action, which is both effective and very funny. MacNeil and Doherty certainly bring their usual A-games to the party, and Manuel Benet does a laudable job for what I believe was his only assignment for the House of Tharg. It was certainly odd to see a new name dropped in the deep end for what was a critically important story, but Benet's work is pretty good, if perhaps not completely suited to Mega-City weirdness. Production of the book is mostly up to Rebellion's very high standards, but an unfortunate production error left a few erroneous credits on the spine and front cover for artists whose work does not actually appear in the book. Overall, though, a fine collection of a very good sequence of stories, and highly recommended. More, please!

Next time, we end the year and, for now, end this blog! Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take a hiatus for the first few months of 2010, but before we go, a last look at the big thrills from the spring of 2003, including The V.C.s and Caballistics Inc. See you in seven!

103. End of a Short Era

Prog 1261, published in September '01, sees the end of two of the current major storylines. Both the Dredd epic "Helter Skelter" and the second Durham Red serial, "The Vermin Stars," reach their final episodes. They're both completely overshadowed by the eye-popping events in Nikolai Dante, discussed last time, but the Durham Red story, with a spotlight cover by Ben Willsher, is memorable for the interesting way it seems to turn its back completely on the character. When Durham was resurrected by Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison a couple of years previously, it looked like she was set to be a regularly-featured character. Yet after that initial serial, there was a one-off episode, and then this lengthy layoff before this storyline, which ends with her supposed death and a poetic narrative epilogue which seals her fate, that even if she had survived the explosive events thousands of years in Earth's future, she was never heard from again. That was certainly a surprise to readers.

For many readers, Andy Diggle's resignation as editor came as a very big surprise, too. Particularly the way he announced it.

In earlier installments of this blog, I had mentioned that Diggle was a regular poster on the newsgroup alt.comics.2000ad. There, he and several of the other freelancers held court and the vibe was pretty relaxed and laid-back. But there was an ongoing frustration: regular complaints from a well-read, albeit unhappy, reader in Eastern Europe. Now it's pretty clear that Diggle's displeasure in the editor's seat had a lot more to do with going rounds with contributors, and the new owners desiring to relocate from London to Oxford, than a disgruntled fan. But it was to her that Diggle made the following announcement:

"If the editor can't re-write without causing a diplomatic incident, is shackled with a restrictive budget, and the editorial department is spread so thin that there is no time for re-writing anyway, what is he to do?

Employ the best people available. Or quit and become a writer.

So that's what I'm going to do. I have resigned as editor of 2000 AD, and from Christmas will be devoting my time to writing comics full-time - starting with "Judge Dredd Versus Aliens", which John Wagner has asked me to co-write with him. I guess he has a higher regard for my editorial skills than you do."



Since 2000 AD requires that its editors commission far in advance, there were several Diggle-ordered scripts in the pipeline which would appear throughout the year 2002, including two major new stories which would debut in December's year-end prog, and the next Strontium Dog story, which will begin in prog 1300 and, unusually, would run alongside a series called Bison which Diggle had rejected.

But that's down the line. The reaction that September was one of considerable shock and surprise that the much-liked editor was leaving after such a short tenure. Professionals and fans alike offered lots of praise for his time in the job. True, there were some misfires and disappointments, and he never found time to launch a major ongoing series, but he discovered several major new talents, and modern 2000 AD would certainly be poorer without the contributions of Boo Cook, D'Israeli, Frazer Irving, Si Spurious and others who got early work in 2000 AD's pages during his two-year run. His assistant editor, Matt Smith, would take over starting with Prog 2002, but that's getting ahead of things.

Speaking of getting ahead of things, the eighth Nikolai Dante collection was released a few months ago. This compiles all of the episodes that originally appeared in 2000 AD # 1518-1580 - 31 in total, all written by Robbie Morrison, with art by Simon Fraser and John Burns.

Maybe the old reviewing circuits are needing a little juice, because I can't come up with much better of a reason for anyone to own this other than "it's freaking Nikolai Dante, people, come on!" By this stage of the series, Dante is working as Tsar Vladimir's principal envoy and blunt instrument. We catch up with several cast members from previous installments, seeing what terrorism Dante's half-sister Lulu has been committing in the name of the Romanovs, crossing paths with his old criminal sparring partner the Countessa de Winter, and making a swath of new enemies while quietly working out some scheme of his own to get back at the tsar.

This set of episodes from what I term the fourth phase of the Dante epic (it is entering its fifth and probably final stage in current installments) is completely terrific. I think there are a few episodes where John Burns' painting is not as detailed as would be preferred, but his work on "The Tsar's Daughter," which looks into the strange death of Jena Makarov's mother many years previously, is truly remarkable. Simon Fraser is as fantastic as ever. He's teamed with colorist Gary Caldwell and the "Thieves' World" story, in particular, is vibrant and exciting. With the expected excellent reproduction from Rebellion, nice binding, gorgeous paper and matte cover, it's a far better-looking collection than practically anybody else in the industry. One of the best comics of the last decade in a package this gorgeous? Surely everybody is reading this, right?

Next week, ah, well, it looks to be something of a hiccup. Just to show we don't always spend every blog gushing about how brilliant 2000 AD is, Judge Anderson misfires, Steve Moore offers some Filler and, despite what I said above, the first Rebellion collected edition which I really think should be left on the shelf. You won't want to miss this... or maybe you do. See you in seven!

100. One hundred page Megs

In the summer of 2001, Judge Dredd Megazine was relaunched into in its most eyebrow-raising incarnation yet. After some experiments with the page count and frequency of the weekly 2000 AD in 1998-99, leading to the hundred-page end-of-year progs on sale over three weeks, the Megazine has begun its new, fourth volume. Renumbered #1 for the fourth and final (we hope) time and costing £3.95 a month, the Meg was now a hundred-page, squarebound comic. In the US, the comic retailed for $9.99 in comic shops. With mainstream superhero books usually running $2.50 for 22 pages of story, suddenly the Meg is really good value for money, even if we were getting kicked in the teeth by a mysterious extra couple of bucks - at a flat exchange rate, £3.95 should have worked out to just under $8 in 2001. Across the Meg's hundred pages, about ninety were devoted to story: forty pages of new comics and fifty of reprints. About half of the reprint pages came from 2000 AD's archives. This time out, they included two episodes of Ro-Busters by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons and three episodes of D.R. & Quinch by Alan Moore and Alan Davis. The other half would come from other British books. For its first few issues, the Meg includes the first four episodes of Lazarus Churchyard by Warren Ellis and D'Israeli, which originally saw print in 1991 in the short-lived anthology Blast!.

Ellis is among a small number of well-known British comic creators without much of a 2000 AD footprint. He only contributed a couple of one-offs to the Meg's earliest issues before finding success elsewhere. I don't know much about his work, to be honest. I'm more aware of the stereotype of an Ellis comic than the reality, but if you're looking to disprove the suggestion that Warren Ellis comics feature foul-mouthed tough guys with snappy comebacks getting drunk and blowing smoke everywhere while taking the moral high ground with smug condescension despite their vices and addictions to the latest weird technology, then Lazarus Churchyard isn't going to help you much. The character is clearly an ancestor of Elijah Snow and Spider Jerusalem, so if you enjoy Ellis's later books, you will probably find Churchyard pretty readable. The complete run is available as a collected edition from Image called The Final Cut. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but the third Megazine does reprint a truly creepy episode entitled "Lucy" which I'm looking forward to reading again.



Even more interesting than Ellis's story is D'Israeli's very unconventional artwork. It looks like his work in the early '90s was inspired by European artists such as Oscar Zarate, but I'm a pretty long way from being able to speak with authority about this kind of material . I do see similarities in color choices between what Brooker does here and what little I've seen of Zarate. He's also using a very shallow field, resulting in foregrounded figures who seem flat, and I wasn't sure what that reminded me of until I looked at some later issues of Crisis which reprinted some episodes of Jose Muñoz's Alack Sinner, and that's when I remembered how Keith Giffen had reinvented his style to resemble Muñoz.

At any rate, whomever it was that Brooker was studying, it's obviously pretty early in his career. Much, much better stuff would come from him after 1991. He's developed into one of my very favorite comic artists, and while this material isn't really as satisfying as what he's done in this decade, it's certainly very interesting to see how his work has evolved.

As for the new material, well, it's much more entertaining than decade-old Churchyard. Judge Dredd now has an expansive 15-page strip, the first part of a storyline called "The Bazooka" by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy. This one revisits some characters from the competitive eating circuit first seen a few years back in the weekly. In this story, they're running a "fat camp." For people who want to get fat.



Plus there's the return of Andy Diggle and Jock's rogue ex-judge Lenny Zero in an excellent two-part adventure, and a new SF tale called Wardog by Dan Abnett and the art team of Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague. This one's based on a Rebellion video game, but it turns out not to be all that bad despite a goofball premise. Our hero has a bomb in his head and if he fails to complete a contracted mission before the timer hits zero, he dies. I suppose that's the next natural step from the countdown clock in most video games, isn't it?

The Megazine would keep this format for the next year and a half, before it gets tweaked to become even better. Some of the strips don't completely knock you down, but overall, it is a fine mix of color and black and white, and of new and previously-printed material. David Bishop was editor during this period of reinvention, and he deserves full marks for making the best Megazine yet.

In other news, Rebellion recently issued "The Promised Land," the first collected edition of Kingdom, a very pleasant surprise from the Atavar team of Dan Abnett and Richard Elson which debuted without hoopla in December 2006 and proceeded to knock all the readers on their backsides with its incredibly clever take on the hoary old post-apocalypse genre.

Giving away too much about Kingdom would really spoil the great pleasure in watching it unfold and learning about the wild and dangerous world the creators put together. It starts with a pack of nine foot-tall genetically engineered dog-soldiers patrolling a wintry landscape and chopping apart hideous, slimy alien bug-things. The pack's alpha male is called Gene the Hackman and like the others, he speaks in slow, careful, simple sentences. The dialogue is countered by a surprisingly rich narration, suggesting the stories of Gene and his pack are treasured tales from a long, otherwise forgotten time. It's a comic where part of the joy is simply following the construction of the language, and how often do you get to say that about a comic book?

Of course, Kingdom proves to be about something bigger and sadder than the snow-covered wastes that these characters walk around, and as the scope increases to incorporate other characters, so does the opportunity for heartbreak and really powerful drama, the sort that Abnett doesn't often get to write in 2000 AD's pages. Each of the two series of Kingdom (2006-07 and 2007-08) are reprinted in this book along with some great-looking extra artwork by Elson. The third series is in production and planned to appear in 2000 AD later in the year. The book's certainly worth your time; every page is a real treat.

Next time, I'll be taking a pair of short summer breaks, but there's one last entry before I go, and in it, Garth Ennis returns to Judge Dredd. And the VCs. And Old One Eye. And D.R. and Quinch. And more. See you in seven!

99. In Which Tyrannosaurs Cause a Fight

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.

May 2001: Prog 1244 features this wonderful cover by Jim Murray for the six-part series Satanus Unchained!, in which the black bull tyrannosaur first seen more than twenty years earlier in a Judge Dredd four-parter is hunted by a group of trappers and big-gamers who've come to the Cursed Earth to take their chances bringing down the planet's biggest, meanest predator. While Murray gets cover duties, the serial is actually painted by Colin MacNeil, who is perfectly suited to the gory action on the pages, as all the technology of the 22nd Century proves a poor match for a few tons of lightning-fast, hyper-smart killing power.

The serial is written by Gordon Rennie, who's quietly staked a claim at being the principal author in Cursed Earth-based tales, thanks to several years scripting Missionary Man and, recently, moving the adventures of Mean Machine out into the badlands in the pages of the Megazine. Rennie chose to script the story in a pastiche of the over-the-top narrative style of older 2000 AD storylines, effortlessly evoking early '80s Pat Mills with captions that describe Satanus's cunning thought processes and using lots of exclamation points. It works perfectly, and the finished story is just terrific. Editor Andy Diggle was quite right to have commissioned it.

Only Pat Mills did not seem to agree.



Each episode of the serial came with a byline stating that Satanus was created by Mills and artist Mike McMahon, but that didn't seem to quell Mills' aggravation that the character was used without his permission. At the time, Mills was firmly opposed to any of his characters being written by any other creator, a policy which extended to fanzines, which declined to feature fanfic with his creations. Over time, Mills' viewpoint has softened somewhat, leading to the latest issue of Zarjaz being a Mills-verse special. Diggle countered that he never considered Satanus a "Pat Mills character," but rather one of Judge Dredd's rogues gallery.

The editor and writer failed to find any agreement on the subject, and Mills, who was already unhappy with the current ABC Warriors debacle, declined to write for the comic again until after Diggle stepped down at the end of the year. He would return with a page in the 25th Anniversary issue, and the Warriors and Slaine would each return in 2003.



Also in this issue, you've got the debut of a major new villain called Armon Gill in the fantastic Dredd four-parter "The Chief Judge's Man" by John Wagner and Will Simpson, more of the ongoing "Return to Mars" storyline in ABC Warriors by Mills and Boo Cook, the second episode of a Sinister Dexter three-parter by Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke, and the second part of a serial called A Love Like Blood by John Smith and Frazer Irving. Last week I had mentioned that Diggle's "rocket-fuel" approach would sometimes result in stories that felt unfortunately chopped up and impossible to embrace. A Love Like Blood would be one of those.

You get the feeling that the serial started from a great pitch - it's Romeo and Juliet done with vampires and werewolves - but at seven episodes, it's at least five too short. Smith's high-concept plot results in some genuinely wild and wonderful ideas. I love the way that these high-tech monsters have their claws into frontline weapon technology and the latest scientific advances, and the werewolves are, amusingly, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Irving's art is simply amazing; he comes up with some great character designs for the Sangreal and Luperci families.

It's all done in far too breakneck a pace, however. It really feels like critical characterization was sacrificed in order to get the plot moving from one wild cliffhanger to the next. Our heroes - what were their names again? - meet at the end of episode two, fall in love and hit the road to avoid their families, who set all other business aside when it's learned the werewolf chicky is pregnant and must be killed immediately. She's dead at the end of part five. Who was she, again?

And here we see the problem with "rocket-fuel" storytelling. If you don't know who the characters are, then the 2000 AD classics that you wish to emulate are not going to be Dredd, Slaine and Sam Slade, but rather plot-heavy bores like Death Planet and Project Overkill. Nobody remembers anything about the leads of those old serials, either. Or much of anything else beyond the nice art.

Three of this prog's stories have since been collected. 2006's Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man reprints this first Armon Gill story and its two sequels. A Love Like Blood is included in 2007's Storming Heaven: The Frazer Irving Collection, and as noted previously, you can get all of "Return to Mars" in 2008's The ABC Warriors: The Third Element.

Before I call this entry a-finished, a special Thrillpowered Thank You to my buddy Pete, who tracked down the missing Megazines from my collection. Longtime readers know that I lost a huge chunk of my British comic library in a flood four years ago; certain issues have been very stubborn to find again. Thanks very much, Pete, and if I'm ever in Edinburgh, I owe you dinner!

Next time, in the hundredth Thrillpowered Thursday entry, you'll be full of wrong if you don't read about the new Kingdom collected edition. Plus the debut of the 100-page fourth volume of the Megazine! See you in seven, fellow Earthlets!

96. War in the Command Module

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

94. The Empire of Sleep

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.

January 2001: Prog 1226 features this terrific Frazer Irving cover of Charles Fort and Arthur Conan Doyle beating the daylights out a horde of twisted zombies controlled by cultists who worship some tentacled deity on the other side of life, and who have decided Harry Houdini's explorations into the realm of unconsciousness have brought him too close to the terrible truth of their dark and evil plans. So they send H.P. Lovecraft to earn the others' trust and lead them all into a trap which will result in the end of life on earth. Yeah, you read that right. Necronauts, a nine-part serial illustrated by Irving and written by Gordon Rennie, is a shotgun blast of wild, high concept coolness. Fort carries a cricket bat to smack around the baddies, and Doyle carries around a medical kit full of lethal brews.

Necronauts is Irving's first series after only a couple of one-offs in the past few months. He's made a huge impact on the readership and the fandom, where he's been participating for some time. Irving once joked that he'd stalked and killed a certain "Gaze into the fist of Dredd"-illustrating art droid in order to prove his loyalty to 2000 AD. The joke is duly hung around his neck, worn well into the ground, and by the time of the first Dreddcon in December, people are threatening to wear "Irving Killed Bolland" T-shirts.

Fandom has become very entertaining at this time, with a number of creators, including Rennie, Irving, John Smith and Simon Fraser, as well as present and previous editors Andy Diggle and David Bishop, regularly contributing to the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup. Of course, by this time, spam is beginning to overwhelm all the newsgroups, and some professionals will conclude in time that there are certain segments of "fandom" that make this kind of casual interaction untenable.

Diggle in particular will have an ongoing dispute with a Ukranian reader living in Germany who seems to read Judge Dredd just to complain about the series' moral philosophy, and what she sees as John Wagner's skewed "view of good and evil," particularly in light of the recent eight-part "Sector House" story which centered on Judge Rico. Diggle is not many weeks away from a huge disagreement with one of his chief contributors, compared to which his newsgroup debates with this reader are probably not that important, but it's worth noting, as the argument of "everybody else vs. this one reader in Germany" raged for months, it was within a susequent thread of her complaints that Diggle would eventually announce his resigning the post of editor.



Apart from Necronauts, there's some really good stuff in the prog. Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser have teamed up on a Judge Dredd one-off that celebrates the work of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes, and Dan Abnett and Simon Davis are wrapping up a four-part Sinister Dexter adventure called "The Man in the Ion Mask." In a spin-off from the earlier Mercy Heights, John Tomlinson and Kevin Walker are wrapping up the first four-part story of Tor Cyan, the genetically-engineered, blue-skinned, mohawked fellow who's a bit like Rogue Trooper. This is notable for showing off, for the first time, the style Walker has been using for the last several years, with lots of heavy colors, solid lines and minimal fussiness in the inking. Compared to his detail-heavy work on The Balls Brothers and his earlier, painted work on ABC Warriors, this latest style is quite surprising, although that shouldn't be taken to mean it looks anything other than fantastic.

Also this issue, John Wagner and Arthur Ranson bring us the third book of Button Man. More on this fantastic story in next week's installment.



Necronauts was released by Rebellion as a collected edition in one of their earlier formats in 1993. I've said before that everybody should sell their home for a copy, and I stand by that assessment. This third book of Button Man is due for a collected edition in June. Entitled "Killer Killer," there's a listing on Amazon, although it was not solicited by Diamond in their April catalog. The Sinister Dexter story should find a new home in the forthcoming collection "Magic Bullets," due in the autumn. The Dredd and Tor Cyan stories have not been collected.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Ramone took his fourth bullet in the previous prog's third episode of "The Man in the Ion Mask." It was a hit to the right shoulder. Finnigan still has a commanding lead with ten confirmed hits.

In other news, while Rebellion tends to focus on releasing collections from more recent properties or big name characters, every so often they do head back to the comic's early days and surprise everybody with a great book full of thrillpower from the past. Such is the case with this new edition of The VCs. This is the original run of 32 episodes from 1979-1980. Most of the installments are written by Gerry Finley-Day, with a couple of fill-ins by Steve MacManus. The art is principally by Cam Kennedy, who contributed the cover, and Garry Leach. Mike McMahon drew the first episode and John Richardson the last five, but everything between them is by Kennedy or Leach. Probably nobody finds that as interesting as I do.

Anyway, The VCs is a pretty standard war story, just dressed up with aliens and spaceships in it. There's the green rookie, disliked by his new crew, and ugly enemies you can neither understand nor sympathize with, and trapped-behind-enemy-lines stories, and callous officers who probably interact with our heroes more than any other company in the military. That's not to say it's at all bad, but I reread this while continuing a once-a-week reread of Battle Picture Weekly produced during the same 1979-80 period and darned if this series couldn't have been flawlessly slotted into that comic. If you enjoy this style of comic storytelling, then The VCs will certainly please you, even if it's only rarely eye-opening.

Actually, I should probably qualify that: if you're coming to this from an American background, there's a lot more to this than simply "another war comic." I grew up reading DC's Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank, and later Marvel's G.I. Joe, with their casts of unkillable regular characters. Compared to these, British war comics are a complete revelation, with surprising fatalities among the cast. Any new reader coming to this collection will probably be pretty surprised by this story as it progresses.

There were 32 episodes of The VCs, but this is a pretty slim book, since the episodes were an unusually short 3-4 pages a week. It runs a little light on extras, since there were so few from the period. The strip was spotlighted on 2000 AD's cover only once, and there was a single star scan of the lead cast a few weeks after it finished, and those are included, but there are no other contributions from the period from any of the creators. In lieu of blank pages filling up too much of the back, the first episode of Finley-Day's better-known future war series, Rogue Trooper is included, but honestly, I'm hard pressed to imagine anybody buying this collection who hasn't already read the first Rogue episode plenty of times already. That's not to say that I don't think potential readers are out there, and I hope you'll give it a read, just that I'm not really sure this was the best use of the pages in the back when a new interview would have been very nice.

Next time, Button Man makes everybody in the audience wince, and D'Israeli shocks the future. See you in seven!

92. The Last of the Great Thrillpower Overloads?

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.

December 2000: So one year after the first, splendid hundred-page year-end prog, Tharg goes to town on a really wonderful follow-up, just cracking with excellent stories. Most of these are one-off adventures from the semi-regular series, but this issue also includes the debut episodes of two series which would be continuing in January: Necronauts by Gordon Rennie and the third series of Button Man by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson. In my opinion, the hundred pagers have not been as strong in recent years as when Tharg first began programming them, reaching their low point with the not-particularly-special "Prog 2008." Over time, this special prog has evolved into simply the comic where the first episodes of the January series begin, and it's often built around little more than double-length debut episodes and a comedy Sinister Dexter one-off. That's not to say that the hundred-pagers are ever at all bad, but compared to how packed and amazing this particular issue is, just about everything looks a little poor in comparison.

In "Prog 2001," apart from the two debut episodes mentioned above, the current crop of thrills is well-represented by one-off stories for Judge Dredd (by Wagner and Cam Kennedy), Strontium Dog (Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra), Nikolai Dante (Robbie Morrison and John Burns) and Sinister Dexter (Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke). In addition, and this is what helps make this issue so memorable, there are one-offs for a pair of much older series which have not been seen in quite some time: Zenith by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, and Bad Company by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy. Plus there's "The Great Thrillpower Overload," the first in-jokey Tharg the Mighty strip since the Vector 13 editorial period came to an ignominious end; it's by Andy Diggle and Henry Flint and features goofball little cameos from a whole gaggle of 2000 AD characters, from Mean Machine Angel to the Lord Weird Slough Feg.



Each of the stories in this issue is really entertaining, without a misfire anywhere. It's a well-designed, gorgeous collection with a glossy cover, self-contained enough to be a satisfying read on its own, and with just enough loose ends to encourage readers to try out the next issue. Honestly, neither the Zenith nor the Bad Company stories are quite as good as the excellent material from their memorable late eighties heyday, but they are both pretty interesting. The Bad Company tale sets up a new situation for Kano that would be explored in a six-part series that would appear in about a year's time, while Zenith's tale is a wild epilogue to that character's superhero adventures. It starts with a pop starlet, later revealed to be Britney Spears, phoning the police to report she's been assaulted, and before it's done, we learn that Tony Blair is nothing more than Peter St. John's puppet, that the pocket universe where Zenith and St. John's enemies have been imprisoned has achieved sentience, and that Mad Mental Robot Archie is just all kinds of disturbed.

For those of us who enjoy combing through Morrison's works looking for nascent versions of themes he would later revisit, the idea of a "little" universe gaining sentience and wishing to interact with our own would see further exploration in his DC maxiseries Seven Soldiers in 2005-06. The Zenith episode would prove to be Grant Morrison's last contribution to 2000 AD to date. Within a few months' time, Titan Books would once again obtain the license to make new 2000 AD collected editions, and planned a new Zenith book. It was solicited in the August 2001 Previews, but was never released to stores, as the printing of the volume actually set up the current legal impasse over the character's ownership, and has also prevented any potential new work by Morrison for Rebellion.

In other news, I ordered one of the recentish 2000 AD trade collections which Diamond should have sent to my shop in the spring of 2008. They didn't, and a reorder also fumbled, claiming that it was no longer available, so I finally broke down and ordered Mega-City Undercover from Amazon UK. It's a very good book, and I'm glad I finally own it, but it must be said that this is a peculiar little collection by Rebellion's standards. It's effectively the first volume of Rob Williams' Low Life, a Dreddworld series about a pair of undercover judges which began in 2004's prog 1387. However, the book actually begins with the five episodes of Lenny Zero, a similar series by Andy Diggle and Jock which first appeared in the Megazine in 2000-2002, and which was prematurely curtailed when the creators signed exclusive contracts with DC Comics.

Despite the nice attraction of having all of Lenny Zero's appearances in one place, it is certainly Low Life which is the selling point of the book. This has been one of the more successful of the recent semiregular series. At the time I'm writing this, the eighth Low Life story, "Creation," is currently running in the prog. The first six of them, totalling 29 episodes, appear in this book.

One thing that makes Low Life so interesting is that it's a "dual-lead" strip. Some of the stories focus on the passionate, liberal Judge Aimee Nixon, and others on the very deep-cover, hopelessly insane Dirty Frank, who somehow manages to work as an effective judge despite having lost his mind some years previously. Usually, the Nixon stories tend to take a more serious approach, while Dirty Frank's are played with a much lighter tone. The characters were created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint, who drew the first 13 episodes in the book. The remaining episodes were drawn by Simon Coleby and first appeared in 2005-07.

Since I'm just now finishing the year 2000 in my reread and would prefer to read these stories in their original context when I reach that period in a few months' time, I only gave the Mega-City Undercover book a brief scan to confirm the quality and contents. The reproduction is fantastic and it includes introductory pages by Diggle and Williams as well as a nice new cover by Jock. After an initial moment of eyebrow-furrowing over Rebellion's choice to use an umbrella approach to collect the stories, I decided I actually prefer this format to issuing a Low Life-only book. Certainly with only one new story a year, it will be some time before we ever see a second collection, but who knows, perhaps Diggle and Jock will return to Lenny Zero before too much longer and future tales of that ne'er-do-well can also be included.

Speaking of "collections which Diamond should have sent to my shop," the distributor is claiming that we can expect to see both Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files volume 12 and Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein in US stores this week. If that's the case, there should be some serious thrill-circuit overload coming my way and you'll hear about it soon. On the other hand, Diamond has yet to provide the previously-announced first volumes of Kingdom and Shakara, which we should've seen in February. What's going on, Memphis?!

Next time, more details about this mysterious Necronauts strip I mentioned in passing above. What strange secrets link Charles Fort and Harry Houdini?

91. Mutiny!

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

(March 12 2009)

90. From Russia With Lurve

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.

September 2000: This very funny cover by Frazer Irving (his second for the prog) heralds the return of Nikolai Dante, in the third book of the "Tsar Wars" storyline. The episode inside is by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and while it's as wonderful as usual, it has had a troubled genesis. The events in this eight-part chunk of the narrative were intended to precede the eight-part chunk that ran in the summer, but deadline troubles forced editor Andy Diggle to rearrange the two stories. So the second chunk ended with Nikolai so unbelievably ticked off with the Makarovs, and Jena in particular, that he memorably cast off his mother's name of Dante, telling the armies his name is his father's: Nikolai Romanov. This really should have set the stage for things falling completely apart in the book's climax. Despite this continuity error, driven home in the second episode where Nikolai's use of the name "Dante" is underlined, the third-as-published story is nevertheless a fine one, with Simon Fraser's welcome return to the art duties, and a brilliant climax of its own in a few weeks' time.

Speaking of Andy Diggle, there's an important addition to the Command Module around this time, an assistant editorial droid who goes by "Cyber-Matt" in the Output pages and Matt Smith in the real world. Smith will become the book's editor after Diggle departs in 2002; seven years later he is still wearing the Rosette of Sirius.

Also starting in this prog is the new thrill Rain Dogs, a ten-part one-off serial by Gordon Rennie and Colin Wilson. It is set in a flooded New York City populated by desperate scavengers, and is the story of one survivor of a flyby probe that crashed there being helped to safety by one of the locals. It's a very good story, one that works really well in the weekly format. Rennie came up with some very good, sympathetic characters, and Colin Wilson's artwork is just terrific, really making you believe in this dark world.



Rain Dogs was reprinted in a hardcover edition in the spring of 2002. This was a very curious little quickly-curtailed publishing plan. The only two books to emerge from it, at the time, were this and a similar hardcover collection of another Rennie-scripted ten-parter, Glimmer Rats, which ran in the comic a few months previously. I'm not certain whether they had printing or distribution problems or what happened, but these would be the only graphic novels to appear at the time; Rebellion would try again 18 months later with a slightly expanded line.

Other stories appearing in this prog are Deadlock by Pat Mills and Henry Flint, and Vanguard by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil, about which more information next week, along with a one-off Judge Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Peter Doherty. Wagner's been on a roll of really interesting one-offs over the last several weeks. Most memorably from today's perspective have been three stories bringing back the recurring menace P.J. Maybe, who's spent the last eight years in prison. I really love the way Wagner chose to expose Maybe's escape as something that happened months previously, right after the Doomsday Scenario epic, and that the judges only just found out about it. This gave Maybe the opportunity to get out of town and make his way to the South American mega-city called Ciudad Barranquilla, where he's had the millions he'd amassed over time locked away, and there start a brand new life. Had P.J. Maybe's story ended there, it would have been remarkably satisfying. In fact, had you purchased 2004's Extreme Edition # 2, that is where the story ends, but of course, much more would come a few years down the line...

At the time these were printed, Maybe was almost overshadowed by the villain from a different Dredd one-off, "Generation Killer," by Wagner and John Higgins. This took a very wild sci-fi premise and turned it into a really clever adventure. It's about a Mega-citizen who panics when his wife tells him that she's expecting, because of what he thinks is a family curse. It turns out that all his ancestors died right after the birth of their first child. This is because, thousands of years from now, one of their descendants commits some atrocity or other, and the legal system then decides that his crime is so great that all of his ancestors have to be punished as well, sending a time-travelling super-cop back in time to execute everybody in the line as soon as their first kid is born! Many fans hoped or thought that this would be the first appearance of a great new recurring foe for Dredd, but the Generation Killer was only seen in this one outing.

In other news, Rebellion continues to impress with their graphic novel collection. Sometimes, they announce a project which doesn't sound like the most exciting book on the shelf, but then the finished product turns out to knock your socks off. That's the case with The Complete Ro-Busters, which does exactly what it claims on the front and compiles absolutely every strip appearance of Hammerstein, Ro-Jaws and the gang from the pages of both Starlord, where the series began, and 2000 AD. The Ro-Busters, as I described 'em over at Touched by the Hand of Tharg, are "a disaster recovery crew along the lines of International Rescue from Thunderbirds, only they are staffed by a crew of robots (chief among them our lead characters Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein) and they are by no means as charitable as the Tracy boys had been. Mr. Ten Percent (so named because only ten percent of him, his brain, was human) charges for the dangerous work his droids perform."

That Ro-Busters should have developed into anything memorable is something of a miracle. The series was created by Pat Mills to fill some editorial request for something about planet-saving superheroes. Since Mills, as anybody who's read Marshal Law could figure, has never had much time for the concept of superheroes, he turned the idea on its head and decided to have the disaster squad staffed, not by noble, selfless people, but by the most expendable of characters: junked-out robots in line for the scrapheap, bought dirt-cheap by a greedy jerk in need of cheap labor to exploit.

Anyway, Ro-Busters is certainly dated, and from the outset feels very much like a comic strip for children, especially in a ridiculous story in which two people disguise themselves as robots in order to start a rebellion on board a casino in space, but it's incredibly fun! The writing did tighten up around the time it moved to 2000 AD, with an engaging mix of class comedy and homages to war comics before the wild lunacy of the final storyline, in which the doomed robots try making a break for a planet where they can be free. But before that frantic conclusion, there's a great story in which Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein are sidetracked for a tale in which one of Mr. Ten Percent's other business ventures show up. A demolition squad called the Terra-Meks, they turn out to be the villains of the piece. Four episodes of utterly gorgeous giant robot violence and mayhem, set against the backdrop of a dying coastal community and its giant robot lighthouse guardian, might be the book's high point.

The book is just tremendous fun, and if Rebellion actually missed an episode anywhere, it'll be news to me. It includes work by other writers besides Mills, including three by Alan Moore, who wrote yearly one-offs for the pages of the 2000 AD Annual in the mid-80s after the series had otherwise concluded. Artists include Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Kevin O'Neill and Carlos Pino. Every bookshelf should have one.

Next week, Deadlock wraps up the final plot threads that Nemesis had left behind, and Beth Vanguard accepts her far-too-brief commission. See you then!

(March 5, 2009)

88. That Table

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.

August 2000: With prog 1205, the Andy Diggle era of 2000 AD is well under way, and he's got Steve Moore as his secret weapon. Moore's principal contribution at this time is the new character Red Fang, and to be honest, it is among one of the comic's greatest missed opportunities. The pieces are all here for what could have been a 2000 AD classic. Fang is a strategist for a criminal empire in Earth's future, locked in an underworld war with other organizations, the police, and a strange alien race that looks like squids. The artwork is by Steve Yeowell, one of this blog's favorite illustrators. The characters and situations are engaging, but it all somehow fails. Hugely. Looking back on it, I think that the problem was that Moore decided to write a twelve-part serial, dumping far too many characters and a great big situation on readers' heads in one swoop. The result is incredibly convoluted and confusing, and nobody is surprised when the series is quietly retired after it wraps up in prog 1211.

If only the twelve weeks had been spent on four or five shorter stories, organically introducing supporting players and letting Red Fang deal with smaller scenarios, slowly building up to this tale of, ummm, stolen... interstellar... technological weapons stuff, then readers might have understood who the characters were, and why they should care about the major plot.

Red Fang is notable for one thing, however. Yeowell and colorist Chris Blythe conspired to decorate these crimelords' offices with some downright amazing furniture. It was a running joke in fandom for months after the series concluded that nobody wanted to see Red Fang return for a second series, but his table was welcome back anytime.

The other draws in the comic at this time are Judge Dredd (here in a one-off by John Wagner and Siku), Sinister Dexter (Dan Abnett and Nigel Raynor) and Nikolai Dante (Robbie Morrison and John Burns). But perhaps overshadowing all of them is the surprising, welcome return of Tharg's Future Shocks after an absence of several years. Previously, the format for one-offs had been used by umbrella series like Vector 13 and Pulp Sci-Fi. These accomplished many of the same goals as the Shocks - to fill space and mark time between series, to give work to aspiring creators, and to tell a good story with a twist ending - but their format imposed restrictions on the sort of stories that could be told. Certainly, a Future Shock in 2000 can be every bit as hit or miss as it was in 1980, but there's a nostalgic glee in seeing it dusted off. First up is a five-pager by Steve Moore, with art by Frazer Irving, who'd go on to become one of the comic's regular droids for the next several years. In fact, he impresses editorial so much with his debut that he's almost immediately given a Dredd episode to draw; it will run in the very next issue.

At this time, most of the stories in this prog have gone unreprinted. The Dante story was collected in the fourth book, Tsar Wars, Volume One, but none of the others have seen a second outing.

Speaking of Tharg's Future Shocks, in a nice bit of timing, we hit their return in this reread just as I finished Rebellion's new collection of several dozen classic ones. The title stretches the truth ever so slightly: rather than somebody's subjective take on the actual best one-offs from the comic, excepting the ones by Alan Moore which have already been compiled, this is a collection of episodes from four of 2000 AD's best-known writers. So it contains a pile of John Smith Shocks, a majority of Peter Milligan episodes, all but one of Grant Morrison's offerings ("Candy and the Catchman" is omitted), and everything that Neil Gaiman ever wrote for the comic.

Certainly the resulting book is uneven and choppy, but there are some real gems to be found in its pages. Grant Morrison's early attempts at channelling Alan Moore are pretty revealing, and not just from an archaeological standpoint. "The Shop That Sold Everything" is really funny, even if the end isn't so much a twist as it is an inevitability. I've also always enjoyed John Smith's "A Change of Scenery," which was the first appearance of some of his Indigo Prime characters, among many other strips in this book.

Seeing characters like Indigo Prime and Ulysses Sweet here actually makes me think that the book's only real flaw is that it didn't collect the five or six one-off adventures of Joe Black by Kelvin Gosnell from the early eighties. That's just quibbling, of course, those are outside the perview of the book, but one of the many things that did make 2000 AD interesting in the early 80s was the existence of characters who only showed up in one-offs or very short series.

Dr. Dibworthy and Abelard Snazz were compiled in the big Moore book from a couple of years ago, and it's a real shame Tharg doesn't have any characters like that today. Harry Kipling (Deceased) was kind of like that, but he hasn't shown up in two years, for some mad reason. Lately it's seemed that one-offs only ever show up to fill space after a ten-part story runs in a twelve-week slot. Maybe one day soon, Tharg will try two or three months mixing one-offs and two-parters, trying out more new creators and ideas, or maybe giving some of the supporting cast of the major series five pages of their own to shine. It seemed to work all right in the 1980s, didn't it?

Next week, there's a hole in the collection! Whatever happened to prog 1208?!

87. A shot glass of rocket fuel

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.

July 2000: And suddenly, things change in a very, very big way. It goes like this:

REBELLION BUYS 2000AD
Oxford-based 'super developer' buys the award-winning and highly influential science fiction weekly 2000AD

July 6th 2000: Rebellion has made the acquisition of the year - literally - with the purchase of the sci-fi action comic 2000AD from publisher Egmont International. The Oxford-based software developer will assume creative control of the magazine's content (all other publishing and distribution will continue to be carried out by Fleetway), while looking to maximise the potential of the many characters and storylines which the franchise has created (in both commercial and creative terms). There will be no interruption to publication.

2000AD occupies an unequalled position in the world of science fiction, having been published for more than 23 years. During this time, the comic has introduced a number of the genre's most popular characters (Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Sláine, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis and many more) as well as launching the careers of some of the UK's most successful comic writers and artists, including John Wagner, Alan Grant, Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Cam Kennedy, Brian Bolland, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

The first issue of 2000AD ('Prog 1' to use the comic's own terminology) hit the streets on February 28th 1977, for the down-to-earth price of 8p (or 17 Galactic Groats on Mercury) and featured a number of characters and stories which went on to enjoy huge popularity, including M.A.C.H. 1, Flesh and Invasion. It was not until Issue 2, however, that the publication's most enduring and notorious icon, Judge Dredd, first appeared. At the height of its popularity, the comic (which has just published its 1,200th issue) sold more than 120,000 copies per week.Rebellion and 2000AD "I am only too happy to confess that I have been an avid 2000AD reader since Prog 1," says Rebellion's Chief Executive Officer, Jason Kingsley. "However, that doesn't mean that this deal was done for sentimental reasons. 2000AD is not only a goldmine of intellectual properties, it is also a hugely enjoyable read. We are looking forward to helping this top quality publication to achieve its fullest potential."

Rebellion's acquisition of 2000AD will allow the team full use of more than 700 characters and series, not only in computer games, but also in films, as action figures, in collectable card games and in any other suitable merchandising vehicle. Also, it is possible that some of Rebellion's own characters and storylines - beginning with the forthcoming Gunlok (to be released by Virgin Interactive later this year) - will make it into the pages of 2000AD.

In addition to its new owners, 2000AD also has a new Editor, Andy Diggle, who adds: "This is a very exciting time to be taking over the editorship of 2000AD, with a new look and a new owner. There is so much untapped potential within our universe of characters that the sky's the limit in terms of licensing and branding. But our first priority will always be the comic itself: sci-fi and fantasy action with skewed black humour, bizarre imagination and attitude. The best of the old and the best of the new!"

"As fans of the galaxy's greatest comic, we will do everything within our powers to make sure that 2000AD reaches its widest possible audience on Earth before we expand into other galaxies - ridding the Universe of all thrill-sucker infestations along the way, of course," says Kingsley.

Diggle himself had this to say, in a forwarded-and-forwarded email which was posted to the alt.comics.2000 ad newsgroup:

Dear All,

Please forgive the impersonal nature of this email, but it seemed simplest to send the message out to all of you at once...

As some of you already know, 2000 AD has just been purchased lock, stock and barrel by Rebellion, the Oxford-based computer games company. By one of those weird cosmic coincidences, this happens to coincide with the debut of 2000 AD's new design and my first week as editor.

From now on, 2000 AD's editorial staff are employed by Rebellion, and although Fleetway will still be handling the publishing side of things on a contract basis, Fleetway no longer has any editorial control over the title. We will be relocating to new offices in central London in a few weeks, after I have returned from my honeymoon (it never rains...!). In the meantime, any freelance invoices should be sent to me at the Fleetway address.

Most of the details can be found in the attached press release, so I'll keep my own comments brief. Jason Kingsley, CEO of Rebellion, has been a fan of 2000 AD since Prog 1 - which means that for the first time, 2000 AD is owned and controlled by people who care passionately about it!

This is the beginning of a very exciting time for the Galaxy's Greatest Comic. Rebellion is a young, dynamic, pro-active company with real media clout, so I think we can look forward to an unprecedented level of commitment in pushing the 2000 AD universe of characters to potential licensors for video games, movies and merchandising in general. And about time, frankly!

On a more personal note, I'd like to say this really is a new beginning for 2000 AD, with a new owner, a new editor, a new format and a new Millennium ahead of us. I hope that together we can turn 2000 AD back into the creative powerhouse that it has been at its best.

It's all about giving the readers a fast hit of dense, imaginative, blackly humorous sci-fi. Or, to use my own well-loved (if tortured) metaphor, it's about distilling a barrel of weak lager into a shot-glass of rocket fuel! If you want to know more, please feel free to drop me a line...

Best,
Andy



Diggle had earlier detailed some of what he was talking about in a widely-circulated "manifesto" which would be posted to the newsgroup in October, and which is currently available, via Google, here. The part that resonated the most with me went like this:

2000 AD readers talk about getting their weekly 'hit' or 'fix' of Thrill-power, and they're only half joking. The comic should be a drug; a jolt of raw, unrefined energy and imagination. We aren't there just to raise a faint ironic smile on the readers' lips; we should blast them into a whole new reality! 2000 AD should be fast, dense, bizarre, twisted, funny, insane, rebellious, dark, ironic, imaginative and exciting! We should blow the readers' minds wide open, and give them something they can't get anywhere else!

What we should never be is bland, derivative and familiar. 2000 AD should be the comic other people copy... not the other way round.

Over the eighteen or so months that Diggle's in charge of the comic, he hits a lot more frequently than he misses. Prog 1200 opens with a John Wagner/Cam Kennedy Judge Dredd storyline in which some freedom-loving citizens take to their flying surfboards to blow up Justice Department's omnipresent spy-in-the-sky cameras. Nobody draws skysurfing as well as Cam Kennedy. Also on board this week are new installments for Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis and Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and John Burns, along with Red Fang by Steve Moore and Steve Yeowell, about which more next week. Joining the lineup in the next issue is a four-part Missionary Man adventure by Gordon Rennie and Jesus Redondo, a Spanish artist who had worked in the pages of 2000 AD, Starlord and some of IPC's romance comics in the early 1980s.



The other interesting thing to note is that, with Rebellion's takeover, there's a size change for the comic. It's as tall as it was before, but an inch narrower. It now has the same proportions as a traditional American comic, just a little larger. In 2003, there will be an aborted attempt to repackage newer material into US comic-size, with none of the distortion of the artwork that was commonly seen in repackaging attempts in the 1980s. The line, however, will be cancelled as soon as DC and Rebellion announce their year-long liaison, and the solicited episodes of Mike Carey and Andy Clarke's 13 will never emerge in that format.

At any rate, while the last several years, under Rebellion, have been pretty amazingly thrill-packed, and we owe them our thanks for the continued survival of the comic, it has always struck me as very odd that so little has come of the "full use of more than 700 characters and series" for merchandising, as was noted in the initial press release. There would be a kind-of-okay Dredd vs. Death video game, and a pretty good Rogue Trooper video game, and, working in reverse, a comic adaptation of the game Wardog, but the first-person shooter based on Strontium Dog has steadfastly refused to appear. Never mind all the video games we should have based on, ohhh, say, Sin Dex, or Slaughterbowl, or Pussyfoot 5, or Low Life, or some kind of racing game. Why am I playing Crash Nitro Kart when I could be playing Supersurf 14? And why were the action figures parcelled out to that Marvel/Legenday line which was only sold at Wal-Mart and died before we got the Mean Machine figure? And why...

Ah, well. At least the graphic novels are fantastic; Rebellion has certainly got those right. More about those next week, along with Red Fang and the astonishing return of Tharg's Future Shocks! Be here!

(Originally posted Feb. 12 2009 at hipsterdad's livejournal.)

85. Out of My Mind on Dope and Umpty

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.

May 2000: Meanwhile, over at the Megazine, some very interesting things have happened. Andy Diggle is now the editor of this publication, while also working as assistant editor on the weekly, and he's beginning to put his own, inventive stamp on things. Much of Diggle's perspective on what 2000 AD should be would later be summed up with his expression "a shot glass of rocket fuel," about which, more another time. What it means in practice is keeping one eye trained on what the comic did best in its 1980s heyday, and how they did it as well as they did. There's plenty of room for nostalgia under Diggle's watch, but principally nostalgia for the fast-paced storytelling style that made early 2000 AD so memorable, and not necessarily for old characters. There will be a few old faces and names showing up again over the next couple of years, but the emphasis will be on new series and storylines, and when classic thrills are resurrected, it will, arguably, be done with a little more attention to detail and respect than some of the second-rate comebacks from the early 90s. Although you might want to watch this space; there'll be a riproaring argument about that point regarding a certain big, mean tyrannosaur in due course.

As editor, Diggle brought an end to Preacher's two-year tenure in the Megazine's pages. After reprinting that comic's first 25 issues (up to the finale of the Masada storyline), the Megazine was resized and now matches the dimensions of 2000 AD during the 1980s. This is to accomodate the new reprint feature: the classic Strontium Dog serial "Journey Into Hell." This adventure first appeared in the weekly in progs 104-118 and had never been reprinted, since the films had been lost, and shooting from the printed pages was not considered an option. Finding the films was motivation to give the serial a fresh airing, and a well-timed one, since Johnny Alpha had a new story running in 2000 AD.



Interestingly, "Journey Into Hell" proved to be a unique challenge for Diggle, who was doing double-duty as the Megazine's designer. Each episode is five pages long, with a double-page opening spread, so there's an ad forced into the space between each of the three episodes reprinted in each of five issues. Journey Into Hell has been reprinted in collected editions twice since this appearance, in 2004's Strontium Dog: The Early Cases and 2006's Strontium Dog: Search/Destroy Agency Files 01, proving itself a layout headache for further designers.

The Strontium Dog reprint is teamed up with two new episodes each month. These are a 12-page color episode of Judge Dredd and a 10-page black-and-white episode from one of the Megazine's supporting characters. This format will stay in place for about a year and a half before the Megazine makes a radical upgrade in the summer of 2001. Currently, the second strip is a new case for Armitage, making his first appearance in about five years, in a new four-part story by Dave Stone and Steve Yeowell. The debt owed to Inspector Morse is made very clear in this episode, part of which takes place in Brit-Cit's "Colin Dexter Block." This isn't actually Yeowell's strongest work, and compared to, say, Zenith, it looks like he's being very tightfisted with the black ink, but he still does layouts like nobody's business, and effortlessly proves what a fantastic storyteller he is.



Judge Dredd, meanwhile, is about halfway through a seven-month storyline called "Dead Ringer" which is the spiritual descendant of classic tales like "The Judge Child" and "The Mega-Rackets," with several events and incidents from those stories briefly revisited in a lunatic romp. The story starts with an assassination attempt on a European diplomat, who is critically wounded. The Mega-City judges will do anything to cover their butts, and when they find that one of their citizens is from the same clone stock as the diplomat, they send Dredd to pick him up to engage in a little subterfuge. Unfortunately, the citizen panics, bolts, ends up on a Helltrek out of town, is picked up by stookie glanders, sold to alien slavers and is last seen on a planet full of umpty addicts, with Dredd all the while in patience-ending pursuit. If you recognize the references in the previous sentence, then John Wagner's script is just for you, readers of classic 1980s Dredd who will recognize the strip's iconography and background. In an interesting experiment, each of the seven episodes is drawn by a different artist, including Duncan Fegredo, Simon Coleby and Wayne Reynolds. The second part provided the first Judge Dredd episode for the Scottish artist Jock, who would go on to contribute several more Dredd stories and some iconic cover images over the next couple of years before decamping with Diggle to work for Vertigo in 2003.

Next week, one of those Jock stories I just mentioned. It's mushroom mania in the Shirley Temple of Doom, plus classic Slaine from back when Glenn Fabry was putting more ink on the page than any twelve other artists.

(Originally posted 1/29/09 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

55. Political Bizness

December 1997: It's been promoted for weeks, and at last B.L.A.I.R. One makes its series debut in prog 1071. The series had its origins in a one-off gag strip from the 3000 AD supplement given away as one of the free gifts from the 20th anniversary celebrations the previous February. That story, by editor David Bishop, John Tomlinson and Simon Davis, reworked the old superspy series M.A.C.H. One into a very silly satire about Britain's new prime minister. Now it's been given over to Alan Grant to script, and the results are, honestly, wonderful. But I'm pretty far in the minority!

Simon Davis was perfectly chosen to paint the bizarre series, in which the superpowered prime minister battles everything from Tory MPs to demonic taxpayers. Since Davis is so very good with likenesses, the many politicians throughout the strip probably don't need to be named for British readers, even if I don't know who the heck some of them are. There is a great moment in a later episode where Bill and Hillary Clinton are at a photo-op, frowning with sour faces as the cameraman calls "Say cheese!" Then he says "Say power!" instead and their eyes brighten. In the first episode, B.L.A.I.R. One solves the crisis of closed mines and too many single mums on welfare by sending them all down the mines. By the end of the four part series, the only Britons with jobs are employed as wardens and guards at a giant prison that holds everybody else.



You could see how this might could polarize readers. Again, I think it's hilarious, as do my kids, but it's about as subtle as a brick to the head and deeply unpopular. However, it will return in 1998 for both a one-off and a two-part final appearance B.L.A.I.R. One, which has never been reprinted, is the last of the "media-friendly" strips that came with press releases attached, aimed at the mainstream media. In the early months of '98, Bishop looked over the results of the two months experimenting with the format and concluded that they were alienating regular readers and not getting any new ones.

Other material in this prog: Judge Dredd in the first part of "Escape from Old New York Street" by John Wagner and Paul Marshall, a Vector 13 story called "Angels" by Robbie Morrison and Lee Sullivan, Sinister Dexter in "Things to Do in Download When You're Dead" by Dan Abnett and Julian Gibson, and finally Nikolai Dante in "The Full Dante" by Morrison and Charlie Adlard. Yes, three complete stories in one issue!

December '97 is also notable for bringing a new face into the Command Module, the new assistant editorial droid Dig-L. Andy Diggle was a lapsed fan who'd resumed reading earlier in the year. He will have a huge impact on the title in the future when he takes the editorial reins himself.



Apologies for the short entry this week; work sort of caught up with me. Next week, we close out 1997 with a look at the rest of the regular features...

(Originally published 5/29/08 at LiveJournal.)