180. One Awesome Lineup

February 2008: It's four and a half years before the release of Dredd, a film adaptation of 2000 AD's flagship character. The film will star Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, and Lena Headley, and be acclaimed by a wide spectrum of filmgoers and fans as one of the very best of all comic-to-movie adaptations. Dark, brutal, uncompromising, and very violent, the movie is, by any criteria, a complete triumph. Any criteria other than financial, sadly. Its North American distribution is left in the hands of the incompetent boobs at Lionsgate, who couldn't market beer at a football game, and whose strategy seems to consist solely of telling theater owners that it would be a hit but neglecting to tell anybody else, anywhere. The film performs well in Europe, but in the United States, it flops, ignominiously, despite incredibly good reviews from dozens of critics, leaving the prospect of any sequel films in doubt. We'll never get the Ampney Crucis TV series that I want at this rate.

Four and a half years before people started pointing fingers at film companies, however, 2000 AD released an issue with this amazing cover of Shakara slicing a tyrannosaur's head in half. Who has time to be discouraged about movies when you've got this in your funnybooks?

The first lineup of 2008 has got to be one of the comic's all-time best. In fact, it's so darn good that, when we come back to the weekly comic in two installments' time, and see what a complete mess the spring '08 gang is, everybody will be Monday morning quarterbacking, asking what in the heck Tharg could have done to avoid the quality plummet that starts around the time of prog 1577. See, what we've got in these issues includes a really terrific seven-part Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Colin MacNeil called "Emphatically Evil: The Life and Crimes of PJ Maybe," along with the third Shakara story by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint, the second adventure of Stickleback by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, the second Kingdom story by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, and another rollicking Strontium Dog case by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.


Which one is the best? Take your pick at random and you could make a strong case. Wagner's two stories have a comfortable feel, even as Dredd is breaking new ground. When we last saw PJ Maybe, disguised as Byron Ambrose, he had been elected mayor of Mega-City One. Now, he's dealing with a copycat killer who's somehow implicated the mayor in his crimes, while Dredd and Hershey revisit the mutant problem. Ambrose/Maybe figures out who the mystery serial killer is, but just after the judges do, leading him to take out his pique on the "true crime" writer who inspired the murders, and the judges vote to relax the old mutant laws. This is going to prove enormously huge, and drive the next few years of Dredd's stories. Comparatively, Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer collecting bounties and busting heads is nothing new, but very entertaining. This will actually turn out to be Wulf's last appearance to date, I believe. The next two "flashback" stories are set before Johnny and Wulf met, and then the series will move to "the present," and finally start telling stories set after "The Final Solution."

Meanwhile, in Stickleback - my favorite of the five, but only by a hair - the Victorian-era supercriminal and his weirdo gang cross swordsticks with Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and a bunch of other Americans who are performing in a traveling circus when they're not pilfering London of weird, occult treasures. This story's got everything from zombie cowboys to steampunk robot battlesuits to Chinese dragons. It's a complete triumph, but, perhaps, not one of character drama.

What goes on in Kingdom when Gene the Hackman finds a colony of humans and a strange species of gigantic, telepathic ticks is miserable and tragic on every page. You can't empathize with the cast of Stickleback, even with the new and strange mystery about his deformity possibly being a bizarre costume instead, but Gene's tale is a heartbreak on every page. The reader knows better than Gene not to entirely trust these good-natured people, even while sympathizing with their problem. They're under siege from the alien insect "them" outside the fence of their colony, and it's a slow and deliberate siege. Gene quickly understands what the humans don't - the bugs are testing their defenses and slowly wearing them down over months. But there's far more going on than that, and secrets being kept from Gene. He doesn't like that at all.

That leaves Shakara, who is cutting dinosaurs in half. This time out, we learn more about this series' wild and ugly universe, and that the red-eyed, mad-eyed screamer seems to be descended from, or a survivor of, some similarly loud and violent blue-eyed species. Lots of things get cut in half, and the giant psychic eyeball people come back, and we get both a recurring supporting player in the absurdly curvy form of Eva, and, in a thunderously effective cliffhanger, a wild new recurring villain. And he's got blue eyes.

But never mind that, scroll back up and look at that cover again. Do you see what Brendan McCarthy drew? It's SHAKARA CUTTING A TYRANNOSAUR IN HALF. I don't know why anybody ever reads anything else.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Volume One, from Amazon UK)
Shakara: The Avenger (Volume One, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Strontium Dog: Traitor to His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, it's over to the Megazine as veteran artist John Cooper gets a new assignment, and new writer Al Ewing creates a very strange new character. See you in seven days!

170. You say potato, I say potato...

December 2006: It is around this point in time that I, your humble blogger, the most nitpicky and trainspotting of 2000 AD fans, picked up on a little quirk of Tharg's lingo that has been bothering me, and absolutely nobody else, ever since. It's our favorite Betelgeusian's insistence on using Terran broadcasting terminology to describe the appearance of new comics in his mighty anthology of thrillpower. You see it in Tharg's input on the inside front cover, and you see when his humanoid units such as Mike Molcher and Matthew Badham contribute interviews or features for Judge Dredd Megazine. It's this utterly bizarre use of "series" to mean "story." Even today, for example, we are all looking forward to the "second series" of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael in a few weeks. Well, everybody but me; I'm looking forward to the second story of that series. I appreciate and enjoy that the good people of Britain use different words to describe things than we do; it makes for great comedy when you're reading a British Christmas annual of the '70s American cop show Kojak thrown together by some studio illustrators in Glasgow on their lunch hour and they've got Telly Savalas shouting "Fetch a torch from the boot." But sometime in the 1940s, the BBC decided to call a "series" a "programme" and a "season" a "series," and around 2006, Tharg decided to follow suit.

I mention this because Prog 2007, the annual year-end Christmas issue, features the debut stories for two remarkably good series that are as good as comics get. These are Kingdom by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson and Stickleback by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli. Each of these is insanely popular, featuring absolutely classic lead characters, and they're each just tremendously good. I also mention this because today's entry is going to be an immensely boring chapter for anybody to read, because all it would be is "wow, wow, wow" otherwise, so I might as well say something to raise an eyebrow and make you think that I've lost my marbles instead of my supposedly objective viewpoint.

Overall, I think that Kingdom is the more popular of the two series, and it is also my favorite of Dan Abnett's many excellent creations. There have been four stories so far, the most recent concluding in March 2011. The lead character is Gene the Hackman, a huge, muscular, genetically-engineered dog soldier. The series opens in Antarctica, and Gene is the alpha dog of a pack that patrols the wasteland killing huge alien bugs. The soldiers have limited intelligence, but wake every morning to "urges" from unseen masters giving them orders and instructions. One morning, after they have discovered that there is a land bridge connecting their area to some unknown place across the sea, they wake and feel no urges. This leads to discord and disunity, and Gene insists that they return home to report on the bridge.

The soldiers, all of whom have curious names that pun 20th Century celebrities like Tod of Much Slaughter, Ginny Woolf and Jack So Wild, are drawn with sharp and engaging personalities. Despite their inability to express much, their simple and direct patois makes each character instantly recognizable from each other. In the above panel, Tod tells Gene that his "mouth is full of wrong," and this instantly became a catchphrase in the same way that, oh, "Gaze into the fist of Dredd" or "Be pure, be vigilant, behave" had decades before.

I'm impressed by a lot in Kingdom, but it's Abnett's use of narration that really pleases me the most. There is a lot of it, and it is lyrical and beautiful, framing the story as a very important fable in some community's folklore. Masterfully, the use of captions abruptly ends at critical moments of the story, as Gene finds very strange new things. That is, they are certainly very strange to him, but readers will instantly recognize and understand concepts like "isolated research bases in the Antarctic waste staffed by cryogenically-frozen humans revived for monitor duty" by the visuals. It is unlikely that Gene would ever be able to understand that sort of thing with that terminology, so the narration is occasionally tabled so that readers can watch Gene explore and comprehend things. Gene may not be intelligent, but he turns out to be very wise.

I don't believe that a fifth Kingdom story has been formally announced, but I hope that we won't wait much longer for it to return. It is one of the best things to appear in the comic over the last decade. That said, I'm one of the very few who actually enjoys Stickleback even more, and we've been waiting for it to return since the ambiguous conclusion to the fourth story more than two years ago. (There have been three multi-part stories and a single one-off.)

I like the structure of Stickleback a lot. Edginton does a fabulous job in "Mother London" in introducing us to the characters after a really curious prologue scene in which two characters from British folklore, the giants Gog and Magog, agree to be ritually slain. Their blood becomes Albion's blood, and feeds all of the land's rivers, and allows a great tree to grow. London is born from the stability brought by the roots of this tree. All of this will, over the course of time, tie in to Edginton's work on The Red Seas and other series.

But that was many hundreds of years ago. Time then skips forward to the dirty East End of Victorian London, where Scotland Yard has employed a young detective, Valentine Bey. Bey is hunting down a charlatan fortune teller who uses clockwork automatons - again, just typing a very slight account of the goings-on in an Edginton story raises a smile - and gets a lead, the first solid lead that anybody in the Metropolitan Police have ever had, about the existence of the much-rumored Stickleback, a "Napoleon of Crime" figure whose existence nobody has been able to ever confirm. The villain appears for the first time in the story's third episode, where he is revealed to be a spindly, long-legged hunchback with a second spine. He boasts, horrifically, that giving birth to such a child caused his mother to die from internal bleeding, but a great deal of what Stickleback says cannot be trusted at all.

Edginton is hardly the first writer to base a character on Professor Moriarty, although to my mind, nobody has bettered Rex Stout in his similar creation of Arnold Zeck in the Nero Wolfe novels. Like Moriarty, Stickleback controls an organized crime empire and enforces a brutal code of conduct among the criminals of London. What Moriarty never had was a gang of weirdos to back him up. These include a zombie, a burning man, Siamese twins with steampunk surveillance gear, and a pygmy with a blowgun.

There's a fantastic bit of rug-pulling in this first adventure. Stickleback has abducted Bey to enlist his help in a curious matter. He alleges that Bey's superior is involved with another grand criminal conspiracy, and wants to employ the law-abiding Bey to ferret out that corruption. Stickleback, after all, has enough to do dealing with honor among thieves in the East End; he hasn't the resources to tackle some Masonic - Royal business in the upper echelons of the police. This is an incredibly entertaining story, and seems to be setting up a series in which Bey and Stickleback would continue their war across several stories of uneasy alliances and awkward double-dealings. But no, thunderously, the first adventure ends with Bey dead and that weird prologue about Gog and Magog shown to be of immediate, fantastic impact on the narrative, and Stickleback's power consolidated in a triumphant finale. I was left breathless for more.

Kingdom and Stickleback each run through March 2007 alongside the mammoth new ABC Warriors multi-book epic, about which more next time, and 2000 AD feels more vibrant, alive and amazing than it had at any time in 2006. And it had been a very good year! But a lineup this thunderous doesn't come along just every day. Looking over 2000 AD's wonderful and busy history, can anybody name another prog in which two such amazing and excellent stories debuted? Tharg spoiled us. (Oh, yeah, and it also featured new episodes of Judge Dredd and Harry Kipling (Deceased) and The 86ers and Nikolai Dante and Sinister Dexter... sheesh!)

Stories from this issue (everything except Sin Dex) have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Harry Kipling (Deceased): Mad Gods and Englishmen (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine 323, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: Origins (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, it's giant mecha-Stalins against the ABC Warriors! See you in seven!

167. Dredd Rides Into History

September 2006: Scheduling this good just can't be accidental. "Origins," a major Dredd epic that will run for 23 episodes, continuing - with a nine-week break after part 16 - until prog 1535 in May of '07, launches in this issue after nine months of hints and teases. It's got a cover by Brian Bolland, which means you know Tharg's taking this epic seriously. This classic-model droid is only brought back into service for the important things. Bolland's cover pays tribute to two important personal losses, who are given tribute names on the city blocks behind the judges. Longtime letterer Tom Frame, a friend to many who've worked on the Galaxy's Greatest, is given front-and-center treatment on the Mega-City One skyline, with former Pink Floyd vocalist Syd Barrett named on a tower behind him.

There's nothing unsatisfying about the opening episode of "Origins," but it does have that feeling of slow burn about it. Readers can tell that this is an epic that will unfold gradually, and that the hints that there is much more to Dredd's - and the city's - past than we've been told is going to keep everybody hooked while the story shakes out. In other words, this isn't a story that's going to knock anybody out in episode one in prog 1505. No, for that, there's "Cal Hamilton" and Simon Coleby, doing a Dead Man twist in episode six of Malone.

I did vow, some chapters previously, that this blog was done with Sinister Dexter, but Malone deserves a little more comment, because it's just so audacious and so unexpected and so incredibly successful. This is a remarkable fake-out, where it looks like we're following an amnesiac, well-dressed man on some future frontier planet in a noir thriller. The story had seemed a little lost and nondescript among all the wild business around it, especially Dredd, which was probably the plan all along. Amazingly, it is exactly the same twist, told exactly the same way, as The Dead Man. The writer is hiding under a pseudonym, the artist is an established talent not known for or identified with the original subject, and at the end of the penultimate episode, we learn that the protagonist is an established character from another series who has lost his memory. In prog 660, "Keef Ripley" (John Wagner) and John Ridgway showed us that the Dead Man was Judge Dredd, and this time out, "Hamilton" (Dan Abnett) and Coleby revealed that Malone was Finnigan Sinister, who vanished from Downlode one year previously, wiped his memories and had face-change surgery to avoid detection by the police or hitmen working for the crime lord Appelido. The event was hailed from the rooftops as a resounding triumph from every quarter.

Well, I say exactly, but not quite. The big difference between the two twists is that The Dead Man led into one of Dredd's most memorable and amazing adventures, "Necropolis," and Malone led into five years of slow-paced, irregularly-scheduled and incredibly frustrating and unsatisfying stories. And on that note, back to Dredd.

Like "Necropolis," "Origins" was preceded by five weeks of tone-setting episodes. In a story called "The Connection" by Wagner and Kev Walker, Dredd hunts down a pair of mutants - or is it a trio? - who successfully enter the city in order to get a mysterious box into the hands of the judges at a critical moment. Walker illustrates the story with the same moody, dark tone that he had mastered on some earlier Dredd adventures, principally the celebrated "Mandroid." There is some remarkably interesting foreshadowing, as Dredd dreams of conversations with Eustace Fargo. Decades previously, he had been the first chief judge. Dredd and his clone "brothers" had been grown from Fargo's cells, but there had always been confusion as to when this history unfolded. A fan, Robin Low, is given a "special thanks" credit on "Origins" for tracking down all of these very old, throwaway references to the past in such earlier adventures as "The Cursed Earth," "Dredd Angel" and "Oz," and coming up with an actual timeline to put Fargo's life, the emergence and establishment of the judges, and Dredd's rookie days, into an actual, linear sequence for the first time.

"The Connection" ends with the two - or is it three? - mutants dead and that box missing. Dredd, eternally unsatisfied, figures that he'll never know what the heck all this pointless running around and shooting was for and gets back to patrol duty. Unknown to him, a kid, paid fifty creds to deliver the damn box, slowly makes his way to the Grand Hall of Justice. He's silent, the box under his arm. Wagner and Walker have put an awesome, imposing weight around the proceedings. Without a word or a sound effect or a narrative caption, the weight of the final panel is impossibly ominous. This boy is going to change everything. He does. He doesn't even get a name, but all of the astonishing, world-shaking changes that have come to Dredd's world in the last six years all come from this kid.

"Origins" sets up the mutant referendum, which sets up the mutants in Mega-City One stories of 2008, which sets up "Tour of Duty" in 2009-2010, which sets up the currently-running "Day of Chaos" spectacle. I don't even know if "epic" is a big enough word to describe or explain "Day of Chaos." The unimpeachable fact of the matter is that Judge Dredd has spent the last six years being the best comic being published anywhere. It has always been great, well, mostly, but for the last several years, the only comic that I have seen that has been as good as Dredd has been Jaime Hernandez's "Love Bunglers." It's an ongoing, incredibly dense set of game-changing, daring storylines that upend the status quo and destroy reader expectations. I know that I'm preaching to the converted when I say this here at Thrillpowered Thursday, but maybe the word will get out. Nobody, in any genre, is telling continuing adventure drama in the comic medium with half the impact or success of John Wagner in Judge Dredd for the last six years. If you think that you like comics, then the collected edition of "Origins" should be on your shelf, and that's just the start. Period.

So what's in the box? Tissue from Eustace Fargo. Tissue from a living subject. This is hardly the first time that Dredd's gone into the Cursed Earth on a quest for some McGuffin or other, leading him into episodic encounters with strange settlements and ugly situations - see also "The Cursed Earth," "The Judge Child" and "The Hunting Party" - but the stakes have never been so high, nor have readers been so invested. "Origins" begins quite surprisingly slowly, with the first few episodes establishing the ugly reality of life in the wild for mutants, before the second chunk of the story finds a novel way to introduce this never-revealed backstory of Fargo and the introduction of police-with-judging powers to the city streets in the early 21st Century.

The story continues, winding its way through flashbacks and following the demands of the mysterious antagonists who seem to have Fargo's body. Along the way, readers learn a lot more than we ever knew and meet a very, very old enemy again. I'm still not entirely convinced that "Origins" is really the best kind of "new readers start here!" story that some think that it might be - I think that it just relies a little too heavily on continuity that longtime readers take for granted - but it is absolutely a triumph, and it is always a huge pleasure to reread, with a hell of an ending. If you're among the few reading this who have not read "Origins" before, then you definitely need to, and if you already know it, then it is absolutely worth a revisit.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Stone Island: The Complete Stone Island (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar (Volume Seven, 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, there's an equally important event playing out for Dredd in the Megazine as we meet Cadet Beeny! See you in seven!

159. Where Things Should Have Ended

December 2005: We've reached an interesting little mark here at Thrillpowered Thursday, where we're exactly six years behind the comic, but this is not the happiest of birthdays, because while the present-day Prog 2012 is all kinds of great, its antecedent is most emphatically not. It has elements of greatness in it - for the second year running, a truly awesome Caballistics Inc. more than makes up for some other, subpar offerings - and a few good stories that get off to fun starts, but even this uninspired cover by Kev Walker feels a little tired. It's meant to play with the imagery of old Soviet propaganda posters, but it just seems very static and dull to me. With a comic as dynamic as 2000 AD at its best, this isn't successful in selling anything to potential new readers.

Inside, there's an incredibly downbeat and glum John Wagner-scripted Judge Dredd episode, most notable for the very cheeky cameo that artist Greg Staples drew of himself, and a silly second outing for the lawman, this time in a Robbie Morrison script that parodies the popular TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. There's the debut of The Ten-Seconders, a new series that I'll discuss in more detail next week, and a fantastic new Strontium Dog story by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, but also a lot of stories that just mark time. The most obvious of these is a six-page Nikolai Dante installment, "Devil's Deal," that very overtly just recaps the most recent plot developments.

Oh, Slaine is back, in the first story since the darn strip should have ended earlier in 2005. So is Sinister Dexter, also in the first story since the darn strip should have ended earlier in 2005. Actually, the previous week. I had not really noticed before that the two series that I'm most down on for continuing past their sell-by date both resumed with new stories in the same issue. No wonder I don't much like Prog 2006.

In "Festive Spirits," a six-page story by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, the same team that managed the triumphant epic "And death shall have no dumb minions," Finnigan and Ramone figure out that they are dead. Oblivious to the fact that their friend Rocky is ignoring them, and that the late Nervous Rex and their dead boss Demi are interacting with them, and, you know, that they don't have any skin anymore, they try to celebrate their last night in town, only to get sadly frustrated that nobody living will pay any attention to them.



This epilogue's incredibly interesting, but good lord, it's really frustrating. I think that, back when it ran, I was equally torn between the amazing climax of "dumb minions," with Ramone dead and Finnigan minutes away from joining him, and the suggestion that somehow, the last two panels of "Festive Spirits" promised the series' greatest moment ever. The ghosts turn away from the cab driver Charon, come to ferry them to the afterlife, with the grim resolve that they have unfinished business. The caption, thunderously, read, COMING SOON: THE MOSES WARS.

That was six years ago. SIX! YEARS! In the present day, in Prog 2012 (it just arrived in American comic shops yesterday), they finally catch up to Miss Deeds, the second-in-command to their enemy Holy Moses Tanenbaum. Six years, and the Moses Wars don't seem to be anywhere near conclusion.

Let me also point out that I sincerely doubt that, when the time comes, Abnett will ever be able to give Ramone a better send-off than his death scene in the final part of "dumb minions." It is completely beautiful. Tracy begs him to surrender to her, and he stubbornly refuses, although he won't raise his pistols to meet her. She shoots him in the chest and he drops against the side of the car, still clutching his handguns, blood everywhere. It is a completely amazing and thunderous gut-punch. It's so beautiful that it really, really should have been the end of the character, with Finnigan's inevitable demise left off-screen, the readers knowing that there was no way out for him. The impact is lessened considerably by the knowledge that Finnigan did get away, and that Ramone got better.

Since Sin Dex subsequently got bogged down with parallel worlds and doppelgangers from other dimensions, I feel justified in looking at it this way: There's an alternate universe where 2000 AD concluded their adventures with two different panels at the end of "Festive Spirits," where they got in Charon's cab and drove away, leaving the city in the hands of the kingpin Holy Moses Tanenbaum. On that note, I'm still unclear why this is a bad thing. Holy Moses was their boss in the beginning of the series, which emphatically states that some level of organized crime will always exist, outside of the police's power to control. Demi was no less of a criminal than Tanenbaum. I resist the moral argument espoused by two hired killers with a shockingly high bodycount that one is in some way worse than another, when they were on each's payroll.

And so Sin Dex joins Slaine, where this blog is concerned, as a series that will only be acknowledged, going forward, as a passing mention among the issue-under-discussion's content. I would be remiss, however, in not noting Malone, a seven-part story that will begin in prog 1500, about eight months down the line. Malone was written by "Cal Hamilton" and drawn by Simon Coleby, and ends, as The Dead Man did eighteen years previously, with the very stunning surprise that the lead character Malone was Finnigan, and writer Hamilton a pseudonym for Abnett. It's safe to say that nobody saw this coming, and it would prove to be the first of three completely left-field Dead Man-styled twists that surprised and thrilled readers in various series over the course of about eighteen months. The practice was, sensibly, then retired as fans started looking suspiciously at every new strip that began, wondering when Johnny Alpha or Rogue Trooper or Abelard Snazz would show up, but only the grouchiest of fans would deny the great double-take fun of Rocky Rhodes showing up at Malone's door.

That said, Prog 2006's standouts are the Strontium Dog story and a very good Caballistics Inc. one-off. This episode tugs at a variety of plot strands, principally attempting to show us why Hannah Chapter is such an unlikeable, motormouthed bundle of mood in a great jacket, but the really impressive part comes with Ethan Kostabi showing up from his mostly offscreen setting to get the Vatican to leave his employees alone. He does this by blackmailing the Catholic Church with some faith-shattering revelations of Jesus's time, the sort of thing that would fuel the next two or three Dan Brown thrillers, and allows them to continue suppressing the documents' existence in return for their backing off. Boy, I love this.

But actually, the really, really impressive part is the artwork by Dom Reardon. I believe that it's fair to note that Reardon can sometimes be slighted for taking shortcuts, and occasionally, his action scenes are a little stilted and posed. There was a scene a couple of years previously where Hannah punches through a mirror to reveal a camera behind it that comes to mind. But when Reardon is on fire, he really pulls out some amazing work. Take a moment and drink in this amazing panel that I've provided for you, and just look at how much work went into that composition, from its construction to the beautiful, solid inking. This is terrific artwork, and everybody should get the reprint of the story in the second Cabs volume, "Creepshow," to see more.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Caballistics Inc.: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Low Life: Mega-City One Undercover Vol. 1 (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar (Amazon UK)
Slaine: The Books of Invasions Vol. 3 (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor to His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, a look back at The Ten-Seconders and Johnny Alpha's trip to the planet of the baldies. See you next week!

158. Lack of Background

November 2005: Over the previous two entries, I've mentioned a very highly regarded Judge Dredd story by John Wagner and Kev Walker entitled "Mandroid." It's a long way from being one of my favorite Dredd stories, but it really is an effective and triumphant look at just how badly the best intentions can go awry. If I'm honest with myself, I'd have to agree that my rotten mindset and personal unhappiness in the last half of 2005 colors my reading of it. I was in a bad place and in a bad relationship at the time, and something as downbeat and depressing as "Mandroid" certainly wasn't going to provide a nice distraction.

Over its first few episodes, the twelve-part story introduced us to Nate Slaughterhouse, a decorated war veteran who has lost more than half his body to grievous wounds and given a realistic cyborg shell. Honorably discharged with his wife, a veteran officer, and their young son, they try to start a life in Mega-City One and find the place every bit as miserable and overwhelming as a reader can imagine. It's one of the very rare occasions where Wagner doesn't play the inhuman insanity of the city for laughs; here, Mega-City One is an absolute, miserable hellhole, and Justice Department is a largely incompetent, badly understaffed agency whose presence, while mostly ineffective, is still desperately needed to maintain just a hint of order. Unfortunately for Slaughterhouse, it isn't nearly enough.

So with his wife missing and his son murdered, Slaughterhouse becomes a vigilante, enraged and driven by the judges' impotence in the face of escalating street crime and organized "legitimate" business. Dredd is there as a constant, reassuring force. "We'll get him," he says. "We always do." And this is true, but it doesn't mean anything, either. The violence of the city just keeps getting worse, as even the lethal force that the judges wield is no longer a deterrent anymore.



Slaughterhouse is a compelling and tragic figure, and Walker's art really works beautifully in this setting. I really like the style that he's been using for the past nine years or so, with stark lines, limited detail and solid colors. He's not afraid to lose figures in fog or shadow, and people stand with huge weight and menace. There's a fantastic cliffhanger where Slaughterhouse returns home to find Dredd waiting for him. The lawman is standing quietly, his gun drawn but by his side, and holding one of Slaughterhouse's overcoats. There are two bullet holes in it, shots that the vigilante took and which bounced off his steel chassis. "I've been waiting for you," Dredd says simply, and even though there's nothing more in that panel's text or narration to imply a specific tone, I read that as Dredd speaking with such human sadness.

Throughout the story, Dredd has been incredibly sympathetic and understanding. I really got the impression that Dredd honestly liked the man, and wished his city was a better place for good people like him and his family. With that one, simple sentence breaking their bond and turning them into adversaries, it is an amazingly effective cliffhanger, one that just makes readers want to put the issue away for a while before tackling the other stories.

As I've expressed before, there's occasionally a big gap between "best" and "favorite." "Mandroid" is completely brilliant, and I strongly recommend the collected edition for anybody curious about the strip. But I also offer the caveat that it's not usually like this. Mega-City One is only bearable because its misery is almost always couched in lunacy. Despite the words I've devoted to it here, "Mandroid" is just too bleak and harrowing for my liking, and I'm honestly glad when the strip ends and I can focus on other things, like Sinister Dexter's world spiraling completely out of control again.

I was rereading some earlier chapters in this blog this week and noticed how one major thing has changed in the way that I approach it. It began with me reporting my reread from the perspective of doing it with my children. Sadly, my older son has elected to live in Kentucky, and my daughter stopped reading after about a hundred issues. She was a little outraged and disappointed with how things went down in Sinister Dexter, her favorite strip. She didn't quite read this strip from the same perspective that I, or anybody else, did. She read the story as being about Demi Octavo. To her, Demi was the central character, and Ramone and Finny were just the guys that she sent out to do her job. When Demi was killed in the epic "Eurocrash," that put an end to her brief flirtation with the comic.

"And death shall have no dumb minions" feels very much like the thematic sequel to "Eurocrash," especially when things start to fall completely apart around Demi's sister Billi. Interestingly, for a while, it doesn't quite go that way. Now, "Eurocrash" was almost totally brilliant, but there was one flaw in the earlier chapters. Violating the "show, don't tell" rule, writer Dan Abnett kept asserting that Demi's hold over the city's crimelords was weakening, but only gave us some very slight evidence that this was true after making these claims. Nevertheless, it was a short hop from that claim to the godawful entropy setting in, destroying Demi's empire and leaving Ramone and Finny helpless to stop it. Demi's inevitable death is an awesome punch when it comes, but it was telegraphed from space.



This story begins with an entirely different mood. Ramone and Finny have new employment with Appelido and they seem to be in control of their destinies. Ramone and Tracy are happy together - and I'd be remiss if I did not mention that a bedroom scene with these two early in the story, painted by Simon Davis, is almost certainly the sexiest and most erotic moment to ever appear in the comic - and Downlode looks to be as stable as this erratic, dangerous city can be.

But then we learn that Billi has been placed in Appelido's organization by the police to gather evidence. Now, a big chunk of this requires some suspension of disbelief at both Downlode's laws and human behavior. Basically, since Appelido is a clone of crimelord Holy Moses Tanenbaum, and the law says that - wait for it - clones can be prosecuted for the crimes of the person from whom they're cloned, the city's planning a big sting operation to prosecute Appelido for Tanenbaum's crimes, and that's what Billi's doing on the inside. Since Tanenbaum had, years before, kept Demi as his mistress, Billi wants to avenge her late sister by killing the clone of Moses.

This is problematic. Of course, the main reason that I have come to dislike Sinister Dexter is that Abnett has overcomplicated the bejezus out of the thing, helping to confirm that a once amusing and playful diversion of the strip has turned into a narrative nightmare, but until I started thinking about it, I had enjoyed "And death shall have no dumb minions" for its surprising and powerful escalation and climax. While, in "Eurocrash," Ramone and Finny are working together very closely and things only hit that inevitable punch because they get separated, here, there's a sense that if only they could make it to the right place at the right time, they could have avoided all the carnage. Pardon my language, but an insightful friend once noted that the really great thing about the famous final episode of Blake's 7 isn't just that they all die, but that they die fucking up. It takes some bravery on the part of a writer to allow his lead characters this kind of vunerability.

So yes, things get really, really bad in this story. It looks very much like it ends with Ramone dead, Billi about to join him in the afterlife, and Finny about one gallon of gas away from either incarceration or a million bullets. Especially with the artwork by Davis at his career best - and I know that no artist appreciates the insinuation that their best work is behind them, but really, this is lush, detailed, vibrant, exciting and so many leagues superior to the latest sixty-odd, identical, orange-and-purple pages of the most recent Ampney Crucis Investigates story that it's not at all funny - and knowing just what an utter and total mess that Sinister Dexter would devolve into, it would have been best off ending here at this emotional high. It would have been ugly and messy and left unanswered questions, but with just a little tweaking to the last few pages, this could have been a memorable and amazing end.

Sure, the bad guys would have won, but this is Downlode, and our heroes are hired killers. The bad guys win in every story anyway.

Stories from this issue are available in the following reprint editions:
Judge Dredd: Mandroid (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Leatherjack: The Complete Leatherjack (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Rogue Trooper: Realpolitik (Out of Print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, "Mandroid" artist Kev Walker gets selected for the front cover of Prog 2006 and a stunning new lineup for the new year! Plus more about Sinister Dexter, because I've got more to say about it.

137. Men and Women Without Many Clothes

April 2004: Well, isn't this a terrific cover? Chris Weston started his career working on Judge Dredd in the early '90s and he'd been contributing to various series here and there while also getting high-profile work for American publishers, frequently illustrating scripts for Grant Morrison. Speaking of which, a few weeks ago, I finally bought the first collected edition of Morrison's run on Batman, and, after my eyeballs got finished bleeding trying to decipher that godawful artwork, I concluded that as soon as I win the lottery, I'm going to pay Chris Weston his top page rate and just give him damn near every Morrison DC Universe script that someone from this battalion of chicken-scratchers has ruined - Batman, JLA, Final Crisis, the lot - and make it look comprehensible at last.

Unfortunately, Weston, who, in a perfect world, would draw damn near everything, is only handling Rogue Trooper on the cover and not the interiors. Artwork on this story is handled by a newly-constructed droid, PJ Holden, and it's not bad, though it certainly suffers by comparison with the cover! It's very much the work of a new talent and it's very rough in places, but any eyeball which would rather look at that garbage Adam Kubert drew for Batman, probably for a lot more money, than this deserves to bleed, frankly. Holden's work starts off pretty good and would improve greatly over the next several years, but this is still a competent and fine job, and a reasonable conclusion to Gordon Rennie's Rogue Trooper series.

If you recall your Thrillpowered Thursday lessons, Rogue Trooper had returned back in July of '02. The 25 episodes that Rennie penned - staggered out over an agonizing 85 weeks - proved to be mostly good reading this time around. Rennie elected to structure the run much better than I had thought, and it would have worked out very well, had there not been such enormous breaks between the stories.

After the four-part opener (#1301-1304), there was a one-shot called "Weapons of War," illustrated by Dylan Teague, which introduced some new supporting players on the Souther side who were looking for Rogue. Their arc, and that of a ruthless and bloodthirsty Nort commander, Arkhan, weaves through the series, and reaches a pretty satisfying conclusion at the end of "Realpolitik." Rennie did a good job with the task assigned him, but this really would have been a better series had it wrapped up in a single calendar year, and not been dragged out over... wow... 22 months.

Rogue will return a few more times, in late 2005 and the spring of 2006, in stand-alone stories designed to tie in to the forthcoming video game, but other than these, his story is over. And so, mercifully, is the story of Durham Red.



Thank heaven this is finished. Durham Red had been an occasionally entertaining space opera starring a bad-tempered, half-naked mutant vampire for some time, but this third major storyline, "The Empty Suns," is just unreadable nonsense. It had actually begun in October of '03, but artist Mark Harrison hit some delays and the story took a 14-issue break after seven episodes.

What remains is an in-one-eye-and-out-the-other melodrama in which Durham Red, her teenage son(!) and some other castaways from the earlier series get back together for one last go at saving the universe from the latest iteration of the pandimensional threat du jour, something whose name has already escaped me. Red rechristens her son Johnny, in honor of Johnny Alpha, whatever that's worth.

All the while, Red wears as little as the law will allow - her latest wardrobe choice is an unbelievable black vinyl loincloth thing that shows every legal inch of leg and thigh - and stays in a bad mood and basically proves to be as unsympathetic a star as is possible. This is absolutely a story where neither writer nor artist are bringing their best, which is a real shame since we know they're capable of far better. Dan Abnett's captions are overwritten and ponderous, and the visuals of outer space action are murky. It's almost impossible to follow the action, and since the lead is so unlikeable, nobody wants to. Tharg promises that the story's conclusion, in issue 1386, will be the final episode ever, and, mercifully, he's meant it.

And on that sour note, it's vacation time! Thrillpowered Thursday will be taking off for two weeks for recharging and recuperation. We'll be back later in June with a look at Young Middenface and Black Siddha See you then!

...Or not. Honestly, guys, I'm really burned out on doing this every week, so this'll be the last Thrillpowered Thursday for the present. Thanks for reading.

130. Heroclix, part two

September 2003: Last week, I was telling you about Heroclix, the internationally-popular beat combo, errrr, that is, well-known collectible miniatures game which, in its sixth set, featured a handful of 2000 AD characters. I was also telling you about how the expansion in question was not as popular with Heroclix's players as WizKids had hoped, and that overconfident retailers had overordered the set. I also left a dangling hint that prog 1356, pictured here, is inexorably linked with Heroclix in my mind. All this tantalizing foreshadowing; you're going to be so disappointed if this turns out to be really mundane, aren't you?

Indyclix, as players called the expansion, represented an incredible missed opportunity for comic shops. Honestly, very few players could swear to be intricately familiar with all the lines represented in the game. Apart from 2000 AD, and its characters from three different series, there were pieces from Top Cow's Witchblade, Cyberforce, The Darkness and Aphrodite IX, the Crossgen series Sojourn, Sigil, The Way of the Rat and The Path, Wildstorm's Danger Girl, Dark Horse's Hellboy, Caliber/Image's Kabuki and Crusade's Shi. I think that's everybody.

Can you guess what all these series have in common that 2000 AD didn't have in 2003? That's right, a comprehensive trade program to keep their stories in print.

I was pretty active on the hcrealms site in 2003, and I was saying that any retailer worth his salt, one who actually wanted to use the interest from the game to prop up sales of his comics, would be nuts not to put together a display of all those titles and to use the captive audience of players who've arrived to compete in a tournament to talk about them. This was around the time that the phrase "team comics" was making a small murmur among the online crowds who wanted to expand the medium, and I was personally very frustrated that a good 2000 AD trade program didn't exist.

At the time, Titan had the license to most of 2000 AD's serials, and while I've normally got nothing but love for the good fellows at Titan, their 2001-03 line of reprints was really disappointing. There were a few exceptions, but most of what they released were either "Hey kids, Garth Ennis!" attempts to sell that writer's subpar Judge Dredd stories, or repackagings of the earlier 1980s Titan books. Some of the hardback collections of things like Nemesis the Warlock and "The Judge Child Quest" admittedly looked fantastic, and set the stage for their subsequent hardback lines of Dan Dare and Charley's War, but overall the line felt flimsy and halfhearted, and it was a long, long way from "comprehensive." Rebellion also had a small line of its own self-contained books, typically European-styled hardcover collections of shorter stories. They were interesting in their own right - Jamie Boardman smacking himself in the head with a Hewligan's Haircut book at a convention to demonstrate its indestructibility instantly became the stuff of legend - but didn't spotlight 2000 AD's long-running characters and ongoing serials.

So I had a neat idea. It would cost me a little bit, but I would order a small stack of 2000 ADs for the players at one store. On Monday evenings, I played with a group of people at a store in Marietta which was really not terrible, but still not quite as wonderful as a comic store should be. This place had a pretty good crowd of regulars, and so I decided, back in June, to preorder eight copies of a forthcoming prog to serve as participation prizes for the first Indy-themed game. It was impossible to tell with preorders from Diamond, but it looked like issues 1356-57 might have been scheduled to ship either the week of or the week after Indy's release, so I picked 1356 and paid for eight copies, hoping that whatever was in that prog would blow at least one person's mind enough to want to follow up.

Oh, 1356, what a disappointment you were. If you were any reader's first prog, they wouldn't knock down anybody's door to find a second.

The first problem was that horrible cover. I like Charlie Adlard a lot, and his interior work in this issue wasn't at all bad, but what to make of that cover, with a jowly Dredd on his back, uniform opened - he doesn't wear a shirt under that motorcycle leather? - and helpless?

Inside, new readers might have enjoyed two terrific ongoing stories, Leviathan by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, about which more next week, and the hilarious Strontium Dog yarn "The Tax Dodge" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, but both stories were several weeks into their run, and a little unfriendly to new readers. The Judge Dredd episode was the last part of the very underwhelming "The Satanist" by Wagner and Adlard, and it's a complete mess, easily one of Wagner's weakest multi-part stories. Dredd spends about the entire episode helplessly chained to a rock, about to be sacrificed in the Brit-Cit countryside to some demon, only to literally be saved by a bolt from the blue, as though God - or Grud - put a stop to the Devil-Rides-Out wannabe.

Sinister Dexter started a new storyline by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis in this prog, and that might have worked for new readers. Everybody likes to jump on with a first episode, right? Unfortunately, this particular first episode was not an action-packed gunfight with our heroes, but instead a lighthearted, jokey, subplot-heavy installment as everyone prepared for two of the supporting characters to get married. That left a Past Imperfect one-shot by Nigel Long, writing as "Kek-W," and Leigh Gallagher, in a very early professional job for him. The one-shot is not bad, per se, but it's about as unfriendly to American readers as can be possible. It's about Dick Barton, who maybe one in a million of us have ever heard of. That's certainly no fault of anybody's (this is a British comic), but for somebody trying to convince a room of American gamers to try this comic, it sure did add up to a colossal disappointment.

But even if it had worked with one of the eight, and people did want to see what happened next in the ongoing stories, there was still a flaw in my plan. The shop in question didn't order 2000 AD for any but its subscribers - the manager told me that he had two - so anyone hoping to see prog 1357 would not, because of Diamond not holding any overstock for reorders, be able to buy a copy easily.

At least my intentions were good, but what I really needed was the opportunity to point people to some pretty zarjaz collected editions. It would be about nine months before I got the chance, and that's a story for another day.

Speaking of collected editions, in more recent news, over at my Bookshelf blog, I reviewed last year's Anderson: Psi Division phonebook collection earlier this week. Go have a read, link to it and tell your friends!

Next week, three serials knock the readership on their backsides. Come back to hear about Leviathan, From Grace and XTNCT. See you in seven!

123. Get Vaped and Stay Vaped!

I'm basking in the warm, circuit-sparking glow of the four latest progs to make their way to American stores and was enjoying them so much that I quite forgot that I had business here to finish, which is a little short-sighted of me. Usually, when I select a topic for this blog, I tend towards the really big events, such as the return of Slaine, the debut of Caballistics Inc. or the crossover epic story of Judge Dredd vs. Aliens. Perhaps I have a habit of overlooking the equally important supporting stories, and the first quarter of 2003 has had quite a few, so I'd like to touch on a few of those before moving on.

Ian Gibson has cover duties for prog 1334 from April of '03, spotlighting the second series of the remade and remodelled The V.C.s. Dan Abnett is still the writer, but Anthony Williams has taken over art duties from Henry Flint. It's surprisingly, stubbornly unengaging, but Williams makes it all look pretty good. There's a collected edition of the first three series of the 2002-05 run of The V.C.s, and in the supplementary material, Abnett explained how enthusiastic he was about writing the strip. Its subsequent refusal to be really entertaining remains completely baffling.

Abnett did such a great job on so many strips in creating memorable, larger-than-life characters, but the cast of the V.C.s are just the most anonymous bunch of nobodies that 2000 AD's ever seen. There's Smith, from the original series, and the alien, who's called Keege, and... Ryx, who I think is the asshole, and the obligatory babe, whose name might be Lin-Fu, and somebody else, and I think the rival pilot might be called Veto. And I can name every member of the ABC Warriors in the order they joined, so I don't think the problem's me. Especially when these guys have their names painted on the front of their spacesuits.



Abnett had much better luck with the second series of Atavar, drawn by Richard Elson. I was very skeptical about this one, because I felt that the original should have been left as a one-off serial with a spectacular twist ending. It was a universe that simply didn't need revisiting, and this colored my view so much that I'm only now reading Atavar for the first time. And you know what? It's incredibly good stuff!

I started to write up a synopsis of what happens in the second series, only to realize that I got way too detailed, and when you're dealing with weird sci-fi concepts and beasties, such a writeup rapidly starts sounding convoluted and silly. Suffice it to say that Atavar's world is one with a dizzying array of new, utterly inhuman races like the Binoid and their sentient machines. Elson's designs for the aliens and all this technology are very interesting and he looks completely at home with whatever Abnett throws at him to draw. I suggest that readers, like me, have done this story a disservice by overlooking it the way we have. It is an interesting and vivid parallel to the similarly far-out, inhuman universe of Shakara, and there's a lot of love for the Abnett/Elson team on their more recent series Kingdom, so Tharg and his team should definitely look into putting all three Atavar stories out in a nice collected edition.

Then on the other end of the quality scale, there's Bec & Kawl by Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts, which is just coughing up blood on the pages. It's another four-week run for the comedy series. It leads with a dopey one-off whose punch line requires you to notice what is written on Kawl's T-shirt at exactly the right moment, and then there's an invasion-by-cyberspace thing guest starring a gang of mean-spirited geek stereotypes. With its third run, Bec & Kawl would develop into something memorable and charming, but at this point, you're left wondering what dirt Spurrier has on Tharg to get this mess commissioned.

What's nice, though, is that Matt Smith, in his guise as Tharg, has a pretty small number of series to pick from, and everything that I've mentioned has come back to the prog after a very short layoff. In fact, the thunderously good Caballistics Inc. by Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon starts its second series just a month after the first ended. In this one, the team moves into a new headquarters once used by a Crowley-archetype for demonic rituals, and I can remember the names of all the characters in this cast, too.

Caballistics will take another short break - only three weeks - before starting its third story. By my count, Smith is only juggling about eight or nine recurring series at this point, and deciding what to recommission in the future. Obviously, this number's going to skyrocket as a huge pile of new series begin over the next two years, and I'm sure it didn't make for a happy Command Module at the time, filling in the gaps with whatever's handy. Prog 1334, in fact, contains two space-fillers: a Future Shock and yet another of Steve Moore's interminable Tales of Telguuth. Tharg will finally run out of those turkeys at the end of '03. But what I suspect was a real headache for Smith and the droids was really to the readers' advantage: with such short gaps between ongoing series, everything seems very fresh and fun. It's much easier to enjoy a series when you don't have to wait a year between installments!

And speaking of waiting for a new installment, that is where we'll leave the story for now. I'm choosing to take a little break because I am adding another regularly-scheduled blog to my rotation, but I'd sort of like to keep the same number of weekly deadlines. If you're a regular reader, thanks for following me, and if you just have me bookmarked, I'll drop a note on the 2000 AD message board when I resume in eight or nine weeks. So I will see you again in March, when Pat Mills and Andy Diggle go at it again, as The ABC Warriors and Snow / Tiger go head to head. See you then!

118. In the Flesh

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

116. Spurrier's Scrap

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time, set sail on the Red Seas! See you in seven!

115. Blasts from the Past

August 2002: Prog 1306 sports a cover by David Millgate for the new serial Bison. Charitably, it's not one of Tharg's better offerings. The kickboxing lady on the cover is a pretty radically redesigned version of the hero, who starts the serial as an aging, hugely-muscled detective in a near-future scenario, but thanks to some bodyswapping technology that's all the rage in the story, he's wearing the body of an untouchable crime lord's junkie daughter and she's got his. But at no point does either character look like the tough kickboxing lady that Millgate has drawn. See, when Detective Jack Bison realized that Esposito's daughter had an account on this bodychanging service, he realized he was going to have to go outside the law to take Esposito down, and planned to use his own daughter as the shooter, but didn't figure she was going to set up whomever was going to take over her body. She was strung out on heroin and such and just didn't want to deal with a weekend's withdrawal and detox. So Bison first has to kick the habit and then go kill Esposito, except he also has to deal with the daughter, who's using his body to go on a shooting rampage of her own, and...

Well, it's obviously not just the bodyswap technology that nobody thought quite all the way through; this plot is an amazingly convoluted mess. This is a nine-part story written by Colin Clayton and Chris Dows, and illustrated by Laurence Campbell and Len Townsend. I don't think any of them would disagree when I say that all four creators would do better in the future. Bison was met with howls of derision from the fan base. Looking at it now, it's perhaps a degree or two better than I remembered it, but it's still a pretty stupid comic. Yet the real disappointment is the art. Laurence Campbell would go on to much better things, particularly a 2005 serial called Breathing Space, but what we have here is just lazy, sloppy work that should have gone straight back to the artist for reworking. Check out the way he gets around drawing exit wounds here by just having people erupt in so much blood that it really looks like the men are being shot with guns that magically turn them into candles:



So is this the shock of the new in our weekly look at the future from the Galaxy's Greatest Comic? Well, believe it or not, Bison really is the most forward-looking strip in a very nostalgic run of 2000 AD this particular summer. Over in Judge Dredd, John Wagner and Colin MacNeil - now there's a man who knows how to draw exit wounds - have brought back the one-off character of Vienna Dredd, an improbable niece conceived by Pat Mills and Ian Gibson in a 1979 episode and never referred to again, as a young actress who would like her Uncle Joe to give her some trace of a family connection. Vienna becomes a very welcome addition to Dredd's supporting cast. Actually, to be honest, I'm tweaking events to make a point; Vienna's return is chronicled in progs 1300-1301. 1306 sees the end to the recurring menace of bent cop Judge Manners in a story by Wagner and Paul Marshall.

In the last blog, we looked at how Rogue Trooper, first seen in 1981, had returned. He's joined by Strontium Dog, introduced in 1978, in an eight-parter called "Roadhouse" by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. Finally there's the return of The VCs, a 1979-80 serial brought back after a 22-year break by Dan Abnett and Henry Flint.



Now the original run of The VCs (the collected edition of which I reviewed back in April) was not quite the classic that some of us squaxx consider it, but it was a solid enough tale of future war. It was a little jingoistic and repetitive, but I think it had a sense of excitement and danger lacking from many kids' comics, and the art was always fantastic. This new take? Well, there's nothing at all wrong with it, and Flint's artwork is as terrific as always, but the story never completely captivates me. There's nothing at all wrong with it, and it's a darn sight better than plenty of other comics, but it's just not one of my favorites. Anyway, this initial run lasts for just seven weeks and is the only one that Flint illustrates. The VCs will return for four more annual outings of about ten weeks each, with art by Anthony Williams.

Surprisingly, every story in prog 1306 has been reprinted. All of the Judge Manners episodes were collected in one of the free "graphic novels" bagged with an issue of the Megazine this summer. Bison was compiled in a hardcover "European-album-styled" edition by Rebellion in 2004. The VCs, Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog stories are all available in Rebellion's wonderful line of 2000 AD reprints. We'll come back to that VCs book in a month or so.

Next time, Simon Spurrier gets his second series, The Scrap, Steve Parkhouse caricatures Inspector Morse, and we look at the new hardback edition of The ABC Warriors. See you in seven!

113. American Ugly

July 2002: In the pages of the Megazine, the new editor Alan Barnes has been shaking the heck outta everything, with tremendously fun results. One very positive change has been increasing the frequency from monthly to every fourth week, so there's an extra issue published each year, a schedule which remains in place today. There's a stronger relationship between the Meg and the prog than ever before, as, for the first time, non-Dredd series have been crossing over into the Meg's pages. Currently running is a really fascinating and fun anthology series featuring the vampire mutant Durham Red, but it's not quite the same Red we've been following in her far-future sci-fi epics in 2000 AD. In "The Scarlet Apocrypha," writer Dan Abnett has been placing the character, or analogues of her at any rate, in a variety of different scenarios and time periods, each illustrated by a different artist. John Burns kicked things off in the previous issue, with a suggestion of what Durham Red might have been like as a Dario Argento horror film, and in this issue (# 13), we get Steve Yeowell doing a neat little alternate history set in the 1890s, with Aubrey Beardsley and the Montgolfier Brothers.

Future installments will see Frazer Irving doing a medieval Japanese adventure and Steve Kyte doing one inspired by more modern Japanese fiction, along with longtime Modesty Blaise artist Enric Romero pitting Durham against Dracula, and Carlos Ezquerra bringing us a strange sequel to the classic Fiends of the Eastern Front. And then there's the grand finale later in the year, but more about that another time.



But the 2000 AD connection doesn't end there. Much of the editorial pages are given over to news about the forthcoming return of the original Rogue Trooper, which we'll look at next time. It's here that we get the first confirmation that Rebellion are working on a Rogue Trooper video game. At this point, it's still years away, and the company's Dredd vs. Death game has yet to be released, but it helps stoke a little excitement among the fan base.

The garish cover, a highlight of which is displayed above so you can get a better look at it, announces the return of the ugly craze to the pages of Judge Dredd. Otto Sump was introduced in the early 1980s as Mega-City One's ugliest man, and the successful entrepreneur made several return appearances in short comedy tales, all illustrated by Ron Smith. The character was retired about fifteen years before this two-part story, a Citizen Kane homage drawn by John Higgins.

"Citizen Sump" is just terrific, a moody and sad little melodrama which isn't simply a parody of that greatest of American films, but also an interesting detective procedural which sees Dredd working a cop beat trying to solve a locked room murder. Everybody has different perceptions of the hapless Otto, but everybody remembers him as one of the Meg's sweetest citizens. In his original appearances, there was a running gag with Sump always greeting Dredd as "my old pal," much to Dredd's disinterest. It turns out that Sump was like that to absolutely everybody, just a genuinely sweet and loving man.

But turning the Kane homage on its head is the revelation of Sump's last words, particularly in view of the way Otto never lost his truly good nature. Kane, of course, let his millions turn him into a near-psychotic recluse, and died a miserable and pathetic figure. The judges never learn what Sump's last word means, and the staggeringly brilliant revelation shows that Sump was every bit as wistful and nostalgic for his lost childhood as Kane was, even after spending his wealthy life loving his fellow citizens and making the best of the odd karmic turn of events that made him deformed, shunned, wealthy and successful.

Frankly, this script is one of Wagner's all-time finest. It's an absolute triumph, and deserves to be seen by anybody who loves comics. It's not yet been reprinted, so try and track down volume four, issues 12-13 of the Megazine. You won't be disappointed.

If that wasn't enough, the Megazine has finally found a perfect place for artist John Burns. Most of his previous work for the House of Tharg has been on Judge Dredd or Nikolai Dante, but to my mind, the best example of Burns being ideally chosen for art duties came with the little-remembered Black Light from 1996. I only mentioned this strip in passing back in the 37th installment, but it was an X Files-inspired, modern-day techno thriller with government conspiracies and tough heroes with guns. It's a strip which really should have returned for at least one second series and been collected in a graphic novel while the iron was hot. Anyway, in this issue, Burns has teamed up with writer Robbie Morrison for The Bendatti Vendetta. This first episode has all the appearance of the most exciting pre-credits sequences of any action film from the seventies. We don't know who the characters are, but some people have slipped into some mob boss's party and caused almighty havoc, with fisticuffs and bullets flying every which way.

I say this is perfectly suited for Burns because I perceive him, rightly or wrongly, as an artist most comfortable in the modern age. No matter how well he paints Dredd or Dante, something about his work on those strips never completely gels for me, particularly in conveying a sense of place. His Mega-City One is rarely more than dark alleyways, and his future Russia is often just bombed-out war zones. But The Bendatti Vendetta is clearly set in the humdrum of our world, and when Burns brings this to life, it's vastly more vivid and exciting. Well, it's less our world than our recent history - it doesn't appear that Burns has updated his reference material in many years, but since the violent iconography within the script screams "seventies action film," it doesn't matter, he's still exactly right for the artwork. Put another way, I keep expecting Ian Hendry and Britt Ekland to make supporting appearances.

There's unfortunately not very many episodes of this series, not enough for a good collection for people to marvel at its coolness. Following this six-part adventure, it returned for a pair of three-part stories and was last seen in 2005. It's a shame that Morrison and Burns never collaborated on one last story to put the total page count over 100 so we could get a nice graphic novel out of it.

And that's all for now. Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take a short little break. As readers of my LJ saw, my family's suffered another house flood, and while my collection was happily safe, we're all sort of scattered right now, without much time or space for reading. When we resume in a few weeks, it'll be to look back in the weekly prog for issue # 1300, when both the original Rogue Trooper and VCs make long-overdue returns. What's with all the nostalgia?

110. Atavar and the UOS

We're up to April 2002 now, and here on the cover of prog 1287, Nikolai Dante celebrates his recent Eagle Award win for best British comic character. This will prove to be artist Simon Fraser's farewell to the character that he co-created for the next four years. As Dante moves into his third phase, "the pirate years," it will be with John Burns as sole artist. Fraser, who will return to Dante in October 2006, is at this time residing in Africa. The series will take a number of very long rests during the third phase, especially during 2004 when writer Robbie Morrison will be engaged in writing The Authority for the Wildstorm imprint at DC Comics.

This issue sees the conclusion of an eight-part storyline called "The Romanov Job," in which Dante and his occasional sparring-and-bedpartner the Countessa work with several master criminals to heist his vanquished family's crown jewels. The other characters in the narrative are analogues of other comic characters, including Catwoman, Janus Stark and the Spider, and they are hunted down by Captain Emmanuel, the Luther Arkwright-analogue who had been introduced in a 1999 story.


Robbie Morrison really closed out this part of Dante in fine form. There's a sense of desperation in the narrative that somehow fits where the series was at the time. After the civil war, the imperial Russia of the far future is a much more dangerous place, and it's not a world where our hero can go gallivanting around pulling heists and breaking hearts like he did before things completely fell apart. When, of course, he gets stabbed in the back by somebody he should have known better to trust, Nikolai falls back on his "I'm too cool to kill" line, only to be slapped in the face by it. The story ends on a cliffhanger which won't be resolved for another nine months. It was reprinted in the sixth Dante collection, Hell and High Water, in 2008.

Elsewhere in the issue, the other stories are marking time until the next relaunch issue, prog 1289, and so there's a Steve Moore / Clint Langley Tales of Telguuth and a Future Shock by Mike Carey and John Charles to fill the page count, along with the last part of a three-episode Judge Dredd adventure by John Wagner and Paul Marshall. I believe the Telguuth installment is actually notable for being the first appearance of Langley's current style, which he has used on Slaine and The ABC Warriors over the past few years. I think we're long overdue for reading a detailed interview with Langley where he discusses how he creates these odd "fantasy Photoshop fumetti" of his. However, the most interesting strip this week, other than Dante, is the penultimate part of a serial called Atavar.

I'm very curious how I'll feel about Atavar when I finish reading the third book of the series in a few months' time. This is a really odd little story by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson in which a group of powerful-but-desperate aliens, tens of thousands of years in the future, reconstruct an atavar of the long-extinct human race in order to help them in their war against machine-creatures called UOS. No series, with the possible exception of that cosmetic warrior "Rouge Trooper," has ever been misspelled as often as Atavar. Everybody wants to call this one "Avatar," perhaps missing the point that the aliens are looking into history to find something from the past to save their species.



Atavar began in prog 1281 with one of the most unusual first episodes of any series. We see our human character awake in a strange cave system from what appears to be cryo-sleep or something and run, panicking, from the huge aliens around him. There is no dialogue. Well, nothing in English, anyway. The human's got a lot to say, but it's all "HNNN!" and "NNNNN!" and the aliens haven't upgraded him to understand their language yet. It's a bizarre little experiment, and it certainly got reader's attention, even if many of them balked at the necessity of spending five pages on it.

The other thing that's really notable about Atavar is that it comes to a spectacular twist ending. The conclusion is so darn cool that everybody reread the previous progs to see how the heck they missed something so neat. It was an ending so perfect that bringing Atavar back, twice, left a bad taste in my mouth and I honestly only just glanced at the later episodes, complaining, in that know-it-all fan way, that the pages would have been better spent on more Vanguard or Balls Brothers. I'll try to judge them more fairly when I come to prog 1329 later in the year.

Next time, those bloody students take over! Eyebrows are furrowed and knives are drawn as Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts bring us Bec & Kawl. Plus, a look at the collected edition of Heavy Metal Dredd. See you in seven!

104. Saying Hello

It's certainly fair to suggest that this little blog of mine does more than a fair share of cheerleading. As a loyal Squaxx dek Thargo, I genuinely believe that 2000 AD is the Galaxy's Greatest Comic. But that's not to suggest that I think it's perfect. Even in the midst of the magazine's great return to hyperquality over the last eleven years or so, there have been periodic hiccups in the quality of the series within its covers, and weeks of turgid pacing where none of the creators on its pages seems to be firing on all cylinders. The last quarter of 2001 is one of those dull periods, when only Judge Dredd seems to be flying the flag high. During the last few months of 2001, Dredd is sharing space with a number of space-filling one-off Future Shocks, some wildly inconsistent Sinister Dexter shorts, and two absolute dogs which ramp up the boredom circuits for ten weeks: Steve Moore and Staz Johnson's Killer and a well-meaning mess of an Anderson: Psi Division case by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson. That's Killer spotlighted on the cover of prog 1266 (Oct. 2001), and I think it's a nice, moody piece by Jock.

Since returning to 2000 AD in 1999, Steve Moore contributed one misfire after another, and Killer, or "Filler" as fans quickly tagged it, was the dullest yet. It's another case of what I've hinted at in other entries about this period. The serial is all plot and no character. The lead character is called Madoc Blade (really), and he's a former gladiator in a far-future, alien-packed world where death is around every corner and nobody likes squishy, fleshy humans. It's almost as though, reflecting upon how many fans complained that his earlier Red Fang was too confusing, with too many twists and turns and subplots, Moore responded by scripting something that would have fit right in a 1981 prog during a short break from Return to Armageddon or something.

Actually, Moore does one very weird trick in Killer that's worth mentioning, just because it's so strange. Episodes two and three consist of a lengthy flashback in which Madoc, retired from the arena and drinking himself to death, is uncovered and is telling the story of his ugly past as a fight-or-die slave to his new benefactor. The cliffhanger comes right in the middle of his story. In the flashback. Fifteen years previously, a weirdo alien judge sentences him to death by combat, and the climax becomes "How did Madoc get out of this?" I honestly can't recall another example of a cliffhanger flashback, and with good reason. Well, at least Johnson's art, inked beautifully by David Roach, is very nice, and he came up with some appropriately weird alien thugs and monsters.



Likewise, Arthur Ranson's artwork on the Judge Anderson ten-parter "R*Evolution" is really wonderful. He devised some terrific imagery for the scenes in which Anderson goes onto the psychic plane to investigate the super-rich magnate Vernon D'Arque, a former Mega-citizen who now lives on an asteroid somewhere in space and who has merged his mind with six other citizens. Justice Department gets involved when one of the minds within the D'Arque-gestalt sends a psychic confession to an old, unsolved murder.

One problem with this story - and I say this as one of Alan Grant's biggest fans - is that readers never really understand exactly what the heck a gestalt mind is. Grant sort of takes it as written that D'Arque has come up with a stunning advance in evolution, even though it's later shown to be the product of alien technology, but never pauses to even explain what all this means to a human who's elected to merge minds with D'Arque. It's such a bizarre, outre concept that it stops the whole story in its tracks, asking "Wait a minute; why would anybody do this to themselves?" Grant never answers. We get clear-as-the-nose-on-yer-face hints that there's a dark side to life in the gestalt, but by the time our Cassandra wakes up in somebody else's mind, or something, the script has become so confused that Ranson's art simply can't salvage it anymore.

Honestly, this period is pretty disappointing, but it's not all bad. With another four-part scrap between Judge Dredd and the mysterious justice killer, Armon Gill, running at this time, the prog's just about worth it for that alone. Yet the Future Shocks are really only "shocking" if you're under ten, and Sinister Dexter is almost consistently on autopilot...



Oh, wait.

Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but Sinister Dexter's finest hour didn't come with one of their epic male bonding melodramas, nor with one of those episodes which turned everything upside down and unexpectedly killed a major supporting player. It's "I Say Hello," a curious little five-pager by Dan Abnett and Marc Pingriff which centers on the doorman of a posh hotspot in Downlode.



I can't tell you why I think "I Say Hello" is so amazing, or pull apart just how it works as well as it does. Really, this blog's going to get awfully boring if I keep mentioning how Sin Dex should've ended ages beforehand, how it reached a natural conclusion with "Eurocrash" and so on, but every once in a while, Abnett and his artists do something unexpectedly eye-opening. Here, there's such a wonderful twist, not within the plot, but with convention and presentation that you can't help but be charmed. It's a classic.

Having said that, let's dive back into the Sinister Dexter's recent past and the new collected edition of "Eurocrash." Like "I Say Hello," this is a straight-up Sin Dex classic. The collection starts with a couple of short stories and then dives right in to the exceptional, epic-length storyline in which crime queenpin Demi Octavo's hold over her city slips out from under her, leading to blood in the streets. By the time it's over, the balance of power in Downlode is changed forever, and Sinister and Dexter go their separate ways, each determined to ferret out the mysterious parties behind the carnage, and to never see each other again.

Which makes it incredibly hard to understand why, when you turn the page, the deadly duo are working together as a team.

Rebellion's line of reprints is easily the best in the industry right now. They do a laudable job 49 times out of 50, picking great material and presenting it in a standout format, on glossy paper, with matte-finish covers and typically some very nice extras. Well, their skimpy little creator biography paragraphs could use a little work, but otherwise it's a terrific reprint line. That's what makes this book so darned hard to understand. For some utterly baffling reason, the collection skips over twenty-four freaking episodes of the series.

As screw-ups go, this one ranks up there. The whole phase of the series when it was retitled Downlode Tales is excised, as well as two one-offs that ran alongside Eurocrash's earliest episodes and set up characters who would reappear within the bigger epic. What you got in those 24 episodes, apart from some very nice artwork by Simon Davis, Greg Staples and Chris Weston, among others, were some critical continuing subplots, the return of Billie Octavo and the deaths of several major recurring players, including both Bunkum and Nervous Rex. Oh yeah, and the whole point, the whole payoff, of the vengeful promises of the last two pages of "Eurocrash." At least Monty Python gave us a "scene missing" screen; this book just hopes you're not reading very closely.

I've never said this about a Rebellion book before, but this is one to avoid. Do not buy this book. They should pulp every copy they can get their hands on and issue a second edition with "Lone Shark," "The Ass Kickers," "Scrubbers" and "The Whack Pack" following Eurocrash. The fifth Sin Dex collection should have "City on Fire" and "Lock and 'Lode" and then the four stories which conclude this book: "Exit Wounds," "Observations," "Mission to Mangapore" and "Life Behind Bars," and probably a couple of other episodes after them. Otherwise, neither this nor the next book are worth purchasing. Speaking as a huge fan of the publisher and a pretty big fan of Sin Dex, I wish I didn't have to say that.

Next time, maybe we can get a last ray of sunshine in before Thrillpowered Thursday takes its summer break...?