178. General Public!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

164. Nothing Looks Quite Right

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday, the blog where I reread my collection of 2000 AD, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, along with its sister titles, and tell you about the wonderfully fun stories that I enjoy. I try to look back at things with a little sense of history and context, and for the next eight weeks, I'll be looking at some issues that were published in the second half of 2006.

In the present day, the comic celebrated its 35th anniversary in February, and perhaps you, dear reader, might be scratching your head wondering why in the world I would schedule some down time to go dark during the festivities, particularly as it was during the 30th anniversary that I started thinking about writing about the comic, its history and fandom. I have not actually been idle, as regular readers of all the Hipster Dad blogs know; over at my Bookshelf blog, I've been featuring a 2000 AD-related review every week - eight of 'em since I last wrote here. Check 'em out, and then tell your friends, share the links and spread the word. It's always good to let your friends who don't read Tharg's Mighty Organ of Thrillpower know that it isn't only you who loves this stuff. It's how we get new readers, I'd say.

But anyway, what I do here is look at the stack of comics-to-reread and schedule issues every fifth or sixth or so along the teetering, toppling tower that might spark a thing or two that I might want to talk about. And so we come to June of 2006 and Judge Dredd Megazine # 246, which is a good point to bring up Matt Smith's editorship of this title and the teething troubles that he appeared to have settling into things. Of course, charting the history of the Meg, as David Bishop did in very great detail over the course of a series of articles that had recently concluded at the time this issue was published, shows just how schizophrenic and unpredictable the comic is. The Meg has changed focus, page count, size, number of reprint pages, you name it, every few years and, under the editorship of Alan Barnes, it had spent about three years being unmissably good. It was a solid, fantastic, hundred-page book with five new stories of about 8-12 pages in each issue, backed up with some choice reprints from the pages of both 2000 AD and Battle Picture Weekly and some excellent text features.

Unfortunately, declining sales have meant that the good times have come to an end by 2006 and, while there is still a lot to love about the Mighty Meg today, the issues of the present just don't have the breadth to compare with the Barnes model. But before we get to the strong uptick in quality that makes today's Meg a very good read, there's this mess to deal with. For starters, there's a four-part Judge Dredd story called "Regime Change." It's got a very good script by Gordon Rennie that sees Mega-City One overthrowing the corrupt leaders of the South American Ciudad Barranquilla as part of an international "peacekeeping force." Unfortunately, there's the art by Inaki Miranda and Eva de la Cruz.



Now, part of what has made Dredd such a memorable strip is the editors' willingness to let artists go off-model. Wild experimentation is what led us to the memorable imagery of, say, Kevin O'Neill and Brendan McCarthy. But that's one thing, and this refugee from muscle beach is another.

To their credit, Miranda and de la Cruz provide some excellent pacing and clean, coherent storytelling, but with wonky anatomy and easy outs-via-stereotyping and caricature, the whole story really does look crass and unpleasant. And while there is certainly a long tradition of the Judge Dredd comic strip indulging in below-the-belt racist comedy in the artwork, that is a tradition that had mostly been tamed for what seems like at least a decade before two Sino-Cit judges show up, all buck-toothed and ready to frighten us with their yellow peril. The artwork was barely floating in the first place before, with one panel, the whole thing gets torpedoed.

It's not just Dredd that looks sloppy and ridiculous, though. In Fiends of the Eastern Front, the almost-always reliable Colin MacNeil elects to letter his own artwork. Not one person on the planet is pleased with his choice of font.

Mercifully, Matt Smith steps up and puts a stop to this after three episodes. The remaining five are lettered by the long-serving Annie Parkhouse, who does not use that font. I think that there's a lesson here for all of us.

"Stalingrad," the first new comic adventure for Fiends since the original in 1980, is further hampered by its bizarre scheduling. It is running alongside the third adventure for Pat Mills and Simon Davis' Black Siddha. Both were commissioned by Barnes, but the budget crunch and loss of pages has left Smith without the space available to run them as they were produced. I believe that both were planned as six episodes of eight pages each, but Smith has only six black and white pages and six color pages for new comics other than Dredd in each issue at the time, so they each get spread over eight months.

The problem, of course, with doing that is that a comic paced as an eight-page episode loses all of its impact when, in its first month, you only get six of the pages and an abrupt ending, and then, in the second, you get two pages where the action rises to a weird climax, resolved over the third and maybe the fourth page, and then moves through the first half of the scripted second episode. A monthly episode needs at least eight pages to "breathe" properly anyway, and this inelegant solution doesn't benefit either story at all.

Having said that, I've argued (most recently over at my Bookshelf blog about ABC Warriors) that, at this point in his career, Mills is writing without concern for cliffhangers anyway. The Black Siddha story, "Return of the Jester," appears to be a single 48-page story and it might not matter how well it is divided, except that it simply doesn't have the impact, carved up the way that it is. "Stalingrad" fares even less well, as its writer, David Bishop, was certainly thinking in terms of individual episodes with specific rises and falls in each installment.

I guess another thing that happened since the last time I wrote in this blog is that Mills gave an absolutely epic three-hour interview for the ECBT2000AD guys and their podcast, and he took another swipe at this Fiends adventure. Bishop had previously been commissioned by the prose publisher Black Flame to write three or four Fiends novels that were pretty well-received, but it certainly didn't please Mills to see anybody else writing Fiends comics other than the strip's creator, Gerry Finley-Day. While the production issues - and, I'm sorry, Colin, the lettering - certainly impacted everybody's enjoyment of Fiends, Mills' comments about anybody other than a strip - any strip's - creator scripting new episodes were appreciated by Smith, who declined to commission any more stories. But he also hasn't commissioned any new Black Siddha either, leaving the story with a reasonably happy ending for its hero.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Fiends of the Eastern Front: The Complete Fiends of the Eastern Front (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, the Red Seas are underground and Rawhead and Bloodybones are in London Town. See you in seven!

162. 86ed!

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

160. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

January 2006: The year begins with a pretty strong lineup of four popular returning series and one new thrill, a fairly typical breakdown of stories for a relaunch period. Judge Dredd is investigating a serial killer in a six-part story by John Wagner and Patrick Goddard, and Slaine is at work in a carnival-set storyline only notable for the appropriation of a Bob Dylan lyric as the cliffhanger to the penultimate episode. The Dredd story is reliable and engaging, but it's the other three stories that catch my eye this time out.

The Ten-Seconders is written by Rob Williams and illustrated by Mark Harrison. It's set in a grim future, where pockets of surviving humans manage a meager existence in the wake of the planet's devastation. Some years before, a "family" of powerful aliens arrived, affecting the appearance of angelic superheroes. They were hailed as saviors, but turned on the world and left it a wreck. The series, therefore, explores a possible future in the wake of the sort of carnage depicted in previous iterations of this kind of story, such as Alan Moore's Marvelman or Grant Morrison's Zenith. The color, the fighting and the mayhem is all in the past, and the gray, miserable present is all that small outposts of survivors have left to them.

The series, for one crafted to avoid the "hook" of watching the superbeings betray the planet and destroy it, is nevertheless written very effectively. It is one of the most promising series to emerge in the mid-2000s, and that's despite some surprisingly ineffective art by Mark Harrison which threatens to sink the whole thing. Normally a very reliable and engaging artist, Harrison's work here doesn't move me at all. Perhaps he's guilty of overthinking things, but while it's certain that a world this devastated would exist in a permanent state of clouds and darkness, it's no fun looking at page after page of battleship gray backgrounds. Men no longer able to reliably find disposable razors probably would have trouble shaving, but it doesn't help readers determine who is who, when, in a main cast of four, three of them are older fellows in fatigues with full facial hair. So it's the story of Beardie, Beardie, Welsh Beardie and Teenage Girl in Ball Cap.

Occasionally, we cut to see what the aliens are up to, and Harrison's panel compositions are bizarre, to say the least. Throughout the story, nobody is posed in a conventional way, and the "camera" is never at the same point that any other comic artist would consider placing it. It is a huge challenge to follow, and things will get much more difficult when the second story, in 2008, sees three separate artists assigned to it.



Still, despite all the many problems with the art, readers who persevered found something exciting and different within. Given an artist more inclined to follow expectations and play this safe, this might be better remembered, and not quite so much the near-miss that it's considered.

Running alongside it is an extremely interesting six-part Caballistics Inc. adventure. "Changelings," by the regular team of Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon, sees the writer feeling very confident that his readers are ready to follow along without question, and he quite safely throws the expectations of narrative right out the window. For fans who have been around since the beginning, knowing the characters and the subplots, this is business as usual, if more frenetic than some earlier adventures. I accepted all the goings-on without question, and it was not until I sat down and looked at it before I realized just how weird the structure of the story is.

Take this week's episode. It moves through four separate scenes with different sets of characters with just a single caption. Not a "Meanwhile, back in London..." and not even a "Meanwhile," just abrupt transitions from one place to another, expecting the readers have read the previous episodes carefully. Anybody coming to this as their first episode of Cabs would be hopelessly lost. And that's an overused cliche, but I mean that on a slightly different level than usual. This week's episode, as it jumps from scene to scene, does not even have a single narrative clue or establishing shot to allow readers to understand that the incidents are happening in different places.

Over the course of the story's 30 pages - and I use "story" pretty darn loosely, as it's really more "a chunk of narrative time where various subplots are recounted and expanded somewhat" - we catch flashbacks to 4000 BC, 1672 and 1922, and see members of the team kill a rakshasa. Chapter and Verse meet a little girl who sends them on a quest into the underworld kingdom of fairies, Ravne shows Jenny "his etchings" and we see that he's got the supporting player, Mr. Slater, in a tank of some kind, Dr. Brand finds clues that their benefactor Ethan Kostabi is many hundreds of years old, and then, in one of the comic's all-time classic cliffhangers, he gets pushed to his death in the London Underground, brutally murdered by his teammate Ness for as-yet-undisclosed reasons. Over the last two pages, the long-imprisoned Magister, a character introduced a year and a bit previously, is seen to have escaped his island prison. Now, the first of these two pages is pretty striking and the last is absolutely glorious, but at no point does the script pause even a breath to explain who this character is. Strangely enough, this will be the last appearance of the series for more than a year, as it takes a very disagreeable hiatus until late 2007.

The Ten-Seconders, with its unconventional artwork and after-the-fall premise, is challenging to anybody who tries it. Caballistics Inc. , with its unconventional script, is challenging to anybody who comes to it fresh. From the perspective of knowing the characters, the Cabs "story," despite giving no quarter at all to its audience, is certainly terrific, and only has one flaw: the plots do not appear to proceed across the same length of time. There is, for example, a necessarily large gap in time between the death of Dr. Brand and the questioning, by Inspector Absolam, of Ravne and Jennifer about his death. This gap is not matched at all by the concurrent plotline with Chapter and Verse and the fairies, which continues as though everything else in the story was happening at the same time. This is a common danger to comics that I don't think writers ever even notice while they're constructing them. David Anthony Kraft, writing Marvel's Defenders, did this once in the 1970s, where a single fifteen minute chase-and-fight scene between Valkyrie and Lunatik in New York City was taking place just one "meanwhile" caption away from the B-plot in Russia, which stretched over the course of several days. Suffice it to say that once a reader notices this, it's not possible to ignore.



So these are two stories that I enjoy in spite of the obstacles thrown up by the creators. On the other hand, there is Strontium Dog, which is lovely, conventional and the great gag this time is that the characters don't look quite right. Working on a planet where the natives don't have hair, Johnny Alpha and Wulf have to go bald to fit in.

Their previous adventure, "Traitor to His Kind," was a mean, downbeat and serious political thriller. This, however, is one of the lighter Strontium Dog adventures. Assisted by a big fellow bounty hunter whose mutation is thick, white, Womble-like all-over body hair - he's one of the occasionally-appearing Fuzz family - they've tracked a criminal with the trademark-tweaking nickname of The Plastic Man to a planet where he's waiting out a statute of limitations, and where Fuzzy is wanted on multiple counts of bigamy. His hair has had the native girls swooning, but the local police take monogamy very, very seriously on this world, particularly when hirsute fellows come to town and woo princesses.

While the death of Dr. Brand proved to be among the most stunning dramatic cliffhangers in 2000 AD's history, Johnny and Wulf losing their hair, and Wulf's trademark bushy beard, is certainly one of the funniest. Prog 2006 had run the first two (produced) episodes as a single, double-part installment, and that's how that chunk of the story ended, with our heroes shorn and shaven and ready for action. I'd like to think that Carlos Ezquerra had to pause for a few moments and spend a little more time with his sketchbook than usual figuring out what Wulf actually looked like under the beard. It's terrific.

Stories from this prog have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Caballistics Inc.: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
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, before there was Zombo, there was... Harry Kipling (Deceased)! See you in seven days, friends!

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!

151. Artists Old and New

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday, a blog where I'm charting the history of 2000 AD, which, for thirty-four years, has been the Galaxy's Greatest Comic. In each installment, I look at some of the important events going on in the weekly comic's fun history, moving forward four or five issues at a time. However, since the last time that I wrote, there have been some quite remarkably important events in the present day. 2000 AD's publisher, Rebellion, has worked out two awesome deals with the big Barnes & Noble chain. If you are an American still a little lost and confused where to actually find these comics, you are totally in luck. Not only is B&N now stocking Judge Dredd Megazine - issue 315 is on shelves now, and priced 20% less than it sells for in comic shops - but, at the end of October, it was announced that B&N has placed a mammoth order for the Rebellion/Simon & Schuster American line of graphic novels. This is in the wake of B&N pulling a huge list of DC graphic novels from their shelves; DC had made several titles digitally-exclusive to Amazon's Kindle, leaving B&N's Nook users in the cold. B&N's quite sensible retaliation has left space on their shelves, and now all their stores should be stocking far more 2000 AD collected editions than ever before. Everybody wins, I think.

The next installment will talk about collected editions in more detail, because there was a big development in April 2005 that helped lead us to this point. But I had already started writing the first draft of this entry before the news broke, and didn't feel like shuffling things around too much yet. I was planning to talk about the trades in chapter 152, and that's what I'll do. This time out, a look at prog 1437. There's a solid lineup inside, with The V.C.s by Dan Abnett and Anthony Williams, Bec & Kawl by Si Spurrier and Steve Roberts, and Slaine by Pat Mills and Clint Langley, about which, more in two weeks. These strips are bookended by two stories that I think are really interesting from an art perspective. These are Judge Dredd, starting a three-part story by Gordon Rennie and Karl Richardson, and American Gothic, a nine-part serial by Ian Edginton and Mike Collins.



Richardson does not seem to get enough work from Tharg. The impression that I get is that he's a very meticulous craftsman, and weekly deadlines might be a bit tough for him. He would soon be assigned The 86ers but will drop out very early on, leaving PJ Holden to draw the bulk of that strip.

I'm not entirely taken with his depiction of Dredd himself - he seems disagreeably like the huge, bodybuilding version designed by Inaki Miranda and Eva de la Cruz that was popularized in the daily strip in London's Metro newspaper - but aside from that, this is really interesting artwork.

The coloring is especially impressive, using garish solid colors bleeding over the figures to indicate the harsh stage lighting behind the band, Death Rattle. Unable to get a visa to enter Mega-City One, they're playing a show in the Cursed Earth, and Richardson puts a spray of brown and tan dust over everybody and everything. He even gives the security guards on the West Wall a distinctive gray uniform. The mutants, Father Sin and his gang, look like they stepped out from the background of one of the covers that Brian Bolland contributed to the 1980s reprint series from Eagle Comics. This is a classy, classy art job.



American Gothic, sadly, features artwork on the other end of my personal "like it!" scale, and that's just baffling, as Mike Collins is a really terrific comic artist. I mean that; his work on Panini's Doctor Who strip is consistently first-rate, and his version of David Tennant's Doctor is the definitive one, in my book. But American Gothic seems crude and unfinished when compared to Doctor Who, perhaps in part because Collins' work is so well balanced for color that it seems like Gothic's pages are really hurting for the lack of it.

The strip itself is one where the creators' initial enthusiasm seems to die outright early on; after a deliberately-paced opening episode set in a frontier town, and a second episode that introduces readers to the large cast of European refugees working their way across the American west - the twist being that these are vampires, trolls, werewolves, and, for lack of a better word, monsters looking for a life away from hateful humans - the pace picks up too quickly for either Collins or any reader to get a grip and ride along. As the sad body count rises, Collins' art becomes scratchy and rushed, and the already imbalanced linework becomes a blur of hatchy inking with an unflattering grayscale wash. Both creators are hugely talented, but this is just a huge misfire, and one best forgotten.

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

Bec & Kawl: Bloody Students (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Slaine: Books of Invasions Volume Three (out of print, Amazon UK suggests sellers)


Next time, speaking of collected editions, it was during this period that Rebellion's deal with DC to create and distribute some definitive books came to an untimely close. More about that in seven days!

148. In Praise of That Floor-Length Sheepskin Jacket

January 2005: So it is a new year and a new lineup, with one new thrill and three returning series in prog 1424. The Judge Dredd episode this week is a one-off by Gordon Rennie and Carl Critchlow, one of several stories in this period to deal with the aftermath of the recent "Total War" arc and the casualties from the three nukes detonated in Mega-City One. The new strip is Second City Blues by "Kek-W" and Warren Pleece. Returning to action are Slaine by Pat Mills and Clint Langley, next week's spotlight strip Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and John Burns, and a new adventure for Caballistics Inc. by Rennie and Dom Reardon.

This time, the Cabs team has split up to investigate a couple of ostensibly minor occult doings which, predictably, turn into calamities. I wonder whether we missed out on a pile of untold Cabs stories in which the team really gets fed up with all the hoaxes and minor nothings which they must surely investigate before we get to the stories that are exciting enough to require gunplay. But there's more to this than just "oh look, the demon thing is real," because it's understood that, well, of course it's real, otherwise we wouldn't be reading it. The twist is that the expected problem turns out to be much weirder. Ravne, Ness, Jenny and Verse have all gone to check out some death metaller whose bandmates have been dying like clockwork since, he claims, he made a pact with the devil. So they're all ready to defend this well-paying idiot from demons, only to be confronted instead by an angel of God, who has baited a trap to get Jenny here and kill her. Now that's a delicious twist.

In an earlier entry, I mentioned how one of the cute things that makes Caballistics so entertaining are the allusions to Doctor Who. These are usually in the text - an early story is set on the same moor as the 1970 serial "Doctor Who and the Silurians" - but this time out, there's a really cheeky epilogue that leads into the next story. In a lovely last page, we see an actor, who looks uncannily like Tom Baker, step away in a break from filming a show with a name awfully similar to Monarch of the Glen, only to get ambushed and murdered by a huge man in Celtic tribal dress and a boar on his head.

Meanwhile, Hannah Chapter and Jonathan Brand have been looking into an old, boarded-up house and find a decrepit old Jewish mystic and a golem. This is very much the B-plot, but damn if it doesn't prove just how great a team these two are together. Also, it gives me the chance to actually show you a picture of Hannah wearing that floor-length sheepskin jacket ("his mum says it cost a packet") that I mentioned the last time we talked about her. What a terrific look. The character is still an abrasive, motormouthed jerk, but she certainly dresses well.



The newest series in this issue is the one with the oldest pedigree: the "future sports" genre. I've always felt that, of 2000 AD's initial six strips, Harlem Heroes was the odd one out. It was a great strip, don't get me wrong, written and drawn well, but it seemed like the strip with one foot firmly in the past, and that a science fiction comic that should have seen the shock of the new every week was not trusting its ability to wow young readers. Sure, there was a cinematic template in the likes of Rollerball and, to a lesser extent, Death Race 2000, but you can see why its inclusion didn't impress literary science fiction fans of the day. It seemed safe, despite the casualty rate within the strip, to program a lineup that included at least one sports story, because that's what just about every weekly comic from IPC or Thomson's had, somewhere. So Harlem Heroes led into Inferno, and some time later, there was Mean Arena, and later, Mean Team. I guess they're each good for what they are, but it frequently seemed like exercises in nostalgia, looking backwards and dressing 20th Century footballers or rugby stars in armor or something, especially with Tom Tully plotting them out precisely the same way that he would break down a lengthy storyline for Roy of the Rovers.

In time, the future sports genre really just got absorbed by Judge Dredd, where skysurfing, eating, ratfighting, boinging, bonking, corpse stuffing and staring have all been shown as the sports of tomorrow. There hadn't been a need for a sports serial in the comic for decades, so it really wasn't anything more than curious nostalgia that led to the development of Second City Blues. Honestly, it's a strip that works a lot better than it should, thanks to a fun, cheeky script by Nigel Long, under his odd "Kek-W" pseudonym, and really fun artwork by Warren Pleece.

The sport this time out is "slamboarding," and it's similar to Harlem Heroes' aeroball, played with the sort of flying surfboards that Chopper in Dredd popularized rather than jetpacks. Also, the "ball" is actually a weird alien critter that is mostly docile, but will occasionally remind players that it's alive by eating their hands. If that strikes you as just a bit ridiculous and outre, then you're in good company with this story. The whole thing is over the top with melodrama and genuinely surreal comedy and plot developments.



One of the more ridiculous tropes of the late seventies and early eighties sports stories is the really stupid opponents taking their team name literally. Naturally, the heroic team that we follow is made up of scrappy underdogs with a charismatic leader, and they seem to dress and act what we would call normally on the field. The other teams, if they're called the Vikings, they dress like vikings and they act like berserkers. If they're called the Vampires, then they wear capes and hiss. And so do all of their fans, not just those twelve fat dudes with the block seats in section B that the TV cameramen keep finding. Second City Blues takes this to its logical extreme, with, for example, a rival slamboarding team that act like "I say!" aristos both on and off the field. With slamboarding a curiously low-rent operation somewhat more akin to the modern day X-games, the players all know each other off the field and have rivalries in mall food courts.

The heroes of our story, of course, don't have a ridiculous affectation that keeps them in stupid costume, but ahead of one match, they get sponsored by a novelty condom company, forcing them to play the game with that logo on their chests.

I like this strip a lot because it knows what it's doing and it's so darn cheeky about it. When the events start sliding completely out of control with a surprise alien invasion, it's already such a naturally and believably outlandish strip that this very goofy turn of events doesn't feel like a desperate cheat to keep readers' attention. It's very fun and it's very knowing, and I enjoyed it.

There was some call for a second story for these characters, but I never felt like one was necessary. I'd really love for "Kek-W" to get the chance, at last, for a really involved, long series that unfolds over several stories. Perhaps the brand new Angel Zero, which started just last week in 2000 AD issue 1751, will be that strip, but Second City Blues could never have been it. When you've thumbed your nose at armageddon with as much fun as he and Pleece had in this strip, where could you have gone next?

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

Caballistics Inc.: Creepshow (2000 AD's online shop)
Nikolai Dante: Hell and High Water (2000 AD's online shop)
Slaine: Books of Invasions Vol. 2 (2000 AD's online shop)


Next time, absolutely nothing is going right for Nikolai Dante. But that's always the case. Anyway, leave it to Lulu to make matters even worse.

147. Christmas at Tharg's

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

142. The Trouble With Girls

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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


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


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

140. The Megazine Takes it Eazy

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Stories from this Megazine are reprinted in the following editions:

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

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

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.

121. By this point, it's been too many

So anyway, we were rereading 2000 AD, weren't we? Shown here is the cover of prog 1326, from February 2003. The art is by Clint Langley, who had done a good deal of work for Tharg in the nineties. He took a few years off and developed a really striking new style, full of gorgeous photo manipulation and computer-rendered landscapes and monsters. The results were sometimes controversial, with an occasional reader not wishing to see beyond the strip's ancestors in cheesy fumetti photo-comics, but I think it looks simply terrific.

On the down side, well, it's just more Slaine, isn't it? The strip marks Pat Mills' return to 2000 AD after a couple of years away, during which he created Requiem, Vampire Knight for Nickel Editions in France. Returning to the fold, as it were, he created a new series, Black Siddha, for the Megazine with Simon Davis, so he has a major new strip running in each title. I'm sure that I'll come back and talk about Siddha some other day; I think it's completely terrific and I wish there was a heck of a lot more of it. I wish I could say the same about Slaine, but I just can't. It's tired and weak and long, long past its sell-by date at this point.

By this point in the continuity, what's happened is that Slaine became the first High King of Ireland (back in "The Horned God"), he served his seven years and was ritually put to death ("Demon Killer"), he was rescued by the goddess and sent upwards through time to carry out missions for her against those awful Christians later in history (which had been foreshadowed back in "Time Killer") and he was allowed to return home and resume his position to battle the Secret Commonwealth led by his old enemy Maeb. This story, the first in a five-volume saga called "The Books of Invasion," sees all those monsters and sea demons that we could've sworn Slaine despatched almost a decade previously in strip-time (you remember, Balor the Evil-Eye and the Fomorian Sea Devils and all those guys), newly allied with a long-limbed sword-wielding beast called Moloch.

The whole thing feels like a tired old Charles Bronson revenge flick, and that's even before Moloch rapes and murders Slaine's wife Niamh. At that point, it feels like the end of comics.



Now, fair's fair, Pat Mills probably did not then, and does not now, give any kind of care for the feelings of superhero-based American fandom. With his attention focused on publishing in France, and the gleefully bizarre mindbender that is Requiem, he probably had no idea that a growing segment of female readers, taking advantage of the internet to form communities, was drawing attention to a big problem in western adventure comics.

Under the blanket charge of "women in refrigerators," Gail Simone charged that female characters in superhero fiction were, historically and increasingly, used principally as plot devices, raped, killed, maimed or depowered, in order to spur male characters into action. This proved to be a rallying point for many readers whose voices had been underrepresented in fandom (outside of LSH APAs, anyway), and drove wedges between creators and fans that, in some cases, still exist today. It became a question of whether you stood with the grouchy old men, or the radical feminists.

That Mills strides the line the way he does shouldn't be too surprising. Never mind his laudable, continuous insistence that his first wife, Angela Kincaid, always receive full credit as Slaine's co-creator, the whole of his nineties work was the definition of radical feminist, with strong central characters like Third World War's Eve, and the pagan perspectives of Finn and ABC Warriors showing chaos and Earth mother-worship triumphing over fraternal order and military discipline. On the other hand, there's nobody in comics as grouchy as the Guv'nor, and Niamh's grisly fate is nothing more a shamefully transparent plot device, set up just to give Slaine a new arch-enemy. So I guess he's both.

Well, even though Slaine is a huge disappointment, the artwork remains amazing, and, in 2005, Mills will conclude the Books of Invasion saga with a jawdropping epilogue that will leave more than one reader's thrill-circuits totally overloaded. But that's a tale for another day.

There are a couple of other major stories running at the moment. Perhaps the most important is the debut six-part adventure for Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon's Caballistics Inc., an excellent occult thriller set in the same universe as the writer's 2001 hit Necronauts.



Caballistics deals with a taskforce of paranormal troubleshooters. They are financed by a super-rich, reclusive former pop star named Ethan Kostabi, and the team has five members in their first mission, including former employees of the British government's Q Department, two gun-toting field operatives named Chapter and Verse, and a real piece of work named Ravne. When we meet him, he's enjoying the fruits of a shocking mass murder, and when the story ends, we learn he was a Nazi officer, and does not seem to have aged a day in sixty years.

The series seems to draw inspiration from everywhere, most obviously Mike Mignola's Hellboy stories, and the scripts are full of lovely in-joke references to science fiction and horror film and TV, including Quatermass and the Pit and a couple of Doctor Who serials. It's probably a little silly to imagine that this world can possibly be the same one as Doctor Who's, but robot Yeti were definitely defeated in the London Underground a few years prior to this adventure. Probably a little more recently than 1967, though, given the age of the soldiers in the tunnels!

Cabs will become a major ongoing series over the next few years, with more than fifty episodes and two collected editions. It will be very fun to reread this great series, which remains hugely popular with the fandom.

Next time, Judge Dredd battles 20th Century Fox Aliens and 22nd Century Tharg Robots! Be here!

114. Going Rogue Again

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday! When last we left off, spirits were low as, for the fourth time in the last decade (and the second in my current home), I had to deal with a minor house flood. Yes, this is the same place, northern Georgia, which was screaming about a drought just a few short months ago, and which is fighting a losing battle against our neighbor states of Alabama and Florida about using too much of the Lake Lanier reservoir for drinking water in the city of Atlanta, and yet somehow I've had property damaged by floodwaters four darn times. Well, the downstairs is almost rebuilt, and we'll be installing a retaining wall in the backyard sometime soon, and I didn't lose any precious comics to this tomfoolery, and it certainly could've been a lot worse, but it did throw us off our reading schedule.

While I was away from this blog, I got the neat opportunity to talk a little bit about 2000 AD and its place in the long, fun history of British comics up at the first annual GMX convention in Nashville. I had a super time, and gave away a couple of dozen old doubled issues and a pair of collected editions from my pile of trade fodder as freebies. I think everybody had a splendid time, and I hope that next year, we can do it again.

Resuming the reread, Frazer Irving gets cover duties for July 2002's prog 1302, spotlighting the return, after almost fifteen years, of the original Rogue Trooper. Created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, Rogue was a pretty one-note character, albeit one very popular with younger readers. Since his original storyline ended in issue 393, the character's adventures continued off and on for another four years, finally reaching an end in 1988.



Shortly afterward, the series was rebooted, rethought, remodelled and was, in the end, done in under the weight of too many creators overthinking the premise and the continuity. Even the estimable John Tomlinson failed to make anything readable out of the concept, insisting on tying in the character of Tor Cyan from Mercy Heights into some convulted story about a big blobby thing spitting out demented clones of the original Rogue. Perhaps it was a metaphor.

For the latest incarnation of Rogue, newly-assigned writer Gordon Rennie was tasked with simply telling some readable stories with the original concept. Teamed with a bank of rotating artists, including Staz Johnson and David Roach on this first four-part story, Rennie went with a back-to-basics approach of relating untold stories from within the original "search for the Traitor General" framework. Rogue Trooper had very few recurring characters - that was one of its weaknesses - so Rennie created a handful of new heroes and villains to work around Rogue and his biochipped buddies. It's such a forehead-slapping obvious idea that, reading it in light of all the labored attempts to fit various reboots into a single tapestry, you're amazed it took 2000 AD so long to get it right.



Of course, having said that, Rogue Trooper remains stubbornly unengaging. With one exception, an unbearably earnest two-parter called "Lions" which is about Our Brave Soldiers, there's nothing at all wrong with Rennie's episodes, except for the unbeatable fact that nobody cares about Rogue Trooper. It's a series where the art has always been the draw, and the elements that you found engaging and exciting when you were twelve turn out to be, in the cold light of adulthood, stilted and awkward. There's also the problem of setting the series within the original "search for the Traitor General" days and trying to wring drama from it, when we already know how it will play out.

Still, Rogue Trooper is enough of a 2000 AD icon that you can't help but root for it. If the comic's going to insist on doing it, you want to see it done right. Rennie does a good job, but it really feels like Tharg's heart just isn't in it. What Rogue Trooper needed was a semi-residency, but after these 12 episodes, there's a one-off at the end of the year, then six more in 2003, six in 2004 and then, finally, three apiece in 2005 and 2006, the last three penned by a different writer. This will seem to happen a lot with Rennie's scripts for editor Matt Smith over the next five years; as with his subsequent Caballistics Inc. and The 86ers along with several Judge Dredd stories, there is an emphasis on continuing characters and subplots which is totally deflated by the enormous breaks between episodes. Since five different artists or art teams tackle this new Rogue Trooper, it can't be deadline drama; we have to assume that everybody involved really just had more important things to worry about. In that case, why bother reading it? Rennie's run was compiled in the sixth in a series of Rogue Trooper collected editions. The book, Realpolitik, was released in March of 2007.

In other news, Rebellion has recently suffered the aggravation of having some books solicited for direct-market distribution by Diamond, only to have the distributor turn around and cancel the orders. One of the books impacted by this was the collected edition of Gordon Rennie's The 86ers, released in May of this year. The book is available, therefore, to proper bookstores in Britain, and easily obtainable online, but not from local comic book shops. The series is a sequel to Rennie's run on Rogue Trooper. A few months after his last episodes of that series in 2005, we met up again with Rafe, a genetically-engineered pilot introduced as one of Rennie's new supporting cast. She's transferred to the 86th Air Support Reconnaissance Squadron and tasked with protecting supply routes to a strategically important mining planet. The series could have been an engaging mix of future war, ancient superweapons and political intrigue, but unfortunately, it never really gelled as a serial.

It's my habit to not sit down and really reread the contents of the Rebellion trades if it's a reprint of material I haven't yet come to in my Thrillpowered Thursday reread, so perhaps I'm being unfair to The 86ers when I say that other than Rafe and the briefly-seen villain Colonel Kovert, a baddie from Rogue Trooper's original run, I have no idea who any of the characters in The 86ers are. There are a lot of them, and a lot of subplots, but after the ten episodes in 2006 (published in three batches over nine months) and the six that came six months later, none of them had made an impact on me at all. Rather than slipping the series quietly under the rug after that, Tharg commissioned six wrap-up episodes earlier this year from Arthur Wyatt, in order to get enough material to warrant publishing a collected edition at all. Rennie, clearly disinterested by this point, had moved on to work for some video game company. I'm sure Wyatt did the best anybody could hope for with what he had to work with, but neither the original run a few years ago, nor a refresher that I gave myself shortly afterwards, nor a quick thumb-through of this edition to confirm what was in it has provided my memory with the name of a single character other than Rafe or Kovert.

In many ways - and this is something we will definitely come back to in Thrillpowered Thursday - The 86ers exemplifies Smith's tenure as 2000 AD editor. He's done so much that is very right during his time in the hot seat, but his biggest failing has been the reversal of the semi-residencies that were common while David Bishop was editor. Ongoing series simply need extended runs of at least 10-13 weeks every year in order to make a consistent impact, particularly if they're going to have many recurring subplots and characters. There are occasional dramatic, exciting moments in The 86ers, and the art, initially by Karl Richardson before PJ Holden takes over, is quite good throughout, but there's too much talking between characters who take forever to do anything.

As a collected edition, The 86ers is nevertheless an impressive one. Released just a few weeks after it concluded in the weekly, the book contains all 22 episodes, along with the single installment of Rogue Trooper that introduced Rafe, some of the series' original covers and sketchbook art from Richardson and Holden. It's a truly fine collection of a sadly inessential series.

Next time, More about the thrills from the summer of 2002, with notes on the revamped V.C.s and a future cop bodyswap story called Bison! See you in seven!