183. Noir on the Doc Cox

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

177. Samantha Slade: The Short Goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

173. Samantha's Finest Hour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

156. Gibson Keels

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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

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

147. Christmas at Tharg's

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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!

133. I'm in love with a Gibson girl

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

132. Character reference

November 2003: In the last installment, I talked about three serials which appeared in the late summer and fall of 2000 AD and its sister comic, Judge Dredd Megazine. Just so we're all on the same page, I think of a serial as a one-off storyline with a definite beginning and end, as opposed to a series, in which a recurring character like Johnny Alpha or a group like the ABC Warriors returns every so often for a new story. It's a bit tricky to schedule these, because it's the characters who get fandom excited and keep our interest - we all want to see our favorites return for another go-around, whereas a one-off serial has to convince us it's worth it every week. In 2003, Tharg's bank of recurring series was really quite low compared to almost any other period, so that left the editors and creators two tasks: develop new characters to hook contemporary audiences, and create some really stunning, memorable serials while the new cast of regulars gets settled in. As we saw in the previous installment, they were mostly very successful indeed. Leviathan, From Grace and XTNCT were all quite popular with readers. There were exceptions - nobody liked Dead Men Walking, a serial written by former editor David Bishop with art by Boo Cook - but overall the work was very solid.

As for new series, Lobster Random, the revived V.C.s, Bec & Kawl, Caballistics Inc and The Red Seas had all been launched to varying degrees of success, with Strontium Dog, Slaine, Sinister Dexter, Nikolai Dante and Durham Red representing the older days of the comic, but 2000 AD is just not in a position to stop there. The Mighty One needs a constant barrage of pitches from the creator droids, particularly at this time, with Dante on hiatus while Robbie Morrison is working for Wildstorm and Durham Red's story finally coming to a conclusion. So that's where Synnamon comes in.

The first image in this entry shows the character as drawn by the great Ian Gibson. It's the latest in a long, very fun tradition of letting other artists tackle the character on the comic's cover. I've always liked this; it lets you see neat things like Strontium Dog drawn by Cliff Robinson or Hannah from Caballistics Inc. painted by Clint Langley. The actual Synnamon strip is drawn by Laurence Campbell and Lee Townsend, and written by Colin Clayton and Chris Dows. This still baffles me. In 2002, these four put together a serial called Bison which ranks as one of the comic's all-time turkeys, and somehow the entire team got the chance to contribute something new? Tharg was being very, very generous and saw some promise there that we never did. Synnamon never fulfills it. It's certainly miles better than Bison, but it's still very weak and unmemorable.

It has to be said that Campbell and Townsend's art has improved tremendously since we last saw it. Either by intention or the result of rushing, the last few shortcut-packed episodes of Bison were laughably poor, but Synnamon mostly crackles with interesting panel layouts and a sleek, minimal futuristic design. It's not completely consistent; in fact, there is a panel on page two of episode eight which is absolutely gobsmacking in its poor anatomy. For the most part, however, this has to rate as an improvement over the earlier effort.

I'm also very impressed by the way the artists choose to approach Synnamon herself. Now gents, and let's be honest here, most of you reading are guys, none of us can claim total immunity to a strip starring a fit redhead in a tight black catsuit. Much to my surprise, however, Synnamon's sex appeal is incredibly underplayed in the strip. The panel here might show an ooh-la-la revealing of her shoulder, but I included it because it's just about the only one in the first six episodes which shows Synnamon actually sitting down long enough so we can see what she looks like. Campbell and Townsend seem to deliberately fight against what could have been an exploitative T&A strip by regularly showing her in long-shot, facial close-up or leaping from one improbably high place to another. Two thoughts strike me: the impression we get of Synnamon being a sexpot T&A strip is due more to her cover appearances drawn by Ian Gibson and Ben Oliver, and most notably a really fantastic piece drawn by Dylan Teague in 2006, than anything that appears in the strip. Also, that if somebody like Greg Land drew it, she wouldn't have been drawn with long shots or improbably high places, and I'd still have a hard time finding a suitable sample image, because I'd be embarrassed.

Besides, Durham Red's running around half-naked again during this run, so the prog's got the T&A business covered.

Oh, one other thing strikes me: Synnamon would be a much more interesting strip if she was some insectoid beast with eight eyes, or, if she must be human, a deskbound grandma. I don't care who draws her and how; if I wanted to look at the Black Widow, I think Marvel still publishes comics with her in them.

You'll notice I didn't mention the story. Well, it isn't awful, what there is of it. She's a secret agent of some kind, she has a sentient computer sort of like Dante's weapons crest, and I think Earth's being invaded by nanobots or something. As we saw in the '90s strip Mambo, the narrative is burdened by an over-convoluted backstory that all gets dumped on the readers very clumsily. Clayton and Dows' most critical mistake, however, was assuming that 2000 AD needed a strip about somebody supremely confident and super-awesome to the point of being flawless. All of 2000 AD's best heroes are flawed, sometimes extremely so. That's what makes them fascinating. Think about it. There's just no reason for a series about a glamorous, sexy, practically perfect super-agent to have been commissioned for this comic in the first place.

Synnamon will return for two further short stories, in 2004 and 2006, before being retired. 2000 AD does need female leads, and in the next installment, the comic gets one of its very best ones ever: Samantha Slade. I'm really looking forward to it. 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!

108. A Night 2 Remember

I think we've reached a little landmark, of sorts. Shortly before I decided to follow in Paul's footsteps and start a 2000 AD readin' blog, I did a LiveJournal post celebrating the comic's 30th anniversary. This served as the "pilot" for the blog that you're reading today. Well, the reread has now brought us to prog 1280, the 25th anniversary, which was published in February 2002. It has this nice, funny cover by Kevin Walker and a lineup of just three stories.

First is a double-length Judge Dredd episode by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. It's called "Leaving Rowdy" and sees Dredd passing the torch, and his old apartment in Rowdy Yates Conapt, to his clone-brother Rico. It's a quiet and reflective anniversary moment, even though it ends in a hail of gunfire, as these things do. It's a really terrific story, showing that Dredd still has twinges of guilt about the death of Judge Lopez some twenty years previously, in the "Judge Child" epic. Even though Rico had been introduced already, to my mind, this story really seems to establish the tone and the feel of the many interlocking stories and subplots about Dredd and his "family" that would come over the next five years.

Bringing up the rear this issue is Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. This episode, part one of a storyline called "The Romanov Job," is pretty close to a one-off. It allows new readers a quick introduction to Nikolai, his current partner-in-crime the Countessa, and his current status as the most wanted man in the Empire. It's really great, and I'll be revisiting "The Romanov Job" in a couple of weeks.

These two stories are the best things in the comic, but it's what's between them that bears a little investigation. It's "A Night 2 Remember," the 25th anniversary "story."

The loose plot of the story, if it can even be called that, is that Tharg, his creator droids, and as many characters as can be drawn, have all gathered at London's fashionable "Ministry of Sound" nightclub for a great big party with a concert by the British techno-metal band Pitchshifter. This mirrored the real-world anniversary bash held at the club that same week. Each of the story's ten pages is handled by a different writer-artist team, and so you just have to take it on faith that there's a plot there at all. Still, the whole indulgent, smug affair is nevertheless incredibly fun, even as it teeters from nostalgic to self-reverential and all the way over to downright mean-spirited.

It starts out with Pat Mills' return to the comic, after stepping away following his disagreements with the former editor. Here, he stacks the deck in his favor by coming aboard with artist Kevin O'Neill and special guest star Marshal Law, who makes his first and thus-far only 2000 AD appearance here, beating the hell out of original 2000 AD star MACH One. The superhero-hunting Marshal has a few words with Judge Dredd before setting his sights on Zenith. Presumably, Law and Zenith settle their differences off-panel, because Zenith and his agent Eddie later have a page by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell where they contemplate their relevance in the current market, and Eddie considers taking on the dragon from Chronos Carnival as a new client.

Elsewhere, John Tomlinson and Kev Walker detail an incident in the gents' between Tor Cyan and the Balls Brothers, Mike Carey and Anthony Williams have Tharg mediate a misunderstanding between Waldo "D.R." Dobbs and Carver Hale, Robbie Morrison and Ian Gibson send Nikolai Dante on the dance floor with Halo Jones, Alan Grant and Trevor Hairsine give Hoagy from Robo-Hunter a book on "how to pick up babes" and watch him try it out on Feek the Freak while the Stix Brothers let the Helltrekkers know that they're not welcome at the party.

Meanwhile, Dan Abnett and Simon Davis have Sinister and Dexter deal with Torquemada and a very drunk Judge Death and consider Durham Red's assets (this page was my son's favorite), and Andy Diggle and Jock dispatch Anderson and Dredd - at least we think it's Dredd - to chase Pitchshifter off the stage, and make a point about editorial staff being commissioned to write their own characters.

That brings me to the most infamous pages of "A Night 2 Remember." Just as prog 500's "Tharg's Head Revisited" featured a page or two that sailed really close to the wind, Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving really raised some eyebrows with a page in which Tharg and Mek-Quake send a number of unloved fictional characters into a supernova, and then toss a couple of unloved creator droids into Mek-Quake's grinders. It's delightfully mean-spirited, and really, you can't say that the author of "The Golden Fox Rebellion" didn't have it coming.

But the one that everybody loves and remembers - and spoiling the jokes with scans would neither do them justice or be fair to you - is Garth Ennis's closing page, beautifully drawn by Dave Gibbons. In it, Tharg starts to take the opportunity to white out certain characters from 2000 AD's history in the 1970s that he's embarrassed by, only to have Ro-Jaws gleefully remind him that Tharg has a lot more to be humiliated about, a lot more recently. There are pointed digs at artists who can't meet deadlines, and writers who are all "twelve years old."

Ennis, who has always expressed public dissatisfaction with his work on the comic, skewers the heck out of himself - the Ennis creator droid rolls in and is shown to be a teeny little tractor about the size of your foot with a pint of Guinness atop it. Neither John Smith nor Mark Millar escape intact, and frankly, I've not been able to see Millar's name in print for the last seven years without hearing his little droid's deeply unflattering dialogue from this page. In the end, Tharg kicks the early 1990s to Mek-Quake and tells Bill Savage that all is forgiven, unwittingly setting the stage for Savage's return to the comic in a couple of year's time.



It's the sort of wild affair which can't happen very often, but reading it with a good knowledge of the comic's history and a playful love for its characters is a pretty darn satisfying little read. It's not very likely to be reprinted, so keep an eye out at eBay and your local thrill-merchant for a copy of this prog. Although, having said that, the forthcoming Marshal Law omnibus collection from Top Shelf will be incomplete without this one page, so hopefully Rebellion will let 'em do it. Bookmark my Reprint This! blog and I'll let you know.

Next time, Alan Barnes takes over editorial duties at the Megazine, David Bishop begins the Thrill-Power Overload feature, and the ABC Warriors return to your bookshelf, so I have a short review of the recent graphic novel collection. See you in seven!

102. Pests!

Welcome back to a slightly revived and very happily married Thrillpowered Thursday! Unfortunately, during my short break from the blog, I suffered from some computer unpleasantness and am currently working without a copy of a decent version of Photoshop, so for now, there's just going to be the single image with each entry, borrowed from the Barney fan site, which hosts the old thrill data-base and cover images. And we'll only be back for a short time: just four entries and then there will be a lengthy break while my co-reading children take one vacation and my new wife and I take one in another direction. But that's later on. For now, let's pick up about where we left off.

In August 2001, we come to prog 1257 and the welcome return of Ian Gibson to cover art duties. After their last appearance more than a year previously (covered here back in January), the pint-sized pest control droids of Banzai Battalion are back in action in a new six-part story drawn by Gibson from a script by John Wagner. The resulting story is a very silly, over-the-top homage to old war comics, with the blustery, true-blue Captain Bug Stomper leading his troops on an expedition through Mega-City One that leads them to a wonderful new garden in which to fight insects. The garden, introduced more than fifteen years previously in a Sci-Fi Special as the home of citizen Martha Fitzenheimer, becomes the battleground for rival teams of robots. Wagner never quite sends the story into a messy, ridiculous spiral like he'd done in such gems as Al's Baby and Robo-Hunter, but it's still a pretty fun and goofy six week story.

You can't really use "fun" or "goofy" to describe the final storyline in Nikolai Dante's ongoing "Tsar Wars" epic, by Robbie Morrison and John Burns. After so many months of high-stakes drama and bloody war, the Romanovs looked like they were about to win and wipe out the Makarov tsar, but he's got a pretty amazing ace up his sleeve, and suddenly there's a strange, armored form on the battlefield. In one of the most stunning cliffhangers in a series known for pretty stunning cliffhangers, four of the crest-bearing Romanov siblings confront the armored man, who shrugs off their superpowered attacks and brutally kills Nastasia in front of them.

If you're on the Romanov side, then the 13-part epic goes downhill fast from there. The armored guardian, who calls himself the Lord Protector and who reveals his identity a few weeks later, sends the rest of the siblings packing just as Makarov reinforcements arrive. It's a complete rout, and the series ends with not just Nastasia, but brothers Andreas and Viktor and father Dmitri all dead, along with half of the Rudinshtein Irregulars, the Romanovs completely destroyed, and Nikolai Dante on the run again, only now in an imperial Russia dozens of times more deadly than it was when the series began, since Tsar Vladimir Makarov has a phenomenal price on Dante' head.

There are many reasons to love Nikolai Dante, as it's one of the very best ongoing comics of the last several years. One of those reasons: the creators have been completely fearless about upending the status quo and killing off the supporting cast. This was a tremendous shock to readers at the time, and co-creator Simon Fraser played along, memorably posting "MY BABIES!!!" when asked how he felt about the bloodletting among the wonderful Romanov family.

There has been much more Dante in the years since "The Romanov Empire." If you're following along in the collected editions, and you certainly should, this actually only takes us to the end of the fifth volume. The eighth was released earlier in the year, and will be reviewed next week, and the ninth is due in September. The Banzai Battalion six-parter was collected in a Rebellion hardback, along with seven other episodes which featured the characters.

Next week, Durham Red finishes up "The Vermin Stars." See you in seven!

75. Veteran's Day

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

I had a moment of very odd coincidence when I read Judge Dredd Megazine # 57 last night. See, I should explain that while this feature appears on Thursday mornings, I do the writeup and the scanning on Wednesday afternoon, meaning that I read the featured issue on Tuesday, which of course was Veteran's Day. The Meg lineup is the same as it was the last time I stopped by; it contains a new, extra-length Dredd episode (here, part two of "Doomsday" by John Wagner and Colin Wilson), some pages of Daily Star Dredd newspaper strips by Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, and an issue of Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. And so it was, on Veteran's Day, that I read one of the most stunning episodes of that series, in which Jesse bumps into an old army buddy of his dad's in an airport bar. The vet, who was called Spaceman to John Custer's Texas, still holds onto his "FUCK COMMUNISM" lighter that the actor John Wayne had delivered to their unit on a goodwill tour to Viet Nam. Jesse still has his dad's lighter as well. It is the only thing he has of his father, who died while he was four, in events recounted in the earlier Angelville storyline. I still stand by my assessment that Preacher is just too unpleasant and too unrestrained for me to like it, and this violent installment of shit-talking soldiers won't change the mind of anybody who has written it off. However, this episode, which closes with a quote from Mark Baker's Nam, is unbelievably effective and moving, and a heartfelt tribute to all the men and women who've given time and blood for freedom.

Interestingly, around the time this issue was in production, 2000 AD's present owners at Rebellion made their first, unsuccessful, bid to buy the comic and all its intellectual properties from Fleetway. The events are recounted in Thrill-Power Overload by David Bishop, who explains that Rebellion's Jason Kingsley was, surprisingly, rebuffed in his efforts to license Strontium Dog for a video game, and so made the offer to purchase everything outright. The negotiations were carried out in secret, but Bishop and Diggle were unwittingly clued in, and encouraged Kingsley to give it another try once his effort was turned down. Perhaps even more surprising than Fleetway's reluctance to license Strontium Dog is that it's been almost ten years, and Kingsley owns the character, and yet we've got no game. Hey! Get a move on, will ya?




As for the actual Dredd content, Colin Wilson's return to action in Mega-City One has been really effective. Wilson had been among the artists in the rotation for both Dredd and Rogue Trooper in the early '80s before finding jobs with various French publishers. His best known work was for the Western series Blueberry, but Wikipedia notes that he also penned several volumes of Dans l'Ombre du Soleil. At any rate, he returned to 2000 AD for a pair of Pulp Sci-Fi one-offs before rejoining the Dredd rotation for about three years at the suggestion of assistant editor Andy Diggle, who also booked him for a few issues of The Losers in 2005. Among other work, in 2006, he illustrated that excellent Battler Britton miniseries by Garth Ennis that I enjoyed greatly.

As far as I'm concerned, any comic which gives you fifteen pages of Wilson art and twenty-odd pages of Dillon art is doing the right thing, but of course the reprints of the Dredd newspaper strip, about which I spoke at greater length in a Reprint This! feature last month, are bringing you wonderful artwork by Ian Gibson. Really, if you're going to have two-thirds of the comic reprint material, this looks like a lineup worth following, doesn't it?



And now, an appeal from your host.

Gang, I still need to track down nine issues of the Megazine - volume three # 69-77. Either the issues themselves or scans of the Dredd / DeMarco / Mean Machine episodes. These are issues I used to have, but lost when my house flooded three years ago. Can you help? I've got a giant stack of double progs, and some graphic novels, that I can swap, or PayPal you some cash... please drop me a line ASAP!

Next time, the Doomsday business continues in Mega-City One, and Devlin Waugh continues the hunt for the Herod. See you in seven days!

(November 13, 2008)

72. Doomsday Begins

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

April 1999: Megazine Vol. 3 # 54 brings us the third episode of the Judge Dredd story "The Narcos Connection," a four-parter by John Wagner, Andrew Currie and Stephen Baskerville which is told from the perspective of Galen DeMarco, the former judge and now private investigator. This is an incredibly interesting story that serves as the first chunk of a series of interwoven Dredd serials which will run through the summer and into mid-October. The overall title for this epic, engaging mess is "The Doomsday Scenario," and it is very much unlike the standard 12 or 26 part Dredd stories seen in years past.

Twice before, in "Judgement Day" and "Wilderlands," the action of a Dredd epic was split between 2000 AD and the Meg by having episodes appear in each comic. But those appeared when the Meg was published fortnightly. In 1999, the Meg is monthly and aimed at mature readers. So the Doomsday epic in 2000 AD runs for 24 episodes (prog 1141 to 1164), and in the Megazine for eight episodes (# 52 to # 59), and each comic can be read completely independently of each other. In fact, reading it in 2000 AD alone actually worked a little better for me, as working the material into DeMarco's P.O.V. is occasionally awkward and reveals dramatic moments before they happen in 2000 AD.

There is more to it than just the final assault on the city by the crimelord Nero Narcos and his robot army, although that's quite amazing in its bloody, violent chtuzpah. Narcos was behind a munitions company that was awarded the judges' new firearms contract, and, as was shown in a one-off in prog 1122, all of their sidearms were fitted with the standard "unauthorized user" self-destruct feature familiar to any longtime reader of the comic. But Narcos controlled the self-destruct system, and as soon as any judge drew his gun to fire on one of Narcos's robots, the gun exploded. The casualty figure for judges in this series is pretty astonishing.



But there's another element to Doomsday: the old Soviet assassin Orlok. He had crossed paths briefly with Judge Dredd in the early 80s before becoming a recurring foe for Anderson and, finding Earth too small for the two of them, taking his single-minded, violent life to a frontier planet. He learns that the East-Meg One government-in-exile has offered a 10 million credit bounty on Dredd for war crimes and returns to Mega-City One to bring him to justice. So seven (2000 AD) episodes into the proceedings, Dredd is captured and taken out of town while it falls to Narcos. When the action moves to Europe, the Megazine episodes breathe a little easier, no longer needing to relate the same incidents from two perspectives.

At 32 episodes, "Doomsday" is the longest of all the Dredd storylines. It is not currently in print, but it was collected into two books by Hamlyn in 2001, Doomsday for Dredd and Doomsday for Mega-City One. More detailed information can be found at the really excellent Wikipedia page for the story, which I probably should've looked at before I typed all that stuff out.

It has been some time since a Megazine made it into Thrillpowered Thursday, and perhaps I should point out that the format has changed just a little bit since then. Half of the comic is still made up of Preacher reprints - they're at the point where everybody's got together at Jesus de Sade's depraved party to beat the hell out of the smack dealers who killed Cassidy's girlfriend - but the black & white reprint pages no longer belong to American comics but to reprints of the Daily Star's Dredd comic from the mid-1980s by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson. Wasn't I just talking about this two days ago? Oh yes, I was.



The Daily Star Dredds - focussing on the Ian Gibson episodes - ran for about a year and a half in the Megazine and are the closest thing available to a complete, proper reprint of them. In Meg # 54-55, we have the story "Bride of Death," in which the actress in a film about the alien superfiend is convinced that she is being haunted. Naturally, bodies start turning up. It is great stuff!

Next time, Ramone Dexter gets a new job. See you in seven days!

(Originally posted October 23, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

50. Murder 101

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write. This week, I don't have time for an entry of any length, so enjoy the artwork with just a couple of comments.

July 1997 sees the very last appearance of a strip in 2000 AD commissioned by prior to David Bishop taking over the job of Tharg. I Was a Teenage Tax Consultant is a downright weird ten-week story by John Wagner and Ian Gibson about a motorcyclin' ne'er-do-well who gets bit on the leg by a rabid attorney, and, whenever the full moon shines, transforms into a bespectacled, calculator-obsessed nutjob. Now, you're probably thinking, "that's cute, but ten weeks?" Indeed, the strip might be a little padded, but it's occasionally very funny, with some of our hero's lines about archaic tax codes really hitting the mark, and as far as I'm concerned, any excuse to get Ian Gibson's art in the prog for ten weeks is a good one. Tax Consultant is, however, possibly not the most highly regarded of this run of progs among the readers. The current lineup also features Judge Dredd by Wagner and Greg Staples. "Mad City" introduces us to Homer Blint, a citizen who does some civilian "spotting" work for Justice Department, but who has no idea that his wife Oola is the notorious serial killer the Angel of Death. Homer and Oola will be recurring characters in the series for several years.



This really is an interesting lineup for a number of reasons, with all the stories deserving of some level of commentary. I'll come back to the Anderson: Psi Division story "Crusade," by Alan Grant and Steve Sampson, in a couple of weeks, and Witch World by Gordon Rennie and Siku, next time. The really big thrill this time around, is the excellent Sinister Dexter story "Murder 101" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis. People who wonder why some of us fans once really liked Sinister Dexter probably never read this story, which is all kinds of fantastic, and would show them how great this series once was. It introduces several characters to the cast, including Agent Bunkum, Tracy Weld and Rocky Rhodes, and crime boss Demi's kid sister Billi Octavo:



Of these stories, only the Sinister Dexter adventure is currently available in collected form. Murder 101 was the second of the three Sin Dex books compiled by DC and Rebellion during their short tenure together and it includes this twelve-parter along with some other stories from the period. Witch World will apparently be republished in a few months in the pages of 2000 AD Extreme Edition. I say "apparently" because sometimes those solicitations don't always match the contents. More about Witch World next time!

(Originally published 4/24/08 at LiveJournal.)