199. The Perfect Prog

March 2010: A slight change of style here for this week's entry. I had been planning to put prog 1674 under the spotlight and talk about just The ABC Warriors - because the episode in that issue, featuring two solid pages of Ro-Jaws insulting Mek-Quake's non-existent mother and Blackblood impatiently trying to explain to the idiot that he does not actually have a mother, is just about the funniest thing ever - and the always-excellent Stickleback, but then I read a few more issues and was struck by something in prog 1677. This comic is flawless. It is completely wonderful. Don't believe me? Check out the contents:


Judge Dredd: part four of "Tour of Duty: The Talented Mayor Ambrose" by John Wagner, John Higgins, and S.J. Hurst

At this point in the story, the action has moved back to the city from the townships, and becomes a masterpiece of intrigue and political maneuvering. Deputy Chief Judge Martin Sinfield has taken control of things by persuading Francisco to step aside for the good of his health, meaning once again a villain is in charge of Mega-City One, but he's not a ranting lunatic like Cal was. He's a much more subtle kind of bad guy, and it's interesting how so much of the reader's dislike of him boils down to "Sinfield has beaten Dredd and given him an awful assignment outside the City."

In fact, for all his villainy - and he's one of the great Dredd villains, no question - Sinfield's actual list of crimes is really quite small. The major one, of course, is using drugs to manipulate Francisco. He's used SLD 88, the drug once used to good effect by the serial killer PJ Maybe, to convince Francisco to step down. The beautiful irony is that Maybe has been masquerading as the city's incredibly popular mayor Byron Ambrose for several years, and doesn't appreciate Sinfield's new planned reforms. PJ Maybe's killed a lot of people in a lot of ways, but he's never planned this level of assassination before. This sets up several episodes of germ warfare, with Sinfield stubbornly refusing to die, and then, in his paranoia, he calls in Dredd to investigate these attempts on his life - which nobody else believes are happening, since he's just coincidentally contracting hideous diseases - just before mutant terrorists make a much more overt attempt to kill him. This leads Dredd to suspect that maybe Sinfield is not so paranoid after all... ah, but more on this in two weeks.


Zombo: part three of "Zombo's 11" by Al Ewing and Henry Flint

The first Zombo story was pretty bugnuts, but it's this one where the insanity is ratched past eleven. This time out, we get an ongoing, ear-splittingly loud supporting character based on Simon Cowell, but in this universe, he doesn't see the Susan Boyle character as a way to make a lot of money, but just another headache.


The ABC Warriors: part twelve of "The Volgan War" Bk Four by Pat Mills and Clint Langley

There's nothing quite as hilarious in this concluding episode as the two solid pages of robot mother insults mentioned earlier, but it does have Mek-Quake in a tuxedo appearing on a TV talk show, and Blackblood sending out mass thought-mails to insult everybody else. Classic.


Damnation Station: part one of "To the Dark and Empty Skies" by Al Ewing and Simon Davis

Here's the weakest thing in the comic, but anywhere else, it could be the standout. This is the first episode of a new series - fifteen episodes would appear in a scattered run over five months in 2010, and a second batch of fifteen is said to be in the works for later this year or next. It's future war and political posturing with fist-to-the-chest impact, memorable human characters, very weird aliens, introduced in a really good pilot episode that gives you a fun and flawed audience identification figure, a complex situation, and great artwork by Davis, who alternates with Boo Cook.


part one of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (and the dead left in his wake) by Rob Williams and Dom Reardon

I saved this one for last - it actually appears second in the comic - because it's just so damn jawdropping. Here's my latest wild pronouncement: No other series in the history of the comic has ever had such a perfect first episode.

Yeah, I know, me and hyperbole, but not even the first episode of Zenith, wherein Earth's only two superheroes are killed by an atom bomb dropped on Berlin in 1945, is as great as this. It is a dense and lyrical tale of a cruel killer in the Old West, beautifully written and with very detailed narrative captions, a stylistic choice that has been stupidly out of favor for far too long. These days, maybe nobody does narration in comics better than John Wagner, but darn if Williams doesn't come very close. The prose is just perfectly judged, and Reardon's minimalist artwork perfectly sparse, with a beautiful trick as the color fades away from Azrael's memory. And then the last panel twist. How in the world, I ask you, could you not demand episode two the instant you finish episode one?

Next time, Nikolai Dante says goodbye to a close friend. See you in seven!

195. Catching up with the Meg

July 2009: It has been several chapters since I popped by to check on the mighty Megazine and tell readers how it was doing. The answer is "not too shabby." It's been a little more than a year since Tank Girl took up residency, and, as yet, the majority of readers are not too sick of it yet. The Tank Girl experience is going to provide ample evidence that the readers really prefer a regular turnover for the Meg, with lots of different stories from the gigantic bank of recurring series available to the editor. Unfortunately, with only thirteen issues a year, and consequently just 26 slots for new stories in the Dreddworld, we've reached the point where giant gaps between stories in a series is just the natural state of affairs.

Issue 287 comes just after a really risky experiment, where the two slots were given over, for five months, to two brand new series instead of bringing back Devlin Waugh or Anderson or one of the big names, or even a known quantity like one of the once-in-a-long-time series such as Bato Loco or Johnny Woo. Fortunately, it worked out all right, because one of those slots was for Insurrection by Dan Abnett and Colin MacNeil. The other was, unfortunately, Citi-Def by Tony Lee and an artist who goes by the name Jackademus, which wasn't very good at all, but at least it had dinosaurs in it. Insurrection was extremely popular with readers, particularly ones familiar with a strategy game called "Warhammer 40k," because it's allegedly a lot like a Warhammer campaign set in the outer space fringes of Dredd's universe. I don't know what the heck Warhammer is, but I liked this comic just fine. A second story will run in 2011, and a third and final run is expected later this year.

As these stories wrapped up, it was back to the well for a pair that were more recognizable, even if the first was only just so. Meet Darren Dead by Rob Williams and John Higgins had been introduced more than three years previously, in a one-off episode published in Meg 240. In the days before any of the atomic wars that shaped Dredd's world, Darren had been a British celebrity, apparently something akin to Russell Brand (about whom I know nothing other than what Wikipedia can tell me), only known for stage magic and escape artistry instead of being outlandish and marrying Katy Perry. He had been buried alive in a stage stunt when the bombs went off, and he remained locked up for many decades, radiation both keeping him alive and unkillable, and giving him the power to talk to the dead. This high concept is not mined for drama, but ridiculous and fun comedy. Darren Dead is a very reluctant hero. He's a rich, easily offended, pretentious idiot.


Sadly, Darren Dead seems to have been retired after this three-part adventure. Admittedly, the concept is a tiny bit limiting, and the character is just a little bit obnoxious, but this story is huge fun. He's blackmailed into solving a series of murders involving a villain in a robot panda suit, and leaves the story alive but decapitated, and relying on his assistant to carry his head around. Not too many protagonists in any comic are bodiless heads. Well, there was the melted fellow in a bucket in the Wagner/Grant/Kennedy Outcasts series for DC Comics, and that's about it.

Armitage has had a much more frequent run than anything that's been in the Meg for some time. This is the second of Dave Stone's stories to be illustrated by John Cooper. Cooper will draw one more story, in 2010, before Patrick Goddard steps in for the terrific "Underground" in 2012.


"The Mancunian Candidate" sees the writer doing his usual trick of juggling more dense plots than anybody else in the business. This time, we've got dark revelations about Armitage's partner's childhood coming at the same time when our hero could really use her assistance. Instead, she's been institutionalized for her incredibly violent behavior, and he's been saddled with some upper-class twit who carries around an antique firearm for some fool reason.

While Tank Girl is kind of entertaining, there are signs that it's wearing out its welcome. The ten-part "Skidmarks" story ended with a very aggravating cop-out ending, the sort of thing that might have been okay had we been following the story for two or three issues, but dumping an "it was all a dream" variant after ten was a guaranteed way to start some ill-will. Online and in the letters pages, we're starting to see some resentment seep through. It's evident that Tank Girl has run too long already, but there's still much more to come. On one hand, there's the question of why this series should proceed uninterrupted for so long, but on the other, if Armitage or Devlin Waugh were to get this sort of residency, would readers eventually turn on it as well?

Well, they might, but I'd love to see a ten-month run of both of 'em.

Next time, Judge Dredd is exiled to the Cursed Earth, and Lulu takes off her clothes again. See you in seven!

191. The Ginger Ninja

February 2009: In previous installments of this blog, I'd sort of glossed over Greysuit, a super-spy thriller by Pat Mills and John Higgins. It launched in the same issue as Defoe in the summer of 2007, and was immediately overshadowed by it. When you seem to wait around forever for a new Mills series and then two show up at once, they'll always be compared to each other, and Defoe is just so darn terrific that not very much is going to come out very well head-to-head.

But Greysuit isn't without its charms, and nobody can deny the huge, visceral pleasure of looking at Higgins' artwork. He and Mills discussed making this series visually realistic, and showing that when superpowered people slug somebody with a fist traveling about just under the speed of sound, it's going to destroy their victim's face. Mills has gone on the record many times as hating superhero comics, but this desire for something like authenticity actually dates back to late 1976, and Greysuit's antecedent, MACH One. This was one of 2000 AD's original five stories, a rip-off - slash - cash-in of television's very popular Six Million Dollar Man. This TV series featured a superpowered spy occasionally toppling corrupt governments and battling UFOs and Bigfoot, but usually he just drove around Burbank wearing a turtleneck looking for counterfeiters, because that was easier on the budget.

When MACH One was developed, a "pilot episode" was drawn for the 2000 AD ashcan that, in one panel, showed its hero, John Probe, decapitating a soldier with a karate chop. This over-the-top violence was toned down considerably before publication, but when Greysuit started thirty years later, Mills finally got to indulge. In this spy epic, the agents are all pumped up on brain chemicals that give them amazing reaction time and they can punch through walls, so when some meathead Afghan policeman or hired bodyguard gets in John Blake's way, that man's going to have his jaw broken into twelve pieces. Instantly, just as Colin MacNeil became the go-to artist for amazing exit wounds, John Higgins got the reputation as the man you want to have drawing your superpowered thug breaking skulls, leaving teeth flying and skin and muscles ripped by shattering bone. It had been a long time since 2000 AD artwork really made us do double-takes, but this did it.

But it was the script in the second story that prompted a double-take, because after John Blake has gone rogue and starts targeting a government-shielded pedophile ring, one of them calls in an agent from another department to defend himself. And suddenly, the story goes really loopy.


Here's the funny thing: I missed this completely. Every so often, I just don't pay as much attention to my thrillpower as I should, and, I guess when this run of issues showed up in the US in April, I was just focusing on Strontium Dog - and the wedding I'd have the next month - and not letting details of the other strips sink in. So when "the Ginger Ninja" debuted, to howls of derision and mockery from fans, I quietly agreed that it was a silly name, and figured that Mills was making a flat reference to some British comedian or media figure or something, but never caught on. Years later, some friends explained to me that this wasn't some crack about Chris Evans or a DJ, but just a premise that doesn't make any sense whatever. He... well, he masks himself so that he doesn't appear to have a head...? and that makes him... invisible...?

We love Mills, of course, he's the guv'nor, and it's nice to say that even when he bombs, he doesn't bore. Greysuit was filed away after this second story, but a third is anticipated later this year.

Meanwhile, Strontium Dog was kicking all kinds of ass. After doing several stories with Johnny Alpha and Wulf set somewhere in their partnership, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra turned the clock back to the earliest days of Johnny's career, before he met Wulf, and when he was still recognized by mutants as a hero of the war, and not a mean bounty hunter. "Blood Moon" is the first of two Strontium Dog adventures to see print in 2009, and, at thirteen parts, one of the longest stories for the character in quite some time. It's also completely wonderful.


I like the structure of "Blood Moon" a great deal. It starts with four episodes set during the earliest days of the war, when a younger Johnny Alpha first meets Colonel Moon. He's a really strange figure, sort of a glam rock messiah terrorist. Some years previously, Ezquerra had painted a two-part Judge Dredd story that featured a goth criminal gang and not quite got the look of the villains right. They looked like fat kids in the KISS Army and not Nephilim obsessives. But the design of Col. Blood Moon is completely perfect. You can't look at the guy without singing "Gotta make way for homo superior."

Moon's terrorist ways and no-compromise law set him at odds with the mutant generals from the outset. Moon wanted extermination of the norms, not co-existence. Since he refused to be represented by the Mutant Army, he was a wanted war criminal, not party to the terms of the armistice, and his mystique carried on into the setting of the strip. Most people believed he was dead, killed in the war, but every so often, a terrorist assault on humans would be carried out in his name. It's like Ziggy Stardust crossed with Osama bin Laden, and completely compelling.

Part of the fun is seeing all these old faces from previous Strontium Dog adventures again. Evans the Fist and Blubberlips had been killed off in the 1980s, as had all three Stix brothers, who appear in cameo in this story along with a previously-unseen cousin, every bit as ugly. But there's room for new characters as well. In this story, we meet Precious Matson, a very young and very pretty mutant journalist. She has three breasts, infuriating other reporters because she has an unfair advantage in getting stories over their ugly mugs. Precious would be reincorporated into Stronty continuity in 2010, when we begin, at long last, the first stories set after 1990's apocalyptic "Final Solution." And what a tale that will be.

"Blood Moon" is also notable for being the first story to feature Ezquerra being assisted on art duties by his son, Hector. He will be his father's regular inker for the next three and a half years, and, if I may be so bold, they'll be three and a half years of some of his very best artwork. We don't like to talk about the reality of our creative heroes getting older, but Carlos's eyes, in 2009, are not quite what they were, and, in 2011, he'll rest for several months, recuperating from major surgery. Since he's been working without Hector for the last year or so, his inking has become much heavier, as though he's trying out yet another new style. The change in inking that came when Hector came on board also a surprising development in style, and attracted a great deal of commentary. I think the art's absolutely terrific, the whole story's a fun triumph, and it's available in a collected edition with the follow-up, "Mork Whisperer." Definitely check those out.

Next time, it's D'Israeli on Low Life, mutants in Mega-City One, and the dazzling debut of Dandridge!

176. Two Come Along At Once

June 2007: A very, very short (time-sensitive) entry this week, to acknowledge that this was the neat little point where Pat Mills got to launch two brand-new series in the same week. Defoe, illustrated by Leigh Gallagher, is the more successful of the two. It really goes over very well with the readership and features the great Mills standard of throwing an incredible amount of ideas and information at you and seeing what sticks. It's set in 1668, two years after a comet has reanimated the dead, and our hero is the tough-as-nails Titus Defoe, saving the city of London from an army of "reeks" - the word "zombie" hadn't entered our lexicon in the 17th Century, of course - who are shown to be under the control of a fantastic general. In a fantastic sequence, the master villain of this story is the decapitated head of Oliver Cromwell, used by the reek army to interrupt the king's privacy by being mounted on a long pole and banged against the window of his majesty's bedchamber.

This first adventure is pretty straightforward, although Mills really introduces a heck of a lot of characters, backstory and wild, weird weaponry. Sir Isaac Newton has been outfitting the good guys with all sorts of cool guns, tanks, and ornithopters, while conducting strange and ungodly experiments with reeks to find out what's causing their rampage. Newton might be the only historical figure to feature as a supporting player in two 2000 AD series at the same time. Both here and in The Red Seas, he's depicted, not without good reason, as one of the smartest men in England.

Over the course of the first four stories, Defoe picks up a pretty huge supporting cast - honestly, having some short sidebar stories digging into their backgrounds would help enormously - and a much broader range of bad guys as the extent of the villainy is shown to be infecting much of Europe as well. Rumor has it that a fifth Defoe story is expected in 2013.

On the other hand, no more Greysuit is presently expected. It's a much more straightforward adventure, with far less of the backstory that informs Defoe. It begins as a a slight revamping of the popular 1977-78 series MACH One, only this time around, it's influenced more by Jason Bourne than by the Six Million Dollar Man. The hero is John Blake - initials probably not a coincidence - and he's a Delta-Class assassin for the British government. He's been given superhuman strength and reaction speed, as have a few other people in his department.

Delta agents are programmed to obey their orders, but Blake has a soft spot for children. He's ordered to kill three bank robbers, but one of them bargains for his life with evidence that a top government official is involved in a child slavery ring. Blake goes out on his own to avenge the crimes, and is, literally, busting heads across Europe. One thing that really makes Greysuit stand out is the remarkable, visceral violence. John Higgins gets to draw some unbelievable brutality. When Blake uses his super-strength on somebody, he shatters their skull, jawbones and teeth flying free in the goriest way.

There are only two Greysuit stories. We'll have to come back to the negative reaction to the second adventure some other time.

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)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Speaking of negative reaction, we'll be back in seven days not to bury Samantha Slade on the occasion of her final adventure, but to praise her. See you in a week!

113. American Ugly

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

96. War in the Command Module

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

26. The Hondo Deal

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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