203. Training Wheels

September 2010: The King's Speech is released. Tony Curtis dies, and, with him goes the final remaining living memory of sex with Marilyn Monroe. There's a new launch prog featuring Dredd, Defoe, Nikolai Dante, Low Life, and a new series, Age of the Wolf. So this week, I'm hitting the absolute bottom of the "drawing together connections to spark a point about worth writing a post" barrel. Fair warning. I thought I had something, and I didn't, and all that's left is fairly weak. But would you believe that there are two stories running in the comic this month with very strong female characters and they're both driving motorcycles? No kidding.

As much as we (obviously) love 2000 AD, the one place where it constantly needs improvement is bringing in female creators, writers, and artists, and developing stronger female protagonists. A big part of that development, for me, is building a world around that character and her situation, rather than other, earlier, male characters. That's why spinoffs don't quite count with me. As much as I liked Samantha Slade, she was operating in the shadow of her grandfather, your old pal Sam. Rafe and Venus Bluegenes both have Rogue Trooper's DNA. Judges Anderson, Hershey, Karyn, and even Aimee Nixon are all policing the same streets as Joe Dredd.

Judge Nixon almost qualifies for me because she's so radically different from Dredd, and in the Low Life adventure "Hostile Takeover," she has one humdinger of a character turn. We'll come back to that in the next chapter, but it's worth noting that in the beginning of this story by Rob Williams and D'Israeli, she's the centerpiece of one of the period's very best cliffhangers. Racing down the mean streets of Mega-City One with the indefatigable Judge Dirty Frank in tow, she comes across a biker in a suit of samurai armor. And then another. They're riding very strange bikes, beautifully designed by D'Israeli but which appear really impractical, having just one big tire. Then, ahead of them, there's a single man holding a sword. Dirty Frank seems to take the worst of it, but he's just overreacting to a scratch. Judge Nixon... she doesn't come out well.

Outside of spinoffs such as these, you really have to put your thinking cap on to find a recent series built around a female lead. (This subject came up about a year later on a friend's Facebook page and some guy chimed in "What about Halo Jones?" Yeah. Awesome. That's the default answer to 2000 AD's lack of female leads: a character who last appeared more than a quarter of a century ago.) That's why Age of the Wolf arrived to instant appreciation. It is the first series in 2000 AD by Alec Worley, although his earlier one-off "Antiquus Phantasma" would be developed into the series Dandridge a little later on. It's drawn by Jon Davis-Hunt, who's been improving and impressing more and more with each appearance in the comic, and the lead character, Rowan Morrigan, bears a pleasing enough resemblance to the actress Karen Gillan, who first appeared on Doctor Who about five months previously.

Davis-Hunt does a simply amazing job laying out the action sequences, but he still has one little artistic hiccup that drives me nuts and, at this point, hasn't seen much improvement from his debut with Stalag 666, and that's his depiction of people running. I can't spell out exactly what's wrong, just that the crowd escaping from the London Underground station in episode two seems frozen in place and wearing lead shoes, which is a very strange problem for somebody who also possesses the talent to make a motorcycle appear as though it's about to leap out of the page to have.

Age of the Wolf - I'm so accustomed to writing about the fictional detective Nero Wolfe that I keep typing "wolf" and adding an e - is a modern-day (well, 2016) thriller that sees England beset by werewolves. There has been a full moon for nine days, and a snowy London has almost immediately become a hunting ground for beasts. Rowan can save the world by fulfilling an ancient prophecy and dying, but she isn't willing to go without a fight.

This series really shows off more and more with subsequent rereads. It turns out that all the place-setting dialogue on page one of the story does more than merely tip a hat to Sydney Jordan and Willie Patterson, the creators of the classic, cerebral adventure strip Jeff Hawke, it sets up the whole premise of sacrifice. From the ancient Greeks to the comely lasses of medieval fairy tales being given up for dragons, there's a long history of women being given up to satisfy a monster and save the world. Nobody has ever really asked what the victim has to say about that.

Rowan doesn't get the opportunity to turn matters around and start kicking werewolf ass until the second book of Age of the Wolf in 2012, but she immediately makes an impact as a character who we want to follow. Her fate is cruel and unfair and we want her to strike back against it. This requires her to run, and episodes 2-5 of the first story are a long and mostly brilliant chase scene. People who were not paying attention to the prophecy aspect, and the very heavy undercurrent of Norse mythology, wolves, and endless winter - fair cop, that would totally include me the first time around - would be blindsided by the strange direction the series takes once things calm down for a moment and it looks like Rowan has found a short refuge. We meet some new characters as Rowan's decision to live looks like it's going to damn the world.

I kind of hate myself for missing the very clear telegraphing that this series is about what happens when Midgard is given up to the wolves, but, to be fair and honest, Worley's only real error in laying out this story was introducing it via what looks to be an incredibly skippable and long monologue being read by a radio broadcaster to the silent halls of a museum. Often in the comic medium, a writer's intention can be subverted by the way that readers absorb comics, and the way that the editors and publishers promote them. This is not, despite all evidence, an action story about a girl on a motorbike fighting werewolves in familiar London, but when, for a solid month, that's what we read, it's a little tough to turn over the coin and tell readers that what they've read is just the scene one hook, not without resentment and confusion. So no, I don't think that Book One of Age of the Wolf went over very well with readers in the end; there was lots of grumbling about the witches and the prophecies and how the heck did this urban thriller transform into ponderous Norse mumbo-jumbo, but it reveals more on each reread. Book Two, which appeared in 2012, was more successful - there is a hell of a blind twist in that one - and I believe that the third and final book is due in September of this year. I'm looking forward to it!

We'll take another short break here to accommodate my being behind on another project and then going out of town. Thrillpowered Thursday will resume on the 20th with more about Defoe and what happens to Nixon and Frank next. See you then! In the meantime, if you enjoy this blog, please tell a friend or something. Share on Facebook or Twitter, or send the link to somebody who should read it. Or everybody who should read it for that matter! Even Google Plus would be a help.

192. After the Flood

April 2009: The cover of prog 1631 is one of 2000 AD's modern classics. That is a beautiful piece of artwork in its own right, never mind all the cute in-jokes hidden within it. It is spotlighting the climax to an eight-part Low Life adventure by Rob Williams and the latest artist, D'Israeli. The story itself is among the weirdest and most high-concept escapades to ever play out in Mega-City One, which is saying something, but it's such a brilliant set of visuals. Inside, we've got a major Judge Dredd story by John Wagner and Carl Critchlow, Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, a new series called Necrophim by Tony Lee and Lee Carter, along with the two stories I'm including today. I'm definitely going to have to find time to go back and just spend one of these chapters talking about "Backlash" and its follow-ups; this storyline is going to continue until the summer of 2010.

Low Life is a series that everybody enjoys because everybody loves Dirty Frank, and because the criminal schemes that play out in this sector of the city are grandiose and bizarre. This one, honestly, barely hangs together. I mean, this latest play by the Big Man to control the sector involves shakedowns and blackmail via billboards that use nanotech to replicate Biblical imagery and disasters, everything from rains of frogs to burning bushes to leviathans and floods. If you stare at the story too hard, it cracks and falls completely apart, but nobody wants to do that because it's more fun just to follow Dirty Frank being himself and look beyond the actual plot, at the characterization and the artwork.

The story begins with Dirty Frank learning that a Long Walk is in his future. Frank's handler, Thora, calls him back in to tell him that despite his successes, the department considers him a liability. He's just too unhinged, he is not reliable anymore, and he smells terrible.


But after he saves the day - a costumed, and awesome, alter-ego is credited with an assist - there's a clue that there might be more to this story than we were told. Throughout "Creation," we get flashbacks to what appears to be one of Frank's last uniformed missions, perhaps somewhere in Asia, that goes horribly wrong and leaves him stranded on a mountainside in a blizzard. A single, gigantic snowflake keeps appearing, looming huge in his memory. We're shown at the end how he managed to survive until a rescue party arrives. Freezing to death and seconds away from his end, he's put that out of his mind and is seeing the world as a tropical paradise instead. It's how Frank survives anywhere; he creates his own reality. Perhaps this criminal adventure was not as ridiculous as we're told. Our hero is, after all, the very definition of an unreliable narrator.

Meanwhile, prog 1631 also sees the first appearance of a new character, Spartacus Dandridge. Like Jack Point and D.R. & Quinch before him, he makes his debut as in a one-off adventure, a Past Imperfect, some time before he gets a series. "Antiquus Phantasma" is set in 1905, but it's not quite our 1905. It's full of spirits and ghosts and poltergeists and very flashy clothes.


Dandridge - what a perfect name for this character - is a flashy, well-dressed bon vivant who occasionally does a little bit of ghost-hunting. In one of the most densely packed, and perfectly paced, five page stories that 2000 AD has ever assembled, we get a grip on this crazy world and this dandy of a protagonist, who changes outfits three times, and also get an exciting plot, a twist revelation about the identity of the ghost - spirits and their corpses being collectible status symbols in this world - and then a whacking huge twist ending after that: Dandridge is abruptly shot dead by gunmen in the employ of his creditors, who figure that he's much more valuable as a ghost than alive. Shooting him and selling him is the most sensible way to settle his tailoring bills! I hate that circumstances require that the ending be spoiled, because had a series never developed, this would have stood alone as one of the very best one-offs in 2000 AD's history. So darn much happens in this episode that it really demands to be immediately reread.

The character was created by new writer Alec Worley and artist Warren Pleece, and, happily, this wasn't the last we've seen of him. He'll return for three more short stories and one-offs in 2010 and 2011. A fifth story will be arriving pretty soon now - April, I think - and I'm looking forward to it. These stories are set 76 years after "Antiquus Phantasma," and are very fun and charming.

Next time, two very popular series make triumphant debuts. See you in seven! In the meantime, if you enjoy this blog, please tell a friend or something. Share on Facebook or Twitter, or send the link to somebody who should read it. Or everybody who should read it for that matter! Even Google Plus would be a help.

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!

171. ABC Fumetti

January 2007: Good grief, didn't I just write about "The Volgan War"...? Well, it was March. Close enough. Anyway, one of the big new launches in the annual 100-page prog had been a major new ABC Warriors adventure. It's a huge 288-page epic told across four chunks of story, and although I recall that events in the third segment got a little confusing, overall it is one of writer Pat Mills' biggest triumphs. If "The Shadow Warriors" had seen Mills flexing his muscles and finally doing right by these characters after many years of subpar adventures, then this is where he raises the game.

From here, I'm going to cannibalize from an earlier review that I wrote, because I can do that sort of thing. Since Mills found success working in the French comic industry, which is based around annual "album" releases of a 64- or 80-page story, or, if you will, a yearly episode of a much larger story, he's exported the form to 2000 AD, which programs strips in weekly six-page installments. Mills' annual story is further subdivided into, say, ten or so weekly episodes.

Working in this format, Mills is able to tell incredibly long stories across several years, and Rebellion, the publisher of 2000 AD, has two prospective revenue streams for the reprints. Working in conjunction with artist Clint Langley, Mills first used the experiment to craft six 48-page episodes of Slaine. These were paired together and reprinted in three large, oversized, but thin hardbacks with an eye on the European market, where this sort of material could safely be expected to sell by the bucketload in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these countries, the hardback "album" has long been the default format for the comic medium, much in the way that monthly "floppy" superhero funnybooks from Marvel and DC are the default in the United States.

Mills and Langley's next project was "The Volgan War," and it appeared as four annual stories from 2007-2010. In it, the characters reminisce about their original days of combat before uniting, only to find some common threads in their stories, including the strange, classified appearances of a top-secret special forces flamethrower robot. As the series unfolds - and it sags a bit in the third chunk before roaring to a colossal, incredible finish - the events of the old Volgan War come back to haunt the Warriors on Mars in very unexpected ways, leaving the team permanently fragmented and new, dangerous bad guys waiting for them.

Overall, I think it's a masterpiece, and easily the best Warriors adventure since 1988's classic "Black Hole," even with some of the head-scratching events of the third volume. It works extremely well in hardback form as well. Following the precedent of the oversized Slaine books assembled with Europe in mind, Rebellion collected the four 72-page stories, beefed them up with some additional artwork by Langley and some extra design work, and released a quartet of 96-page hardbacks, where the material shined even brighter.

But I was telling you about this first quarter of the story. Well, it begins with the Warriors committing their demented member Mek-Quake to an asylum on Mars, not knowing that the place is effectively a recruiting center for violent, combat-ready machines looking for a new boss. Hammerstein, square as ever, is reminded of how he was sometimes forced to abandon his "boys" in combat in 22nd Century Europe. Langley has a ball with the scenes of robot combat and mecha-carnage. At one point, we meet giant robot mecha-Stalins called Uncle Joes, and they're revealed in a turn-the-comic-the-other-way double-page spread that serves as one tall, vertical panel. It's a deliberate callback to similar introductions of giant robots in the original series (Mad George, in prog 138) and in Book Three of Nemesis the Warlock (the giant Torque-Armada in prog 340-something).

After Hammerstein's story, and his introduction to the flamethrowing secret agent Zippo, Mongrol reports that he met Zippo just before the paratrooping accident that destroyed his original body. His tale, told across three issues, is actually an expansion of the character's first appearance, only with Lara, the cute young girl who rebuilt him, reimagined considerably from Mike McMahon's notion! McMahon's depiction of Lara in a nightdress, secretly rebuilding a robot in the dead of night, evoked candlelit, stormy potboilers, old-fashioned thrillers, and, of course, Frankenstein. Langley's Lara is a Suicide Girl. But this sequence is still amazing, just for how well Mills expanded those original four pages into something with more weight. Reading it, old fans are sure to recognize various lines and snatches of dialogue, and wonder how on earth Mills managed to stick so much information into the original comic in the first place.

And then there's Joe Pineapples' story, which is definitely one for people who like Mills best when anything goes. Working behind the Volgan lines in old Moscow and tasked to assassinate the enemy super-robot Volkhan, Joe has smuggled just enough innocuous parts in his own chassis that he can kill a civilian taxi driver robot and, using chunks of it and its GPS, pull off another of his absurd, impossible shots. Astonishingly, it's one of those very rare moments where Joe doesn't get a clean kill, and leaving town also requires Zippo's assistance. This volume of the story ends with Mek-Quake in considerable danger, and our heroes wondering whatever happened to Zippo, and some of those plot threads get picked up when it resumes in August.

While The ABC Warriors and its stablemates Kingdom and Stickleback (which I talked about last week) were getting all the attention, Rob Williams' Low Life also surfaced for a short four-week story, its only appearance in 2007. Again drawn by Simon Coleby - this would be his last work on the series to date - it is the second time that a four-part comedy has spotlighted Dirty Frank. This time out, he's teamed with another undercover Wally Squad operative, Eric Coil. This poor fellow had been infected by a mutating plot contrivance in the Cursed Earth - we'll call it "The Jim Kidd Effect" - and returned to Mega-City One with his brain intact and his body de-aged to a baby's.

It's just Coil's luck that the Wally Squad occasionally has need of somebody who can pose as a baby, like... well... actually, I'm pretty sure that this has never, ever happened before. "Baby Talk" is a definite brain-in-neutral story, just there for the laughs, which is a really good thing, because everything else in the prog at this time is either ultra-serious or tragic. In Kingdom, Gene's entire pack is dead, and in Stickleback, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey's wife and children have been killed in a house fire, so thank heaven there's something light and uncomplicated to follow. Even Judge Dredd has found the ugly beginnings of Mega-City One too much of a pain in the rear to continue unabated, and so it's taking a nine-week break from the story to run some shorter episodes, although that's probably more to do with that story's artist Carlos Ezquerra taking a long weekend and a good stretch than it is Tharg giving us a merciful break from the relentless and the grim.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Low Life: Mega-City Undercover (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Speaking of a merciful break, Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take June off, during which time I've got four 2000 AD features lined up for my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf. See you in July for a look back at the actual issue that started this blog going in 2007, and a new eight-week run of your most favoritest blog ever. Credo!

163. Hitmen and Her

April 2006: That Tharg, always on top of Earth's latest trends, gives us a very silly cover blurb to herald the return of undercover judge Aimee Nixon and the rest of the Low Life gang. Aimee, seen here in all her nose-broken ugliness, is drawn by Steve Roberts. The tag line, "The Hitmen and Her," refers to a popular late-night dance music show that had been canceled fourteen years previously. The Hit Man and Her ran from 1988-92 and was hosted by Pete Waterman, one-third of that production trio that spent the late 1980s making all of Bananarama's records sound like all of Rick Astley's and Kylie Minogue's records. Thanks to "radiator" from the 2000 AD message boards for making the connection; I think I was probably not in the mood, after hearing how Waterman and his colleagues ruined Wow! in '87, to really care what the hell he was hosting on late night British TV. Well, okay, I like "I Heard a Rumour," but that was not at all a good album.

Anyway, so the current Low Life story, "Con Artist," is written by Rob Williams and drawn by Simon Coleby, and we get Tharg's obscure and terrible pun from the setting. It's held at an underground convention of hitmen in Mega-City One. After the comedy detour of 2005's "Rock and a Hard Place," which gave the popular supporting character Dirty Frank the lead role for the first time, this is back to serious business with Aimee in charge. It's a moody melodrama, and the tone is established by Coleby's art. Here, everything appears in a wash of gray.

I probably appreciate Coleby's art a lot less than anybody else reading this does. He has proven to be very popular among 2000 AD's fans, but you can't please everybody, and his work leaves me cold. I really didn't like it at all on "Rock and a Hard Place," and 2007's "Baby Talk," another comedy story with Dirty Frank in the lead, aggravated me even more. Here, though, it makes a much better match for what Williams is writing. At this stage of the series, Low Life is a serious drama about Aimee that occasionally takes detours into broad comedy and gives a different character the lead. It's a noir strip where nobody can be trusted and the lead character is haunted by violence.



Solid lines and psychedelic details, as seen to wild effect throughout the first thirteen episodes of Low Life when Henry Flint was drawing it, are not what the strip necessarily needs, and while I personally don't enjoy Coleby's work, I'm very impressed by how well he serves the story. I appreciate it, and praise it, on a technical level, but not an emotional one.

Overall, I was honestly not enjoying Low Life very much at this stage. The shift in tone as the stories switched between the two leads did not work for me. In 2009, when D'Israeli becomes the series' artist, Williams finds a new approach, putting Dirty Frank and his blinkered, damaged and occasionally hilarious psyche in charge of dramatically important and emotionally engaging cases, and the result is pure magic. The annual Low Life story of the past three years has been one of the comic's greatest successes, and it's honestly fascinating to see how this series has evolved.

However, detailing a series with qualifiers about it being technically or archaeologically interesting really is damning with faint praise. The honest fact is that I just don't like the Coleby period of Low Life and have trouble figuring out what the heck the artist is trying to draw in some shots. No, it's much more satisfying to talk about something wild and fun like Si Spurrier and Carl Critchlow's Lobster Random.



"The Agony and the Ecstacy" is the third Lobster Random adventure and it is possibly my favorite of all of them. It's terrific. Rebellion seriously needs to collect the first three stories in a book as soon as possible, because it's just a hilarious and constantly inventive series. This time out, the story opens with Lob having formed a criminal partnership with Mrs. Redd, the brain-in-a-robot from the previous story. They are happily bilking old rich dudes just after she's married them when another, much weirder gang of criminals intervenes. Their partnership severed, Lob attempts to hook up with the gang and give them a taste of what a big swindle feels like. While Lob was not responsible for Mrs. Redd's fate, she built a contingency plan into her robot body, expecting Lob to double-cross her. So he does not know that a signal has been sent to those two big and mean bounty hunters, Pinn and Hogg, from the previous story, and as soon as things get their worst, they'll be showing up.

This story has everything. I've mentioned before that one reason I love this series is that it's set in a world where the wildest and most imaginative sci-fi ideas are just thrown around casually, without any ponderous buildup or explanation. It's like being seven years old and seeing the Tattooine cantina from Star Wars for the first time and thinking "Lookit all dose ALIENS!" It's really like Si Spurrier built a cast of characters from weird, castoff parts from an old toybox. This time out, there's a sentient spray of graffiti and a sentient zoot suit among all of the other crazy-looking people. Among them is a guy with a video camera for a head. And then there's the kingpin behind the scenes.

If you've not read this before, then anybody who spoils this kingpin guy for you has done you a genuinely criminal offense. The cliffhanger where he's revealed is, flatly, one of 2000 AD's all-time finest. Top ten, easy. The shock of seeing this guy, and the casual, ridiculous one-liner that he delivers, is pure genius. With only five or six pages an episode, it can be an indulgence to use a full-page splash cliffhanger in 2000 AD, which is why creators use it very, very sporadically. It's a tool that Tharg's droids only pull out for once-in-a-lifetime reveals like this. The character is actually very clever, as well as a design tour-de-force. He's a conjoined twin, which leaves Lob baffled, because why, he asks, should anybody in this fantastic a future suffer through that. It actually gives him a remarkable tactical advantage over Lob, who is, for once, absolutely stumped as to how he'll get the better of his enemy.

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

Next time, well, that'll be in March after a little break. This wraps up Thrillpowered Thursday's latest "season," but we'll be back in a few weeks' time with an amazingly off-model Dredd in South America, and an egregious misuse of the Comic Sans font. Until then, take care of yourself!

138. Bill and His Shootah

Hey! Is this thing still on?

It's been more than a year since I last wrote here, and a couple of people have said that they missed reading me, so I let the little itch settle me back into writing a bit more about 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. If you're new to this blog, basically, ages ago, I sat down and started rereading my collection at the rate of about six issues a week. By the time I got to something like 1993, I decided to rip off Paul Rainey's Prog Slog Blog and write a little each week. I let this turn from a pleasure into a chore and found myself running out of things to say, so I quit doing it.

I kept on reading, but rather than skipping this blog ahead to where I had reached at the end of June - to the issues originally published in September of '08 - I am going to re-reread and report and scan, so there's not a break in the entries.

Also, John Smith's completely brilliant series Indigo Prime is returning to the comic in about two months, and I am certainly going to want to celebrate that. Look for an article about that great series in September. Plus, of course, this is a fine week to relaunch this blog, because - and when I started the first draft of this entry, I didn't know this was coming - the 2000 AD website has just been quite spectacularly redesigned. If you have not visited the web site in a while, you should definitely swing back by, because they have done a super job upgrading it.

Anyway, you've got me for thirteen weeks. I'm committing to that much. We'll see how it goes. You'll also notice there's a Google Ad somewhere over to the side somewhere. That's new. If you enjoy Thrillpowered Thursday and see an ad that might interest you, I sure would appreciate it if you'd click it. Money's got to be pretty darn tight since my wife and I had a baby two months ago. If there are some pennies in this blog, I might can see myself writing longer.

So, onto prog 1387. This wonderful cover, by Dave Gibbons, of Bill Savage and Judge Dredd, reminds me that the summer of 2004 - that's when we received this April-dated issue in North America - was when my best buddy, the fellow who introduced me to 2000 AD, up and moved to Canada. For a few years, I'd been feeding his thrill-power habit because Diamond, the distributor that sends 2000 AD to American funnybook stores, was completely unreliable, repeatedly missed shipping dates and would occasionally claim that they were shorted and would only send one issue to a comic shop if it, in fact, ordered two. So, nothing's changed there, anyway. In other words, for quite a few years, I was ordering and paying for two copies of 2000 AD in order to guarantee delivery of at least one of them. From prog 1387, my second copies - when those second copies arrived, about eight times of ten - went to another local friend.

These days, I no longer use Diamond for 2000 AD. I was, however, very pleased to hear that they will be once again offering 2000 AD by the single issue rather than in a sealed pack, as had been the case for some lengthy time. I hear that's supposed to start at the end of this month, for the comics that will ship in October.



1387 was also notable for the debut of two great big series that are still continuing today. The seventh book of Savage is running in the current issues of 2000 AD, and a new series of Low Life is scheduled to start in just a couple of months, in prog 1750.

Savage is the story of an occupied Britain, which lost a quick-strike "war" with the eastern European Volgan Empire five years previously. It's the sequel to one of the original 2000 AD serials, Invasion, which ran from 1977-78. Our hero is Bill Savage, who lost his family to the Volgs, picked up a shotgun and has been blowing hell out of the Volgs in a long-running guerrilla war. As book one of Savage opens, Bill and other resistance leaders are executing a plan to fake his death so he can work undercover.

Written by Pat Mills and illustrated by Charlie Adlard, Savage is just a blisteringly good comic, full of realistic villains and desperate heroes. Well, there's one bit in the first series where the Guv'nor's research fails him and tank treads suddenly don't work the way they really do, but otherwise this is a really great series, and shows Mills continuing to roar back to life with some fantastic comics for 2000 AD. Several more winners would be forthcoming.

Then there's Low Life. This is less a spinoff from Judge Dredd than one of the many comics that are set in his world. The Low Life is the most crime-ridden slum in Mega-City One (this week, anyway) and the series follows a group of undercover "Wally Squad" judges. In these initial outings, scripted by Rob Williams and drawn by Henry Flint, the lead is Judge Aimee Nixon, a tough, ugly, broken-nosed, one-armed master of disguise.



In time, Nixon will cede the spotlight to her more popular co-star, the comically deranged Judge Dirty Frank, but she is really a compelling and fascinating character in these first two stories. In time, Low Life will get pretty dense with subplots and Nixon's role will take a pretty surprising turn. Most fans are anxiously awaiting its return in September.

Also appearing in this prog, there's Judge Dredd in a one-off by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy, an outer space serial called A.H.A.B. by Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson, and Chopper by Wagner, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

Chopper: Surf's Up (2000 AD's Online Shop).
Low Life: Paranoia (Amazon US)
Savage: Taking Liberties (2000 AD Online Shop).


Next week: What happens when Judge Dredd takes on the war on terror. And stop by my Bookshelf Blog tomorrow for a short review of the Mean Machine collection, "Real Mean."

92. The Last of the Great Thrillpower Overloads?

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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