167. Dredd Rides Into History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

159. Where Things Should Have Ended

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

158. Lack of Background

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

130. Heroclix, part two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

116. Spurrier's Scrap

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

104. Saying Hello

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

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

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



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

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

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



Oh, wait.

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

94. The Empire of Sleep

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.

January 2001: Prog 1226 features this terrific Frazer Irving cover of Charles Fort and Arthur Conan Doyle beating the daylights out a horde of twisted zombies controlled by cultists who worship some tentacled deity on the other side of life, and who have decided Harry Houdini's explorations into the realm of unconsciousness have brought him too close to the terrible truth of their dark and evil plans. So they send H.P. Lovecraft to earn the others' trust and lead them all into a trap which will result in the end of life on earth. Yeah, you read that right. Necronauts, a nine-part serial illustrated by Irving and written by Gordon Rennie, is a shotgun blast of wild, high concept coolness. Fort carries a cricket bat to smack around the baddies, and Doyle carries around a medical kit full of lethal brews.

Necronauts is Irving's first series after only a couple of one-offs in the past few months. He's made a huge impact on the readership and the fandom, where he's been participating for some time. Irving once joked that he'd stalked and killed a certain "Gaze into the fist of Dredd"-illustrating art droid in order to prove his loyalty to 2000 AD. The joke is duly hung around his neck, worn well into the ground, and by the time of the first Dreddcon in December, people are threatening to wear "Irving Killed Bolland" T-shirts.

Fandom has become very entertaining at this time, with a number of creators, including Rennie, Irving, John Smith and Simon Fraser, as well as present and previous editors Andy Diggle and David Bishop, regularly contributing to the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup. Of course, by this time, spam is beginning to overwhelm all the newsgroups, and some professionals will conclude in time that there are certain segments of "fandom" that make this kind of casual interaction untenable.

Diggle in particular will have an ongoing dispute with a Ukranian reader living in Germany who seems to read Judge Dredd just to complain about the series' moral philosophy, and what she sees as John Wagner's skewed "view of good and evil," particularly in light of the recent eight-part "Sector House" story which centered on Judge Rico. Diggle is not many weeks away from a huge disagreement with one of his chief contributors, compared to which his newsgroup debates with this reader are probably not that important, but it's worth noting, as the argument of "everybody else vs. this one reader in Germany" raged for months, it was within a susequent thread of her complaints that Diggle would eventually announce his resigning the post of editor.



Apart from Necronauts, there's some really good stuff in the prog. Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser have teamed up on a Judge Dredd one-off that celebrates the work of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes, and Dan Abnett and Simon Davis are wrapping up a four-part Sinister Dexter adventure called "The Man in the Ion Mask." In a spin-off from the earlier Mercy Heights, John Tomlinson and Kevin Walker are wrapping up the first four-part story of Tor Cyan, the genetically-engineered, blue-skinned, mohawked fellow who's a bit like Rogue Trooper. This is notable for showing off, for the first time, the style Walker has been using for the last several years, with lots of heavy colors, solid lines and minimal fussiness in the inking. Compared to his detail-heavy work on The Balls Brothers and his earlier, painted work on ABC Warriors, this latest style is quite surprising, although that shouldn't be taken to mean it looks anything other than fantastic.

Also this issue, John Wagner and Arthur Ranson bring us the third book of Button Man. More on this fantastic story in next week's installment.



Necronauts was released by Rebellion as a collected edition in one of their earlier formats in 1993. I've said before that everybody should sell their home for a copy, and I stand by that assessment. This third book of Button Man is due for a collected edition in June. Entitled "Killer Killer," there's a listing on Amazon, although it was not solicited by Diamond in their April catalog. The Sinister Dexter story should find a new home in the forthcoming collection "Magic Bullets," due in the autumn. The Dredd and Tor Cyan stories have not been collected.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Ramone took his fourth bullet in the previous prog's third episode of "The Man in the Ion Mask." It was a hit to the right shoulder. Finnigan still has a commanding lead with ten confirmed hits.

In other news, while Rebellion tends to focus on releasing collections from more recent properties or big name characters, every so often they do head back to the comic's early days and surprise everybody with a great book full of thrillpower from the past. Such is the case with this new edition of The VCs. This is the original run of 32 episodes from 1979-1980. Most of the installments are written by Gerry Finley-Day, with a couple of fill-ins by Steve MacManus. The art is principally by Cam Kennedy, who contributed the cover, and Garry Leach. Mike McMahon drew the first episode and John Richardson the last five, but everything between them is by Kennedy or Leach. Probably nobody finds that as interesting as I do.

Anyway, The VCs is a pretty standard war story, just dressed up with aliens and spaceships in it. There's the green rookie, disliked by his new crew, and ugly enemies you can neither understand nor sympathize with, and trapped-behind-enemy-lines stories, and callous officers who probably interact with our heroes more than any other company in the military. That's not to say it's at all bad, but I reread this while continuing a once-a-week reread of Battle Picture Weekly produced during the same 1979-80 period and darned if this series couldn't have been flawlessly slotted into that comic. If you enjoy this style of comic storytelling, then The VCs will certainly please you, even if it's only rarely eye-opening.

Actually, I should probably qualify that: if you're coming to this from an American background, there's a lot more to this than simply "another war comic." I grew up reading DC's Sgt. Rock and The Haunted Tank, and later Marvel's G.I. Joe, with their casts of unkillable regular characters. Compared to these, British war comics are a complete revelation, with surprising fatalities among the cast. Any new reader coming to this collection will probably be pretty surprised by this story as it progresses.

There were 32 episodes of The VCs, but this is a pretty slim book, since the episodes were an unusually short 3-4 pages a week. It runs a little light on extras, since there were so few from the period. The strip was spotlighted on 2000 AD's cover only once, and there was a single star scan of the lead cast a few weeks after it finished, and those are included, but there are no other contributions from the period from any of the creators. In lieu of blank pages filling up too much of the back, the first episode of Finley-Day's better-known future war series, Rogue Trooper is included, but honestly, I'm hard pressed to imagine anybody buying this collection who hasn't already read the first Rogue episode plenty of times already. That's not to say that I don't think potential readers are out there, and I hope you'll give it a read, just that I'm not really sure this was the best use of the pages in the back when a new interview would have been very nice.

Next time, Button Man makes everybody in the audience wince, and D'Israeli shocks the future. See you in seven!

84. The Commonwealth That Wasn't Secret Enough

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 2000: Sinister Dexter are on the cover of prog 1190. It's a very silly piece by Greg Staples which uses word balloons for just about the first time in living memory. The story inside is part two of "Mission to Mangapore" by Dan Abnett and Andy Clarke, and it continues the long investigation into the criminals that were behind the carnage of the epic "Eurocrash" storyline which appeared about a year previously, and reintroduces Finnigan's estranged wife Carrie Hosanna as being in the employ of the series' latest underworld kingpin. Sinister Dexter has a long history of playing with puns and stereotypes in its multi-ethnic, European cast, and this is the first time it's really played with Japanese stereotypes. It hits the expected targets, including yakuza and ninjas and rock gardens and five-mile-high buildings and a liquid metal Terminator II-type robot killer which chooses to hang out in the shape of a big-eyed schoolgirl, but it's all a bit predictable and dry, really. Clarke has a really hard time adjusting his style, which is gorgeously realistic and natural, to accomodate Polly, who's supposed to be some sort of generic "anime" stereotype. She looks deeply out of place. My feeling at the time, and it's echoed as I reread it, is that Ray and Finny aren't enough out of their element, that Abnett didn't make Mangapore as bizarre as it could have been. Obviously the island-city has that name for comedy identification reasons, but "manga" doesn't mean "just another Japanese thing" to me, it means "comics." It's a shame that this world wasn't populated by a culture as obsessed with comics as Downlode is by hitmen and kingpins. Maybe it's just me, but while "Mission to Mangapore" isn't a bad story, it's really just any other Sin Dex adventure, albeit one with ninjas in it. File them off and the story could've been set in Downlode.

On the other hand, the current adventure of Pat Mills' Slaine is utterly unlike any other Slaine adventure previously published, because it is jawdroppingly awful. No kidding, friends, this is the one that nobody can stand.

The story is called "The Secret Commonwealth," and it is four months of eyekicking artwork burying what might have been an interesting plot somewhere. It earned the instant derision of fandom when it first appeared, and my kids immediately cried foul when they saw it. David Bircham is the art droid responsible for this mess, and I have previously said an unkind thing or two about his artwork in previous installments of Thrillpowered Thursday.



I think what amazes me most about "Commonwealth" is that the style Bircham uses here is a quantum leap backwards for him. No, I did not like his work in Vector 13 or that chunk towards the end of "The Hunting Party" storyline in Judge Dredd or the Sin Dex adventure "Smoke and Mirrors," but apart from some obvious problems in pacing and how the characters on the page relate to each other, I would say that those were still evidence of a skilled professional using a style that I simply didn't enjoy looking at. "Commonwealth," with its bargain-basement heavy metal airbrush appearance, looks like it predates those stories by years.

What really strikes me is that "Smoke and Mirrors" at least evoked its island setting with a consistent use of greens and browns in the pallets, and full backgrounds of trees and local color. "Secret Commonwealth," as befits something that looks like the night security guard was doodling in between six-hour recreations of Iron Maiden's "Eddie" in a Crimean War uniform, mostly doesn't have backgrounds at all, just vast expanses of white separating the characters. Seventeen weeks of this was enough to sour the readership on Slaine for ages, and once this turkey ends in prog 1199, it would be the last we'd see of the character for two and a half years.

Lest my negativity bring you down too much, the other three stories in this prog were good. John Smith and Simon Davis teamed up for a Judge Dredd episode, Nikolai Dante concluded the magnificent "The Rudinshtein Irregulars," and there was a fun one-off by Andrew Ness and Siku called "Space Dust." Ness was a regular on alt.comics.2000ad and everybody had high hopes for him landing a series commission, but this has proved to be his only 2000 AD work so far. Haven't seen Andrew around the message boards and forums in some time; I hope he's doing well.



In other news, Rebellion has continued its series of Strontium Dog collections with The Kreeler Conspiracy. This follows up the five-volume "Search/Destroy Agency Files" which reprinted the entirety of the original run of the series. This book, unnumbered on its spine, reprints three of the first four adventures from the revived series. It starts with the titular "Kreeler Conspiracy" (mentioned here in Thrillpowered Thursday a couple of weeks ago) and also includes the very fun serials "Roadhouse" and "The Tax Dodge." Lost in the shuffle, sadly, is the one-off adventure "The Sad Case," which originally appeared in "Prog 2001," and was presumably left behind for space reasons, and which we hope to see in a future collection.

Despite that story's absence, the book's a fun, meaty little exercise in plotting, as Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer face challenges that require them to use their wits more than their firepower. "The Tax Dodge" is especially fun, as the bounty hunting duo are faced with a representative of customs and excise on one side, and a very amusing alien race on the other. These guys, easily-offended, overcompensating loudmouths with quick tempers, are among the funniest alien species to ever appear in 2000 AD. All three stories are by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, and this book is very highly recommended!

Next week, since the Megazine entered the 2000s with another format change, I'll be looking at that. Also, Dredd gets high on drugs.

79. Downlode Downtime

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.

As 1999 comes to an end, and all the big epic storylines from the last several weeks start wrapping things up, I see that I have been a little lax in mentioning the big developments in the two better-known semi-regular series from the period. I've mentioned in passing that there's a terrific epic going on in the pages of Nikolai Dante but haven't paused to let you know what it was. As of November 1999 (prog 1170, represented here by this funny Jason Brashill Devlin Waugh cover), our hero is about two-thirds of the way through the epic "Courtship of Jena Makarov" story. This brilliant story represents the close of the first of Dante's four storytelling phases, and was reprinted by Rebellion in the third Dante collection. Here, the mighty houses of Romanov and Makarov finally find an excuse to go to all-out war with each other, as Jena is abducted by a third party. Her supposed suitor Mikhail Deriabin plans to manouver himself into a position of power alongside whichever house wins the war. That it will decimate Russia is irrelevant to anybody involved; it never matters to the people with power. Not even family matters to them.

For fans of the series, the heartbreaking way that things play out really elevate this storyline into something both special and compelling. It features Simon Fraser's best art yet, and several of the Romanovs get screen time. But what really makes this story so memorable is that while Dante races desperately against time to rescue Jena before the empires start their war, writer Robbie Morrison has been putting all the pieces in play to make sure that it's going to happen regardless of whether Dante comes through. Most tragically, the spy that Dante and Konstantin conscripted some months previously does her part, and, in a heartbreakingly grisly cliffhanger ending to this week's episode, Konstantin shows up to murder Jena's sister.



Meanwhile, Downlode Tales, the follow-up to Sinister Dexter in which the protagonists have been working opposite sides of the law to track down the conspiracy which brought an end to Demi Octavo's empire, wrapped up in prog 1168 after the better part of five months. It's been quite a bloodbath, but the villain Telemachus Gore has been ferreted out, exposed and killed. The body count includes about half of the supporting cast: Nervous Rex, Steampunk Willy and Agent Bunkum are all dead, along with pretty much all the "Ass Kickers" and the "Whack Pack" assembled for the job.

The last part of Downlode Tales sees the duo in the hospital, having crashed a helicopter while hunting down Gore. It's less of a grand finale than a "what next" moment, and they'll be returning under the Sinister Dexter title in a few weeks.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Adding to their previous totals, Finnigan and Ramone each take one more confirmed hit storming Gore's headquarters. This gives us a total of 10 for Sinister and three for Dexter.

That's really all I have time to discuss today, but please enjoy the following gorgeous picture of Nemesis from the Pat Mills-Henry Flint storyline which I discussed last week, and also this review of a new graphic novel.

---

I'm a firm fan of the "satisfying chunk" school of bookshelf collections. I'll take a slight downtick in paper quality if it means more bang for my buck. And that is certainly the case with the recent Ace Trucking Company collection. Rebellion's great big trade, the first of two, covers a whopping sixty episodes of the early '80s comedy series, plus a text story from an old annual.

Almost all of Ace Trucking was drawn by the late Massimo Belardinelli, and I think it's his finest work. Completely full of bizarre aliens, mechanical marvels and weird landscapes, he always found new ways to pace the action by way of strange angles and dramatic positioning of his characters. And they're a downright weird bunch, too. The grapevine says that the editorial team was rarely satisfied with Belardinelli's ability to draw tough guys at the time, so John Wagner and Alan Grant developed a strip with exactly one human being in it, and he was one of the loudmouthed bad guys. The hero was an absurdly skinny alien with a pointy head and enormous feet, and the supporting cast included an eight-foot tall dude with blank eyes and a mane of hair, and a half-naked midget with a skull for a head. Constantly screaming at each other in a parody of the palare used by CB radio nuts, it was one hairbrained get-rich-quick scheme after another for years, until the series was finally felt to have run its course in 1986.

Time's been kind to Ace Trucking. It's clearly a period piece - anything with "Breaker, breaker!" in a word balloon will be - but its comedy is timeless thanks to the likeable characters and escalating disasters of its situations. Belardinelli's work would eventually lose a little luster and he'd fall out of favor with subsequent editors, so it's likely you might not have seen very much of it before now. Also, his work, like Jesus Redondo's and Carlos Ezquerra's, was not favored by the editors at Titan Books, who originally compiled much of the 2000 AD reprints in the 1980s, and in many ways set the stage for what had been considered "classic" or not. Many of these episodes are only now seeing their first reprint, and it's great to see so much of this lovely art under one set of covers. This comes highly recommended, and I hope you check it out.

Next week, it's Prog 2000! Tharg promises the best issue yet - can he deliver?

(Originally posted 12/18/08 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

73. Time-sensitive entry

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'm afraid work caught me at a bad time this week. I would have composed an entry yesterday, but my job sent me on a site visit (at last!) to Riverdale all day yesterday, and I didn't get time to, and now I'm behind on my desk duties. For those following along, I did want to note that this prog's cover reveals the new direction for Sinister Dexter. In the wake of "Eurocrash," the title of the series is changed to Downlode Tales as the former partners work opposite sides of the law to find out who was responsible for the incidents of that epic, and the death of their friend. So Finnigan Sinister begins assembling a cadre of like-minded criminals and gun hands, but Ramone Dexter turns himself in and is commissioned to work as an advisor to a new police initiative to combat organized crime, hoping they can find whoever had the resources to pull off that event.

Next week, evil rears its beastly head! I will definitely find more time to write about the spectacular return of Devlin Waugh...

(Originally posted October 30, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

71. Eurocrash

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 1999: Prog 1138 marks the third and final time that the entire comic was given over to a single episode from one of 2000 AD's series, which doesn't do you much good if you're not a fan of the feature. In early 1998, there was an all-Judge Dredd issue, followed by prog 1100's feature-length episode of Slaine, and now episode twelve of the Sinister Dexter epic "Eurocrash."

I realize that very few of my readers are interested in this sort of trivia, but from the production / editorial side, "Eurocrash" is a very odd storyline. Had it run one five-page episode a week, then it could have been a 17-part epic, but it was apparently decided early on to compact its climactic episodes into one mammoth-sized part, like an omnibus edition, instead. I don't know that it is a tactic that should be employed ever again, but the sequence of spiralling, escalating drama that has fueled "Eurocrash" for the last three months deserves an epic climax which this issue provides. Dan Abnett and Simon Davis don't disappoint; it's a terrific story with more than one shocking moment in this issue.

"Eurocrash" begins with the confirmation that Downlode's queenpin, Demi Octavo, does not have as firm a power base as she had suspected. Her decisions have led the criminal underworld to mistrust her enough to begin consolidating power against her. Add to this the revelation that one of the city's principal sources for black market weapons has a mole in his office allowing long-illegal neural control units into play, and a confrontation with several gun sharks at the formerly neutral territory of their favorite diner, and the sprawling city has become a powder keg.

When it ends, it really does feel like the grand finale. There's an argument to be made - I've made it - that Sinister Dexter should have concluded here. Of course, there are still some fantastic moments to come down the line. "I Say Hello," which surely must be the best episode of the series, is about three years after this episode. And then there's "...and death shall have no dumb minions," which features at least two of the most heartbreaking scenes of the whole series, and that was just a couple of years ago, I think.



But there's also a lot of padding and failed humor to come. And had "Eurocrash" been the series finale, it would probably be better remembered, and its reputation would not have been tarnished by what will be shown to not work very well.

When DC and Rebellion had that ill-fated alliance three-and-a-bit years back, they released three collections of Sinister Dexter, right up to the point before "Eurocrash," leading fans to suspect Rebellion would soon continue with a fourth book compiling this story. Well, they took their time, but "Eurocrash" is finally on the schedule for March of next year. The book is tentatively listed as 160 pages, but I'm not sure how much additional material that will contain. Prog 1139's conclusion to "Eurocrash" (part 13) appeared to be the final episode of the series, with the protagonists going their separate ways into another series, Downlode Tales, that deals with this epic's aftermath, before reuniting in December '99. I imagine that at least a good chunk of Downlode Tales will make it into the book, but I don't know that 160 pages will be enough to cover it all.

Next time, we'll pop back to the Megazine for the first time in a while, to see how these Dredd subplots have been shaping up, and to see whether I can tie Thrillpowered Thursday into Reprint This! successfully...

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Finnigan gets his ninth hit of the series in this prog, a bullet to the left shoulder. It doesn't slow him down much, but there's a lot of blood.

See you in seven days!

(Originally posted Oct. 16 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

70. Tour of Books

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.

February 1999: Prog 1032 has a pretty lovely cover by Greg Staples announcing the new Anderson: Psi Division six-parter, even if it's interrupted by a Babylon 5 promotion with some postcards from that year's TV movie. Staples is not the artist for the new story; in fact, I don't believe that he's ever drawn Anderson other than on this cover. It is instead handled by Anderson's semi-regular artist Steve Sampson. It's not quite his swan song, as a one-shot called "Semper Vi" will appear in the spring, and then Anderson will take a lengthy break from the comic. I don't believe that Sampson has worked for 2000 AD since. (It's a little difficult to check, as Sampson does not have a Wikipedia page, although a fellow by the same name who used to coach the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club does...)

Judge Anderson is, sadly, quite poorly represented in graphic novel form. In the 1980s, Titan did a decent enough job by the standards they'd set for themselves. 64-page collections were pretty common then, and the annual 12-parters that ran in the summers of 1985, 1986 and 1987 were well-suited to that format. But as her series began more sporadic appearances, with one-offs, three-parters or longer adventures, drawn by a variety of artists, the collected editions really fell behind. There was a one-off Dredd in 1988 called "Night of the Brainstem Man," by Alan Grant and Barry Kitson which did not feature Anderson but which served as a prologue to Anderson's 1989 storyline "Helios," which cries out for a reprint, as does "Leviathan's Farewell," a critical one-shot which appeared in the 1989 Sci-Fi Special and whose ramifications are felt in a number of subsequent Anderson adventures.

But as Hamlyn got the rights to 2000 AD material in the 1990s, they released some trades which, haphazardly, just collected work by a single artist, so there's a Kevin Walker Childhood's End book and an Arthur Ranson Satan book, but not a compilation of "Postcards from the Edge," the interesting, episodic adventure with six or seven different artists.

And sadly, Rebellion seems to be following suit. While their graphic novel line is pretty amazing overall, as I will mention in just a moment, their first Anderson collection, Shamballa, is another assortment of Ranson episodes. It's more comprehensive than Hamlyn's Satan was, but it skips so many episodes that it doesn't seem like it could possibly read well, although admittedly I have not picked up my copy. I confess to being annoyed just enough that when four 2000 AD books were in my shop's box last visit and I only had enough cash for three, Shamballa was runt enough to warrant staying behind. It sure looks pretty, at least.



On the other hand, Rebellion's other lines mostly get it emphatically right. I started reading the seventh Nikolai Dante book last week and it's tremendous fun from start to finish. Rebellion have collected all the episodes, in order, and periodically found room for a little supplemental word or two from the creators or their sketchbooks. Plus, of course, the books are printed on gorgeous paper with very nice matte glossy covers and look fantastic. The image here is from the "Tour of Duty" serial, reprinted in the second Dante collection, The Great Game. "Duty" is the fourth of five short serials, written, as always, by Robbie Morrison, in which Nikolai is teamed with one of his half-brothers and sisters on some mission for the Romanovs. Simon Fraser handles art chores on the stories with Andreas and Lulu and Charlie Adlard illustrates the stories with Nastasia and Konstantin. Andy Clarke drew the first one, featuring Viktor.

"Tour of Duty," the adventure with Konstantin, is quite interesting from a production standpoint, as it is actually three separate stories run as a three-part adventure. Actually, I suppose I could get amazingly trainspotterish and tell you that the second Konstantin story was intended as a two-parter - that's the original cliffhanger above - but it was decided to run both parts so that each story would appear as a single chapter, but I think that level of trainspotter detail just makes my readers' eyes roll, so perhaps I shouldn't. Oh, too late.

Anyway, apart from Anderson and Dante, the prog also includes the concluding episode of the Judge Dredd eight-parter "The Scorpion Dance" by John Wagner and John Burns, and the continuing Sinister Dexter epic "Eurocrash" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis...



...about which, more next week.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Speaking of whom, our heroes each take a couple of wounds in parts three and four of this story. They're both very minor and almost instantly recovered from, but that still makes eight confirmed hits on Finnigan and two on Ramone.

See you in seven days!

(Originally posted October 9, 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

66. The Swan Children and the Holiday in Barakuda

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.

October 1998: Meanwhile, as Die Laughing appears to some small success at British newsagents and shops, the prog has been featuring some pretty worthwhile material which has aged much better than the Batman crossover. Judge Dredd has had a solid run of good stories by John Wagner, the most memorable of which is possibly "There's Something About Four Marys," a parody of a long-running series from the pages of the old girls' comic Bunty. In prog 1117, there's the start of a new story called "Virtual Soldier" with art by Rafael Garres. Nikolai Dante and Sinister Dexter have been reliably solid for several weeks, and Slaine has really been surprising, with Pat Mills pulling off one of his finest moments yet with "The Swan Children," an adaptation of the Irish legend of the Children of Lir, which concluded a couple of weeks previously.

I think one of the reasons we readers are hard on Pat Mills for the work he did in the 1990s is that while little of it is demonstrably poor, or anywhere near the low standards set by certain other publishers, it's that the Guv'nor's highs are just so great that when he's treading water, it's visibly dispiriting. Subpar Slaine is worth any number of other comics, but most of his work in this period was nevertheless mediocre by comparison, cursed to linger in the shadow of superior work from the 1980s. So when a fantastic, well-told tale like "The Swan Children" comes about, it's easy to overlook. There is a scene in which the scheming Aoife lies to Slaine and tells him, in turn, that each of his four adopted children have drowned. This is absolutely one of the most heartbreaking things in comics, spectacularly well-paced by the artist Siku, and a genuine high point in the series' long history. If you, dear reader, are among those who've overlooked "The Swan Children," then you have some back progs which need revisiting.



Anyway, prog 1117 sees the final installment of Vector 13, the conspiracy-minded anthology series that looked into fortean events throughout human history. This time, Lee Marks and Cliff Robinson contribute "Divine Fury," a five-page look at the slightly familiar subject of Adolf Hitler getting his hands on occult or alien technology and it failing to win the war for him. With this, the Men in Black are finally retired, never to trouble the readers again. In their place will come a few more episodes of the Pulp Sci-Fi series of one-shots with twist endings. This prog also features Sancho Panzer by Dan Abnett and Henry Flint, about which more next week, and, sadly, it also includes the first part of an especially dire Sinister Dexter serial.

Now, I've been very fair to Sinister Dexter here at Thrillpowered Thursday, mostly because I really liked it for a good while. Speaking from the benefit of having read the whole run, I suggest that it's had flashes of excellence since "Eurocrash," a great big climactic event in the series. "Eurocrash" will appear in '99, so it's just around the corner for our heroes at this point. However, despite the periodic post-"Eurocrash" stunners in the strip, as the recent eleven-week run (progs 1589-1599) demonstrated, it is well past the sell-by date and needs to be retired very badly. "Smoke and Mirrors," a six-part story by Abnett and David Bircham, is where the rot sets in. There had been one or two misfires in the series up to this point, usually artistic ones, but this was the first time that Abnett looked like he was running out of material.



I'm always leery of calling artists out for what I perceive to be poor work, because so much of it is so subjective. Technically, these are not bad illustrations, and the work is certainly better than the Judge Dredd episodes that Bircham contributed in 1997, and overwhelmingly superior to the Slaine serial he'd paint in 2000, but I still find it lacking. His figures look creepy to me, with enough flesh on the face to make their skin sag, and with awkward, inhuman posing. But while that's an "eye of the beholder" complaint, his pacing and storytelling skills are simply not of professional quality. There is no sense of place on any of his pages, no understanding of how any of the characters relate to each other and their surroundings, and no flow from panel to panel. Comics should be far more than a series of random illustrations in frames.

"Smoke and Mirrors" is a colossal failure from start to finish. It has not yet been reprinted, although it is possible that may appear in a Sinister Dexter book that is planned for March 2009. In fact, nothing from this prog has yet been reprinted, although Dredd, Slaine and Sancho Panzer are certainly entertaining enough to see the light of day again.

Next time, more about this Sancho Panzer character. See you then!

(Originally posted Sept. 11 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

64. Durham a la Drucker

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.

Prog 1111: The real world's kind of uncooperative and awful this week, so I don't have time for much of an entry. This issue is a very neat little double-sized one-off, with four ten-page episodes of the recurring strips Judge Dredd, Slaine, Sinister Dexter, all of which will be back with their regular-length stories in the next issue, and Durham Red, which is between series. Durham gets the cover, in this fantastically sexy portrait by Mark Harrison. There's a lot to like about this cover, even beyond the admittedly not inconsiderable "hot babe with cleavage" factor. Even the most casual readers have certainly noticed that 2000 AD covers are typically full of text. During this period, it was typed in a genuinely awful font, and hemmed in the artwork far too much, an unfortunate legacy, perhaps, from the higher-ups at Fleetway who were letting focus groups tell them that you needed lots of words on the cover to sell a magazine. Here is a far-too rare example of just letting the art do all the work. The result is magnificently sexy and inviting, a simply flawless cover.



The other real standout point about this cover: Durham's cheekbones, which immediately betray a huge influence from MAD's Mort Drucker. Harrison has never made a secret of his inspiration, and a few years later, he'd get to do an entire out-of-continuity Durham episode in Drucker's style, a simply perfect little story which I look forward to reading again.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Finnegan increases his lead over his partner in this week's episode, "Death is a Lonely Donegan." Here, he suffers hallucinations of the afterlife while in the hospital recovering from bullets four, five, six and seven to the chest. Ramone still only has one confirmed hit, from back in part two of "The Eleventh Commandment."

Next week, assuming things get back to normal, it's deadline hell for Dredd and the Darknight Detective in "Die Laughing."

(Originally posted August 28 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

63. Clowning Around

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.

You'd never know it from Marc Wigmore's completely inappropriate artwork (below), but this issue of 2000 AD features the most harrowing, intense and ugly of all the Sinister Dexter stories. Like Wagner and his fellow writers do with Dredd, Dan Abnett uses Sinister Dexter's very flexible format to tell stories in a variety of styles, from melodrama to comedy, and the editors who've been in charge of the series almost always match just the right artist to the strip. Prog 1105 features the third episode of a remarkably bleak story called "Slay Per View," in which Ramone Dexter is suffering horrible nightmares where he is stalking and murdering women, who are found dead the next day at the hands of a serial killer. Convinced that he is acting out these murders while asleep, Dex elects to kill himself, and the second episode ends with a breathtaking cliffhanger: Dex putting a revolver in his mouth.

I'd like to think that I'm pretty good about monitoring the Hipster Kids' reading and making sure that they don't read age-inappropriate strips. As far as I can tell, they even follow my directions, which is really impressive. I guess they figure that if I'm letting them look at occasional over-the-top violence and periodic bare boobs in 2000 AD strips, then when I tell them to skip Preacher or the "Russia's Greatest Love Machine" episode of Nikolai Dante, then I'm pretty serious about the mature content. So I spoke to my son (age eleven) beforehand, and made sure he knew that this was an intense and mean episode. I told him that he could read it if he wanted, but he might want to skip it. He soldiered on. His nine year-old sister, on the other hand, didn't get the option. The script itself was bleak and ugly enough, but that cliffhanger image was something I did not want her to see.

Speaking personally, the only really objectionable thing about this story was Marc Wigmore's art. What the heck happened? Wigmore had illustrated several episodes of Judge Hershey for the Megazine, and while he was never one of my favorites, he had a unique style, marked by thin, angular characters and very stark use of negative space. Wigmore drew the first three episodes of "Slay Per View" before Julian Gibson arrived to tackle the last two, and the art is just hideous, packed with wonky anatomy, way too much black ink, confusing storytelling and... well, while Sinister's "pale/drunk" look often had him looking a little like a clown, he rarely looked quite so much like Ronald McDonald as he does in these pages.



The rest of the prog is very good. Slaine is back for a new series of adventures set a little earlier in the character's life. For the last several years, the saga was telling stories from after his seven year reign as High King of Ireland, with a dismissal from Ukko that nothing very interesting had happened during that period. Evidently, Pat Mills had a change of heart and has been scripting a few new stories set during this time along with co-writer Deborah Gallagher. "Kai" is a four-parter illustrated by Paul Staples. The second book of Mazeworld by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson continues as well, although the high points are certainly still Dredd and Dante.

As I mentioned last week, Morrison and Fraser's "The Great Game" is a genuinely spectacular story, with our hero taking a battering from a high-stakes plot on one side, family secrets on the other, and the emotional bodyblow of his own past on the other. I can't say enough good things about "The Great Game," because stories like this are why I read comics.

.

"Slay Per View" has been collected along with several other, better, episodes in the third Sinister Dexter book, and "The Great Game" is in the second Nikolai Dante book.

Next time, four stories about death.

(Originally posted August 21 2008 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)

60. Lady in Black

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 1998: Well, normally I like to make these entries a little meaty, but I suppose I'm still recovering from the twin duds of the low-thrilled spring '08 lineup (only the first issue of the far better summer lineup has arrived in the US) and the disappointment of some of the more recent collections going missing again, and not arriving at my local shop. So while I'm rereading a pretty good period from ten years ago, and enjoying it a great deal, there's a certain spark missing. It's a good lineup, with Judge Dredd by John Wagner, Alex Ronald and Gary Caldwell, Slaine by Pat Mills and Steve Tappin, Missionary Man by Gordon Rennie and Simon Davis, and finally Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Greg Staples - every strip a winner.

The Dredd story sees the second appearance of the Euthanasia Killer, Oola Blint. This serial killing "lady in black," under the guise of doing the Lord's work, goes door-to-door offering the personal touch as she sees citizens into the next life. Oola's husband Homer is a Justice Department auxiliary who spends evenings working as a licensed peeping tom looking at neighboring city blocks. In this story, Homer learns Oola's awful secret.

I can't claim to be a huge fan of Alex Ronald's artwork, but it is still quite good. I like the way he draws people to look very ordinary, with most of the civilian characters packing a few extra pounds they could stand to exercise off. What I like most of all about this story is that Wagner continues to script his best villains as being very intelligent, and able to work around the realities of the constant surveillance of Mega-City One and the always observant detectives in the judge system. Of course, some blind luck comes into it as well, but as Homer and Oola Blint make more appearances over the next few years, it is always done very believably.



Probably the biggest news from this prog is the first 2000 AD appearance of Missionary Man, who has been moved to the weekly since Preacher took up residence at the Megazine and squeezed everybody else out of town. Alex Ronald's going to handle the story that begins in the next episode. The one-off in this issue is designed to introduce the character to the weekly's audience. Simon Davis painted it, and it looks wonderful. Greg Staples' art on "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is also fantastic. This is a four-part story compacted into two issues and introduces Finnigan's estranged wife, Carrie Hosanna, who will make a couple more appearances a few years down the road.



Only the Sinister Dexter story has been reprinted at this time, in the book Slay Per View. I'm optimistic that we'll see Missionary Man collected some time in 2009 (see my Reprint This! feature on it here), but that's just speculation.

At any rate, I'm continuing a little vacation from this while my kids are in Louisville, Kentucky with their mom. Thrillpowered Thursday will resume in August with the debut of Pulp Sci-Fi. See you then!