54. No sex please, we're squaxx dek Thargo

Oh, you thought last week was weird. November 1997 brings us to one of 2000 AD's most absolutely skewed moments of oddness. It's the Sex Prog, number 1066, and there on the cover, you've got Wide Open Space, looking nothing whatsoever like Jason Brashill's model of the character, enticing readers in with her enormous boobs. The comic was released in a sealed polybag, with a "Not for Sale to Children" notice on the cover. Now, over the previous twenty years, 2000 AD had been slowly maturing along with an audience that it was holding onto far longer than any publishers' wisdom would have predicted, but at its core, shouldn't this be a title which kids can read? What about my kids? Am I going to let them read it? What are we to make of this development, and how saucy and inappropriate is this prog, anyway?

Well, first in the lineup is Judge Dredd by John Wagner and Greg Staples. This might be the first episode to admit that in Mega-City One, citizens who don't want to bother with human relationships can purchase a humanoid robot called a Love Doll. These droid partners would turn up as plot elements in later storylines, and here they're shown to be every bit a target for theft as either flatscreen TVs or cars are today. The artwork is not explicit, although topless dolls - robots that look like humanoid girls - are shown in three panels. I figured this would be okay for my kids to read. I'm not going to freak out about exposed nipples in a comic, and "In the future, people can have robot boyfriends and girlfriends" is something they can understand without too much issue.

Next up is an episode of Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Siku, who joins the rotation of artists working on this series as it becomes the second regular feature, behind Dredd. (More on this development in two weeks.) The plot of this episode involves four members of the cast spending their evening looking not to spend it alone. The twist is that it's Demi Octavo who's actually planning to spend it with gunplay, while Sinister and Dexter each spend it looking for some amour. There's nothing objectionable about the artwork, apart from Siku making everyone appear to be garishly-colored rocklike polygons, and I judged this one to also be suitable for kids. Oddly, though, this story was among six or seven which were omitted from the three DC/Rebellion reprints of early Sin Dex stories. So far, with only three panels of topless robots in two episodes of story, anybody who bought this issue looking for something akin to the latest Heavy Metal was going to be deeply disappointed.

Third in the lineup is the fourth episode of A Life Less Ordinary, and it doesn't play along with the Sex Prog raison d'etre at all. The only notable thing about this episode is how unbelievably sloppy the storytelling by the otherwise reliable Steve Yeowell is. The opening panels, in which Robert learns that the "bomb" in a car's trunk is actually a bag of carrots, are very poor, but the experience is just surreal, like some odd comic adaptation of a weird dream. The really offensive bit of this strip is this: the only thing I remember about A Life Less Ordinary, which I saw at the Beechwood Cinema in Athens around this time, is the scene where Ewan MacGregor and Cameron Diaz engage in some show-stopping karaoke. That's not in the comic. The build-up to the scene is there, and then Robert wakes up with a hangover.

So 60% of the prog is child-friendly. But then we hit the final episode of Tomlinson and Brashill's Space Girls and everything falls apart. Now, I'm an understanding guy, and I can see that nine year-old girls probably were not Fleetway and editor David Bishop's target audience, but what the hell was anybody thinking here? See, grown-ups can constructively read a strip like Space Girls, understand that it does not work for many and varied reasons, accept that it was just a five-week thing to get little sidebar writeups in newspapers, and move on. But nine year-old girls are not constructive and not critical. The Hipster Daughter was enjoying this strip, even if nobody else on the planet was, and then her old man cruelly yanked the ending away from her. Now, there isn't anything in the visuals that's offensive, thanks to Brashill's discretion and self-censorship, but the "story" is about the girls, who are all clones, watching an advertising video made by the corpulent, grotesque caricature which designed them, suggesting ways in which the clones can be used for personal gratification. Look, this isn't serious stuff, and it's played for laughs, but it bombs completely, and it's not suitable material for the only person on the planet who was enjoying the strip. You remember how a few weeks ago, we were talking about the "2000 AD: It's Not for Girls" ad campaign? Well, no kidding.

Now, you're probably thinking that with two dud strips, a Sin Dex with awful art and a pretty good Dredd, this is probably a prog that can be safely labelled a failure. However, Tharg saved the best for last as Nikolai Dante returns in the prog's fifth and last slot.



Since his first appearance earlier in 1997, the Russian rogue became a big hit and his return was never in doubt. The second batch of episodes, by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser is due to begin in the next issue, but this one-off, with art by Chris Weston, comes to bat first. I got the impression that it was commissioned especially for the Sex Prog, since all there is to it is a single night's shenanigans between Dante and a bearded nun. Yeah, you read that right. She belongs to an order called the Devil's Martyrs and is "fanatically devoted" to the mad monk, Rasputin.

At his blog, Chris Weston featured an interview from 2006 which David Bishop conducted for Thrill-Power Overload. There, he states that after self-censoring the artwork down to just tits and ass, "much to my surprise, my strip turned out to be the filthiest one in the Prog." Indeed, visually, it was still a whole lot more explicit than anything else in the issue, and might have warranted the plastic bag, but it was also a heck of a lot tamer than what was published in the old Penthouse Comix, for instance.

Well, regardless of whether it was too explicit for kids or not explicit enough to justify the wrapper, the episode is a riot, and a simply great return for the character. It's also the only episode in the book to have been reprinted properly, in the first of the DC/Rebellion editions, although the Dredd episode later reappeared in an issue of the Megazine a year or so back.

So that's the Sex Prog: a curiosity more for raising eyebrows than anything else. But next week, we'll see whether politics can't cause the outrage that sex couldn't.

(Originally published 5/22/08 at LiveJournal.)

53. Girls Less Ordinary

In October 1997, two of the most unusual of all 2000 AD series debuted. They would both be finished before the end of the year, never to be reprinted and never to be seen again. They're called The Space Girls and A Life Less Ordinary, and they're both pretty darn lousy. This is a shame, because prog 1063 does contain some very good material. There's the first part of a fantastic Judge Dredd comedy called "Mrs. Gunderson's Little Adventure" by John Wagner and Henry Flint which is probably better than any comic you've read in the last week, a good Sinister Dexter one-off by Dan Abnett and Julian Gibson, and a really creepy little Vector 13 by Abnett and Alex Ronald. So 60% of the comic's pretty great.

The UK had some pretty big pop culture exports in 1996-97. The Spice Girls released a series of hit singles, and Trainspotting, a film by the team of Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald, became one of the biggest and most imitated British movies in recent memory. The trio's next project, an odd fantasy about an heiress and her kidnapper falling in love thanks to the machinations of a pair of angels, was predicted to become another big hit. So the marketing people at Fleetway were already talking with editor David Bishop about finding some ways for 2000 AD to get some more publicity from the mainstream media when Channel Four Films asked for a meeting about a comic adaptation of A Life Less Ordinary. It's a little unfortunate that the scheduling worked out the way it did, because it meant that the eight-part comic version, which preceded the film's release by about three weeks, would run at the same time as the similarly market-led Space Girls.

That Space Girls isn't any good is no surprise, but what is odd is how utterly empty the story is. The strip was only going to run for five weeks, but the closest thing to a parody in the strip comes in the characters' wacky nicknames (such as Hyper Space and Wide Open Space). Otherwise, it's a very dull and boring affair which focusses on the villains instead of the heroines, who have nothing whatsoever to do with the world of pop music or media manipulation, two subjects which might have made the strip at least briefly memorable. The artist, Jason Brashill, had been painting episodes of Judge Dredd and Outlaw over the last couple of years. Here, he uses traditional pen and ink and the result is nowhere near as vibrant as what he'd done before. Since I often feel the reverse is true with 2000 AD artists (I believe that Clint Langley and Simon Bisley, for instance, did much better work in the 1980s and 1990s with pen and ink than paint), this may be seen as evidence of just how utterly backwards everything in Space Girls is.



I'll continue on that note next week, because there's "backwards" and then there's "upside down in the wrong dimension," which is how the Space Girls story will conclude.

John Tomlinson is listed as the writer of the series, and on the official site, David Bishop is listed as the uncredited co-writer of the first episode of Space Girls. Bishop is also listed as the writer of the Life Less Ordinary adaptation, but is not credited in the comic with it, either. Now here's a thankless job. You can't completely hold this dull, drab comic against him. Bishop had to assemble a comic script from an early shooting treatment of the movie in virtually no time at all, and then Steve Yeowell had to put the artwork together with inadequate reference of actors, costumes, locations, you name it. Turning it into a 48-page story would have been difficult enough, but with a cliffhanger every six pages?

In fact, it's been so long since I saw the film that I've forgotten practically all of its details. Without them, reading the first episode was a real chore, wading through choppy events with poor transition and even worse storytelling. It's a really bizarre experience, because neither Bishop nor Yeowell were novices when they put this strip together, and yet it feels like the disjointed work of people who'd never worked in comics and were still learning the rules. A little clue: the introductory text page with the photo of Cameron Diaz should not have been required reading to follow the comic. On that note, Steve Yeowell is a wonderful artist, and responsible for many classic thrills, but the photos that appear with each episode actually serve as a painful reminder of how much the characters do not resemble the actors who played them* and should not have been included.



Did this "marketing approach," as Bishop has sinced coined it, work? Probably not, as the "media-friendly" events in 2000 AD will end before 1998 and not be tried again. I can sort of see A Life Less Ordinary drawing in some curious readers but losing them within a week or two. However, if the Space Girls earned any readers, I'll be amazed. Hands up if you saw the name "Space Girls" and didn't think "oh, how stupid."

Next week, the wincing continues as the Space Girls meet an ignominous end.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: In prog 1062, Sinister takes his third bullet of the series, wounded in the back by a target called Lance Boyle.

*note: David Bishop, who was both editor and scriptwriter for the serial, clarified that 2000 AD didn't have the rights to the actual likenesses of the actors in question. So it was not that Yeowell "botched" the characters, as the original version of this entry stated, but that they weren't allowed to. This entry was modified on May 15 '08 to reflect the updated information.

(Originally pubished 5/15/08 at LiveJournal.)

52. Volt's Folly

We're at September 1997, just in time for one of the more controversial moments in 2000 AD's fictional history. There have certainly been more dramatic moments offscreen for people to discuss, but what happens in prog 1060's Anderson: Psi Division episode - part eleven of "Crusade" by Alan Grant and Steve Sampson - had people muttering for years, in newsgroups and letters pages.

The situation is this: more than a million Mega-City One citizens demand to leave the city and make their way into the Cursed Earth. They're all children. Faced with a situation far too great for them to control, the judges relent and let them go, in order to find out exactly what has lured the children out there. It turns out to be Hope, the mutant child previously seen in a 1991 Anderson story called "Engram," a telepathic being of perfect purity born in the hellish radlands that used to be middle America. The judges send the psychic cadets Corann and Lesley, long-time supporting players in Anderson's adventures, to infiltrate the children's crusade, but they also send a heavily-armed assassination squad to take out the ringleader.

The fellow with the silly haircut in the images here is Chief Judge Volt. He's been in the job since the aftermath of the 1994 Judge Dredd epic "Wilderlands," but nobody, not even his creator John Wagner, has given the guy any personality or major storylines. You could make the case that this is how it should be, because strong characters like Dredd and Anderson really don't need a "boss" figure except in really big, world-changing events. Volt only gets two, this one and 1999's "Doomsday," and he doesn't come out of that one very well.

So here's Volt's defining moment. He orders a missile attack on Hope.



Was he right to do it? As I remember it, the scale of the killing was overstated by the serial's critics. Earlier in the story, when senior judges were debating the next course of action, Dredd growls that they could "nuke 'em," and that seems to have been the impression some people took from the story, but that isn't what's shown. In part twelve, the carnage looks pretty high as Hope and a shocking number of bystanders appear to be killed by the explosion, but the missile is launched from a shoulder-mounted bazooka-type launcher. What would appear to be several hundred thousand survivors carry on, and, if I'm not mistaken, are never seen again after going through a massive set of blast doors set into the side of a mountain.

Since the "holy shit, the judges just sent missiles into a crowd of children" reaction was pretty harsh, it isn't surprising that Alan Grant never followed up on the story. But it might also be because he never intended to. Anderson, who was seriously wounded in an earlier episode, which is why she's not on her feet here, insists that Hope does not intend to use the children against the city or harm them in any way. Nobody's out there secretly building an army with conscripted Mega-City One kids. The story takes its inspiration from classic stories of children's crusades (like the tale of the Pied Piper and the incident of 1212, which, it turns out, wasn't really a "children's" crusade), much in the same way that Neil Gaiman did in a 1993 Vertigo series, but considers how the totalitarian regime of the city would react to such a thing. Predictably, they react badly.



Other stories in this prog include Dredd in "Spooks," a four-parter by Wagner and Calum Alexander Watt, Sinister Dexter in "Murder 101" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, Witch World by Gordon Rennie and John Burns, and a Vector 13 episode by Rennie, Dylan Teague and Dondie Cox. As mentioned in previous installments, only the Sinister Dexter story has been reprinted.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count Update: If you click the Sinister Dexter tag below, you'll see how I've been counting the number of hits the heroes take throughout the series. Sinister takes his second bullet in this storyline. He gets shot in the back of his right shoulder by his fellow gun shark Bubba Dotrice. This character will reappear in a year or so's time, meaning "Murder 101" marks the first appearance of five recurring players in the series: Billi, Weld, Rhodes, Bunkum and Dotrice.

Next week, the folly's all the editor's. In fact, it'll be his folly for the next three weeks, as we look at the short-lived "marketing-led" approach to series commissions that brought us the Space Girls, BLAIR One and the Sex Prog. It won't all be wince-inducing, I hope!

(Originally published 5/8/08 at LiveJournal.)

51. Witch World

August 1997 brings us to prog 1056, and this Greg Staples cover - I believe that it's an homage to some famous piece of fantasy art by Frank Frazetta - is showcasing a short-lived series called Witch World. It ran for twelve episodes which comprised four short stories and the writer, Gordon Rennie, has been known to dismiss it as a failure not worth remembering. Personally, I'm inclined to agree. It's incredibly wordy, and the words are straight out of the Cliche-o-Tron 2000. Rennie had done much better than this before - the earlier episodes of Missionary Man, for example - and he'd do much better work than this in the future, so we should probably just discreetly dismiss this effort.

And yet...

I'll set the artwork, most of which is very good, aside for the moment. I'll also note only briefly that Witch World gets as many, if not more, calls for a sequel series as many other, superior efforts from the period. Seriously, Black Light, which ran a year previously, is a better strip on practically every level, but the time's long since gone where people on the message board were hoping to see new episodes of that. And yet the usually sane Floyd Kermode, known to all squaxx dek Thargo as the fandom's most prolific letterhack, was suggesting new Witch World stories on the official message board just a week ago, and he's by no means the only one.

I think Witch World was a very interesting example of editor David Bishop's style of commissioning series from the era. It didn't seem to be very effective in actually launching new, long-running strips, because the best-known launches from the period, Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante, had been ordered by his predecessor John Tomlinson and then revised to fit Bishop's needs. Witch World, like Black Light and Outlaw before it, was commissioned to run for 12-14 weeks, with the episodes divided into 4-5 short stories, each with different artists.



It's around this time that I realized that Bishop had taken an approach from television scheduling, for example with four clearly-defined season launches a year. Each series then got an order approximate to the standard television 13 weeks. If you've ever been involved enough in cult TV fandom to put together an episode guide for, say, Ace of Wands or Taggart, then Witch World's serial format makes perfect sense. Had Witch World been considered a success by Rennie, Bishop and the audience, then it could have picked up another order for 13 weeks, and maybe even regular scheduling like Sin Dex and Dante would be receiving.

Witch World did include some very nice artwork. The four stories were illustrated by, in order, Siku, Paul Johnson, Will Simpson (a panel from his "The Anatomist" is pictured above), and finally John Burns. They all look great, and the characters of Caitlin and Prestor Jon are engaging, but I don't think it ever really clicked. That's why it was so surprising to see a solicitation last week for a collected run in the pages of a summer 2000 AD Extreme Edition. It'll be nice to be able to enjoy all the great-looking painted artwork on better paper, but otherwise there's not a lot of reason to be thrilled to see it again.

Elsewhere in the prog, we have the continuing adventures of Sinister Dexter and I Was a Teenage Tax Consultant, as mentioned last time. There's also a really good Judge Dredd four-parter by John Wagner and Kev Walker. Entitled "Fast Food," it shows Dredd investigating corruption and thrown games on the competitive eating circuit.



Stories with Mega-City One's super-obese "fattie" population rarely disappoint, and this one's absolutely a winner. What I like best is Wagner once again taking a sledgehammer to the morons who provide commentary to the action. This is a gag he's done before and he'll do again, but it never fails to please. Actually, if the commentary in that panel above sounds familiar, it's because I understand that those droning morons at Fox Sports who called the 2006 Capitol One Bowl used it as their script.

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

Next week, a decision by Chief Judge Volt in the pages of Anderson: Psi Division sparks a debate which lasts for many years. It's the defining moment of this ill-defined character's tenure as chief judge, and you can find out more about it in seven days.

(Originally published 5/1/08 at LiveJournal.)

50. Murder 101

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

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



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



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

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

49. How Not to Advertise a Comic Book

June 1997: Prog 1048 continues the recent, solid lineup in the Galaxy's Greatest, with everything moving towards their final episodes in the following week's issue. Jason Brashill contributes the cover for this week's Anderson: Psi Division story by Alan Grant and Steve Sampson, and there are two episodes of Judge Dredd as John Wagner gets ready for the climax of "The Hunting Party," with art by David Bircham and by Henry Flint. Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser continue Nikolai Dante, and Pat Mills and Steve Tappin have the penultimate part of Slaine: "The Grail War."

Normally, thanks to participation in fandom, reading interviews and the like, I have the benefit of knowing a little bit about the background to 2000 AD's history as it unfolds. This week, however, we have a subject that I didn't know anything at all about until it was written up in the fabulous secondary source that is David Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload. This is the sordid tale of the two worst advertisements that have ever been seen, anywhere. And to understand them, you have to know what the hell Loaded is.

American readers may recall that for a few years, we had these very tame little girlie mags on the shelves, called Maxim, Stuff and FHM, along with some even tamer contemporaries. Maxim's the only one that survived, and I don't know how long it's got, since The WB no longer exists, and that's got to have dried up the stream of twentysomething Hollywood starlets to pose in bikinis for them.

What many Americans may not know is that these were only the US versions of longer-running magazines with many international editions, and they all started in England in the mid-90s. John Harris's essential book Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock links the rise of these "lad mags" with the rise of Blur and Oasis and the demise of the Conservative Party. Heady times, as lad culture and a love of lager and soccer were louder and prouder than they'd been in years. Basically, the English editions are a little more than the tame girlie mags we got here - they're handbooks for single men in their twenties who embraced the culture. And they're slightly more risque, since it's de rigeur in the UK for twentysomething starlets with small roles in Hollyoaks to pose topless. But they're still no more explicit than Playboy was in 1969.

Maxim, Stuff and FHM found it easy to make the jump to US publishing, and it guaranteed a larger bank of pictorials for their international editions. So before long, the British edition could feature photospreads of American starlets like Alyssa Milano and Alyson Hannigan in their undies, and English starlets like Davinia Taylor and Gail Porter in very tame layouts with an occasional discreet nude photo.

Loaded, and their competitor Front, had no easy access to the WB's starlets, and no easy access to the BBC's starlets either, so they settled for the Sun / Daily Sport Page 3 set, giving the likes of Sophie Howard and Lucy Pinder more exposure. They're still just this shy of full-frontal, but considerably more explicit than their fellows, with unbelievably shallow PHWOAARRR LADS text features. In other words, remember how, in 1994, Grant Morrison created Big Dave specifically to lampoon the sort of morons who live their days guided by Daily Sport and Loaded editorials? This, of all places, is where Fleetway chose to advertise 2000 AD.

Then again, as has been mentioned in previous entries, Fleetway is the same company that blew tens of thousands on a cartoon ad which only aired in the wee hours on the poorly-viewed Sky Sports subscription channel.

How the heck this happened is described by Bishop thusly, on page 198 of Thrill-Power Overload:

"In 1997, a long-running dispute between Egmont Fleetway and IPC was settled when the comic publisher was offered £25,000 of free advertising in IPC's publications. It was decided to utilise this by hyping 2000 AD in the pages of Loaded. An advertising agency was brought in to design the ads and came up with the slogan, `2000 AD: Women Just Don't Get It'."

Bishop goes on to explain how this was completely out of the hands of the comic's editorial department, and that he was forbidden by the publisher from responding to reader complaints about the ads, which were pretty offensive, but more importantly, they were goddamned stupid. I mean, these really are the worst ads I've ever seen for a comic book, and whatever bozo came up with these things really had no clue at all. Somebody got paid for this! Well, Thrill-Power Overload was not able to reproduce the ads, which no doubt has left some readers curious about the articles in question. Fortunately, scans later made their way to the official site's message board, courtesy of user "opaque":



Yep. Bishop writes of several instances where editorial's desires came crashing against the marketing department of Fleetway and the focus-group goons who ran the place, but this might have been the most egregious and downright wince-inducing example. Personally, I don't know that I'm bothered by the jawdropping misogyny quite as much as the notion that these ads are supposed to sell a comic book which has never made a practice of excluding anybody.

It wasn't completely the PR nightmare that it could've been. It apparently cost the comic more than it gained, as offended readers cancelled their subscriptions, but the story wasn't picked up by any media, and, mercifully, the comic blogosphere didn't exist then. Because really, Marvel Comics may have pathetic statues of Mary Jane, and DC may apparently disrespect the memory of fictional females who dressed as Robin for two months before being killed off, and they both may release action figures that can't stand upright because their boobs make 'em topple forward, but when it comes to outright sexism and contempt for your readers, what you see there just can't be beat.

Thrillpowered Thursday's going to take a week off while the kids enjoy a spring break with their grandparents. I'm rereading the comic while they're enjoying it for the first time, and I don't want to get too far ahead of them. We'll be back in two weeks for the return of Sinister Dexter. Credo!

(Originally published 4/10/08 at LiveJournal.)

48. Exit Polls

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write. This week, I'm not particularly inspired at all, and so this could be a shorter-than-usual entry.

May 1997: Prog 1044 features the final part of the last Al's Baby story. This series had first been suggested for the comic Toxic! in 1990, but found a home in the Judge Dredd Megazine. Then, it was thought important that everything in the Meg be some part of the Dredd universe, and so Al's Baby was shoehorned in by way of a prologue and epilogue to the first adventure which suggested the story happened in the past of Mega-City One. Created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, it's the story of Al Bestardi, a real jerk of a mob enforcer in our near future. Since the godfather only has one daughter, a brutal, talent-free "singer" called Velma, and the godfather allowed Al permission to marry Velma, and Velma doesn't want to have her "career" sidelined by a pregnancy, and since male pregnancy has newly become medically possible... well... Two series of Al's Baby ran in the Megazine and they are both screamingly funny. But as the Meg had to give up space in '96 for reprints, the third series was moved to 2000 AD, and it's not a case of either creator firing with both barrels. It's funny, and Ezquerra's art is always good to look at, but it's weaker than what came before.

Also running at this time are Nikolai Dante in "The Romanov Dynasty" by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, along with Slaine: "The Grail War" by Pat Mills and Steve Tappin and Mercy Heights, both of which are quite good, even if the time-travelling Slaine is starting to feel a little lost in the face of his guest stars. This storyline, which encompasses two books of ten episodes each, sees Slaine teamed with Simon de Montfort in an adventure with the Cathars, and it honestly feels like Mills would rather be writing this story without Slaine in it. And there's Mercy Heights, an SF soap opera by John Tomlinson, with art on this installment by Lee Sullivan, which is probably the weakest thing currently, but it's still very readable.

Judge Dredd's still in the Cursed Earth on his "Hunting Party" adventure. The story's by Wagner and the very nice art is by Henry Flint:



This wasn't a particularly good blog entry, was it? Five perfectly good stories by some of Britain's best creators, and all I can come up with was this? Well, I plead scattershot interest; I've got spring fever and have been doing other things.

Anyway, to beef things up a little this week, I had the Hipster Kids fill out Exit Polls for this prog. Tharg hasn't actually included these in years, but they might've done a little back in the day to let the editor know what kids liked. Here's what we thought of prog 1044.



Next week, be here to see what some have described as the worst advertising campaign ever seen.

(Originally published 4/3/08 at LiveJournal.)