March 2000: The cover of prog 1185 features a wonderfully old-fashioned composition by Cliff Robinson which evokes any number of 1980s IPC comics. The little gunmen are the action figure-sized heroes of Banzai Battalion, who are this week wrapping up their second run-in with Judge Dredd in a three-part story by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy. They are actually semi-sentient pest control droids who keep finding themselves thrown into situations where human criminals become the pests they need to stamp out. Since their human owners died during the events of the recent "Doomsday Scenario," and since they keep making themselves useful, the droids are sent by Dredd to join Justice Department in some capacity, but when they reappear in their own series in 2001, they'll have to take the initiative to strike out on their own. The subsequent Banzai Battalion series will run for thirteen episodes, most of which were reprinted in a 2005 hardback by Rebellion.Probably the most important series running at the moment is Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and John Burns. We've now left behind the initial, devil-may-care Phase One of the series and entered the period of bloody war between the Makarovs and Romanovs. Burns is the principal artist for this period, and while I personally find him not a patch on Dante's co-creator Simon Fraser, I must agree that he is well-suited to painting lavish, double-page spreads full of desperate soldiers on bloody battlefields, carving each other up against the backdrop of burned-out buildings and the misery of human suffering. Yes, this would be the point where Dante loses a lot of its magic as things get incredibly bleak in imperial Russia.
But even while the focus of the writing has moved from outlandish escapades and intrigue to the horror of war, the artwork's change of focus is similarly striking. Burns chooses not to linger on the instantly-identifiable architecture and fashion that defines Dante's world, and he eschews the grandiose camera angles, the surprising perspective and the action-oriented speed lines that Fraser has used to such great effect in the earlier episodes. Burns makes a stamp on Nikolai Dante, all right: he darn near stamps out entirely everything that made the last three years of stories so wonderful.
That sounds quite harsh, but it's not to say Burns' work is in any way poor. While there will, sadly, be one or two future Dante episodes that look like they were painted while his laundry was drying, "The Rudenshtein Irregulars" is a tour de force from start to finish, and is visually breathtaking in its own, inimitable fashion. Faced with the challenge of tearing down the beauty of the future vistas that Fraser and those artists who handled fill-ins in the first phase had created, and emphasizing the stark horror of all-out war, Burns is more than up to the challenge. It is bleak, amazing stuff.
What I'm identifying as the second phase of Dante, known informally under the agonizing pun "Tsar Wars" and available as two volumes from Rebellion (the fourth and fifth in the series), will turn out to be its most troubled period. The initial plan had been to tell this storyline in five series of eight episodes. Burns was to paint the first, third and fifth series and Fraser was to handle the second and fourth. However, Fraser was in the process of relocating to Africa when the deadlines for his first story came up, and as a result, this adventure, "Battleship Potemkin," had to be postponed until later in the year, causing some rewrites and an unfortunate continuity error. Fraser would not be available in early 2001, and the creators and editors will revise the plans for the subsequent stories, as we will see.
Also of interest this week is the first of two stories for Pussyfoot 5, an adventure series set very loosely in the Judge Dredd universe. It's actually a spinoff from the 1999 Devlin Waugh epic "Sirius Rising," where three of the five characters on the team first appeared. It's about a team of gun-toting troubleshooters employed by Vatican City to handle crazy SF-threats, and the cast includes two sexy ladies, one enormously fat guy, a weird, growly rock-like alien pet, and Mantissa, who hasn't shown up in the narrative yet. As the bulk of the action falls down to the two curvy cuties, it looks very much like the cast is about three members too large. As Dave Merrill once asked me, "What was that Dirty Pair thing that was running the other month?"
John Smith handled the script for the series, and Nigel Raynor is the artist for the first story. Raynor's not bad at all most of the time, but something about this strip completely fails to gel. Everything seems very flat and unappealing, and the coloring, by the usually reliable D'Israeli, does not flatter Raynor's work at all. Events in every location seem balanced by exactly the same lighting, a harsh wash of reds and yellows, like the characters are all at a '70s disco. And, to be blunt, while I am using terms like "sexy" and "curvy cuties," Raynor doesn't really succeed in bringing the cheesecake that would have made this strip memorable.
Since I'm a big fan of John Smith's universe, and since I do believe 2000 AD needs more leading ladies, I was very much prepared to like Pussyfoot 5, but the result was fairly average. On the other hand, running as it did alongside the current Slaine epic made it seem pretty spectacular by comparison, but more about that in the next installment.
The Dredd/Banzai story and the Nikolai Dante adventure are both available in reprint editions from Rebellion. A collection of Pussyfoot 5 is said to be on the horizon as a free supplement to a forthcoming issue of Judge Dredd Megazine.
Next week, an oddly all-S edition, with updates on Sinister Dexter, Slaine and Strontium Dog!
February 2000: I love the fantastic cover by Jason Brashill on prog 1181. Okay, so maybe he doesn't get Cain completely right - he appears a little jowly to me - but that's a fantastic composition, and when Gordon Rennie's Missionary Man gets its long overdue collection, as surely it must, this needs to be the cover of Book Two. The current storyline is called "The Promised Land" and it is a proper, old-school Dreddworld epic which runs for about four months and features Cain hooking up with a Helltrek in the Cursed Earth. In a small departure from the many stories set in the atomic desert that was once middle America, there are several overlapping subplots that propel the adventure beyond the patchy, episodic style of the many "Cursed Earth quest" tales that John Wagner had already penned before this one. Principally, there's the problem of the Helltrek making new enemies everywhere they go, and these menaces carrying on in pursuit of the settlers from story to story. The artists on "The Promised Land" include Trevor Hairsine, Colin MacNeil, Dean Ormston and Alex Ronald, who puts in his best work to date with some eerie quasi-suburban landscapes in the early episodes, set in an isolated community populated by gun-toting maniacs who think they're the rightful government of the long-destroyed United States.
Jan. 2000: Prog 1177 sports a cover by Mark Harrison which promotes the series Glimmer Rats by himself and Gordon Rennie. Harrison signs the image "After Frazetta," but I'm not certain which particular Frazetta piece that Harrison's homage is evoking. For my money, the cover is certainly the best thing about Glimmer Rats, a gruesome, violent war story set in an ugly, physics-defying world with a million graphic deaths around each corner. The ten-part story began in "Prog 2000" and ranks among my least favorite strips to ever appear from the House of Tharg.
Brian Bolland has cover duties for "Prog 2000," the first in what has become an annual series of year-end progs which mix one-off episodes of classic and recurring thrills with the first episodes of new storylines, new artwork by favorite creators, and a variety of text features. The 100-page prog is on sale for three weeks over Christmas and has become a holiday tradition. But in 1999, editor David Bishop and assistant editor Andy Diggle were not thinking about what would become a standard ten years on, but rather to do a spectacular once-in-a-lifetime issue. The lineup includes a pair of Judge Dredd tales, along with one-off episodes of ABC Warriors, Nikolai Dante, Rogue Trooper, Sinister Dexter and Slaine, along with the final episode of Nemesis the Warlock and the first episodes of new serials for the new thrill Glimmer Rats and, back in action after a nine year absence, Strontium Dog, about which more next time. It really does feel incredibly special, and everyone involved deserved congratulations for a job very well done.
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.
On to October 1999 and prog 1165. Well, there he is, back on the cover, promoted for weeks and with all sorts of ass-kicking promise, it's the freaky, pointy-headed, devilish alien freedom fighter Nemesis the Warlock, back to wage war on the tyrannical despots of totalitarian future Earth. It's a long overdue final series for Nemesis, who was last seen five years previously in a truncated three-part adventure. This had possibly been intended as the first part of a much longer storyline (and was discussed in these pages eighteen months ago, see 
Welcome back to the little ol' sub-blog at my LiveJournal, for another few weeks of looking back at the run of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic! I already know that I'll be taking a few weeks' break again at the end of the year, but, as Kermit the Frog often said, "before we go," I'd like to finish up the issues that originally saw print in 1999. Prog 1162 is a very, very good comic. I'm not completely keen on the cover, by Dylan Teague, which spotlights the imminent conclusion to the Judge Dredd epic "Doomsday Scenario" (creators this week: John Wagner and Charlie Adlard). I was also a little underwhelmed by the Pulp Sci-Fi one-off written and illustrated by Allan Bednar, but the rest of the lineup includes Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, the completely brilliant Nikolai Dante romp "The Courtship of Jena Makarov" by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and more of Devlin Waugh by John Smith and Steve Yeowell.
So it was with no small amount of fanboy thrill, and no small amount of fanboy terror and paranoia at the possible death of a much-loved character, that I took up an offer from the fanzine Class of '79 to interview John Smith. The interview, available online 