143. Something About a Man Who Likes Metal

October 2004: As the year comes to an end, Tharg begins programming the last batch of series that will see us to the Prog 2005 relaunch issue. This week, the remarkably fun Lobster Random, by Si Spurrier and Carl Critchlow, returns for his second story. Lobster is drawn on the cover by Boo Cook, who is the artist of Asylum. I sort of talked myself out with the previous two weeks, so please don't let this comparatively shorter entry imply that these thrills are anything less than terrific.

Asylum, written by Rob Williams, is also working through its second story, but it's really more like the second half of one long adventure, and reads very well in collected form. The lead character is an alien tracker named Holt, a half-breed fellow without a nose who loses an eyeball partway through the first story. This might make him an uglier lead than Synnamon, but, as far as 2000 AD characters go, a more attractive one, if you take my meaning.

Asylum isn't one of my favorite strips, in part because Cook's artwork is still at a rough, early stage and, when printed, is as muddy as 2000 AD at its post-Bisley early-1990s worst. On the other hand, Holt's story is a very compelling one, as he desperately tries to negotiate peace between a tense future government and the very violent alien asylum-seekers whom he represents. It's a good story, and one worth reading in the collected edition.

It's one of the weirdest little quirks of recent 2000 AD that only the first Lobster Random adventure has been collected. The second story, "The Agony and the Ecstacy," is every bit as wild and ridiculous as the first. The Mighty One needs to put Lob's first three adventures in a book in 2012, and get a fifth story in the prog immediately.



If you've not met Lobster Random before, he's a torturer-for-hire, an incredibly grouchy ex-soldier who, thanks to genetic modification, can't feel pain and can't sleep. He's also got two extra appendages with freakishly big lobster claws growing out of his back. He's kind of got a weakness for the ladies, provided the ladies are androids. Somebody calls him a mech-fag in his first story and he puts the guy's head into a wall. Don't you judge him.

Random's stories take place in an incredibly weird and wonderful future, dense with bizarre aliens and broken laws of physics. Remember when you were nine and the creatures from that cantina in Star Wars promised a universe of incredibly diverse, dangerous and outre alien life forms? Lobster Random is like that on every page. Rereading it, I'm falling in love with it all over again. It's ridiculously engaging and addictive.



Earlier, I mentioned how Asylum reads better as a collected story. Perhaps one reason that Lobster Random has not been properly collected is that it works amazingly well as an episodic adventure. Spurrier does a great job tailoring each individual installment to work as a fine read on its own. The cliffhangers are excellent, and in some cases he masterfully moves the story forward to open episodes a little later in the overall narrative with a blast of excitement before stepping back to show readers how things got into such a mess.

And the mess of the plot... well, it's wonderful. Lobster Random is very much in the same vein as classic Robo-Hunter, where the stakes keep getting higher as the situation spirals ever more out of control, usually driven by the hero's overconfidence. He's a really competent character, but his universe is just so ridiculously chaotic that he can't predict what thunderously weird thing is around the next corner. It's an absolutely terrific series, and it needs continuing and collecting, and pronto.

Stories from this issue are available for purchase in the following collected editions:

Asylum: The Complete Asylum (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: Total War (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: The Furzt Case (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 307, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, Nuclear armageddon in Mega-City One! Again! It's Total War for Judge Dredd, while Strontium Dog hunts down a king. See you in seven!

142. The Trouble With Girls

September 2004: It can, quite honestly, be said that 2000 AD has had a little trouble in both attracting female readers and in presenting stories that star female leads. There's an unavoidable boys' club mentality about it. Every so often, somebody will offer a half-baked defense and name some villains or supporting characters or ensemble characters or spinoff leads (like, y'know, the girl in the picture here) as evidence that the comic isn't a complete sausage fest, but that's just studying one tree really intently and ignoring the forest. I mean really, we're coming up on thirty-five years of stories now and the successes in this field would include Halo Jones and, if you really wanted to squint, Tyranny Rex.

Various Thargs have tried, but something about the predominantly male readership and the predominantly male creative units seems, sommmmmehow, to make this a really uphill climb. Of course, letting potential female readers know that there's something in the comic with a lead that they might want to check out is a huge problem the way stories just get slotted in for a month or two these days. By the time the comic media and general geek bloggers become aware that, say, Synnamon has a new story in the prog, it's probably already finished. Four-week runs don't do anybody any good.

Well, Synnamon is perhaps a poor example; as discussed in an earlier entry, the character suffers from being completely perfect and boring and promoted on the covers as a T&A redhead. She was just a misfire right out of the gate. But it really doesn't feel like any lessons were learned from Synnamon's failure.

For example, there's the mostly wonderful Samantha Slade. I say "mostly" because I'm not completely blind to her series' faults. There's the second story, for example. Samantha first appeared in "Like a Virgin," which ran in December 2003's year-end Prog 2004 and the next three issues, published in January. She was then benched while a follow-up was considered. This was nowhere close to being long enough of a run to build any momentum, which is part of what I complained about in the previous entry. I hope that you'll agree that most of the series in 2000 AD will need a lengthy residence and some promotion to drive reader interest, or risk losing it.



If I'm completely honest with myself and not just hyping a series that I love for the sake of sounding all positive, it's no damn wonder Samantha Slade didn't set fandom alight when we had to wait eight months to see what would happen next, only to have this mess as a result. "The Furzt Case," written by Alan Grant, isn't a terrible script, and it has amusing moments, but it's obviously a script that artist Ian Gibson found uninspiring to the point of boredom. You can see his frustration early on, in the ridiculous design of three robots that are meant to look generically "anime" and wear Sailor Moon costumes. I think that Ian Gibson is one of the medium's very best artists, and he can draw the hell out of anything when he wants to. This, he doesn't want to. The art doesn't really fall off a cliff, however, until the end of episode three, when the villain of the piece, Nippon Furzt, shows up. From there, it's phoned-in, lazy, awful artwork, mostly without backgrounds. Not inspired, Gibson stopped trying. I can't defend it; the promise of the first three episodes is completely ruined by the slapdash sabotage of the finished pages.

Samantha didn't escape this unscathed. I believe that most readers were at least curious and optimistic after her first story, but she took a beating before this one was done and her reputation never recovered. I think she works terrifically as a character. She's practical, savvy, clever, makes mistakes and is genuinely fun, and I would love to see her used well by creators who are really giving their all. Happily, readers would get to see stories that fit that description when she returned. But fans are harsh and unforgiving; I suspect that many, burned by "The Furzt Case," just groaned and didn't bother.

Sharing space with Sam Slade this week is a much, much more popular female character, Hannah Chapter. She's among the ensemble cast of Caballistics Inc. and, arguably, the most popular of the team among readers. I'll say something blasphemous here, but give me a chance to explain. Hannah's popularity makes no sense whatsoever.

That's not to say that Caballistics Inc., written by Gordon Rennie and drawn by Dom Reardon, is a worse series than Robo-Hunter, far from it. Objectively, Cabs just kicks the tar out of the 2004-07 run of Robo-Hunter. It's a far better series, with consistently excellent artwork, a real sense of danger and drama, lovely, winking allusions to other horror and SF stories, and a completely unpredictable storyline that left everybody reading it utterly blindsided several times. It's a terrific strip, and Hannah Chapter is the least attractive thing about it.

I can't fault her design. I really love her floor-length sheepskin jacket (Feargal Sharkey's mum says it cost a packet) and rectangle glasses, but it's almost as though Rennie went out of his way to make the character as unappealing as possible. She's a bored, contemptuous nerd and - you'll love this - she talks too much. I'm leaving that in, no matter how misogynist that sounds, because it amuses me so. No, seriously, here's some of what I'm talking about:



And I'll cheat my own rules and add this example from another issue:



In the first case, we've got incredibly unnatural dialogue. Read it aloud and see what I mean. This is what Orson Welles was complaining about when he was reading the script for those fish fingers with the crumb-crisp coating, and he was right. In the second case, you may think oh burn! until you actually try speaking it. Actually, try using it as an insult the next time you're out at a goth club, and watch the target of your barb get bored and look away before you finish talking. Then again, she's American. Some of us have a tendency to be a little long-winded. (Ahem.)

Hannah is always like this. Finding examples is no chore. She is unfailingly surly, rude, smug, sneering, downright obnoxious and she speaks with more words-per-dialogue balloon than anybody this side of Chris Claremont. I don't care how cool that sheepskin jacket is, my heart sank whenever she showed up. Caballistics Inc. was fun because of the wild left turns in the plot and the unbelievable cliffhangers and the artwork and the Doctor Who references. Samantha Slade was fun because she was a believable, reluctant hero in way over her head, and who really would prefer to spend her time buying nice frocks. I know who I'd rather read about, and it's a shame that Grant and Gibson could never quite make Samantha's series as wild and engrossing as Hannah's. Or as popular.

At any rate, I'm sure that my opinions on these characters are not shared by everybody, but I hope I've made a case for them. One thing that I'm sure we all do agree on, however, is that 2000 AD needs to do a far better job on the gender front. The comic should definitely reach out to female talent and nurture some women writers and artists, and it should definitely make a legitimate effort to launch more than one strong female lead for an ongoing series rather than a one-off serial. None of this "testing the waters" nonsense with a six-week commission and gauging reader response. Let's have a character who is not spun off from an existing, male-led property, one who is not drawn as a sexpot, one who is flawed but whose stories are fun to read. This is long overdue, so let's see it in 2012, all right, Tharg?

Anyway, other stories in this prog include a Judge Dredd one-off by Alan Grant and Shaun Thomas, Asylum by Rob Williams and Boo Cook, and Strontium Dog by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, and reprints are available thusly:


Asylum: The Complete Asylum (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Caballistics Inc: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: The Furzt Case (free "graphic novel" collection bagged with Megazine # 307, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, a quick look at Asylum before I get all happy about the return of Lobster Random. Be here in seven!

141. King Hell!

August 2004: You know what would be a really thankless job? Editing 2000 AD. Oh, there are perks, I suppose. You get to commission great series and work with incredibly talented creators, but you also get a fan base that is convinced that it knows better than you at every stage and constantly makes demands, I mean, offers helpful suggestions about what it wants to see in the comic. And, when you and your predecessors have spent thirty-odd years cultivating the mythology that the series are actually created by put-upon robots whipped and beaten into the service of thrillpower, it's a little difficult to explain, in character, exactly why the Alan Moore and Ian Gibson droids haven't been chained to a desk to create more Halo Jones, or why the loaning of the Grant Morrison droid to some inferior American publishers has gone on so long that we don't have more Zenith.

About which, I don't know about you squaxx, but I finally resolved a few months ago that I'm not reading any more stupid superhero trademark protection funnybooks from anybody, regardless of who writes them. Except Paul Levitz writing Legion of Super-Heroes. 2000 AD droids on Hulk comics? Not in my house. Join me, won't you? You know it makes sense.

Anyway, new episodes of Zenith and Halo Jones, by their original creators, seem to turn up most often when fans compile their fantasy "perfect prog." From there, it's anybody's guess as to what will show up next, the only other real tricky bit is deciding whether you want Strontium Dog or you want Ezquerra drawing that imaginary issue's Judge Dredd.

I mention this here because I figure that Matt Smith, the man who has been Tharg for about the last decade, has made a really strong case for being 2000 AD's best editor, but man, he does something that I have never liked, and that's not building up a solid recurring feature to run alongside Dredd in almost every issue. That's one of the reasons why fans came to love Sinister Dexter and Nikolai Dante in the late nineties, because David Bishop made them co-stars of the comic, with Dredd, for the better part of two solid years. Particularly with subplot-heavy series like Sin Dex, as it has evolved, and, frankly, darn near everything that Ian Edginton or Gordon Rennie has written, the whole business of a single story per year has mostly been a burden for fans to follow. I've said before, and I feel very strongly about it, that The Red Seas would have been massively improved had its hundred-plus episodes appeared over a run of about three years, and not ten.

See, if I were Tharg, I would note those series that seem to get nearly unanimous positive feedback from fans. In recent days, these would include Zombo, Ichabod Azrael and Absalom. I'd treat that initial story as a successful pilot and then sit down with the writer and see where this series is going. Then commission it, to the end. Rather than ordering a single story each year, and hoping that the writer doesn't get poached by some inferior American publisher who will take up all of his time before it's finished, I'd slot that series in for at least forty weeks a year and give it a backup artist and turn the series' lead into the next 2000 AD superstar. Johnny Alpha did not become beloved in our hearts by collecting one bounty a year, Tharg.

Ah, but there's a problem with my plan. In quite a few cases, it's completely unworkable. Many series, and many of the writers responsible for them, genuinely need time to find a footing and the maturity necessary to churn out something really workable and memorable. Take Simon Spurrier, for instance. Presently, I might groan that he's one of those droids wasting his creative energy turning out garbage for inferior American publishers when he could be writing more Lobster Random, but he wouldn't even be in that position had Tharg not given him the time to develop Bec & Kawl over several, individual, month-long batches. "Hell to Pay" is the fifth of these month-long runs, and it's a real treat. In it, Jarrod Kawl is duped into a cunning plan by Margaret Thatcher to take over the underworld.



Even if Spurrier had wanted to tell this story from the outset - contradicting my "annual appearance" claim above, Bec & Kawl usually appeared once every six months - he wouldn't have told it at all well. The earliest Bec & Kawl adventures, despite the goodwill that some fans felt towards them, just weren't very good. Since Spurrier was a fan who made it in, and since the art was so nice, and since the series was so darned different, and - this might be the important bit - it only ran for four weeks at a time, readers were mostly able to overlook the series' deficiencies, in the hopes that it would improve.

Well, I say mostly. There certainly are readers with a "kill it immediately!" mindset whenever Tharg programs a series that they don't enjoy.

Honestly, the leap in quality between the first two batches of Bec & Kawl and this one is just eye-popping. There are huge problems with the earliest stories. For one, he relies on visual humor, not just to hit a punch line, but to complete a story. Infamously, the climax to a one-off episode called "Enlightenment" (prog 1327, Feb. 2003) is the slogan written on Kawl's T-shirt. No attention is drawn to it. More than that, the pacing of the early stories is really bad. There's no getting around it, while there is a skeleton of a plot in May 2002's "The Mystical Mentalist Menace" (progs 1290-91), there is no sense of a transition between scenes or gags. The action is compressed so much that there is no feeling of the passage of time, nor a space where the story develops.

"Hell to Pay" isn't without its problems, but thank the stars that Tharg commissioned Bec & Kawl the way he did, so that Spurrier and Roberts could learn from their mistakes. It's a very funny story, but, more importantly, it's a story that readers can understand. There are conventions to the language of comics, and the buildup to this hilarious cliffhanger is one of the things that makes it work so well. It's more than just "SHOCK! Thatcher is the baddie!" but the way that we get this cliffhanger at the right point in the story - the halfway mark - and that we learn what Hell is, in terms of how Spurrier is going to use it, so that the comedy of Thatcher privatizing it actually means something. Creating a world that a reader can care about, even for the six or seven minutes one might spend reading a Bec & Kawl episode, is critical for the story to work.



World-building is something that the Guv'nor, Pat Mills, does better than darn near everybody else in comics. When Mills is on fire, as he is in Book Two of the ABC Warriors epic "The Shadow Warriors," he's throwing some completely crazy ideas at the protagonists. Some of these ideas are so offbeat as to be ridiculous - above, as drawn by Henry Flint, we see grouchy apes called Cyboons riding three-legged lizards called Trisaurs - but Mills treats all of the elements of his stories with the same respect and enthusiasm, grounding the mindblowing ideas with casual acceptance by the protagonists.

Now, the weird problem with the Guv'nor is that, unique among 2000 AD's writers, he seems to get a free pass to write his stories in either 48-page or 60-page chunks. He seems to have picked this up writing for the French market, where his publisher there releases 60-page episodes of the series Requiem and Claudia once a year. This means that Mills gets to mostly blow off the idea of cliffhangers. It's pretty rare when you get to, say, page six of episode five of a modern Mills story and get that jawdropping shock that leaves you begging for the next part. From the perspective of a reader, "Book Two of The Shadow Warriors" doesn't mean so much. It's really that "The Shadow Warriors" is a three-episode story, and the episodes are really long, and split into chunks for British serialization.

And then of course, there's the problem that, as editor of 2000 AD, Matt Smith has so darn many popular series to juggle that even if the Guv'nor wanted to run a 156-page ABC Warriors adventure across 26 consecutive weeks, there wouldn't necessarily be room for it. See, thankless job.

For the record, I'd figure the lineup for a perfect prog, considering that Nikolai Dante is coming to an end in early 2012, would include Dredd by Wagner and Ezquerra, backed by new stories for Robo-Hunter, Zenith, Stickleback and Lobster Random.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Bec & Kawl: Bloody Students (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Caballistics Inc: Creepshow (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: The Art of Kenny Who? (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop).

Next time, The Galaxy's Greatest and its Trouble With Girls. See you in seven, friends!

140. The Megazine Takes it Eazy

June 2004: Well, here's an entry that I can tell is going to be a little frustrating to write. There's so much that I want to say in the next two entries, and get up on a couple of pet hobby horses of mine, but instead I have this utterly flawless issue of Judge Dredd Megazine to discuss. Wow. Reading this again reminds me of how utterly perfect a comic it was during this period. It's a big, thick chunk of a book with a pile of features and some classic black and white reprints (Charley's War and The Helltrekkers) backing up five downright excellent new stories.

On the cover, it's the return of Judge Koburn in his own series, Cursed Earth Koburn. He'd previously appeared as a guest star in a two-part Judge Dredd adventure. Writer Gordon Rennie did this several times, introducing new characters like Johnny Woo and Bato Loco as spotlight-stealing guest stars in Dredd, usually pulling the rug out from under the ostensible lead or otherwise looking much more fun, before they moved out to their own strip. Hey, it works for television spinoffs.

Koburn, of course, is a Dreddworld remodeling of the classic Major Eazy, a delightful World War Two strip by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra that ran in Battle Picture Weekly in the late seventies. One run of the series was set in North Africa and another in Italy, and it featured a laconic, droopy tactical genius who routinely bettered the Nazis and the fascists by way of being an independent thinker who fought his way, never panicked and never hurried. He was visually modeled on the actor James Coburn, and apart from stick-up-their-rears children who weren't in on the joke and wrote unintentionally hilarious letters to Battle complaining that it was a jolly poor rum show to suggest that the disgraceful, unshaven, disrespectful Eazy should have such luck.

Naturally, a character like Eazy is going to have all kinds of fun making the judges of Mega-City one look like idiots. Too much fun, as it turns out, which is why he's a circuit judge bringing law to the lawless of the Cursed Earth wasteland. Here, he's free to drink, brawl, smoke, have girlfriends in every frontier town and occasionally be tasked with cleaning up some city problem in the desert.



And tool around in his great big car. Or hover-ship thingy, whatever. So, teamed with a young stick-up-her-rear Mega-City judge named Bonaventura in this series by Rennie and Ezquerra, he brings law to the lawless and has a ball doing it. The series tackles darker drama with a grain or two less success than it does comedy - the most recent story, featuring an indestructible monster killing everything in the Cursed Earth, felt a little stale - but most of the time, it's terrific fun. Koburn has been resting since his most recent appearance in 2006, but will be returning to the Megazine in 2012.

There's a lot more of interest in this issue. Old hands Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson are putting the comatose Anderson: Psi Division through hell and introducing an incredibly neat set of supporting characters, fleshing out the judges' very weird department of psychics, pyrokines, telekinetics and witches. Somehow Grant is able to make this believable and compelling.

Pat Mills and Simon Davis are collaborating on Black Siddha, which is really neat. Mills has gone on the record many, many times about how much he dislikes superheroes, but when he does them here, the results are really fun. Black Siddha is an Indian superhero operating in London, featuring a young, put-upon lead who really, really doesn't want either the great power or the great responsibility thrust upon him. This impacts his karma-based superpowers and leaves him vulnerable at awful moments.

Surprisingly, this isn't actually a comedy, but it's written with a much, much lighter touch than most of the Guv'nor's work during this period. I think it's a complete trip, a sometimes smutty Bollywood action romp through criminal gangs and reincarnation that plays out very well. There have been three Black Siddha adventures so far, and while it has yet to be collected and the character is currently resting, I certainly hope that we will see him again.

The Simping Detective by Simon Spurrier and Frazer Irving is continuing a celebrated run of stories. Jack Point, a wally squad judge who poses deep undercover as a private investigator, is one of the best characters to emerge during this period. He gets to indulge in all the vices that Koburn enjoys, but he never gets to take much enjoyment from them. He's constantly riding a knife-edge, about to be busted by either the judges' "SJS" internal affairs unit or sent to certain death by a corrupt sector chief. The series is lovely, dense and complex, and Point's ability to think on his feet and manage spiraling chaos is really entertaining.

But it's Judge Dredd who beats even this tough competition of excellent strips. This time out, in the first episode of "Six," written by John Wagner and drawn by Chris Weston. It's an investigation into the work of a serial killer, obviously following in the footsteps of the David Fincher film Se7en, but it takes a fantastic new twist as readers gradually realize that the killer is actually our old, illiterate, super-genius friend PJ Maybe...



Maybe was last seen in a trio of one-episode stories in 2002, where it was revealed that he had engineered a fantastic breakout from the prison where he'd been sent almost a decade earlier. By the time the judges have any idea that he had gone, Maybe had already left the city, established a new identity in Ciudad Baranquilla and then faked his death, leaving his heart behind as evidence. Since the judges never found his many millions tucked away, he was able to live in unimaginable comfort.

Except, well, killers have that urge. Now accompanied by a sexbot called Inga, real estate mogul Pedro Martinez returns to Mega-City One to take care of some old grudges. Time in the sun hasn't dulled Maybe's senses. The story is inventive and the killings are gleefully sick, and once the judges find out what's going on in the concluding episode, the peripheral bodycount gets pretty enormous.

I think I can safely bet that nobody reading this story had any idea how Maybe's story would play out. Wagner probably didn't, either. It's a great example of what I was talking about last time, how Wagner puts so many pieces into play in his stories that subplots naturally arise from all over his world and weave into things. I'm sure it might make Judge Dredd a denser comic for newcomers these days, since there is just so much going on, and an occasional pain in the rear to collect in book form - lost in the nevertheless quite readable Complete P.J. Maybe collection is the reality that the stories unfold over the course of about twenty years - but man, the payoff is amazing. This is terrific stuff.

Stories from this Megazine are reprinted in the following editions:

Cursed Earth Koburn: The Carlos Ezquerra Collection (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: The Complete P.J. Maybe (Amazon UK).
The Simping Detective: The Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop).

Next time, a little change of pace, as my own personal daydream of what it might like to be Tharg runs up against a reality exemplified by Bec & Kawl and The ABC Warriors. See you in seven, friends!

139. War on Terror

Now the other reason that I decided to start writing about 2000 AD again is that I figure I sort of owe it to them. I've been saying for, I don't know, ever that the main barrier to the comic's success in the American marketplace is that nobody involved with the comic has done the sort of protracted screaming at the potential audience necessary to make a hit. Ours is a culture that rewards constant advertising - surely every single person in America over the age of two knows what Coca-Cola is, but that corporation still spends more on ads every year than most of us will ever earn in our lifetime - and when you're a niche product in a world where, even for comic fans, "comic news" equals little more than "who will draw Marvel's top trademark protection comic this year," you've got to do a lot of screaming. Little blogs like mine or David Page's or Douglas Wolk's fun new Dredd Reckoning are not enough.

Fortunately, Rebellion has hired a PR man, Mike Molcher, and he's been doing a great job placing stories and getting press. There's been more talk about 2000 AD in the geek media over the last six months than in the last six years. And there certainly should be: there have been some really excellent stories in 2000 AD over the last six months. Between the conclusions of Shakara and Necrophim, the return of Pat Mills' Flesh, Mike Carroll's debut as a rotating scriptwriter on Judge Dredd and the premiere of Gordon Rennie and Tiernan Trevallion's Absalom, there has been a lot to talk about, even before we get to the "new readers start here!" fun of issue 1740. Add in the new American editions of The Horned God (in a lovely hardback, promoted extensively by Mills), Low Life (promoted through several interviews with writer Rob Williams) and Kingdom (promoted, irresistably by a doggie dish!!) and there have been many opportunities for promotion, all of them seized.

At the time this chapter is published (July 21), many of the editorial and PR droids are at San Diego Comic-Con, focal point for most of that promotional screaming. If you see them there, tell 'em that Thrillpowered Thursday sends its regards and best of luck for a successful show.

But that's the present. Back in prog 1396, there was still a lot to talk about. It's June 2004 and Andy Clarke's cover promotes a Judge Dredd thriller called "Terror," now in its second episode. America's occupation of Iraq is about a year old at this point. If you think contemporary events might be influencing the series, you're very right. It's remarkable stuff.



More than a decade earlier, writer John Wagner had introduced a terrorist organization to the world of Judge Dredd. Called "Total War," this group was one of many in the city devoted to the cause of democracy, and was willing to cause a lot of death and collateral damage in pursuit of it. Total War was introduced in the classic 1990 serial "America," but I don't believe they were mentioned again, unless perhaps in passing, since that story.

In "Terror," we follow a university lecturer named Zondra Smith who is totally in the wrong place at the wrong time. She's on the prowl and looking to meet a young man, only to get caught up in a Total War bombing. Making matters worse for herself after the carnage is over and the death toll is being counted, she's "political," and therefore trouble as far as the judges are concerned.

Painted by Colin MacNeil, "Terror" is an example of Wagner's remarkable ability to use long, multi-part serials to better effect than anybody else in the business. There's a heck of a lot going on in this eight-part story, but it's every bit as important as a building block in the ongoing Dredd saga as an adventure of its own. It will reach a conclusion, but it will also feed into a major epic that will begin in just a few months' time.

It's a good example of a Dredd story that covers most of the series' dramatic beats - action, criminal investigation using future technology, a look at the often bleak existence of citizens in the future metropolis - and rereading it, I'm reminded of how fun it is to watch Wagner unfold multi-part stories. It's a completely unpredictable adventure, and the judges' seemingly impossible task - keeping Zondra Smith alive and able to work as an informant while still protecting her from Total War - is really thrilling. There's no way to know what will happen next.

"Terror" was reprinted along with its longer follow-up epic in one nice volume from Rebellion, which you may order by following the link below. I highly recommend it.

Continuing in this issue are the same ongoing stories discussed last time, A.H.A.B. by Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson, Chopper by Wagner, Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague, Low Life by Rob Williams and Henry Flint, and Savage by Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard.

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

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

Next time, over to the Megazine, as Cursed Earth Koburn kicks ass, and one of Dredd's most cunning enemies starts a new body count. See you in seven!

138. Bill and His Shootah

Hey! Is this thing still on?

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

Stories from this prog are reprinted in the following editions:

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


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

137. Men and Women Without Many Clothes

April 2004: Well, isn't this a terrific cover? Chris Weston started his career working on Judge Dredd in the early '90s and he'd been contributing to various series here and there while also getting high-profile work for American publishers, frequently illustrating scripts for Grant Morrison. Speaking of which, a few weeks ago, I finally bought the first collected edition of Morrison's run on Batman, and, after my eyeballs got finished bleeding trying to decipher that godawful artwork, I concluded that as soon as I win the lottery, I'm going to pay Chris Weston his top page rate and just give him damn near every Morrison DC Universe script that someone from this battalion of chicken-scratchers has ruined - Batman, JLA, Final Crisis, the lot - and make it look comprehensible at last.

Unfortunately, Weston, who, in a perfect world, would draw damn near everything, is only handling Rogue Trooper on the cover and not the interiors. Artwork on this story is handled by a newly-constructed droid, PJ Holden, and it's not bad, though it certainly suffers by comparison with the cover! It's very much the work of a new talent and it's very rough in places, but any eyeball which would rather look at that garbage Adam Kubert drew for Batman, probably for a lot more money, than this deserves to bleed, frankly. Holden's work starts off pretty good and would improve greatly over the next several years, but this is still a competent and fine job, and a reasonable conclusion to Gordon Rennie's Rogue Trooper series.

If you recall your Thrillpowered Thursday lessons, Rogue Trooper had returned back in July of '02. The 25 episodes that Rennie penned - staggered out over an agonizing 85 weeks - proved to be mostly good reading this time around. Rennie elected to structure the run much better than I had thought, and it would have worked out very well, had there not been such enormous breaks between the stories.

After the four-part opener (#1301-1304), there was a one-shot called "Weapons of War," illustrated by Dylan Teague, which introduced some new supporting players on the Souther side who were looking for Rogue. Their arc, and that of a ruthless and bloodthirsty Nort commander, Arkhan, weaves through the series, and reaches a pretty satisfying conclusion at the end of "Realpolitik." Rennie did a good job with the task assigned him, but this really would have been a better series had it wrapped up in a single calendar year, and not been dragged out over... wow... 22 months.

Rogue will return a few more times, in late 2005 and the spring of 2006, in stand-alone stories designed to tie in to the forthcoming video game, but other than these, his story is over. And so, mercifully, is the story of Durham Red.



Thank heaven this is finished. Durham Red had been an occasionally entertaining space opera starring a bad-tempered, half-naked mutant vampire for some time, but this third major storyline, "The Empty Suns," is just unreadable nonsense. It had actually begun in October of '03, but artist Mark Harrison hit some delays and the story took a 14-issue break after seven episodes.

What remains is an in-one-eye-and-out-the-other melodrama in which Durham Red, her teenage son(!) and some other castaways from the earlier series get back together for one last go at saving the universe from the latest iteration of the pandimensional threat du jour, something whose name has already escaped me. Red rechristens her son Johnny, in honor of Johnny Alpha, whatever that's worth.

All the while, Red wears as little as the law will allow - her latest wardrobe choice is an unbelievable black vinyl loincloth thing that shows every legal inch of leg and thigh - and stays in a bad mood and basically proves to be as unsympathetic a star as is possible. This is absolutely a story where neither writer nor artist are bringing their best, which is a real shame since we know they're capable of far better. Dan Abnett's captions are overwritten and ponderous, and the visuals of outer space action are murky. It's almost impossible to follow the action, and since the lead is so unlikeable, nobody wants to. Tharg promises that the story's conclusion, in issue 1386, will be the final episode ever, and, mercifully, he's meant it.

And on that sour note, it's vacation time! Thrillpowered Thursday will be taking off for two weeks for recharging and recuperation. We'll be back later in June with a look at Young Middenface and Black Siddha See you then!

...Or not. Honestly, guys, I'm really burned out on doing this every week, so this'll be the last Thrillpowered Thursday for the present. Thanks for reading.