July 2008: In prog 1796, a serial called The Vort wrapped up. This eight-part tale of future war on a strange planet where the laws of physics are challenging the human army had readers' suspicion circuits buzzing from about page two. There's a really strange "man of mystery," badly wounded and disfigured, his facial features obscured by hideous scar tissue, among the cast. He's called Crispy, and the main protagonist, a reporter, is determined to learn his secret.What's more, there's the curious nature of the serial's credits. The artist is the popular and awesome D'Israeli, and the writer is listed as "G. Powell." We'd been down this road twice before. When John Wagner had written The Dead Man in 1990 as "Keef Ripley," that certainly looked like a pseudonym, but this was before any internet-based fandom could get together and speculate about it. The Dead Man established this unusual tradition to hide the identity of the hero: the writer uses a fake name, and the artist, in that case John Ridgway, is one not really known for drawing the character.
This was repeated in 2006, when "Cal Hamilton" and artist Simon Coleby collaborated on a serial called Malone, who was revealed to be Finnigan Sinister. By this time, of course, we had the internet for research and for speculation, and the actual writer, Dan Abnett, anticipated the nosy nature of fans and reused the "Hamilton" name, which he'd previously employed for some work for licensed comics such as James Bond Jr. in the 1990s. Since nobody ever knew that "Hamilton" and Abnett were one and the same, this worked perfectly,
As for "G. Powell," Tharg swore that this was a brand new droid, but nobody believed him. Speculation wasn't exactly running wild, but I had my theory, and I was pretty sure of it. I figured "Powell" had to be Arthur Wyatt. See, the writer Gordon Rennie had taken a sabbatical from 2000 AD around this time, leaving lots of dangling subplots across three separate series, to take on some better-paying work in the video game industry. It was understood that Cabbalistics Inc would be rested for the time being - a really long time being, as it has turned out - but that The 86ers would be resuming in 2009 with Wyatt as the new writer. This series, a spinoff of Rogue Trooper, had been absent for about a full year at this point. My guess was that "Powell" was putting a subplot together - the return of Rogue himself, badly wounded, amnesiac, and calling himself Crispy - and that we'd get a last-page revelation of Crispy as our blue-skinned, biochip-totin' buddy, setting up his move to the Acoma System to hook up with Rafe in the next 86ers story.
This theory made perfect sense. It even worked on the art front, because D'Israeli had never drawn Rogue Trooper before. Of course, he'd never drawn Lobster Random before, either.
Aloha! Crispy was Lobster Random and "G. Powell" was Si Spurrier. So there.
Elsewhere in the Galaxy's Greatest, Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson start a four-part Judge Dredd story in which criminals use an electromagnetic pulse to shut down a city block, with the unintentional side effect of also shutting down Dredd's bionic eyes. There's more Sinister Dexter, and the Nikolai Dante epic "Amerika" moves toward an unforgettable conclusion. For about the last two years of the series, since prog 1511, Dante has been working as Tsar Vladimir's top agent, neither trusting the other, and with good reason. Dante doesn't know that Vlad's armored "Lord Protector" is really his own half-brother Konstantin, and Vlad doesn't know that Dante's been quietly assembling "an army of thieves and whores" to lead a rebellion.
So, Dante has assembled a rough alliance in the streets of New York to repel the beachhead from the alien White Army, and Vlad sees the whole endeavor as, tactically, a big waste of time and resources, and moves his fleet in to just wipe Manhattan, and everybody in it, human and alien alike, off the face of the earth. Dante escapes in the nick of time, but it looks very much like all the people who moved onto the island from the other old boroughs at his urging have all been slaughtered. Our hero completely loses his temper, especially when Vlad and Arkady are all smug and supercilious about their awful abuses of power, and the look on Vlad's face when Dante puts his sword through the old man's stomach is a stunner.
Dante's blow is about six inches lower than it needed to be. As our hero goes down in a hail of energy blasts, he knows that he wasted the effort; Vlad is going to survive, and we poor readers will have an agonizing thirteen weeks to see what will happen to him next.
And Defoe, by Pat Mills and Leigh Gallagher, nearing the end of his second ten-part adventure, sees his subplots twist and tangle and get incredibly convoluted in the best possible way. The series does seem to have about twice as many characters as is necessary, but it's really fun. (Tharg! If you're reading, the week before this series returns for story five in 2013, please program a five page "who's who" prologue, would you? Thanks!) I really like the structure, where Titus Defoe is usually deep in the trenches, fighting zombie "reeks" at the street level, completely unaware of all the political machinations going on between Scotland Yard and various palaces and country houses.
The story brings him, briefly, in opposition to a lady of the Prussian court, a diplomat who appears to be slumming and enjoying an illegal pit fight between a brawler and a reek, before she takes her leave of the event. He's then contacted by the secret agent brother of the reporter who accompanied him in the first story, who reveals the reporter's tale about his meeting with the villains controlling the reeks, known as Mene Tekel and La Voisin, alias "Mr. Quick" and "Prussian Blue." Defoe realizes that the woman he met is certainly La Voisin, and this story ends with Defoe and Damned Jones preparing to track her down.
I really do enjoy this series despite the genuine reality that there are a heck of a lot more characters than anybody can keep up with. Wikipedia is some help, although it reveals the deaths of three of Defoe's twelve (twelve!!!) fellow zombie fighters in stories three and four. On the other hand, ten times as many things happen in sixty pages of Defoe than in sixty pages of anything else in print, so you can't complain too much. Also, the reporter and the spy? Their names are Fear-the-Lord Jones and If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Wouldst-Be-Damned Jones. How could anybody not love this comic?
Next time, don't get your knickers in a twist, Tank Girl is here!
If you enjoy Thrillpowered Thursday, I'd really appreciate your help in spreading the word along. Perhaps the blog is getting stale, or my writing has become predictable, or we've hit the "familiarity breeds contempt" wall, or something, but readership has been noticeably dwindling over the last six months. I should probably redesign this ugly and old-fashioned thing, were the time available, that's for sure. In the meantime, if you like the blog, please tell your friends. I really would appreciate it. Thank you!
July 2008: As I create these articles, I often find myself overlooking Judge Dredd, planning in advance to highlight one of the other stories running. "The Edgar File," a major seven-part story by John Wagner and Patrick Goddard, however, demands everybody's attention. Even as Wagner has solidified his skills writing police procedurals and giving Dredd a meticulous and detailed approach to investigation, this one really is a standout. It makes you wish Rebellion would skip ahead in their Case Files to Volume 35 or whatever it will take to start getting big, complete collections of the modern series in print, so that those foolish non-scrots who still haven't caught on can have their minds more easily blown.
June 2008: Two chapters back, I briefly mentioned a John Smith-written serial, Dead Eyes, illustrated by Lee Carter. Rereading it, I'm not persuaded that it's an overlooked treasure. Smith is, by some distance, one of my absolute favorite writers of comics, but Dead Eyes simply isn't very compelling, in part because the early episodes of this serial are a misshapen, turgid bore about secret conspiracies, ley lines, underground civilizations, and a naughty British government. It's like somebody shook out the contents of an issue of Fortean magazine over the plot of Smith's 1993 serial Firekind.
May 2008: In the previous chapter, we looked at a particularly rough patch at the House of Tharg, a period of about three months when there was nothing particularly good appearing in the pages of 2000 AD. This was a sad hiccup, and one isolated to the weekly, because Judge Dredd Megazine was really terrific at this time. Even the oft-maligned Extreme Edition reprint book was going out in style. For most of 2007, that magazine had been incredibly skippable, reprinting as it did both the agonizingly long sports saga Mean Arena across three issues, as well as the similarly-named Mean Team, a rare and massive misfire from the otherwise reliable Alan Grant, John Wagner and Massimo Belardinelli that is - somehow - on the calendar to be reprinted again in book form in 2013. But with that title closing down, soon to be supplanted by a new series of reprints in the Megazine itself after the summer, they went out in style. The final two issues, # 29 and # 30, are excellent. They collect a pile of great Ian Gibson-drawn stories, including all of the episodes - four stories! - that might have appeared in a potential never-published fourth Robo-Hunter book in the Rainbow Spine line, along with the classic shoulda-been hit character Maze Dumoir's single two-part adventure, a couple of Anderson: Psi Division stories, and two Tharg the Mighty stories from the early 1980s.
April 2008: It's simple arithmetic: at some point in any editor's time in charge of an anthology comic, there is going to be a "worst moment." In the case of 2000 AD, for my money, Matt Smith's one and only utter fumble at the helm came for a three-month run in the spring of 2008, when, flatly, the only thing in the comic that was any good was a three-week Nikolai Dante adventure. When it ended, all that was left were ashes, with even Judge Dredd stumbling badly, and, in a grisly reminder of certain patches in the early 1990s, not one of the five stories was worth reading. The best of them was a one-off serial called Dead Signal by Al Ewing and PJ Holden, which, to its credit, offered up a cliffhanger to episode four that really was thunderously wild and weird. It even made up for the fact that the reliable Holden fumbled the cliffhanger to part two so badly that it's impossible to tell what the heck you just read. Coming just a few pages after a similarly baffling and confusing cliffhanger to an episode of the interminable The Ten-Seconders, it really is very memorable. The following week, it turned out that the helicopter chasing our hero Marc vanished into thin air. That's not what it looked like.
March 2008: In the previous chapter, we looked at how 2000 AD's first lineup of 2008 was completely terrific, but honestly, the Judge Dredd Megazine is every bit as wonderful. At this point, issue 269, the structure is quite similar to what readers in the present day will find in the issues on newsstands, except for the polybag and the little reprint comic; those come a few months down the line. Each issue contains contains about thirteen pages of text and articles, and four strips. The major text feature is an interview with one of the many artists or writers who've worked on the Galaxy's Greatest. The previous three issues had featured a detailed talk with Alan Grant. This time out, it is artist John McCrea, who also contributes the colorful and wild cover painting.
February 2008: It's four and a half years before the release of Dredd, a film adaptation of 2000 AD's flagship character. The film will star Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, and Lena Headley, and be acclaimed by a wide spectrum of filmgoers and fans as one of the very best of all comic-to-movie adaptations. Dark, brutal, uncompromising, and very violent, the movie is, by any criteria, a complete triumph. Any criteria other than financial, sadly. Its North American distribution is left in the hands of the incompetent boobs at Lionsgate, who couldn't market beer at a football game, and whose strategy seems to consist solely of telling theater owners that it would be a hit but neglecting to tell anybody else, anywhere. The film performs well in Europe, but in the United States, it flops, ignominiously, despite incredibly good reviews from dozens of critics, leaving the prospect of any sequel films in doubt. We'll never get the Ampney Crucis TV series that I want at this rate.
What goes on in Kingdom when Gene the Hackman finds a colony of humans and a strange species of gigantic, telepathic ticks is miserable and tragic on every page. You can't empathize with the cast of Stickleback, even with the new and strange mystery about his deformity possibly being a bizarre costume instead, but Gene's tale is a heartbreak on every page. The reader knows better than Gene not to entirely trust these good-natured people, even while sympathizing with their problem. They're under siege from the alien insect "them" outside the fence of their colony, and it's a slow and deliberate siege. Gene quickly understands what the humans don't - the bugs are testing their defenses and slowly wearing them down over months. But there's far more going on than that, and secrets being kept from Gene. He doesn't like that at all.