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.
March 2004: Judge Dredd's supporting cast grows with another newly introduced clone in prog 1380. Inside is episode three of "Brothers of the Blood" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, in which we meet Dolman, a rookie who, like Rico before him, is a clone of Old Stony Face. However, Dolman is very much his own man, and, as the story continues, he looks forward to leaving the academy and making his own way. Rico is assigned to spend a day with him on the streets to try to shake some sense into him. He introduces him to Vienna, last seen in progs 1350-1356, who is recovering from her ordeal in Brit-Cit, and who welcomes him to the "family."
February 2004: I guess that this week's entry really is proof that I'm not the same gleefully malevolent critic that I was in the early '90s, writing for the university newspaper. Once upon a time, the prospect of writing an epic, pages-long takedown of a series as misbegotten and brainless as Valkyries would have been something to look forward to, but now it's just depressing and tedious. Life is too short to waste even reading garbage like this, let alone writing about the experience. The cover art pictured here is by Frazer Irving and it is, by leagues, the best thing about the series, about which the most interesting thing I can impart is that it is the worst 2000 AD series of the past ten years, and the only one about which I can't find a single redeeming thing to say. There have been other great big steaming disappointments in the prog over the last ten years - Bison, Detonator X and the second series of The Ten-Seconders come to mind - but only Valkyries stands up as a complete waste of paper, time and talent. It really does rank down there with the worst of the early '90s misfires. Think Wire Heads bad.
January 2004: This week, one of those short entries I promised myself that I would write. Over in the Megazine, editor Alan Barnes has, without question, turned the comic into the best it has ever been, with an exciting, fresh balance of really good new comics and a handful of very good reprints. Of particular interest is a new series called Whatever Happened To, which are one-offs done by a rotating bank of creators following up on old characters from the pages of Judge Dredd. First up is Pat Mills and Chris Weston showing that Dredd is still looking out for Tweak, the snouted alien who helped the lawman way back in the 1978 epic "The Cursed Earth," and this issue, we've got Gordon Rennie and Graham Manley introducing us to Maria, Dredd's housekeeper from the strip's early days, who has passed away with a surprising secret.
December 2003: Buried in the bubble between Tharg's mighty hands on the cover of this year's annual prog is the announcement that Robo-Hunter returns inside. That's exciting news, even greater than the cover's artwork by the great Duncan Fegredo. Robo-Hunter last appeared in 1995, with writer Peter Hogan and artist Rian Hughes at the helm. Theirs was a terrific series, whimsical, clever, pleasantly surprising at every turn, and only suffers by comparison to the original run by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson because those three created my all-time favorite comic series. And now, Grant and Gibson have reunited to resume this popular series, as though they'd never been away. Although Samuel C. Slade himself is mostly absent from the story. Holy Joe Smith, great god of robo-hunters, what has happened to your old pal?
November 2003: In the last installment, I talked about three serials which appeared in the late summer and fall of 2000 AD and its sister comic, Judge Dredd Megazine. Just so we're all on the same page, I think of a serial as a one-off storyline with a definite beginning and end, as opposed to a series, in which a recurring character like Johnny Alpha or a group like the ABC Warriors returns every so often for a new story. It's a bit tricky to schedule these, because it's the characters who get fandom excited and keep our interest - we all want to see our favorites return for another go-around, whereas a one-off serial has to convince us it's worth it every week. In 2003, Tharg's bank of recurring series was really quite low compared to almost any other period, so that left the editors and creators two tasks: develop new characters to hook contemporary audiences, and create some really stunning, memorable serials while the new cast of regulars gets settled in. As we saw in the previous installment, they were mostly very successful indeed. Leviathan, From Grace and XTNCT were all quite popular with readers. There were exceptions - nobody liked Dead Men Walking, a serial written by former editor David Bishop with art by Boo Cook - but overall the work was very solid.
It has to be said that Campbell and Townsend's art has improved tremendously since we last saw it. Either by intention or the result of rushing, the last few shortcut-packed episodes of Bison were laughably poor, but Synnamon mostly crackles with interesting panel layouts and a sleek, minimal futuristic design. It's not completely consistent; in fact, there is a panel on page two of episode eight which is absolutely gobsmacking in its poor anatomy. For the most part, however, this has to rate as an improvement over the earlier effort.
October 2003: This completely excellent cover by D'Israeli is well-timed to appear here at the blog because it's a potent reminder that Leviathan, a wonderful serial that he drew, scripted by Ian Edginton, is coming back into print in Rebellion's paperback line. A hardback was released in 2006, but it's been out of print for a while. In fact, the new edition is solicited to retailers this very month in the pages of that Previews catalog that they all get. If you've never heard of Leviathan, it's set on the world's largest ocean liner some twenty years after it vanished at sea. It mixes a murder mystery with a tale of society breaking down after two decades in isolation, a population still trying to enforce the class codes of Britain in the 1920s unable to understand where they are and what happened to them. If it sounds intriguing, then you should get on the horn to your local funnybook emporium and tell 'em to order you a copy. (I should probably swing by a comic shop and get the page number, just to make it easier for you, but it's out of my way.)