146. Indigo Prime is back, and it's about time. And other things.

September 2011: Today, we jump about seven years ahead in the narrative in order to look back more than twenty. We can only do this - well, that's not true, it's my blog and I'll do what I want with it, but play along - we can only do this when there's been such a massive upheaval to reality that somebody needs to come along and manipulate time, space, parallel universes and the building blocks of matter and fix things to our liking. It's time to contract with the agents of Indigo Prime, and hopefully, paying the invoice won't mean wiping your great-grandfather out of history. For new and recent readers of 2000 AD, the comic is about to get really, really weird. Old fogeys like me are rubbing our hands in anticipation and glee for the first proper new Indigo Prime adventure since 1991, but newbies might need a little explanation for what's about to be unleashed in the pages and pixels of prog 1750. This issue will be available from Clickwheel in digital format on September 14, but hard copy subscribers in the UK got their prog in the post five days ago. This is one of those times when the eleven-day gap between the two causes a small but nevertheless thermonuclear explosion between my ears.

I'm also writing this entry at the end of August, before the subscribers get their copy, and before I ruin things for myself by reading the spoiler threads on the message board. I'm very impatient about this.

So, what's the deal with Indigo Prime that warrants this kind of discussion? Most comic series, after all, even the ones returning to action after a long absence (such as Flesh) have a simple premise and a coherent backlist, so a newbie can hear a sentence description, grab a collected edition and jump right in. Well, Indigo Prime is a trifle incoherent, confusing, complex in the most lovely way and intermittently utterly brilliant, and despite the good intentions of a previous graphic novel editor, the "complete" collected edition is missing the first three stories and a sense of grounding to explain what the heck this series is about. So if you're sitting uncomfortably...

Back in 1986, John Smith was among the wave of writers breaking into 2000 AD, and the larger industry, through several one-off comic episodes, usually under the Tharg's Future Shocks banner. He was punching these out alongside the likes of Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison, Alan McKenzie and Neil Gaiman under Steve MacManus's editorship. Under MacManus's tenure, 2000 AD's format was a good bit more flexible than it is today. While, for years, we've had a fairly strict lineup of five stories in each issue, with one-offs usually scheduled to mark time between the end of a serial and the next relaunch prog, back then, MacManus was telling these and other rookie writers to turn in Future Shock scripts anywhere from one to five pages in length. With strips like Ace Trucking Company varying its page count week to week - probably to give its artist Massimo Belardinelli occasional chances to catch his breath and only draw three pages once in a while - and wild variations in the number of ad pages, 2000 AD was able to release weekly editions with as many as seven strips an issue. Actually, sometimes it was eight - I was forgetting that Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy's Sooner or Later was appearing most weeks on the back page at the time.

The point being, these rookie writers were able to fling a hell of a lot of ideas at the wall, far more than rookies get to these days, while learning the rules of short weekly episodes, and Smith found an interesting way to try building a small "universe" of interconnected strips. In 1986, with artist Nik Williams, he came up with a Future Shock called "A Change of Scenery," in which two strange beings named Basalt and Foundation, representing a company called Void Indiga, offer to spare Earth from a pending alien invasion, in return for a huge amount of the Earth's natural resources: the Pacific Ocean. Their offer is declined, but humanity quickly calls them back when the aliens overwhelm us. Basalt and Foundation change reality so that the invasion never happened, but the world's leaders, led by a Clint Eastwood-like American president, renege on our end of the deal. Basalt and Foundation cannot be found again when the next alien invasion comes. This story was finally reprinted in Rebellion's The Best of Tharg's Future Shocks collection.

Eighty issues later, in March of 1988, a new series by Smith and Steve Dillon was launched, without much in the way of hype or announcement. Tyranny Rex debuted as a light and odd little three-parter about a reptilian girl in a world where clones of 1980s pop stars are hugely profitable for big mega-corporations, and where pirated clones of these performers are singing across the black market. Tyranny was a sort of underground celebrity, an art terrorist one step ahead of The Man. It was a pretty stupid story, but just strange enough to be memorable. She returned in July with another three-parter about an actor opening a supermarket that gets swallowed by a giant floating whale. This was a weird series, albeit, up to this point, one told in a pretty straightforward way.



Things got really demented in July with the release of that year's Sci-Fi Special. The Tyranny Rex story here is untitled but referred to as "Woody Allen." Madly, it has never been reprinted, and confusingly it references another story, "Soft Bodies," which wouldn't see print in 2000 AD for another four months. (And then there would be a five week gap between its last two episodes. Seriously.)

Anyway, anybody who was expecting another frothy and light adventure for Tyranny Rex quickly got a wake up call when Basalt and Foundation showed up again. Now the company they are working for has been renamed Indigo Prime - Smith explained that he changed the name when he learned of a Steve Gerber property that was one letter off from his - and Tyranny has hired their services so that she may build herself a universe from the atoms of one that's just expired. She's actually there not to play God, but to cause enough spectacular damage to the fabric of everything that the universe where she came from starts suffering cataclysmic aftershocks. She's basically using parallel universes to avenge the death of her species, and it leaves Major Arcana, one of the company's directors, out for the blood of the two freelance "psilencers" who cleared Tyranny for this level of power, and then overbilled the company. (Though I suspect that Arcana has really, really hated these guys for ages anyway.)

We finally get to know the freelancers Fervent and Lobe, the time-traveling psychic cowboys who made that fleeting appearance in "Woody Allen," when "Soft Bodies," illustrated by Will Simpson, appeared sporadically throughout October and December 1988. They got their own eight-part story, "The Issigri Variations," the following autumn. It's a comic about an opera that the characters wrote after an adventure descending into Hell on a false trail that results in Satan breaking free of his shackles and threatening a universe or two. Basalt, Foundation and Major Arcana have to bail them out of this mess, which also introduces Lobe's former girlfriend, a morbidly obese fortune teller named Almaranda.

It must be said here that Simpson and Mike Hadley, who drew "The Issigri Variations," deserve combat medals for making any sense of Smith's scripts. In much the same way that the late John Hicklenton would often throw down his gauntlet and confrontationally challenge what we expect as traditional comic art storytelling, Smith just goes to war with conventional narrative in these stories. Some chunks of "Soft Bodies" are excerpts from the film adaptation of the actual event, and some chunks of "Issigri Variations" are highlights from a musical stage performance of what really happened. Neither the film nor the opera are fair or accurate adaptations. At one point in "Soft Bodies," Fervent and Lobe are shown at a screening of the movie, protesting that the director got it wrong. Perhaps this is why the comic adaptation of "Soft Bodies" saw print after "Woody Allen." The actual event came first, but the movie came later? Anyway, both are just huge fun, but when you take these very, very challenging ways to tell stories, and then tell very dense and confusing tales about art terrorists, disintegrating bootleg clones, rewriting reality and, somewhere in the background, a corporation that unzips the walls of time and space for profit, and then tell these narratives with Smith's over-the-top purple prose - the "shatterlight shatterlight p o p p y c o c k" stuff, as Garth Ennis once parodied it - it's no wonder this stuff was trying people's patience.



So about seven months passed, and in May 1990, we finally got the first of five episodes, illustrated by Chris Weston, that actually went out under the Indigo Prime banner. Somehow, the Tharg of the time (Richard Burton, I think) resisted the urge to promote it by saying "At last! Those weird-ass supporting characters who've been making your head hurt for four years have their very own series!" These appeared in issues 678 and 680-82, and they are completely terrific, although still wonderfully weird and challenging. We learn that Indigo Prime is in the business of re-making and re-modeling whatever reality and whatever events are paid for, through the use of sceneshifters, who manipulate space, seamsters, who manipulate time, and imagineers, who have the most fun and manipulate dreams and the collective unconsciousness.

Indigo Prime employs at least fifty-four operatives, working in teams of two, for full-time field work across all the parallel universes, along with another eighteen or so freelance Psilencers and moderators and countless office staff to monitor events. Most of them, by far, are never seen (about which, more in a moment), but we get to meet the signature team of Winwood and Cord, seamsters, in a little adventure tracking an important inventor from an Earth's future back through a hole in time to prehistory. Max Winwood is a well-dressed dandy who mixes well into Victorian or Edwardian culture, and Ishmael Cord is a muscular, slightly vulgar fellow in a top hat with body odor issues. In "How the Land Lied," we meet another pair of sceneshifters: Sean Fegredo (named, one suspects, for two of the artists who worked on Smith's The New Statesmen, yeah?) is a big-haired oddball who looks like the BBC-TV version of Zaphod Beeblebrox with just the one head, and Trevor Brecht is a London city gent, and they're brought on by planetary theme park developers to eradicate a culture that based itself on teevee transmissions from the 1970s and worships the images of actors Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul. That was it for the spring. In December 1990, Fervent and Lobe got one more story, again drawn by Hadley, in that year's Winter Special. Almaranda came back for a two-parter in March 1991.

There are many really neat things in the narrative of Indigo Prime, but one of the things that I like the best is that there is a simply huge cast of characters whom the readers don't meet. In the comics, we are only introduced to six of the 54 full-timers, and none of these pairs meet or interact with each other. It has always reminded me of television's Sapphire & Steel, where a weird plot gets started, and then these strange protagonists show up, with nothing more than little hints of where they come from and who sent them. In much the same way that in that first TV serial, a supporting agent called Lead arrives and, with one line of dialogue addressed to Steel, "Jet sends her love," a thousand fanfics were launched, Indigo Prime tickled the imagination of readers. There's a single panel of flashback in the final story of the original run that appears to show more than a dozen Indigo Prime operatives locking an old villain away. So do these guys know each other pretty well? Do they work together or do they have petty rivalries? Do they have interoffice romances in the vacuum of unclaimed universes, sneaking away to the other side of a collapsing star during the holiday party?

In a way, all this hidden backstory is reminiscent of the huge amount of background apocrypha that Smith, clearly influenced by Watchmen, prepared for The New Statesmen. That's understandable; a writer as young as Smith was at the time is bound to let his excited imagination prepare far more material than is really necessary, but releasing supporting details like the company's organizational chart had a remarkable impact on Indigo Prime's fans. It made an already strong series much more memorable because of the stories that we knew were out there, but had not yet read. And we haven't even got to "Killing Time" yet, which is when everything really ramped up.

Oh, yes, "Killing Time," easily one of the wildest things to ever appear in 2000 AD. Up to this point, Indigo Prime had been an incredibly neat, dense and occasionally fantastic little series, but in my book, "Killing Time" remains one of the finest things to ever appear in this or any other comic.

"Killing Time," if I may cannibalize my old essay at "Touched By the Hand of Tharg," was a truly shocking ten-part story in which seamsters Max Winwood and Ishmael Cord allow Jack the Ripper, disguised as a traveler on a train that travels backwards in time, to complete his last murder in order to provide the burst of psychic energy needed for them to leave all known realities and battle the Iscariot, a creature imprisoned outside time and space who was using the Ripper to ensure its own freedom. Smith's scripting on this beast is a masterwork of horror - each episode builds upon the previous with some absolutely stunning moments and horrendous imagery by Weston. The story is discussed in much greater detail by my friend David Page at his YouTube-based 2000 AD blog, Dead'll Do, in a five-part retrospective that you should enjoy viewing.

It's understood that stories like "Killing Time" will enjoy some inventive bloodshed along the way, and that the supporting cast includes characters you probably shouldn't get too attached to. But with death scenes as nightmarish and downright bizarre as what gets meted out in this story, Smith took the high-concept weirdness of Prime's unusual SF origins into something jawdropping and horrific. 2000 AD should always be dangerous and unconventional - it's what makes it better than any other comic - but never mind what happens to the guest stars and the baddies, the heroes in adventure series simply never meet the sort of fate that awaits Winwood and Cord in "Killing Time." Not one person who read the finale in 1991 did so without exclaiming aloud.

Which made it very odd that, after it, there was silence.

Smith lost interest in Indigo Prime after this and moved on to other things. Among them was the disappointing Scarab, an eight-issue miniseries from DC's Vertigo imprint in 1993-94. Disagreements with editorial and management left this the remnants of a planned, ongoing Dr. Fate series. Having written his characters into a wall and realizing that low sales and corporate indifference meant that it didn't matter what he did any longer, Smith invented a couple of new characters called Dazzler and Creed who act exactly like Indigo Prime agents and had them save the day. They don't appear on Indigo Prime's organizational chart and that agency is never named in Scarab - wouldn't want to give anybody any trademark advantage - but it's otherwise very much like the stunt that Steve Gerber pulled when he freed his creation Howard the Duck from the character's owners in an issue of Savage Dragon, entering him and Bev into Image Comic's witness protection program as "Leonard the Duck" and "Rhonda." Since we have Gerber to thank, in a roundabout way, for the name Indigo Prime, I consider that appropriate symmetry.

It also means, since DC later incorporated Scarab into their mainstream superhero universe for some idiotic reason, that Smith can have Indigo Prime just close off and shut down that entire fiction as a waste of time.



Well, there was actually a little more from this property, but not as a comic. There were a few additional Indigo Prime text stories that appeared in the pages of various 2000 AD summer specials and Yearbooks in the early 1990s. Honestly, without the visuals and the language of comics, I didn't think that these worked at all, but the determined might find a little amusement in "Weird Vibes," which introduces imagineers Carrol Walken and Miles Quiche. It appeared in the 1993 Yearbook.

Well, all times and all places are the same to Indigo Prime, but those of us in this world had to wait until 2008 before seeing them again. This came at the very end of a twelve-part serial called Dead Eyes by Smith and Lee Carter that ran that spring in issues 1577-1588. It looked like, again, Smith was writing himself into yet another cul-de-sac when everything shut down and the protagonist was yanked out of his dying reality by none other than Winwood and Cord, last seen mutilated and helpless at the end of "Killing Time." They were depicted, in that brief, tantalizing moment, as not having got out of that mess entirely intact.

That spring's lineup was a really disappointing one, but the end of Dead Eyes almost made up for the whole thing. Fandom jumped and we all punched the air. Indigo Prime was back! Winwood and Cord survived! Could this be the setup for their return?! Well, kind of. It's been three and a half years since that wild moment. We finally got confirmation in the summer of 2010 that the series would be returning. Everything else has been drumming fingers on the desk waiting.

There is a book, co-published by DC and Rebellion during their short-lived enterprise, called The Complete Indigo Prime. It isn't. It's got the 1989-91 episodes from "Issigri Variations" through "Killing Time" complete, but lacks the appearances in "A Change of Scenery," "Woody Allen" and "Soft Bodies" that let readers understand what the hell they're about to read. As a book, it's therefore a complete mess, starting with the most difficult story, the narrative-attack of "Issigri." I don't know whether there's a more dizzying example of being thrown in at the deep end in comics.

As for the future, Tharg and John Smith have been quiet about what to expect. I sincerely hope that this new series, at last, heralds the long overdue great big domination of 2000 AD by one of my all-time favorites. Given John Smith's, shall we say, mercurial tendencies towards committing to a series long-term (where in the hell is the next Devlin Waugh story, man?!) and editor Matt Smith's tendencies against keeping anything in the prog for much more than twelve weeks at a time, this might well turn into another frustration of occasional short runs and brief appearances without any momentum to keep things going. But I've got my fingers crossed that this initial run of perhaps three months will be a huge success and we'll see a lot more of the series, and many more of its huge cast of characters and realities.

I think that we've waited quite long enough, thank you!

Next time, back to 2004 and that year's Christmas prog, which gives me another chance to talk about Samantha Slade. Aren't you grateful?

145. What Grant Was Writing

December 2004: While new names like Steve Roberts, Dom Reardon and Boo Cook have been blowing readers away at 2000 AD this year, over at the sister Judge Dredd Megazine, veterans have been getting all the assignments. There are five new strips in this issue, and the newest creator working on them is Colin MacNeil, whose first Judge Dredd episode came about fifteen years previously. True, there is a Simping Detective text story by newcomer Si Spurrier, illustrated by Frazer Irving, but the strips are all by veterans. There's a Devlin Waugh one-off by John Smith and MacNeil, and four strips written or co-written by old hands John Wagner and Alan Grant, with art by John Higgins, Robin Smith, Arthur Ranson and John Ridgway. Along with other text features and reprints of Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, it's a terrific comic, but not one with much room for new talent.

Ridgway is among the artists rotating on Grant's Young Middenface, a strip that's probably completely impenetrable to new readers. They're prequel adventures of a supporting character in Strontium Dog, somebody who has not been seen in "the present" for more than five years at this point. Wagner and Ezquerra had not reintroduced Middenface McNulty to the pages of their revived Strontium Dog adventures at the time this story was printed, and so these Young Middenface chronicles, which vary wildly in tone from broad and bawdy comedy to the action melodrama of this story, "Killoden," are really fan service for longtime readers. They're very well-told and well-drawn, but with Grant writing these and Anderson: Psi Division and, over in the weekly, Robo-Hunter, you can't help but wish that no matter how good these stories are, you'd prefer Alan Grant working on a property a little more fresh.

Judge Anderson, for example, reflects that she's pushing fifty in the opening episode of "Lock-In," which sees her returning to service after her last couple of psychic-plane adventures. Wow, it's been a really long and strange trip for Cass at this point. In the late nineties, her strip had been a recurring feature in 2000 AD under David Bishop and Andy Diggle's editorships. In 2001, a ten-part story, "R*Evolution," had appeared to instant reader derision that lasts to this day. (Just last month, one of my friends at the 2000 AD message board who goes by the handle "The Cosh" referred to this story as, simply, "Stupid Monkeys." Everybody knew which one he meant and everybody shuddered.) In the summer of 2002, John Wagner had Judge Death get Anderson out of his way, putting her into a coma in the celebrated "My Name is Death" six-parter. Frankly, Anderson had been so non-thrilling for so long, and that story was so damned amazing, that nobody really minded this once-loved character being sidelined.

Obviously, when Alan Grant returned to the character, he had a lot of work to do to make her seem vital and important again. He accomplished this in a really fantastic series of interlocking adventures, all drawn by Ranson, that cover 24 episodes stretching from Meg 214 in January '04 to Meg 241 in February '06. These have not received the attention that I believe that they should, and have yet to be reprinted. (Cass's reprints are, happily, continuing, with the second volume of The Psi-Files phonebooks planned for next February. This will cover all the episodes from 1990 to early 1995. We're getting there!)

Anyway, "Lock-In" is the third of five stories in Grant and Ranson's epic, and it really digs into how weird and how fragile and failing Psi Division really is. The story began with Cass unable to free herself from the coma, thanks to a series of psychic mind-traps left behind by Judge Death and his freaky "sisters," the inhuman Phobia and Nausea. Since her superiors didn't get the message that she needed to be left alone to prevent a virus from leaving her mind should it become conscious again, they send a team of agents and operatives onto the astral plane to revive her. Absolutely nothing goes right, readers learn just how unpleasantly creepy certain departments of Psi Division are - I didn't know what an extispist was until I read "WMD," the second of the five stories - and supporting characters meet gruesome ends and crippling fates all over the place. By the time Cass is brought out of the coma, you start to wonder whether she'd prefer a quiet retirement.



I might be mistaken, but I believe that this 24-episode, 208-page arc storyline was Ranson's last comic work before he retired. I suppose that it will get collected in the Psi-Files phonebooks eventually, but it's a real epic, overlooked by many readers at the time, and deserves a nice, hardback library edition on its own. I am really, really enjoying rereading it. Sure, The Simping Detective and Cursed Earth Koburn got all the attention among Meg stories at the time - and deservedly so; they're great - but I think this saga will be reevaluated in time.

Suggesting that the editor might have been leaning on Alan Grant's considerable talents a wee bit too much in '04, he's also at work co-writing the fourth adventure for The Bogie Man. One fine day, somebody's going to give this creator-owned property a nice and prestige reprint and I'll be incredibly happy. I'll refer readers who'd like a little more background to Wikipedia to learn more, but basically, Grant, John Wagner and Robin Smith did one story for John Brown Publishing in 1989-1991, a second story which was finished for Atomeka Press in 1993 and a third story which appeared in the pages of Toxic! before the second story was completed. "Return to Casablanca" is the first Bogie Man tale in eleven years.

If you're not familiar with the character, he's a very dangerous, escaped mental patient named Francis Forbes Clunie, who believes that he's an amalgam of all the tough, leading characters played in films by Humphrey Bogart. He turns every bit of information he receives into something from the fiction of that actor's iconic films, but his gun is loaded with real bullets.



So the character is basically a tabula rasa, to be dropped into other characters' criminal adventures and wreak holy hell onto them. I mean, you might well be a criminal mastermind with schemes to use your white slavery ring to force eastern European immigrants to make shortbread for you, and you might well be prepared for any possible eventuality, but you're not likely to factor Clunie into your scheme. It's a demented, hilarious, utterly ridiculous series, with the completely unpredictable Bogie Man usually crashing into the more baffling segments of Scottish culture - Americans, go watch "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" to see what I mean - and emerging unscathed and barely ruffled.

A supporting player from an earlier story called Rab McNab turns up again in this one. He's a devilish parody of those safe, 1970s teatime entertainers allegedly popular with housewives of the day - think Rolf Harris singing "Please Release Me" in a Scottish accent - who is desperately trying to hold onto his career and his sobriety while everything around him spirals out of control, bad guys are shooting up the place and Clunes is, obliviously, punching the daylights out of everybody. This poor guy. Man, I love this series.

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

Well, here's a surprise. The only thing in this issue to have been reprinted so far is the Simping Detective text story, in : The Complete Simping Detective (2000 AD's Online Shop)



Next time, the present collides with the past! I'll be temporarily derailing this reread format for one week for a quick look back at John Smith's Indigo Prime as this amazing series returns to present-day 2000 AD with a new adventure. Normal service, such as it is, will be resumed on the 15th!

144. What Wagner Was Writing

November 2004: Prog 1415 reminds me of just how much I dislike the loudmouthed comic book fandom literati. This is because, while the prog has some pretty darn good stories in the form of Faces by Mindy Newell and John Higgins, Lobster Random by Si Spurrier and Carl Critchlow and Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Jack Lawrence, they're all completely blown out of the water by the two veteran series that bookend the issue. John Wagner has written both the current stories for Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog and they're both completely incredible. You know what comics were better than these in 2004? None of them. John Wagner's name should have been in lights that year. And every year. He's consistently the very best writer in all of comics. "Total War" and "Traitor To His Kind" just prove it.

So the situation in "Total War" is this: the terrorist group of that name, last seen putting things together in the recent story "Terror," has issued an ultimatum to the judges of Mega-City One. They have secreted several nuclear devices - much like the "dirty bombs" that were all over the news that year - of varying power into hiding places throughout the city. They detonate a small one, killing hundreds of thousands, to prove that they're serious, and announce that larger bombs will be going off at regular intervals until the judges hand over their power and leave the city. Simple as that.

With one caveat, this is a completely terrific story. For readers who enjoy the more cerebral, detective fiction side of Dredd, this is one of the all-time best stories. Future technologies and the oppressive city surveillance are incredibly important in this race against time to find the bombs and find the terrorists. Watching the judges, especially long-time supporting player PSU Judge Roffman, desperately working under incredible pressure for any clue and any lead, is a real treat. The dead ends are completely heartbreaking. There's a real sense of despair when so much work goes into identifying one of Total War's top men, and the arrest goes flat when the judges learn he'd killed himself hours previously.

Two-thirds of the way through the story, there's a twisting development that I did not enjoy. Perhaps Wagner had created too clever a villain, and an organization that covered its tracks too well for even the trained investigators of Justice Department to find, but the twist that brings the judges a needed break is just too convenient for my liking. On the other hand, it really didn't matter at the time. The simple appearance of an old man with an eye patch somehow, in the hands of Wagner and artist Henry Flint, turns into one amazing cliffhanger when read weekly.

There's also a very cool subplot dealing with Dredd's niece Vienna. Early on, before the terrorists' demands are made, we are introduced to another clone made from Dredd's genetic stock, but this one has suffered severe brain damage and is deteriorating quickly. The tek judges consider Dredd the clone's next of kin and ask his permission to euthanize him. Dredd replies that he's certainly not any "next of kin" and tells them not to involve him. So they involve Vienna instead. Vienna's dealing with this and keeping her uncle Joe dragged in brings the two story threads crashing together as millions try to flee the city by any means necessary. Mega-City One being what it is, everything spirals completely out of control.



As good as this Dredd serial is, I'm not sure that Johnny Alpha's latest case isn't better. "Traitor to His Kind" is a mean political thriller. Alpha is called to Earth to track down Clarkie, the King of England, who's been abducted by mutant terrorists. King Clarkie had first been introduced back in the 1980s, a fun little parody of "I Say, Jolly What"-styled upper class twits. Now, his government is quietly keeping his abduction secret, and the minister who's brought Alpha into the picture, to smoothly and discreetly rescue him, is playing a really interesting game, keeping many plates in the air.

This is a really great story that has Alpha working pretty far outside his comfort zone. I mean, it's normal that he can't really trust anybody, but this time out, the stakes are a lot higher. He's been using the wealth of his bounties to help rebuild the mutant ghettos of Milton Keynes, and is much loved by that community. But now, as gossip is filtering around that somebody has abducted the king in a bid for more rights for mutants, Alpha is on entirely the wrong side of public opinion. Add in the usual Strontium Dog tricks of a hatefully two-faced British government and previously unmentioned family members making appearances, and this one's a taut and mean winner of a story.

Honestly, I'd have bet good money on Clarkie not getting out of this one alive. The character had earlier, in the epic, controversial "Final Solution," been seen to be executed, but in these revisionist, untold tales of Strontium Dog, there was always the feeling that Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra were going to change things around in a big way. Here, they don't, although "The Final Solution" would come up for major reappraisal in 2010.



These are both absolutely excellent stories. Wagner may not be writing darn near everything like he seemed to in the 1980s, but his work is consistently of the highest quality. He's absolutely the best, most reliable craftsman in the medium of comics, and this issue provides all the evidence that I need to make that claim. Comic fans that ignore Wagner's work are doing themselves a huge disservice.

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

Judge Dredd: Total War (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Strontium Dog: Traitor To His Kind (2000 AD's Online Shop)


Next time, Anderson's new do and the Meg premiere of The Bogie Man get the spotlight as I look at what Wagner's frequent collaborator Alan Grant was doing. See you next week!

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!