176. Two Come Along At Once

June 2007: A very, very short (time-sensitive) entry this week, to acknowledge that this was the neat little point where Pat Mills got to launch two brand-new series in the same week. Defoe, illustrated by Leigh Gallagher, is the more successful of the two. It really goes over very well with the readership and features the great Mills standard of throwing an incredible amount of ideas and information at you and seeing what sticks. It's set in 1668, two years after a comet has reanimated the dead, and our hero is the tough-as-nails Titus Defoe, saving the city of London from an army of "reeks" - the word "zombie" hadn't entered our lexicon in the 17th Century, of course - who are shown to be under the control of a fantastic general. In a fantastic sequence, the master villain of this story is the decapitated head of Oliver Cromwell, used by the reek army to interrupt the king's privacy by being mounted on a long pole and banged against the window of his majesty's bedchamber.

This first adventure is pretty straightforward, although Mills really introduces a heck of a lot of characters, backstory and wild, weird weaponry. Sir Isaac Newton has been outfitting the good guys with all sorts of cool guns, tanks, and ornithopters, while conducting strange and ungodly experiments with reeks to find out what's causing their rampage. Newton might be the only historical figure to feature as a supporting player in two 2000 AD series at the same time. Both here and in The Red Seas, he's depicted, not without good reason, as one of the smartest men in England.

Over the course of the first four stories, Defoe picks up a pretty huge supporting cast - honestly, having some short sidebar stories digging into their backgrounds would help enormously - and a much broader range of bad guys as the extent of the villainy is shown to be infecting much of Europe as well. Rumor has it that a fifth Defoe story is expected in 2013.

On the other hand, no more Greysuit is presently expected. It's a much more straightforward adventure, with far less of the backstory that informs Defoe. It begins as a a slight revamping of the popular 1977-78 series MACH One, only this time around, it's influenced more by Jason Bourne than by the Six Million Dollar Man. The hero is John Blake - initials probably not a coincidence - and he's a Delta-Class assassin for the British government. He's been given superhuman strength and reaction speed, as have a few other people in his department.

Delta agents are programmed to obey their orders, but Blake has a soft spot for children. He's ordered to kill three bank robbers, but one of them bargains for his life with evidence that a top government official is involved in a child slavery ring. Blake goes out on his own to avenge the crimes, and is, literally, busting heads across Europe. One thing that really makes Greysuit stand out is the remarkable, visceral violence. John Higgins gets to draw some unbelievable brutality. When Blake uses his super-strength on somebody, he shatters their skull, jawbones and teeth flying free in the goriest way.

There are only two Greysuit stories. We'll have to come back to the negative reaction to the second adventure some other time.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Defoe: 1666 (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Greysuit: Project Monarch (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)

Speaking of negative reaction, we'll be back in seven days not to bury Samantha Slade on the occasion of her final adventure, but to praise her. See you in a week!

175. Speaking Sick of the Dead

May 2007: On the front cover of Meg 259, Clint Langley brings vivid, weird computerized color to John Hicklenton's pen and inks, and a truly vile and nasty villain is brought to life. He's called, alternately, Lord Omega or X-Face, and he's the antagonist in the controversial and very weird "Blood of Satanus III," in which, well, heck, I don't know. This is a story that absolutely defies conventional description or a simple recounting of the plot, because it is more dense, more weird, and more challenging than just about anything that Pat Mills has ever written, and that includes Requiem. There are no mild reactions to it. A few people embrace it for its gauntlet-throwing spectacle; many, many more loathe it utterly for gobbing in the eyes of comics, but, in the wake of Hicklenton's sad end a couple of years later, denying the multiple sclerosis that was ravaging his body any more success by kicking the disease in the head and ending his life prematurely at the Dignitas center in Switzerland, the skeptics took a kinder view, and said no more about it.

I do recall reading Hicklenton's first work in 2000 AD, 1986's "You're Never Alone With a Phone" - written by Neil Gaiman, it was - when it was first published. The second, 1987's "Invisible Etchings of Salvador Dali" - that's right, he started his professional career by illustrating first Gaiman and then Grant Morrison - eluded me for quite some time, owing to erratic distribution in the US. His artwork on the "Phone" story struck me as weird and wonderful from the start. There's a panel depicting the smell-a-vision phone, where the person, repulsed by her correspondant's garlicky meal before calling, turns her head in such a way that it looks like her nose and mouth are trying to crawl away from her face.

And then there was Book Seven of Nemesis the Warlock. I remember seeing episode one of that beast and lingering over how dense and full the panels were, how it looked like Hicklenton spent more time on each individual drawing than I had spent over the previous seven years of trying to think I was learning to draw on stacks and stacks of notebook paper. Nemesis himself didn't show up until the final panel, and if Hicklenton's depiction of him didn't make your eyes pop out of your head the first time you saw him, then you were not paying attention. Hicklenton's Nemesis was all visceral and organic, with the real curvature of nature's ugliest animals, a hideous mating of a water buffalo, a giraffe and some undersea beast - a very far cry from Bryan Talbot's superhero with a funny head and knees. Just that one panel - Purity Brown reinvisioned as a nose-broken, plain, anti-heroine and Nemesis, beady eyes atop a curving stalk of a neck - demanded the arrival of episode two immediately, in a way that the usual cliffhanger, dependent on a plot twist, never can. The writing threw no surprise at the reader - Nem and Purity were in 16th-Century Spain along with their enemy Torquemada - but we had to see the next episode to see more of the artwork.

Nemesis Book Seven is more packed with powerful, unforgettable images like that than just about any other storyline that has ever appeared in the comic. Torquemada having his feet oiled. Torquemada in that torture chair. His namesake smiling pleasantly, encouraging his future self to tell him more. Nemesis throwing his arms back and filling the air with flies. Torquemada spitting on his chainsword, the reflection of Thoth running from him. Thoth bidding farewell to Satanus in the Cretaceous Period - "it was the end of an era." Oh, and that utterly horrific, final shot of Thoth, his small body cruelly and savagely... yeesh. If you read this story just one time, you recall every one of those images.

Hicklenton certainly came up with memorable work after that - nobody's going to forget those fatties hitting the ground in that episode of Heavy Metal Dredd, ever - but that was, to my mind, his crowning glory. Nothing that he ever did matched Nemesis Book Seven for detail and imagination. Certainly we can forgive "Blood of Satanus III" for lacking the intricacy of his early work, because just holding a pen in 2007 caused him incredible discomfort, but over the course of his career, Hicklenton set out to challenge readers and break the rules.

His panel compositions and breakdowns started getting very obtuse on both Heavy Metal Dredd and, most thunderously, in a 1995 serial called Pandora, which is just so damn weird that I'm not convinced that Hicklenton wasn't deliberately trying to alienate everybody who wanted to read it. It's something like thirty-six pages without a single transition or establishing shot, where a solid third of the panels don't seem to depict anything from the script whatever. Having found his specialty in depictions of brutality and ugliness, he was unhappy doing anything conventional.

"Blood of Satanus III" is certainly not easy to follow either, and it's not easy on the eye, but what hurts the most is looking at the parade of nasty imagery and demonic nightmares and knowing that the artist was less able to depict them than he was twenty years previously. Only the sickest of minds could come up with a design like the living mountain of shifting, fluid fat, or the politicians with two mouths, but Hicklenton's weak body simply couldn't draw it with the intensity that you just know that he wanted. The inks are solid blacks and thin lines, with none of the splatters of detail that marked his early work.

As for the story's plot, I don't think that it really matters. It's something to do with a portal to another dimension, and hellish beasts who've been influencing all of humanity's bad behavior getting the chance to act overtly and do horrible things, and Dredd spearheading a mission into the circular world from which they came to strike back. But what it really is, bluntly, is a good opportunity for Hicklenton to unleash his freakish, nightmarish and brutal imagination one last time. We can all wish that maybe it would have hung together as a story a little better and been a bit more comprehensible, but we got a long, last, ugly, ugly look at Hicklenton's demons before he left us. That's a good thing.

This issue of the Megazine also features a tribute, written by Michael Molcher, to the late, great Massimo Belardinelli, who had passed away a couple of months previously. Here was an artist who I only came to appreciate after some time. The first I remember seeing of Belardinelli's work was likely a one-off (a Future Shock without the Future Shock masthead) called "Bad Vibrations" from the early 400s, and an Ace Trucking Company story, "The Nightlight Flight," that I could barely understand because the writing was so incredibly weird. (What was with this author? Grant Grover? Did this guy just not speak English or something? I caught on eventually...) Oh, and Mean Team, which was hopeless. He seemed like an ordinary and nondescript artist stuck with the crummiest and lousiest scripts, when, of course, Massimo was very, very far from ordinary.

Belardinelli's best work was behind him when I discovered him, although he still had some occasional terrific things to come, like 1987's The Dead. I just caught him in a mid-career lull, a short break in a spectacle of hyper-quality. Had I been following 2000 AD from the beginning, and seen his amazing work on Dan Dare, on Inferno, on Meltdown Man, on the first fantastic run of Ace Trucking, alternating with Mike McMahon on the first thirty-something episodes of Slaine, then I would have been a fan much earlier on.

He never seemed to be driven by nightmares in quite the way Hicklenton was, but there was often something ethereal, dreamlike, and really uncanny about his alien worlds and landscapes. Ace Trucking let him design dozens of freaky aliens doing weird stuff in the background, but it was a thoughtful and surprising and often very funny sort of weird, and not a nauseating one. He was never as imaginative or powerful in his designs for human characters, or the force and impact that they brought to the page, but when it came to aliens or technology or humanoid animals leaping out of the page, he was in a class by himself. That whole sequence on the frozen lake in Meltdown Man, where the evil, mind-controlling snake makes a break for it, is simply one of the most frantic and exciting sequences in the comic's history. You couldn't film it and make it more thrilling!

Mills has eulogized both of these artists, and been extraordinarily gracious and complimentary to the work they did his scripts. He's recently called for Rebellion to negotiate with the owners of Dan Dare's copyright to get the 2000 AD version reprinted. Some of it was, in the lousy American format in the late eighties, but only starting with Dave Gibbons' run. Those first six months, with Belardinelli in charge and Dan fighting the Biogs, have never been reprinted anywhere, meaning only the hardcore collectors have seen just how inventive and fun it was. He's also said that, until Simon Bisley painted the Slaine epic "The Horned God," nobody but Belardinelli had depicted the hero's warp-spasm right. Mills has often been very, very gracious to his artists for doing such great work on his scripts. They weren't always to my liking, but we were, honestly, really lucky to have so much great work from these two.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: "Street Fighting Man" in Lenny Zero & the Perps of Mega-City One (Amazon USA)

Next time, hey, speaking of Mills, you wait around for ages for a new Pat Mills creation, and then two come at once: Defoe and Greysuit. See you in seven!

174. Love Letter to Japan

April 2007: Prog 1534... Now is that a cover, or is that a cover? This amazing piece by Karl Richardson heralds the beginning of Detonator X, a ten-part serial by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell. It is, obviously, a gorgeously designed homage to 1950s drive-in sci-fi epics and their attendant, over-the-top movie posters and it just glows with its love of the genre. It also, in what was certainly not intended as a bait-and-switch, does not have much of a damn thing to do with the actual comic inside. See, while that cover speaks of a love for 1950s American trash cinema, the actual story was written from a love of 1970s Japanese cartoons. The audience for these two genres frequently overlaps, but they really aren't the same thing at all, are they? I'll tell you exactly what Detonator X feels like. It's like Ian Edginton spent his childhood playing with Popy Chogokin and Jumbo Machinder robots - they were distributed in the US by Mattel as "Shogun Warriors" and that's certainly what I spent my childhood doing - and watching Mazinger Z and Grandizer on TV every afternoon and saying "One day, I'm going to write a comic book just like that."

It's actually very weird reading an Edginton story that isn't a revisionist or subtle take on the genre where he's working. Stickleback is a very 21st Century take on Victorian detective fiction, with a criminal protagonist and a post-League of Extraordinary Gentlemen group of outlandish villains as his supporting cast upending the apparent premise of the ostensible star of the series, Valentine Bey, working in collaboration with or opposition to the criminal. The Red Seas mixes up just about every myth or legend that could possibly squeeze into a story about pirates, from krakens fighting the Colossus of Rhodes to Sir Isaac Newton fighting werewolves. The later Ampney Crucis Investigates will reinvision Lord Peter Wimsey as an action hero and send him fighting Cthulu through parallel universes. But Detonator X is just a simple love letter to the fiction that amazed Edginton's peers as kids.

And what's really weird is that Japanese writers and directors had spent the last fifteen years reconstructing and deconstructing the giant robot fiction that thrived from about 1966 to 1978 until there wasn't much left to twist into new shapes. To be clear, I'm referring to a specific genre of kids' adventure melodrama that developed around the time the Japanese TV companies started broadcasting cartoons in color. The networks started commissioning thousands of hours of gorgeously-designed and cheaply-animated kidvid nonsense, much of which was raced off from quickie pitches by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, by Go Nagai, by Shotaro Ishinomori, whose studios would then churn out tie-in comics for that country's weekly anthologies, and who would license the designs for toy companies to create, in bulk quantities, some of the greatest toys any child ever owned. The giant robot shows/comics/merchandise - Mazinger Z, Getter Robo - Starvengers, UFO Robo Gurendaiza - Grandizer - Goldorak, Fighting General Daimos, Brave Raideen, dozens of other also-rans - seemed to fade out around the time that the team superhero "sentai" live-action shows started, as did the amazingly long-lived Mobile Suit Gundam franchise.

But Gundam's run for so long that it started eating its own tail and deconstructing itself with its periodic reinventions and reboots, and comic artists and animation directors have been reviving old properties for new examination through adult and revisionist eyes for years before this silly love letter by Edginton started. Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo was relaunched in an extremely popular series of direct-to-video films by Yasuhiro Imagawa, himself a former Gundam producer/director, that placed characters from six or seven different 1960s comics into one eventually tedious "coming of age" / "hero's journey" narrative. Much of the '90s Robo production crew also worked on Big O, a short-lived TV series that adapted more Western tropes, and basically gave Bruce Wayne a giant robot. Then there was Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, a comic that ran from 1999 to 2006 (at least four years too long) and presented, as heroes, men who as kids had all been obsessed with giant robots and color live-action science fiction in their "secret society," and confront a cult leader who pretty much stole all his ideas from the bad guys in those sorts of melodramas. In other words, while there are many examples of modern fiction in Japan that use all these wacky old kids' teevee and forgettable junk comics for exactly the sort of deconstruction and genre-twisting that Edginton does so astonishingly well, given the chance, he just... writes a wacky old forgettable junk kids' comic.

It does, on the other hand, feature the deeply curious design work by Yeowell that gives us a tin can robot almost as clunky as Yokoyama's barrel-chested Gigantor, which predated the color giant robot era, and monsters that look a heck of a lot like the '90s American remake of Godzilla, leading everybody to wonder why Yeowell didn't borrow some Go Nagai comics from the actual period under the microscope. It's certainly vibrant and exciting and the action scenes move at a furious pace, but it does not in any fashion look like it should. Happily, the action scenes are often so good that it doesn't matter. In the panel above, Detonator X, lacking any weapons, just rips the arms off another giant robot and beats the hell out of a monster with them.

Detonator X also, sadly, sees Yeowell frequently not drawing any backgrounds and allowing Chris Blythe's coloring to paper over the cracks. This actually works here, since Blythe can polish anything, but his newfound shortcuts are going to set off alarm bells when The Red Seas returns later on and it looks like he ran out of ink for every page.

Speaking of deconstruction, I'd like to take a revisionist look at Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard's work on Savage. Here, the third story, "Double Yellow" is the last to be drawn by Adlard. In 2008, Patrick Goddard, who has drawn the next four "books" and, I understand, is presently at work on the forthcoming Book Eight, becomes the regular artist. He also seems to be on hand as the continuity changes completely. The Mills-Goddard Savage is still excellent and absolutely worth reading, but it's a different thing entirely from how comparatively grounded and visceral the Mills-Adlard take is. Below, just before the people of Occupied Britain rise up and get ready to throw the Volgans off their Green and Pleasant Land, our hero Bill takes out an important resistance leader who's actually a dirty Volg himself.

It goes without saying that Adlard draws the heck out of this sequence, as he does everything. The man's a genius. But at no point during his three stories does Adlard draw any robots or anybody named Howard Quartz, or anything that ties into Ro-Busters or ABC Warriors. Adlard's Savage is, outside of the Britain-under-SovietVolgan-control premise, free of fantastic elements. It's a powerful and brutal series. The second story had ended, unforgettably, with Bill killing Captain Jaksic, whom we thought for sure was going to be his ongoing nemesis, and then gunning down a dozen or more collaborators in a fancy restaurant. My God, what a comic that was.

"Double Yellow" can't top it, but it certainly tries. The previous story had ended with the revelation that Bill's brother Tom was killed by the Volg secret police, and so Bill goes out for vengeance and he genuinely doesn't care who suffers along the way. It's amazing and incredibly vibrant and at the end of this book, it really feels like his job is done, and that England's going to be okay. That's why I was so pleased that the collected edition - sadly out of print at the present, and certain to remain so for the foreseeable future as the publisher replenishes stock on Judge Dredd material in preparation for the film - compiles all three of Adlard's stories, so they function and feel like a unified and complete whole. I've reread them many times, while I'm actually not as familiar with the ones that Goddard has drawn. I'm very curious to revisit them, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, while I like and enjoy them, closer scrutiny will find me firmly believing that the Savage of Hammersteins and Blackbloods and teleporting tigers is a different continuity altogether. More on that when the reread gets us to prog 1577, and that'll be a bit down the road.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (Amazon UK)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, a few words about two artists no longer with us, Massimo Belardinelli and the always controversial John Hicklenton, as the narrative reaches the time of Belardinelli's sad death, and Hicklenton's final work for Judge Dredd Megazine. See you in seven!

173. Samantha's Finest Hour

March 2007: I wrote editor Matt Smith a letter around the time of this issue. Not Tharg, but the human who actually runs things. A "not intended for publication" letter, if you will. I just wanted to tell him thanks. See, several months before the release of this issue, prog 1530, I had filled out a personality profile on some website. Never you mind which one. I met a girl, we went out for a few months, it was all good. The profile asked me to name my top three this and my top three that, and my top three favorite artists. So I thought for a minute and typed "Ian Gibson, Carlos Ezquerra, Simon Fraser." Then I wondered whether there was ever actually an issue of 2000 AD that featured work by all three. As best as I could tell, there was not. Finally, with prog 1528 and the return of the Judge Dredd epic "Origins" after a nine-week break in the action, we had it. All three artists with pages in 2000 AD for a few weeks. I just had to say thanks. Sort of bittersweet, knowing how 2007 would play out, and what Smith clearly already knew about Gibson when he read that letter of mine. Still, issue 1530 has this amazingly nice Gibson cover of Samantha Slade looking very unhappy with events. I just love it.

For a few weeks there, Gibson was actually doing double-duty in the prog, with the last two episodes of a six-part Dredd story written by Gordon Rennie alongside the first two parts of the fifth Robo-Hunter story starring Samantha Slade. It is called "Casino Royal" and it is very much an overlooked classic. To be fair, Gibson's work doesn't quite scale the dizzy heights of the previous story. The ended-too-quickly "Stim!" featured such beautiful layouts and coloring, a palette of midnight blues and purples that showed the artist really sinking his teeth into Samantha Slade's world for the first time. "Casino Royal" doesn't quite match it, but there's only one moment that looks like Gibson's dissatisfaction bubbled to the surface: The mobster Tony Da Tongue has this girlfriend, and it looks to me like Gibson couldn't decide between making her a hideous, ugly, plastic surgery-and-too-much-makeup harridan with a va-va-voom bod, and just not drawing her head with any more care than the circle above the letter "i" in his signature. But enough about the stumble; let me wax a little about just how absolutely terrific "Casino Royal" otherwise is.

Strangely, the story appeared a few months later than it was announced. The title is, of course, a riff on the James Bond story, and Ian Gibson gets to draw caricatures of all the Bond film actors in the early episodes as background detail. According to the September 2006 issue of Previews, this story was scheduled to appear in November of that year, right as the highly-anticipated adaptation of that story, the first in the series to star Daniel Craig, would be released. But November came and went without the story, depriving us of the front cover that shoulda been: somebody definitely should have mocked up a parody of the movie poster and had that on newsagent shelves while the movie was in theaters. No explanation was ever given for the delay, but I bet we can speculate a little about it when Samantha comes back for her sixth story. Come back again in four weeks for that.

So anyway, if the only complaint about "Stim!" was that, after six weeks of hilarious buildup, writer Alan Grant ended the story too darn quickly in the seventh, then this is where he recovers in full. "Casino Royal" is a perfect five weeks long, paced just right, with just the right focus on escalating weirdness and things getting out of Samantha's hands. She has ostensibly been hired for a simple tailing job and gets admitted to a casino to watch her mark, but, back at the office, her dimwit assistants Hoagy and Stogie stumble upon the reality that she has been set up.

In the casino, we learn that, in Robo-Hunter's ridiculous future, even card games have been infiltrated by robots. The decks are made of self-shuffling cards whose memories are supposed to automatically erase between hands. Now, you may well ask what in heaven is the purpose of such an idiotic idea, but this is Robo-Hunter we're talking about, a world where lazy humans send robots out to play sports for them, and who elect them to be political leaders. Samantha is surprised when one card, the Five of Spades, somehow avoids having its memory erased, and proposes that she follow its lead and win her way to a fortune at a major Texas Hold 'Em tournament.

Samantha and the Five of Spades work together while the tournament is besieged by one distraction after another, from an assault by armed criminals, to Hoagy and Stogie sneaking in through the restroom to rescue their boss, to Tony Da Tongue's inevitable treachery. It all ends in tears, with Hoagy and Stogie apparently blown to bits and Samantha, acting very stupidly and selfishly, learning the harsh lesson about not sticking up for your friends. So desperate for a happy ending for once, she abandons those two to their fate, thinks that she's won the millions legitimately, and then finds herself arrested while the Five of Spades, who arranged the whole darn thing from the outset, vanishes, getting away with a hundred million creds.

This leads to one of the best and most wonderful gags in the entire series. The last episode is told in flashback as the conniving Five of Spades, on some beach somewhere and surrounded by sexy, shapely lady robots, effectively gets for himself the same island paradise with gorgeous gals that Samantha's grandfather, the original Sam Slade, enjoyed for so many years before his idiot assistants blew it for him. If that meta-gag's not clever enough, there's the very, very funny revelation that the Five of Spades is looking forward to being downloaded into his new body. It's just one panel, and it's a throwaway, but the Five of Spades' new body has me absolutely roaring with laughter every time. No longer content with being a measly little playing card, he's orchestrated all this so that he can enjoy life in a new body... a really big playing card.

Samantha gets the final panel, lost in some jail somewhere and swearing vengeance. "I'll get you for this if it's the last thing I ever do!" had been Grandfather Sam's last words as the mysterious island of exercise nut Dr. Droid sank beneath the waves, and Ace Garp's last words as his prison cell orbited away into space. As co-writer (with John Wagner) of those two classic moments, Grant certainly knew how to play with our happy memories of incredibly funny, larger-than-life comics, and heroes who dreamed of big things being cruelly and hilariously denied them. But what a terrific set-up this is! Samantha would be returning in a few months' time, and Grant and Gibson were clearly in sync and on fire, and the Five of Spades was established as an awesome returning villain who is much, much smarter and a lot more resourceful than our heroine. Man alive, I'll tell you, what would happen next was absolutely certain to be a gen-yoo-ine 2000 AD classic.

Little clue for the foreshadowing-impaired: it was not. But that's another story...

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: Origins (Amazon UK)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Robo-Hunter: Casino Royal (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine issue 308, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, it's giant mecha-boxes against the lizards! See you in seven!

172. 2000 AD Turns Thirty

February 2007: As I charge this blog for another couple of months of entries, it appears that it has come full circle. It was in fact the celebrations for 2000 AD's thirtieth anniversary in 2007 that got me making a big celebratory post on my Livejournal - heavens, remember when that was important instead of just "another place where I announce that a blog post has gone live someplace else"...? - and then I started thinking about talking about the Galaxy's Greatest to a captive audience of about seventy or eighty regular readers from my 120-odd active "friend" list, plus whomever wandered through via Google, usually about three hundred a day. Times change. Last time I checked a little bug I keep, maybe a dozen users regularly look at that Livejournal page daily, and surfers number under a hundred. That's how soundly, and how firmly, Facebook killed that service.

Thrillpowered Thursday was the first dedicated blog that I started writing, after a dual period of posting new material both at Livejournal and on Blogger. I had a couple of non-scrot real-world friends who didn't much enjoy the lengthy, image-heavy posts about 2000 AD and complained that they wished they could be filtered out from them, and a small, new, audience of regular readers whom I did not know and who had no real interest in my often oversharing Livejournal posts, and so I eventually made the much more sensible transition to writing here and linking there. Now I just have to hope that Livejournal's image hosting never goes away, because I really have no desire to upload all those older images onto Google's Picasa and re-code dozens of older entries. Really.

Anyway, while I enjoy writing and talking about 2000 AD, one thing has certainly changed. Possibly because of having greater family obligations and a new baby, the real world has really sucked the enthusiasm right out of scanning old comics and resizing panels, which I used to enjoy much more than I do these days. It doesn't actually help matters, I must say, when part of the job includes, for example, actually finding an image from a ten-page episode of Flesh that does not completely stink. This is "Hand of Glory," and it is the first episode of the very occasionally-appearing series written by its creator Pat Mills since 1993. It sees him reunited with one of the original artists, Ramon Sola, and, well...

I'm not sure where Sola had been working for the last twenty-odd years since he was last seen in the comic, but, if I may venture an intemperate opinion, his style certainly had not changed very much. Sola was very much of the old school who, for me, defined the look of IPC and DC Thomson titles in the early 1970s, and while he would occasionally blow the minds of kids with his work on, to name a fabulous example, Hookjaw in Action, his was never artwork that appealed to me at all. He had drawn many episodes of Flesh during its original five-month run in 1977, and occasionally turned in some episodes of MACH One before moving on from the comic. He never had a consistent run on a story or series, and his work really didn't have the solid, mass appeal to older fans that Massimo Belardinelli's or Dave Gibbons' or Brian Bolland's had. And, of course, with the bulk of his pages appearing in the dark days before creator credits in British comics - thank you, Kevin O'Neill! - readers didn't really know who he was anyway.

With respect to Hookjaw's legion of fans, I just personally don't like his seventies work at all, and I remain baffled that something so very backward-looking and dated appeared in the comic for its birthday. Credit where it's due; Mills requested Sola specifically, because he wanted to do Flesh right and wanted an original artist for the job. Belardinelli, who drew the fantastic second book of the series, was retired and would soon leave us, and I don't think anybody knew who the heck the other artists from those first 19 weeks of Flesh were in the first place. They're credited by names like "Boix" and "Carrion," and all served, with Sola, in always making Flesh look like something to flip right past and get to some lovely Dave Gibbons art on Harlem Heroes.

Then again, I'm perhaps in the minority who was never sold on Flesh in the first place. Maybe if I had come to it when I was six, the same way I found other dino - slash - giant monster fests like Land of the Lost, The Land That Time Forgot, Warlords of Atlantis and all those Toho movies, I'd have the nostalgic love, but instead it has always been the least entertaining, and, apart from when Belardinelli drew it in 1979, the worst-looking strip in 2000 AD. Belardinelli's story, written by Geoffrey Miller to no apparent objection by Mills, was just fantastic fun. Flesh was then rested until 1992-93, when Mills, then in his "not-fun-at-all" period of co-writing comics with Tony Skinner, assembled a lengthy and deeply silly story, "The Legend of Shamana," painted with mud by Carl Critchlow.

There was a curious diversion in 1996. Under David Bishop's time as editor, there was a seven-episode Flesh story called "Chronocide." This positioned Earl Regan, the hero of the original story, as a time-traveling action hero in a more conventional drama co-written by Dan Abnett and Steve White. While it had dinosaurs and violence, the story lacked the over-the-top gore and carnage that typifies Flesh, and I have a memory, although I can't confirm it, that Mills was displeased that the strip was used without his input or involvement. Mills ensured that the series stayed dormant until he was prepared to revive it, in this curious "pilot" episode with its backward-looking artwork. It was not popular, and a new story would not emerge for another four years.

Well, there's "backward-looking" and then there's "looking backward," which is what Robin Smith did with his little Tharg the Mighty strip, "A History of 2000 AD in Five Pages."

During Matt Smith's tenure as editor, the occasional comic adventures of Tharg and the creator droids, which had mostly been quietly shelved in the mid-90s, have been relegated to the occasional Droid Life strip on the inside front cover. I'm of the opinion that one of these would be more fun than almost any Future Shock and would make an agreeable change, but, then again, I have lots of silly opinions. This is the only Tharg comic strip of the last decade, a celebration-in-verse that, in five pages, takes the story of the comic about as far as the first appearances of Judge Fear and Slaine. In other words, it unwittingly implies that 2000 AD's Golden Age is long in the past. As nice as it is to see Robin Smith working in the weekly again, that's no way to celebrate your thirtieth birthday.

No, as far as the actual celebrations go, there's that wonderful cover by Philip Bond, and the very good Judge Dredd multi-parter by Gordon Rennie and Ian Gibson, and the first episodes of new stories for Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser and Savage by Pat Mills and Charlie Adlard. In the following week's issue, this issue's one-offs would be replaced by new stories for Robo-Hunter by Alan Grant and Ian Gibson and Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis. That's a pretty good lineup for a happy birthday!

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Savage: Taking Liberties (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Tharg the Mighty: Thrill-Power Overload (2000 AD's Online Shop)

Next time, everything completely clicks with the hilarious "Casino Royal," one of the funniest and very best stories to appear in 2000 AD during this period. I'll try not to make the story too bittersweet...

171. ABC Fumetti

January 2007: Good grief, didn't I just write about "The Volgan War"...? Well, it was March. Close enough. Anyway, one of the big new launches in the annual 100-page prog had been a major new ABC Warriors adventure. It's a huge 288-page epic told across four chunks of story, and although I recall that events in the third segment got a little confusing, overall it is one of writer Pat Mills' biggest triumphs. If "The Shadow Warriors" had seen Mills flexing his muscles and finally doing right by these characters after many years of subpar adventures, then this is where he raises the game.

From here, I'm going to cannibalize from an earlier review that I wrote, because I can do that sort of thing. Since Mills found success working in the French comic industry, which is based around annual "album" releases of a 64- or 80-page story, or, if you will, a yearly episode of a much larger story, he's exported the form to 2000 AD, which programs strips in weekly six-page installments. Mills' annual story is further subdivided into, say, ten or so weekly episodes.

Working in this format, Mills is able to tell incredibly long stories across several years, and Rebellion, the publisher of 2000 AD, has two prospective revenue streams for the reprints. Working in conjunction with artist Clint Langley, Mills first used the experiment to craft six 48-page episodes of Slaine. These were paired together and reprinted in three large, oversized, but thin hardbacks with an eye on the European market, where this sort of material could safely be expected to sell by the bucketload in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these countries, the hardback "album" has long been the default format for the comic medium, much in the way that monthly "floppy" superhero funnybooks from Marvel and DC are the default in the United States.

Mills and Langley's next project was "The Volgan War," and it appeared as four annual stories from 2007-2010. In it, the characters reminisce about their original days of combat before uniting, only to find some common threads in their stories, including the strange, classified appearances of a top-secret special forces flamethrower robot. As the series unfolds - and it sags a bit in the third chunk before roaring to a colossal, incredible finish - the events of the old Volgan War come back to haunt the Warriors on Mars in very unexpected ways, leaving the team permanently fragmented and new, dangerous bad guys waiting for them.

Overall, I think it's a masterpiece, and easily the best Warriors adventure since 1988's classic "Black Hole," even with some of the head-scratching events of the third volume. It works extremely well in hardback form as well. Following the precedent of the oversized Slaine books assembled with Europe in mind, Rebellion collected the four 72-page stories, beefed them up with some additional artwork by Langley and some extra design work, and released a quartet of 96-page hardbacks, where the material shined even brighter.

But I was telling you about this first quarter of the story. Well, it begins with the Warriors committing their demented member Mek-Quake to an asylum on Mars, not knowing that the place is effectively a recruiting center for violent, combat-ready machines looking for a new boss. Hammerstein, square as ever, is reminded of how he was sometimes forced to abandon his "boys" in combat in 22nd Century Europe. Langley has a ball with the scenes of robot combat and mecha-carnage. At one point, we meet giant robot mecha-Stalins called Uncle Joes, and they're revealed in a turn-the-comic-the-other-way double-page spread that serves as one tall, vertical panel. It's a deliberate callback to similar introductions of giant robots in the original series (Mad George, in prog 138) and in Book Three of Nemesis the Warlock (the giant Torque-Armada in prog 340-something).

After Hammerstein's story, and his introduction to the flamethrowing secret agent Zippo, Mongrol reports that he met Zippo just before the paratrooping accident that destroyed his original body. His tale, told across three issues, is actually an expansion of the character's first appearance, only with Lara, the cute young girl who rebuilt him, reimagined considerably from Mike McMahon's notion! McMahon's depiction of Lara in a nightdress, secretly rebuilding a robot in the dead of night, evoked candlelit, stormy potboilers, old-fashioned thrillers, and, of course, Frankenstein. Langley's Lara is a Suicide Girl. But this sequence is still amazing, just for how well Mills expanded those original four pages into something with more weight. Reading it, old fans are sure to recognize various lines and snatches of dialogue, and wonder how on earth Mills managed to stick so much information into the original comic in the first place.

And then there's Joe Pineapples' story, which is definitely one for people who like Mills best when anything goes. Working behind the Volgan lines in old Moscow and tasked to assassinate the enemy super-robot Volkhan, Joe has smuggled just enough innocuous parts in his own chassis that he can kill a civilian taxi driver robot and, using chunks of it and its GPS, pull off another of his absurd, impossible shots. Astonishingly, it's one of those very rare moments where Joe doesn't get a clean kill, and leaving town also requires Zippo's assistance. This volume of the story ends with Mek-Quake in considerable danger, and our heroes wondering whatever happened to Zippo, and some of those plot threads get picked up when it resumes in August.

While The ABC Warriors and its stablemates Kingdom and Stickleback (which I talked about last week) were getting all the attention, Rob Williams' Low Life also surfaced for a short four-week story, its only appearance in 2007. Again drawn by Simon Coleby - this would be his last work on the series to date - it is the second time that a four-part comedy has spotlighted Dirty Frank. This time out, he's teamed with another undercover Wally Squad operative, Eric Coil. This poor fellow had been infected by a mutating plot contrivance in the Cursed Earth - we'll call it "The Jim Kidd Effect" - and returned to Mega-City One with his brain intact and his body de-aged to a baby's.

It's just Coil's luck that the Wally Squad occasionally has need of somebody who can pose as a baby, like... well... actually, I'm pretty sure that this has never, ever happened before. "Baby Talk" is a definite brain-in-neutral story, just there for the laughs, which is a really good thing, because everything else in the prog at this time is either ultra-serious or tragic. In Kingdom, Gene's entire pack is dead, and in Stickleback, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey's wife and children have been killed in a house fire, so thank heaven there's something light and uncomplicated to follow. Even Judge Dredd has found the ugly beginnings of Mega-City One too much of a pain in the rear to continue unabated, and so it's taking a nine-week break from the story to run some shorter episodes, although that's probably more to do with that story's artist Carlos Ezquerra taking a long weekend and a good stretch than it is Tharg giving us a merciful break from the relentless and the grim.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Low Life: Mega-City Undercover (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Speaking of a merciful break, Thrillpowered Thursday is going to take June off, during which time I've got four 2000 AD features lined up for my Hipster Dad's Bookshelf. See you in July for a look back at the actual issue that started this blog going in 2007, and a new eight-week run of your most favoritest blog ever. Credo!

170. You say potato, I say potato...

December 2006: It is around this point in time that I, your humble blogger, the most nitpicky and trainspotting of 2000 AD fans, picked up on a little quirk of Tharg's lingo that has been bothering me, and absolutely nobody else, ever since. It's our favorite Betelgeusian's insistence on using Terran broadcasting terminology to describe the appearance of new comics in his mighty anthology of thrillpower. You see it in Tharg's input on the inside front cover, and you see when his humanoid units such as Mike Molcher and Matthew Badham contribute interviews or features for Judge Dredd Megazine. It's this utterly bizarre use of "series" to mean "story." Even today, for example, we are all looking forward to the "second series" of The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael in a few weeks. Well, everybody but me; I'm looking forward to the second story of that series. I appreciate and enjoy that the good people of Britain use different words to describe things than we do; it makes for great comedy when you're reading a British Christmas annual of the '70s American cop show Kojak thrown together by some studio illustrators in Glasgow on their lunch hour and they've got Telly Savalas shouting "Fetch a torch from the boot." But sometime in the 1940s, the BBC decided to call a "series" a "programme" and a "season" a "series," and around 2006, Tharg decided to follow suit.

I mention this because Prog 2007, the annual year-end Christmas issue, features the debut stories for two remarkably good series that are as good as comics get. These are Kingdom by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson and Stickleback by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli. Each of these is insanely popular, featuring absolutely classic lead characters, and they're each just tremendously good. I also mention this because today's entry is going to be an immensely boring chapter for anybody to read, because all it would be is "wow, wow, wow" otherwise, so I might as well say something to raise an eyebrow and make you think that I've lost my marbles instead of my supposedly objective viewpoint.

Overall, I think that Kingdom is the more popular of the two series, and it is also my favorite of Dan Abnett's many excellent creations. There have been four stories so far, the most recent concluding in March 2011. The lead character is Gene the Hackman, a huge, muscular, genetically-engineered dog soldier. The series opens in Antarctica, and Gene is the alpha dog of a pack that patrols the wasteland killing huge alien bugs. The soldiers have limited intelligence, but wake every morning to "urges" from unseen masters giving them orders and instructions. One morning, after they have discovered that there is a land bridge connecting their area to some unknown place across the sea, they wake and feel no urges. This leads to discord and disunity, and Gene insists that they return home to report on the bridge.

The soldiers, all of whom have curious names that pun 20th Century celebrities like Tod of Much Slaughter, Ginny Woolf and Jack So Wild, are drawn with sharp and engaging personalities. Despite their inability to express much, their simple and direct patois makes each character instantly recognizable from each other. In the above panel, Tod tells Gene that his "mouth is full of wrong," and this instantly became a catchphrase in the same way that, oh, "Gaze into the fist of Dredd" or "Be pure, be vigilant, behave" had decades before.

I'm impressed by a lot in Kingdom, but it's Abnett's use of narration that really pleases me the most. There is a lot of it, and it is lyrical and beautiful, framing the story as a very important fable in some community's folklore. Masterfully, the use of captions abruptly ends at critical moments of the story, as Gene finds very strange new things. That is, they are certainly very strange to him, but readers will instantly recognize and understand concepts like "isolated research bases in the Antarctic waste staffed by cryogenically-frozen humans revived for monitor duty" by the visuals. It is unlikely that Gene would ever be able to understand that sort of thing with that terminology, so the narration is occasionally tabled so that readers can watch Gene explore and comprehend things. Gene may not be intelligent, but he turns out to be very wise.

I don't believe that a fifth Kingdom story has been formally announced, but I hope that we won't wait much longer for it to return. It is one of the best things to appear in the comic over the last decade. That said, I'm one of the very few who actually enjoys Stickleback even more, and we've been waiting for it to return since the ambiguous conclusion to the fourth story more than two years ago. (There have been three multi-part stories and a single one-off.)

I like the structure of Stickleback a lot. Edginton does a fabulous job in "Mother London" in introducing us to the characters after a really curious prologue scene in which two characters from British folklore, the giants Gog and Magog, agree to be ritually slain. Their blood becomes Albion's blood, and feeds all of the land's rivers, and allows a great tree to grow. London is born from the stability brought by the roots of this tree. All of this will, over the course of time, tie in to Edginton's work on The Red Seas and other series.

But that was many hundreds of years ago. Time then skips forward to the dirty East End of Victorian London, where Scotland Yard has employed a young detective, Valentine Bey. Bey is hunting down a charlatan fortune teller who uses clockwork automatons - again, just typing a very slight account of the goings-on in an Edginton story raises a smile - and gets a lead, the first solid lead that anybody in the Metropolitan Police have ever had, about the existence of the much-rumored Stickleback, a "Napoleon of Crime" figure whose existence nobody has been able to ever confirm. The villain appears for the first time in the story's third episode, where he is revealed to be a spindly, long-legged hunchback with a second spine. He boasts, horrifically, that giving birth to such a child caused his mother to die from internal bleeding, but a great deal of what Stickleback says cannot be trusted at all.

Edginton is hardly the first writer to base a character on Professor Moriarty, although to my mind, nobody has bettered Rex Stout in his similar creation of Arnold Zeck in the Nero Wolfe novels. Like Moriarty, Stickleback controls an organized crime empire and enforces a brutal code of conduct among the criminals of London. What Moriarty never had was a gang of weirdos to back him up. These include a zombie, a burning man, Siamese twins with steampunk surveillance gear, and a pygmy with a blowgun.

There's a fantastic bit of rug-pulling in this first adventure. Stickleback has abducted Bey to enlist his help in a curious matter. He alleges that Bey's superior is involved with another grand criminal conspiracy, and wants to employ the law-abiding Bey to ferret out that corruption. Stickleback, after all, has enough to do dealing with honor among thieves in the East End; he hasn't the resources to tackle some Masonic - Royal business in the upper echelons of the police. This is an incredibly entertaining story, and seems to be setting up a series in which Bey and Stickleback would continue their war across several stories of uneasy alliances and awkward double-dealings. But no, thunderously, the first adventure ends with Bey dead and that weird prologue about Gog and Magog shown to be of immediate, fantastic impact on the narrative, and Stickleback's power consolidated in a triumphant finale. I was left breathless for more.

Kingdom and Stickleback each run through March 2007 alongside the mammoth new ABC Warriors multi-book epic, about which more next time, and 2000 AD feels more vibrant, alive and amazing than it had at any time in 2006. And it had been a very good year! But a lineup this thunderous doesn't come along just every day. Looking over 2000 AD's wonderful and busy history, can anybody name another prog in which two such amazing and excellent stories debuted? Tharg spoiled us. (Oh, yeah, and it also featured new episodes of Judge Dredd and Harry Kipling (Deceased) and The 86ers and Nikolai Dante and Sinister Dexter... sheesh!)

Stories from this issue (everything except Sin Dex) have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
The 86ers: The Complete 86ers (2000 AD's Online Shop)
The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Vol. 1 (Amazon UK)
Harry Kipling (Deceased): Mad Gods and Englishmen (free "graphic novel" bagged with Judge Dredd Megazine 323, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Judge Dredd: Origins (2000 AD's Online Shop)
Kingdom: The Promised Land (Amazon USA)
Nikolai Dante: The Beast of Rudinshtein (Volume Eight, from 2000 AD's Online Shop)
Stickleback: Mother London (out of print, link to Amazon UK sellers)

Next time, it's giant mecha-Stalins against the ABC Warriors! See you in seven!