Welcome, citizens, to this week’s installment of Multiver-City One! Each and every Wednesday we will be examining the latest Prog from Tharg and the droids over at 2000 AD, and giving you all the pertinent information you’ll need headed into this week’s Thrill-Zine! This week is the PERFECT week to try 2000 AD out, as Tharg has made sure every strip in the magazine is starting over with a new jumping-on point. No excuse to not try it, humes!
This week’s cover is by Edmund Bagwell.
I. NOW ARRIVING
This week we’ve got a full slate of brand new stories beginning, covering all sorts of genres and types. These ‘jump-on’ issues are always exciting, but this one seems to really be hitting with new and lapsed readers, as the issue sold out a week before hitting stands! As far as we know, an issue of 2000 AD has never experienced anything like this in their 37-year history, so big congratulations to them! If you see one out in the wild, be sure to snag it and see what all the fuss is about! But if you don’t come across one in the real world, don’t fret! Digital copies are readily available via the 2000 AD website and their iOS newsstand app.
Judge Dredd: Mega-City Confidential, Part 1
John Wagner hops back into the driver’s seat of the lawman he co-created to begin a dark new chapter in the character’s history!
Before we get into the nitty gritty of this story, let’s talk for a minute about Colin MacNeil. He’s an artist who’s been turning in 2000 AD pages for decades, but always seems to be fresh and surprising in his approach. Never one to stagnate, MacNeil adapts his style to the story he’s telling, switching technique and tools to effectively capture the tone required. Compare his work here to something like Our Man in Hondo, and you’ll immediately see the type of range he’s capable of. For Confidential, he’s clearly illustrating the immense weight our characters find themselves under by leaning heavily on his shadows and bold linework. In contrast, the aforementioned Hondo story utilized a finer line and what looks to be a combination of watercolors and marker for color. It’s exciting to see what he’s doing now, and I can’t wait to see what he does with this strip.
Mega-City stories that treat Dredd as more of a force than a central character always fascinate me. He’s such an unbending, immovable man of the law that seeing others crash against him is always interesting. Especially when those doing the crashing are so much more human and relatable. Confidential opens with readers being introduced to Erika, a newly hired tool of bureaucracy working in The Meg’s most secret of departments: the ominously named Section 7.
It seems that Erika’s sole duty is to watch her fellow citizens at times when they have no idea they’re being observed. The specifics of how exactly this is being done are foggy, but they’re invasive enough to shake her to her core. All she’ll tell her husband is that if the Justice Department wanted to find something out, then nothing could stop them. Being the all-seeing entity they are, it’s no secret that Erika is straining under the immense weight of her duties. When she’s told that she would have to go for ‘re-assessment’, Erika steals as much information as she can about the activity of Section 7 and runs. Dredd is brought in to find Erika and see to it that she does not have the opportunity to release any of the highly sensitive information she’s sitting on. As any good cop would do in this situation, Dredd starts with her husband…
Judge Dredd, The Justice Department, and Mega-City One are all very effective means of examining the world we live in. Dredd as a commentary on governmental overreach and abuse of power works so well because of the seemingly futuristic environment that serves as his backdrop. With the new revelations of government surveillance and collection of big data, this strip seems to be especially well-timed. That said, it should be no surprise that this is the same creative team that brought us the classic America over twenty years ago.
Continued belowCredits: John Wagner (script), Colin MacNeil (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Slaine: A Simple Killing, Part 1
One of the misconceptions about 2000 AD is that it’s all sci-fi, all the time, which is just not true. Even in the short time we’ve been bringing you this column, we’ve seen strips like Aquila, a historical fantasy set in a Rome where the only science involved is the science of violence. There are more to come down the road, but Slaine, a 2000 AD staple for over 30 years, is another historical fantasy taking place in Albion, a version of the UK still steeped in the same mythological grounding that helped inspire Robert E. Howard to think up Conan. Turn that idea up to 11 and make him extra Celtic, and you have an idea of what to expect in Slaine.
I’ve actually never read Slaine before this, so I wasn’t sure what to expect before this Prog. But one look at this issue and seeing Slaine and his axe Brainbiter in action? Yeah, I’m hooked. Simon Davis has a lot of different tastes going on in his work: a little Cam Kennedy, a little Mike McMahon… but all good. And co-creator Mills balances making Slaine a likable character in the story’s early pages, even as we later see him wreaking bloody vengeance on those stupid enough to steal objects of his patron goddess Danu.
Welcome back, Slaine.
Credits: Pat Mills (script), Simon Davis (art), Ellie DeVille (letters)
Outlier, Part 1
And a big first-time “Welcome” to Outlier, a brand-new strip to 2000 AD. No prior knowledge required, as none of us have any. So what does it look like Elington and Richardson are bringing to the table?
A bit if a “locked room” mystery. Billionaire who once served on a scavenger ship turns up aggressively deceased in his nigh-impenetrable mountaintop home with no signs of approach or entry. Carcer is a private investigator with a different way of looking at things. Can he solve the mystery? I’m guessing yes. But what does that solution mean. Ahhhh, that’s something else…
Credits: T.C. Elington (script), Karl Richardson (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Sinister Dexter: Gun Shy, part one
To all of our foreign readers: it’s true. There have been banks in America that have offered guns to those who open new accounts with a minimum deposit. I know Generica is a fictional place created as a satire, but this is something that’s actually happened.
As with Wagner on Dredd, Abnett returns to one of his co-creations this Prog. After acquiring an absurd amount of arms from various banks, Sinister and Dexter find themselves in a bit of a sticky situation when a gang seems to somehow get the impression that there is a bit of gun-running going on.
Quite the departure in tone from Grey Area, Sinister Dexter relays way more on humor and satire to get the story told. It’s a testament to Abnett’s dexterity (no pun intended) that he’s able to cover such a wide range of genre.
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Smudge (art), Ellie Deville (letters)
Jaegir: Strigoi, part 1
Holy smokes, this strip makes me want to see Simon Coleby draw everything. I could watch that mutant run for page upon page if Coleby does the art. Between this and his work on The Royals of War over at Vertigo, I’m convinced that there is nothing this guy is afraid to put on a page. At least, no type of airplane!
Set in the Rogue Trooper universe, this is the story of Atalia Jaegir, a Nordland solider living in the shadow of her father’s service. Considering what is hinted at about said service, that’s not exactly an enviable place to be. This story seems like it’ll focus on the way the war on Nu-Earth is fought, but from the Nort side of things. With mentions of atrocities and savagery, it’ll be interesting to see how exactly they view their own means of warfare and how such things are looked upon.
Continued belowCredits: Gordon Rennie (script), Simon Coleby (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
II. 2000 AD FOR DUMMIES
Since we started Multiver-City One, the thing we keep hearing most from people is: “I really want to start reading 2000 AD/Dredd but have no clue where to start.” This section is where we offer suggestions that will hopefully fix that. As teased two week’s ago, this week we’re taking a look at one of the all-time favorite strips in 2000 AD history: The Ballad of Halo Jones.
Written by Alan Moore and drawn exclusively by Ian Gibson, Halo Jones ran in three chunks from Prog 376 in 1984 to 466 in 1986. And before you think we’re going to make you go eBay hunting for these, the whole story has been collected multiple times, and is currently available both in print and in PDF/CBZ digital from 2000 AD, with original 2000 AD covers and Alan Moore script pages. No hassle involved, which is good because this book is great.
The series follows Halo Jones, an 18-year-old girl who decides after a series of events that her life in The Hoop (basically a ringed slum anchored off the coast of 50th Century New York City) is a dead-end. She manages to escape The Hoop and Earth by finagling a job on the space liner Clara Pandy, and seeks her fortune among the stars. Several glimpses into the future of the series show that Jones does, in deed, lead a full and eventful life. While the strip did not get to run the full course of its planned nine volumes before Moore quit in protest over then-publisher IPC’s handling of ownership rights, what we are shown is certainly entertaining and very much worth your time.
There are a few key things that make Halo Jones the series stand out. One is the fact that it has a female lead, and more importantly, one who isn’t just a complete bimbo or a macho hardass with breasts. Moore and Gibson go to lengths to show us Jones as an everywoman; she’s neither rocket scientist nor airhead, but a normal person who is clever one moment and a little slow-on-the-uptake the next. Halo is positioned by the creators to be the reader surrogate to show us the future society that she lives in. Which leads to another strength of this strip: the world-building.
As told in 8-page installments, 2000 AD strips have very little, if any, space to waste. As we would come to know from his work in Watchmen and Promethea, Moore shines when layering his settings with details, both major and minor, that set them as realistic without being bogged down in the real. From his use of future slang that is just enough removed to be exotic without ever being confusing, to his extrapolations of what a future could be like and still have situations to be useful in making comments about present-day society (as all great sci-fi does), this may be the first time Moore really took the gloves off in terms of world-building. Gibson matches him step-for-step with designs that, again, either play up an idea’s satirical aspect or its straight role in the narrative. Or, when things really get cooking, both at the same time.
Halo Jones works in both the individual Progs, the longer Books, and with the overall narrative. Jones is given a character arc that is still all-too-rare in mainstream comics. Moore really uses the tropes of science fiction to set up scenarios that are both inventive conceptually and tied back to Jones’ overall journey. For example, during her stint as a soldier in Book 3, Jones is involved in a campaign on Moab, a world with overall intense gravity and pockets of even greater gravity. These pockets, due to the relationship between time and gravity, cause time to flow at a different rate for those inside than those outside. After several missions inside and through one of the gravity pockets, Jones becomes disoriented as to how long she has been involved in the conflict and the war in general. Thoughts common to all those in combat, but given a nice sci-fi backing here. While he’s probably not the first to come up with concepts like that, Moore certainly peppers Halo Jones with enough of them to keep things interesting, as well as shifting tones from humor to horror to adventure to tragedy from Prog to Prog, sometimes page to page. Oh, and I challenge you to read about the Glyph and not get a little lump in your throat at some point.
Continued below
If I were to offer one reservation, it would be that Gibson’s artwork, while perfectly suited for the series concept and execution, can be a little hard to follow in black & white, especially since his faces can be a little of-the-same-mold. He does a good job at varying up body types, and giving characters costuming details to keep things distinct, but giving this book a colorization wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Also, I do wish there was more. It does stop at AN ending, but knowing that it’s not THE ending is a little disappointing.
However, that doesn’t make me any less enthusiastic to recommend The Ballad of Halo Jones as some of the best 2000 AD material to come out of her first 37 years. Tharg knew what he was doing when he green-lit this series, and you should do yourself a favor and go pick it up!
III. OF INTEREST
Each week we like to scour the web to find some noteworthy images to fill your eyehole with, and this time we’ve surely struck gold!
That there is a bit of 2000 AD fan art from none other than Shaky Kane. It appeared in Prog 126, waaaaaaaaaay back in August 1979. And as it turns out, there is a whole mess of notable names that appear in the letters column from a time before they were real-deal art droids.
A month before Shaky, the aforementioned Colin Macneil made an appearance.
It looks like these were put together by Gordon Rennie for a piece he called ‘Letters to the Green Dude.
We’ll close this section out with Simon Frasier’s first appearance in the mag. Like I said, there are a ton of these. You should really check them out!
IV. FUTURE PERP FILES
ATTN: ALL CITIZENS OF THE MEG! Be aware that there is always a Judge watching you. Each sector is equipped with millions of HD-CCTV and bioID units. They are there for your protection. If your intent is upright citizenry, then you have no qualm with our surveillance. And remember: if you see something, you are now an accessory to a crime. That’s six months in an Iso-Cube, creep! Random CPU algorithms has selected this citizen for immediate surveillance and assessment…
That’s gonna do it for us this week! Prog 1874 is on sale today and is available from finer comic shops everywhere, from 2000ADonline.com, and via the 2000 AD Newsstand app for iPad and iPhone. So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
