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! It’s a double-header this week, as we’ve got both a new Prog and a new Judge Dredd Megazine, so let’s get right to it!
This week’s cover is by Simon Davis.
I. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1886
Judge Dredd: Traumatown, Part 4
The Justice Department comes to grips with what is happening as the mystery grows deeper!
Mass hysteria is sweeping The Meg, or is it? I mean, the hysteria could just be a shared hallucination, right? Either way it goes, Dredd is on top of the situation. Lots of people are seeing ghosts, there are plenty of zombies running around, and Dredd is dreaming of leveled Blocks, so there’s a pattern emerging. Who or what is causing these horrific visions?
Credits: John Wagner (script), Nick Percival (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Indigo Prime: Perfect Day, Part 7
So a dying old Nazi from an alternate dimension who can go anywhere in all of space and time decides he wants to go see the crucifixion of Jesus. You know, King of the Jews Jesus? You can see how there’s clearly nothing good that can come of this, right?
What’s the old man’s end game here? We’ll be finding out soon, now that Danny seems to be out of the way. And does Indigo Prime stand to benefit more than just gold from whatever it is that’s going down? It’s beginning to feel like we’re coming to the climax of the story, so all should be revealed soon!
Credits: John Davis (script), Lee Carter (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Terror Tales, Done Deal
What is it that gives us health and vitality? What is it that gives us life? Whatever that thing is, can it be traded or sold?
This short story is a classic interpretation of an age-old question: how far would you go to protect the ones you love? Of course, since the story must please Tharg the Mighty, there’s a pretty horrific twist to the answer to all of these questions.
This is Tom Foster’s first appearance in 2000 AD. He won the 2013 Thought Bubble portfolio competition, which landed him as art droid on the strip. Congrats to Tom for a hell of a first appearance; we hope to see more of him in the future!
Credits: Alec Worley (script), Tom Foster (art), Ellie De Ville (letters)
Grey Area: Nearer My God To Thee, Part 3
Even though this strip took a hiatus between the last set of stories and this one, Abnett continues to make sure the patient readers are seeing how things seeded back then are now starting to bloom. We saw the human Outreach Movement spreading the love of God to all creatures. We saw the Rookuk, who killed their God when he decided they weren’t worshipping him properly. We saw the Rooruk reaction to the Outreachers, and we heard what they had to do to get their God off their back.
Now that God’s starship is orbiting Earth. “Disciple” pods are spreading out to cities all over the world like discs in Independence Day. Riots are breaking out all over as most of the world’s population have been receiving psychic visions from whatever that thing is and think it’s the Second Coming (which also goes to show that Star Trek popularity is greatly diminished in the future, as any fan would tell you that mixing gods and starships never turns out well for anyone). Capt. Bulliet and his ETC squad are tasked for the First Contact mission, which he delays to have this heart-to-heart with the Rookuk.
Let’s just say the picture Kymn translates for Bulliet and the reader is neither feasible nor pleasant. Unlike the pictures Mark Harrison paints for us this and every Prog, which are outstanding. This is actually one of two instances of an artist using CGI modeling for spaceships, and this case is integrated into a artwork a little more seamlessly than the other. They are both done well, but Harrison has the edge.
Continued belowLet’s hope Bulliet manages to figure out one quickly…
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Mark Harrison (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Slaine: A Simple Killing, Part 13
Slaine’s made it into enemy territory, up to the top of the tower where Sinead is about to be sacrificed. All he has to do is grab her and go. How hard can that be? You’d be surprised. First he has to fend off the attacks, both physical and psychological, of Slough Gododin. He’s the guy with the beak and apparent five-foot-standing-vertical-leap. But we’ve seen Slaine take down all manner of opponents, great and small. How hard could it be to put the axe to the bird skull and make off with the girl? Again, surprisingly difficult.
Mills and Davis bring the first book of The Brutania Chronicles to a close here. Gododin puts Slaine through some paces, dealing him wounds that might be too much to recover from. Given the weapons at his disposal, are these wounds physical? Mental? Mystical? Read the Prog and find out!
Credits: Pat Mills (script), Simon Davis (art), Ellie De Ville (letters)
II. THIS WEEK IN JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 349
This week’s cover is by Cameron Stewart.
Judge Dredd: Rad To The Bone, Part 3
Gaze into the fist of… Fryer?!
This week Eglington and Cook cap off their story, and it is brutal! Judge Dredd manages to narrowly escape yet another deadly situation, and as is usual he does it by leaving a pile of corpses behind. But he couldn’t have done it alone, and Judge Fryer (pictured above) certainly deserves recognition for all she did in the rescue effort. Not that she’ll ever get anything other than a critique from Dredd, I’m just saying she’s deserving. Cook’s art has been a delight to read these past few months, and we cannot wait for him to return to the world of Mega-City One!
Credits: T.C. Eglington (script), Boo Cook (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Mega-City One Tales: Two Tons of Trouble
Mega-City Fatty Two Ton Tony Tubbs is in a bit of a predicament: he’s no longer two tons! I mean, he’s slimmed down so much he’s able to use his belly-wheel again, so you know the situation is dire.
This strip is pretty incredible. Tony, who’s blown though all the creds he’d made from his Fatty fame, is hurting for some kind of cash flow. When he sees an ad directed at children telling them to report crimes in exchange for prizes, Tony starts getting ideas. It was great seeing this enormous guy ‘sneaking’ around trying to find crime. Coveney’s art is so fantastic, the way he draws Tony sidling up against walls and lurking in backgrounds. It’s this unique type of humor that I love 2000 AD for. This strip truly made me wish this was the opening to a Two Ton Tony: Fattie Detective ongoing. Because I’d read the shit out of that.
Credits: David Baillie (script), Eoin Coveney (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
The Man From The Ministry: Part 2
And here is the second bit of CGI modeling for this week. Well, not the actual image above; that’s still pen & ink. But another page has the liftoff of the Newton, which we see above, and Hopgood uses the pixels to give it an extra bit of gloss and sheen to separate it from the norm of the rest of the story. Very effective and eye-catching, it captures the glory of British exceptionalism in its reach for the stars. But like Morningside mentions later in this same issue, the problem with the dream of having humanity being a part of a larger universe is that now those other parts are starting to notice us.
Rennie gives us the return of Guy Britton (in the Newton) after fifty-some years in space without aging a day and no memory of his time between takeoff and landing. We also have the granddaughter of the scientist who thought all this up, and with her a box that has been silent for just as many decades…until it now isn’t. Oh yes, and there are Slithoks. Chameleons that can hide their natural squid-shaped, laser-blast-shooting heads and look like normal people.
Continued belowGood thing Rennie gave Morningside that service revolver and some extra shells, huh?
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Kev Hopgood (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Anderson, PSI Division: Dead End, Part 7
I love Michael Dowling’s art. As excited as I am for the finale to this long-running Anderson strip, I’m a little bummed that we don’t have Dowling to look forward to every month.
While this story has gone to some pretty dark places, and this week’s strip opens in a tense situation, Alan Grant closes this chapter in Anderson’s life in what seems to be a fairly optimistic way. I love everything about the way he writes this character; from the voice he gives her to the relationship she has with Judge Dredd, Grant understands Cassandra Anderson inside and out. When he writes her into difficult situations, the reader is really given the sense that it is not because Grant wants to watch her squirm. It’s actually the opposite of that. He wants her to be safe and happy, but with the nature of the hub and this city doing nothing but threaten any chance at a stable life, having it be any other way would be disingenuous. Grant’s been writing Anderson stories for a while, and I can hardly wait to see where he takes her next.
Credits: Alan Grant (script), Michael Dowling (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
III. MEGAZINE FEATURES
Besides scheduling, there’s a big difference between a Prog and a Megazine. While each weekly 2000 AD Prog acts as a comics anthology, Judge Dredd Megazine is more of a, well, magazine. In addition to all the comics (new and reprints), a variety of contributors write articles focusing on topics that, while usually related to the Dredd-verse in some way, spread the scope of the Megazine beyond the obvious cast of characters and into topics, both Meg-centric and real world, that would be of interest to the readership as a whole.
Interrogation: David Pugh by Matthew Badham
At first glance, I thought this article was about Steve Pugh, who had done a fair amount of work for Vertigo and DC on this side of the Atlantic, but was originally from Birmingham. Turns out I was completely wrong. David Pugh (no relation) was one of the main artists for Slaine in the 1980’s, but was only on the strip for a relatively brief period and never seemed to be able to catch the break that he should have gotten given that platform at that time. But that hasn’t stopped Pugh from living an interesting life and having an interesting comics career. I guarantee you will learn something new in this Interrogation, including what Pugh’s idea for a revival of Black Hawk would have been, and why artists should take the money they were going to spend on art school and use it to just go to Kathmandu instead.
Interrogation: Nick Percival by Matthew Badham
We know you’ve been reading the Traumatown strip that’s been going on in the main Thrillzine. We know you’ve been knocked out by what Nick Percival has been bringing to that story. We also know there’s more than a few of you out there who are thinking “Where did this guy come from?!?!” Well, humes, this is where you get to find out what Nick’s been doing during his seventeen-year hiatus from 2000 AD, and what he was up to before that happened. Just a little tease: the last thing he did was a Slaine story featuring a time-travelling Slaine meeting William Wallace. Yep, Slaine chopping heads with Braveheart, drawn by this guy. Sold.
Interrogation: Vince Locke by Karl Stock
Rounding out this trio of artist interviews, Karl Stock picks the brain of Vince Locke.
Locke’s got a pretty varied body of work behind him. As the images accompanying this piece show, the guy is just as good with fine-line ink drawings as he is paints and colors. I found it particularly interesting when he talked a little about not feeling like he quite fit in with the style of book Vertigo was doing during his time on Sandman. I’d have been interested to read a little more on why he felt that way, and what changed that over the years, as he’s now inking Peter Gross on The Unwritten.
Continued below
IV. OF INTEREST
If you’ve been reading this column with any sort of regularity then you know how much we’re enjoying what IDW has been doing with their 2000 AD license, especially Judge Dredd. The monthly comic and the various mini-series they’ve published have been a treat to read and are the best American-made Dredd stories to date by a significant margin. In addition to all the new content, IDW has also seen fit to reprint classic Judge Dredd tales in color.
Now, I’m always wary of colorizing black & white comics, but IDW has done an exceptional job with their classic Ninja Turtles line. And that is no easy task given the heavy zip-a-tone nature of those early issues; there’s a lot of ways to make those pages look like a muddy mess, but Tom Smith’s Scorpion Studios avoided all of them. So I decided IDW knew what it was doing and give this the benefit of the doubt. Charlie Kirchoff has been given the task of coloring these seminal Dredd stories, and they look just as great!
The first recolored version was premiered in the Free Comic Book Day 2013 offering, with a subsequent Judge Dredd Classics series hitting the shelves. Written by John Wagner and Alan Grant with art by Mike McMahon, Ron Smith, Steve Dillon, Brian Bolland, and Carlos Ezquerra, this series saw a magazine-size hardcover collection released last month, containing the seminal stories Block Mania and The Apocalypse War.
The book opens with the first chapter of Block Mania, which begins with what seems to be a not uncommon Mega-City phenomenon: a Block War! You see, in the future thousands of people will live in these monolithic structures that are part apartment complex and part shopping mall called Blocks. Sometimes a Block can get into tiffs with other nearby blocks, and if left unmitigated these squabbles could end up as full-on wars. Guns, RPGs, bloodshed, the whole nine. It seems that the up-side to a Block War, if you can call it that, is that the violence all takes place in a relatively small area. So the Judges just drop some riot foam on everyone and wait for the situation to cool down.
Block Mania is about Block Wars breaking out across the entirety of Mega-City One. The story has got some really funny moments as well as some pretty fantastic Block names. Dredd’s house robot Walter the Wobot even makes an appearance. Everything seems like just another zany Judge Dredd adventure until the cause of the Block Mania is revealed. That’s when things become decidedly less zany and much more tragic. That’s when The Apocalypse War begins.
I also love that, although the original Judge Dredd Classics issues were printed in traditional American comic proportions (shown on right), IDW went with something closer to 2000 AD’s original magazine-proportioned presentation. This alleviates that dead space at the top and bottom of each page, which comes from trying to fit a wider page into a thinner space, and gives you something like the Ezquerra spread above with no extra gutters. So reading this hardcover is like watching a widescreen movie on a widescreen TV instead of on an older TV with letterboxing. Sure you get the whole picture either way, but the widescreen TV is just more suited for the image.
And it’s 25 bucks!
Now, all that out of the way, I gotta say that I think the biggest draw for this book is Carlos Ezquerra’s art. His Apocalypse War chapters look unbelievable. There has been a litany of phenomenal artists who’ve worked on Dredd, but this collection is a strong argument for why Ezquerra is one of the greatest to have ever done so. And the size of these pages do well to show this off.
Continued belowV. COMING SOON
Next month is a milestone issue of Judge Dredd Megazine, and the droids over at 2000 AD are putting together a hell of an issue for us. Dan Abnett is launching a new series, John Wagner and Henry Flint join forces to make all our dreams come true, a new Dredd movie-verse story kicks off, and more! And all we have to do is wait one month for Megazine #350 to arrive in stores. One teeny tiny month…
VI. 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! Both 2000 AD Prog 1886 and Judge Dredd Megazine 349 are on sale today and 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!”
