Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our “2000 AD” weekly review column! Every Wednesday we examine the latest offerings from Tharg and the droids over at Rebellion/2000 AD, the galaxy’s leading producers of Thrill-Power entertainment. Let’s get right to it!
NOW DEPARTING — EVERYTHING!
Judge Dredd: War Buds, Part 5
Credits: John Wagner (script), Dan Cornwell (art), Abigail Bulmer (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Matiasevich: In the future, everyone will have jetpacks, and cars will drive themselves. In Mega-City One, that future is now . . . with a few exceptions. You’re more likely to see sky-surfers like Chopper (aka Marlon Shakespeare) than George Jetsons commuting to work, and the self-driving cars are still driven by SOMEbody. So if you were, for instance, on the run from the Justice Department, trying to get yourself and your cohorts to Texas City in a van stolen from your place of work? Your employer could commandeer that van and turn it right back around, taking you right into the path of the pursuing Judge Dredd and his Lawmaster. Drokk!
It’s the end of the road for the Apocalypse Squad this week. John Wagner and Dan Cornwell bring us the final installment of ‘War Buds’ with an ending that readers should have seen coming. Certainly one of the Squadders did. That doesn’t make it a bad strip by any means, but happy endings in an apocalypse are few and far between, even thirty years after the fact. Wagner reminds us that war’s fallout is tragedy as much as radiation, and tragedy is as much a matter of timing as it is action. Last week’s look at Dredd’s compassion for Chief Judge Magruder informs this week’s conclusion, but Wagner is smart enough to remember that a sincerely compassionate Dredd is still Dredd. And for Dredd, the law is the law.
Next week brings Wagner collaborator Colin MacNeil back to the Progs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see Wagner himself back on the beat before too long!
The Alienist: Inhuman Natures, Part 8
Credits: Gordon Rennie & Emma Beeby (script), Eoin Coveney (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Alice W. Castle: Being the kind of person that I am with strange short term memory problems, it wasn’t until I sat down with this week’s Prog that I remembered it was the clean slate issue. Every story inside wrapped up in order to make way for a whole new slate of stories next Prog. While I appreciate these built-in jumping on points to an anthology format that can be notoriously hard to pick up for new readers, it does mean that the conclusion “The Alienist: Inhuman Natures” feels fairly… cut short.
For one, the entirety of the story is wrapped up in a mere five pages, and while I also appreciate the challenge inherent in such a feat, it does mean the threat of Praetorius needs to be dealt with in a fairly concise manner. Having Vespertine go from an uneasy alliance with Praetorius to him being a multiversial Galactus chasing a human pilot fish across realities already felt like a lot was going on in too short a span, but here Vespertine handily removes him for the picture. Sure, it’s an act that will have ramifications in the next chapter of “The Alienist,” but it just makes Praetorius feel like a bit of a chump. At no point did he ever feel particularly threatening, instead he just seemed like Jared Harris in cosplay as the Corinthian.
I don’t want to come down too hard on this story because, for the most part, I did enjoy it. I love Eoin Coveney’s artwork and cannot praise the unique style of the stark, woodcut-esque linework throughout the chapters. However, I feel like that unique art style was underserved by writing that focused too much on the mundanities of the story being told instead of the interesting meta-universal aspects of the characters at play. This wasn’t a bad story, but one that largely disappointed me in many ways.
Hope: . . . For The Future, Part 12
Continued below
Credits: Guy Adams (script), Jimmy Broxton (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Greg Lincoln: In true noir film fashion Guy Adams, Jimmy Broxton and Simon Bowland delivered a morally ambiguous resolution with a real emotional impact. Mallory Hope got away with the violence he committed at the Whispers somehow and Tommy Byrd, Joey Fabrizzi’s kidnapper and killer, is in police custody despite Mallory’s momentary desire to finish him off. Adams brought back the film producer and other occult magician, Lupus, into the story and sets up a kind of unwilling buddy/partner relationship between him and Hope. Lupus revealed that it was him who called Mallory to lead him to the Whispers for his own purposes but he was happy he exposed Tommy Byrd in the process of getting rid of Fats who “knew too much.” Somehow despite the killing Mallory still seems a good guy in my mind not an anti-hero and that goes for Eileen Fabrizzi too. If anyone is the victim of this story sadly it is her.
To me the heart of this final chapter if not the whole story is Eileen Fabrizzi. Her actions as Mallory thought condemned her to the electric chair and Mallory’s humanity and compassion would not let her face that alone. Though it was only two pages of the chapter Jimmy Broxton made he most of those pages. He used shadows and lighting to set the scene in the Tehachapi Correctional facility making those panels intimate and personal where the other pages felt more distant and impersonal. The ghostly occult characters returned here as Hope used his talents to make her final moments painless. Though it was not the final scene in the comic Broxton’s final panel in this sequence showing parallel silhouettes of Eileen and Mallory left a haunting image in my mind. I expect that haunted feeling will stay with me till Adams, Broxton and Bowland return with another Mallory Hope story.
Future Shocks: Alt-Life
Credits: Rory McConnville (script), Jake Lynch (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Rowan Grover: McConville understands what makes a good “Future Shock”. His protagonists are brilliantly ordinary people set in extraordinary. Colin, on the surface, is a regular joe. He even acknowledges this, saying ‘This is the best it gets?’ as alternate reality versions of himself come gunning for his so-called perfect life. It’s well crafted too, in that you don’t need backstory as to why this is happening, nor do you feel the need to know more. McConville gives you everything in the one package. The ending is a little predictable, but in a way that you know it’s coming, but you feel satisfaction at having pieced it together.
Lynch’s art is great at exaggerating these normal people to their logical extreme. There’s a great opportunity to explore character styles as we see so many alternate forms of Colin in this four-page story. We get Colin as psychotically mad, passively confused, and depressingly desperate in a way that perfectly suits the tone. His art style is a fusion of loose, modern sketchiness and pulp 50’s sci-fi, which adapts well to the action of Colin and Gaspar fighting away the alt-lifes. It works well within the 2000AD style, and Lynch shows he’s got a good grasp on how to tell stories within this context.
McConville is on his way to becoming a great short sci-fi writer with these “Future Shocks”, and I love seeing newer artists like Lynch in this. Get into these done-in-ones if you haven’t already.
That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 2049 is on sale this week and available from:
- The 2000 AD Newsstand app for iPad and iPhone,
- The 2000 AD app for Android devices,
- 2000ADonline.com in print or DRM-free PDF and CBZ formats, and
- Finer comic shops everywhere
So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
