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! And while last week’s Prog 1900 was a full-on fresh start for new readers, this week’s issue has TWO new strips debuting, making it another great chance to jump aboard the Thrill-Power Express. No excuse to not try it, humes!
Also, our sincerest thanks and gratitude to everyone who entered our giveaway contest. Since the contest is now closed, we will start picking the winners and notifying them by email. We’ve got some zarjaz swag to give away, and maybe an extra surprise or two, so keep an eye on those inboxes starting today!
I. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1901
NOW ARRIVING
Greysuit: Prince of Darkness, Part 1
Credits: Pat Mills (script), John Higgins (art), Sally Hurst (colors), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Despite this being Mills and Higgins’ return to Greysuit, this is my first time being exposed to the title. And despite having never read anything set in this world, I never felt like I was missing anything I needed to keep up. This opening strip set the tone of the story well and teased a bit of who (or what) this ‘Greysuit’ could be. At the same time, I can see how this chapter could be a great primer for returning readers. It feels like it could be a quick refresher on things as opposed to having your hand held through an exposition dump.
The story got off to an interesting start with a cat-and-mouse chase through an industrial setting. The narrative seems to be pointing towards the Greysuits being some sort of covert government agents. I say ‘seems to’ because there’s never any direct reference to that being the case. Well, that and the complete lack of any semblance of due process. And then there’s that cliffhanger. Guess we’ll all have to come back next week!
The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael (And The Dead Left In His Wake): One Last Bullet, Part 1
Credits: Rob Williams (script), Michael Dowling (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Ichabod Azrael is a killer. Or was a killer, since he’s dead now. But he’s still killing, so maybe it is “is a killer” after all.
Ichabod, a vicious Old West gunfighter killed by a demon-possessed child, was tricked by Charon to blaze a path of death for the ferryman to use to get out of Purgatory and out of his eternal job of taking souls across the river Styx. That trick was in making Ichabod think that he had a love of his life in the living world to return to. When Charon was eventually sent back to Purgatory, that lie was revealed as such to Ichabod. To say he did not take the news well would be an understatement. There a missions of revenge, and then there is the path Ichabod sets himself on after finding out he had been tricked. Forget men, women, and children: woe be to anyone or anything in this world or the next that stands between Ichabod and the target of his revenge. Starting with Charon himself, whom Ichabod straight-up blew the back of his head clean off.
This is the third and final series for Ichabod Azrael, and Williams and Dowling go for a real John Cassaday-drawn “Unforgiven” vibe right out the gate, but with afterlife vistas, talking horses, dead ferrymen, and the like. Although the image above is B&W, the series does flip back and forth between that for the afterlife and color for our world. Either way, this is a nice change of pace to the other strips running in the Prog, and one I’m looking forward to following until the bitter, bloody end.
Judge Dredd: Block Judge, Part 2
Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
One of the many things I love about “2000 AD” is the way Tharg allows every Judge Dredd artist brings their own sensibilities to the strip. Each one presents the city, its citizens, and even Dredd himself in their own unique way. Ezquerra is no different, which is great because his interpretation of this world is still so unique, despite being the creator of so much of its visual vocabulary. Every person in his Mega-City One looks worn and grizzled; you see the weight of their own lives sitting firmly on their shoulders. His architecture has a distinct roundness to it, giving the city a look like it’s almost bubbling and blistering up out of the earth. His take on the city makes it look, while certainly futuristic, like something that has been cobbled together over many years. This approach to art gives Ezquerra’s Dredd stories a plausibility easily lost in other situations when your world and characters are so firmly planted in a sci-fi setting.
Continued belowThis week’s strip opens with what was made clear last Prog: Gramercy Heights has an enormous class divide. Wagner’s narration on the first page, as we’re shown a few different units, tells us a little bit about where in the block they are and what their inhabitants’ lives are like. He starts with some residents from the upper floors, including a penthouse dweller, and works down, down, down the tower. Each resident gets an illuminating bit of information: how far up or down they’ve been in the block. So we learn how low the folks from the upper floors have ventured, and inversely, how high the lower inhabitants have been. Some reasons are given for the lack of exploration. For example: the wealthier folks from up at the top have heard tale of the crime and violence down below. Why tempt danger when you really don’t have to, right? But it’s a different story for the poorer inhabitants of the lower block. You see, they can’t go higher because they’re just not allowed. The upper block has its own elevators that bypass the lower floors for an express trip up. On top of that, guards keep unwanted people out of those elevators, and therefore off of the upper levels. In Gramercy Heights, the economic divide is a physical one as well.
After the tear Judge Dredd went on in Gramercy last week, I naively thought we’d now see how his installment as Block Judge would affect the tower’s more affluent residents. That was a sort of silly expectation to put on the story, in hindsight. Why would he go up there and shake cages? The crime is all down below. So what if funds are diverted from lower level security and education to make life more comfortable up top? That may be a social crime, but no actual laws are being broken. That’s happening with the littering, violence, and drug use on the lower levels. So, despite leaning on the upper level administrator over fat in the block’s budget, Dredd’s focus is on punishing the cash-poor lower residents in an attempt to ‘bring the block to heel.’ Needless to say, all of this only serves to fan the flames of social unrest.
Kingdom: Aux Drift, Part 2
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Richard Elson (art), Abigail Ryder (color), Ellie DeVille (letters)
Last week we were introduced to Gene the Hackman’s army. This week we get to see them battle!
During the gorgeously drawn combat we’re given a little bit of history on Gene and his roving army. We see a little about how they came under his command as well as what Gene is doing traveling the land with a small legion of warriors. You see, he’s trying to find out if The Masters are still around. But from the looks of things, that may very well be a big ‘no.’ But I wouldn’t expect Gene to take that for an answer, especially since that’d mean the story would be over. It’s not, so we travel on with Gene, his army, and his new friends. Let’s just hope they aren’t too worn down from that battle; I’m sure there’ll be another one just around the corner.
Stickleback: The Thru’Penny Opera, Part 2
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), D’Israeli (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
The killer I mentioned last week? The one I said was worse than Jack the Ripper? He has a name: The Cutter. “On account of how he slices ’em up like a draper’s bolt,” says one of the characters in this week’s strip. Anyone and everyone is a target. But why should Stickleback care? Maybe because, even though he’s the Pope of Crime, he still has a heart, disguised though it may be.
D’Israeli continues to make this strip literally unlike anything else in comics at the moment. For a start, he’s eschewing color for B&W. But he’s not even the only artist in this Prog doing that, so let’s look a little deeper. He’s eschewing traditional line art for more of a woodcut/geometric-shape method; the art doesn’t look ‘drawn’ so much as ‘assembled’. But even that doesn’t quite capture what he has going on, I don’t think, because with all these shapes and dark spots, there aren’t really any areas where he uses a flat black. This isn’t “The Hard Goodbye”-era Frank Miller, where he seemed to build the panels out of solid black shapes on pure white backgrounds. Everything on these ‘Stickleback’ pages has a texture to it; some type of pattern or finish to it to keep it from being that stark, distractingly eye-catching black. So while the art may look simple in some respects, it never actually is simple.
Continued below
II. OF INTEREST
Longtime 2000 AD fans and readers of this column know that there was a Judge Dredd movie released theatrically in 2012. I’d say ‘everyone knows’ but the qualifier has to be used since, because the fact that film barely missed making its budget back in domestic box office, obviously everyone did not know. But those who did see it, and have seen it since that release, have been overwhelmingly positive about the film and the need for a sequel. 2000 AD has done as much as they can do, in the form of comics sequels “Underbelly” and “Uprise”, but they aren’t like Marvel, owned by a multinational entertainment juggernaut; they can’t just greenlight a sequel.
That’s where we, the fans, come in.
The folks over at Make A DREDD Sequel have decreed that today, October 1, is the Day of Dredd. This is the day to show your support for another Dredd movie by:
1) Signing the sequel petition here,
2) Buying a copy of DREDD on DVD or Blu-Ray (if you already have one, make this your gift/loaner copy), or watching it streaming on Netflix or your video service of choice, and then
3) Pluggimg the cause on social media with the #DayOfDREDD hashtag.
This campaign, and the MADS folks in general, have the support and blessing of 2000 AD, Tharg, the Judge Dredd co-creators, and Karl Urban. And we think they’re pretty nifty, too. So please do what you can to raise Dredd awareness today (and every day) so we can get the Thrill-Power back into the cinemas where it belongs!
III. 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! “2000 AD” Prog 1901 is on sale today and available from finer comic shops everywhere, from the 2000 AD Newsstand app for iPad and iPhone, and from 2000ADonline.com in print or DRM-free PDF and CBZ formats. So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
