Welcome, citizens, to this week’s installment of Multiver-City One! Every Wednesday we examine the latest offerings from Tharg and the droids over at 2000 AD, the galaxy’s leading producers of Thrill-Power entertainment! Between the weekly “2000 AD” itself, the monthly “Judge Dredd Megazine”, an extensive library of graphic novel collections, and new US-format one-shots and mini-series, they have decades of zarjaz comics for you to enjoy.
I. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1963
Judge Dredd: Ghosts, Part 1
Every day the Mega-City One Judicial System tests its children, searching for those with the promise of becoming her future Judges. Because there are many, many more child applicants than there are Judges, the majority of hopefuls are simply thanked for their time and sent on their way. Now it seems that someone is taking advantage of recently rejected kids, telling their parents that there was some paperwork mix-up and that they actually were accepted. The only problem is that it seems the parents are being misled and handing their children over to someone who is certainly not a Judge.
This strip sees the debut of brand-new art droid Mark Sexton, who’s really started out on the right foot. His work reminds me of a young Mike Allred, but with a distinctly “2000 AD” sensibility. It’s that indefinable something that artists like McMahon, Ezquerra, Dayglo, and Flint all have in spades, despite their notably different styles. I want to say it’s something like a punk aesthetic but I don’t mean leather jackets and safety pins; rather more in the spirit of the work than anything else. It’s about expectations, maybe. I think that every artist I listed, and Sexton is included, works without a care of what the larger world thinks. But there is a care for the narrower world, a desire to impress peers and others who ‘get it.’ And that’s where I think the spark in Sexton’s work comes from. It appears to me that the guy not only has an affection for the character, but also really enjoys drawing this story. He’s got his idea of what the city should look like, what shape and fit the helmets are, and how a Judge’s jumper should fit. He’s got references in mind, and he wants others who get those references to smirk and nod when they see them.
Michael Carrol is back, but this time to unwind a multi-part story. Even though his last few strips have been character reinforcing one-offs, I can’t help but wonder if there’s anything in those stories we’ll be calling back to in the coming weeks. As a writer, Carroll likes to build his own continuity in the series, as opposed to picking up where others have left off. We saw it in 2014 when he wrote ‘Cascade,’ which was the big wrap-up to the preceding few stories he’d written. However it plays, I’m intrigued by the mystery he’s laid out and can’t wait to see where next week takes us.
Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Mark Sexton (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Kingdom: Beast of Eden, Part 3
In a fight to the end, Gene The Hackman is the guy you want on your side. Not just because he’s badder than bad, but because when you take a crippling blow from an enemy, he will bestow his mercy upon you. Without hesitation.
Gene and company have found themselves in a bit of a bind. After being blindsided by hostile forces, they’re left out in the middle of The Wander with no food, little water, heavy casualties, and no mode of transportation. Despite the odds against them, Gene never loses a step. He’s quick to rally the remainder of his team and put together a plan. It’s not much of one, but it’ll buy time. Then, to their surprise, a discovery is made…
Also this week: still no astronauts. Back in part one we met them, but there’s been no sign of them since!
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Richard Elson (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
The Order: In The Court Of The Wyrmqueen, Part 3
Continued below
The gap between the last ‘Order’ strip and this one is starting to come into focus. We stay in Elizabethan London for the second straight week and follow the stumbling & bumblings of Daniel Colhoun after his encounter with The Rotting Man. What does all this have to do with Anna Kohl and her band of medieval “Expendables”? Quite a lot, actually. It turns out that The Rotting Man had a connection with Ritterstahl, the robot from the last strip. Connection might be too soft a word to use, but saying they were the same person seems a little too much in the other direction.
Here’s what we know or have been able to piece together: Ritterstahl was given human form through the wyrms at the end of the last strip, set a few hundred years prior to ‘In The Court of the Wyrmqueen’. This Rotting Man passed along some portion of Ritterstahl’s memories to Daniel last Prog, so The Rotting Man was either an incredibly long-lived Ritterstahl himself OR the latest in a series of host bodies for the wyrms that carried Ritterstahl’s personality/soul/whathaveyou. Anna Kohl, while longer-lived than most due to her bloodline, would have a much harder time still being active or even alive at this point given the timeline, but after what we see in the last panel, who knows? Can we ever really rule anything out in ‘The Order’ (or “2000 AD” in general)? Nope!
One bit of business artistically speaking that I noticed (particularly this week) was how red Daniel’s hair is. I mean, how can you not, right? The script goes to great lengths to remind us he’s Irish (which I think also sets up the plot point that this simple fact would make him instantly suspicious to the general London populace, right? Given the political reality of the day?) and you would think the blazingly red hair on his head would be a visual cue to that. And I’m sure that’s part of it.
But look at some of the color decisions Burns makes; dropping out the color into a much-more sepia-toned palette in certain panels during Daniel’s escape. But he doesn’t drop out the red in Daniel’s hair, does he? Nor the blood in his attack. To Burns’ credit, he doesn’t just go to black&white or lineart; he still gives the color wash the same texture as the full-color panels, he just mutes the palette and places even more emphasis on Daniel’s red hair as the constant that moves and almost ping-pongs its way through these panels.
Credits: Kek-W (script), John M. Burns (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
A.B.C. Warriors: Return to Ro-Busters, Part 3
We’ve seen Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein (think about it…), can Mek-Quake be too far behind? Nope!
The trip down Ro-Busters Memory Lane continues, and for those of us who missed it the first time around (and haven’t picked up 2000 AD’s “Ro-Busters: The Complete Nuts and Bolts, Vol. 1” yet) are being treated to a snappy re-telling of the early days of Hammerstein and his meeting the defiant Ro-Jaws for the first time.
‘A.B.C. Warriors’ strikes me as a very sharp and destructive strip that always carries a surprising amount of pitch-black humor with it. At this point I guess the surprise should be wearing off; one because I’ve been following it long enough to see that combination is no fluke and two because that’s Pat Mills’ M.O.. Having a character like Mek-Quake as Quartz’s enforcer is an obvious choice, but having him obsessed with singing incongruous tunes while carrying out his ultra-violence is an endearing choice that helps the readers that might be put-off by Cliff Langley’s art get a foothold on the material. With the punk DNA coursing through the pages of “2000 AD”, was I expecting to see Bobby Vinton and Roy Orbison lyrics show up? Nope!
And just to backtrack a bit, that isn’t to say that Langley’s artwork isn’t good or suited for this strip, because Tharg knows it is. Langley’s rendering can be so sharp at times I’m worried I’ll cut myself just handling the Progs! But that kind of commitment to an aesthetic with this much visceral punch to it can wear out the casual reader, so having Mills’ forays into black humor is a nice palette-cleanser in-between plot points and gut punches.
Continued below
Strontium Dog: Repo Men, Part 3
The time for thinking is over! Johnny Alpha’s plan is now in action!
Actually, since Strontium Dog Johnny Alpha is the best he is at what he does, the thinking never stops for him. Which is why a bunch of his fellow Dogs wanted to have him onboard as they fulfilled a suicidally difficult contract to clear out an asteroid-based city of criminals. Johnny’s big thought was to get the extremely powerful Galathans involved and have them do the work, despite the fact crossing the Galathans is even more of a suicide move than clearing out the asteroid But that John Alpha — always thinking!
The Hitchhiker’s Guide-style captions is a nice way to camoflague some foreshadowing and infodump situations, if you can pull off the right tone in them. Wagner doesn’t go quite the full Douglas Adams territory with these, but he does use those Mega-City One muscles to hit just the right mix of deadpan absurdity. Like having your kids chemically muted.
Will John/Johnny be able to pull off his plan-within-a-plan despite the Galathan’s ice-cold shoulder and growing doubt among his cohorts? We’ve got a few more Progs to go before we find out, but my credits are on “yes”…with a side pot on “no” because this is “2000 AD” after all and nothing ever going completely according to plan.
Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
II. OF INTEREST
This week’s “Of Interest” won’t actually be available until tomorrow, but when it pops up here on Multiversity you’ll see that it’s worth the wait! We got a chance to check in with PR droid Molch-R and talk about all things 2000 AD for our Robots From Tomorrow podcast!
What originally was going to be a simple 2015 retrospective morphed and transmogrified into a look at a lot of Tharg’s 2016 offerings, including:
- The Uncensored Cursed Earth
- ”Misty”
- ”Realm of the Damned”
- “GOLDTIGER”
- 2000 AD Thrill-Cast and ABC’s
- And more!
We also talked a bit about the new 2000 AD documentary Future Shock! The Story of 2000 AD, and I could not let Tharg’s representative off the line without asking about the status of Dredd on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or other moving visual mediums.
The interview will go live tomorrow at 9am EST, so please check back here to hear the fun!
III. AN EARTHLET’S GUIDE TO 2000 AD
We understand that having such a large selection of comics to choose from can make knowing where to start with 2000 AD seem daunting. What do they publish? Where can I get it? What’s up with Judge Dredd? Can I still read “2000 AD” if I don’t like Judge Dredd?
So to help new & potential readers, we’ve put together An Earthlet’s Guide to 2000 AD. This FAQ collects everything you need to make your initial foray into the 2000 AD Thrill-verse as simple as possible.
That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 1963 is on sale today 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,
- Select US newsstands, and
- Finer comic shops everywhere
So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
