Welcome, Earthlets, 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.
We have a special treat for you this week. In addition to covering a Prog AND Megazine today, we have a review of the new feature-length 2000 AD documentary Future Shock! The Story of 2000 AD. Long story short, it is definitely worth your time to see this film ASAP!
I. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1968
NOW DEPARTING
Judge Dredd: Ghosts, Part 6
Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Mark Sexton (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
After six weeks and a number of twists and turns, Michael Carroll and Mark Sexton bring “Ghosts” to a close. While the status quo of Mega-City One made it through this story unscathed, Carroll has planted a number of seeds for future writers to sow. This is one of the more interesting elements of “Judge Dredd” comics; since nearly everything ever published is in play, any sort of unfinished business from any point in time can be revisited. Carroll himself has done this before with his recent inclusion of The Lawlords, a once-used alien race of John Wagner’s creation. He’s also one to leave himself a story thread To pick up later, as was the case with his use of Gideon Dallas. So will Carroll return to the idea of Sector Zero again, or will he leave it for some future storytellers to return to? Time will tell.
And how about Mark Sexton’s art? For this being his first strip in the Prog, he’s done an incredible job. From the Judges’ uniforms, to the tech, to the city itself…Sexton’s vision of this world is fully realized. Which came in handy as ‘Ghosts’ called for some pretty intense stuff! Armies of Judges, Mega Blocks in the distance and all sorts of speed healers were just a few of the tasks set upon Sexton during the creation of this story. I know he’s had a hand in the designs for DC’s upcoming “Wacky Racers,” but we’ll be eagerly anticipating his next full-fledged foray into Dredd’s world!
Kingdom: Beast of Eden, Part 8
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Richard Elson (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Finally! I’ve been harping on these astronauts for weeks now!
Way back in part one of this story, some human astronauts with an Aux landed on a planet that was clearly foreign to them. Immediately danger seized upon them, but then they were gone. Now, with Gene the Hackman en route to bust up the super swarm of bug monsters by killing its king, he’s stumbled across our absent astronauts.
Let’s give a hat tip to Richard Elson’s costume and character design. His future-punk, Conan-meets-Mad-Max approach to this story is top notch. I guess I really noticed how out-of-this-world it all was when I saw Gene in the same panel as the human astronauts. They seemed so…ordinary next to him. Which made me flip back to the first page and really take in his comrades in the tank, with their stylish haircuts and dystopic knack for accessorizing. In this discovery, I feel like I uncovered a bit of unspoken narrative. They’re part of Gene’s crew, the baddest of the bad, which must carry some sort of honor or distinction with it. In a hard and violent world, that sort of thing seems like it’d be important, doesn’t it? So of course they’d dress in outlandish ways! As far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of uniforms in this world, so how else would anyone know who and what they are?
The Order: In The Court Of The Wyrmqueen, Part 8
Credits: Kek-W (script), John M. Burns (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
How do you solve a problem like Calhoun? With a chamber pot. And a knife. And some gold.if that sounds confusing, don’t worry. Writer Kek-W and John Burns make sense of it. Some threads are resolved this week, but the creative team thankfully avoids the exposition dump I predicted in the last column.
Everything I like about ‘The Order’ was on display in Part 8. Kek-W works the anachronistic future tech angle well, but I think it succeeds in large part because he has the items understood & used in ways organic to the story, as opposed to simply cool moments. Although there certainly are cool moments. He’s also sketched these characters in as vivid terms as Burns’ color choices. It can come off as melodramatic or overly short-handed in spots, but when he wants to hit a particularly strong relationship moment, like with the Anna Kohl bit this week, it resonates more because we have such clear understandings of who these people are. And this version of The Order (2.0) has a bit less homogeneity to it, which helps make each member stand out a little more than having Kohl, Ritterstahl, and a bunch of German warrior retirees, as was the case in 1.0.
Burns? Continuing to excel. Can’t wait to see what he brings next week
A.B.C. Warriors: Return to Ro-Busters, Part 8
Credits: Pat Mills (script), Clint Langley (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
As I’ve mentioned a few times over the course of this strip, ‘Return to Ro-Busters’ has Mills and Langley going back and revisiting the early days of Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein. I figured that these weren’t ‘untold tales’ from some of the reader comments I’ve seen, but I wasn’t sure where or how much of these stories had been seen or published before. Well, at least in terms of ‘Return’, the answer has been discovered!
The events we see play out at Greasy Gracie’s comes from 1979’s Prog 112, Part 10 of the last & longest Ro-Busters story ‘The Rise & Fall of Ro-Jaws & Hammerstein’. In that one, also written by Pat Mills but drawn by Kevin O’Neill & Mick McMahon, we see the bar activity but without the Scotland Yard side of the story and also missing the Led Belly-as-Apex thread, presumably because Mills hadn’t thought of it yet. The whole “robot rights” thread & tenor is present & prominent in the original strip, if a little one-dimensional. Getting the Quartz angle on this go-around does add an extra dimension; bringing that up to two dimensional might not seem like something worthy of praise, but in this case it is. Seeing Quartz ‘decode’ the Ro-Jaws & Hammerstein minstrel show dance number (present in the original) is a nice bit that’s also funny once you know why they were dancing like that on stage to begin with.
Another addition in ‘Return’ is the mention of the Defiance Code as an actual tangible thing that can be installed versus being just some personality quirk. Mills’ seeding of this is directly setting up something that will pay off once we get back to the present day for the ABC’s. But having now read ‘Rise & Fall’ and knowing what’s coming down the pipe, I will say that Langley isn’t going to want for action to draw. If you think the bar brawl gave him good art fodder, just wait til you see him reinterpreting some of the O’Neill insanity to come. Oh boy!
(and speaking of insanity, apologies for last week’s bit about Langley modeling Led Belly after that Kirby Eternals piece. While I stand by the idea there is a strong resemblance, turns out that look was laid down by O’Neill back in ‘Rise & Fall”. Oops!)
Strontium Dog: Repo Men, Part 8
Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
We get both a bit of search AND a bit of destroy in this week’s strip! Nice to see the Dogs kicking a little ass (or chin) after getting it handed to them by the Twister Sisters in Part 7. Wagner & Ezquerra have them bust out the official duds in the performance of their official duties. This works as not only an extra badge of legitimacy to their questionings, but also just to show off some classic Ezquerra design work. Almost 40 years on and still a good look, which isn’t something you can say about most 70’s designs.
Continued belowAnother nice touch? The electronux. Well, come to think of it, they’re probably a pretty nasty touch if you’re unlucky enough to be on their receiving end, but leave it to Wagner to come up with a clever portmanteau as funny as it is painful.
Although the Dogs can’t catch up with the Sisters this week, they can see where that particular twister is looking to touch down: The Rock. And not Alcatraz. I mean, THE ROCK: the place the Dogs rousted Johnny out of retirement for his help in clearing, the place Johnny tried tricking the Galanthans into helping them clear. THAT Rock.
I may have been skeptical about Wagner & Ezquerra’s ability to wrap all these threads up in the next month, but this impending consolidation shows me those two old dogs still have tricks up their sleeves. Here’s hoping Alpha’s Dogs are just as cunning…
II. THIS MONTH IN JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 369
NOW ARRIVING
Realm of the Damned: Tenebris Dios, Part 1
Credits: Alec Worley (script), Pye Parr (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
This new Black Metal-infused gothic horror series blends music and madness into a world where the forces of darkness that once stalked the fringes of reality have finally taken over the world.
The supernatural defence agency known as ‘The Congregation’, a covert wing of the Catholic Church, has been destroyed and its sole surviving operative, legendary monster-hunter Alberic Van Helsing, is now a fugitive and addict. Now he’s been recruited by the so-called Vampire Elite to help them destroy an ancient evil that threatens them all.
And if Parr’s name sounded familiar to you, that’s because before going freelance, he was the in-house design droid for Tharg and 2000 AD. And while we were all sorry to see him leave that post, I am ecstatic with his decision if it meant he gets to bring us comics that look this good. There’s definitely a mid-80’s Matt Wagner vibe to his work on this strip, just in terms of line and tone. But he’s clearly channeling some other influences when it comes to giving Worley’s script the lunatic energy it sounds like this strip is going to put off.
My metal tastes run a little more NWOBHM than Black, but for series that looks like as much fun as this does, I’m throwing a pair of devil horns in the air and rock out to the beat these two demented drummers throw down!
Judge Dredd: The Gyre, Part 2
Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Nick Percival (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
I always find it a little exciting when a creator turns up simultaneously in the Prog and Megazine, particularly if both appearances happen to be on ‘Judge Dredd.’ It happened most recently when Wagner and MacNeil saw ‘Terror Rising’ launch in the midst of their weekly ‘Serial Serial,’ and before that Rob Williams wrote the stoney-jawed lawman in a Megazine one-shot while one of his weeklies was running. Now this week sees another cosmic alignment between the two Thrill-Zines as Michael Carroll claims each pole-position for himself.
I’m not sure if The Gyre is a Michael Carroll creation or something that predates this story, but it certainly FEELS like something that came from the same idea cloth as the Black Atlantic or The Cursed Earth or any other number of environmental atrocities our atomic weapons delivered upon the planet. Set in the North Pacific, think of The Gyre as a 100-km-wide island of trash in the middle of a perpetual electrical storm and general maritime unpleasantness. You’d happily book a week’s vacation in the Bermuda Triangle before thinking of visiting The Gyre. But something lost from MC-1 has turned up there, so Dredd and partner have been sent to investigate and retrieve.
Drawing rubble and detritus effectively is a skill not every artist possesses, but we’re lucky to have two strong trash masters working on the Thrill-Zines simultaneously: Clint Langley on ‘A.B.C. Warrior’ and Nick Percival here. Percival gets to put a bit more of a sheen on his work here than Langley does, but that sheen is drenched with saltwater and peppered with rust, so it’s just as effective as telling the readers this is NOT a good place as Langley’s.
Continued below
DREDD: Dust, Part 3
Credits: Arthur Wyatt (script), Ben Willsher (art), Chris Blythe (color), Simon Bowland (letters)
The exploration of the DREDD movie universe continues as we see, for the first time, their iteration of the infamous Cursed Earth.
Writer Arthur Wyatt presented the Cursed Earth to us in an interesting way: by having it be Judge Conti’s first foray out of the city. This gives Wyatt a more natural in-story reason for the exposition; Conti will ask questions and when she gets answers, so will we. It’s a simple choice to make in storytelling, but one that seems to be so easily missed. How many times have we read two characters affirming shared knowledge and experiences, in great detail, in order to catch the reader up in a hurry?
While there weren’t too many big departures in the way this Cursed Earth seems to operate, Ben Willsher’s art provides a difference that isn’t narratively based. His re-envisioning of this environment is where things really diverge, I think. I’ve always felt that, no matter how serious the story, whenever we’ve seen the Cursed Earth in the comics, there’s always been some degree of cartoonishness to it. Whether it’s through the mutated inhabitants, or the monsters, or even the long-lost ruins of America, something, somewhere is going to get outlandish. But here, Willsher plays things a little closer to the established reality of the world. The locals aren’t hyper mutated (so far,) and the landscape seems to be simply a desert wasteland.
Things end with Dredd and Conti leaping from a moving plane, so expect next month’s strip to hit the ground running!
DeMarco, PI: Damocles, Part 3
Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Ellie De Ville (letters)
Not only is this the third Michael Carroll story published this week, but it’s the second he’s written with Galen DeMarco in it! It’s also a story that leans a bit on the writer’s previous works, like with the Lawlords’ ship in “The Gyre” and Gideon Dallas in “Ghosts.” But unlike those other two stories, “Damocles” is a narrative that is more crucially tied to what came before it. Names, places and external motivators are all things that need to be kept track of, and, given the nine-pages-a-month pace that the story is presented in, that can prove to be a bit of a task. The deeper into things we get, the more I can’t help but feel that this should have been a weekly strip over in “2000 AD.”
On the art side of things, Steve Yeowell continues to impress. I find myself most impressed by his approach to space and environment. It’s safe to say that Yeowell’s got a pretty minimal way of cartooning, but despite that, is able to convey a ton of information that isn’t related directly to the characters who are on the page at the moment. Sprawling laboratories and tight hallways are rendered with an expert shorthand that communicates exactly what you need to know, but does so with the fewest marks possible. This is something the artist has done for a lot of his career, but has achieved new heights in the last few years.
III. MEGAZINE FEATURES
Interrogation: Dan McDaid – The Zero Option by Matthew Badham
I was really excited to see this one. I’ve been watching McDaid’s Instagram with a lot of interest over the last few months, as he’s been posting a lot of his Dredd process work. I’d already had the impression that he’s been blending his influenced into one version of Dredd, so it was really interesting to get a first hand account of how McDaid himself views what he’s doing. There was some really good process talk in here as well, so if you’re into that sort of thing, as I am, this is one not to miss.
Interrogation: Al Ewing by Stephen Jewell
It’s funny to see an Interrogation of Al Ewing pop up this month, as the topic of British creators making it big in the States is fresh on my mind after watching Future Shock. Although that gave the phenomena a more dour spin to it, I don’t think anyone would begrudge Ewing his success on this side of the pond. Find out about all the projects he has under his belt that are making US readers as excited about him as the loyal Prog followed have been for years in this article!
Continued below
Interrogation: Alec Worley & Pye Parr by Matthew Badham
You’ve read the story; now get the BACKstory! Matthew Badham sits down with the creative team behind the Megazine’s latest addition and picks their brains about their black-metal-infused slab of Thrill-Horror. You also get a healthy dose of Pye Parr sketches and design material accompanying the text, and since Parr’s day job prior to this strip was as Tharg’s lead designer, it’s fascinating to see those skills at play…in a completely different context. Value-added content doesn’t come much more biting than this!
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 1968 and Judge Dredd Megazine 369 are 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,
- Finer comic shops everywhere
So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
