Welcome, Earthlets, to 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 British sci-fi comic “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 worth of zarjaz comics waiting for you to discover and enjoy.
This week brings us a brand-new Prog, so let’s get right to it!
I. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1993
NOW ARRIVING
Anderson, PSI Division: The Candidate, Part 1
Credits: Emma Beeby (script), Nick Dyer (art), Richard Elson (colors), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Greg Matiasevich: It’s been longer than I can remember, but this week sees the return of Judge Anderson to the Progs in a solo strip. And a little surprisingly, a story not written by longtime Anderson scribe Alan Grant. But if the success of this week’s chapter is anything to go on, Tharg would be smart to let writer Emma Beeby could telling Anderson tales for a long time to come.
Before we talk about Nick Dyer’s artwork, let’s touch base on where we find Anderson at the start of things. The Mega-City One mayoral race is heating up, and one of the female candidates has received death threats from the anarchist group Citizens Army. The candidate refuses to cancel her public speech, so Anderson and Psi Division are called in to provide protection, a la a psychic Secret Service. Beeby works in the basic setup and retinue of the Psi Division into Anderson’s dialogue, making this intro chapter one that non-‘Dredd’ readers can dive right in to.
It’s also worth noting that, while not powerless, the job of Mega-City One mayor doesn’t bestow the type of authority in the Meg that being the mayor of, say, New York, gives the holder over that city. The mayor isn’t a puppet office per se, but have no illusions that true power in Mega-City One lies anywhere but in the Justice Department. And the Justice Department likes their mayors nice and docile. Too bad ‘docile’ doesn’t seem like a word used to describe candidate Carol Smart.
Moving over to the art side of things, I’m going to go ahead and say what I’m sure more than one person reading this thought as they first read ‘Candidate’: for a second or two, I thought Tharg brought Cam Kennedy back into the fold to draw this strip. We were wrong to think so, and Nick Dyer does some really good work here, but his approach to the page (and more directly his figurework) is clearly taking cues from Kennedy. The online discussion of labeling this approach sways from ‘homage’ to ‘swipe’. And while I can see how some would jump to the latter, I would make the case the former is much more accurate.
I’m not seeing direct lifts or tracings in Dyers’ work. Yes, his shading and texturizing of surfaces is very Kennedy-inspiring, and his figures carry the Scotch artist’s DNA in them in spades. But one could easily and strongly point out the connection between Kennedy’s work and that of Spanish artist Victor de la Fuente. So is Dyer swiping Kennedy? Or de la Fuente? Or any other artist? Or has he just done what artists have always done: latch on to the visual vocabulary of like-minded artists to help them work out their own style, their own idiosyncracies. Bill Sienkiewicz had to work through a hell of a lot of Neal Adams influence before he became the gonzo artist we all know and love, but that also doesn’t mean that the Sienkiewicz-by-way-of-Adams was bad work either. Far from it! And Dyer is no different. He’s clearly of a certain school when it comes his artistic influences. So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m looking forward to seeing where he takes those influences from here.
Tharg’s 3rillers: Mindmine, Part 1
Credits: Rory McConville (script), Colin MacNeil (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Adrian Johnson: Tharg serves up another one of his three-part 3rillers this week. These stories are standalone done-in-threes that give us a stronger dose of Thrill-power than the usual Future Shock, but don’t overstay their welcome. It’s lately been common practice lately for up-and-coming teams to be assigned these 3rillers, but this latest installment sees freshman script droid McConville paired up with veteran Colin MacNeil!
‘Mindmine’ begins with a strong opening; contrasting the benign scene of a birthday party with the narrative hook that is compelling within the first page. The hook is the implementation of ‘mindmines’ by marauding galactic pirates called the Carasoga within those unlucky to cross their path of pillage. The mindmines, as the name would imply, not only lull the unfortunate carrier into a dreamlike sleep; but are also booby-trapped to explode psionically if the carrier is not awoken in a certain way. A soldier named Staff Sergeant Caxon is a member of a detail that actually enters the minds of the afflicted to disarm these mindmines. Kind of like The Hurt Locker meets Scanners.
McConville has scripted a highly intriguing premise here; coupled with the backdrop of an ongoing war between this military unit and the pirates. One could make a real world correlation per my previous analogy to the film ’The Hurt Locker’ as the unit has to contend with disarming the mindmines even after the pirates are long gone from that sector; much like the US military had to neutralize IEDs in the occupation of Iraq after the second Gulf War. However, I would not presume that McConville had that intention; though it comes present to mind given the premise.
The art and color by MacNeil and Doherty respectively is clear and effective as veterans of their caliber should be. Coincidentally, the pair should be familiar to most 2000 AD fans and have illustrated the same titles at the same time previously in their careers such as several ‘Dredd’ stories and ‘Devlin Waugh’. They have never worked on the same strip together until now. They make a solid team and I’m looking forward to more of their collaboration in upcoming installments.
Judge Dredd: Ladykiller, Part 3
Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Mike Romeo: A thousand years in the future you’d think people would be more sensitive. There’s some course language in this strip with regard to gender identity, and at first it felt very out of place. It wasn’t necessarily violent or hateful, but definitely insensitive.
As I read the sequence where Warren Buffet Block was raided, one particularly dickish undercover Judge’s statement stood out to me. His remark that “this lady ain’t all lady” seemed needlessly vindictive. If we take today’s society as a starting point, and leap forward a millennium, how can transgender slander still be a thing? I thought last week’s strip handled this stuff in an interesting way, with Dredd discussing Maybe’s new identity in the same matter-of-fact manner that he’d assess someone’s shoes. It made me realize: of course this’d be how it is! In a world where eldster fetishists and robosexuals are just another fact of life, who’d give a shit about how someone identifies when it come to something as fluid as gender? But then here’s this undercover being a prick for no good reason, carrying on in a manner that should be considered ancient.
That’s when it hit me. This guy, this undercover Judge? He’s the bad guy.
All Judges are, but since they play on the same team as our titular ‘hero,’ it’s easy to lose sight of that. I let myself get caught up on what this undercover was saying, not what he was doing. His comment compounds a problem, it doesn’t create it. A squad of Judges were set loose on a block equipped with x-ray specs with the explicit instruction to inspect citizen’s genitals without their knowing. On top of that, by the time we encounter the aforementioned “all woman” comment, the poor lady has already been pulled out of her apartment without cause by two men who will not identify themselves. It’s wrong, on top of wrong, on top of wrong. And since this is all standard operating procedure in Mega-City One, the comment was the first thing I took away from the scene. I’ve been desensitized by the extreme nature of this future society.
Continued belowThis is, in my opinion, one of the big reasons that John Wagner continues to be such a powerful Dredd writer. He’s able to twist perceptions, making the reader blind to the fascism of the Judges. There are distractions everywhere, which pull our focus away from the fact that Judge Dredd is a villain. It’s like a certain American presidential candidate, right? Something bad happens, so you throw another worse thing on top of it to draw attention away. The undercover Judge is trampling all over any number of this woman’s civil liberties (by real-world standards, at least), but the fact that he’s a goddamn bigot about it somehow feels like the worst part.
When combined with Carlos Ezquerra’s masterful, highly stylized approach to storytelling, the illusion becomes even easier to buy. This isn’t a reflection of the world we live in, it’s just comics, right? It helps soften the bite of the satire, which makes it even more subversive. Ezquerra’s chunky characters and future-primitive landscapes wrap the message of the story in something far more palatable than a simple lecture on modern day policing or gender identity. His art is the spoonful of sugar we need while swallowing our daily bitter pill.
I’m always fascinated by how Ezquerra frames out his panels. His line can get a little rugged to begin with, but his panel borders have such a tooth to them. It’s like he’s showing us the decay around the edges of society, or the fraying that’s taking place in Mega-City One. It creates a dissonance between the action of the story and its place in the world, like every event we’re witness to has been gnawed on before coming to us.
Oh yeah, and PJ Maybe is still on the loose, probably killing lots of folks. Someone should really do something about that.
Outlier: Survivor Guilt, Part 4
Credits: T.C. Eglington (script), Karl Richardson (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
AJ: The Alliance continues to assemble information and personnel for a strategy to combat the Hurde, an alien race determined to humankind’s destruction. One of these key personnel is Caul; who is now in hiding on a remote world from the Alliance as a result of the previous arc. Caul was experimented on by the Hurde and thus would have knowledge vital to the Alliance’s plan. The Alliance finds Caul and captures him to divulge that knowledge, willingly or not.
Eglington maintains his balance of action and dialogue in his scripting; if not tenuously. I commented in an earlier review that the pacing within this arc had been somewhat glacial in terms of getting the narrative to crank into gear. However, this installment was definitely an improvement as it focuses on Caul; who has been a key character in the previous arc. I’m hoping that getting the info from Caul will be the catalyst for kicking the story into the second act to ramp up the pacing.
I was pleased to see Richardson’s art have more body language than in the previous installments to date. Granted, there was a lot of ground to cover script-wise earlier in the story which accounted for mostly ‘talking heads’. As I remarked about Eglington’s balance of dialogue and action in the script, it’s good to see Richardson also getting comfortable with the pacing and staging of the script for some nice storytelling and shot selection.
Scarlet Traces: Cold War, Part 6
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), D’Israeli (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
GM: Pace is an interesting thing in a weekly comic. The topic comes up from time to time and it’s one that I find myself coming at from more than one angle when I think about it.
Comics, by and large, are a constrained medium. The page is only so big, the number of pages only so finite, and the number of installments to tell your tale only so long. So one can look at finished comics, especially those by seasoned professionals, as a list of choices made by the creative teams as what was the most important aspects of this story to show the reader given the preciousness of the space available to tell that story. Spending 8 pages showing Ahron going back home and saying goodbye to his mother and family last week was deemed important. The lead-up, prep, and travel from Earth to Venus by Ahron and crew was not, because this week opens with a “42 days later…” caption and a gorgeous image of their capsule orbiting the destination planet. And I can see why that choice was made: Ahron’s visit gives us context into not only his life but also the lives of Venusian refugees living on Earth. It’s the more emotional and engaging of the two scenarios, and Edginton wisely chose to keep it and chuck the space-travel porn.
Continued belowThat said, we get three wordless panels of the lander … landing… on Venus. The previous page has earlier stages of the crew’s approach and descent, but Edginton has those panels do double-duty with exposition balloons, although smartly not enough balloons to cover too much of the art. But in the image above, Edginton lets the moment(s) breathe, however much they can in such a tight space. It also helps break up the reading pace just a bit because the reader is most likely expecting the previous page’s monologue to continue. But starting the next page with no balloons would be like having someone pushing against your hand as you push against it, and then giving no resistance at all. Although since this wasn’t on a page-flip, the effect might not have been too jarring.
This might be my most inside-baseball observation of the column, but I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that this level of decision-making about the final reading experience is something Edginton and D’Israeli think about when they bring ‘Scarlet Traces’ to the page.
That, and Martian tripods. They’ve definitely been thinking about Martian tripods lately. As you will see…
II. AN EARTHLET’S GUIDE TO 2000 AD
GM: At Multiver-City One, we understand trying to figure out to start with a selection of almost 40 years worth of comics can be 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?
To help all you new & potential readers, we’ve put together something we call 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 easy and simple as possible.
That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 1993 is on sale today and available digitally worldwide on:
- The 2000 AD Newsstand app for iPad and iPhone,
- The 2000 AD app for Android devices,
- 2000ADonline.com in DRM-free PDF and CBZ formats.
It is also available in print today from:
They are available in print in North America next month from your local comic shop.
So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
