Multiver-City One: 2000 AD Prog 2023 – Punch It! [New Jumping On Point!]

Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, the oh-so-cleverly named “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. This week brings us Prog 2023, another one of Tharg’s special ‘jump on’ Progs. All the stories are either one-shots or the first installment of continuing stories — perfect for new readers! Plus, this week’s Future Shock is by the winners of 2000 AD’s script & art competition at last year’s ThoughtBubble Festival. So new readers AND new droids!

And as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also added two new droids to our Multiver-City One review squad: Alice W. Castle and Greg Lincoln. Welcome aboard!

Let’s get right to it!

Cover by Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague

Judge Dredd: Get Jerry Sing
Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Greg Matiasevich: Three of the five strips this week are the start of continuing features, but like the cover, Tharg decided to give readers one punch of Dredd to get things started. The talent pool for Dredd runs pretty deep, and the number of script/art droids who could nail a great Mega City One-off is high, indeed. But when you absolutely, positively HAVE to get primo Dredd material, you go to the source: co-creators John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

These gentlemen have forgotten more about the character than most of us will ever know, and as many times as they’ve handled him over the years, they never fail to deliver the goods, in mega-epics like ‘The Apocalypse War’ or one-and-dones like ‘Get Jerry Sing.’ Since this story is only six pages long (or five-and-change with one page essentially a splash), there’s very little room for flourish in this story about the snowball effect of an errant piece of graffiti. But these two craftsmen waste zero time and space in getting things done. How do they do it?

Something Wagner does particularly well is use third-person omniscient narration to give texture and connection to what might otherwise be choppy inter-scene cutting. Covering Ezquerra art with captions might seem like an Iso-Cube-punishable crime, but Wagner makes them count. Think of them like brush strokes from a master painter; just the right dab here and there suggests so much.

Ezquerra continues to prove you can go home again by making every return to drawing Mega-City One like he never left. It’s interesting to compare Ezquerra’s tenure with the character to someone like Colin MacNeil, who’s also put decades into drawing Dredd and his environment. MacNeil’s style has evolved over the years, from painting to basic linework to the stripped-down heavy line he uses today. Ezquerra’s hasn’t covered nearly as much ground, which isn’t to say that Ezquerra hasn’t improved over the years, because he clearly has. But with a seemingly Dredd-like confidence, Ezquerra has always had a clear idea of who he is as an artist, using his time on the Mega-City beat not to find himself, but rather drill down on what makes his pages different than anyone else’s.

Brink: Skeleton Life, Part 1
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), INJ Culbard (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

Alice W. Castle: Something that continually impresses me with anthology magazines like “2000 AD” is how comic creators are able to build tone and intrigue into each chapter of their story even with such a small space to work with. Clocking in at only five pages, Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard don’t exactly have a lot of room to explain what is going on and why the reader should care. Instead, they need to cut straight down to the bone and convey what ‘Skeleton Life’ is going to be about in the same space that would take up the same space most creators would use for one dialogue scene.

Abnett and Culbard do this by conveying as much information they can in each panel as possible. Through the use of expository dialogue that may get a little heavy handed as well as captions that straight up point to objects in the panel and explain what it is and why it’s being shown, there’s not much room for subtlety here. However, all that leads to an excellent three page section that makes up the crux of this opening chapter as Culbard slowly brings into focus the massive structure of Galina Habitat, almost abandoned and apparently haunted, and a man, Belk, working on the surface.

Continued below

Culbard’s linework is very simple and uncomplicated, conveying a very stylistic future in only a few lines, but it’s in his storytelling that ‘Skeleton Life’ comes alive. On a page with six horizontal panels stacked on top of each, all of them claustrophobically thin and close up on the subject, we see Belk mesmerised by something before a page turn reveals a much larger panel of just what he’d do to stop himself from seeing whatever it is he encountered on Galina’s hull.

It’s a heavy hit of a last page that effectively captures the opening of what looks to be a ghost story in space and leaves you haunted, desperate for more.

Future Shocks: The Best Brain in the Galaxy
Credits: Andrew Williamson (script), Tilen Javornik (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)

Ryan Perry: ‘The Best Brain in the Galaxy’ treads fairly worn ground. Most people will have read or seen every plot point a thousand times before. That isn’t to say the story is bad, it’s just that you know exactly where it’s going from the first page. One of the big failings that keeps this story from getting off the ground is the lack of any depth in the main characters; they’re complete and utter cliches. This could be forgiven if the world around these characters had been interesting, or even explored at all, but we know nothing about the world this takes place in.

That said, the art in this story is really interesting. It’s a black and white story, and while traditionally that would mean black, white and grey, there is only black and white. Shading and depth is created by the density of lines through hatching and cross-hatching. Unfortunately, most of the design work here is fairly dull; it is like someone was asked to draw “Indistinguishable Sci-Fi set” #478. However, most of the character work is actually really good; many of the facial expressions and body language convey their emotions expertly, even if the characters are hard to tell apart.

There honestly isn’t much to say here. It’s a simple story all the way around that doesn’t innovate on anything but if you’ve got an itch that needs scratching for this type of story, it’ll do the job.

Scarlet Traces: Cold War – Book Two, Part 1
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), D’Israeli (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Rowan Grover: Coming off the conclusion of book one, the first part of book two serves as more of an introductory zero issue of sorts. Edginton primes readers to re-enter the world of “Scarlet Traces,” in a way that doesn’t completely alienate newer readers like myself. We get a great sense of scale in an almost Lovecraftian way as it’s revealed the Martians have become so powerful they simply might not care about Earth anymore. It’s cold, unforgiving sci-fi that Edginton nails in tone.

D’Israeli lives up to his reputation as a long time 2000 AD artist here, delivering a diverse amount of content for a short amount of pages. The second page depicting the Martian Gantry is striking yet subtle, the lines loose and expressive. In this way, D’Israeli manages to haunt the readers with deliberate vagueness, playing on the traditional fear of the unknown.

As most of the comic is set in a conference room, it would be easy for D’Israeli to take shortcuts. But each scene is uniquely rendered, and he goes crazy with the facial rendering. The conference speaker will switch from passionate anger to calm wisdom in a few panels, yet D’Israeli manages to make it feel smooth. Overall, this serves as a solid re-entry into the series.

Cursed: The Fall of Deadworld, Part 1
Credits: Kek-W (script), Dave Kendall (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Greg Lincoln: “Cursed” is the third story of the people remaining in the world of the Dark Judges before the judges exterminated the living in a quest to prevent crime following “Tainted” and “Dreams of the Deadworld.” Initially inspired by a nightmare Dave Kendall had about the hellish creations of John Wagner Alan Grant and Brian Bolland, this story I suspect has taken on a life of its own as the end is yet to come.

Continued below

Everything about this five page dive into Deadworld set the atmosphere well, especially the faded color pallet Kendall chose, His deft use of so much green and grey with the occasional splash of purple and yellow worked so well for me. The overall feel was the same as the dirty grimy appeal of Fury Road. Ken-W and Dave Kendall dump us right into the wasteland with our heroes grim Judge Fairfax, his snarky Lawgiver Motorcycle and his equally snarky ward Jess. We met them doing the usual for heroes of an apocalypse story as they loot a petrol station with an mutant ambush moments later. With five pages to work with the action is fast and brutal as they dispatch the problem and proceed on their journey to supposed sanctuary. They pepper this story with little story details: drugs to mask psionics, ammo conservation, poisoned water. Likewise the landscape is full of ruins, wrecks and many many oil rigs as Fairfax’s inner monologue details their possible hopelessness before a foreshadowed cliffhanger.

Kek-W and Kendall excelled at piquing my curiosity about how long the players in this tale will live, and what matters to them, regardless of the future we know for a fact is coming. It succeeds, too, for the humor in the tale; survival horror need moments of levity. It may have been just a bit of black humor about a fire, or the wry snark of Fairfax’s motorcycle, but it gave the moments break in the grim and even the doomed should merit a laugh. As a reintroduction to “2000 AD” this was a solid one.

That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 2023 is on sale this week and available from: