Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our “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. Let’s get right to it!
NOW ARRIVING
Hunted: Furies, Part 1
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), PJ Holden (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: “Hunted Furies” left me interested if a little bewildered as someone who is not all together up on my Rogue Trooper history. Wikipedia though no way to read a story did give me some familiarity with the history of this military science fiction vengeance tale, it’s genetically engineered hero and the scarred deformed man who betrayed him. Nu-Earth at first glance is inhospitable, bleak, poisoned, unfriendly and war torn. Part one of this story feels a lot like a round of setting up the pieces for what will be a long game of cat and mouse.
P.J. Holden’s art does a great job in setting up this scene. He has a marvelous sense of texture and I appreciate his strong inks and overall sense of pacing. Holden does little to streamline or update the dated look of the technology in the setting leaving it worn, lived in, clunky, and damaged yet functional. That stylistic choice captures a comics moment in time rather then committing revision. Len O’Grady’s colors lend a believably toxic yellow green tinge to it all. Through the colors he add some nice character notes subtlety adding the personal even in this toxic world with small personal pops of color like an incongruous pink parasol to the opening scene. Between them set up visceral feelings of atmosphere on the page wether it be the open land vast, impersonal and toxic dangerous or the space station we later see that is tight crowded and claustrophobic.
The scoundrel scavengers Mister Brass and Mister Bland are our entry point to the story of the continuing hunt for the notorious Traitor General. These two amoral money hungry fixtures of the Nu-Earth cast are easily recognizable as the vultures they are concerned only for the value of wreckage around them. Gordon Rennie spends no time doing any real exposition. In a way it shows a great strength of the story because I am hooked regardless of my lack of strong reference points for some of the later action. It’s easy to get the jist of what is going on as the story unfolds but certain particulars are sadly lost I fear. The imposing figure of the Traitor General that appears in the story I do get but the full value of actions remain quite a mystery for me.
NOW DEPARTING
<Scarlet Traces: Cold War – Book Two, Part 12
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), D’Israeli (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Rowan Grover: What a way to close a story! “Scarlet Traces” opens guns ablaze as Edginton has spacecrafts in a double page firefight. I’m a big fan of how he centres the plot away from the main conflict, rather having Ahron and Icarus just be caught in the tides of war. It works especially as Icarus looks up at the burning sky and finds beauty in the chaos. Edginton also manages a smooth POV change to the earth president this chapter, developing intrigue as we see him foreshadow the next major Scarlet Traces arc, his usual cynical tone replaced with genuine fear.
D’Israeli works hardest here to really deliver this closing chapter. Scale is represented well here in the opening pages, as D’Israeli depicts gigantic space architecture towering over Ahron and Icarus’ figures. He’s able to render a destroyed landscape beautifully, paralleling the dialogue. Sharp, broken framework and intricate debris lays strewn across the panels, creating a believable setting for total immersion.
“Cold War” has been a rocky instalment for “Scarlet Traces”, but it’s still one of the most solid original Sci-Fi works in 2000AD as of late. Edginton and team develop their interesting, Bond-esque characters well while laying the ground for an intriguing sequel.
Continued belowTHIS WEEK IN 2000 AD
Judge Dredd: Hoverods, Part 2
Credits: T.C. Eglington (script), Brendan McCarthy (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Matiasevich: Dredd rides his Lawmaster into the Cursed Earth to save a couple of joyriding, thrill-seeking juves this week, but it’ll be his skill behind the wheel of a hoverod that determines if everyone gets back to Mega-City One in one piece!
Some Dredd stories are mega-epics and some are just mega-doses of concentrated Thrill. ‘Hoverods’ has been the latter, with T.C. Eglington giving Brendan McCarthy an excuse to be Brendan McCarthy (with the help of Dom Regan on colors). McCarthy did n’t exactly hold back last Prog, but now that things shift to outside the city walls, art and color choices lose all kinds of inhibitions — always a good thing to see when handled by McCarthy. And yet there still feels like a sense of control and (dare I say it) restraint? Or if not restraint, per se, then a real sense to invoke both 60’s/70’s black-light poster artwork, hot rod artists motifs (obviously), and Carlos Ezquerra. That last one really jumps out at me, and here’s why.
In the closing-in-on-four-years(!) we’ve been doing Multiver-City One, there’ve been a lot of Ezquerra art pages to pour over, both in stark black&white and color. And Ezquerra has been handling his own colors digitally for at least some years prior to that. To me, the final product has always been unmistakably him but not always in a way that feels entirely complimentary. I don’t want to give the impression I’m saying he’s a bad artist or unsuccessful at what he’s trying to accomplish, because I am not saying that at all. Just that, for me, this latest iteration of his comprehensive approach comes across as slightly disjointed or out-of-sync. It’s not that his color choices are too broad or lacking in nuance, but that the way he actually puts them on the page (the digital brushstrokes, I suppose) come across as too blunt. Or using a butcher’s knife where a scalpel is required; you can do probably get the job done with the first one, but forget about any kind of finesse.
So what does that hot take have to do with McCarthy’s work here? McCarthy (and Regan) are pulling off that integrated, boldly electric color palate/linework integration that I wish *I* could get from Ezquerra’s work. And McCarthy’s linework hits some Ezquerra sweetspots for me with the crosshatch-by-way-of-stippling in parts, so the McCarthy/Ezquerra comparisons hit my brain every time I look at a page of this story.
Back to Eglington before we finish: I like the way he has Dredd handle himself outside of MC-1. The Judge knows he’s out of his element and getting everyone out of this situation will require something other than kicking down doors and giving everyone daystick handshakes. But Eglington doesn’t let the reader equate caution with lack of confidence. Even out of his usual jurisdiction, Dredd knows exactly what to do; the only question is will everyone else come through?
Defoe: Diehards, Part 9
Credits: Pat Mills (script), Colin MacNeil (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Ryan Perry: I’m thoroughly confused. What is a reek? From their characterization up unto this point I would’ve assumed that they were basically zombies because they’ve been described as the dead brought back to life. This issue though we’re shown they can speak and that they respond to stimuli such as torture. It’s as if they’re shown to have a brain that can control their actions yet characterized as if a master magically controls them. The characters in this book too are so forgettable, and don’t appear regularly enough that when they seemingly figure out who might be behind these monsters attacking, it’s hard to remember who it is. The character’s in this book just are not relatable or interesting. They talk so out of step with what would be realistic that it’s hard to see them as anything other than cartoons. The mystery up unto this point has been executed so poorly that I don’t know who the guy is that it ends up being, nor do I care.
Continued belowThe art in this book is not bad. There are some places where the panel structuring is done really well, especially when Colin MacNeil is trying to portray two things happening at once. The thing with MacNeil’s art though is that he’s never bringing anything really new to the table. If you liked his art in the first issue, you’re going to like it in the ninth and vice versa. Hid depiction of human entrails does leave a bit to be desired though. This leads me to worry that if the conclusion of this book leans into being a little more gory he won’t be up to scruff. To conclude I want to say that while I applaud MacNeil’s distinct character designs week in and week out, I have no idea who this character at the end of the story is. I don’t know what it necessarily says about your design work that it’s distinct but forgettable.
Brink: Skeleton Life, Part 12
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), INJ Culbard (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Alice W. Castle: Before I actually start on this story of this chapter, which has it’s own interest revelation, I want to talk about colour. Colour has been an important aspect of “Brink: Skeleton Life” so far, but this chapter sees the most drastic changes from scene to scene of all of the chapters we’ve seen. The issue with the blinding neon the signifies that the scene is about Mariam Junot with bright pink border edges and orange and blue panel backgrounds. It’s a jarringly bright way to open the issue, but it in the second page we see the panel border colour very literally fade from pink to black as the story swings to focus on Kurtis and her investigation.
Then, Culbard switches from the green and blues that have defined the Galina Habitat setting to a colour that is being focused on for the first time: red. As Kurtis circles closer and closer to the truth, Culbard has introduces increasingly harsher and warmer colours only to wash the page in this dreadful red lighting as Kurtis finally learns who and what is behind the haunting of the Galina Habit.
Sure, the revelation that it’s all been an attempt at corporate espionage and sabotage that has escalated out of control is a tad… normal for a series like “2000AD,” the way in which Abnett and Culbard have built to the reveal has been, honestly, masterful. If nothing else, I will remember this story for just how stellar the artwork has been.
That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 2034 is on sale this week 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, and
- Finer comic shops everywhere
So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
