Multiver-City One: 2000 AD Prog 2043 – Signs Of The Times!

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!

Cover by Jake Lynch

NOW DEPARTING

Hunted: Furies, Part 10
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), PJ Holden (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Greg Lincoln: This weeks finale of “Hunted Furies” leaves no doubt about the nature of the object of everyone’s search shines in a couple of characters final moments. Though I may have figured out who would be taking the shots meant for the Traitor General fired by Doctor Cochran last week, I did not foresee the awful fallout of that sacrifice by Trasker. Gordon Rennie at least for me created an effective heel centric story; he manages to humanize the Traitor General, making him more then a melodramatic villain while avoiding the need to make him a sympathetic figure. His story presents a man driven to work towards what he sees as a greater good and to whom the ends justify any means necessary. The Traitor consigned his son to a gruesome fate in a moment of cold calculation with not a single hesitation with little compassion or remorse.

PJ Holden and Len O’Grady delivered some excellent detailed and emotionally charged art again in their final go round with the story this week. They spent their time and effort with giving both Doctor Cochran and Trasker a proper sendoff. The Doctor gets a final spotlight with a richly illustrated panel; I think the bright eye highlight brings real focus to that panel to that page and to the kill shot that followed it . Trasker gets a last couple of pages leading up to his end, each of the panels telling a complex story of his fathers betrayal with a very effective use of pacing and inset artwork.

I have to mention Ellie de Ville’s lettering work. I really didn’t notice it till this week and only when I specifically looked only at her letters. Her use of bold lettering highlighted and emphasized emotional or important beats in the scripting. I didn’t notice it the first pass but I knew the effect it had on the read when I finally did pay attention. This week she heightened a lot of the cold and calculating nature of the General in face of the horror he was in the process of committing.

The whole creative team made this strip work for me and created an interest for where this story may lead. I do still feel that some of the characters were short-changed and left a bit shallow but that’s just me and Kobalt is still around for the next go round at least.

THIS WEEK IN 2000 AD

Judge Dredd: Ouroborous, Part 3
Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Paul Marshall (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Greg Matiasevich: A new strain of Spike is leaving users across Mega-City One lobotomized, and Dredd is closing in on the drug’s source. Seems pretty simple, right? But when Paradox Vega gets involved, things tend to go from simple to cluster in no time flat. Will she end up being a blessing or a curse for Dredd’s investigation?

Writer Michael Carroll introduced Paradox Vega earlier this year in the ‘Deep in the Heart’ storyline, and showed a real understanding of ‘Judge Dredd’ (the comic) in doing so. When you have a rigid character like Dredd, especially as the series lead, there’s very little room to go when you pair him up with a similar personality type. For one, there’s very few characters who can match ol’ Stonejaw as a hardass; even Batman comes off as a softie when the two of them cross paths. So just in terms of setting up a character who would believably be more intense than Dredd is tough. And two, even if you do pull that off, then you’ve really only succeeded in making things even more downbeat. Something that can work in the short-term, but not a recipe for long-term success.

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The tactic keeping Dredd’s attitude and demeanor from overwhelming the strip is to play against it. Doing that gives you more interesting character interactions and accentuates Dredd’s ‘Dredd-ness’ (for lack of a better term) in the contrast without having to keep giving him more and more contrived reasons to show it. The nice thing about ‘Judge Dredd’ as a strip is that contrast comes in different intensities.

Take these three characters: Vega, Judge Harvey, and Judge Anderson. Harvey, being a Mechanismo robot based off Dredd’s personality and written work, should be as close to a clone of him as you could get. But John Wagner gives Harvey an emotion algorithm to allow for variance and, therefore, drama in their interactions. Anderson has long been seen as an opposite to Dredd, occasionally going against him when his application of the law overrides common decency or sense. That said, she’s still a Mega-City One Judge, and her comfort level with authority is still higher than most of the readership’s. I’d place Carroll’s Vega as furthest from Dredd among the three, and that distance gives the writer a lot more opportunities to make Vega a memorable character.

The Alienist: Inhuman Natures, Part 2
Credits: Gordon Rennie & Emma Beeby (script), Eoin Coveney (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)

Alice W. Castle: Last week, I remarked that “The Alienist: Inhuman Natures” impressed with a strange, off-kilter vibe akin to the classic Vertigo works that blended surrealism, occultism and the humour of the British counter-culture of the late 90s. This week, the story follows up on the impossible murder of a man in a field with no tracks around him. That strange off-kilter vibe returns with an unexpected reveal: the poor soul stumbled upon a rupture in time leaving him on a motorway in the path of an oncoming lorry.

That reveal, in and of itself, has been gripped for the rest of this story. For all the things that I could have guessed would be the cause of death, I would never have expected a) for it to be revealed so early in the story and b) for it to be a goddamn lorry from the 21st century running over a man from the 1800s. That’s the kind of unexpected charm that Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby have brought to the writing of this story in just two chapters and it’s astounding.

That, combined with astonishing, woodcut cross-hatching of Eoin Coveny’s art that had me awestruck for another week makes this one of the must read stories of the current “2000AD” magazine. You better not be missing this one. The early Vertigo vibe’s back, baby, and it’s good.

Greysuit: Foul Play, Part 4
Credits: Pat Mills (script), John Higgins (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)

Ryan Perry: This issue starts out with what has consistently been one of the main issues with this stories, which is that it wants to talk about technology but feels like it’s coming from a writer who isn’t very familiar with it. He simply doesn’t understand how to colloquially convey modern technological jargon. The story then takes an odd left turn around three or four pages in where it begins to tell this story that is only peripheral to the actual plot of the book. It was one of those situations where the writer took three pages to explain something that needed a text bubble to explain. Outside of that strange intermission in the story, this installment is quite engaging as the espionage angle begins to heat up and we see that everybody may not be as adamantly on one side as we’d previously thought.

I’m curious if the intermission in the story is taken so that the monotony of pages featuring guys in grey suits walking around and talking could be broken up. This seems even more likely to be true as those are the only panel with any real array of color; in deliberate contrast to the limited palate of the rest of the book. I’ll say that the story is again suffering from the problem of having really static art, and that really becomes a problem when you’re trying to depict things like covert assassinations. Then just one little nitpick that I noticed is John Higgins doesn’t draw fire well. It’s used in a few different panels of this story and it just looks really fake even within the context of the cartoony art style.

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Grey Area: Code Six Twenty-Four, Part 1
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Mark Harrison (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Rowan Grover: Straight off the bat, I love that Abnett has developed a sass to the character Bitch, as she remarks about human slang. Character development has been key to this series and it shows with telling details like this. On the whole, I’ve been more partial to the self contained, grounded stories “Grey Area” tells, but Abnett is clearly building to something huge in proportion here, and you can’t help but feel the infectious excitement he brings to every page. As soon as the ‘large mass vessel’ pops onto the page, you know that we’re not messing in this story. There’s some serious metatextual narrative here, as the squad essentially find themselves dealing with alien asylum seekers, and question what the ethical option is. It’s conscious storytelling within an epic sci-fi tale, and I’m hooked.

Harrison delivers some seriously atmospheric work in this installment. Never has the dystopian, futuristic Earth been so well defined from page one. Harrison’s use of smog and high rise buildings complementing the muted palette shows you that this isn’t your papa’s big city town. However, you get a sense that this is still something of a slum, through the messy planning and abundance of telephone wires – a simple but great way to distinguish the Grey Are setting. The most breath taking scene resides halfway through the issue, however – when the squad board the gigantic ship, the panel is a luminous, yet foggy sprawl of lights and alien silhouettes. It’s really pretty to take in, but also heavily implies the crowded and poor living conditions the aliens live in – once again, commenting on the refugee plotline.

“Grey Area” looks to be delivering one of its most meaningful multi-chapter stories yet with ‘Signal Six Twenty-Four’, and the creative team deliver a powerful opening piece. I’m looking with eager eyes to what the future holds for this series

That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 2043 is on sale this week and available from: