Multiver-City One: 2000 AD Prog 2045 – Apocalypse Then!

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 Jimmy Broxton

NOW ARRIVING

Tharg’s 3rillers: Mechastopheles, Part 1
Credits: Gordon Rennie & Lawrence Rennie (script), Karl Richardson (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Rowan Grover: Few times have I been so sold on the idea of a comic based on the title alone. The Rennie brothers manage to capture the magic of the title and spread it throughout into a competent comic story, as well. I get a strong sense of mythology told through the mouth of monster hunters, in a thoroughly Mignola style that skips on the world building monologue, choosing to show you instead. It’s a great style that mixes well with the steampunk aesthetic that’s introduced later on in the book. The Rennie brothers also capture character well within the few pages they’re allotted, showing us tragic people that represent both sides of optimism and pessimism. It’s a lot of fun to follow and makes for an engaging opening.

Karl Richardson has a clean, ink heavy style that isn’t uncommon within what I hesitate to call the 2000 AD house style. He has a great sense of tone established right from the opening – throwing us into a Greek style necropolis that has a lot in common with the mazes from their mythos. In line with the Mignola comparisons, Richardson includes a lot of telling details in the passing architecture from scene to scene – you’ll learn more about the mythology by noticing the little details rather than deconstructing the dialogue. I have to congratulate Richardson too on being able to render the alleged title character so well on the last page – the sheer size and absurdity of the mecha’s existence flips the tone of the book in a way that I would never have expected, but works so damn well.

“Mechastopheles” is a brilliantly fun gem hidden among long standing 2000 AD Titans that begs for your attention. This has been one of the most well-executed debuts I’ve seen recently from the magazine, and I hope momentum can be sustained.

THIS WEEK IN 2000 AD

Judge Dredd: War Buds, Part 1
Credits: John Wagner (script), Dan Cornwell (art), Abigail Bulmer (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Greg Matiasevich: Thirty-five years after East-Meg One launched a surprise nuclear attack against a Mega-City One still reeling from the effects of the Block Mania drug outbreak, one of the few remaining Judges involved in the counterattack squad is at the end of his life. Will his wartime compatriots come to his aid one last time? And role does Dredd play in all this?

“Judge Dredd” is often described as a post-apocalyptic series, and rightfully so. The Cursed Earth covering vast swaths of the former United States outside of the Mega-Cities came about from the Atomic Wars started by President Robert L. Booth. But that exchange isn’t the only nuclear apocalypse the strip has shown readers. In 1982, co-creators John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra brought us the first true mega-epic: ‘The Apocalypse War’. That storyline saw East-Meg One (the Soviet Union stand-in) nuke large chunks of Mega-City One and occupy the city, wiping out almost 400 million inhabitants before it was all over. The Mega-City One retaliation culminated in Dredd leading Judge Anderson and a small band of Judges to commandeer an East-Meg missile silo. Now able to strike at East-Meg One from within the protective shell of their ‘Apocalypse warp’ force field (which shunted Mega-City One’s initial countervolley of nukes to an alternate Earth, destroying it), Dredd personally orders the missile launch that kills half a billion East-Meg One citizens.

‘The Apocalypse War’ is THE game-changer in terms of “Judge Dredd” storylines. Aftershocks from that story have rippled through the strip for decades. Either in direct direct follow-ups like 1995’s ‘The Doomsday Scenario’ (with an East-Meg government-in-exile trying to try Dredd for war crimes) or 2011’s ‘Day of Chaos’ (a more direct revenge attack against Dredd and the city), or in simply being too big of a status quo shift to fully ignore, it’s the epic that all other “Judge Dredd” epics are measured against. Humes interested in checking out the story in all its radioactive glory can find it either in its original (mostly) B&W form in The Complete Case Files vol. 5 or in an oversized full-color hardcover from IDW.

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Wagner has either written or had a major hand in every ‘Apocalypse War’ follow-up since writing the original and is on-hand for ‘War Buds’ as well. This appears to be a smaller-scale story about one of the many casualties of that war, but with Wagner, smaller stories have a tendency to lead to bigger and bigger ones.

More next week!

The Alienist: Inhuman Natures, Part 4
Credits: Gordon Rennie & Emma Beeby (script), Eoin Coveney (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)

Alice W. Castle: It’s not that surprising that, after three chapters, “The Alienist” has fallen into a second act rhythm. I am a little surprised in how disappointed I am that this chapter just doesn’t have an awful lot going on. After last week’s revelation that Reggie has been hunted by a masked figure from the time portal he opened (a figure I incorrectly assumed to be Miss Vespertine), this chapter doesn’t do an awful lot with that.

Sure, Reggie and the woman have a scene where Reggie tries to play up the fact that he’s totally, 100% not in over his head and fails miserably, but we only vaguely get a sense of who this woman is and what she wants. We’re introduced to some form of time hounds that seem to be hunting them, but are constrained by the page limit to largely gloss over what’s apparently a potentially world-ending threat. That’s a big thing to drop on the reader and then move swiftly on.

I know I shouldn’t exactly expect a massive bombshell at the end of every chapter, but after the opening chapters all having some kind of hook to get me thinking about what could come next, this chapter ends on a pretty flat note. That strange, Vertigo-esque charm is still very much kicking, but I’m not as excited about picking up next week’s chapter as I had been going into this one.

Greysuit: Foul Play, Part 6
Credits: Pat Mills (script), John Higgins (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)

Ryan Perry: Let’s start with the good in this issue. Pat Mills writes dialogue for his main character really well in this issue. It generally feels like something someone with real human emotion would say which works effectively in contrast to many of his other characters that are intentionally written as cold hearted. There’s also a fun, if cliche, the dynamic between our main character and the character is set up as his foil. They get several fun moments of interaction, including a fairly intense fight scene. One of the big downs for this installment though is that the character who’s acting as the hit, the one everyone is trying to kill, is quite one-dimensional. She’s an unwavering stereotype of the clean freak rich character whose downfall is their super strict sanitation policies.

John Higgins seems to be genuinely improving as an artist with this issue. Disregarding one weird panel, his art is much more dynamic than last time around. His action scenes here are quite enjoyable as the characters’ interactions here have a visceral violence to them. The expressive facial reactions Higgins crafts add depth to the proceedings of this issue. The book’s main cast don’t completely come across as robotic the way they have in previous issues. At the end of the day though, I’d be remiss not to mention Sally Hurst’s colors in this book. The use of cool greens and warm oranges helps the story flow seamlessly between quiet spy work and load action.

Hope: . . . For The Future, Part 8
Credits: Guy Adams (script), Jimmy Broxton (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

Greg Lincoln: Guy Adams, Jimmy Broxton, and Simon Bowland deliver five pages true to “Hope…for the Future’s” pulp and noir Private Eye traditions. They hit on beats like the vengeful femme fatale, literally, A lead-less case emotionally connected to Mallory, a mysterious tip off call, and the smooth talking PI. Our hero, Mallory Hope, got played in the last chapter by his client Eileen Fabrizzi who wanted more than just a night of comfort in his arms. The fallout of that bad conscious choice came up on him fast as she already had used his pistol she stole to off her abusive husband by the end of page two. Despite that and because of his emotional need to save a child, even if it’s not his own, Mallory continues a fruitless search for Eileen’s son Joey, Hollywood child star. Told mainly in a more tell than show voiceover, which works pretty well again, Guy Adams reveals Mallory’s good nature despite his questionable choices as he does the best with the clues he’s got.

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Jimmy Broxton created pages that bring the ’40s era Hollywood to life through his staging and realistic detail. Convincingly rendered rotary telephones, automobiles, and a really big semi-automatic pistol dominate some panels and pull focus on some pages making you a part of them. In other panels it’s the backdrops of expensive houses with pools and believable movie sets that anchor the scenes in reality. Given the film origins of the noir aesthetic, I can’t help but use film terms to think about and describe Broxton’s pages. His ability to use light and shadow to create the sheen of a phone in one panel, the quality of light through blinds in another and then the reflections on a car’s paint job in a third panel shows a great command of his storytelling tools. He continues that use of textured patterns to fill his blank backgrounds both to create an atmosphere and to further pull your eye where he wants you to look. All in all, it’s effective if a short trip into an alternate magical past that is in every way a great example of what it’s trying to be.

That’s gonna do it for us this week! “2000 AD” Prog 2045 is on sale this week and available from: