Multiver-City One: 2000 AD Prog 1869 and Judge Dredd Megazine 345

Welcome, citizens, to this week’s installment of Multiver-City One! Each and every Wednesday we examine the latest Prog from Tharg and the droids over at 2000 AD, giving you all the pertinent information you’ll need headed into this week’s Thrill-Zine! It’s a double-header today, as we’ve got both a new Prog and a new Judge Dredd Megazine, so let’s get right to it!

This week’s cover is by Alex Roland.

I. NOW DEPARTING

Two strips wrap up this week, starting us on the path to an all-first-chapter Prog in Prog 1874!

Judge Dredd: Titan, Part 8

This is it! After two months of high-tension adventure off-world, Williams and Flint bring this whole thing home with an (almost) bang!

THIS REVIEW WILL HAVE SPOILERS! Skip down to what we have to say about Ulysses Sweet to avoid them.

Aimee Nixon, you sure know how to play a long game, don’t you? Let’s make sure everyone is up to speed: Dredd and some Space Marines head up to Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons, to investigate a loss of communication (and possible breakout) from the prison built there. That would be especially bad considering that the Titan facility is reserved for ex-Judges who would probably want nothing more than to get back to Earth and exact some revenge. Such a turn of events would surely spell the end for Mega-City One, which is still reeling from the devastation and depleted Judicial force in the wake of all that Chaos Day craziness. Dredd’s mission fails right out of the gate. He and his team are confronted with hundreds of low-orbit corpses, limited oxygen, and betrayal from within. When things are at their worst, Dredd is confronted with some faces straight from his past: Former Wally Squad Judge Aimee Nixon and former Chief Judge Martin Sinfield.

So what was that about Nixon and her long game? This week’s strip opens with a flashback to Nixon giving Dredd water and telling him that she needs him alive for when she breaks him. At this point in the story, Nixon was having Dredd on a continuing loop of going through round after round of hand-to-hand ‘combat’ with inmates who wanted a piece of him, all while wiping his mind after every encounter. Dredd would wake disoriented and broken from the last round of beatings with no recollection of where he is or how he got there with three ex-Judges waiting to get their licks in. I’m sure that, like me, many readers figured that this cycle of violence and amnesia would eventually lead Dredd to the breaking point Nixon was after. Not quite.

Last week, we saw Nixon leave Dredd with the remote to detonate the explosives on the prison’s two spacecraft. She feigned bravado at the time and had a plan to have the prisoners hold their ground on Titan; all the while the negotiations between Sinfield and Chief Judge Hershey over the cession of Titan to become an independent state were going nowhere. She knew that every prisoner on Titan would need to use those ships to escape. Cut to this week.

Nixon, while rousing her fellow prisoners with a rallying speech, declares they would head to the moon of Enceladus where they would all be free to live in an abandoned (and more importantly, non-bomb-rigged) prison. Once on board the ship, Nixon watches Dredd from a window for one reason: to see him use the detonator to stop the inmates from escaping. Nixon’s plan to break Dredd was to force him to murder a thousand former Judges. Maybe she figured it would buy him his own sentence on Titan. Or maybe she thought it would ruin his standing as a Judge. Whatever the outcome would be, we were a hair’s breadth away from it happening. At the beginning of the story, Dredd was unhappy to find that SJS Judge Gerhart would be on his team, but in the end it was Gerhart who talked him back from detonating those ships. Well played, Williams. Well. Played.

Now Nixon and all those former Judges are on Enceladus, where it’s freezing cold and no one is sure if the generators at the old prison even work. I just hope we don’t have to wait too long to find out what’s next for all of them.

To close things out, I have to say what an absolute treat it’s been to see Henry Flint’s work for the last eight weeks. I don’t think he’s ever looked better, and given the body of Dredd work the man has under his belt, that’s saying a lot! I can only hope we get more of him coloring his own work from here out. This story has been a real high point for Judge Dredd, and I can’t wait to see where it all goes from here.

Credits: Rob Williams (script), Henry Flint (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Ulysses Sweet, Maniac for Hire: Centred, Part 9

From maniac to enlightened catatonic (complete with drool) and back, Ulysses Sweet brings the house down this week. Wait, not house. Whale. He brings the whale down.

In an ending that must have made Douglas Adams smile from wherever he may be at the moment, a giant headless whale falls from the heavens, killing everyone who needed killing. It’s practically Shakespearean. And not just everyone dying in the end like in Hamlet (spoiler!); I mean the whale. Ol’ Willy Shakes loved a good whale ending. Not a lot of people know that, but he did.

Big Multiver-City One congratulations to Guy Adams on wrapping up his first 2000 AD strip. Hopefully we’ll get more Sweet from Adams, but I’d really like to see what Guy can do with something like Sinister Dexter. Dexter would give him room for humor, but also call for a decidedly more dramatic approach to story. After the introspective shift the strip took last week, I have no doubt that he’d be able to handle a wide range of characters and tone shifts with ease.

Credits: Guy Adams (script), Paul Marshall (art), Chris Blythe (grey tones), Ellie De Ville (letters)

II. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1869

ABC Warriors: Return to Mars, Part 8

My dad told me something when I was a young lad. Back then, I ran up a phone bill or two calling friends in the United States while we were stationed overseas. He asked me why it was that I always seemed to call them but most of them never seemed to be the ones to call me. I said that they would but it was just easier for me to call them. He said that friends aren’t the people you call; friends are the people who call you. Or in this case, the people who don’t try and stone you to death because you happened to stop eating the Biol synthetic food that causes mutations such as testicle-like air sacs hanging from your chin and the like. So the people we see above? Not friends at all.

Throughout this strip, Mills has shown us both sides of the Harry Shrapnel/Tubal Caine coin: one the warrior, one the pacifist. Started out the guns-blazing type, but switched over to a simple mechanic after being brought back to life following a shootout that went horribly horribly not good for Shrapnel. Langley gives us a little bit of both sides as well this Prog, with a few spots of CGI toned rendering for Shrapnel flashbacks amidst the straight-up Caine B&W linework. But Mills flipped that coin at the end of last Prog and now we get to see what side it lands on: scarred or clean. Let’s just say, the ol’ six-shooters get a bit of a workout today.

Credits: Pat Mills (script), Clint Langley (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Grey Area: Rates of Exchange, Part 1

Let’s talk about Abigail Ryder for a second. It may seem like stating the obvious, but a strip with a title like Grey Area is going to have a lot of gray in it. (And just as an authorial note: I know ‘grey’ is an acceptable spelling of the color between black and white, but I’m an American and have associated with color with ‘gray’ and the surname with ‘grey’. Also, as a comics fan, ‘grey’ says name to me. But I horribly horribly digress…). This is a science-fiction story but one set in a bureaucratic no man’s land of a spaceport more cinder block than anything else. The uniforms/body-armor of the ETC are also gray, as in militaristic. Even other color sources, like viewscreens and monitors, are more often than not shown through a filtering medium (like plate glass or the like) that offers just enough desaturation to keep things well within the established palette. Ryder has the tone of this strip locked into certain parameteres.

Except when it comes to the explosions. And the blood. Of which there is quite a bit this Prog.

A small alien that looks like the Xenomorph baby’s uglier cousin is loose in the Grey Area, and after taking a few lives to announce its presence, the ETC (with their gray bodysuits) going on a little bug hunt. So Ryder gets to throw a little color exclamation point here and there with the gunfire and some choice panel shadings. But never going too out-of-bounds to the reality of the strip. Not B&W like Flesh or ABC Warriors has been, and not electric neon like Mark Harrison’s Damnation Station was back in the 1850’s (those are Prog issues, not pre-Civil War years…). But also not gray as in a dulling of white or black. But grey, as in what we have here.

Huh, maybe I have found a way to use grey as a color descriptor…

Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Patrick Goddard (art), Abigail Ryder (colors), Ellie De Ville (letters)

Strontium Dog: Dogs of War, Part 9

Eighty-seven Ikans. Warriors brought in by the Norm government to turn the tide against a mutant army marching on New London that picks up more and more steam with each passing step (or foot, depending on their mode of transport). There’s no way these eighty-seven would be enough to make a difference. They were shot and killed too easily and too quickly. Yeah, they got back up again, but….

What? They got back up? Shoot ’em again!

BLAM!

How is he getting back up again?!?

And therein lies the problem, for the mutants at least. The Ikans were unkillable. That eighty-seven packed the punch of a force one hundred times as large if they were unstoppable. And it didn’t take long for the mutants to realize this and retreat in droves. A few Strontium Dogs remained, but even they were thinking discretion was the better part of valor. But not Johnny Alpha. Ezquerra sells the look of Alpha as a man just as uncaring about the killing shots as every one of the Ikans. They because they know they will get right back up again. Johnny because he is hoping he won’t, and that he’ll stay there this time.

Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

III. THIS WEEK IN JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 345

This month’s cover is by Phil Winslade

Judge Dredd: The Call of K. Cattrall, Part 1

One of the strengths of stories told in the Dredd-verse is that, for the most part, you can basically graft any kind or type of story onto a Dredd tale and have a lot of confidence it’ll work. Case in point? This month’s Dredd strip. The first three words of the title should give you an idea of what pool of fiction Wyatt and company are drawing from. And it is certainly possible, as New England, this author’s setting for the majority of his work, would fall in the upper part of Mega-City One. One person’s Great Old One is another’s alien. And when you have some type of human/merman hybrids involved? That’s someone taking a page or two from Providence’s own H. P. Lovecraft.

Now, you can look for the Lovecraft nods and concepts all you want, and enjoy them for what they are, but Wyatt and company make sure this is a Mega-City One story first and foremost. The inciting incident ties into a Megazine story from almost six years ago. Dredd is present, but the main protagonist is PSI Judge Zheng. Davidson and Blythe really do a great job in giving the story a moodiness and almost underwater murkiness without making it too obvious or hitting you over the head with it like Dredd’s billy club. As a fan of both Dredd and dread (ugh…sorry…), I’m excited to see how this team straddles the line between both in the issues to come.

Credits: Arthur Wyatt (script), Paul Davidson (art), Chris Blythe (color), Annie Parkhouse (Letters)

Demarco, P.I.: The Whisper, part 3

Ex-Judge and current private investigator Galen DeMarco continues her current job of finding one lost SovSec citizen/needle in the rebuilding Mega-City Two/haystack. One particular haystack she finds herself unable to get a chance to look around is The Compound. The Compound is essentially a gated community for normal humans who fled Mega-City One after the anti-mutant laws were repealed. They are super super paranoid of anyone getting in who is not 100% human. How does DeMarco get the guards on the walls to not shoot her long enough to convince them they really don’t need to shoot her? Well, by shooting her mutant guide as he tries to ‘escape’ from her custody, of course! Geez, and that’s the best option?

Needless to say, DeMarco manages to not get shot (an accomplishment her guide can’t match) and gets into The Compound, where she and the reader learn more about The Whisper and the increasing number of disappearing people. Theories abound, but one thing that isn’t theoretical is how good Steve Yeowell looks in this strip. The man is a pro and this month’s installment is just as easy-to-follow and fun-to-read as the last. Can’t wait for next month’s!

Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Ellie De Ville (letters)

Ordinary, part 6

I’m bummed to see this strip end. I know it’s time, but I like it so much I don’t want it to end!

This month’s double-sized chapter starts with a little skip ahead in time from the last. Williams plays with the reader by putting Michael in an entirely different environment than we last saw him. When he says, “This is heaven,” we have no reason not to believe him. After where we left him last month, why wouldn’t we? The narrative from there on, beautifully rendered by D’Israeli in such a dreamlike quality, leaves readers wondering where we really are.

D’Israeli’s art for this final chapter as a whole is just from another world. Yes, he’s been amazing up to this point, but there’s a little extra something here. The chosen color palette feels just a little more vibrant, and when he changes his line-work from straight black to a maroon-ish color-hold like in the example above, the visuals can’t help but shift from already dream-like to just plain otherworldly. Whether you know him as D’Israeli or Matt Brooker, this man is, without a doubt, a master of his craft.

While I’m still sad to see this story finish its Judge Dredd Megazine run, I’m placated with the knowledge that I’ll get to read the whole story again once it is collected into single issues from the folks at Titan. Repackaged as a three-issue series, it will launch this April.

Credits: Rob Williams (script), D’Israeli (art), HV Derci (letters)

Anderson, PSI Division: Dead End, part 3

Now this strip is a real heartbreaker. Watching Anderson, usually the positive counterbalance to Dredd, struggle on her own like this is tough. Grant and Dowling, who obviously love the character so much, are doing  all they can to make sure you feel every single minute of it.

It’s no secret that being a PSI Judge in the Meg is beyond difficult. Last year’s Cadet Anderson strip was an excellent primer for Dead End. It made me familiar with the statistics that Anderson has had stacked against her throughout her career. Suicide is a major problem among PSI Judges, as is severe depression and feelings of isolation. After years on the streets, this story sees Anderson faced with a new kind of human horror and depravity, and may just be the case that puts her over the edge she’s been teetering on through this story.

They say it’s darkest just before the dawn, right? Right?

Credits: Alan Grant (script), Michael Dowling (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

IV. MEGAZINE FEATURES

Besides scheduling, there’s a big difference between a Prog and a Megazine. While each weekly 2000 AD Prog acts as a comics anthology, Judge Dredd Megazine is more of a, well, magazine. In addition to all the comics (new and reprints), a variety of contributors write articles focusing on topics that, while usually related to the Dredd-verse in some way, spread the scope of the Megazine beyond the obvious cast of characters and into topics, both Meg-centric and real world, that would be of interest to the readership as a whole.

Family at War by Matthew Badham

These features are not afraid to look at and discuss the comics being published by other companies; a refreshing attitude that bypasses pure unit-pushing and goes further into boundary-pushing and exposure. For example, this month includes a feature on Rob Williams and Simon Coleby’s Vertigo mini-series The Royals: Masters of War. It gives the account of how the comic came to be and touches on Coleby’s initial reluctance to do a story set in World War II:

“I’ve always said that I wouldn’t draw a ‘real world’ twentieth-century war story, as I feel such books can often be painfully naïve, jingoistic, and somewhat gratuitous. It was the strength of Rob’s concept and the brilliance of the scripting that persuaded me this was something I could feel comfortable about drawing in good faith. This isn’t a story about ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. It’s not a comic that glamorises war or simplifies the conflict. This is a story primarily about a family and their relationships – about trust and betrayal.”

The best part is all the preview art that accompanies the piece. It’s clear Coleby threw himself into the research and the discipline needed in telling this story true to his intention from the panels we’re given. If you haven’t yet checked out The Royals, we highly suggest you change that!

Your Move, Creep! by Calum Waddell

Did you know that Judge Dredd had a direct influence on the creation of Robocop? If you didn’t, it makes perfect sense now, right? The detached lawman who may or may not actually be human, the authoritarian future, the biting satire…it’s all there. Waddell’s piece looks at the production history of the Robocop franchise, including the film series, television adaptations, and eventual remake. There are some great quotes from co-writer Edward Neumeier and animator Phil Tippett. Neumeirer recalls first discovering Judge Dredd:

“I was one of the young guys at Columbia so someone decided to give me a bunch of comics and I was told, ‘Have a look at these and see if there are movie ideas in there.’ I remember reading Iron Man, which I liked, and Judge Dredd – which was just starting to do the rounds in the US at the time. There was a short time when everyone seemed to think Robocop should be serious, just like other Eighties action movies, and I always argued, ‘No, no – it has to be funny. It needs the sort of humor that you see in the Judge Dredd comics.’ I remember giving Paul Verhoeven some issues of the comic to read, and he really liked it.”

The Dark Art: Jose Ortiz Obituary by Michael Molcher

2000 AD PR Droid Michael Molcher takes time from his usual duties to write a nice piece on the late artist Jose Ortiz. Readers are taken through a brief overview of Ortiz’s career, which spanned nearly fifty years and included stints at companies on both sides of the Atlantic: from The Eagle and 2000 AD to Creepy and Eerie. He was so good for so long that he left an incredible body of work behind him, and hopefully giving Ortiz this two-page write-up in the Megazine will get a few more eyes on that work than would otherwise have seen it. The man will be missed, but the work shouldn’t be.

V. MEGAZINE REPRINT

Every month, in addition the the strips and features in the Megazine, each issue comes polybagged with a trade’s worth of bonus reprints. The last couple of months have featured the Adventures of DeMarco, P.I., but this month we move on to another familiar title.

Originally serialized between Progs 578-638 (1988-89) these Strontium Dogs stories feature work from Alan Grant, Stewart Edwards, Hilary Robinson, Colin MacNeil, and Simon Jacob, with a cover by co-creator Carlos Ezquerra.

VI. OF INTEREST

I don’t think I can add to that; the page says it all. Thanks to toymaker and guy-you-wanna-talk-sci-fi-with Mark Ultra for passing this along. Now what’d be really interesting would be if he’d make a Judge Death figure…

VII. AN ORAL HISTORY OF JUDGE DREDD

The tale of Judge Dredd has been continually published since 1977, and has been brought to us by some of the most creative minds to ever work in comics. As a result, there have been some out-of-this-world story beats woven into the fabric of the character. We thought it would be interesting to talk with the writers and artists behind Mega-City One and see what their favorite bits of Dredd’s history are. This week Rob Williams returns to give us the rundown on Titan and talk about what he looks for in a Dredd story.

(Here’s the direct download)

Make sure to check out the rest of our talk with Rob right here!

That’s gonna do it for us this week! 2000 AD Prog 1869 and Judge Dredd Megazine 345 are on sale today and available from finer comic shops everywhere, from 2000ADonline.com, and via the 2000 AD Newsstand app for iPad and iPhone. So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”