Welcome, citizens, to this week’s installment of Multiver-City One! Each and every Wednesday we will be examining the latest Prog from Tharg and the droids over at 2000 AD, and giving you all the pertinent information you’ll need headed into this week’s Thrill-Zine! We’ll get to this week’s Prog in a sec, but before we do, we have a special note to pass along from Tharg himself!
It’s that point in July again when I jet a handful of my droids off to one of the world’s biggest comics conventions – San Diego Comic Con – to fly the flag for Thrill-power. My minions have been attending this huge shindig for several years now, manning a 2000 AD booth that has heaved under an increasing weight of graphic novels and merchandise, all of which is rapidly consumed by the Thrill-starved hordes. This year there’s more SDCC exclusives than ever, including caps, Judge Death T-shirts, and Dredd posters by Jock and Henry Flint, so if you’re planning on heading along make sure you stop by booth 2806 and pick yourself up some goodies.
Also, on Thursday 24th at 2.00pm there’ll be the 2000 AD Zarjaz Hour, a Thrill-packed panel featuring Jock, Henry Flint, Chris Burnham and Mike Carroll. The Californian coast will crackle with zarjazness!
With that out of the way, let’s go right to this week’s slice of Thrill-power!
This week’s cover is by Alex Ronald
I. NOW DEPARTING
Judge Dredd: Student Bodies, Part 2
Poor ol’ Lenny. This was all just supposed to be a joke. A little gag, you know? Knock that mutie down a peg, make him know his place. They didn’t mean for anything like this to happen, really!
Wagner’s study of class structure ends with a twist, and a lot happens in surprisingly few pages. After reading last week’s installment, I believed the strip to be about bigotry and discrimination. You can still argue that it is, but I think that maybe there’s something larger happening here. It seems this was really, at its core, a story about survival; Darwinism playing out in The Meg. Lenny was weak, so he became the victim of his classmates, and later the cannibals. The Judges are strong, so they eliminate the cannibals. Even the doctor’s flippant attitude towards Rathbone’s parents’ financial situation can be interpreted as a type of social Darwinism. And while yes, the comeuppance Rathbone receives for being Lenny’s aggressor is to teach him a lesson about his own personal behavior, said behavior seems to be the byproduct of growing up in a hard, ruthless environment.
Or maybe I’m looking too hard and all of this really is about racism and bigotry. Either way, I can say definitively that Boo Cook’s art for the last two weeks have been a real treat. His character and tech design is top notch. Hopefully he’s already hard at work on his next 2000 AD contribution!
Credits: John Wagner (script), Boo Cook (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
II. NOW ARRIVING
We’ve got a brand-new never-before-seen strip kicking off this week!
Black Shuck, Part 1
For what is ostensibly a science-fiction comic, “2000 AD” features an awful lot of dudes with swords. And I’m not talking about laser swords or the like, although those do show up occasionally. I mean real blades-of-steel swords wielded by men wearing leather or robes or at least some type of body paint. You’ve got Slaine, who, come to think of it, actually uses an axe most of the time, but that’s close enough for our purposes today. You’ve got Aquila later in this very Prog, using his blade to decapitate for the glory of Nero. Now you’ve got Black Shuck.
Ever since I heard that was going to be the name of the strip and title character, I thought it was odd. Was he a farmer? Or some kind of cast-off or rube? The team of Moore & Reppion struck me as one that would chose a name that tied in with the work in some way, and probably not as a joke given the strip’s tone. So I asked my friend Mr. Google what a black shuck was. And it turns out that the Black Shuck is a ghost dog supposedly found in the region of East Anglia in eastern Britain. This dog is a cryptic like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, and is alternately described as a protector or a harbinger of death, with the latter occurring not necessarily to the direct observer of said Shuck, but to those close to him or her. Quite the margin for error there.
Continued belowBut having read that, I see why the name was chosen, because the protagonist here was taken from East Anglia by a Viking raiding party in 871 AD and eventually winds up back in Scandanavia, with the rest of his Viking kidnappers dead. And after being discovered by more Vikings, the settlement he was brought to is, as you can see above, attacked by giants. I think we can fill out his job title as ‘harbinger of death’ at this point.
Yeowell finished up the ‘DeMarco P.I.’ strip for the Megazine a few months back and apparently didn’t miss a beat jumping into this thoroughly grounded and realistic-looking story. He’s also gotten the opportunity to color his work here, which I feel is a real asset. His earlier stuff was great, but the color adds a nice degree of separation here, even if the palette is the muted tones we’d expect from a Scandanavian-set tale.
Credits: Leah Moore & John Reppion (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
III. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1890
Brass Sun: Floating Worlds, Part 4
One of my favorite parts of the 1980 sci-fi masterpiece “Flash Gordon” is the siege of the War Rocket Ajax. So this week’s installment reminded me exactly of that scene. Except for the fact that the heroes are on the ship instead of invading, are hopelessly outnumbered, don’t have the firepower to really fight back, aren’t getting help from the Sweet Sisters (but that’s probably for the best given the type of help that would probably be), and most importantly don’t have the thundering Taylor/Deacon rhythm section coupled with Brian May’s laser-like guitar to carry them to victory.
They do, however, have air pirate Ariel O’Connor at the helm of the airship. And she has a plan.
Will she save every one of them?
Credits: Ian Edgington (script), INJ Culbard (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Sinister Dexter: Congo, Part 3
This week’s strip was really stressful! I guess that’s just what happens when you put that many assassins together and make them have a barbecue.
Finny and Dex seem to have walked away from this happy little gathering with nothing that they wanted. And that’s sort of unsettling. They were given a firm ‘no’ when they asked for the information they tried to get from Congo, had a few beers and some food, and then left. They just left. No gun fighting, no backhanded sneakiness, nothing. And that’s the part that makes things feel so stressful. I went through the whole strip waiting for the shoe to drop, and it never happened. So are Sinister and Dexter just going to head off into the sunset, accepting that they came all this way for nothing?
Yeah, I don’t think so either.
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Jake Lynch (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Aquila: Carnifex, Part 2
Since this obviously takes placed before the ‘Nero fiddles while Rome burns’ phrase was coined, one could be forgiven in thinking that Nero’s Rome was a decent place to love. Not so for Triscus the Diviner. He’s seen the writing in the entrails and knows it’s time to get the hell out of town.
Which goes about as well as expected.
Not one to give up that easily, Triscus needs another look into the future to figure out his next course of action. Which seems to be leading him right into the path of Aquila and his Nero-sanctioned mission to behead people connected with the gods. Or in the case of his next victim, with God.
Maybe registering an appeal isn’t such a bad idea…
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Leigh Gallagher (art), Dylan Teague (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
IV. OF INTEREST
This week brings us news both happy and sad. First, the happy…
2000 AD was a big winner at the recent London Film & Comic-Con. The awards presentation hosted by Anthony Stewart Head (aka Giles from “Buffy”) saw “2000 AD” the Prog win Best British Comic, and Annie Parkhouse took home the award for best letterer. Or she would have taken it home had she been there and not at home lettering. I’m sure PR droid Molch-R, who was on hand, will make sure the award gets to her as soon as possible. Congratulations from us here at Multiver-City One to the award winners!
Continued below
But on a more somber note, we were saddened to hear about the passing of designer Jan Shepheard last month. Shepheard was a longtime designer in British comics, including stints on “Valiant” and “Roy of the Rovers” during the 1970’s and 1980’s. But it is her work as the first art director of “2000 AD” that she is probably known for best. She designed the first Judge Dredd logo (above) which was used for decades and is still, with the badge included in the word ‘Judge’, very influential in Dredd titling to this day. You can find out more about her life and work here.
V. COMING SOON
Here’s a little taste of the future! Writer Rob Williams (Judge Dredd: Titan, Ordinary) and artist Mike Dowling (Death Sentence, Anderson: Psi-Division) will be joining forces to tell a new story featuring Ichabod Azrael. It’s been almost two years since this character graced a Prog, and we are quite curious to see what lies in store for him. Co-created by Williams and Dom Reardon, this undead gunslinger made his first appearance back in Prog 1677. If memory serves, this’ll be Dowling’s first crack at the character. Readers may remember the gorgeous work Dowling did with Alan Grant on Judge Aderson in the Megazine a few months back. The image above seems to indicate a pretty significant departure form the look of that story!
VI. FUTURE PERP FILES
ATTN: ALL CITIZENS OF THE MEG! Be aware that there is always a Judge watching you. Each sector is equipped with millions of HD-CCTV and bioID units. They are there for your protection. If your intent is upright citizenry, then you have no qualm with our surveillance. And remember: if you see something, you are now an accessory to a crime. That’s six months in an Iso-Cube, creep! Random CPU algorithms has selected this citizen for immediate surveillance and assessment…
That’s gonna do it for us this week! 2000 AD Prog 1891 is on sale today and available from finer comic shops everywhere, from the 2000 AD Newsstand app for iPad and iPhone, and from 2000ADonline.com in print or DRM-free PDF and CBZ formats. So as Tharg the Mighty himself would say, “Splundig vur thrigg!”
