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’ve got a new Prog this week, so let’s get right to it!
This week’s cover is by Neil Roberts.
I. NOW ARRIVING
Judge Dredd: Cascade, Part 1
Time isn’t a universal constant. Indira Knight knows that better than anyone in Mega-City One, or even Earth for that matter.
You see, Indira is the first human to travel to another solar system and it took her 87 years to get there. The problem is, in that time, humanity figured out faster means of travel, so she wound up going through all that effort to show up at the quite-discovered Ricardo’s World amusement planet. The only saving grace to all that is the whole endeavor only took a little longer than a year for Indira thanks to the time dilation/non-universal constant thing.
Now she’s returned to Earth after almost a century away. To wrap your head around disorienting this whole situation is for her, imagine what it’d be like if someone, in a manner of twelve months, jumped from 1927 to 2014. As it turns out, this is a difficult point for certain members of the press to grapple with, too.
So what’s to become of Indira in this brave new world? Chief Judge Hershey has some ideas, but she’s not the only one.
Credits: Michael Carroll (script), Paul Marshall (art), Gary Caldwell (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
II. THIS WEEK IN PROG 1894
Brass Sun: Floating Worlds, Part 7
The old “no honor among thieves” truism holds true for pirates as well, apparently. I always thought it would be an interesting twist to have a thief set up some kind of automatically triggered revenge scheme on one of their allies they assumed would betray them, then have that ally not betray them but still get schemed because they had every reason TO do it even if this once that ally took the high road and didn’t. No need to worry about that this week, because the Sweet Sisters are totally betraying Ariel and Wren.
Ariel, as you can see, was prepared for this.
And if it was expected, is it really a betrayal? Does it count as a betrayal if there was no actual trust placed that a person would not do such a thing? Probably not.
But just because Ariel planned for this to happen doesn’t mean everything else worked out as she planned as well.
Credits: Ian Edgington (script), INJ Culbard (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Aquila: Carnifex, Part 5
In most stories, we would see Aquila realizing that Nero, the emperor whose will he is seeing done, is the greater evil and that he should not be killing so Nero could attain godhood. The thing about “2000 AD” is that their stories have characters like Aquila who realize that…and don’t care.
He’s not under some spell or thrall. He’s not being mind-controlled. And he’s not stupid enough to fail to realize his part in all this. But Rennie has built up Aquila’s reasoning to be strong enough for us to, if not agree with, at least sympathize with his conviction to the point that we’ll keep reading. Because as much as we may want to see Triscus et al. trying to get the hell out of Dodge, they aren’t the main character. Aquila doesn’t have to be a hero, and he certainly isn’t, but if he’s pushed too far away from that ideal then it could sink the whole strip. Which it hasn’t. Yet.
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Leigh Gallagher (art), Dylan Teague (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Black Shuck, Part 4
Aside from the blood-letting and the large mounds of gold we’ve gotten to see so far, one of the treats of this strip has been seeing the bits of Norse folklore that Moore & Reppion sprinkle it with. ‘Wights’, as seen above, are one example, although the authors don’t feel the need to be constrained to a perfect replication of any particular take on these creatures, as there are various and varying descriptions of them through the centuries.
Continued belowAnother is ‘dragur’, which is a burial treasure’s guarding spirit. If you were stupid enough to steal a huge pile of gold and treasure from a giant’s, or Jotunn’s, burial barrow, then you could certain expect his dragur to show up and at the very least curse you and your entire line, to say nothing of sending hordes of his brethren against you and even cracking a few skulls himself if they were within reach.
Black Shuck’s problem is his raping-and-pillaging dad is just that kind of stupid.
Good thing he’s not afraid of ghosts, because before this us all through, I’m sure he’s going to be seeing quite a lot of them. And wights. And Jotunns. And all manner of other nasties Moore & Reppion tell Yeowell to throw at him.
Credits: Leah Moore & John Reppion (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Jaegir: Circe, Part 2
As we’ve seen over the last two weeks, yes, this body does have some personal significance to Atalia Jaegir.
Jaegir is a solider haunted by her memories of fighting on Nu-Earth; memories that, as her investigation begins, are being brought back to the surface. The flashbacks we’ve seen in this strip are of the gruesomeness she’d witnessed first-hand from chemical warfare. One is of fellow soldiers at the hands of the Rogue Trooper, while the other showed us some of her fellow Nordlanders trapped with their own chemical weapons.
While there are some similar themes between this and Jaegir’s previous Strigoi case, this new investigation seems to have found, however possible, even darker depths to plumb. The Nordland military obviously dehumanized their enemies on Nu-Earth to make the atrocities committed against them somehow more acceptable. But what will happen to Jaegir’s beliefs and convictions when she sees what it looks like when Nort weapons are turned against her own people? Will she begin to see her blue-skinned enemies as something other that cannon-fodder?
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Simon Coleby (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Ellie de Ville (letters)
III. COMING SOON
Speaking of Jaegir…
With a new Jaegir strip in full swing, 2000 AD will be collecting her first adventure in a one-shot comic. “Jaegir: Strigoi” is a tale from the perspective of Kapiten-Inspector Atalia Jaegir of the Nordland State Security Police as she’s been tasked with a job that’s basically internal affairs. She will, on behalf of the Office of Public Truth, examine possible war crimes committed by Nort soldiers. This story has her butting up against a more sinister-sounding Nordland bureau: The Office of Genetic Purity.
Rennie and Coleby make a hell of a team on this comic. The narrative and dialogue are tight, and the art is unbelievable. It’s clear that both creators enjoy telling this story and are excited to have it play out.
This release is the latest in a series of 2000 AD strips to be collected in the US comics format. After the success of “Dredd: Underbelly”, 2000 AD seem to have seized that momentum to present some of their more unique sci-fi tales to a new audience, repackaging ‘Jaegir’ and ‘Brass Sun’ for a North American audience.
“Jaegir: Strigoi” hits stands August 27th.
IV. ARTIST AUGUST: 2000 AD EDITION
Multiversity is currently running Artist August, a showcase of the graphics side of comics and the men & women who bring life to the writer’s words and their own ideas through pencil, ink, color, pixel, or any combination of those elements. I thought that was a fantastic idea and wanted to play along, so without further ado, let the showcasing begin!
Simon Davis is an artist that we’ve mentioned a few times over the course of Multiver-City One, as he was the artist for the ‘Slaine’ strip running from Prog 1874 to 1886. While that has been his most recent work for the comic, it certainly hasn’t been his only work. With work stretching back almost 20 years, Davis has worked on strips like ‘Missionary Man’, ‘Black Siddha’, and ‘Stone Island’. One of his more recent works has been the 1920’s horror strip ‘Ampney Crusis’:
Continued below
But one of the things you’ll notice about Davis (or pretty much every 2000 AD artist, come to think of it) is that you can’t really pin any of them down to a single time period. So while you might think that J. C. Leyendecker-inspired painted work would really only fit in that particular era, Davis shows that he can adjust it to different settings. Like here in ‘Sinister Dexter’:
Or even outer space in ‘Damnation Station’:
and of course, there is the medieval past of ‘Slaine’:
As you can see from the work above, one of the things Davis excels at is capturing the human form in paint (and even that form with paint on it). So it should come as no surprise to find out that he is an award-winning contemporary figure painter who has had his work exhibited in British art galleries, as well as a member of both the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. And with works like these, I can see why:
I could go on all day with examples of why you should check out Simon Davis and his work, but instead of doing that, I’ll let the droids over at 2000 AD do the work for me. They put together two videos of Simon and his work that can do the job much better than I can.
V. 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 1894 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!”
