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!
THIS WEEK IN 2000AD
Judge Dredd: Live Evil Part 4
Credits: Ian Edginton(script), Dave Taylor(art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: This week’s closing chapter of ‘Live Evil’ brings this dangerous alien artifact plot to a close and, sadly, takes another strong female Judge from the world of the living. After last weeks exposition heavy chapter, part four delivered a finale more rooted in Dredd’s police procedural action storytelling roots. Judge Lola’s possession and the ‘walking dead’ like situation that grew out of it was resolved like a bizarre hostage crisis. Judge Lola, who was most clearly possessed at this point, even got to “prove her continued safety” with the single word “ricochet.” It was a clever call back to the end of part two when she joked about forgetting to use the lawgivers’ incendiary rounds until it was almost too late. This ending to ‘Live Evil’ feels a little rushed; events solved themselves and Dredd himself was little more then an observer for the most part. Those feelings aside, ‘Live Evil’ reintroduced the character Lamia and made her someone we want to see again along with her new spectral partner.
Dave Taylor again pulls out all the stops delivering interesting, rich, shadow heavy images. Taylor got a lot of mileage of the translucent ghosts he created and the special effects he employed to show Lamia using her unique abilities. The pages had an appealing animation cell quality due to his dynamic use of light and color. The brightest bits he created appear to have a real motion to them and, oddly, his ghosts have a lot more life then many of his living people. Lamia, Lola, and the ghosts faces had real expression where most others were kind of just there. Annie Parkhouse contributed the sound effects that made the climax of the story work, as well as clear, unobtrusive word balloons as always.
Bad Company: Terrorists, Part 12
Credits: Peter Milligan (script), Rufus Dayglo (art), Dominic Regan (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Tom Shapira: And thus ends another Bad Company series. To call it an anti-climax would be an understatement, but this turns out to be not so much a cop-out as but the whole point of the exercise. Colonel Crawly, Keane, the frame-up job, the various monsters – Kano has a chance to end it all but choses to continue, simply because fighting’s the only thing that keeps him going. He claims he does it for the rest of the squad as well but the story, wisely, leaves it up in the air – he might be saving them from themselves by giving them an objective or he might be damming them ever farther.
While leaving the story open for whatever continuation the creators have in mind is all well and good the problem is that many of the smaller plot points simply end up ignored: just last week Danny Franks was talking about feeling out of synch with the rest of the team but now the whole’s thing is forgotten about as they become a well-oiled fighting machine once more. Turns out this was Kano’s story all the way, and whatever happened to the rest of Bad Company is quietly shoved to the side.
Still, for all its faults “Terrorists” has more highs than lows. The art team really are giving it their best. Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy have left some big shoes to fill but Rufus Dayglo and Dominic Regan succeed not by aping them but by finding their own voice. It’s not as bleak a series as it used to be, there’s a more colorful and cartoony design sense, wallowing in the strangeness of whatever strange idea Milligan has this week. If anything my complaint is they should be given more free reign to hog-wild on the action.
There’s always a sense of dread when an old creator comes back to something they made their name on decades ago but Milligan confronts the problematic nature of digging up the past by making it his subject; “Terrorists” is a story about people not being able to let go – how clinging to past glories sustains them, and how it destroys them.
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ABC Warriors: Fallout, Part Twelve
Credits: Pat Mills(script), Clint Langley (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Rowan Grover: Mills presents a fairly by the numbers and abrupt ending to ‘Fallout’ in his wrap up. This prog plays out largely as typically as you’d expect given the bot vs. bot formula that has been happening in the last few progs, and it’s certainly passable. It’s a lot of fun to have the Warriors making snappy remarks at Blackblood like when Joe Pineapples, his former tutor, sarcastically gives him a ‘D Minus’ for his efforts. It’s just that as soon as this initially larger than life AI threat seemed to have been stopped with minimal exertion from the Warriors and wrapped up as soon as narratively possible. It’s almost as if the editorial called for this story to be cut short, which is a shame because it had drummed up so much momentum.
At least Langley gets to have a good shot on his last hurrah here. Each figure is clean and sharp, and Langley poses them fighting dirty like an old fashioned Kirby brawl. The background is stark, taking place on an arid desert plain, which is a shame considering some of the great gritty backdrops Langley had been providing throughout the series. It does highlight the bots well, however, and gives a very climactic feel to the scene, appropriate considering the tone. One scene I found well constructed was when the camera drew back to see the Ro-Jaws and co admiring the battle from afar, we get to see the massive robot figures highlighted by the dust storms of Mars, which is a powerful image.
‘Fallout’ may have come to an alarming stop, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable ride to get to this point. Mills brings the Warriors back to good ol’ status quo, and Langley gets to draw them in their violent, mechanical glory. As much as I’d have loved a more satisfying and drawn out conclusion, I’m glad the creators got to tell such such an enjoyable tale overall.
Future Shocks – Sunday Scientist
Credits: Laura Bailey(script) Paul Williams(art) Ellie De Ville(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: This brief strip from Laura Bailey and Paull Williams hits on some current anxieties and one of the most well-known movie twists. All the while using those beats to effectively tell a tale of madness in 5 pages.
Bailey’s script and Williams’s art show just enough to make the plot function. The top of the first page starts with our protagonist Wendy being ejected from her research lab at a university and ends with the revelation of what necessitated her ejection. At the same time, her initial ejection is coded in a mixture of sexism and cynicism, as onlookers write off her outbursts as a byproduct from her pregnancy. It is those layers, mixed with the macabre beats, that make this strip work so well. She is a capital ‘M’ mad scientist by the end, but all the time that fall is couched in the reader knowledge of some sort of inevitable dark joking twist at the end. So maybe she isn’t as mad as she seems.
The efficiency Williams and Bailey employ in these pages is fantastic, as things just keep getting comedically worse by the panel. What makes them work is how they correctly address what is funny about this trip. Stealing a corpse is darkly humorous acts because of the action, not because they are being done by anyone in particular. The creative team doesn’t really use these moments of progressive dark comedy to really reflect on character. Once it becomes time for the mad science experiment to commence, Williams and Bailey rightly shift focus onto some reactions to their put-upon Igor for this strip. He goes from feeling mildly depressed about his actions to out right disgusted.
Of course, by this point his wife is too far gone, to obsessed with being proven right despite some obvious ethical concerns. Paul Williams nails the unhinged look on Wendy’s eyes as things get even uglier. She isn’t “crazed,” she’s fully in control of herself, and that makes her more freighting. That sort of layered approach to the character is why the ambiguity of the ending works so well. This is just a strip, so it doesn’t have a ton of space but the efficient way that space is used makes it a creepy, but darkly funny, turn.
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Brass Sun: Engine Summer, Part 12
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), INJ Culbard (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Kent Falkenberg: In the wearied calm after battle, Wren stands silent in front of the weathered stone cog that acts as her infant daughter’s gravestone. A wound, high on her shoulder, leaves a stream of red running down her forearm to trickle off her fingers. And that blood on her hands is more than just literal, as Ian Edginton and INJ Culbard close out the last chapter of “Brass Sun.”
‘Engine Summer, Part 12’ forces Wren to come face to face with how stained her hands have really become, in spite of how badly she’d like to forget. There’s blood and grief and pain and rage. And as much as she’d like to hide away from it all, the recent assault of the Enginemen have shown there’s no way to actually turn her back on the larger conflicts lashing through the Orrery.
“She has been living in her head for too long. While she dwells in the past, she has no future,” Anaru says. ‘If all we have left of the one’s we love is pain, then we choose to cling to that pain.”
‘Engine Summer, Part 12’ is a reflective piece. But Edginton and Culbard play it out with precision. For its part, this act is over. And when “Brass Sun” returns, Wren will once again fly into the fray. But it will never again be quite the same Wren we knew.
