2000 AD Prog 2079 Featured Columns 

Multiver-City One: 2000 AD Prog 2079 – Top of the Class!

By , , , and | May 2nd, 2018
Posted in Columns | % Comments

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 Mick McMahon

THIS WEEK IN 2000AD

Judge Dredd: Nans of Anarchy Part 1
Credits Alec Worley (script), Karl Richardson (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Greg Lincoln: ‘Nans of Anarchy’ introduces a very real-world-feeling situation as the residents of the “Betty White Retirement Block” face imminent eviction due to the block’s condition. Dredd, who was there to deliver a reminder of the soon to be forced relocation, becomes the uncomprehending strait man for several timely jokes about age by the bake sale and ticket ladies trying to save their block. Crazy Daisy McGonnagal, a figure equally imposing to the towering Dredd, shows up to remind him of the tenants’ rights to attempt to fix the block up so they could stay. Alec Worley’s script none too subtly reminds us that Dredd seems unchanged by his years of service, he is a contemporary of these oldsters. In addition to being amusing satire, ‘Nans of Anarchy’ is wonderfully grey in its morality. Worley’s script paints Crazy Daisy as a compelling anti-hero; she’s willing to fight the good fight, all be it a caper, for “while (she) still can and for everyone who can’t.” It creates a warm feeling for the old zizz running criminal biker club and gives me a real original Blues Brothers “get the band back together” kind of vibe.

Karl Richardson filled the pages of this story with comedic secondary elements. His various scenes of street life and the incidental secondary victims of the Valkyrie heist add some fun momentary sight gags. At the ‘club’s’ planning session Richardson shows several Valkyrie vests over empty chairs to signify lost members to very good effect. His faces are possibly a little too line heavy at times for my taste but Richardson does craft some distinctly effective expressive looks. Lampoon-ish and clever, the bizarre moment where Dredd and his Lawmaster burst from the crowd is not just an abrupt shock to the reader but it’s a shock to the crowd and his fellow Judges. Absurdities like that litter the panels in this satirical story. The gang leader, McGonnagal, used a literal vacuum to Hoover up the credits they were heisting. Her getaway knocks over a “Breakfast in a Suitcase” stand before hitting a “Craft Antlers” stand. Richardson uses the beard-y hipster-y diesel Punk-y looking like subculture with their tribe tats and affected irony as the punchline for many of the scripted and visual gags in his sometimes very populated panels. There is even a drive by victim taking a bloody selfie.

Sinister Dexter – The Gangbusters
Credits: Dan Abnett(script) Steve Yeowell(art) John Charles(colors) Annie Parkhouse(letters)

Michael Mazzacane: Referential humor has been a staple of “Sinister Dexter,” but this strip takes it in a different direction with ‘Gangbusters.’ Normally these sort of references were satirical and functioned more like sight gags, think the delivery businesses from Prog 2078. Prog 2079 finds titular gunsharks are on another job for the Lizard King trying to make a hit in a dog fight simulation. With the addition of augmented reality, writer Dan Abnett is able to break the fourth wall, Ramone is aware of his own thought bubbles, without shattering it. This simulation layer sees Abnett and artist Steve Yeowell craft a strip unlike their previous one, a strip that harkens back to the Golden Age in design and setting as Finn and Ramone dogfight it out and try to escape this matrix.

You’d think a strip featuring dog fighting would be right up Steve Yeowell’s wheelhouse, and it likely is. However, in sticking to the traditions of early ace pilot comics, Yeowell isn’t given the space to do the kind of dynamic layouts and design work that makes the action in the strip pop. Pages in this strip are all contained, which is fitting for a simulation but not the most interesting thing to look at. His and colorist John Charles art is by no means bad, the forced closeness of cockpits make for some well-done facial designs, but as a whole fail to evoke the sense of speed associated with flight.

Continued below

The real let down is the lettering by Annie Parkhouse. The strip gesturing to the narrative style of the time is narrated by an unseen observer. Abnett’s writing is fine, Parkhouses lettering is just boring. It is plain in the way those kinds of boxes aren’t traditionally. They’re plain text set against a white background. Normally there is a bit more color to them, or at least something that makes them visually interesting. Functionally everything about them is fine, except for their lack of eye appeal.

All told everything about this strip works, but the individual parts seem to underperform their combined quality.

Future Shocks: An Inconvenient Tooth
Credits: Martin Feekins (script), Joe Palmer (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)

Kent Falkenberg: Martin Feekins and Joe Palmer deliver a spot of bio-engineered, secret-agent bother in ‘An Inconvenient Tooth.” It whips by in a black-and-white flourish of Bond-ian proportions.

As with any “Futute Shock” installment, Feekins’s script relies on a final page turn that helps shed a different light on the preceding three pages. As brief as the story might be, that turn feels earned. And it definitely adds an extra layer or two to the already fantastic opening line of, “When he punches out my tooth, I know things are going well.”

Joe Palmer’s angular art feels propulsive, and somewhat reminiscent of Michael Avon Oeming. The pacing of Feekins’s script keeps the action tumbling foward, and Palmer matches lockstep. Whether Axel Lott is caught amidst a brawl or lurking in the shadows, there’s a palpable tension as to what will happen next.

‘An Inconvenient Tooth’ is a brisk palette cleanser. It looks smooth and reads smoother.

Anderson, Psi Division: Undertow, Part Seven
Credits: Emma Beeby (script), Mike Collins and Cliff Roberson (art), Jose Villarrubia (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)

Rowan Grover: A confrontation between Anderson’s squad and the vampires is reached here in “Undertow”. We start to dive a little further into the enigmatic Kazuo’s backstory, and his relation to the Psi’s, though Beeby still keeps it vague, leaving what we’re given feeling a little generic and stereotypically outsider. The main focus of the story though, with Anderson’s squad trying to save her, comes through a little more. What’s interesting is that it comes down to a stalemate of sorts, with Karyn holding Anderson’s life in her hands, yet the human side of her holding back from totally finishing her off. Beeby chooses to make things more interesting by having Echo enter the Karyn’s mind and strike a deal – as they both establish that if they kill Karyn in her possessed form, Anderson will die, yet Echo still resolves to having it as an option. It’s an uncompromising trope not typically seen in mainstream comics, and keeps readers on their toes as to what will happen in the series climax.

Collins and Roberson deliver some of their more free-flowing and kinetic art here. The cinematic, heavy inking is still present here, but it’s complemented by more feathering in the shading, giving it a more traditional comic book feel. What’s fun is that the action scenes feel really frantic as Collins and Roberson frame them diagonally, giving the sequencing a sliding feel and pulling the reader’s eye to the bottom and focal points of the page. It works best when rendering Karyn’s vampire form, as her anatomy is more supernatural and works better at being distorted and flung around. Villarrubia doesn’t get many chances to spread his coloring wings here, with most pages being a palette of light blue and greys, but the final Psi sequence uses a soft palette of psychedelic rainbow colors, pastel toned so they add to the haze and surreal nature of the scene.

There are some interesting developments in this part of Beeby, Collins, Roberson and Villarrubia’s “Undertow”, although what Kazuo is really adding to the story still seems shrouded in mystery. This still warrants a read and a catch up, if you’re into more detached and speculative flavored sci-fi.

Strontium Dog: The Son, Part 7
Credits: John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Ellie De Ville (letters)

Tom Shapira: This chapter should really be stronger than how it turned out to be. It’s a nice simple concept, the obviously green Kenton taking on two alien assassins while Johnny is panicking trying to find him before something bad happens, but the performance isn’t quite up to par. The two big visual hooks here are that the Glazers are made of glass (which allows us to see shattered limbs and bodies without the whole effect being too gory for the younger readers) and that Kenton turns off the light in order to gain advantage – it should be a gift for a storyteller of Ezquerra’s scale, and while the presentation of the action is efficient nothing ever crosses the line to spectacular.

I think it’s mostly the use of cut-aways to Johnny Alpha torching his way through the security door that kind of ruins the moment for me – the light and dark contrast between the two scenes is too much and it pulls right out of cramped terrifying situation Kenton is supposed to be in. We do get a rather powerful ending out of the affair though – and while Johnny is the type to always blame himself when something goes wrong this time he just might have earned it.


//TAGS | Multiver-City One

Tom Shapira

Writes for Multiversity, Sequart and Alilon. Author - "Curing the Postmodern Blues." Israel's number 1 comics critic. Number 347 globally. he / him.

EMAIL | ARTICLES

Greg Lincoln

EMAIL | ARTICLES

Rowan Grover

Rowan is from Sydney, Australia! Rowan writes about comics and reads the heck out of them, too. Talk to them on Twitter at @rowan_grover. You might just spur an insightful rant on what they're currently reading, but most likely, you'll just be interrupting a heated and intimate eating session.

EMAIL | ARTICLES

Kent Falkenberg

By day, a mild mannered technical writer in Canada. By night, a milder-mannered husband and father of two. By later that night, asleep - because all that's exhausting - dreaming of a comic stack I should have read and the hockey game I shouldn't have watched.

EMAIL | ARTICLES

Michael Mazzacane

Your Friendly Neighborhood Media & Cultural Studies-Man Twitter

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