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: The Booth Conspiracy Part 5
Credits T.C. Eglington (script), Staz Johnson (art), Abigail Bulmer (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Tabloid journalist Mo Malik statement that ends this story arc, “This is for justice,” asks us with the question, was this justice. T.C. Eglinton cleverly leaves that statement out there without any other comment letting us answer that implied question for ourselves. The Sons of Booth are clearly criminals and deserve some kind of punishment gang a prison break, exciting riots, endangering civilians, vandalizing pubic and private property among other things. What’s strange in the ending of this story is how Dredd doesn’t mention the crimes to Linus or apply a sentence to the cubes he nearly leaves the gang leader and his men to the mercy of the Cursed Land. Mo Malik and his cameraman catch near the entire encounter on camera and it’s clear in Malik’s final few comments the experience has at least temporarily changed him. We don’t know what he thinks other then the fact he does not see this series of events as justice. Dredd’s revelation to Linus above his parentage is a hit of a shock too, the fact the Boother leader had no clue he was in fact the ex-presidents son was a bit unexpected as was the mans complete 180 into near begging to be a rat, an informant for the Judges. With the way the entire showdown is stages Dredd and his men come off as cold and callous in what might better be called revenge then justice. The last line changed the tone of the entire finale, we don’t really feel sympathy for the Boothers but it’s hard to see the Judges as the heroes in the wake of their actions.
Staz Johnson and Abigail Bulmer’s art plays well with the implied message of the script. Johnson’s planet layouts particularly drive home the brutal landing suffered by the Boothers when the gel suits were turned off. He also delivers dome pretty dramatic expressions through Linus as he leans the truth of his parentage. Mo Malik and his cameraman also have some pretty telling expression if you look closely at them in the final long shot. Bulmer’s colors bring a subtle cold harsh feeling to the ending with the chilly sunset colors that tone the entire scene. The creative team deliver a strong possibly final ending to the multi-arc story of the Sons of Booth, but July time will tell as there are still Boothers possibly all around Mega-City One.
Survival Geeks: Slack and Hash, Part Four
Credits: Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby (script) Neil Googe (art), Gary Caldwell (Colors) Ellie De Ville (letters)
Rowan Grover: Rennie and Beeby bring this story of “Survival Geeks” to a close with part four. The deconstruction of the horror movie genre continues to be a theme here, with the slashers seemingly ambushing the survivors before deciding to attack each other. It never has a concrete reasoning in the script other than “NEW RULES!” so it feels a little like an unearned victory. Nonetheless, it’s still super fun to see the gory action ensue. Rennie and Beeby then proceed to give the Final Girls their just desserts from Sam, as the Final Girls get caught by their now-Slasher friend before Sam traps them all, ironically becoming the true final girl. It’s a great way to wrap up the defining arc of this story, and Rennie and Beeby handle it well.
Googe’s art here seems to have swelled into its most exaggerated and violent form of the series. As usual, the handling of multiple bodies in a single, small panel is one of the best highlights, especially when we see the slashers descending on each other in a scarlet rage. Each of them has a distinctive look of hatred and glee on their face as they proceed to engage in a festival of blood. Similarly, I love Googe’s depiction of Sam. She’s become sodden with brains and blood in the first sequence, so her mood from this point in essentially is: sick-of-everyone’s-shit. She hunts down the Final Girls with a confidant stride, and uses her blood stained pom-poms as a deadly weapon to trap the Girls with a triumphant scowl. It’s great character work that feels well developed and earned.
Continued below“Survival Geeks: Slack and Hash” proves that great stories can come in small packages. Part Four closes out the meta-narrative on horror movies with charm, violence and character development, and we’ll be counting down the progs until we see this group back together again.
Mechastophales: True Faith, Part 8
Credits: Gordon Rennie & Lawrence Rennie (script), Karl Richardson (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Kent Falkenberg: The beast is back! The demon hordes descend on Benedictia. And Gordon Rennie, Lawrence Rennie, and Karl Richardson close out this arc of “Mechastophales” with the kind of bombast and spectacle that this strip deserves.
After keeping him to the sidelines for the past couple of weeks, Gordon and Lawrence Rennie unleash the full fury of their title character. ‘True Faith, Part 8′ finds Lord Mechastophales raining hell upon all the opposing forces that have been placed in his way up until this point. And the Rennies are clever enough to entwine the fates of Benedictia’s oligarch and the rock monsters dispatched early in the series.
But that quirk of fate aside, this installment really isn’t about dense plotting or anything of that sort. For the most part, Karl Richardson is given room to paint Mechastophales’ wrath in broad swaths across the page. His framing within panels gives a sense of velocity and momentum to the art. This allows you to truly feel the devastation that Mechastophales is capable of.
‘True Faith, Part 8’ rounds out a fantastic arc by the Rennies and Richardson.
Future Shock: Talk’s Cheap
Credits: Mark McCann (script), Adam Brown (art), Ellie De Ville (letters).
Tom Shapira: is there anything harder to write than a “Future Shock?” probably not. It’s not just the page limitation, though that is certainly a factor, it is more about what you are expected to with the few pages you do have – shock the reader, a reader who (by the sheer history of the feature) knows you are trying to surprise him. At this point of the strip’s existence pretty much every sci-fi twist ending had probably been tried at least a dozen times each and so the question is less about if you can actually deliver an ending no one will ever see coming but in the way you deliver that ending.
“Talk’s Cheap” is not a bad strip, nor is a particularly good one. The trouble is that after establishing the main concept, a technology that allows travels into parallel realties is used by intel agencies as leverage in quasi-legal interrogation, it seems writer Mark McCann is more interested in raising questions about predestination and paradoxes than exploring the inner world of the characters (the two main ones are rather broadly established – a grieving angry husband and a stone-cold interviewer). These are the least interesting questions not only because they are utterly hypothetical but also because it’s not very different, in effect, then any time travel story. There is something interesting in the bleakness of this world, at how casually intelligence agencies take this amazing technology and use it to basically torture people and nothing else, but the story doesn’t probe into that enough.
I was pleasantly surprised by Adam Brown’s painted art – because, as a matter of personal taste, I find that type often stilted and uninspiring. Here it worked for me, something about the coldness of it, the lack of momentum actually works in its favor – making the whole procedure extra creepy. I wish I could like this strip more than I do, maybe in another Earth.
The Order ‘The New World’ Part 13
Credits Kek-W (script) John Burns (art) Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: This edition of ‘The Order’ comes to a strong conclusion. Kek-W and John Burns manage to wrap up the overall arcs for both Berg Jr. and Ana and setup the terrifying next phase of the strip. At the start of this round of strips, Ana and Berg Jr. could not be further apart, allies of convenience, and now the half wyrm is letting Ana ride him in his centaur form as they take on the monstrous form of his mother. Burns does an excellent job with the horse portion of the centaur’s anatomy giving it just the right amount of definition for their style and imbuing it with the frantic energy of a galloping horse. That sort of efficient storytelling is key to this strips ability to wrap everything up. Everyone manages to make peace with their desires and current predicaments.
Linking these moments of self-realization with the destruction of the Wyrm Queen gives this strip coherence and momentum with each page turn. It is the equivalent of all the babyfaces teaming up and hitting their signature moves on the lone heel, sending the crowd home happy. Burns page design turns to body of the Queen into something of a ping pong ball bouncing off everyone, the image of her head sliced off and flying at the reader might be one of the single best panels in this round of strips. It isn’t the most technically dexterous one, but there’s a simplicity to the image of her shocked head as green blood leads the readers eye that is quite effective.
The strips final page beautifully visualizes the coming conflict by splitting it into four quadrants with diagonal opposition. The comics page breaks time and space and imagines the automata forces of Francis Bacon marching on our heroes like it’s the start of X-Men: The Animated Series. Calhoun-Ritterstahl prophetically warns of the union between Bacon and Evil George Washington. It’s an excellent page to send the strip out on because it teases what is to come after effectively wrapping everything else up.
