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 Small House Part 1
Credits Rob Williams (script), Henry Flint (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: ‘The Small House’ is a bit disjointed at first read. Rob Williams opens with a bit that seems kind of a philosophical think piece of problem and then dives into lots of expository third person boxes. Though the action heavy art by Henry Flint is as pretty as you please there is a bit of a disconnect between the images and the narrative voice over. At a second read ‘The Small House makes a whole lot more sense when you separate the narration from the action following Dirty Frank in the China Mega City Sino-Cit from the spycraft paranoia of Rob Williams’ setup. It’s a shame that at first read it kind of doesn’t work because the story Williams is telling is really quite compelling, stealth Judges manipulating city politics across the globe working. The set up also plays with the idea that Dredd and his cohorts are running their own opposing shadow-op against the other cabal. It’s all very special ops, espionage fitting in with the appearance of the John le Carré homage character, Judge Smiley, apparently on the final page.
Where this intro chapter shines is the gritty grimy art by Henry Flint and Chris Blythe. Flint excelled in creating eccentric outsider characters that jump off the page and his depiction of undercover Wally Squad Judge Dirty Frank of the “Low Life” 2000 AD storyline is a glorious thing. He’s part Rorschach and part mumbling barely coherent detective and his action heavy scenes are both cool and charming. Chris Blythe’s colors being the pages drawn by Flint alive with some downright uniquely rendered color. Blythe did an odd patchy kind of highlighting and shade that matched well the grit of Flint’s scratchy inks. The lovely art begs to be looked at again leading to a second read to parse the actual story and taking that second and third look is very much rewarded.
Skip Tracer: Legion, Part One
Credits: James Peaty (script) Colin MacNeil (art), Dylan Teague (Colors) Ellie De Ville (letters)
Rowan Grover: Peaty’s “Skip Tracer” returns to 2000 AD with a new story in this landmark prog. For the most part, this is pretty straightforward and by-the-book. Nolan Blake, out protagonist, spends most of the issue reintroducing readers to what he does best: essentially, bounty hunting. We get a short moment of tension as Nolan is knocked over an edge, with Peaty cleverly having Nolan express worry in his internal monologue about the situation. However, it’s short lived, but gives Peaty a chance to show off Nolan’s ambiguous yet powerful psi-abilities. On the topic of internal monologue, I do have a problem with how Peaty spaces this out. Especially on the last page, we get this monologue in the first and last panel, disconnected by so many panels in between that I had to jump back up to the top of the page to remember what was going on. It’s the only major issue, but it does make the ending a little sticky.
Colin MacNeil on art has a super stylized, Mignola-esque style with heavy inks and very stripped back, mostly empty panels. He draws the fugitive Xherdan Cask with a classic monstrous jawline, and even harkens back to Kirby with the way he flings himself around the panels and approaches Nolan with a monstrous and lowered hunch. I also love what MacNeil brings to the setting work in this issue. The environments are very clean-lined and aesthetically pleasing, from the floating Cube station to the spaceship dropping cargo to it. Dylan Teague also returns from the last series here to brings some delightfully Tron style coloring, especially in the interior scenes. There’s a lot of flashy neon lights highlighting landmarks, and it gives the series a very confident visual style blended with the hard, cyberpunk style settings.
Continued below“Skip Tracer” is back, though this prog is mostly reintroduction for the hero. We’re introduced to a dynamic new art team, however, giving us a lot of eye candy to drool over.
Anderson Psi Division: Death’s Dark Angels
Credits Alan Grant (scrip) Jake Lynch (art) Simon Bowland (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: Jake Lynch’s black and white art feels like a throw back to the start of Dredd strips and “2000 A.D.” when it was primarily a black and white book. Modern processes being what they are, Lynch is able to get a good amount of grey mid tones to give his pages a better sense of dynamism. It isn’t like Patrick Goodard’s work which relied more on intricate line work to create dynamic images. As with any black and white piece, large spots of black can read as a bit over powering and make an image feel more messy busy than it is, such as Dredd’s introductory page. The mixture of half shaded, full black graffitii’d walls, mixed Dredd’s uniform and the large body count on the page makes it a bit harder to read.
Conversely the use of heavy blacks and shadow for exterior shots, like the block that Judge Death originally ravaged goes a long way in selling the feeling of contamination that Judge Anderson picks up as she investigates. That page in general is an example of how using lighting to create a sense of horror and tension.
Those senses go a long way in playing towards the comedy of the strip as readers figure out who exactly the titular ‘Dark Angels’ are. A bunch of dumb fanboys who think deifying a fascist multiversal threat is a good thing. Am I talking about Judge Death or Dredd here? At the turn of a page they are revealed to be in costumed shambles trying to recreate the famed Dark Judges. After Dredd shows up and quickly puts them down, Anderson wonders why someone would dedicate themselves to something that had mistreated them so mightily. Which nicely ties together the overall mirrored, ironic sense I get from this strip about the nature of the Judges who nominally enforce the law and inherently fascist with their capricious attitudes. Of the Judges in this case, Dredd is given a much harder edge, you can’t help but read him egging on his soon to be collars. I generally haven’t seen Judge Anderson stories where she has that sort of hard edge about her.
Fiends of the Eastern Front 1812: Part 1
Credits: Ian Edgington (script), Dave Taylor (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters).
Tom Shapira: I’ve never read “Fiends of the Eastern Front” before, so I don’t really know how this story fits into the canon – is it an historical transplant (the original series took place in World War II and this one, as can one can glimpse from the title, over a century earlier) or a continuity reboot? Truth be told it matters little, if the story is good. The lovely thing about something like “Fiends of the Eastern Front” is how catchy the concept is – it’s an historical war story, only with vampires. Once you get that all becomes clear.
The first chapter doesn’t really expand upon the concept; we’re during the period of Napoleonic conquest and the French army is marching through Russia, gaining easy victories but also miles and miles of scorched earth with nothing to eat or grow. Major D’Hubert is our point of view character and this chapter doesn’t really do much to bring him to life – he’s our Ishmael, which means he’ll either need to be flashed out or someone more interesting will have to take the center stage.
The real charm here is Dave Taylor on art – it’s all very European and lovely looking, there’s a sense of classy elegance to his work (which is fitting with superior minded French officers in the center of the story) and scenes in the snow with great big black wolf are a masterwork in contrast. I would also like to personally thank Annie Parkhouse for not doing the diary scenes in elaborate shorthand, which might look nice but makes them nigh unreadable if you haven’t grown with the style, instead sticking to strong traditional curvy look.
Continued belowSo far it doesn’t seem to be a story with much depth to it, but it is well told and fantastic to look at.
Kingdom: Alpha and Omega, Part 1
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Richard Elson (art), Abigail Bulmer (colours), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Kent Falkenberg: Gene the Hackman crashes back to the world in ‘Alpha and Omega, Part 1’ from Dan Abnett and Richard Elson. Things open with an evocative bit of narration that will catch anyone up to speed who is not familiar the big, bad Aux. Over a vista of desiccated skulls impaled on rusted spikes, we see a lifepod streak across the skyline before making fiery impact with the surface below. For a series that’s always operated with a healthy dose of word play, it makes perfect sense that this expository moment takes place while the characters themselves are on their on distinct crash course.
‘Alpha and Omega, Part 1’ shows how deftly Abnett handles a chapter such as this. He introduces a nefarious group of scientists, whose own purpose in the story is to fling some new adversaries into the Hackman’s path, while offering their own bit of explanation as to what the hell is going on. Abnett’s script never feels like it’s slowing down for newcomers, but neither is it to deep in it’s own mythology to be impenetrable.
Elson relies on tightly cropped horizontal panels that run the full width of the page. In doing so, there’s a sense that this story is played out over the wide expanses of hostile landscape. But at the same time, he’s forced to frame Gene and the others so tightly that there’s always an uneasy sense of some unknown danger lurking just out of sight.
It’s always a good week when Abnett and Elson return to this world. ‘Alpha & Omega, Part 1’ hits the ground running. Welcome back to their kingdom.
