2000 AD Prog 2196 Featured Columns 

Multiver-City One: 2000 AD Prog 2196 – High Speed Thrills!

By , , , and | August 26th, 2020
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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 Neil Roberts

THIS WEEK IN 2000AD

Cadet Dredd: Bad Seeds
Credits: Mike Carroll (script), Luke Horsman (art), Matt Soffe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Rowan Grover: Mike Carroll provides a story here that shines a light on Joe and Rico Dredd’s formative years as cadets, one that shows a more morally flexible Dredd who doesn’t think that the law is absolute. Carroll has a great take on Joe and Rico’s relationship, with Rico acting out almost as the renegade cop that is disgusted by the law, almost in a way that his later death will shock Joe into siding more and more with the law. The infiltration scene is solid, and lots of fun, up until we realize that somehow the Judges had already sent people to infiltrate the antagonists of the story, Wasted Youth, months ago. It feels like a weird little deus ex machina, and also serves to confuse the Dredd siblings, to the point of them saying – well screw it, let’s just keep doing the right thing anyway, a story swerve that I quite enjoyed.

Luke Horsman does some pretty solid classic artwork that works well as a potential introduction to younger readers to the more stylized and often busy artwork of 2000AD as a whole. Each character is visually unique in their characteristics, even the judges and cadets have quirks that make them identifiable. The senior judges Chaplin and Duval have more relaxed and controlled body languages, while you can definitely see the roots of what will become Joe Dredd’s on-edge-all-the-time style in the way Horsman carries him here. Soffe handles colors and gives everything a terrific, shiny graffiti-like quality. The judges and cadets look the most spick and span, whilst everything else has a much more muddied tone to it, giving the satirical look at class structures in the Dredd universe a much more obvious visual quality.

Bad Seeds is a little complicated for being a short one-shot, but still has a sleek visual style and some interesting character dynamics: a story that is well worth your time if you’re interested in the “Judge Dredd” comics at all.

Pandora Perfect
Credits: Roger Langridge (script), Brett Parson (art), Simon Bowland (lettering)

Matthew Blair: Pandora Perfect is a thief who has just broken out of jail and is on the run. Unfortunately for her, she has a special anklet that will explode in a few hours if she doesn’t get it off. Fortunately, Pandora and her robot companion know where to find the key to the anklet and all they have to do is play nanny to the children of a rich industrialist for a bit. Combine the set up with a bag made out of a piece of black hole that can store anything, a few song and dance numbers, and a nanny outfit that looks more like it came out of the late 1800’s and you have a strange and wonderfully bizarre retelling of Mary Poppins.

Writer Roger Langridge does a great job telling a fast paced story with limited space. Within the first few panels of the comic we know who Pandora is, what she wants, and how she’s going to get it. She’s a well written, tough, no nonsense protagonist who is capable and quick thinking, and the supporting cast are fantastic as well. Of special note are her long suffering robot companion playing the role of a solid down on his luck comedic foil while the children steal the show playing the role of sidekicks who, in a refreshing change of pace from the source material, are actually helpful and supportive of the main character and her quest. On top of that there are quite a few well placed and well written sight gags involving her bag that can hold anything that are expertly placed and timed.

Just like the script, the artwork does a great job of showing the audience that this is a satire of a famous Disney property. Artist Brett Parson draws the characters in “Pandora Perfect” in a cartoon style that evokes the classic Disney cartoons, complete with big eyes and exaggerated mouths. However, Parson goes out of the way to lend his own twist to the visuals, giving the whole story its own special retro futuristic look that ensures that the story is one of a kind.

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“Pandora Perfect” is a fantastic satirical retelling of a classic Disney movie that isn’t afraid to be its own thing and allow the creative team to leave their own mark on the story. It’s a one of a kind experience and the only regret is that they don’t take this set up and turn it into a longer running series.

Finder & Keeper: The Curse of Kreepindeth
Credits: John Reppion (script) Davide Tinto (art) Jim Boswell(colours) Simon Bowland(letters)

Michael Mazzacane: Meera Hundal and Eliot Hunter return for another round of supernatural investigation, this time without co-writer Leah Moore. Now with three appearances under their belt, starting with the 2019 “Regened” Prog, the potential of this strip has been clearly articulated. This is a fun, less campy, riff on Scooby-Doo like shenanigans with a dash of cultural commentary. In this adventure the keepers of the Finder Goggles and Keeper Device are on a class field trip to the natural history museum and the new exhibit of Pharaoh Kreepindeth, there is just that troublesome matter of the titular curse to deal with.

David Tinto’s art is what you would expect from a story like this, representational and cartooned but never unreadable. The page designs are a tad repetitive but given the nature of the story readability and clean visual communication is more important than pushing a dense page. There is one awkward moment on the fourth page which is more to do with John Reppion’s script than Tinto’s art. The fourth page is the exhibition dump on the titular curse and how a British museum received the cultural products of Egypt. While there are several panels showing flashbacks there are also several panels of fake newspapers that also tell this story. The interplay between imagined reality and a printed one is interesting to consider. The moment where the panels become boring is when they are not the recreation of newspapers themselves but small drawings of them with Simon Bowland’s lettering plastered above them in a word bubble. It creates a second layer that previous panels did not have and is visually boring.

John Reppion provides a fresh twist on the Mummy’s Curse plot so often associated with these kinds of stories. That twist is the part of the strip that makes me hope Hundal and Hunter will continue to appear in these specials. Awkwardness on the fourth page aside, ‘The Curse of Kreepindeth’ is a well put together strip that does its job. It has the kind of setup that could easily allow it to run on a series of one or two strip stories for a very long time.

Future Shocks: Boss Level
Karl Stock (script) Tom Newell (Art) John Charles (Colours) Annie Parkhouse (Letters)

Christopher Egan: Like most “Future Shocks” strips, ‘Boss Level’ really delivers on the wtf factor. The introduction to this story starts listing crazy things that will happen in the future – dinosaur clones, zombie virus, etc. It is a set up to make you believe the plot is going in one direction, but quickly lets you know that the intro is part of an in-story video game.

We get a look at a pair of siblings playing mobile games together in their home, when a new game ‘Free the Monkey’ comes out, devouring the life of their father who seems to be nearly comatose due to it. As the game becomes increasingly popular turning everyone into braindead zombies with their faces in their phones, the kids quickly realize something is very wrong.

The game pulls the characters into its own world where they are forever trapped unless they can free the monkey. As each level gets more insane, the siblings and their father somehow make it to the end, only to learn a darker truth.

This is a wild and fun romp. At only 5 pages long, this takes no time to read and is full of silly action from start to finish. The writing is witty, and to the point. There isn’t room for over explanation. The art is fun, full of bubblegum violence and wacky visuals. It’s like The Matrix meets Bill & Ted.

Fun and quick, with obvious satirical material that young readers will find easy to understand and older readers will chuckle at. Nothing terribly original, but still enjoyable. It feels like the real world of 2020 has caught up the type of satire and insanity found in “Future Shocks.’

Continued below

Department K
Credits: Rory McConville (script), P. J. Holden (art), Len O’Grady (colours), Jim Campbell (letters)

Greg Lincoln: “Department K” introduces a bright new element into the grim dark bleakly humorous world of Judge Dredd. Built on the of fighting the inter dimensional threats posed by creatures like Judge Death the Justice Department created a group to proactively try to police and close cases of dimensional rifts parallel worlds. Rory McConville, P.J. Holden, Len O’Grady and Jim Campbell introduce us to this new group and concept as intern Judge Afua arrives to join the Department. Holden and O’Grady give us a great feel for the story. Their art tells us this is a bright lighter hearted adventure tale. Their imaginative character design and world building shows how wild this story might get and the bizarre places they have in store.

This strip does little more then introduce the concept and its cast but it does it quite well. We get to know our ever curious viewpoint character, the intern Afua, well enough to be attached to her. We meet the irascible member, the mechanizmo scientist(?)Estabon, the sarcastic alien(?) Blackberry, and the gung-ho leader Kirby. McConville has them all make a definite impression on Afua and therefore on us too. The art team settings and backgrounds leave a really lasting impression . There are multiple characters that have no speaking lines but stick in the mind. Department K has a very frightened looking robot in the base that I can’t stop wondering about. The whale like creatures flying in the last panel look so impressive. It was also brilliant to see a Jack Kirby homage in this story. Though they were little more than a presence in the story, the appearance of the giant reality devouring creatures calls the Locusts was a welcome cosmic comic trope reference. As we are left at a kind of cliffhanger hopefully we’ll see this strip again sooner the next all ages special.


//TAGS | Multiver-City One

Michael Mazzacane

Your Friendly Neighborhood Media & Cultural Studies-Man Twitter

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Christopher Egan

Chris lives in New Jersey with his wife, daughter, two cats, and ever-growing comic book and film collection. He is an occasional guest on various podcasts, writes movie reviews on his own time, and enjoys trying new foods. He can be found on Instagram. if you want to see pictures of all that and more!

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Greg Lincoln

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Matthew Blair

Matthew Blair hails from Portland, Oregon by way of Attleboro, Massachusetts. He loves everything comic related, and will talk about it for hours if asked. He also writes a web comic about a family of super villains which can be found here: https://tapas.io/series/The-Secret-Lives-of-Villains

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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.

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