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: End of Days, Part Fourteen
Credits Rob Williams (script) Henry Flint (art) Chris Blythe(colours) Annie Parkhouse(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: It’s the penultimate episode and things are not looking good.
At first Henry Flint’s art wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. Their art wasn’t bad, but the switch the more cartooned style was jarring. The style isn’t’ entirely effective in quitter walk and talk moments, like the batch of strips dealing with War, but in these moments of high tension where the morphed style is able to operate on more of an emotional than a level of believability Flint’s art comes through as strong and impactful. It comes through with the first anchor image of the page as Death Dredd shoots a hole through Judge Giant Jr., Blythe punctuates the copious speed lines with a yellow-orange gradient that pushes the moment to an emotional, visceral, level. That highly warm image is quickly contrasted with the cool blue background of Anderson in Dredd’s sights.
The color play continues on the next page with Flint and Blythe representing Anderson’s loss of life. Dredd fires, Anderson is thrown black into darkness with Dredd in a halo of blue light. One of them is technically alive and the other isn’t. It’s clear and easy to understand visual storytelling. Now if I buy Anderson actually being “dead” or at least staying that way is another matter, but visually the art team is firing on all cylinders.
This is the penultimate strip, everything is going wrong. Anderson’s death would normally be the punctuating moment you could build a strip around. Williams isn’t finished killing off our cast with Ichabod going next. The mysterious, mythical, gunslinger was brought to kill Death and found wanting. Of all the pages in this strip, Flint’s page design and mirrored composition of the Dredd-Ichabod showdown is the best page they’ve done in this strip. The environment disappears. It’s just two mythical figures in a yin-yang formation doing the dance of death until one of them doesn’t get up.
Normally with these kinds of strips the endings can feel a bit rushed and Williams has certainly put himself in a corner. Will he be able to wrap it up in a matter of pages, in a satisfying fashion? Guess we’ll have to find out next week.
The Out, Part Eleven
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Mark Harrison (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: For the first time in its run, “The Out” spins its wheels a little bit in this, its penultimate issue. That’s not to say that what happens in the issue isn’t good, or that the creators don’t do a good job in executing its plan, but much of ‘Part 11’ feels explanatory, not revelatory. This installment focuses on Cyd’s past, going into more detail about what led her to leave Earth in the first place, and how the trauma of losing her daughter scarred her.
There is nothing contained here that wasn’t hinted at in ‘Part 10,’ but Abnett does a good job of showing us Cyd’s mental state in conjunction with what Earth was going through at the time of her daughter’s abduction. These bits of clarity help us to further understand Cyd’s difficulty with a 47 year break in her plans, as that is nearly half of her daughter’s lifetime wasted not looking for her. Abnett walks the line of Cyd being optimistic and fatalistic in her mindset about finding Joey, and it feels very much like a person grappling with something they know is nearly impossible, but desperately need to feel is possible.
This is the second straight chapter that Harrison is given less to do than he had in the first nine, but he does get to draw some ‘normal’ things for the first time: cars, an apartment, a city street. Harrison has typically been at his best when drawing the weirder parts of “The Out,” but he does a really nice job juxtaposing normalcy and science fiction in this chapter. His Cyd is also shown changing a lot, with the stoicism of her current narration grounding the physical and temperamental changes that are going on in the various flashbacks. It’s really masterful stuff, even when it is playing against what he’s typically thrived in.
Continued belowI’m not sure if next week’s installment is the final chapter of “The Out,” or just a pause before getting more Cyd stories in the future. Regardless of that, the strip has been one of the more interesting and emotionally satisfying that 2000 AD has had in quite some time. Let’s hope that Abnett and Harrison get to finish their story, however they see fit.
Tharg’s 3rillers Present: Saphir, Un Roman Fantastique, Part 2
Credits: Kek-W (script), David Roach (art), Peter Doherty (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Noel Thorne: The homicide of a socialite bohemian has led Inspector Mucha and the socialite’s giant blue axe-wielding assistant to a hostile insect world – the life of a 19th century French copper, eh? Time to listen to the Big Bad’s monologue, get out your trusty handgun and see if bullets will somehow fix everything!
The second part of “Saphir” isn’t bad but it’s full of cliches and easily-understandable motivations, probably in large part to the compressed nature of 2000AD stories. So you’ve got characters expositing like crazy to produce a coherent narrative and some rather uninspired revelations over why this is all happening.
Speaking of uninspired, David Roach’s character design of the Big Bad isn’t terribly impressive – bizarrely it’s just Jacob Rees-Mogg (a British Conservative politician, for anyone who doesn’t know) in New Romantic garb paired with a generic insectoid in a French maid’s outfit (and how appropriate that the artist’s name is Roach given the prevalence of insects in this comic!). Still, the line-work is very skilful, precise and detailed – whether the characters are fighting or just talking, Roach captures the action perfectly.
I liked Peter Doherty’s choice to colour the backgrounds of the villain’s lair in bright yellow which helped sell the otherworldly nature of the environment. The visuals of the last few panels are very memorable too and leave things on a tantalising cliffhanger. And that’s the thing – despite my critiques, this isn’t a boring comic. It’s fast-paced and interesting and the combo of real-world crime and fantasy is a winning one – just look at Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, which Sapir reminds me strongly of.
“Sapir” Part 2, like the first part, remains engaging with excellent artwork, even if the whys and wherefores turn out to be underwhelming. C’est comme ci, comme ca.
Sinister Dexter: Bulletopia Chapter Three: Ghostlands, Part 1
Credits: Dan Abnett (Writer), Nicolo Assirelli (Art), John Charles (Colours), Simon Bowland (Letters)
Jacob Cordas: “Sinister Dexter” wants to be cool so bad. You can feel it on every page, every panel. It wants you to sit there impressed with just how bad ass it is. But, like everything trying so hard to be badass, it can’t live up to its own words.
Dan Abnett’s writing is filled with overblown, ‘try too hard’ dialogue. It’s a bad impression of Philip K. Dick, without the hard drugs. It wants to be that semi-futurist hardboiled dialogue that has worked maybe four times. The dialogue is clunky in a vain attempt to pull of what might be the hardest kind of dialogue since Mamet. And if it seems like too much time on dialogue, narratively this is all just characters trading exposition so it lives and dies off its dialogue. And in this case, it dies.
The line work in the art is surprisingly good here though. Nicolo Assirelli gives it a nice clean look that has a feeling of authority to it. It’s a shame John Charles colors it so brightly; if the colors had been faded out, he maybe could’ve gotten away with the base choices. But as it stands, there is no texture to it – just the kind of vivid blues and yellows that you’d paint a small child’s room with.
There’s a compelling story somewhere in here. I don’t know what it is though. It’s too funting cool to figure out what it was supposed to be.
The Diaboliks: A Crooked Beat Part 2
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Dom Reardon (art), Jim Campbell (letters)
Ryan Pond: Meet punk rocker Jake Pazuzu, a former acquaintance of Solomon. He wants the help of the Diaboliks to protect him from Deus Vult as they are outside the protection of the current arrangement. Jake has led the cult to their home, so they have no real choice this time.
Gordon Rennie does a great job of giving us dialogue in a setting that doesn’t involve much movement. Every word is dripping with character and information, but it is also fun and well paced. Reardon delivers great artwork that portrays the characters consistently. The black & white palette pops against the clean edges, and the shadows dance in the moonlight across the background.
Jake Pazuzu shows up uninvited, but Solomon owes him a favor. He is on the run from Deus Vult, who is just outside the gates. Whether they want to or not, the Diaboliks are going to have to take a stand.
