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 Removal Man Part 1
Credits: John Wagner (Script), Colin MacNeil (Art), Chris Blythe (Colours), Annie Parkhouse (Letters)
Christopher Egan: A lone man moves through Mega City One telling us his story. He is a removal man. Basically, giving himself a cooler moniker than hit man, which is exactly what is line of work shakes out to be. Taking out the bad guys, at all levels and status. His goal is to make the kill look like a natural death, or an accident; never wanting any attention placed on him or the act, unless time is short. His latest job is a higher profile hit, with Judges involved. With time to prepare on the shorter side he makes a few mistakes along the way.
Wagner goes into a hard-boiled narration with his writing, which suits this kind of story just fine. It occasionally comes off as a little corny, but it’s all in good fun. Especially with a story set in Mega City One. The story’s inspirations and satire are worn on its sleeve. It’s a solid opening to the current on-going strip and leaves readers with a good cliffhanger by the end. Stakes aren’t terribly high just yet, but the script makes you feel like this won’t have a totally happy or satisfying end.
MacNeil’s artwork is sleek and he gives us some cool character designs right off the bat. His work blends a gritty realism, with a classic comic book style that holds onto a more pop-y fun side that really works in this universe. Blythe’s color work is truly stunning and his talent brings the entire chapter to where it should be. It feels whole and he has an eye for coloring MacNeil’s work.
A solid opening chapter, that sometimes relies too heavily on its narration, but will leave readers interested in where things go next.
Mechastopheles: The Hunting Party Part 3
Credits: Gordon Rennie and Lawrence Rennie (script), Boo Cook (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Gordon and Lawrence Rennie do a great job of building tension as they continue to build this story on both fronts. They give some space for Boo Cook to show the massive Mechastopheles impressively moving forward as much as they give the human cast room to move forward with their search for a missing child. The diabolists insistence that the child is most certainly dead, if not from mishap than from murder, is a great source of internal conflict. It gives Captain of the Guard, Lysander, an opportunity to seem like the hero, insisting on continuing the search. The changing scenery gives ‘Part 3’ a sense of motion if, for the most part, all it really does is set the scenes for conflict for next week. The Rennies brilliantly set both scenes and wet our appetites for coming battles next week.
After last week’s set pieces of talking heads and textural vistas, Boo Cook brings back the panels that give the impression of vast panoramas. Cook’s use of the page space, color, and levels of detail makes the images seem much more expansive than the limits of the physical page. Showing scenes both with deep backgrounds and figures lurking at the edges of the foreground invites us to join them and feel a part of the image, bringing us into the panel. For sure there is a simplicity to some of the figures occasionally, but these pages are really a joy to explore.
Department K: Cosmic Chaos, Part 3
Credits: Rory McConville (script), Dan Cornwell (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Simon Bowlnad (letters)
Brian Salvatore: In part three of ‘Cosmic Chaos,’ Department K return to Tril’s homeworld and manage to send at least some of the intruders from whence the came. In this sequence, we see Rory McConville introduce a clever way to bring the team back from disaster for future installments, but then instantly removes it from the table for this chapter. It’s a fun way to create a situation that feels natural, instead of the ultra convenient deus ex machina it will, likely, become one day.
Continued belowMcConville’s script also gives Don Carnwell a few new creatures to play around with, including the first real look other members of Tril’s species. Each of them, as well as their ‘dog,’ are given tweaks, both to the shape and contours of their bodies, but also to their truly loud fashion choices. The species is one of the more unique we’ve seen in comics in 2021, and so it’s a delight to get to play with them a little bit.
The strip ends on a cliffhanger that, to the characters on the page, is a huge deal. But to us, the reader, it is a little unclear what sort of impact this will have on the rest of the story going forward. Tril seems to have some explaining to do.
Chimpsky’s Law: The Talented Mr. Chimpsky Part 3
Credits: Ken Niemand (script), PJ Holden (art), Chris Blythe (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: The bananas have split at this point in ‘The Talented Mr. Chimpsky’ as Ken Niemand and PJ Holden deliver a strip that is more comedic murder montage than traditional narrative strip. It still pushes the narrative forward closer to our en media res opening, but mostly acts as an extended exercise by Holden and Niemand to figure out how many murderous gags they can fit into a page. They can fit a maximum of 3 with a minimum of one, with a few kills being two for one special.
This montage of violence makes the strip a bit of a quick read, though Neimand and letterer Simon Bowland do punch in some narrative clues to how the latest Jepperson died. Their often-mangled corpses just kind of exist for comedic spectacle and to tell the reader that they died not how. In terms of execution these kills have the right mixture of Saw, Destination, with a dash of Mindhunters. And with the gag in the previous strip about the extended nature of the Jepperson family, it’s not like the reader is asked to emotionally invest in them. The murdered Jepperson’s are rendered anonymous like their slave caretakers.
The upside of there being so many Jepperson’s is there was bound to be a gentleman detective type within the family, that role is filled by Herakles Jepperson. A character I am not sure how to feel about, he is obviously a parody of Hercule Poirot type of detective. His character design is an homage to Charlie Chaplin, but with that Chaplain association comes the Hitler stache and it maybe rightfully stops me from going along with and laughing at this character. Instead, I’m stuck looking at him trying to divine something more from his ineptitude.
It isn’t all sight gags from the creative team, Niemand works in a few darkly commentaries on the nature of tribal affiliations and the inability to look within for real danger and instead designate an Other as the true threat.
Feral and Foe II: Part 12
Credits: Dan Abnett (script) Richard Elson (art) Jim Campbell (lettering)
Matthew Blair: This is how the fantasy adventure ends. Sure, there is a massive fight with the fate of the world at stake and some real emotional trauma to process at the end, but not much else. There are no cheering crowds, no happily ever afters, not even a thank you from a grateful king and/or populace. It’s just…over.
Yes it’s a bit of a bummer, but “Feral and Foe II: Part 12” really couldn’t end any other way.
Dan Abnett provides just the right amount of action to make the ending good and closure to make the ending satisfying in “Feral and Foe II: Part 12”. It’s been said before, but Abnett has a very good grasp of all the cliches and tropes that make up the fantasy genre, so it’s not that difficult for him to subvert them without being annoying about it. All the characters behave and act in ways that make sense for them, they don’t do anything out of place, and while the ending isn’t overly big or epic, it’s a satisfying ending to this strange and twisted tale.
When it comes to the artwork in “Feral and Foe II: Part 12” Richard Elson goes out with a literal bang. This is one of the more action packed segments of the story and Elson demonstrates a keen sense of fight geography and space to give the magic bolts and athletic feats a sense of scale and proper timing. Elson’s artwork also extends to the emotional toll that each of the characters is going through and has everything from grim determination to desperate, bumbling idiocy. The artwork is a great match for Abnett’s story and it would be really nice if this partnership continued into other stories.
“Feral and Foe II: Part 12” is a good ending for a story that does a very good job of subverting several classic fantasy tropes without burning the whole thing to the ground. It has just the right amount of action and melancholy to be rousing while leaving the reader a bit sad to see these characters go.
