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: Now That’s What I Call Justice!, Part 5
Credits: John Wagner (script), John Higgins (art), Sally Hurst (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Christopher Egan: As this strip continues along, Judge Dredd is still trying to put the pieces together and figure out who is committing the Justice Watch murders. Unlike that last few chapters, he actually gets on his bike and goes to at least one other location, but we continue to get a lot of him standing around and gritting teeth while the criminals continue to be many steps ahead of him. This week’s chapter feels more like filler than ever before, even as it tosses some crucial details to us, but it’s little more than scraps in the grand scheme of things. Wagner’s script is trudging along at this point and feels thinner with each passing Prog release.
The art team of Higgins and Hurst continues to give us a great diverse look at characters and settings. Their pairing has been the best thing for this entire run. John Higgins’s knows how to balance beauty and brutalism with his take on Mega City One. He never strays out of the norm with his look of the Judges and their accouterments, but it all looks great. Modern enough without stepping too far back into the character’s early days. Fine details and close-up moments continue to be a true highlight. The line work is bold and confident. Sally Hurst gives the entire world a bold palette with plenty of shadows, grime, and scarring to give this a fully lived-in look. Her work, like Higgins’s, moves between finely detailed, and purposefully flat to keep things moving along.
An OK entry in this storyline with some key details, but at this point it is time to wrap things up.
Skip Tracer Eden: Part 8
Credits: James Peaty (script) Paul Marshall (art) Dylan Teague (colors) Jim Campbell (lettering)
Matthew Blair: We’re now at the point in the story where we learn just how despicable and powerful the villains of this story can be, where the hero is at his lowest point, and that there is something else going on that has the potential to change everything. Nothing big has happened yet, but it probably will in the next couple of stories.
James Peaty continues to be a massive tease in “Skip Tracer Eden: Part 8” and while it’s not bad, it’s a bit exhausting to expect a payoff to all this set up and have to wait another week to get it. With that being said, Peaty’s storytelling chops continue to improve as the story goes on as he builds layers of characterization and plot that weave together in a tapestry of a story where we get to see the nuance of Skip’s responsibilities, fears, and love for his newly discovered daughter. Also, the bounty hunter Nimrod is great as the most despicable and evil character this story can come up with
A lot of the previous praises and critiques of Paul Marshall’s artwork continue to hold in “Skip Tracer Eden: Part 8”. It’s still a story that jumps back and forth between the dream world and the real world and like the previous stories, there aren’t a whole lot of artistic differences between the two. With that being said, Marshall does a very good job of displaying the emotions of all the characters and showing the reader what they’re going through from the pain and concentration of Skip to the delightful evil of Nimrod who revels at the prospect of destroying the hero and continuing to make him suffer. It will be very satisfying to watch the payoff.
“Skip Tracer Eden: Part 8” is more set up and continues to build tension in the story, waiting for the inevitable climax where it all pays off, and while it’s certainly frustrating, it’s still very good.
Continued below
Dexter: Somewhere, Beyond the Sea – Part Two
Credits Dan Abnett (script), Tazio Bettin (art), John Charles (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: The second chapter of ‘Somewhere, Beyond the Sea’ is full of surprises from the best use of “funt” in a while to the idea that the back half of this strip turns on aggressive references to Jaws 2!
I’m not the most well read on Abnett’s “Sinister Dexter” series, but it is largely episodic at times as these two scoundrels go on adventure to adventure and leave mayhem in their wake. So running into Alura Bates after they left her with plenty of reason for payback is a nice bit of serialization and possible comeuppance. Abnett and Tazio do a good job of taking a standard scene and still achieving a level of tension as Bates works through why she won’t torture them with electric eels. She won’t because that’s so barbarous and Planktown has modernized under her regime. That isn’t the best gag of the strip but it is the most ironic.
Look Jaws 2 is a somewhat maligned sequel to one of the greatest Hollywood films ever made. Which is odd considering they made two more which are clearly worse. One of the great moments of the first sequel is the shark fights a helicopter! A sequence that is parodied in this strip and also literalizes the idea of Dexter and Finn being gun sharks. It is absurd and glorious. Tazio Bettin and John Charles’ artwork really comes through in this sequence. Charles takes a reserved palette to things as it’s all a bunch of grey-blues and some green, but he puts special emphasis on the skin tone of the figures and drawing the dimensionality out there. Those extra shadows on top of Bettin’s strong line work help to create a real sense of melodrama in the final panels.
Tharg’s Terror Tales: The Way of the World
Credits: John Tomlinson (script), Smudge (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: It was only a matter of time before there was a 2000 AD piece that directly referred to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, while the pandemic in ‘The Way of the World’ is of the lychanthropic variety instead of the novel coronavirus, there is a lot in this strip that speaks to the fears of the world beginning to return to ‘normal.’ There are new HR policies, gripes about not being able to work from home, and other reminders that while the world is beginning to open back up, things will likely not be ‘back to normal’ for a long time, if ever.
Add to the pandemic imagery a healthy fear of technology and a disdain for office culture, and you’ve got the basic elements of this strip. It’s heavy handed and a little silly, but to distinguish this horror from the horror of our real lives, it sort of has to be. Smudge takes that challenge seriously, making everyone just too something or other: muscular, sinister, new age-y. John Tomlinson’s script establishes this as satire pretty quickly, but with each page, the satire grows less and less subtle. By the end of the strip, it’s gone fully to the absurd, but honestly, that’s fine.
These one-shots can sometimes try a little too hard to develop an entire world, and scrimp on the story in favor of creating a more developed setting. ‘The Way of the World’ does both without too much sacrifice. The story does feel a little rushed, especially just how quickly things escalate without warning. But for the most part, this is a cathartic, weird little werewolf story that, unfortunately, hits close to home at times.
Aquila: Rivers of Hades Book 1, Part 7
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Patrick Goddard (art), Dylan Teague (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln Gordon Rennie may have moved Lady Cruciata’s story forward with this weeks entry, but it’s so much a tangent to the rest, it’s hard to recall what occurred in that interlude. Aquila’s journey into the giant corpse was a disturbing experience, and both the writing and the art leave you unsettled. It is surprising how disturbing it is to see giant bugs with human heads; it’s such a common horror idea, but it’s is surprisingly effective. Perhaps it plays so well because the insects are living off a giant corpse, or maybe it’s the identity of the one that Aquila wants, the emperor Caligula. Either way, this chapter is viscerally just a bit nauseating, making it affective and memorable.
The visual images of the characters crawling around inside a giant corpse created Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague were realistically vile. It was surprising just how affective the human faced insects were in conjuring a sense of body horror. Revolting though it is, the sneering face of the onetime infamous Roman emperor seems well suited for the roach-like insect. As a reader, you feel a bit sorry for the one who ends up carrying the thing in the end.
