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 Citadel 06
Credits: John Wagner (script) Dan Cornwall (art) Dylan Teague (colors) Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Matthew Blair: The Apocalypse War remains one of the biggest events in the history of the Judge Dredd comics and its impact is still felt in stories published to this day. The conflict between the Sovs and Mega City One was a true contest of equals, with obvious similarities to the real life Cold War between the United States and theSoviet Union. The only difference between the real world and the fictional conflicts? The fictional conflict actually got to go out with a bang and some real nasty action.
“Judge Dredd: The Citadel 06” is a release valve to a lot of the pressure that writer John Wagner has been building for the past five parts of the story, and Wagner certainly knows how to deliver. This part of the story is essentially one long action sequence where we get to see Dredd at his most inspirational, capable, and terrifying. The Sovs are occupying Dredd’s city and killing anyone who resists, they outnumber the heroes thirty to one, and the only recourse the characters have is to fight in a desperate last stand, so they fight. The section is short, but it is brutal and packed with great action.
An action heavy script demands action heavy artwork and Dan Cornwall’s art on “Judge Dredd: The Citadel 06” delivers on the action in an admirable fashion. It’s very clear that most of the characters in this story are terrified at the prospect of taking on the entire Sov army on their own, but they buckle down and fight alongside Dredd in a brutal and bloody war that feels fast paced and visceral. Cornwall does an especially good job showing the gore and spilled blood of the conflict as Dredd and his soldiers are forced to get close up and nasty. The whole thing is clear, easy to follow, and makes violence look good.
“Judge Dredd: The Citadel 06” is a fast paced and nasty piece of writing that captures the desperate nature of close quarters combat in the famed Apocalypse War. This isn’t a war of superweapons and high technology; it’s a battle that uses knives, bullets, and lasers to rip and slice the enemy to ribbons and it is both brutal and awe inspiring to read.
Kingmaker: Falls The Shadow. Part Eleven
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), Leigh Gallagher (art), Jim Campbell (letters)
Christopher Egan: This final chapter begins to take an interesting stance by diving into classism and racism in not-so-subtle ways. As Thorn soldiers shake down a peasant village for the last of their earnings, they let word slip that an Ork is now in charge and things aren’t going as well for the Empire as usual. This allows for the peasant and his family to divert their anger towards “one of them” rather than at the guards are the problem standing in front of them. That sounds familiar.
If you’ve forgotten all about Ichnar, that’s OK, I did too. The rotting, barely regenerated corpse of the Wraith King is shuffling about and decides to take out, and absorb the life force of, these Thorn guards, saving and forcing the peasants to now worship him as he is now fully restored to his former self. This should spell certain doom for the “heroes” of this story.
Far off, Ablard feels a disturbance in the force and Crixus knows something is wrong., but his ego and confidence make him feel above any coming threat. To which Ablard, and the coming doom literally in front of him may actually change his mind.
Over the course of the five pages, we essentially got some mildly interesting social commentary and two cliffhangers setting up the next set of major events to come. Nicely paced over its short length and giving some interesting ideas and plans, what comes next could be genuinely exciting; or it will just be another run of chapters that repeatedly move between decent storytelling and feeling like its setting up something better.
Continued belowAnd with that, “Book Three” is over with two major cliffhangers setting up “Book Four: The Twilight Kingdom.”
Intestinauts: Rise of the Impactors Pt 1
Credits: Arthur Wyatt (Script), Pye Parr (Art and Letters)
Greg Lincoln: “The Intestinauts” is a bizarre concept, a stories about a team of robots that patrol, deal with the crap inside of people and then are recycled to be used again. For robots that have alpha numeric names they are surprisingly engaging characters despite being essentially faceless recycleable robots. Pye Parr’s art and colors somehow manages to give these capsule shaped modular robotic intestine travelers individual character. When one of them gets destroyed by something bizarre inhabiting the sewers there is an odd and palpable sense of loss. Parr’s subtle changes in their otherwise static expressions, his used of the flashy neon color palette and this clever lettering are likely the reason this all works so well. I could not tell you the names of the characters but they are distinct enough from one another that it feels like a diverse interesting croup of individuals. Parr also seems to have has a great time creating the sewer landscape for these characters to move through, the entire is a visual treat and great experiment in storytelling.
Arthur Wyatt needs to spend little time with technobabble given the amazing job Parr did with the art. The dialogue pushes the story along and let’s us clearly know what has gone awry with the usual course of events. Our heroes are trapped because of something huge and if you know anything about the existence of fatbergs in the sewer systems the it’s pretty clear where this tale is going before the ending discovery arrives. It’s all in good dirty fun and sets up you to be hungry for next weeks installment.
Fiends of the Eastern Front: 1963, Part 3
Credits: Ian Edginton (script), Tiernen Trevallion (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: Three episodes in and “Fiends of the Eastern Front” really begins to lean into its Cold War weird espionage trappings. Prior episodes operated as espionage affairs, a certain procedural and drudgery filled exercise in plot, but that was all so mundane. Ian Edginton and Tiernen Trevallion amp things up by leaning into Mission: Impossible style theatrics with a mystical edge and end with classic horror.
That mundane aesthetic does have a point, they create the appearance of an understandable reality and genre. When two strangers randomly start speaking to each other in Frost, you contextually understand that this is the meet. Those niceties are quickly thrown aside by the final panel of the page as Constanta declares without ambiguity: this is a trap. A declaration that also unmasks his own vampiric appearances.
Tiernen Trevallion work on the following page is body horror Mission: Impossible, or I guess you’d call it Wes Craven-esque. On one hand the page visually homages the Impossible staple of pulling off a false face. Except that reveal is due to that face suddenly spitting hundreds of bugs out of its maw and melting like it stared into the Lost Ark. There is an interesting sense of narrative closure to the page though as it begins and ends on clean normal looking faces.
Major Armond D’Hubert is back, and he is working for “her” now. And her orders are that she wants Constanta “alive”, or as alive as a vampire can be. Edginton writing and Parkhouse’s lettering on this page work with the art to make a real sense of rhythm as Consanta’s head is cut off and he is unceremoniously captured. This is normally the sort of page the strip would end on, but we have two more.
Our final two pages instead act as a return to that normalcy, a false sense of security. Which is quickly shattered with the reveal of Baba Yaga and apprent death of our American Spook. It’ll be interesting to see where this story goes now with the board seemingly tossed aside.
Brink: Mercury Retrograde Part 6
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), INJ Culbard (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: “Whispers” is a word that perks up the ears of two very different union people this week. The term clearly means something very specific, but we are, along with Maz, on the outside of the union, and so we can only infer what that term really means. It’s almost irrelevant, except that it connects the two pieces of this story in an effective way, and allows us to get a better sense of what, exactly is happening.
Maz’s story remains more or less the same: he’s annoying folks for information and getting stonewalled, even by people who usually like/help him. As for the goings on in the Union Hall, we’ve gone full rumors of the Masons, with coded language, vague threats, and a sense of foreboding and even danger. INJ Culbard gets to do a little more here with some elaborate costuming and architecture, but I still am waiting for more than talking heads to dominate the frame as we move forward.
While this chapter does move some stuff along and allow the reader to begin to piece some elements together, “Brink: Mercury Retrograde” has stalled out a little bit. Hopefully, Dan Abnett can begin to steer this into territory that is less hypothetical and more action-packed in the strip’s back half.
