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 2000 AD
Judge Dredd: The Night Shift Part 4
Credits: Ken Neimand (script), Nicolo Assirelli (art), Peter Doherty (colors), Jim Campbell (letters)
Greg Lincoln: ‘The Night Shifter’ is ultimately the tragedy that was foreshadowed in the beginning. Luna Aguerra was doomed from the night she recognized the hottie cook despite his changed appearance. Though it’s not likely the exact ending anyone foresaw for her, the tale is certainly one of the typical range of sad Law and Order SVU endings. Nicolo Assirelli’s art brings the tale impact through his pacing and his skillful use of facial expressions. Even on the run, the perp, Frank, looks every bit a sleazy, detestable, and overconfident creep even without his dialogue. There is a an image of Luna from page one that really pops. She appears fearful with just a hint of hope as she has the opportunity to leave her confinement. It is the face that foreshadows the final panel. Assirelli’s faces throughout make their impact; even the people in the crowd scene at the zoom stop have their momentary impact on the way we see the story.
The choice to keep the majority of the Judges nameless except for Dredd and the one that takes a bullet from Frank makes a real impression. They may be the law, but their attitude and body language shows the difference between them and Dredd. They are faceless functionaries in the machine of the Justice Department. Even as they hunt for the missing Luna, it is perfunctory and a matter of course. In the sequence of panels following them finding her body, Dredd methodically and mechanically takes down Frank. The scene lacks catharsis, and Peter Doherty’s use of color and Assirelli’s choice of angle makes it matter of fact. Dredd’s narration is brutal and nonplussed as well. Each panel highlights the damage he inflict right down to the broken jaw. There is a bit of emotion in it, but the impact feels saved for the final panel, where the med Judges arrive to take care of the body. The law is served, the perp is punished and all is right, but it’s not ok. Luna feel lost, forgotten and traumatized. The law could not protect her, and maybe it never could save her from the trauma of her past.
The Out: Book Three, Part Five
Dan Abnett (script), Mark Harrison (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: One of the thing that “The Out” has been excellent in doing thus far is building tension and releasing it in unexpected ways. With Cyd being on ‘trial,’ the outcomes seemed clear: innocent and let free or guilty and locked up/executed. But she was found ‘un-guilty,’ which is something less than guilty but not quite not guilty. Essentially, it is determined that she had no control over her actions, but she must be kept under lock and key forever, just in case. Dan Abnett’s script lays all of this out in a way that feels unexpected one minute and then totally logical the next.
This isolation, of course, drives Cyd nuts and is bordering on ‘worse than death’ for her. Mark Harrison does a great job of expressing her boredom through both a layout that has cleverly laid out Scrabble tiles, and a bunch of wonderfully effective Cyd decisions. She’s got a Post-It on her face, she’s stopped wearing tops, she’s developing a little pot belly. After a first half of the strip in which there’s chaos reigning, the back half feels like a hangover. It’s masterful stuff.
Joe Pineapples Tin Man 05
Credits: Pat Mills (script), Simon Beasley (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Matthew Blair: What do you do when you’re stranded, millions of miles away from any sort of help, and stuck with a rather annoying companion? Well, a human would probably go desperately insane, but when you’re a robot with a power source that should last for ages and the processing power to contemplate the past and your own emotions you would probably get very introspective.
Continued belowSo what happens when a robot built for war and assassination gets thoughtful? Let’s find out.
“Joe Pineapples Tin Man 05” is a surprisingly emotional bit of writing from creator Pat Mills and shows a killer robot developing quite the psychological profile. A large portion of the story shows Pineapples missing his friends and colleagues, which is probably going to be a fun little call back to anyone who has invested more time into these characters than I have, and it shows the same killer robot demonstrating a fear of his own death. There’s also a brief mention of a crossdressing phase that Pineapples doesn’t want to talk about. However, there’s a bit at the end (that won’t be spoiled here) where we see the robot doing a job that will lead to future stories, and it does a great job of getting the reader interested again and keeping the momentum of the story going.
One of the calling cards of Simon Beasley’s artwork in “Joe Pineapples Tin Man 05” has been the absolute bonkers panel layouts and the fact that it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what’s going on. However, someone must have talked to Beasley about this because this section of the story is easy to read and much more traditional in its presentation. We get the best of both worlds here with fantastic character design that makes the story special and fun to read, but it’s all laid out and presented in a way that helps the story and emphasizes clarity over experimentation.
“Joe Pineapples Tin Man 05” shows a robot with a surprising amount of emotional depth, even if that depth is presented in a somewhat humorous way, and leads rather nicely into the mystery of how this robot got there in the first place. It will be interesting to see how a soulless assassin reached this moment of emotional clarity in future progs.
Terror Tales: Rites
Credits: Honor Vincent (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Jim Campbell (letters)
Chris Egan: This week’s “Terror Tales” is a classic story of lone exorcist rents a house to clear it out, house is wall to wall haunted in ways they didn’t even imagine. In a darkly funny story, this supernatural investigator/exorcist, Mara, briefly settles into the house and is almost immediately bombarded with haunted dolls, the ghost of an old woman, melting zombified appartitions, and more. It is a supremely wild short story and left me with a nice uncomfortable smirk on my face through all four of its pages. Honor Vincent writes a clever and spooky little story with Steve Yeowell’s clean illustrations with a perfectly muted palette that leaves you somewhere between a health & safety pamphlet and the works of John Higgins. Highly recommended for fans of “Tales From the Crypt” or Creepshow.
Proteus Vex: Crawl Space Part 5
Credits: Mike Carroll (script), Jake Lynch (art), Jim Boswell(Colours), Simon Bowland(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: “Vex” takes a slight shift in perspective and is for the better in this episode. I’ve felt something of a distance with “Proteus Vex”, perhaps it’s the narrative framework around it that melds the future and past together. Perhaps it is Jake Lynch’s excellent but maybe a little too European for my taste art style. Everything is just very constructed, and the strip acknowledges that contractedness. Which only serves to reinforce the whole thing! The fifth entry in ‘Crawl Space’, however, takes that distance and puts it into a more understandable scenario: a conversation.
Tsellest the leader of the Scorchers is impossibly old. The same is for Viridian Silk, two rulers of galactic spanning empires with a sense of time beyond imagining of the so-called “lesser” species. Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch take these alien and abstract concepts and put them in a more understandable form a conference between two beings who might not be friends, but at least see themselves as colleagues on equal footing. They’re aristocrats dressed in regalia for all their alien designs. Their petty arrogance towards one another and everything around them is immediately understandable. Unlike some of the styling of previous strips this gets across their personalities and functions immediately.
This being a conversation, an intergalactic zoom chat, there isn’t much room for evocative movement. Lunch does some solid work with Tsellest, but he kind of comes off like a Darkseid impression – which could also just be me reading more than anything. To spice things up Lynch instead superimposes some of the massive concepts and ideas they are talking about, turning the talking heads into frames for the page as whole. We do get one page of action, an alternative view of Midnight Shame’s quixotic path across the galaxy. While this may not be the most exciting strip in the series, the construction and formal arrangement of everything is probably the strongest of the batch.
