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
Cadet Dredd: Dream Team
Credits Ned Hartley(script) Toby Wellsmer(art) Annie Parkhouse(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: “Cadet Dredd” walks this fine line between earnest dramatics, satiric workplace comedy, and child endangerment. ‘Dream Team’ forgoes the tightrope walk and instead mixes it all together for an effective, if standard, dream narrative. Hartley’s script cuts straight to the point: the tech division has something they need to test, so it’s up to the cadets to be the guinea pigs. It’s the kind of straight-to-the-point efficiency you look for in a one-off strip like this. By the fourth panel, we already have child endangerment as comedy!
What does this macguffin do? Who cares? The real draw of the strip is getting artist Toby Wellsmer into Rico Dredd’s mind. After the macguffin goes wrong and renders Rico comatose, Cadet Dredd must dive into his clone brother’s psyche in an attempt to save him. Along the way, Wellsmer does a good job of mixing surrealist sensibilities without making it psychedelic beyond recognition. The content of the pages isn’t too surrealist, but how Wellsmer puts it all together by working with Harltey’s script creates the dream logic “… and then” style pacing as Dredd tries to figure things out then things just take a turn.
Harley’s art is the real draw for this strip; it reminded me of Simon Bisley in the best way. The pastel color palette and overall graphic look has a sense of materiality; I don’t often see in digitally reproduced art. The art feels like a throwback to the 90s in a good way, even if the comics for “2000 AD” at the time were at their lowest.
The relationship between Dredd and Rico tends to be at the center of these strips, and it’s always hard for me to get a read on them. This strip waffles back and forth between reader-induced dramatic irony and the surprising sincerity that can happen in the workplace. Even one like the Justice System, at least, until it’s been beaten out of you.
As with most “Cadet Dredd” strips I’d be curious what it would look like if they went for a more serialized narrative structure.
Lowborn High: Old Familiars
Credits: David Barnett (script), Anna Morozova (art), Philli Vaughn (colors)Jim Campbell (letters)
Matthew Blair: High school is hard, being a teenager is harder, and if modern fantasy has taught us anything, it’s that performing acts of magic in fiction is incredibly difficult as well.
But if you combine all three of these problems into one like they do in “Lowborn High: Old Familiars”? Forget it.
“Lowborn High: Old Familiars” is written by David Barnett, who does a good job of making the usual high school experience feel awkward and isolating, even without the use of magic. There’s a very real sense that these kids are actually children and it goes a long way towards making the story relatable and interesting. Unfortunately, it seems that Barnett loses focus pretty quickly in the story, since the plot appears to lose interest in the main character and focus on several other plot points that don’t need the attention and are a detriment to the main character.
The artwork of “Lowborn High: Old Familiars” is provided by Anna Morozova, and while there are some charming details and everything is clear and easy to understand, it does have some pretty serious flaws. On a macro level, the environment and setting of the story doesn’t look very interesting. This is a magical school for students with special skills and magic, but it looks like any ordinary school building with seemingly no effort to make it look like a fun place to be. But the biggest critique of the comic is the character design. Yes, the characters have their unique wardrobe and hair style, but Morozova seems to give all the characters the same face no matter what their gender or appearance may suggest. They’re still interesting and engaging characters, they just all look the same.
Continued belowIt feels like “Lowborn High: Old Familiars” is trying to subvert the magical high school genre, but the problem is that it lacks focus and is populated by characters who all look the same and act stiff and uptight. There are some good ideas here, but they get lost in everything else.
Robo-Hunter: Tough Crowd
Credits: Scott Montgomery (script, art, letters)
Chris Egan: If you flip through the magazine too fast there’s a good chance you’ll miss this story. A two-page spread of a short story written in prose with 2 black and white illustrations blends in amongst the highly colorful stories that fill out the rest of the issue.
Montgomery spins a funny detective noir style story of Samuel C. Slade’s sillier investigations. Slade infiltrates a robot comedy club to hunt down his target. The comedy comes not from the jokes, though their terrible quality is funny in itself, but the fact that Slade has dressed up pretending to be a robot with face paint and tinfoil.
It’s a fun story overall. The writing is detailed while getting to the point. Montgomery’s humor and sense for the genres he’s dabbling in is excellent, but in a magazine known for its comics it would have been nice to see these sequences drawn out.
That said, fans of detective/hit-man stories, classic “Judge Dredd” stories and spinoffs will find plenty to enjoy here. It’s a quick read good for a few chuckles.
Future Shocks: Vin-E, Blow the Doors!
Credits: James Peaty (script), Gary Welsh (art), Pippa Bowland (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: A lot of the ‘Future Shocks’ tend to be little morality plays, and “Vin-E, Blow the Doors!” falls squarely into that category. Eddie, a small-time crook, happens upon a robot that will obey his every wish, and he uses it to his full advantage. However – and this is true – because Eddie isn’t kind to Vin-E, the robot, he winds up getting caught and going to jail, where he will be assaulted by…you guessed it, a series of Vin-Es.
The story isn’t any more clever than that, and James Peaty’s script has fun with the relatively slight fare. Peaty writes Eddie as the scummiest of the scumbags, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. This is helped by Gary Welsh’s depiction of him, which leans heavy on the doofus look, with a shitty haircut and a smarmy grin. Welsh also gets to let loose a little with the design of Vin-E, which is an amalgam of lots of robot tropes from the 1950s through today.
These ‘Future Shocks’ are meant to be disposable, even when compared to other comics, by their very nature disposable experiences, and by that metric, this one-shot works. But if you’re looking for anything of substance, keep moving on.
Mayflies: The Scarab
Credits: Mike Carroll (script), Simon Coleby (art), Len O’Grady (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Greg Lincoln: “Mayflies” is an odd fusion of a strip it’s somewhere between its source material Rogue Trooper and the superhero tropes of the “X-Men” or perhaps the “Teen Titans.” It’s works a treat until it kind of doesn’t. Mike Carroll plays the introduction game by using a mission prep meeting of an organized crime hit on our clone teen heroes. What we learn is both interesting and perfunctory, it sets up the characters for new readers and maybe hooks us or not. Carroll then tried us right into the story, it’s the strength of his characters stakes that will mange to hook us no not. The interplay between that clone troopers is pretty compelling as they argue a course of action, avoid capture or surrender to their makers. They are distinct individuals with pretty defined personal stakes. Things are completely unsettled between them and pretty engaging and then the mob hit happens. It’s here things go a bit awry storytelling wise.
Simon Coleby’s realistic approach to character and design is really appealing and he gives you a lot to dig into in the setting. The world seems populated, alive and lived in. He does his best to define the heroes but as they are very physically similar it’s easy to loose who is who very fast. A couple of the aside the way to tell them apart is their hair style and perhaps their clothing, much of which are very similar. The standouts are the ones that physically stand out, Wrecks and Slink. Coleby does make the action interesting to follow and the reveal of one race of the antagonists is very compelling.
Carrol gives us an interesting developments in this speedily told story arc. The “players” (if you will) split the party into two, making their collective futures more fraught. The two standouts find a surprise under an enemies helmet which hopefully will lead to a bigger story in the future. The Scarab is very much a middle part of the tale and suffers for that but it is interesting none the less if confusing due to all the blue people.
