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: Flusher
Credits: Ken Niemand (script), Nick Dyer (art), Gary Caldwell (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: ‘Flusher’ is a continuation of an earlier one shot, as the quest for the “age of newflesh” goes on. The entity that first possessed a trash grinder is now a public toilet, if anything a worse fate for a body less entity. Ken Neimand leaves no doubt in the narration just how much the entity hates the city and its people who regularly defile its insides. He plays this awful situation off for a few laughs before he makes it pretty sinister. We learn that some among the population have been modified to be useful to the entity. This is to be a problem when the next installment happens, and all of this happens before Dredd shows up to use the Flusher and ruin the entity’s day.
Nick Dyer does a great job of providing scenes that look both engaging and textured and blandly everyday throughout this story. His character designs make pretty clear statements about the blandness of the people the entity could use and the more interesting people it needed to dispose of. The action gets a little muddled when Dredd is fighting the Flusher from the inside, but it is worth a second look to figure out the whole scene because it is nicely drawn. Dredd’s expressions throughout are pretty entertaining too. The final panels make it clear the next incarnation of the new flush entity will likely be less comedic, too.
Durham Red: Mad Dogs 06
Credits: Alec Worley (script) Ben Willsher (art) Simon Bowland (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: This sixith entry is mostly an action strip, Red versus the Drone, but Alec Worley’s plotting has just enough tricks up its sleeves to make things interesting. Artist Ben Willsher for their part makes Red versus the Drone visually interesting with dynamic angles that ride the line between spatial continuity breaking images and something resembling coherence. Red goes into a state of hunger … as she takes on the robotic non-blood fueled drone. And with that berserk state Willsher gets to go off just a little bit by drawing Red in these dynamic poses that also fail to fully capture her. Willsher takes advantage of the nighttime setting by washing everything in a mixture of dark blues and inky black. Those two primary colors are the backdrop for the various flashes of bright lights, explosions, gunfire, and the like that do a good job of drawing the reader’s attention and their eye through the page. It is rather smart page construction for such a chaotic set of panels.
These chaotic images are contrasted with the frame story that depicts Red’s inner drive, Worley returns back to something the spook said to her about where to find redemption and the nature of her hunger getting the “better” of her. The images in this section aren’t inherently calmer than the hectic present, but when mixed with Simon Bowland’s lettering it does slow them down in a way.
All of this introspection gives a false sense of comfort and control to the reader, until the final pages when you get a giant panel saying, “Drone Self-Terminated”. Mister Kanaka is playing to Red’s strengths just as she believes she is playing to theirs. Both consider themselves the hunter and never the hunted. Just who is who by the end of things will be the subject of the next couple of strips, but this was nevertheless an excellent setup to them.
Enemy Earth Book 2: Part 6
Credits: Cavan Scott (script), Luke Horsman (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Matthew Blair: So the group is now on their way to India, but there are a couple of problems. First, there’s still some unresolved tension between the members who tried to kill each other in previous parts of the story.
Continued belowThe second reason is that Mother Nature is relentless, and the murderous plants and animals have found them again.
“Enemy Earth Book 2: Part 6” is a bit of a subversion of the usual tropes in this type of post-apocalyptic story. Normally, once the characters have managed to build some rapport with each other and maybe saved someone’s life they wind up becoming good friends, even if they started off as enemies. Writer Cavan Scott does a good job of turning this idea on its head a little bit, showing that while traumatic experiences can bring the most bitter of enemies together, it doesn’t always mean that they trust each other completely.
While the writing focuses on character relationships in “Enemy Earth Book 2: Part 6” artist Luke Horseman gets to shift his artistic talents back towards drawing weird and scary looking monster plants and animals. The section of story is dominated by a massive double page spread showing a collection of horrors that have come for the group and it shows a fantastic amount of imagination and quite a few creatures that look genuinely terrifying. It just goes to show how brutal and scary this world can be, and how outside factors can force people into making choices that aren’t necessarily in their best interests or are choices they would normally make.
“Enemy Earth Book 2: Part 6” is an exploration on how the end of the world can bring people together, but does something interesting by showing that even when you’re being attacked by murderous plants and animals that want to eat you alive, even friendship has its limits.
The Out: Book Three, Chapter 14
Written by Dan Abnett
Illustrated by Mark Harrison
Lettered by Simon Bowland
Reviewed by Brian Salvatore
Brian Salvatore: With the return of “The Out,” the somewhat strange pacing of ‘Book Three’ ramps up intensely. This chapter presents Cyd’s trial before the Unama, which she basically takes over like she’s Matlock. The scene is pretty funny, but it is also hard to, after a lifetime of seeing Earth-based trials, not feel for Cyd in her desire for fairness. She is doing all she can to ensure that her friend didn’t die in vain, that her life won’t be contained to, essentially, a prison, and that she can be left alone to seek her daughter and/or live her life without being bombarded as a conduit to the Up.
As always, this book lives and dies on the artwork by Mark Harrison. Harrison’s style is inimitable and unlike much of what we see in 2000 AD, or really anywhere in comics these days. Yes, it is a painted style, but it is also as rough and ragged as anything you’ll see on the shelves. His work really feels singular and, because he’s been on “The Out” since it started, feels personally connected to Cyd and her plight. Another artist cannot be imagined doing this work, and his blending of surrealism, emotional nakedness, and sci-fi tropes really works. But more than that, in this particular issue, Harrison manages to make the chapter visually interesting, even when Cyd is basically standing still for the bulk of it. He does this by changing perspective around her and making Cyd’s expressions, never exactly wallflower-y, even bigger and more pronounced than usual.
Dan Abnett’s script is doing its best to pick up the pace, and it is noticeable in this issue that things are breezing along. In addition, with the concept of slicing time re-introduced, it looks like ‘Chapter 15’ will be a similarly exciting installment. Let’s hope this pace continues…well, apace.
Rogue Trooper: Blighty Valley, Part Five
Credits: Garth Ennis (script), Patrick Goddard (art), Rob Steen (letters)
Chris Egan: Doubt and duty swirl around in this week’s chapter as the Rogue Trooper makes his way across the battlefields with his new-found platoon. Ennis is questioning a lot of war-time ideas and conceptions by having the Trooper fight his own internal battle. The script is smart and executed deftly for its size as it interrogates beliefs.
Goddard’s art is crisp and beautifully detailed. The lack of color lets us see every tiny aspect of the work with full clarity. It works both as a connection to the black and white images we are used to of WWI and the classic look of all things ” Judge Dredd. This blending of a WWI warzone and futuristic science fiction spaces is done in a way that captures a fantastical storybook tone as well as adding to the nightmarish quality of worlds colliding and the true perils of war under both a micro and macro lens.
All at once Ennis’s writing is forming connections within this fictionalized past-Earth, its brutal future, and the details it shares with our own world. He pulls from histories, real and imagined to help document this push and pull of time and how the Rogue Trooper handles his place in this latest chapter of his life. Equally beautiful and bleak storytelling.
