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: Juves Rule Ok!
Credits: Ken Neimand (script), Simon Coleby (art), Matt Soffe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: ‘Juves Rule’ is an out of context, out of continuity Dredd story. It doesn’t tell you at the outset and this spoils it a little, but this is a Dredd and Rico cadet-era side story. A disease or pathogen is killing anyone over 25 that is outside or unprotected, so this leaves a Lord of the Flies situation, complete with one of the gangs wearing pig heads fighting for territory and killing all the adults not killed already. It’s a shock to see a white helmeted Dredd arrive and put down a gang fight. What’s not a shock is seeing Dredd head into a nu-law zone run by his clone brother Rico. The reminder that they are clone brothers of a prior Chief Justice was interesting, but it didn’t lift this strip out of feeling like it’s retreading old stories via classic fiction.
Simon Coleby created a very specific atmosphere for this alternate Dredd story. His fine line work, alongside the large areas of dense shadow work, fits well in a battle heavy comic. He makes no attempts to make people aesthetically pleasing, which fits well with the borderline horror themes of ‘Jules Rule Ok!.’ His interpretations of the cadet uniform and the variations he shows are pretty choice; the cadet helmets are so different from the ones we know, more realistic, making it clear it is not a normal Dredd strip from the moment the Judges arrive. His art reads stronger towards the end of the chapter where it carried a lot of the emotional weight of the story between Dredd and Rico.
Death Game 2049 Part 1
Credits: Geoffrey D. Wessel (script), Nick Deyer (art), John Charles (colors) Jim Campbell (letters)
Matthew Blair: It’s time for convicted felons to come together, put on silly costumes, and engage in a deadly game of Spinball! What are the rules, what is the meaning of this game? Who cares! All that matters is that people kill each other for your entertainment!
Also, there’s some pretty sneaky and sinister stuff going on, and one of the new members of a team is out for revenge against the unknown person that killed their brother.
“Death Game 2049” Part 1 is written by Geoffrey D. Wessel, who does a good job of laying the foundations of the world and establishing the stakes. Since the game is the centerpiece of the story, we get to see a game being played and it is just as ridiculous and as crazy as most of the other futuristic bloodsports that we’ve seen in other movies While Wessel doesn’t crank up the blood and gore factor, there’s a lot of weird rules and dramatic character reveals in the story, which makes it reminiscent of old 70’s and 80’s sci fi movies like Logan’s Run or Running Man. It’s cheesy, but it’s a fun kind of cheesy.
The artwork of “Death Game 2049” Part 1 is provided by Nick Deyer, and it helps enhance the insanity of the script. The highlight of the artwork is definitely the costume design, which takes some pretty heavy influences from Running Man with weird designs and flashy, bulky elements. Aside from that, the action is well presented and everyone looks and feels futuristic, but run down at the same time. It’s a very good aesthetic for this kind of story and it will be fun to see where this goes.
“Death Game 2049” Part 1 is an old school science fiction story that looks and feels weird and over the top, but once you get the meat of the story it’s incredibly violent and angry. It’s a group of prisoners with no hope, no future, and very little time left going up against the system and the system isn’t afraid to fight back. Who will win? Tune in next week!
Continued below
El Mestizo: Demon with a Six Gun
Credits: Chris Weston (script and art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: A nice genre mash-up is good for what ails ya, and this exploitation-inspired Western story gets a nice dose of sci-fi in the form of a space squid that can control its host delivers on its premise. The art by Chris Weston has a foot in classic cowboy tales, and his space elements seem thoroughly out of place without being anachronistic. There’s a grittiness that Weston’s touch gives the sci-fi elements, though his art elsewhere is not exactly rough or grounded. By making the squid look particularly gnarly, it helps ease it into the Western setting.
Weston’s script checks off a number of classic Western tropes, but has fun with some of them as well. The more overtly 2000 AD elements of the final page were a fun conclusion as well. With Rebellion owning so many classic British strips, I hope that El Mestizo gets some more love in their books, as this is a really fun character to bring out now and then.
Dredger: Time to Kill
Credits: Karl Stock (script), Paul Marshall (art), Quinton Winter (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: A Dirty Harry for the Brirish comics world, Dredger doesn’t really feel like El Mesitzo in that there are a ton of stories to tell in his original setting that feel like they need to be Dredger stories, instead of [insert any gun toting Brit here]. But by this strip sending him to a distant future without crime for future stories, all of a sudden there’s a lot more to ponder. It’s a bit unfair to the rest of the story that the last few panels were the most exciting part, but the strip had a lot of work to do, and it did most of it well.
Karl Stock and Paul Marshall had to introduce new readers to Dredger, set up the future world, and find a way to bridge that gap without incident. And while both script and story felt a little boiler-plate at times, they did their jobs well enough to invest readers in future stories. I did want to single out the sneer that Marshall gives Dredger, which is half Clint Eastwood and half Elvis Presley. How such an American dream can be British is beyond me.
Hellman of Hell Force: Fiends of Ungeistwelt Ost
Credits: Arthur Wyatt (script), Jake Lynch (art), Jim Boswell (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Despite the characterizations and plot being pretty obvious, “Hellman of Hell Force” is pretty engaging. Between the hellish landscapes and creature designs Jake Lynch created that evoke Christian mythology and the pallet leaning heavily into the red warm spectrum, the art really sets the stage well. Arthur Wyatt’s story is more concerned with the hellish setting and the workings of the hellish portal that got them to hell than the men themselves. The interesting bit here is that the heels of the story are not the demons and devils but the worst villains of mankind: the SS. Hellman himself denies the Nazi label when he saves a group of allied prisoners headed to slaughter for the creation of an exit portal. Wyatt makes a clear division between Hellman and the SS; the heels call him a coward because he tried to minimize losses to his own men.
Lynch does a great job of making the tanks, trucks, troop carries and weapons all realistic. Even if the characters are left mostly unnamed he makes efforts to differentiate them from one another despite the ubiquitous uniforms.
Major Eazy: The Treasure of Solomon
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Dan Cornwell (art), Dylan Teague (colors), Jim Campbell (letters)
Brian Salvatore: Part of what makes this “Major Eazy” strip so enjoyable is that this is a beloved trope. The re-stealing of precious artifacts from the Nazis or similarly evil plunderers is the basis of the Indiana Jones films, film serials, comics, Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy, and countless others. Unfortunately, the length of this strip means that there isn’t really time to dig into some of the treasures, which is usually half the fun. The one artifact we get time with is revealed in an extremely trope-y way, and the reader likely saw the plan fully formed about five words into the sequence, but it still worked well.
Dan Cornwell’s art doesn’t try to do too much here, but excels at giving each character design elements that instantly place them into the reader’s orbit. Eazy has a leather jacket and dog tags, Sackville-Smith has her bucket hat that signals an interloper in this world, and Dreichler’s facial scarf and black trench coat instantly code him as not just evil, but supernatural. The shorthand in the art allows the story to get down to brass tacks which, due to its brevity, is very necessary.
