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: A Better World Part 8
Credits: Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt (script), Henry Flint (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt foreshadowed the events in ‘A Better World, Part 8’ effectively. Thee big moment was pretty predictable and somehow still is a dramatic shock when it comes. The two page spread created by Henry Flint is one of those sublime pieces of art that transcends the page and makes you hear and feel the fatal shot.
Flint’s art is amazing throughout this chapter. He makes you feel the years described in the opening narration of Elia Fimble’s life and dread the coming burning of sector 304. He clearly recalls what childlike joy there can be in art and on that one page contrasts it well with the coming of the tanks, and the terrors that follow a few pages later. If anything was unclear, in either narration or art, it would be the identity of the prisoner who gets a mysterious reprieve. It’s only an a later reading that it became clear that it has to be Domo being freed by Hernandez and set up to commit the acts that follow in the story. Wyatt, Williams, and Flint made it very clear that the experiment was a success; Maitland knew it and tried to prevent the coming terror, saying “…you don’t have to do this…,” clearly knowing what was inevitable. If anything, seeing her fate and Dredd being swallowed by the violence that is sure to follow makes the coming finale all the more tragic. This is one of the best “Judge Dredd” arcs in a long, long time.
Indigo Prime: Cracked Actors, Part 2
Credits: Kek-W (script), Lee Carter (art), Jim Campbell (letters)
Chris Egan: The story continues, under a new title, as the Bateman movie proceeds and Johnny Depth decides to go off the rails and begin improving his way through filming. The hilarious and bizarre references to movies and characters – specifically that of our world’s Johnny Depp’s roles, is both silly and quietly disturbing, while still holding onto its sense of humor.
And this chapter just gets weirder as it goes, but in the right ways. There is a distinct absurdity throughout the entire chapter that borders on slightly confusing and downright perplexing. It caused me to read and re-read the majority of this week’s chapter to make sure I was following along. The humor is on point throughout, but the jumbled nature of the narrative did cause me to lose my way a few times. Still a fun time for sure.
Full Tilt Boogie: Book 2, Part Five
Credits: Alex De Campi (script), Eduardo Ocanna (art), Eve De La Cruz (colours), Annie Parkhouse(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: Alex De Campi makes a very smart decision to start this latest strip with the evil empire. For starters we haven’t seen them really since the first episode, it was time for a check in. It also puts us so far away from Tee, Grandma, and the gang that it inevitably creates this sense of distance and time so that when we do eventually by page two return to Tee we have that sense of time spent for her to be in a totally different spot. On the Tee front things also finally begin to get proper weird.
The Empress is not doing well. If this were a Victorian era romance, you would say she has come down with consumption as she deliriously curses the haunted visages in her chambers. The old manor environment is such a left turn compared to the aesthetic of the overall series that I had at first thought perhaps this was the wrong strip. Darius looks like Count Strahd von Zarovich as he commands the cherubs and brings in the “pushy little technologist” to teach her about computers. What there is to learn about computers is left hanging for the reader as we transition to Tee on the next page, but these two pages did a good job of building some amount of sympathy for the Empress. The whole thing is coded in horror.
Continued belowThe horror continues as Tee travels further and further into the heart of the ship and things get weird. Still not formal breaking trippy surrealism but the way Eduardo Ocanna hangs on the image of the door she is about to open on one page and then the very next panel shows that door open with a stream of crystals is an interesting juxtaposition. It had the effect of me reading it as if the crystals suddenly burst out of the door, but that is not the case. Weird stone looking people with chunks of their body cut open and exposed do jump out and grab Tee. Their designs are not that far off from Hirohiko Araki’s work on the Pillar Men from “Jojo”.
Tee is left captured by these mysterious assailants as our cliffhanger. It’s not a meta or winking one but it is a plainly effective one.
The Fall of Deadworld: Retribution, Part 9
Credits: Kek-W (script), Dave Kendall (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: It is unclear if the decision was made due to the months-long gap in the publishing schedule, but this week’s installment has a weirdly out of sequence storytelling approach, with a flashback to ‘earlier’ that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. It wouldn’t have made sense to open the chapter with this flashback, nor open last week’s with it, but it still feels shoehorned in here. Kek-W is in a no-win situation in some ways, but if the information is so important to the story, it is understandable why this has to be wedged in someplace.
Dave Kendall has to draw a number of characters this week that are possessed, but his art style and color choices make it really hard to see who is actually possessed versus who is drugged up versus who is traumatized. Everyone Kendall draws looks like they’re off their rocker in some way, so to glean who is the host is only determined by the coloring of the text box, which gets confusing when two characters have the same coloring on the same panel.
This is one of the issues with this painterly, dark style of art: it looks great when doing stuff like pinups, but when it needs to sequentially tell a story, it is almost never pulling its weight. Kendall is creating panels and pages that look good, but as vehicles to get the story to the reader, they are seriously lacking.
Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 8
Credits: T.C Eglington (script), Simon Davis (art) Simon Bowland (letters)
Matthew Blair: As the stress of being part of a failing film continues to take its toll on everyone’s mental state, people start to crack. In this case, it seems that the director is starting to get desperate and is determined to do whatever it takes to make sure this film is a success.
It turns out that a director–you know, the person who makes important decisions and has the most power over everyone on set–is the LAST person you want cracking under pressure.
Movie set power dynamics can be icky at the best of times, and writer T.C Eglington does a great job of showing how things can go wrong very quickly in “Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 8”. The subject of the film already made things difficult enough, but Eglington does a great job (one might say a bit too good) showing the director start to buckle under the pressure. Nothing horrific really happens, there’s an unfortunate instance with the corpse of a dead animal, but Eglington gives the reader a pretty hint that the director’s actions are going to get some people either seriously hurt or killed if he isn’t stopped.
Unlike the last scene, Shane Davis’ art in “Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 8” isn’t as experimental or interesting, but it is still very effective. One of the things that hasn’t been talked about a whole lot is Davis’ ability to draw gore, and his hyper realistic line work doesn’t shy away from showing some pretty graphic stuff in this part of the story. What’s really interesting here are the colors, which are hyper stylized and saturated to the point where it feels like the reader is thrust into an old exploitation movie where they flooded the movie with color in order to make things more interesting for the people tripping in the audience. It all comes together to enhance the creeping horror of the scene, and other horror artists could study this in order to enhance their stories.
“Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 8” is the culmination of all the previous things that have gone wrong and show the chaos and danger finally starting to have an effect on the people and their actions. If this were real life, we would pray that they stop before it’s too late, but it’s pretty clear that something really bad is going to happen soon.
