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: Next Man Up
Credits: Rob Williams (script), RM Guera (art), Giulia Brusco (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: It is nice to see a fresh set of art and design hands working on “Judge Dredd.” RM Guera and Giulia Brusco gave the look of the Judge Dredd world a much needed reimagining. The uniforms look sleeker with the less of the four color comics blue highlight or lowlight. Their revised design of the Lawmaster cycle might look less overbearing, but it’s sure more appealing to the eye without all the extraneous fascist forward styling. The sharper colors rendering and bolder lines of this style is a good contrast to the ones that preceded it. The rendering also played well emotionally; the shadows and sharper contrasts casts some of the characters in the story more sinister relative to Dredd and the Cadet Moon who come off more sympathetic. The art effectively tells the story as to why Dredd wants to have a fresh face around him for whatever sensitive and dangerous mission that it taking him to northern Eurasia.
Rob Williams clearly shows Dredd dealing with the loss of Maitland; she was one of this few people he actually trusts in this world where his number of actual friends in falling. He tells us zero about the mission other than it’s sensitive and the suspect Chief Judge Logan has set up most of the support crew. Dredd is somehow immediately sympathetic and that says a lot given how he’s sometimes the heavy of the story. Williams doesn’t tell us why Dredd picks to promote Cadet Moon but it is almost immediately obvious he doesn’t cotton to the trainers’ favorite. There is a bit of a whiff of Rico in the air around to the cadet after his grandstanding stunt instead of the simplicity of a heat seeker round.
Full Tilt Boogie: Book 2, Part Nine
Credits: Alex De Campi (script), Eduardo Ocanna (art), Eve De La Cruz (colours), Annie Parkhouse(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: This strip has had its moments of terror but Eduardo Ocanna hasn’t been given a moment of body horror and viscera to render, until now. The magical sci-fi crystal promptly plunges into the man, revealed to be Patrick, chest in gore fashion. But just as soon as the insides became outsides it all disappeared. Ocanna colors this moment with a purple-pink filter that just gives everything this unnatural lighting to help further push this moment of bloody bodily violence as outside the bounds of normal for the series.
Patrick’s eyes open soon afterwards, but there is one problem. In response to his husbands shocked, happy, question it responds, “who’s Patrick?” Everyone got the magical crystal wrong. It doesn’t revive the dead, it creates life in the unliving body. It is now a perfectly servile emotionless entity linked to the Mother Quartz. That also explains why the rock people tried to kidnap Tee while she was in the ship, it assumed she was volunteering.
While De Campi’s dialog does a lot of expositional heavy lifting, Ocanna’s art in this section represents the lack of affect and emotion quite well. Patrick’s face isn’t lost or naïve, just disinterested to his husbands please. Those please then give Ocanna plenty of space to just write melodrama over that face making for a nice juxtaposition.
We also jump back briefly to Lilac’s and Nyx’s thread and the realization of what has happened to Lilac’s parents. This is one of those moments where if I was more familiar with the first book I might care more, but for the purposes of the present narrative it is functional. Lilac’s parents have been imprisoned and are threatened with death unless they can get them out. It’s an interesting tease for future plot when considering the final image of Patrick’s husband alone looking for his partner. You have this increasing feeling of isolation and convergence in these last couple of strips. It’ll be interesting to see where that motif takes things.
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Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 12
Credits: T.C Eglington (script), Simon Davis (art) Simon Bowland (letters)
Matthew Blair: This is the end. Every slight, every stress, every bit of unresolved anger has built towards this. The story ends with a veritable orgy of blood, violence, rage, and massive hallucinations that may or may not be supernatural in nature.
It’s also a reminder that this whole story was told from the point of view of one of the townspeople decades into the future, a narrator that has NO CONTINUED INTERESTED IN THIS STORY WHATSOEVER (wink).
Writer T.C Eglington knows how to craft an ending in “Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 12”. It has all the hallmarks of a good horror movie ending. There’s the chase through the woods, the unrelenting terror, a horrific tragedy that comes out of the blue but makes sense, and an absolute demon of a cliffhanger that will make you upset that the story is over. If there is a flaw in this story, it’s that the ultimate fate of the director is unknown, but it’s still a rollicking good time.
A crazy, horror movie ending demands crazy horror movie art and Shane Davis pulls out all the stops in “Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 12”. Davis has always been good at showing the fear and terror on the character’s faces and it comes to great use here. There’s a fantastic sense of energy and pacing to the story and you feel out of breath reading each page. On top of that the drug addled hallucinations are bright, bold, and utterly horrific and drawn in great contrast with the dark and shadow filled mundane world. It would seem that Davis has had a blast drawing this story and personally, I would love to see more.
“Thistlebone The Dule Tree: Part 12” takes everything that has made this series fun and exciting and ramped it up to eleven. The horror of the unknown, the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the need to satiate whatever dark creature lurks in the town of Thistlebone all come together in a brutal and mostly satisfying ending.
Indigo Prime: Black Monday, Part 5
Credits: Kek-W (script), Lee Carter (art), Jim Campbell (letters)
Chris Egan: We’ve reached a slowing down point in this series. It is time for the Aaron Sorkin and David Lynch information dump chapter. As the walk and talk through Void Indiga HQ commences, our characters give us a lot of world building dialogue while allowing everything going on around them to help fill out the story. It’s a classic case of show AND tell when it comes to visual storytelling. While most of the chapter is quite clear in its intention, its surely nature does allow it to be a little confusing and challenging at times, but never uninteresting or dull.
The use of mostly black and white imagery with very specific pops of color also really worked for me. It has been a bit of a cliché, especially in film or comics to do this sort of thing, but what works about it here is that it actually feels apart and different from the majority of things that use it. It’s most likely the high contrast black and white line work. It isn’t a grayscale image with a single item that is given all or some color. It is the stark look of it that makes it such a good-looking comic. Overall, this series has been nothing short of wild, dream logic, sci-fi gobbledygook and I am here for it.
Rogue Trooper: War Child
Credits: David Barnett (script), Paul Marshall (art), Pippa Bowland (colours), Jim Campbell (letters)
Brian Salvatore: “Rogue Trooper” always mixes hard scrabble military tales with morality plays about the horrors of war. Although 2000 AD is the definition of a British comic, “Rogue Trooper” has always seemed to be the UK’s analysis of the US war machine. But “War Child” takes on a different target, which is any country that would make a child a soldier. This strip deals with propaganda, the disposability of those who fight wars, and the insistence that you’re one of the ‘good guys.’
Continued belowDavid Barnett’s script isn’t exactly subtle in any of these areas, but it is not for lack of trying. His intensions appear pure, wanting to get across these Very. Important. ideas, but at times it can feel a little heavy handed. That’s an issue with “Rogue Trooper” in general, but usually the story is doled out over various chapters, and so it isn’t as condensed as it is here. This compression makes everything feel a little more intense.
Paul Marshall’s art fits the story like a glove, and the design of the child-soldier costumes is really sharp and does a good job obscuring their ages at the beginning. There’s not a ton of action to be shown here, but Marshall makes the best of the opportunities the script gives him to do something a little different in parts. Without action and with most of the faces either covered or non-existent, a lot of emotional weight is put on Rogue’s stoic face, which means that some pages look a little bland, but that’s not really Marhsall’s fault.
Proteus Vex: Devious, Part One
Credits: Mike Carroll (script), Jake Lynch (art), Jim Boswell (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: As if it wasn’t obvious in a strip called “Proteus Vex,” the entirety of ‘Devious, Part One’ is dedicated to the idea that Proteus Vex is not really dead. No one comes out and says that, and we don’t see Vex all strip, but this chapter is designed to catch the reader up to how the state of the universe is without Vex, and to tease his imminent return. This is a fine way to begin a new arc, but it does feel like an awful lot of backstory that may not wind up being too important to the overall story once Vex does return.
The art of Jake Lynch is always somewhat unsettling; Lynch creates creatures that look and feel just…off. That is meant as a complement, as most of what he draws are aliens and monsters, and those creatures shouldn’t be too humanoid. He plays with proportion quite a bit here, and by doing things like removing noses from faces, gives these characters visual identifiers that never fail to remind the reader of their other-ness. Lynch’s art really carries what is a relatively dry script from Mike Carroll, but one that is necessarily backwards looking. Hopefully, once the story picks up a bit, the strip can get a little less talky and add some intrigue that isn’t just people talking about how Vex is totally dead, when we all know he isn’t.
