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: Iron Teeth Part 2
Credits: Ken Neimand (script), Nick Perceval (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Nick Perceval’s art in this chapter is a bit more unnerving then chapter one. His art crosses that line this week between the edge on the uncanny valley right off the cliff into it. Judge Dredd arrives in the underground and meets his guide(s) in a setting he’s all to familiar with. He’s lucky he only to meet Rabelais in person as his real guide Martha Hobbs looks all too painfully real as drawn by Perceval. This part also gives us a real good look at the otherworldly underground and the supernatural threat posed by Iron Teeth. Perceval’s backgrounds set a deeply unsettling mood; it could be his use of color or just the unworldly shapes themselves, but they bring as much of the horror in this story to life as the faces an the juves. It is a shock that they were not the victims that we saw at the end of the first installment, though it is clear that they are on the endangered list.
Ken Niemand first gives us a familiar scene where the kids nearly kill the one of their own they initially sent back before launching into a real attack. The kids hunting Iron Teeth walk right into his lair while Arlo talks about his parents vanishing into the underground, landing him in the orphanage. It is effective as Arlo’s abduction and the narration leading out of that scene leaves you as horrified as the serene look on his face in the creatures embrace. It’s a chilling moment cast in some oddly warm tones that don’t change the overall feeling.
Brink: Consumer, Part 6
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Inj Culbard (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: Kurtis finally hits the streets, the grav enabled and disabled ones. What it adds up to in this singular episode isn’t much. We still have no apparently connection or pattern for the random glyphs, they appear everywhere: residential, commercial, and grav slum. It’s starting to give me the vibe of something like The Invitation where an innocuous everyday symbol is suddenly twisted in an uprising.
Kurtis hitting the streets also means that we get to hit them and beging to devlop a better cognitive map for the Hab. While the spatial orientation of the Bathsheba to the meat plant, the golf course, or the slums are; readers understand where they are in functional relation to one another. Commerce, to productivity, to leisure, and the underside unrecognized non-space. Inj Culbard’s art helps to distinguish these sections, Bathsheba is realized through vertical lines an panels. Which contrast with the horizontal orientation of the leisurely golf course, seen when Bonner calls. The productive space of the meat factory is a fusion of these two oreintations. The environment, the meat cube farms are vertical in nature but their paneling is horizontal rectangles. In contrast to all this is the gravity slum, which points out into a vanishing point much like the residences (or should I say non-residence given their lack of capital interaction with the above Hab).
We don’t have anything that points us towards a break in the case but these five pages show us the main spaces of the Hab and how they function, which will be useful later on.
Tharg’s Thrillers: Blue Skies Over Deadwick part 1
Credits: David Baille(script), Nick Brokenshire (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Matthew Blair: Deadwick is one of–if not the last–inhabited cities on Earth. We don’t know why that is, we don’t know when the story takes place, all we know is that the only reason Deadwick is still around is because there are teams of people working to keep it safe by listening for the rumble of giants, and working to destroy them.
Continued belowThis story follows one such team as they work to kill a giant, but something seems different this time.
“Blue Skies Over Deadwick part 1” is written by David Baille and is a textbook example of how to craft a world with minimal exposition. Baille does an amazing job of giving the audience bits and pieces of the story and keeping it interesting and engaging. We’re not fully introduced to the stakes and purpose of the main characters until a couple of pages in, and when it happens it opens the story up to a whole new world of possibilities. Baille has crafted a fantastic world with great stakes and purpose, and he presents it in a way that feels natural and exciting. A lot of interesting stuff is revealed here and there’s a very real sense that there is more behind the curtain if we just keep reading.
Nick Brokenshire provides the artwork for “Blue Skies Over Deadwick part 1”, and it’s fascinating and beautiful to look at. At first glance Brokenshire’s clean, narrow lines don’t feel like they would be very good for a post apocalyptic story, but it works. Brokenshire showcases a talent for crafting broad, sweeping vistas showing a world that has been shattered and ruined by war and some great close up character work that shows people determined to carry out their mission to keep Deadwick safe no matter what. It’s a pretty world that manages to be fun to look at and bleak at the same time that gives off some pretty intense early Heavy Metal comics vibes.
“Blue Skies Over Deadwick part 1” introduces the reader to a fascinating post apocalyptic world of giants and the humans trying to kill them. It presents itself in a highly engaging and entertaining way that looks great and has plenty of mystery left ot keep the reader interested.
Intestinauts: Busted Flush – Part Two
Credits: Arthur Wyatt (Script), Pye Parr (Art/Letters)
Chris Egan: The battle between the Intestinauts and Omega Genocide Four rages! Wyatt’s script moves quickly as it shifts between dialogue between our tiny heroes and play by play narration boxes that sound more like video game hints and Dungeons & Dragons DM storytelling rather than your typical omniscient text. It’s a bit of clever fun added to this already off-center action romp. The action is explosive and fun, feeling grand even when in the back of our minds we know this is happening on a near-microscopic level. And the humor is dark and very silly all at once. The art, both the illustrations and colors, is absolutely stunning. Psychedelic, cosmic, cyberpunk is the best way I can describe it at this point. As the story ramps up and things take unexpected turns, the story becomes something wholly unexpected by the final panel, giving us a few questions, and some bigger concepts to mull over until part 3. Headier than someone might expect from a title like this.
Proteus Vex: Devious, Part Nine
Credits: Mike Carroll (script), Jake Lynch (art), Jim Boswell (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: After last chapter seemingly laid the groundwork for a big chapter with Proteus Vex at the center, we get yet another ancillary story, one that is almost too perfectly begun with the line “Now, bear with me on this one, okay, because it might seem a bit meandery, but I promise there’s a point at the end.” That is the ‘Devious’ mission statement in a nutshell.
And, unfortunately, this is another chapter of the book that seems almost entirely superfluous. Sure, it sets up some context, but it seems unlikely that, over the course of all future “Proteus Vex” stories, there will ever be this many words spent on Silk or this unnamed new queen. Again, the stories themselves have been fine on a case by case basis, but it seems like there is a reason that I can’t quite grasp to tell all of these stories without telling the Vex element. At first, it was to talk about how the universe was doing in the aftermath of his ‘death,’ but at this point, the entire narrative is disparate narratives.
If this sounds familiar, it is because I’ve been talking about this for weeks now. There’s just nothing to really chew on here. The art remains good, the individual scripts cromulent enough, but this just feels like treading water. Again.
