By Frazer Irving, John Smith, Gordon Rennie, Simon Spurrier, Steve Moore, Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright

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What to expect: Vampires, werewolves, super-powered hippies, fallen angels, moral guidance, a sting in the tale and a handful of zombies.

Review by Alex Frith

There’s something surprisingly weighty about this volume. Physically, I mean. It doesn’t look as thick as other collections, but it’s still heavy. Perhaps it’s the extra weight of all the ink Irving must have applied in the creation of the various stories they’re in. Even in the black and white strips, there’s barely an inch of panel that hasn’t been marked in some way, even if it’s with a well-considered patch of empty space. It’s worth being honest up front about this – if you’re planning on buying this collection, I hope your primary interest is in Irving’s art, and not in the mish-mash of stories he illustrates herein. There are three longer strips and seven one-offs, which are all fine - but the art steals the show every time.

Frazer Irving has been well-served by Rebellion’s collection line already. His best strips from a writing point of view have been collected separately – Necronauts with Gordon Rennie, Judge Death with John Wagner, and The Simping Detective with Simon Spurrier (or ‘young Spuz’, as Irving refers to him in the dangerously smug introduction). This latest Irving volume simply gathers together the rest of his 2000 AD output, from his debut Future Shock to the two ‘Sean of the Dead’ tie-in comics he produced. There’s also a splendid 10-page sketch gallery at the back, which includes an uncensored version of the seduction scene from ‘Mars needs mates’, if you’re into that sort of thing. In fact there’s rather a lot of nudity and sex in this collection.

What is there to say about Frazer Irving’s art that isn’t immediately obvious to those who’ve seen it? I imagine there are a small handful of people who don’t like it, but even they would surely cede that from a technical point of view it’s outstanding. Atmosphere, creepiness, characterisation, storytelling – it’s all here, in ethereal technicolour, in stark monochrome, and occasionally in both together. Best of all, you can see Irving trying out new things with each story, keeping it fresh and in most cases working well with the central concept. There’s a reason why Irving merited such a collection – he’s annoyingly good at drawing.

So what about the stories? Well, there’s not a dud in the book, but there’s perhaps only one tale that might have deserved a collection in it’s own right had it been long enough – the 30-page ‘From Grace’, written by Spurrier. It’s almost unique in 2000 AD history in that it’s a pure exploration of character. Specifically, we get to watch one man’s (or angel's, or whatever creature he is) descent into evil. There’s no great twist, no outlandish sci-fi concept, and what action there is serves to explore the inner character, not to advance any plot. I remember finding it hard going when it was in the weekly, but read in one go it really works. Intelligent, thought-provoking and of course exceptionally well-drawn. Some might find it pretentious as all hell, mind.

‘Storming Heaven’ written by Rennie is the longest strip in the collection, which is presumably why it’s lent its name to the book. I remember it as a much-anticipated follow-up from the team who brought us Necronauts. Sadly it doesn’t live up to that lofty goal, mostly because it introduces a massive number of characters and concepts in a very short space of time before destroying them all too quickly for the reader to care. As with ‘From Grace’, this tale also reads better in one go, but it still feels rushed. The set-up is that San Francisco in the 1960s became a free state where people went to take experimental drugs and as a result turned into peace-loving hippies with super-powers, under the watchful eye of Dr Trips.

Before we get to find out how this set-up actually works, we’re immediately thrust into a conflict between Trips and the evil Lizard King who uses the transcendent power of drugs for evil. Imagine that. And then there’s an unborn messiah and a whole bunch of other religion (not to mention drug-lore) parallels that are actually rather clever, but not entirely conducive to a compelling story. On the other hand, Irving’s art on ‘Storming Heaven’ is simply extraordinary. The colours are every bit as sublime and as repellent as they need to be for this transcendental tale. Perhaps if I’d ever tried acid I’d be more impressed with the story. Perhaps.

Rennie and Irving also produce three tongue-in-cheek Thargian morality tales, exploring the triple threat to teens of drugs, sex and rock-n-roll. Each vice soon leads to flesh-rending terror in a pleasing way, but none of these tales is as funny as it should have been, although I can’t quite put my finger on why not. Irving draws a splendidly sinister Tharg, though.

These are still better than the two Steve Moore-penned Future Shocks. Moore invented the 2000 AD one-off, and from a technical point of view his tales are magnificent – there’s always a double twist, always a nasty central idea that one might not have seen coming, and always a complete bastard at the centre of it. And yet all too often there’s a lack of charm that is ultimately unsatisfying. Of course, individual Future Shocks are often a matter of personal taste. I think the two here are merely ok.

The two Sean of the Dead tales are surely only included for completeness. I can’t imagine they’d make much sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the film – or at the very least who hadn’t heard of the basic premise of the film, which isn’t explained in the stories. If you are familiar with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s rom-zom-com, you might be pleased to learn that their two tales here are not mere adaptations of scenes from the film. Instead, they're a rather more serious take on the concept of zombies in North London. More is made of the parallel between undead zombies and mindless worker drones that the film explored in the opening scenes, for example, and there are a couple of genuinely chilling moments. But if you want belly-laughs at zombie expense, you won’t find it here.

And now to end with the first story in the volume, John Smith’s ‘A Love Like Blood’. It’s about the son of the vampire king falling in love with a werewolf, which doesn’t go down too well with the higher-ups on either side. I really enjoyed it. Being a John Smith story, there’s a whole lot of world-building going on around the central doomed romance plotline. The vampiric ‘sangreal’ tribe are locked in eternal conflict with the werewolf ‘luperci’. Both tribes seem to rule the world at large behind the scenes. Indeed, humans only feature as clueless cattle, and as fodder for some of the nastier bloodletting ideas that John Smith can think up. One imagines that Smith was desperately trying to think of ways to make this strip a bit weird in his usual ‘Indigo Prime / Firekind / Leatherjacket / Revere’ style, but the central concept is just too straight for him to really get there. Nonetheless, it’s a sound idea for a story, well constructed, over a little too quickly, but served with a delightfully bleak ending. Recommended.

So, is this book worth buying? Should Tharg invest in more art-droid based collections? Well, Irving is a strong enough artist that I’d say yes, but I’m not sure there are many others outside of the ‘Judge Dredd’ collections already available – if only because the quality of stories that great artists have worked on can be so varied. If ‘Necronauts’ had been included in this collection, it would instantly have become a must-buy. As it is, the stories here are all good enough if not outstanding, but the art is the star of this show, and that’s as it should be.

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