Sinister Dexter: Should the gunsharks be put out to pasture? 

“Finnigan Sinister and Ramone Dexter you stand here accused of the heinous crime of not being thrilling enough for audiences of 2000 AD. This grievous crime comes with it the penalty of the derision of the readership and eventually, the death penalty. How do you plead?”
 
“Vayase, I cannot believe you are even asking this question, Senór? Not guilty, no way!”
 
“To be sure, ya’ funtin’ skuzzwaz! We been framed, man!”
 
“M’lud, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is my duty here today to defend messiers Sinister and Dexter of this crime and being a thrill-vacuum. As we proceed I will be presenting evidence which, while some may not be popularly known, in its totality will prove that my clients are in fact innocent of said crime. Indeed, it may well be the only thing that they are innocent of at all.
 
“Now the prosecution will allege that this fine pair of gentleman have a distinct lack of thrillingness, that they have repetitious storylines, that they are impossible to kill and as a result they fail to engage the readership. They may even be scurrilous enough to suggest that their characters are superficial. But, ladies and gentleman, as you hear these arguments, I ask you to consider could this truly be the case? Can a strip that has lasted this long be based on nothing but piss and hot air? I say NO!!! For it is based in the greatest of storytelling tradition, the epic! We do not judge a novel for its punctuation? We do not judge a movie for the five minutes in the middle? Or a black forest gateaux cake for the flour it used? We look to the big picture, to the work as a whole! And this story, gentles, is not yet told. So do not jump to judgement too soon, until we have seen the bigger picture…”
 
“Get on with it, ya’ no good funtin’…”
 
“Easy, man, easy. He’s on our side, y’know. Have patience, perfervour.”
 
“Easy for you to say. I don’t have a Fony Headcase^TM to tune out to. What are you watching on that thing anyway?”
 
“Aye, you know. Re-runs. Re-runs of the all-nude ‘I love Lucy’ remake.”
 
“Not the cream pie episode? Stop grinning!”
 
“Order! Order in the court! Mr Prosecutor, you may now discharge your duty.”
 
“Vayase, man, here is the real funtwad right here…”

by Chris Landless

Welcome to my third attempt at this. The first attempt was too critical, the second attempt wasn’t critical enough, so the question - is will I get the balance right with this one? I guess time will tell. Given that I hate Sinister Dexter and there’s plenty of ammunition available I thought this would be a doddle, but surprising it hasn’t turned out that way. Anyway – to business!

What can I say about Sinister Dexter? Well, first off, the series is a blatant rip-off of John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson’s hitmen in Pulp Fiction, Dan Abnett admits as much in Thrill Power Overload. That need not be a bad thing – Judge Dredd was, after all, inspired by Dirty Harry but rose from that starting point to become his own character in his own world. Show a Dredd strip to somebody who knows nothing about Dredd or 2000AD and they won’t link it to Dirty Harry. Try the same trick with a Sinister Dexter and they’ll immediately say “Hey, this reminds me of Pulp Fiction…”

The gunslinging duo have never risen beyond their inspiration. But crucially, they also missed an element that was present in Pulp Fiction – morality. You know the story - Vincent and the Jules are going about their everyday killing people for money business when they face a near death situation. Jules sees it as a sign, questions his life and gives up being a hitman. Vincent doesn’t see it as a sign, doesn’t question his life, doesn’t give up being a hitman and therefore doesn’t make it to the end of the film alive, instead getting gunned down by Bruce Willis. There’s a message there somewhere.

Sadly that message is missing from Sinister Dexter, where it’s OK to kill people for money because only bad people get contracts put out on them. Hell, Sinister and Dexter are actually doing a GOOD thing by killing the bad guys that the cops can’t touch. They’ve got the gunshark code, you see? To give Dan Abnett his due he’s tried to address this over the years, notably when Dexter turning himself into the police, but in the end it always comes back to the same old grating formula set out in the first few strips.

Lately he seems to be taking the piss out the whole morality thing, especially in the Christmas episode. Of course, he might possibly have been taking the piss out of 2000AD forum members criticising Sinister Dexter’s morality, who knows?

So, the series is unoriginal and morally simplistic. What else is there? At some point the case for the defence will probably argue that a large part of the appeal of Sinister Dexter is down to the location – the city of Downlode. A rich but corrupt backdrop, full of memorable characters. But let’s face it, Mega City 1 puts Downlode in the shade. As does Nikolai Dante’s futuristic Russian empire and Torquemada’s Termight empire.

And now for my final argument. Up to this point I’ve listed a few points which, in my opinion, stop this series from being up there with the greats. Having said that, I’ll admit it has been a fairly entertaining series for the most part. The next point is the killer though, the reason why Sinister Dexter should be consigned to history.

Put simply, Sinister Dexter has run out of steam.

The series first started in 1995. It’s been going for 13 years now. 13 years of Sinister Dexter! It’s never been a particularly rare series during that time either as during those years you were probably never more than a few weeks away from the next Sinister Dexter instalment. I’d say there’s only a finite amount of material in what is essentially a rip-off of Pulp Fiction. And I’d say the limit was reached long ago.

Coming back to Thrill Power Overload again, Dan Abnett admits that Sinister Dexter was just an idea he added to a list of proposals to make up the numbers. So not only is Sinister Dexter a Pulp Fiction rip-off, but it’s also a series that Abnett wasn’t particularly bothered about in the first place. Fair play to the bloke, he’s managed to wring every last drop of dramatic potential out of the set-up. Sinister Dexter have died, been reborn, went on holiday, killed their boss, went on more holidays, split up, fought each other, got back together again, had haircuts, went into space, had a morality crisis, died again, pretended to be a different series, came back to life again, been paralysed for life, got better.  After all that the series is pretty much exactly the same as it started out. Where else can it possibly go now without repeating itself?

Oh yes, Sinister Dexter killed my parents as well. They must be found guilty!

by Paul Stewart

So much of the controversy around Sinister Dexter seems to be based around story structure. The strip seems to incite a great deal of passion amongst people, particularly those who feel that it has pulled its punches. Namely that Sinister and Dexter should both be dead, particularly Dexter who was shot by Tracey Weld in the story “And Death Shall Have No Dumb Minions...” The subsequent revelations that Dexter lives and was crippled, and then in turn was healed to become able-bodied again, has left some feeling cheated. However this should not be the case, as the story-telling around these events has led to a riveting and engaging storyline, that instead of hitting the ‘reset’ button, is hurtling into unknown territory.
 
Sinister Dexter has been going for over 10 years now, to become one of the most printed stories in 2000 AD after Judge Dredd. It started off as a series of one-off stories where there was a formula and a style. Lots of PUNishment, a euro-pop post-Pulp Fiction style, a riff on the emerging Eastern European bloc into the mainstream. Stories establishing two skilled and groovy hit men who would amoralistically go and off someone because they were paid to do it.

Then, in Gunshark Vacation, we had first extended story that showed us the characters were capable of telling tales on a bigger canvas that incorporated threads from older stories. An overall storyline was established. More one-offs followed, but now we needed to pay more attention to these because they would sometimes hold little nuggets of information that would later become relevant to a larger story arc. The Murder 101 story revealed that not only were the killers connected, but there was family involved. This means that relationships come into play and we have a new depth developed. 
 
Relationships and story threads all came to a head in the first Sin/Dex epic, Eurocrash. This was the moment when it really felt like the gunsharks had arrived. Big story, big consequences, major characters die, and because of a lot of careful development, we cared about it. And then the team of Sin/Dex go their separate ways. 
 
Some would feel that this should be an ending in itself, but this led into Downlode Tales which itself led into Lock and Lode. This was a mini-epic all of its own which told lots of different stories, all parts of a bigger puzzle which would eventually reunite the duo. 
 
Recently there has been controversy about Dexter appearing to be dead, and then disabled and then not so much. Perhaps the origins of this lie in this conclusion to the Downlode Tales where 'things get back to normal'. That no matter what happens, that writer Abnett can just hit the reset button, and everything will return to the way it was.
 
The Sin/Dex stories during the time that Kal Cutter joined the duo were of very high quality (or should that be calibre). I often thought the stories were gripping and couldn't wait for the next instalment. There was characterisation and pathos, big events moving forward with clever plots to boot. Last Train to Kal Cutter and And Death Shall Have No Dumb Minions… were terrific chapters in Sin/Dex history. The culmination of all of this was the destruction of the team, the apparent deaths of at least one of the leads and the reversal of some pretty significant relationships. 
 
Then Malone emerged and we were cleverly tricked into thinking we were reading something else until Rocky Rhodes makes his cameo. The punch of the sleight of hand of this story was that Sinister wasn't dead and believed he had unfinished business back in Mother Lode. But because of the sleight of hand it seems that this quelled some of the dissatisfaction that a supposedly dead character had come back to life. Less generous was the response when we found out the Dexter was handed a get-out-of-grave free card.  This was slightly quelled when it was revealed he was quadriplegic but it soon transpired that with surgery he wasn't really quite so quadriplegic after all.
 
This convention of the dead coming back to life and hitting that reset button has really upset a lot of people and caused them to switch off from the story. Yet I believe that the strip is still running exceptionally well. The current storyline harks back to the very first stories with a rich back history, but you don't need to know all this to get the feel of what is going on. It is dramatic and gripping, well characterised and with an emphasis on drama more than on killing. It is almost as if the strip has looked for a way to justify its callous disregard for execution-style killings and work out its moral centre. It soon found it didn’t have one, and instead emerged with the personal struggles of the characters. 
 
I believe that people have become way too hung-up on the lead characters not being disposable and have dismissed the story as being same-ish for seeming to hit the reset button. I think that this is an unfair dismissal of an excellent strip which is tightly scripted and with a depth of characterisation that we don’t always get to see in comics.
 
Sinister Dexter remains a saga about a couple of amoral assassins who like to whacks lyrical. Yet, in its history it has found itself to be much more, as a tale that is continuing to unravel as it seeks to find a morality all of its own.
 
Sinister Dexter has become a stalwart of the comic, and has lasted so well because of the fact that it has such flexibility in the stories it tells and the way that they are told. It is amoral and makes no apologies for it, allowing us to travel the journey without judgements about right and wrong, and to explore those ideas. 
 
With Sinister Dexter I believe the best is yet to come. All of the manoeuvring and events that the characters have faced will only form a tighter background to that which is still to happen. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the ride because it is tight, witty, action-drenched, chock-full of pathos and Thrill-Powered up!
 
Now sing it with me… “All we are saying… is give whacks a chance…!”
 
P.S. You better come through for me, Abnett, or I may be forced to employ a certain pair of gunsharks…

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