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 By Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison
What to Expect: A grand space opera with the vampiric Durham Red as the centre of a cult of personality as she wrangles with the moral questions of power and her own past. Oh and some smashing art. And sound effects, apparently.
Covering the Books:
Review by Paul Stewart
Durham Red started her life in the pages of Strontium Dog. After the Death of Wulf, and needing to expand the supporting cast of potential partners for Johnny Alpha, Durham Red was introduced as a sexy red-headed mutant whose power was that of a vampire, requiring her to drink fresh human blood in order to survive. In theory, that was it. Traditional vampire lore meant nothing to her, garlic and crosses had no effect, daylight wasn’t a problem, and a stake through the heart would harm her pretty much as it would harm you or me: unpleasant at best.
Durham was a strong character and was swiftly involved in a kind of romantic entanglement with Johnny Alpha before having the occasional series by herself, penned by the likes of Grant, Hogan and later Abnett. These were all set in the Strontium Dog universe, and Abnett dropped a few hints that he wanted to take the strip in a new direction.
The Scarlet Cantos saw that new direction arrive suddenly and shockingly. Abruptly we were propelled over a thousand years into the future to find that Durham has been made, somewhat inexplicably, a deity of sorts, a symbol to the oppressed mutant masses who have virtually become a race all on their own. And of course Durham Red has been relaxing in cryosleep, ‘accidentally’ oversleeping for way too long, the lazybones. Exactly why she was in cryosleep in the first place is never engagingly revealed. She wakes up on the university world of Woden to find it soon under attack by a faction called the Iconoclasts destroying the world rather than have her spread her mutant sainthood and get the Tenebrae mutant faction feeling like they have a living symbol of power walking amongst them.
Durham escapes with the help of Judas Harrow, a member of the Tenebrae and a bit of an all round dupe. However she also soon picks up Matteus Godolkin, a professional vampire slayer who was bitten by Red and believes that as a ‘vampire’ he is now in her thrall, and must do whatever she says. As the story progresses we discover that Godolkin’s loyalty is more hormonal than a belief in the supernatural. Durham then goes rocketing around the universe with one follower calling her ‘Your Holiness’ and the other as ‘Blasphemy’. Nice to have friends who give you nicknames.
With Red reawakened the Iconoclasts and the Tenebrae launch all-out war on each other. Red becomes very distressed that all of this has been done in her name and vows to stop the war somehow, bring about peace between mutants and humans and retire comfortably on the Greek Island world of Vampiros, or something. The only skills that she has to call on for doing this though seems to be her old S/D agent training, the loyalty of her companions, overwhelming agenda biases by the two factions and a vatload of luck.
Unfortunately things become a bit bogged down, in events within the story, in the writing and in the artwork. This should be a meaty kind of s story, and in many ways, it is. But some of this asks us to suspend disbelief a little too much. Abnett deserves full credit for world-building in creating such a complex universe, but somehow in the storytelling it doesn’t quite work. Why is the division between mutants and humans? Surely mutants are always going to be an (unpleasant) offshoot of humanity anyway, rather than a race of themselves, each with their own distinctive random physiology. This is largely avoided in all three of the books as we seem to barely ever glimpse an actual mutant, and when we do they don’t appear to be much more than ugly humans, perhaps almost mutant in name only. Perhaps this is the point about genocidal racism, that it tends to be pretty superficial anyway.
 The situation becomes more muddied with Harrison’s artwork. I have enormous trouble deciding whether I like this artwork or not. On the plus side it is detailed and complex, the love that has gone into it is simply breathtaking. It is grand and colourful. On the downside the detail and the action don’t always mesh very well and there are so many frames which might as well be done by Jackson Pollock, such is the ability to make any kind of sense out of it. The occasional frame is forgivable, but when the only way to tell what is going on is with the script captions, that can become a problem. Short of a kind of metaphysical eyestrain to tell what is going on, it is easier just to skip over and move on. And this in itself is a small tragedy with the brilliance of much of the art.
The other interesting conceit is Harrison’s inclusion of sound effects. Not the traditional KROOM-SKREE and KA-BLAMM but instead he tried to include a soundtrack. Playing over much of the art is pencil-thin outlines of letters denoting the kind of music you might hum from an opera written by Ennio Morricone. It’s grand and dramatic and draws your attention away from the story so that you start to wonder what the point of it is unless you have a penchant for humming show tunes while reading comics and really need to have the score supplied for you.
 After Red, Harrow and Godolkin have finished trashing evil mutants who were using Red’s vampirism as an excuse to suck the life out of humanity, it is the turn of the Humans in The Vermin Stars. The trio have journeyed to the eponymous Vermin Stars after Red has discovered a mysteriously secret secret. And from it she has hatched a fiendish plot to stop the war, because despite her best efforts last time, the mutants and the human chose not to give peace a chance. Meanwhile, back on the ranch, the kinda’ villainous Lord Pierceheart decides that he will use his best pupil, Godolkin to get at Red. Godolkin meets Pierceheart and subsequently betrays her, but this in fact is a double-betrayal as he seeks to betray Pierceheart to Red instead, because he secretly has the hots for her. This probably should make Godolkin a really interesting character, but this may be somewhat smothered in the overall story.
Godolkin and Red end up doing the horizontal mambo with Harrow feeling left out and subsequently having his jealousy and fanaticism drive him to feel that he had to die in a hail of bullets, which he does. This occurs in the foreground as in the background Red has led the mutants and the humans on a merry chase to a hidden locale in the Vermin Stars where someone carelessly left Earth. But Earth has become a prison for one solitary mutant called the Offspring who has been secretly pulling the strings all along and laying a gigantically elaborate scheme over a thousand years to break free and punish humans for imprisoning him in the first place. These humans are really horrible when it comes to persecuting mutants it seems, except that the Offspring’s own agenda was actually revenge on all humanity, not just to destroy everyone who has got a weapon that they can use to shoot at the other guy.
The Vermin Stars ends with the Offspring ‘killing’ Durham Red and spreading a disease throughout all humans making them barren. And somehow having the series end on this note was convincing nobody, and so we move to the final volume.
 The Empty Suns is set a hundred years later and Godolkin, now an old dude, leads a last ditch mission back to Earth to find Durham Red because apparently if you don’t believe that someone is dead, you can go back and rescue her. Godolkin’s amazing hunch pays off when he finds Red was only playing possum but had gone completely stark raving bonkers and reverted to the primitive state of a game show host. Never fear though because her sanity is quickly restored because of her S/D badge. Yes, apparently every S/D badge records all of your personality for just when you lose your marbles, go feral, and decide to invite contestants to play on into the bonus round.
When everything was good again, we discover that Red has a son also called Durham Red, which she later renames Johnny, probably to remind us that Red wasn’t always Saint Scarlet. Indeed the Empty Suns seems to have a bit of nostalgia for the good ole’ days going on. The main theme when Red decides to go hunting for the Offspring is that in the end all she probably ever was, was a Stront with the power to search and destroy. And the skimpier the outfit, the better. And boy, is this one skimpy.
Red goes hunting for the Offspring to lure him into a fracture in time and space where his powers will be diminished. It was the same fracture that gave us the interesting time technology often seen in Strontium Dog. Now the Offspring wasn’t your average ultra-super-powered unstoppable mutant killing machine, he was really strong. So Red is facing an impossible task to have a face-off to get the Offspring to change its mind in rescinding the death sentence on a withered humanity. She does this by shooting him a lot. It doesn’t work, and eventually the Offspring turns its toes up, killing Red in the process. Again. Sorta’.
Indeed the only way to wrap up a series like this is to have the epilogue in which we discover that Red didn’t die after all, and is perhaps now inexplicably immortal and that all mutants live happily ever after because all the humans are dead and gone. Perhaps it would all start up again when a mutant gives birth to the first pure-gene, the mutant’s mutant and mutants start persecuting humans and making them S/D agents and so forth. Red dying a couple of times meant that death would not have been a satisfactory conclusion.
So the question that I am left asking is: was it worth it? After the death of Johnny Alpha Strontium Dog seemed to fall apart as a concept with the remaining cast members going off in their own directions, some more successfully than others. Durham Red was obviously considered to be a strong enough character that she could be ripped out of the Stronty universe and given her own space opera epic with her as the protagonist. The universe developed for her new role was also a strong one. A strong character in a strong setting should have been a formula for massive success. Yet somehow I cannot help but feeling rather let down by the whole experience. Too many times we were asked to suspend disbelief and the final book of the saga asks us to revisit the essence of Strontium Dog, as if this had been what was missing from it all along.
The sublime artwork, so meticulously crafted sometimes did not tell the story well at all. The energy put into the computer animation for space scenes was jaw dropping, yet somehow a bit static when we see it repeated frame after frame. Inexplicable washes of colour also meant not knowing what is going on, and a groovy soundtrack in our own head tends to fall into the category of being ‘interesting’ yet unfulfilling.
 However the story was not quite over as the volume of The Empty Suns also comes with a bonus story, The Scarlet Apocrypha. Originally published in the Judge Dredd Megazine, the Scarlet Apocrypha is an odd collection of short stories which take the idea of Durham Red as a deified vampire saint and places it into all sorts of interesting contexts based on the conceit that a legend has to come from somewhere, and that threads of that legend can be found in all threads of fantasy and reality. Each book of the Apocrypha is known as a heresy, and plays with ideas of Italian schlock films, Fiends of the Eastern Front, anime, Japanese folk lore, the legend of Dracula, and even the science-fiction convention. Each story is strange and original, and have no direct connection with the Scarlet Cantos saga, yet oddly compliment it. It might even be argued that these are the highlight of the epic, that the story allows us to understand the legends better. Each have art done by a different 2000 AD supremo.
One of the outstanding features of the Durham Red books are the extras. Mark Harrison’s developmental sketches and designs, and the work that he puts into explaining them are nothing short of a triumph. Any failings of the art can almost be forgiven when you look at the lavish detail and precise draftsmanship which has gone into producing the characters and the setting. Looking at these you really feel that Durham Red has been a labour of love and dedication, that Abnett and Harrison undoubtedly believed in what they were producing, and wanted to wow us with the scope and detail. And some of his portraiture of Durham Red is breathtakingly beautiful (the cover of the novel ‘Manticore Reborn’ is a particular favourite of mine).
The three books of the Scarlet Cantos saga mark an interesting approach for 2000 AD. Whenever the comic has tried to revitalise an old character, it has generally fallen flat on its face and made a real hash of it. In this case however Durham Red has not been reinvented but her setting has been. She has been supplied with motivation and scope, has grown as a character, and ended up falling back on old skills. The artwork is undoubtedly beautiful, if at times a little confounding.
The Scarlet Cantos saga ideally should be read as a story unto itself. The epic nature of the story is captivating and at times challenging, and is ideal fodder for fans of the space opera on the grand scale. These books should have been a masterpiece of 2000 AD showmanship, and at times it comes close, but doesn’t quite make it. Perhaps if you can suspend disbelief for just long enough, this will work for you. Otherwise you might feel that Durham Red at times can really suck. Just ask Godolkin.
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