2000AD 1391 - 26 May 2004
Cover by Charlie Adlard & Chris Blythe

Synopsis and 1st review by James Mackay
2nd opinion by Eric Moore

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

JM: This should have been fantastic. Bill Savage is an instantly iconic figure in almost any pose the big man cares to strike, few if any on Tharg's roster do mean n' moody like Charlie Adlard and Chris Blythe is probably the most reliable colourist around. Strangely enough, it's Blythe that here lets the side down, turning what was already a fairly dark cover into a mess of dark blues and purples, with no element of contrast to lighten the shade. The overall effect, while suitably sombre, takes more than a few squints to become clear and frankly isn't worth the hassle when it does. The foregrounding of the Volgan helmet, which must have worked brilliantly in the monochrome original, here becomes muddy and all the potential poignancy of the image is lost. The fault may, of course, lie with the reproduction or print quality, but frankly it seems as though Adlard handed in one of those rare covers that actually deserve to be boldly left in the original black and white, only for Tharg to determine that colour would have to be used anyway. Even a contrasting shade on the extra text would have been nice, but even here all is left in sepulchral gloom that isn't so much foreboding as downright depressing. Hardly the promotion that one of the best progs of the year deserves.

EM: I can sort of take it or leave it with Charlie Adlard’s work. He’s done some nifty stuff for the big boys in the States and some of his older 2000AD work is okay, but his recent work has left me kind of cold.

But with the start of Savage he's adopting a heavy use of black quite similar to the works of Irving and Reardon. And boy, does it look better for it. This cover is simply superb. Lovely use of black, the helmet is done very well, nice rain effects and – all in all – a dead moody shot. Even if Savage does look like the Punisher.

At Home with the Snozzburns

Dredd noses around

Synopsis: A new reality show, "At Home with the Snozzburns", is showing the lives of large-nosed fading rock star, Snozzy Snozzburn, his wife Karin and their two equally nasally blessed children, Conk and Hooter. As this week's show starts, death threats are ruining Snozzy's concentration - and thus his songwriting abilities - and Judge Dredd is called in to investigate.

Conk, wearying of the freakish nose she was forced to grow by her father, defies her boyfriend's impassioned pleas and cuts it off with a laze-saw. In a different part of the mansion, Hooter is talking to his dealer and arranging a delivery of (illegal drug) sugar. A commercial break interrupts the show to promote Snozzy's range of nose-related products, including a nose pump and "Honking Snozzy Doll!"

Back to the programme, and Judge Dredd is interviewing the desperate Snozzy. The rock star's foul mouth nearly earns him an obscenity charge, but Dredd is distracted when he notices a camera hidden on the robo-butler, and arrests the butler instead. Hooter's deal is successfully concluded, and he returns to the mansion with a shovel and an enormous tube to begin snorting the sugar, unaware that a hooded figure is following him. Conk, with her nose bandaged up, is feeling the freedom ("I'm a person, not just a nose!"), bursts in on Hooter and liberates him from his nose as well. Meanwhile, the hooded figure threatens Snozzy and Karin with a gun and reveals that she's the mother of Snozzy's child - a fact she proves by showing the infant's abnormal proboscis.

Dredd moves in to protect Snozzy and disarm the assailant, who give in without a fight. Snozzy escapes to another room, only to be confronted by a now completely crazed Conk, carrying the two noses she's already severed - and wastes no time cutting Snozzy's off instead. The programme is cancelled with a judgement from Dredd that portions of it are illegal and a fine for every viewer of 1000 creds.

JM: The restaurant critic Jay Rayner often repeats the adage that nobody likes to write a bad review. In this case, I'm going to make an exception and thoroughly enjoy myself.

This is, without a doubt, a stinker: possibly the worst, laziest Dredd one-off ever written, with phoned-in art from Ian Gibson that doesn't suggest he was too impressed with it either. The feeling the reader gets is that Alan Grant watched one episode of The Osbournes, long after the programme had ceased to have any kind of hold on the cultural consciousness, thought "hey, that'll do", and couldn't be bothered to think about it any more, so threw in a few nose jokes and bog-standard plotting in the hope that maybe the readers wouldn't notice that it makes no sense at all. Why does Dredd arrest the robot butler? Robots (with one exception) aren't citizens in Mega-City One: they get busted down to scrap. Why does he suddenly declare the programme illegal? All television in Dredd's world is pre-approved anyway. Assuming Snozzy's not a mutant - a fairly safe assumption - why would his baby have his artificial nose? And after the new crime of "stupidity", shall we now add "obscenity" to the possible charges in 2126?

In fairness, had any of the jokes been any good whatsoever, a certain lack of plot logic might have been permissible. But there's nothing in this to raise even the limpest of giggles. These are the lyrics to Ozzy's signature song:

Everybody's nose is their fame and fortune
Everybody's nose is the thing to pick
An' so it goes
With everybody's nose…
DROKK DROKK DROKK

Those "drokks" are the sound of a writer giving up before he's even begun to bother.

Which leaves one question. Why noses? Surely it can't just be the weak Ozzy/Snozzy pun? Well, given that rock stars are usually famous for the size of another fleshy bulbous protuberances, it makes one wonder about the writer's unconscious mind that we see not one but three appendage removals here…

EM: Alan Grant does one of his pastiches of a current celebrity, teamed up with Ian Gibson. Which should be cause for celebration but … it isn't and I don't really know why. The huge noses are vintage Dredd, the characterisation is spot on and Gibson does a perfect Ozzy and Sharon but less so the kiddies – Kelly/Konk minus the nose looks disturbingly like Pink to me. All the ingredients are there but the thing just doesn't gel. Maybe it's because Dredd is hardly in it?

Book 1 - Taking Liberties Part 5

The Volgs attack...

Synopsis: The two cops who have been interrogating a captured Resistance fighter, Rusty, return to his cell to find that he's killed himself with a cyanide capsule. They think that Savage could have had plastic surgery, but even so would definitely return to his home turf of Shooter's Hill in Eltham. They conclude that the Resistance fighter's suicide means Savage is definitely still alive.

The action moves to a barricade in Oxford Street, where two teenage members of the resistance - Samantha and Camel - are discussing Bill, who they only know under his new name of Jack. Samantha teases Camel, whose mother is possibly Bill's lover, and they speculate about what in "Jack's" past must have lead him to hate the Volgans so much, when he's been so good to Camel's family since her father was executed. Bill arrives in time to hear the news of Rusty's capture and realises that it means the prisoner will kill himself to protect him. Camel and Samantha offer what appear to be drugs to Savage, who reacts with disgust before they reveal that it's actually a chemical agent that blocks the smell of Cadaverene. He still turns it down, saying that he's used to the smell of death. Turning to talk to Harry, another resistance leader, "Jack" says that the two girls remind him of Bill's children before the Volgans killed them.

A tank comes roaring down Oxford Street and straight into a makeshift ambush, with potassium soap bars laid on the road to make it skid out of control. It crashes into a shopfront, and the rebels shoot the soldiers as they emerge. A television station in the store that the tank hit is broadcasting "Scooty" (the British Prime Minister, actually a puppet of the Volgans) who is saying that the rebels are only looters and criminals who British people must stand firm against in the War on Terror. Bill borrows one of the girls' lipstick and they leave, after he has written - on the side of a broken shopwindow that clearly has all the goods untouched inside - "THIS IS HOW WE LOOT".

JM: This is, quite simply, perfect. Mills' preaching can, as has been exhaustively commented on, become heavy-handed and boring. But being faced with a subject like the resistance to an illegal occupation and the urgency of the current political situation in real life, he seems to have rediscovered his raw anger and intelligence. For a 5-page comic strips to begin with a near-parody of 70's cop dramas, pass through a quiet moment on the barricades, and finish with a pitch-perfect piece of pure political parody takes balls, brains and brilliance in spades.

There is still the odd moment of, erm, idiosyncratic sexual characterisation in here. It makes sense that Bill and his co-fighters might dismiss the other side as effete homosexuals and perverts, but it detracts from the effect if they actually turn out to be right. Equally, would a resistance fighter - even a girl - really be carrying lipstick in a heavily-rationed Britain? But the fact that these are the most major criticisms I can makes really shows just how strong this is.

Also, unfortunately for the realism of the strip, I'm told that soap or any slippery surface would be useless against a tank, which carries it's own "floor" along with it in the forms of the tracks (acknowledgements for this fact go to ex-tank driver and regular reviewer WR Logan). But as a device for showing the unequal nature of the conflict the tank assault works very well indeed, particularly when coupled with the previous episode's hi-tech Volgan crowd control.

I'm running out of room here, but there should be equal space devoted to just how good Adlard's art is. In contrast to the terrible Gibson work on the Dredd strip, here's an artist who obviously cares about the script he's illustrating - just one looks at Bill's face in any panel is enough to completely get across the quixotic nature of this infuriating hero - and the use of shade on the panel where Bill is forced to disown his children is absolutely stunning.

EM: As I said above, I'm really enjoying Charlie's art on this, much more than the tale itself. It's a nice idea to take the very first story from the very first prog and re-do it for another century but right now the whole thing seems to be treading water. Here we see the Volgans still don't know whether Bill is alive or not, we get a couple of new characters, whoops – Bill/Jack nearly gives the game away again and we learn tanks can't drive over soap. Oh, and Tony Blair has a bit more hair in this universe. I'm hoping things crank up a gear or two pretty soon.

Part 5

Tashtego takes control

Synopsis: Ishmael announces to her companion that she is leaving the ship. She has perfected the cure to the Ebola virus, and reveals that her true purpose on this voyage was in fact to reach the region of space they're currently in to look for her son, who is half Toran. Torans don't believe that children as old as he is now (14) any longer need a mother, so his father simply kidnapped him from school. She intends to bring him back.

But as she heads for the airlock, she overhears Tashtego (another Toran) trying to persuade the crew to mutiny and to sell the chemicals from the Kohenyu on the black market. Some of the crew remain loyal to A.H.A.B., while some others like the plan. A fight begins, and Tashtego kills another Toran who has tried to resist the revolt.

Ishmael goes to warn A.H.A.B. about the mutiny. She finds that he is keeping his old human body on the deck with him, and already knows about the mutiny thanks to his independent robotic eye. He also tells her that the Science Officer who died had determined that the vaccine she developed did not, after all, work. She accuses him of lying, but before he can respond, Tashtego and his allies burst onto the deck to seize control of the craft. Ishmael is offered the chance to get to the lifeboats in the midst of the fighting, but realises that if she leaves now the vaccine will never get to Earth. After an agonising struggle with her conscience, she chooses to stay.

JM: A somewhat disorienting time-shift between episodes and over-long chunks of exposition on pages 1, 2, and 4, don't help this strip hold my attention. I've never been as huge an Elson fan as some, and seeing the two alien races side-by-side with A.H.A.B. just shows how same-y his non-human character design can be. Jane Ishmael also seems to have only two expressions - steely-eyed determination and bewildered surprise - which is a bit of a drawback when the character's got some rather subtle lines in this episode. I also wish he'd re-introduce a few primary colours to his palette.

The plotting is also so far pretty predictable. I'll be honest and say that that doesn't mean I'd predicted any of it in advance, but once I read the pages everything here just feels a bit tired and generic. That said, this is quite obviously an expository episode designed to give depth to Ishmael's character, and to Nigel Kitching's credit she isn't quite as standard-issue a "tough chick" as many of 2000ad's other heroines have been.
Overall, by far the least good A.H.A.B. episode so far, but it's not enough to condemn what has been a moderately intriguing run on the basis of a single issue.

EM: Still turning out better than I thought it would. I guess next week things really start going pear-shaped what with the mutiny and AHAB starting to show his true colours. The characters are engaging and the art – although a bit too DC in my view – is pretty stunning. The strip I look forward to reading the most right now.

Paranoia - Part 5

Another business goes under water...

Synopsis: The episode begins with three gangland hits - a shooting in an underground carpark, a man being stuffed into a garbage shredder, and another man tied to a concrete block and thrown in the river.

Aimee Nixon, looking at her bank balance, which now shows she has 2,356,000 credits where she should have 700, realises that she's being set up to look like the mastermind behind the spate of gangland killings. But for someone to plan this, they'd have to know that she was Wally Squad, which means the rest of her team are in danger. She sets out from Link's house to warn them. Link, left behind at the computer, begins typing something in, murmuring"Yeah, Aimee…. Why you?"

Parker, the artificially young assistant to Mob bigshot Tiernan, is summoned to help as his wheelchair bound boss has accidentally run over a leaning lady. He goes to wake her up, muttering about how much he hates his supposed boss, when the house alarm sounds. Aimee, outside Tiernan's mansion, uses her Judge lie-detector evasion skills to pretend to be Tiernan's grandmother, and gains admittance from the electronic gatekeeper. Inside she finds Parker, barely alive from gunshot wounds. He tells her that his attackers knew he was Wally Squad. As he dies, he reverts to his older self. A gun is cocked and held to the back of Nixon's head by a mysterious man, backed up by a gang of goons.

JM: Any writer droid who gets Henry Flint on art duties must know they're onto a winner even before the first pages are even sketched. Truly one of 2000AD's greatest discoveries, it's difficult to imagine a script that Flint couldn't improve. The first page here isn't much more than a few stereotypical gangster movie images, but every detail is excellently planned out, from the raw edges of the panels to the space left to get across the loneliness of the drowning man.

And it's not as if he does have a duff script to work with here. Rob Williams comes up with some storming images and ideas, from the hint that Link may be the mastermind (conveyed almost entirely without words), to the dying Parker growing older.

This strip has been a slow-burner for me, but I'm now happy to say that I'm a convert and am waiting in anticipation for the next installment.

EM: Nice to see this tale appear since it's still going to be a while before we see any new Lenny Zero. The Big Meg is so vast that's it's a wonder that we haven’t seen more in this vein before. The plot is thickening nicely with guessing who's behind it all being a bonus to reading it. Link’s "yeah Aimee… why you?" while at the computer screen is too obvious isn't it? I'll join the opinion of Henry Flint being one of the very top talents right now but on this strip I get the feeling he’s a bit rushed. Even so, it's still some stunning work. It's a nice move to have a female lead character that doesn't look like she’s stepped out of the pages of FHM and you really couldn’t say that about Aimee on the last panel. And is that a tribute to Steve Dillon with the mob man?

The Big Meg - Part 5

Chopper shows off his skills

Synopsis: The episode intercuts between Chopper and Calista planning their raid on Augustus Popp's home, a giant structure hovering thousands of feet in the air, and the execution of the plan. Calista agonises over whether she should be dragging Chopper into all this, but Chopper reassures her that he'd do anything for such a "beautiful, precious woman".

Calista is shown into Popp's house. She excuses herself from the dinner table and opens a window in the bathroom. Chopper, avoiding the eye-in-the-sky by hooding his face, rises up towards the floating fortress. The judges spot him but determine that the board's not the one Chopper was known to be using, and lose him in the shadow. They contact Popp's home, but the controllers say that he hasn't entered.

Chopper floats through the house on his powerboard, nearly setting off the floor alarms by dropping an earring but catching it in time. He enters the gallery and uses dust to show up the laser-beams of the intruder detectors. Surfing carefully between them, he readies himself for the moment that he will smash the glass and set off the alarms…

JM: Compared to the high-octane thrills of Savage and Low Life, Chopper seems slightly underpowered. While there's nothing to complain about in the crisp Teague/Goddard artwork, neither is there anything that sets the heartrate pounding in quite the way that Adlard and Flint do. The reason that I'm making the comparison, though, is by way of introducing the fact that in any other prog this would still be the highlight, and it's a compliment to the way the current run is going that it ends up third in my affections. Nobody handles outrageous plot-device-theft (which isn't quite the same thing as a homage) with quite the barefaced cheek that Wagner does, from the Mission Impossible alarmed floors to the Entrapment sliding among laser beams. The setting up of potential cross and double cross, in classic noir style, couldn't be more telegraphed…yet it all hangs together brilliantly.

Part of the reason is the skilfully-handled structure, with flashbacks serving to break up any monotony of tone. Then there's the carefully insincere cheesy protestations of trust between Chopper and Calista, and the silence of the fourth page building the tension.

This might still feel a bit like Wagner on autopilot, but that's better than three quarters of the comics writers out there can manage on their best days.

EM: Lovely art combined with so-so story combined with main character that I've never really liked. All adds up to a real take it or leave it strip for me and the one I least look forward to reading. Can't say more than that really.