2000AD 1397 - 7 July 2004
Cover by The Phantom (after Jock)

Synopsis and 1st review by Gavin Hanly
2nd opinion by James Mackay

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

GH: Is it a cover or a sneaky advert for the 2000AD stencils on sale inside this week’s issue? I can’t deny that it’s an eye catching image, and I love the way the texture of the wall is carried on inside. But the minute I saw the stencil advert, I’m afraid my appreciation nose dived…

JM: Well, not being a hardcore thrash punk - or whatever slang the kids are using these days - I'm not entirely sure about the ethics of Tharg promoting graffiti stencils to the readership. Banksy is good in small doses, but believe me when you live in his chosen stamping-ground (like I do) after a while you long for some nice clear walls without funky designs like this one. But I suppose that's just me.

The image itself is deeply cool and makes for a real stand-out cover. Jock's face-on Dredds are among the best images of old Stoney-face ever created, and "The Phantom" (wonder which member of Rebellion's staff that pseudonym covers - maybe Tharg himself?) has done what seems to be a very good job in replicating it. Should appeal nicely to the core readership. Apart maybe from those with houses and spray-can happy little bastards living near them.

Terror - Part 6

Total War gets warmed up for the main event...

Synopsis: The judges place bugs on the other members of Total War and Dredd also tells them not to warn the Antarctica team that they are targets in case it tips them off. The evening of the job draws close, and Sonny writes a farewell letter to Zondra. She tries to contact him, but when he doesn’t reply she finally corners him at the fair and begins to realise that he was mixed up in Total War all the time. She storms off. We learn that Sonny’s father had been left brain dead by pro Justice thugs, and after his death his mother became an activist, herself to be taken away and die in custody.

Sonny meets his contact and is guided towards the car with the bomb. The judges are monitoring everything – but Dredd is concerned that some of the group are splintering off. With all units at the target zone, Dredd goes to investigate. While the judges cause a road block, hemming Sonny in, Dredd realises the others are going do hit Zondra…

GH: As the series continues, I am beginning to run out of superlatives. Yes, the art is still the best MacNeil has produced in ages, and the story is still the best Dredd tale in a very long time indeed. Knowing that there will be a follow up to this later in the year, with Flint on art chores, makes this all the more enjoyable, especially given the fans clamouring for something other than the seemingly unconnected Dredd tales that we’ve had for a while now. And with Dredd potentially back on centre stage next week, the best could yet be around the corner…

JM: When I heard that a Dredd strip called Terror was in the works, I had images of a fast-moving story involving Dredd giving some psychotic mutants what-for. Luckily, all those fears were unfounded. As it's progressed, this grim, downbeat story just continues to get better. Choosing to concentrate on Zondra Smith, who most writers would have had in for two episodes maximum and then forgotten, has proved a masterstroke. Rather than Dredd in best Dirty Harry mode going up against terrorists (Pure Evil in Arab robes) and thus making us sympathetic to his actions by virtue of the other side being worse, Smith provides a route for the reader's sympathy and enables us to question both the judges and the fanatic democrats without having to come down on one side or another. If only more writers would remember to include a human dimension like this.

The only quibble I have is with Castinello's motives, as revealed in this episode. It's a bit too easy to put everything down to the parents, and 2000AD writers do seem to reach for either the box marked "My parents did bad things and that's why I am who I am" or the box marked "Bad thing happened to my parents..." with rather too much ease. Just as the 9/11 bombers were rich and well-educated people who came to a certain point of view (however ugly and terrible that was) and acted on it without having to enact any particular childhood trauma, wouldn't it be more interesting if Sonny actually believed in democracy because he'd chosen to, and was prepared to die in his cause because he was so passionate about it? For me, it's this lack of authorial empathy for the bomber that makes Terror just inferior to the recently-departed Savage (now there's a sentence I didn't think I'd be writing 2 months ago!).

There's also the factor of MacNeil's art. Week by week, it feels as though the layouts are just getting more and more lazy. Though the images in the panels are brilliantly drawn - I don't think MacNeil's capable of drawing uninteresting figures - the page doesn't invite you in as it did in the opening episodes.

Scare Tactics - Part 1

A novel way to quit smoking

Synopsis: Sinister, Dexter and Vijay are investigating one of Apellido’s buildings. It’s said to be haunted by the workers remodelling it, but the team are there to find out what’s really happening. Vijay is a little put out by the idea of the haunted house, and both Sinister and Dexter tease him about this. Vijay shouts that he saw a figure, and they head into the room that he went into – while Dexter’s head TV starts playing up.

Inside, they find a mad worker who shoots at them with a nail gun. They follow him into a room with no other doors, but he has disappeared. They hear a moaning sound as faces start to appear from the walls…

GH: A story that simply screams “fill-in” to keep us going until the new bunch of tales starts in prog 1400. It never really rises above acceptable. These days Sinster Dexter tread a very fine line for me. The light hearted tales like this just don’t seem to be cutting it any more, whereas the development of Vijay that we saw in the last series proved to be far more interesting. It’s a similar situation that we saw with the recent Middenface tale in the Megazine. That was a fun knock-about tale, but all the way through it I just wanted the series to get back to the more dramatic tone it had been building up in the previous series. So it’s the same here: an enjoyable tale, well drawn by Cam Smith, but I just want them to get back to the real story and to stop wasting time…

JM: A fun and very lightweight tale, so far. The joshing between the three hitmen is well-handled. But it's not actually funny as such, which gives the whole strip the feel of listening to in-jokes in someone else's office, until the nailgun-wielding fear-crazed maniac enters. Veejay really feels integrated into the strip, and it's going to be interesting to see how Abnett handles him going bad/dying heroically/whatever's in the pipeline. It's also nice to see Mr Apellido still being referenced, and again wondering how this will all turn out.

There's something about Cam Smith's version of Sinister in particular that doesn't feel quite right, and that something is the sideburns. The result is that I read every panel featuring Sinister with a slight double take.

The Comeback - Part 3

Tyranny does James Bond...

Synopsis: Tyranny dives out of the line of fire, and turns to fire Vovotny’s pistol at her attacker – which freezes him solid. The other two appear, holding Clay’s grandson hostage, asking her to throw her gun to them. She throws it in the air, distracting them as the grandson bites his attacker. Tyranny whips her tail, sending one of the attackers flying, while she catches the gun and freezes the other. Later, the sole surviving attacker is tied above a vat of Sandflukes – electric eels. They start torturing their captive for information, but they don’t get anything more out of him. Clay gives Tyranny a taurochs and she heads out into the desert, soon riding into a Tribo-eletric storm…

GH: After last week’s exposition filled part, this week’s episode is much more pleasingly down to earth, allowing both Smith and Yeowell to have a little more fun. Smith reminds us that he can mix intelligent sci-fi with action, and hopefully the balance between the two will be more even now that we’ve got the backstory out of the way. Yeowell proves to be a good match for Smith, but is let down by the colouring, with the ice gun effects looking a little too similar to the guy crashing into the vat (or whatever it was), which threw me for a minute. But despite that small niggle, I’m enjoying this Tyranny “redux” more than I expected to.

JM: John Smith's Tyranny Rex has had a somewhat zigzag course through life. From artist/musician to nun, and now... what exactly? It's a bit worrying, given the disappointments of last year's chased-by-vampires Devlin Waugh and chased-by-aliens Meatmonger, to see vague hints that this series is going to feature a chase through the electro-desert.

Still, there are some very nice touches here. Why aren't ice-9 guns as popular as lasers? They certainly have a more artistic effect than any bullet. Not sure about the sand-flukes, though - I'm no scientist, but wouldn't static electricity at 7000 volts be more than survivable? Isn't it a matter of amperage, likely in this case to be vanishingly small? Ah, if only it were 15 years ago and I still remembered Ohm's Law...

One of Smith's better features as a writer is on show in spades here, namely his way with the casual brutality of his protagonists. They don't wail or weep, they do bad things and those bad things are fully on show. And unspoilt by either of the two faults that most afflict sci-fi writers: unnecessary introspection ("Gosh, I hate killing... but sometimes it has to be done") or excessive authorial glee (see: Mark Millar).

Yeowell's art doesn't seem quite up to his usual high standards here, but Yeowell on a blocky day is still better than half the artdroids on Tharg's roster, so I'm not complaining.

The Mainstream - Part 2

Another unpleasant end for Anders...

Synopsis: Anderson is in a persistant vegetative state, but his agent seems happy with this. As she leaves, she bumps into a visitor, who seems annoyed that he’s attracted her attention. He rushes into see Anderson who he calls "Anders", but the agent has turned into one of the Clench. The visitor fights the Clench, and finally gets to Anders, managing to release his mind before he is killed. It turns out that Anders mind was too strong for the Clench once it was integrated, so they placed his consciousness into an alien body. But now released, Anders took control of Mindraper and took it back to attack the Clench homeworld…

GH: There are some great ideas in this Future Shock, and the main one, that the mind of Anders is locked inside a writer who feels compelled to write about the Clench, is a fairly decent twist. That said, the whole structure of this tale seems all over the place. Frankly, I can’t see any reason why with a little clever re-writing and editing this couldn’t have been a very good single tale. As it is, it becomes a fairly good, but over-stretched one.

The art also suffers from an element of over embellishing. The Clench may well be a clever design, but unfortunately, they’re also a very confusing one. The hospital scenes are something to single out in this respect. Only on a second reading does it become clear that the agent is turning into Clench in the background, and I still have no real idea what happens in the hospital room at the end. So, in all, it’s worthwhile experimenting with multi-part Future Shocks – but this one doesn’t quite hit the mark.

JM: This really is bloody awful. Stretched to two episodes where one would have done, and without the sub-Banksian writing, too. I was reluctant to judge it on its first half alone. Maybe the twist WASN'T going to be the collision between fantasy and reality, as in so many stories written by writers who've just discovered metanarrative? Maybe I WOULD come to care about one of the protagonists? Sadly, neither of these came to pass.

Andy Clarke's art also lacks dynamism, particularly in the design of the Clench. OK, fine, it's an utterly inhuman entity, but that means I have now idea what it's doing or in which direction it's heading. In fact, at points it's rather as though the page has been covered up with samples from some particularly nasty 70's wallpaper.

File under "Forget" and hope that the upcoming Synnamon sees this team reach the peaks that they should be capable of.

Heavy Duty - Part 1

Mega City technology at its finest...

Synopsis: A fatty has been impaled on a spire of the Lo-Cal slimming tablet company headquarters – but this fatty was ex Wally Squad. He was Orwell Green, and his CO Thora has arrived to meet Nixon. Despite being younger than Nixon, she has had body change technology to make her look like an old woman, just as Judge Green had to make him appear like a fatty. They use a variant of face change tech to change the body, and fill it with fat taken from Resyk. Nixon asks why Green was sent in. She is told that he was investigating fitness regimes run by Low Cal towers which have left fatties signing over their wills to Lo Cal and then mysteriously ending up dead. Green was body changed to investigate, and now Nixon goes through the same procedure – emerging from the body changing machine as a fatty herself …

GH: A full 13 weeks of Henry Flint art on one strip (and even more after this with the ABC Warriors!) is not to be sniffed at. And with the initial image of the fatty impaled on the tower Flint once again gets us hooked on this tale from the beginning. I’m also impressed with the way he seems to come up with a new and individual look for Nixon every week, reinforcing her as a believable Wally squad judge.

Kudos to Williams too, as this single episode makes it very clear that the 10 weeks spent developing Nixon’s character was time worth spending. She’s now a more well rounded character as a result, and as this episode shows, there’s plenty of scope for Low Life stories from here on in. Indeed, the entertainment from this episode alone shows that this is a character that we really deserve to see more from – just make sure it’s Flint on the artwork duty…

JM: Finally, an artist I can't grumble about! Henry Flint's dirty, gritty art is just a perfect match for Rob Williams' narrative, and being set loose on brand-new characters and a brand-new area of Mega City One has really allowed him to stretch his wings. When I heard this episode was going to feature a Fatty I was a little worried, as Flint tends to the sharp & angular, but I needn't have worried - the cellulite on display here even gets ahead of Chris Weston's over in the Megazine (and that's saying something!)

I like the idea of Aimee having a different face in every series, distinguishable only by the broken nose. It fits with the nature of the Wally Squad, and if Flint is ever unavailable for art duties it means that almost anyone else could take over without the usual feeling of "that isn't what they look like!"

The more broadly comedic nature of this second series sits well with the character, and proves her versatility. Handled as well as it has been so far, this could be a real long-runner.