Synopsis by David Knight
1st review by Gavin Hanly
2nd Opinion by Leigh Shepherd

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

GH: A suitably apocalyptic cover following last week's Judge Dredd events. I wasn't so sure about this on a first glance, but Percival has produces a mean looking Dredd visage, and although the whole thing is clearly computer generated, it does convey that "big Judge Dredd story inside" feeling.

LS: Inside the prog, "Total War" is doing a good job of holding its own against similarly themed classics like Block Mania. The cover is also reminding me of a particular old school classic - Bolland's cover for prog 197 and Dredd being nuked off his Lawmaster by the Pirates of the Black Atlantic. Sadly, there's no comparison to be made here, with nothing more than an ugly and bored looking Dredd surrounded by generic computer flame effects. It really doesn't sell the idea of the threat to the City - you have to squint to realise that there's a mushroom cloud, and Dredd looks
more like he's miffed because he's missed the last synthi-roll at the Sector House canteen rather than contemplating the horror that Total War might unleash!

Total War - Part 3

The Justice Department's dental plan...

Synopsis: As Vienna Dredd returns home, her taxi is diverted around the blast area centred on Sector 4’s Boingbowl following a nuclear detonation by pro-democracy terrorists. A force shield has been erected around the burning crater. Her uncle, Judge Dredd, has left her a vid-phone message in her absence advising her to leave the city. The news media report that Total War have announced a 48-hour deadline before the next device is detonated. Tek judges McTighe and Ramos estimate that the terrorists may be exaggerating their nuclear capability, and that realistically they are likely to have enough fissile material for no more than 10 devices. Dredd tells Chief Judge Hershey that the ongoing investigation into Total War’s command structure has so far identified the group’s leader in the central sectors. Oddie Radley is brought in for questioning. A medical examination reveals a cyanide capsule hidden in a hollow tooth, and Dredd starts to interrogate the suspect, when the Chief Judge is informed that a nuclear device has been found in the basement of Ezra Pound Block.

GH: Another excellent episode, with Wagner still able to throw in a large number of clever touches after all these years - the "Human Cab" being a prime example early in this week's story. Dredd's abrupt call to Vienna is right on the mark too, with Dredd showing as little concern as he can allow himself to.

Back with the rest of the story, this is beginning to look like an impossible situation for the judges and the way this tale is tying in with the events in Terror is becoming clear, as the Judges start to flex their muscles. But they still continue the form set out in Terror, by not letting the other members of Total War know that they're onto them (with the Judges' methods of extracting citizens from the population is both impressive and fascistic at the same time) . A vast amount of characters are being bandied about here, but Wagner seems at ease with all of them: a sign of a master storyteller.

As usual, Flint adds an apt cinematic level to the artwork, making this a blockbuster in every sense, while his designs of the Rad Suited judges are also excellent.

LS: I can always tell when Wagner's on a roll, because it's only when I come to review the story for this site and realise that not much has happened that it becomes clear what a master of suspense and drama he really is. Of course, He's always doing this with consumate ease, so it shouldn't really come as much of a surprise. Certainly not as much as a surprise as it was to realise that Henry Flint, master of the weird strip and king of all-out action, is just as at home with the slow-burn mood building that's going on here.

While there are many highlights this week, the final panel really did send a chill through this reader, hammering home the fact that the stakes haven't been so high since the opening episodes of Block Mania. Forget the so-called "Mega Epics" such as Judgement Day and Doomsday, where the City and its citizens are almost incidental to the plot. Focusing the large scale devastation onto specific places such as the Boing Bowl and Ezra Pound Block calls to mind the panic in Billy Carter Block, or the insanity of Dan Tanna's Block War, and give the threat a very real human face.

Escape

Luxaar's less than impressive catch-phrase...

Synopsis: On board women’s prison satellite C3SS-PT, known as the Cess Pit, prisoner Maya Doran fantasizes about the exciting life of Luxaar the Pirate Queen, and reads tales of her exploits as she dreams of escape. She is stunned to meet her heroine in the flesh when Luxaar herself is captured and brought to the Cess Pit as a prisoner. However, when she tells Luxaar of her admiration for her, Doran’s friendship is violently spurned. The prison governor has learned that Luxaar has planned an escape, and enlists Doran’s help in a scheme to thwart the escape plan. Doran is a cyberneticist imprisoned for murder. Governess Mallinson wants her to build a robot replica of Luxaar that will be teleported out by Luxaar’s pirate crew in her place, carrying a bomb that will destroy them. Anticipating treachery on the part of the governor, Doran builds a robot replica of herself instead, and disguises herself as the Pirate Queen, using her skills in designing prosthetic face panels and voice chips for androids. Doran is teleported over to the pirate ship to revel in piracy disguised as Luxaar, while her own robot replica, containing the explosives, detonates, annihilating the prison satellite and everyone on board.

GH: Another middling Future shock - as ever crucially hampered by the reader looking out for the twist right from the very first page. I've written in length about this before, but with the readers of 2000AD becoming ever more sophisticated (read "older") a new format is that isn't reliant on these spot-it-a-mile-away twists. This story is acceptable, but doesn't feel terribly original. The art is decent, but there's a clear stamp of Cliff Robinson on the inks and it's hard to tell exactly how good Crutchley's work would be on its own merits.

LS: Cliff Robinson has done this kind of job a few times before, lending his inks to a newer droids pencils. That said, this time it's with fairly lack lustre results. The fact that the pencils aren't a million miles away from what you'd expect from Cliff himself, the unusually scrappy inks give the impression that the art is the work of a second rate Robinson copiest more than anything else.

The Future Shock is fairly standard, and if you can ignore the gaping plot holes (is it likely that Doran would be given the materials she needed to create a duplicate of herself rather than Luxaar, as well as the lack of supervision necessary for her to complete a copy of herself and a Luxaar disguise?) it does the job of being a Future Shock solidly enough. The question as to whether the job of being a Future Shock is a particularly good thing is another matter! The only real annoyance I had with the strip was the final panel - is it really necessary to spell out what has happened by having Doran's mask hanging off in such a bizarre fashion? We've all read enough Future Shocks over the years to understand the twist by now, Tharg!

The Furzt Case - Part 5

Samantha gets deep...

Synopsis: Inside the head of a flying giant robot lizard that’s falling out of the sky, Samantha Slade wrestles with its six-foot lizard droid controller. Just as Samantha appears to be winning the fight, a miniature lizard droid emerges from a wall panel and knocks her out with a mallet. Nippon Furzt, nearby on his yacht, orders his robot sea captain, Fujimoto, to stop Grudzilla’s fall with a remote-controlled tractor beam. A force bubble envelops the giant robot, snapping off its head, which falls into the sea.

Grudzilla releases its grip, and Hoagy, Stogie and Sam board Furzt’s yacht. They are shown around Furzt’s exhibition of robo-hunters embalmed in dramatic dioramas fighting rogue robots, and see Sam’s preserved body ready to receive its missing head. Captain Fujimoto brings in the body of Slade’s old robo-hunter buddy Stiv Aggro, injected with pre-embalming drugs. Meanwhile, Samantha has regained consciousness and swum to the surface, and climbs up the anchor chain onto the deck, looking for revenge.

GH: This strip is unfortunately still rambling on with no sign of excitement in sight. Maybe there's a sense of looking at the past with road tinted spectacles, but surely the earlier Robo Hunter tales were a little more substantial than this? Decent artwork from Gibson helps, but it's clearly not the best he can do, and given the script, who can blame him. Certainly a case of one retro strip too far...

LS: It's a real shame that this strip still feels undercooked. Many of the right ingredients are there, and there are some nice touches - I liked the mini lizard with the hammer for example. However, there's enough missing from the classic recipe to leave me with the feeling that this is one revival too many.

For a start, the idea of Sam's head in a box could have sparked the story off into all manner of weird and wonderful places. As it is, the idea that Robohunters are viewed as celebrities reeks a little too much of some of the storylines we had to endure during the Mark Millar period - not a good memory to stir! Another problem I have is the fact that since Samantha has appropriated Sams persona lock, stock and barrel, it's left little for Sam to do. His current role is in danger of making him one of the three stooges along with Hoagy and Stogie and that doesn't ring true for me. Sam was always the only sane one in an insane world, and I'm worried he'll become
more Robo Goonie than Robo Hunter...

Having said that, it's probably not all as bad as I've painted it, but these revivals always face an uphill struggle in the face of their reputation and the inevitable comparisons that will be drawn. This is probably magnified if the characters have been ill served by previous writers and reinventions. Like Rogue Trooper before it, I'm drawn to the conclusion that unless the new strip can get anywhere near the heights of it's original run, it's probably best left alone.

Part 5

Holt Wrestles with himself...

Synopsis: Holt dreams he is being chased by an alien monster, which pushes him over a cliff into a river and drops down into it to confront him. Face to face with his adversary, he sees that it is a monstrous version of himself, which tells him to stop fighting it and demands to be ‘let in’.

Holt was asleep in the cockpit of a military aircraft in which he and Buchanan are searching for the rogue aliens Run and Spore. Holt’s senses lead them to an outback town where he detects the recent presence of the fugitives. The town appears deserted, but they find a bar piled with people killed by toxic alien spores. The word ‘WAR’ is spelled out on the floor in blood. Holt receives a vision of the future in which Sydney is filled with corpses and deadly spores are carried on the wind. While Holt is incapacitated by an apparent seizure, Run and Spore attack. Run knocks Buchanan to the ground, damaging his filter mask, and Spore emits a cloud of poison.

GH: The art is clearly the best thing about this series. The return of "painted" art to 2000AD in recent years has been a promising one, and the use of computer assistance has meant that painted strips shouldn't be saddled with the "rushed finish" appearance that they often were in the past. Boo Cook has improved dramatically the longer he's been on 2000AD and the switch to colour art has clearly proved to be a well informed move.

Unfortunately, I don't feel I can say the same about the storyline. I feel there's a good story trying to get out of Asylum, but it's having trouble deciding what it wants to be. The murky characterisations of the lead characters doesn't help in this area. We really don't know what is driving Holt or Buchanan yet, and with the character of Buchanan in particular, this is starting to prove a problem. Is he friend or foe? This is ground that seems worth covering, yet seems underwritten in the script. Asylum is readable, certainly, but needs to have a clearer purpose to really prove a success, and perhaps regain some of it's predecessor's black humour.

LS: I wasn't a fan of the original Asylum story, which I thought took an interesting premise and wasted it on a tale full cliches, mysterious and unlikely superpowers and one looooong fight. Since then, Rob Williams has turned in "Low Life", which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would based on my aversion to Asylum. Sadly, I'm not finding this second run for the characters any more rivetting than I did the first lot. Characterisation is all over the shop, the plot lurches along with the "aid" of convenient super powers (such as Holt being able to track aliens through the power of "kind of" being able to), and plainly dumb things happening (Buchanan not wearing his mask while wandering around a spore infected town).

On the plus side, Boo Cook's art continues to improve - the computer colouring looks nicer each week, and even though his style isn't up there with my favourites, so long as you can see an artist striving to improve on his last panel I'm more than happy.

Traitor to his Kind - Part 5

Alpha swears revenge..

Synopsis: Johnny Alpha contacts his sponsor Lord Negus to inform him of his progress and to request help with keeping Culliver’s Anti-Mutant Squad at bay. Negus says he’ll do what he can, but tells Alpha that police raids against mutants are increasing and that the danger to King Clarkie is worsening. Johnny concludes that he and Wulf can expect no assistance. Wulf asks about Johnny’s fraternal link to Culliver, and Johnny tells Wulf about his father’s adulterous relationship, and how his mother was humiliated by her husband parading in public with his mistress and illegitimate son.

Johnny saw his half-brother only once in his childhood. The second time they saw each other Alpha was fighting with the mutant resistance and Nelson Culliver emerged from the wreckage of a Kreeler gunship, claiming to be a captured mutant sympathiser. Culliver joined Johnny’s resistance band, fighting against the Kreelers, but secretly giving information to the enemy. Johnny discovered his brother’s treachery during a raid to liberate a concentration camp on Salisbury Plain, where Culliver rejoined his Kreeler allies. As Johnny reaches the end of his story, Wulf and Johnny hide their vehicle in the undergrowth and head into St. Albans disguised as monks. Elsewhere, Billy Glum, head of the Milton Keynes Mutant Association, is the prisoner of Nelson Culliver, and his interrogation is about to begin.

GH: The inclusion of the missing brother is clearly potential cliché ridden territory, and last week there were some concerns as to whether even John Wagner could pull it off. But with Dredd becoming very much a family affair these days, Wagner has developed a keen way of writing these situations. In addition, if the Alpha tales were to develop further, a considerable family nemesis, one to rival Kreelman, was necessary to add some drive behind the series. So this week's episode comes as something of a relief, with the duplcitous nature of Culliver well set up and a thirst for revenge laid in Alpha that should come to the fore in the latter episodes. So yes - it's still great...

LS: There really is little more to say than this: take your prog - open it to the page after Dredd and tear out all the pages up to the end of Asylum*. Now discard those pages and read the prog again. Can you honestly say that even if they'd only sold you a 16 page prog like the one you now hold in your hands, you would honestly feel cheated?

The introduction of another familial foe for Alpha should make for interesting times. Hopefully Culliver will survive this strip so that he can return at a later date to fulfill the rare role of returning stront villain. Off the top of my head I can only think of Stix (kind of!), the Weerd Brothers and NBK himself as making it through more than one encounter with Alpha, so I'm hoping the double-crossing git will get his comeuppance later rather than sooner. The stront continuity geek in me would be interested to know if this story is set before the events of Outlaw, or after...

Ezquerra's art is, as ever, flawless.

* Please note that we take no responsibility for any loss or damage that may occur to your prog from this suggestion. Don't let your prog fall into the hands of a Grexnix who would actually follow this advice!