Synopsis by David Knight
1st review by Richmond Clements
2nd Opinion by Ed Berridge

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

RC: I was fool at first glance. I saw it was drawn by Boo Cook, and assumed it was an Asylum cover. On second glance however, I realised my mistake. Great image this one, well and truly announcing the return of Mr. Random. If you’re paying attention that is.

EB: Nice cover by Boo Cook, who seems to have become the unofficial cover artist for Lobster Random. Cook’s new style works very well with the character and he achieves a good likeness. The layout of the cover is also nice: Random takes the foreground, his torture victim filling the background (and actually pulling off the trick of making him look worse than in the interior of the comic. The blowtorch also does a nice job of highlighting the cover tagline, and I’m sure Gavin will be happy to see that the logo remains comfortably free from obscurity. The only niggle I might have is that, as the co-creator of the series, Carl Critchlow has yet to have a cover for Lobster Random, and I can only hope that he gets one later during the series.

Total War - Part 4

Not a dud after all...

Synopsis: While Rad Squad judges examine and attempt to defuse the nuclear bomb in the basement of Ezra Pound Block, Chief Judge Hershey authorises the evacuation of all blocks within blast range. Hundreds of thousands of citizens throng the streets as zoom train services are curtailed and hover-flights out of the city become fully booked. Popular protests have begun, with citizens motivated by self-preservation demonstrating against the judges. Judge Dredd continues with the interrogation of Total War co-ordinator Oddie Radley, using a combination of physical violence and truth drugs. Softened up, Oddie lets slip that someone outside Total War may be orchestrating the bomb plot, and that Oddie’s contact is called Yugene and has lots of hair.

Oddie suffers a heart attack before he can reveal any more. Judges investigating the Ezra Pound bomb discover a transceiver that allows the bomb to communicate with the bombers and enables the bomb to be remotely detonated from anywhere. In a luxuriously appointed meeting room, three shadowy figures receive the bomb’s message that it has been compromised and will proceed to detonate ahead of schedule. Forty seconds later the bomb explodes.

RC: Wagner again shows himself to be the master of cranking up the tension. He tells the story with effortless ease, and manages to cram a hell of a lot of plot into one episode; flicking between Dredd’s bloody interrogation, the bomb disposal squad, Hershey, and our first peek at those behind the bombing campaign.

Henry Flint. I’m in two minds about his work. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, very good in fact. I just don’t thing he’s this Saviour figure that some people seem to paint him as. While he can throw us some brilliant imagery with incredible regularity, I have yet to see anything in his work that doesn’t remind me of another artist.

EB: Things continue to heat up in Judge Dredd. Wagner certainly seems to be enjoying himself, and there are already a multitude of strands converging that we can expect to see climaxing in the story, such as the Dredd/Vienna/Nimrod story, or the mysterious leaders of Total War. Also causing much interest this issue was Dredd’s interrogation/torture of a suspect in order to try and extract information about the terrorist group. If this were a more typically prosaic action story, we would be told to look on this as a positive move by the protagonist, but due to Wagner’s excellent writing here, we might see it as an unfortunate necessity, but we never see Dredd’s actions as in any way positive.

Of course, the star of the show here has to be Henry Flint. It’s been a busy year for him, what with Tharg’s Alien Invasions, Judge Dredd, Lowlife and ABC Warriors, yet this might well be his best work yet. The level of detail is amazing – just check the fourth page view of a panic stricken Mega City 1, which must surely rank up there with recent cityscapes by the likes of Chris Weston and Andy Clarke. Here Flint pulls off the trick of having a genuinely packed looking Mega City – it is often a problem for artists drawing the huge crowds needed in these sorts of stories, but Flint achieves it here with aplomb. One can only hope that (unless something goes spectacularly wrong with the storytelling) this story will be released as a collection in the not too distant future.

Tooth & Claw - part 1

Random back at what he does best...

Synopsis: Lobster Random is a torturer-for– hire. Having become bored with undertaking one criminal escapade after another, and following a break-up with his robot lover, he has taken on legitimate employment as the personal torturer to the masochistic, evil and depraved dictator, Carriaglo Morturosa. Lobster Random has his employer chained to a torture rack, as per the terms of their contract, and ignoring requests for more torture, proceeds to tell him that his fortress’s defences are disabled and a rebel army is on its way. Lobster Random accepts the rebels’ payment for the double-cross and leaves Morturosa to their tender mercies. Later, while Random counts his wages on a hillside, the fortress is obliterated from orbit by a ship belonging to a robot, backed up by an incredibly strange-looking henchman and a flying monkey, proposing, at gunpoint, to hire him for another job.

RC: Very much a ‘new readers start here’ episode, with a terrific introduction to the character. Reading this, I remembered how much I’d enjoyed the first series, and I’m looking forward to see where this one is going. So far so good. It’s a lovely twist to have the torturer disgusted by his victim’s enjoyment of the pain, and Lobster’s solution to this quandary was perfect.

Critchlow’s at is the high standard that we have come to expect from this Droid. Great character designs and nice colours. All this and a flying monkey too! You’ve never had it so good.

EB: It’s nice to finally see the return of this series that successfully debuted last year. This is probably my personal favourite of the strips that Simon Spurrier has penned for 2000AD and the Megazine. The main character is great, one of those ones that seemed to appear with its own voice fully formed (although he may have been cribbing a little bit from Steve Moore’s Axel Pressbutton), and the mix of black humour and extreme violence has always worked well for the comic. Yet Spurrier has a lovely turn of phrase, with terms like ‘Fractalbots’, ‘Tazer Bubbles’, ‘Blattershields’ and ‘Fungusmines’ both raise a smile, whilst at the same time are inventive descriptions that paint an immediate mental image.

Again though, the art here is just as important as the writing. I have to admit that I’m a long term fan of Carl Critchlow, and I absolutely love his work on the self-published Thrud the Barbarian. So Critchlow’s work on this strip almost seems like an extension of his other work on Thrud, depicting, as he does, both extreme violence and extreme idiocy with equal aplomb. His character designs are also great, whether it’s for Random himself or Carriaglo Morturosa. However, his best work in the issue comes on the last page of the episode, when we are introduced to a monkey with rotorblades coming out of its back, a kind of gelatinous, see-through blob with a bow-tie and a cudgel, and some kind of crazy red female sex robot. And if that doesn’t get you wanting to read next weeks issue, I don’t know what will.

The Furzt Case - Part 6

Samantha gives her grandad some air...

Synopsis: On board his yacht, criminal mastermind Nippon Furzt pumps suffocating gas into the box containing Sam Slade’s living, severed head. While Sam’s robots, Hoagy and Stogie, make a run for it, Samantha Slade leaps down to attack the yacht’s robot captain, destroying it with one blow from a claw hammer. Furzt launches a martial arts attack at Samantha and receives a hammer blow to the head. While Furzt and Samantha fight, Hoagy and Stogie lack the wits to save Sam, but the gas nozzle comes loose from Sam’s box. With Samantha defeated, Furzt reconnects the gas supply, and while his back is turned, Samantha shoots his head off with Sam’s gun.

It transpires that Furzt was an imposter – a robot villain whose brain was inserted into the real Nippon Furzt’s head by a crooked surgeon. With Sam Slade and Stiv Aggro rescued, the companions set sail for Brit-Cit to have Sam’s head grafted onto Furzt’s body.

RC: So this ends, like the Earth, not with a bang, but with a whimper. There have been flashes along the way of what Robo Hunter should be, the odd flash of lunacy here and there has managed to make me laugh, but it hasn’t got the sheer scope of nuttiness the original series had.

I can only hope that the move to Brit Cit that seems to be on the cards will lift the series upon its return.

As for Gibson, he seems to be rising to the challenge of the script, i.e. not at all. There’s a frame every now and then where it looks as if he’s enjoyed drawing it, but most of this looks like he’s got one eye on the paycheck.

EB: There has been something of a mixed reaction to the recent revival of Robo-Hunter. I would agree with most people that the initial introduction story was not all that it could have been hoped for. But I have to say that, despite the opinions of (seemingly) almost every other reader (online at least) I have rather enjoyed this most recent series. It harks back to the classic days of Robo-Hunter, when the strip was mainly read by kids aged between 8 and 14. It’s a more gentle tale, perhaps, than the standard of story we, as adult readers, are now used to, but that proves to be a welcome change of pace for the comic, and a welcome breath of fresh air. The writing by Alan Grant does wobble occasionally – the plots are nothing more than perfunctory devices of getting from a to b, and as such don’t seem to hold any inherent meaning. But essentially this is only to allow us, the reader to get the full advantage of the characters. Grant also still manages to pull a few subtle comic gems out of the bag, such as the description of Furzt’s boat: “The boat converts into an aircraft. Sometimes Mr. Furzt goes flying.” Being the whole extent of the information gleaned. This might not be as immediate a comedy style as some other strips, but for me it’s just as funny.

Ian Gibson’s art for the series has been great, but occasionally patchy. Like Henry Flint in Dredd, Gibson has produced some great crowd scenes, and his depiction of the characters, particularly Smantha and the first appearance of Furzt are genuinely beautiful to look at. However, his frequent use of a white background in a colour strip can occasionally look confusing, as though he simply ran out of time, and was unable to finish them. Yet Gibson’s almost unique use of line and paintwork still works extremely well, and he always seems right at home when having to design bizarre robots and strange creatures.

The series does suffer somewhat from the sidelining of Sam (original) as a comedy character on the sidelines with Hoagy and Carlos Sanchez Robostogie, when he used to be a voice of reason, but hopefully with a body restored to him (even if it’s not his) his reputation will be restored too. Although this story is not perhaps all that it might have been, now that I think the set-up is out of the way (the introduction of Samantha and the restoration of Sam’s body), I think we will see a steady improvement in the series, and I for one hope that it returns soon.

Part 5

Run runs.

Synopsis: Patrill, an aquatic alien, attempts to escape the refugee island by swimming away, but is stopped by a torpedo bomb. In an outback town Holt and Buchanan come round from the effects of the non-fatal toxic cloud released by Spore. Buchanan considers killing Holt to avert the future glimpsed in Holt’s vision, but Holt persuades him to warn the army that Run and Spore are heading for Sydney. A barricade is set up, and the alien terrorists are met with an armed battalion. Spore tells Run that he couldn’t go through with killing Holt, and it’s his fault the warning got to Sydney ahead of them. The aliens run at the armed battalion as the soldiers open fire. Back on the refugee island, Skunk pronounces “screw this!” as the body of an alien drowned by the warships surrounding the island is washed up on the beach.

RC: This is still a mite confusing. I think what It’ll need is a read of the entire series once it’s finished. That’s not to say I’m not enjoying it. The fish guy getting blown up on the first page was a nice bit of writing. But what really lifts this series is the complex political theme threaded through the tale. The conversation between Holt and Buchanan, with Holt’s assertion that there are ‘no sides here’ resonates brilliantly with what we are witnessing our own governments are up to as we speak.

Oh, and the art’s fantastic too.

EB: An interesting start to this episode, as we see the way the humans are keeping the aliens, trapped and desperate, on the island. Rob Williams’ writing is clearly well intentioned and motivated, and indeed it can be very affecting, like in the opening page. Unfortunately, he does sometimes slip into the slightly mawkish, particularly when Holt and Buchanan are together. This is not helped by the fact that the roles of the two protagonists are still not very clear – what exactly is it that happened to Holt in the first series, what are Buchanan’s real motivation? The series itself feels rather rushed, and to be honest it seems like it could do with a few more episodes to spread itself across. However, I don’t want to prejudge the series, as all these points may well be pulled together for a successful and satisfying ending.

On the other hand, what can be said about Boo Cook’s art that hasn’t already been said? His art has constantly grown since he was first published in the comic, and this is, without a shadow of a doubt, his best work to date. Cook still has the ‘Gibsonic’ knack for designing funky-looking alien creatures, but this new ‘painted’ style has really allowed him to stretch himself on his human characters, greatly heightening their realistic look, when judged against last years ‘Dead Men Walking’. But for me, the artistic highlights of this issue are the little details, like the excellent colouring of the power-watsits on Buchanan’s backpack, or the close-up details of one of the dead soldiers killed by Spore, all produced in grey/blue and very similar in fact to the beginning of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Traitor to his Kind - Part 6

Billy Glum pays the price for helping Alpha...

Synopsis: Under torture by electric chair, Billy Glum tells Nelson Culliver where he’ll find Johnny Alpha. At the Wrestler’s Arms, Johnny and Wulf, disguised as members of a mutant religious brotherhood, are met by their Mutant Liberation Army contact, Walton Fuzz. Outside, Anti-Mutant Squad police are dropping out of hover transports by tractor beam and surrounding the pub. Walton Fuzz leads Johnny and Wulf out via a secret tunnel while the police violently restrain mutants in the pub and raining down gunfire on rioters from above. Johnny and Wulf are led to a garage where they meet Spider, a mechanic and pilot, who will take them to Shrewsbury to meet a contact who will introduce them to King Clarkie’s captors in Wales.

RC: Tell you what; old Clacton Fuzz must have put it about a bit, eh?

Wagner started of the prog reminding us of how he is the master, and just in case we’d all forgotten by the time we reached the end of the issue, he goes and shows us again. It also makes me worried about the man too. In both the scripts he has in this weeks prog, we have someone being tortured...

What this weeks episode also has though, is a sense of moving the story forward. Which I think is a skill that a lot of other writers do not seem to possess, or at best seem to find important.

Carlos. He’s pretty good. Loved the ‘Minority Report’ style attack on the bar and the effortless pacing of the escape through the cellar into the toilet.

EB: It’s great to see Johnny Alpha return to Portrait of A Mutant territory, after so long for both the character and his creators. Unfortunately, this episode we start with one of the series few returning characters, Billy Glum, being horrible tortured. And by Alpha’s previously never mentioned half-brother, to make matters worse. Wagner has made something of a narrative leap with yet another extension to the strips core characters, and I’m sure Johnny had a half brother in another story, didn’t he (Lord Sagan, was it)? Yet I’m willing to follow Wagner on this one, not least because the story itself is so compelling. I can’t remember seeing Alpha this much of a tight ball of suppressed rage since, well, the ‘Rage’ storyline many moons ago. It’s also nice to note that Wagner throws in little details, little nods to both Alpha’s history and the history of Mutant suffrage in the strips history, such as the characters of Glum, or Walton Fuzz, the son of Clacton Fuzz, one of the Generals of the Mutant Army alongside Johnny Alpha from Portrait of A Mutant.

Carlos Ezquerra has done some of his best work on Strontium Dog. As an artist he has drawn almost every single episode ever printed. And yet sometimes his (comparatively) new computer art can sometimes lose the rough sharpness that his inks used to achieve with alarming regularity back in the 1980’s (something I felt by the end of the last Strontium Dog story, ‘The Headley Foot Job’). Yet, like last years ‘The Tax Dodge’, I really couldn’t imagine this particular story being drawn any other way. Whether it’s Johnny’s grim face underneath his monk’s hood, his fury at the massacre of the mutants at the pub, the painful torture of Billy Blum or the large panal of the police surrounding the Wrestler’s Arms, his artwork is exactly spot, and is as much of a joy as it ever was.

In all, this tale makes a nice change of pace from the earlier comedy tales, and it would be nice to see the series alternate between comedy and drama in the way that it used to more than a decade ago. To be honest, I would be quite happy to see this serial run as long as Portrait of A Mutant, some twenty-odd instalments, and we’d be very lucky readers if that we’re the case.