2000AD Prog 1443 - 15 June 2005
	Judge Dredd (Rennie / Currie) Atavar 3 (Abnett/Elson) Shakara (Morrison / Flint) Sinister Dexter (Abnett / Davis) Caballistics Inc. (Rennie / Reardon) Synopsis and review by Richard Pearce 2nd Opinion by Leigh Shepherd 3rd Opinion by Sam Wilkinson Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

RP: Simon Davis turns out a typically attractive cover that is clearly inspired by film posters for the 1970s film versions of Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" and, more relevantly, "Murder on the Orient Express". It's a smart decision that sets the tone for the story beginning inside and introduces the key players, and the careful use of appropriate typefaces is a welcome touch that finishes the cover nicely.

LS: SB Davis is good at heads, so when he draws seven of them, you know he isn’t going to make too many mistakes. The train is a bit wimpy though, and not particularly impressive. Still, it's another in a run of covers that are trying something a bit different and as such, it's hard to hold such nitpicking against it.

SW: I'm somewhat in two minds about this cover, and can't put my finger on exactly why. Simon Davis's picture is an effective one, succeeding in its task of making us all think about murder mysteries on trains and the like, but as a cover I don't think it's all that effective; it fails to grab one's attention and demand 'buy me' in the way that a cover really should, possibly due to the rather bland background colouring.

Blood Trails - Part 4

George, er... I mean Travis, takes aim

Synopsis: At a retreat in the Black Sea Sov Southern Territories, Anatoli Kazan - Warlord Kazan's crippled clone (last seen in Gulag) - meets with his aide, Yuri, to discuss their investigation of Vienna. Based on what Yuri tells him Kazan determines that Vienna is Dredd's niece and tells Yuri it is time for Pasha to "engage fully with the target".

Meanwhile, Dredd is with a team of Judges in the basement of a Mega-City car park waiting to arrest Myron Loont. Rico reports to Dredd with what little information he has found on "Travis Cole", Pasha's alias. Dredd tells him to contact Brit-Cit's Justice Department to find out more. Loont emerges from the car park lift and confronted by Dredd and his team. After a brief gunfight, Loont is subdued and arrested.

In a restaurant, Vienna and Pasha are having a meal with Renee and her boyfriend, Colin. Colin is from Brit-Cit and asks Pasha what part of the country he comes from. Pasha tells him he's from Oxford Sector, but almost has his cover compromised when he doesn't recognise a pub that Colin asks him about.

After the four finish the meal and say their goodbyes, Pasha takes a taxi to Colin and Renee's home in Joe Madden Block to take care of his earlier mistake. He surprises the couple by bursting into their apartment, then shoots Colin in the face and guns down Renee. As a final touch he places his pistol in Colin's hand, then calmly leaves the block...

RP: Blood Trails moves along briskly, revealing - for anyone who hadn't already guessed - who is behind the investigation of Dredd and Vienna. As always with Gordon Rennie's Dredd tales this story shows that he has a firm grasp of Dredd himself, but I have my doubts about exactly where this story is heading. Perhaps the reader is being carefully misled, and the story so far will be turned on its head in the next few weeks, but at the moment this tale is well written and crafted - but completely safe and predictable. Andrew Currie is still producing polished, professional art, but it just isn't a style that suits this story, or Dredd in general.

It's perhaps also worth mentioning that this is the third story in Rennie's "Clone Kazan" arc with a different artist. I appreciate that the pressures of weekly publication and artist availability mean that a single artist can't always be called on for each story in an ongoing storyline, but when stories like Savage, Slaine and Caballistics, Inc. are clearly being scheduled so that that can be arranged, I would like to see more care being given to Dredd, especially with Rebellion's new focus on reprinting recent Dredd stories.

LS: As with every story in the prog, this tale demands that you've been paying attention for the past couple of years. Thankfully, the synopses above should be pointing you in the direction of the previous tales this ties in with. Thought you could live without 2000AD Review's handy recaps? This prog begs to differ! Most immediately, the aftermath of Total War and Vienna's trip to Hospital are relevant, as are recent Democratic Terrorist tales and the one from a while back with Kazan's (oddly dissimilar) clone.

All these strands mix together with a new Vienna in Peril subplot to try and create another "Dredd as thriller" tale. It's not a bad move, as Wagner has been very successful with these kind of Dredd strips in recent years. For me personally, too much of this seems to cover old ground, either in terms of the previous Dredd stories (Sovs, Vienna as pawn to get to Dredd) or previous thriller clichés (Pasha's removal of Colin). The stories certainly building up to something, or so were told. Actually, I wish they wouldn't keep telling the readers when someone’s due to die, or how major a story is going to be, as all it does is ruin any surprise when the person dies or the world shaking event arises. I'm old enough to remember the shocks of Block Mania, where Giant died and half the Meg evaporated without so much as a warning!

One thing that I found a bit unlikely was Pasha's decision to off Colin. Surely that's more likely to blow his cover anything Colin might do - Couldn't he just avoid Colin until his job is done?

I liked Andrew Currie’s art on Doomsday, but I'm not quite as impressed with this outing. The caricatures are a little too obvious, and his Vienna is a bit too cute given the more masculine jawline other artists have given her. Beyond those quibbles, it is pretty decent Dredd art.

SW: As the story picks up the pace, and Gordon Rennie reveals that this is, as we all suspected, a crazy Sov plot, he magnanimously throws us a handful more clues and leads to keep us all guessing. The oft-used 'Ah, you're from <x>? Me too! Don't you remember <y>?' routine is used particularly well here, letting Rennie start the killing off of people close to the Dredd family, as well as demonstrate what a clever and dangerous bastard Pasha is. Why, though, did he use the Clooney face to do the job, despite his general affection for swapping faces a lot?

Andrew Currie's art is lovingly detailed and effectively drawn, crisp and clean while avoiding drawing any more famous people. Or, at least, I never noticed any.
One question, though: how, on panel two of page two, does a security robot not notice half a dozen judges hiding rather conspicuously a matter of feet away?

Part 1

The Atavar returns...

Synopsis: Continues from Atavar 2. In the depths of the Lumin Sphere, Imoti Landual Shra awakens. Shra is a member of an alien species known as the Riders: curious, multi-limbed beings who appear to be searching for some kind of change in the universe outside.

Fitting a mask to its face, Shra sets out beyond the Sphere to seek "the Death". As it drifts across strange, barren landscapes it detects something and moves closer to investigate. It finds a humanoid figure wielding blades and a cannon, battling a swarm of creatures...

RP: Atavar was a story hardly crying out for a sequel, let alone two. The first "book" struck me as little more than an extended Future Shock, while its sequel was cut so far adrift from the original as to be almost a separate strip. On the strength of this opening episode, it appears that the final installment of the saga is going to follow the same pattern. Time will tell whether Dan Abnett can bring this "trilogy" to a satisfying close.

Richard Elson's art is as solid and well realised as ever, but strikingly conservative in a series that focuses on the bizarre and alien.

LS: As Tharg seems well aware, this strip is the worst offender in terms of "previously in 2000AD" syndrome. He was a man, who died, and came back, and fought robots, then didn’t, but should have, then a big space cancer came along...I think. Luckily, The Mighty One is willing to sell you the answers in his future shop!

Not that reading it would give you much more insight to what's going on if your experience of the strip is anything like mine. A Flying alien goes out into the big bad messed up universe, and bumps into (presumably) Atavar. Perhaps a double length episode might have disguised the slightness of these 6 pages, as it did with the return of Shakara a couple of weeks ago (Five pages of Shakara.... draining!).

Like Abnett’s similarly universe spanning Durham Red, I feel a bit lost in the ‘epicness’ of it all to be particularly engaged.

SW: Dan Abnett's space opera begins afresh, with an opening episode in which not very much happens. I'll be frank: Atavar has always been something of a closed book to me, another vaguely interesting space story among hundreds. This first episode of the third book does little to dissuade me, though I am willing to accept the possibility that the series might progress beyond 'Atavar finds things to fight, talk to, and then fight again.' Unfortunately, that's just what I fear will happen in this upcoming storyline.

Richard Elson's art is, as ever, well suited to this kind of story, and he clearly gets a kick out of visualising a variety of alien creatures and situations. Unfortunately, it's also something of a downfall for him: he tends to utilise the same imaginative techniques for stories like this and A.H.A.B., for instance, which means that there's always an element of similarity between alien or robot characters in otherwise different stories.

The Assassin - Part 3

Fist unleashes his speciality...

Synopsis: On the planet Azaki 12, a castle is being laid siege by a warlord and his army. From out of the hordes surrounding the castle, a huge figure bounds toward the keep. This is Fist, a cyclopean berserker with a monstrous artificial left arm. He pounds the base of the castle causing it to collapse, much to the displeasure of the warlord who had hired him. He hurls insults at Fist, who turns and crushes him. Valentine D'eath has been watching all of this and now he steps forward to reintroduce himself to Fist.

Valentine is recruiting old accomplices to help him with the assassination of Shakara, and next on his list is Phaze. Phaze is a Shifter, a creature who can summon versions of her self from across the multiverse to fight in this dimension. She's initially reluctant to help, but Phaze and Valentine used to be lovers, and Valentine uses all of his charm - and a spot of flattery - to tempt her back.

Valentine's next recruit is Void, a sentient, psychotic Dwarf Galaxy. He's scornful of Valentine's request, asking him why he shouldn't just kill him right there. Valentine has a proposal for Void: if he wins a card game with him, he can take everything he owns and kill him; if he loses, he has to do one last job for Valentine. Unfortunately for Void, he's an inveterate gambler and can't resist Valentine's gambit. He loses and in a fit of rage demolishes the casino. Standing in the wreckage, Void asks Valentine who they're going to kill and Valentine tells him:

"Something that should've died a long, long time ago..."

RP: The return of Shakara to the pages of 2000AD in prog 1441 was a welcome antidote to the tiresome adventures of Sláine and Dan Abnett's reimagined V.C.s, and in the weeks since it's become the first story I turn to. That's due in large part to Henry Flint's remarkable art, a style that echoes two of my favourite 2K artists, Mike McMahon and Kevin O'Neill, without ever simply aping them. His design work here is striking, from the alien-bondage-freak look of Shakara itself and the raging, one-eyed Fist, right down to small touches like images on playing cards and slot machines.

Robbie Morrison seems to be riffing off classic 2000AD strips like Nemesis the Warlock and ABC Warriors, and there is a slight feeling of déjà vu to this "recruiting the team" passage, but it's handled lightly enough to overcome this sense of familiarity. The focus on D'eath himself has clearly paid off; he's strange enough to fit in to this universe, but his very human character and motivations give him an appeal that the wholly alien Shakara lacks.

LS: Now Shakara on the other hand, does epic quite well. Certainly it was one of the plus points of the original run, beside Henry Flint's gorgeous art. Set against these positives were the repetitive nature of Shakara's exploits and the invulnerability of its star. The fact that the plot of Shakara could be boiled down to mysterious Alien freedom fighter travelling the universe in his spacecraft and uttering only one word also meant it had to brave a few comparisons with the superior Nemesis the Warlock.

For all that, the original run was a fair stab at trying to do something different yet at the same time old school. The new run seems to have learnt from past weaknesses, adding in some back story to Shakara and developing some (hopefully) credible foes for him to face. In doing so, the alien angle to the strip has suffered (all of the villains have very human traits - gamblers and lovers, even the sentient Galaxy!), but it does seem to have gained a bit more depth.

There's little to say about the art, that hasn't been said before - Henry Flint is 2000AD's premier artist from the last decade, and never knowingly undersells a panel, let alone a strip!

SW: Imaginative, original story and characters, fantastic art courtesy of the talented Mr Flint, and a man with a giant hand. Where can you go wrong? Well, with the current series of Shakara, it seems you can't. The first single-length story of the run doesn't suffer from the cut in page length; instead it allows a focus on the elements of the story which don't involve Shakara, but rather the creations who populate his universe. It's these that I'm loving about this series - just as Joe Dredd is really a tool to show us Mega-City One, Shakara is just a means for us to explore this war-torn universe through him. There are a number of highlights in this episode, but among them has to be the sight of Valentine De'ath in a tux. The man has style.

Slow Train to Kal Kutter - Part 1

Mr Fuscus gets mussed...

Synopsis: Friday, aboard a train in Indian National Territory.

Isobel - last seen in Just Business, apparently shot dead by Kal Cutter - is hiding in a carriage. She's startled by gunfire outside, and when someone opens the door and says her name she looks up - into the barrel of a gun.

The previous Tuesday. Somewhere in the Balkan wastelands.

Ramone and Finnigan skid to a halt at the end of a car chase. Smoke and flame rises in the distance from the vehicle they were pursuing. As they go to check the crashed vehicle a figure emerges from the flames. The duo recognise him just as he opens fire on them. They take cover behind the Edsel to return fire, and Sinister tells Dexter that the "kid's really dropped us in it this time!"

Downlode. The previous Monday.

Ramone and Finnigan arrive at the Belle Epoch, a glitzy Downlode restaurant, for a meeting with Senor Apellido (last seen in Just Business). They're met by his henchmen, Mr Albus and Mr Fuscus, and led to Apellido. Apellido is furious, telling the pair that he has a problem - and that means they have a problem.

Downlode. Monday evening.

Kal Cutter is aboard the Suleiman Express, a luxury train bound for Mumbai. He's talking on the phone to his brother, Sanjeev, telling him that he's messed up and that he's on his way home. He returns to his carriage, where Isobel is waiting for him…

RP: I'm firmly of the opinion that the duo are long past their use-by-date, but very occasionally Dan Abnett writes a story that reminds me of what was exciting about the strip in the first place. It's clear from the outset that this will be a more tragic story than we've been used to from Sin/Dex recently - possibly harking back to Eurocrash - and this, coupled with the focus on Kal Cutter, promises something more substantial than the filler that this reader has come to expect from the series.

It helps that Simon Davis - the definitive Sinister Dexter artist, in my opinion - is back on the strip. The series has never looked better than it does in his hands, and the promise of exotic locations ahead on this adventure should give him the opportunity to equal his work on Gunshark Vacation.

Surprisingly enough, this is an intriguing opening episode that bodes extremely well for this adventure.

LS: As was speculated at the time, Kal Cutter didn't shoot Isobel all those progs ago, and it seems Apellido has found out. Setting aside the incompetence of Sinister and Dexter in allowing this to happen in the first place (wouldn’t Apellido have wanted some evidence of her death at the time?), the story promises to be less throwaway than many previous tales, and may be all the better for it. SB Davis art always adds a bit of class to the strip that he's made his own, so we can but wait and see how this one develops.

SW: Typical. Dan Abnett gets two strips in the same prog, and I've never had one. I'll forgive Tharg, though, because it looks like this run for the hitmen might well be quite enjoyable. Abnett's decision to give us a story told in a series of flashbacks, feeding us the story jigsaw-style may well work out, especially for a story that's beyond the typical 'let's whack someone' guff. If the rest of the story's written as well as this opener, I might actually be looking forward to reading Sin/Dex every week, instead of treating it as the chore it can often become.

Simon Davis on art duty is, of course, excellent, and it's good to see Tharg making sure the best stories are matched with the best artists. One puzzler, though. Whatever happened to the 'this is Downlode, the city that forgot to pay its dry cleaning bill' bits? I quite liked those.

Northern Dark - Part 1

Jenny goes out for a spin

Synopsis: Continues from the end of Safehouse. At the Caballistics, Inc. headquarters, Jenny is meant to be recovering from her battle with the angel in Safe House. Instead, she's preparing for a night on the town.

Chapter, Verse and Brand are in Inverness-shire investigating the latest in a string of brutal murders. Brand suspects that something supernatural is responsible for the killings, and uses his slightly rusty geomancy to pinpoint a nearby stone circle. The three go to investigate, while in the woods nearby several bestial figures watch and wait…

Meanwhile, Ravne and Ness are in Fleshmarket Close in Edinburgh. Ness notices that Ravne seems to know his way around, and asks him if he's been here before. Ravne tells him he has - though not since 1737. They arrive at a pub called The Resurrection Man's Rest, but when the pair step inside they're met by an angry
mob, all of whom seem to recognise Ravne

Back in London, Jenny is drinking in a Soho pub. A man approaches her and asks if she's looking for some company. She tells him no, but that she's looking for some fun and suggests that they go somewhere quieter to talk about it…

RP: The fifth and final strip in this week's prog, and a welcome return appearance. I've made no bones about my appreciation of this strip: it's one of a handful of stories from the past five years that can stand comfortably alongside other 2000AD classics, and that can lift a prog whenever it appears.

This episode is no exception, and we're launched straight into the aftermath of Safe House. Rennie deftly handles several strands, as three of the team head to northern Scotland to find out what's been killing people in Inverness-shire, while Ravne and Ness visit Edinburgh for what appears to be another revelation about Ravne's origins, and Jenny continues her own little adventures back in London.

It's this smart juggling of multiple storylines, posing and answering questions in equal measure that makes Caballistics, Inc. so compelling. The reader is fed just enough to intrigue and solve some minor mysteries, but is always left wanting more. It stands in stark contrast to other ongoing stories in the prog, and indeed to Gordon Rennie's other contribution in this prog, Blood Trails. From the very first episode several years ago, there has been a feeling that anything could happen, that any character could be introduced or removed at a moment's notice, that gives Caballistics a power that other tales lack.

Of course, Dom Reardon's deceptively simple art is a large factor in the appeal of the strip. His work here is as enjoyable as ever, and I'm particularly looking forward to seeing more of the grotesque beastmen glimpsed on page three.

LS: Resurrection seems to be the name of the game in Caballistics again, with Jenny recovering from being sliced and diced in the previous tale fairly quickly. You have to question why the "good" members of Caballistics Inc hang around, teaming up with the greater evil in order to defeat the lesser doesn't seem to me the best career move. When even the Lord Almighty is after your work colleagues (haven't we all been there?), you just know it's time to update your CV. As it is, they seem quite happy to be chums with the Damned and it would be nice if the story could touch on this seeming incongruity (especially the God Fearing Lawrence Verse, who witnessed the Angel attack on Jenny).

Even with those thoughts nipping away at the back of my mind, Caballistics continues to be a worthy strip, always pushing forward (sometimes a little too quickly) and developing the characters and their back story. Dom Reardon’s art continues to improve week on week

SW: Cabs return for another of Gordon Rennie's excellently scribed tales, so I won't begrudge that he gets two strips as well. As is his wont, he's got the team handily broken down into a few groups, so that we can not only get three times the tension at the end of an episode, but he can also give each of his characters the dialogue and development they deserve - there isn't room for them all to be squeezing around the corpse of Tom Baker, for one thing, and the sharing of dialogue wouldn't function at all.

Nice to see Dr. Brand doing some magic of his own, instead of being a walking encyclopaedia or gawper as he's occasionally in danger of becoming. The closing with two separate, contrasting bar scenes is a particularly nice touch, I thought.