2000AD Prog 1469 - 4 January 2005
	Judge Dredd (Wagner / Goddard) Caballistics Inc. (Rennie / Reardon) Slaine (Mills / Langley) The Ten-Seconders (Williams / Harrison) Strontium Dog (Wagner / Ezquerra) Cover: Carlos Ezquerra

Synopsis by David Knight
1st opinion by David Knight
2nd opinion by Robert Cornell

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

Cover Review

DK: Depicting Johnny Alpha, Wulf and Shaggy Fuzz with their heads shaved, but not saying much more than that, this isn’t a cover that distinguishes itself greatly. It didn’t jump out at me from the newsagent’s shelf, partly due to the uniformity of colour achieved by echoing the red of Wulf’s gloves and the sunset in the red border. Furthermore, from a marketing point of view it can’t add up putting one of your most well-known characters on the cover with its distinctive likeness so disguised.

RC: A chucklesome cover, although presumably new readers won’t get the joke. Last year’s covers were a bit “cartoony” for my taste but this is Ezquerra cartoony.

Your Beating Heart - Part 1

Surgery Mega City 1 style...

Synopsis: In Berlin, July 2080, country singer Henk Villems is shot dead through the heart in a nightclub during a performance of his number “Your Beating Heart”. 46 years later, in April 2126, a bandit murders a hiker in the Desolation of Krakov. Outside Brit-Cit in May 2127, the German driver of a motor home picks up a hitcher on Highway 1, drugs him, ties him up and cuts out his heart.

In present-day Mega-City One, February 2128, the same killer strikes again. He murders 26-year-old slab-walker Myriad Sinks in a low-rent, by-the-hour hotel, after first making sure she’s human, and not a sex android, by listening to her heartbeat. He knocks her unconscious, ties her to the bed and waits for her to wake up before cutting her heart out while he plays “Your Beating Heart” over and over again on a portable track player.

The judges are called by the hotel’s night man, Howlan Yogman, after he discovers the murder. Another sex worker who used the same hotel recalls the music she heard coming from the room where the murder took place, and Yogman is old enough to recognise it as “Your Beating Heart”.

DK: I liked this as a fairly standard John Wagner Dredd story and, as ever, that’s a pretty high standard. That said, it’s a bit ragged, with the killer’s modus operandi being elaborated with the depiction of each kill, so that it’s not obvious, but may be inferred, that all the victims were killed by removal of the heart while still conscious. The 46-year gap between the shooting of Henk Villems and the murder spree we are shown is a curious detail that will presumably be explained later. The killer is obviously someone who was present at the murder of the singer; but whether it’s Villems’s murderer, an eye-witness, or Villems himself back from the dead is something we’ll have to wait and see.

The murders themselves are so utterly repellent as to make me feel queasy. Serial killers and scenes of torture are so commonplace in fiction it sometimes makes me wonder whose side the audience is on; but that’s just an aside, and not really the subject of this review.

Patrick Goddard did a fine job of the artwork, producing very clear visuals with dynamic movement and a variety of angles, and evoking a different atmosphere in each location used in the story.

RC: This could very well be the perfect opening episode. It’s entertaining; it makes you want to read more without giving too much away. Wagner shows his versatility with a very un-Dredd-like story. We get four murders before our hero even appears and it looks like he’ll be taking a rare dip into detective work, the question not being so much “who” as what’s this with all the hearts?

Some great psycho-dialogue: “It is good that you are afraid.”

Goddard’s art perfectly complements to grim subject matter, as does the gloomy colouring. It would have been so easy for the murders to lose their impact by using too much gore.

My only concern is that this genre has been done to death. Can Wagner come up with a new angle on the serial killer thriller or will this be yet another Seven wannabe? Let’s see.

Changelings - Part 1

Hannah Chapter takes a trip to the zoo...

Synopsis: In Sussex, 1922, two boys are playing in countryside when one, who is named Harry, sees a curious sort of animal run into a thicket, moving in an odd way as if injured. He intends to put the creature out of its misery with his catapult. He calls out that he has seen it going into its burrow; then he disappears, cut off in mid-sentence. His friend, flying a kite, edges closer looking for Harry. He more than likely shares whatever fate has befallen Harry, and his abandoned kite flutters away on the breeze.

In Bradford, 2006, Hannah Chapter and Lawrence Verse are hunting a Rakshasa, a spirit with the form of a demon tiger. Hannah corners it in an alley behind a takeaway and narrowly avoids being slashed by the demon’s claws. Moments later it runs into Lawrence, who shoots it with crossbow bolt blessed by a holy Brahmin and dipped in the river Ganges, but is batted through the back of a bus shelter by the monster. Demon Jenny incinerates the Rakshasa with her fiery demon breath.

Hannah Chapter reports back to Ravne on her mobile telephone. She supposes the Rakshasa was conjured to combat right-wing thugs causing trouble locally. She is proposing to investigate further when Ravne tells her they have another job to do down south, involving fairies.

DK: Gordon Rennie and Dom Reardon are on their usual top form with another superb episode of Caballistics Inc. Exactly what happens in the prologue isn’t spelled out, but the reader is left to infer, from the close-up on one boy’s transfixed eyes and the fluttering kite, that neither of the boys was seen again. The demon hunt in Bradford is a bit of fun - it never looks like any of the team are in serious danger, despite what happened to Verse - and as such it’s a slick way of suggesting here’s the team wrapping up a fairly routine mission when along comes another that will no doubt involve a more in-depth investigation.

The revelation that the team are going to be investigating the appearance of fairies has captured the imagination of many readers over on the official 2000AD message board, so Gordon’s teaser this Prog has worked a treat!

RC: The first thing I have to say is that I love everything about Caballistics and as far as I’m concerned, it can do no wrong. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to get my vote as strip of the week in any prog featuring it.

And this was sublime.

Featuring a strange rhino-cat demon, aka “Kitty,” with a taste for human flesh and rancid meat. This begs the question, "which one was in those kebabs?” My only complaint was that it was killed a little too easily. There’s something about Reardon’s scratchy artwork that is perfectly suited to horror. Something about it just says to me, “supernatural.”

Also notice the clever use of “sound” effects and the prologue-punchline combination.

The American Dream - Part 2

Backstory time...

Synopsis: The prisoner rescued/captured by the resistance from the Followers’ base at Canary Wharf won’t speak. Harris threatens the prisoner at gunpoint, but still he says nothing. Jennifer asks Malloy to let her speak to the captive. She tries to reassure him, then tells him about her recollections of the arrival of the Gods, beginning with the first appearance of the one named Hero. For a while the ‘Gods’ performed rescues and improved people’s lives, and were loved for it; but all of a sudden they decided humanity couldn’t be trusted to govern itself, and deposed the world’s rulers. War followed between the Followers, who agreed to obey the Gods, and those who refused to comply. London was levelled in the conflict, and both Jen’s parents were subsequently killed.

The captive finally answers Jen: “Take me to New York. I’ll show you how to stop them”. Jennifer rushes to inform Malloy of the breakthrough. Harris threatens the captive again, warning him not to double-cross them. With Harris’s back turned, the stranger’s powers manifest themselves: his amber eyes glow and his fingers stretch preternaturally. He is a God that has defected to the other side.

DK: I don’t have a whole lot to say about The Ten Seconders, other than it’s good to see a new story that I’m not going to find it a chore to read like I did Synnamon and Breathing Space. This instalment does a good job of getting the back story across in a few pages so that readers can make sense of the events the characters are in the middle of in the here and now. Some commentators have likened this to Zenith with a bad outcome, but I’m finding it sufficiently different that I’m not seeing all of that baggage myself when I read this.

RC: This is the story I was most looking forward to this week. Without anything really happening; part one had me totally gripped and eager for more.

After part two I’m twice as hooked. The back story kicks in and we find out a little about the Gods and Followers. For every question answered, two more are asked.

Williams uses a slightly clumsy plot plot device with Jen’s expositional monologue. I found it a bit annoying. Presumably, the guy with the fingers already knew everything she said. (Imagine someone saying to you, “a plane hit the World Trade Centre, then another one did…”)

Harrison’s artwork is very nice. Perhaps too many close ups, or that may have been inevitable given the nature of the script.

And those fingers! A great final page.

I predict that this will turn out to be a classic and that the trade paperback will be eagerly awaited next year.

Carnival - Part 2

Kai turns detective

Synopsis: In a travelling carnival in ancient Britain, Wardo the Shoggy Beast (a lycanthrope) has gone berserk, attacking his wife and son. Slaine’s druid son, Kai, tackles the beast before the carnival’s security troll, Anger Management, arrives to escort Wardo to the prison wagon.

Later, while Ukko the dwarf is introducing one of the carnival’s sideshow acts, ‘The Chitterling’, Anger Management informs him that Wardo the Shoggy Beast has killed himself by inhaling poisonous dragon’s breath from a bag. The carnival has its own dragon, Hardhide. Kai investigates, and finds the bars of the prison coach have been loosened and there is blood on Wardo’s fur from a struggle in which someone else suffocated him by force after breaking into his cell.

Kai’s girlfriend, Estella is the carnival’s ‘Sleepless Beauty’, unable to sleep a wink. Kai offers to talk to Estella’s guardian spirits and find out why she cannot sleep, but she declines his offer. After her show in which Estella apparently uses pain to stay awake, a regular carnival punter asks Estella for a ‘private session’, which she declines. She tells Kai that when she was a child someone tried to suffocate her with dragon’s breath too, which is why she is now afraid to sleep. While Kai performs his fortune telling act, Ukko sells bogus fragments of Slaine’s magic axe to unsuspecting rubes, unaware that Slaine is standing right behind him.

DK: Seeing how much I had to write to do the synopsis, this is a very densely written story with a lot happening over 6 pages. The script must have been very chunky, and Clint Langley must have had a hell of a job drawing it all, so hats off to his fine effort - it was worth it.

However, there’s so much going on - in the dark - that it really does help that everything you need for the story is already in the dialogue, so that it would probably work as a radio play. It isn’t always clear from the artwork alone what is going on. I didn’t even see Crom Dubh, The Headless Man standing to the right of panel 4 on page 2 until it was mentioned in an internet forum; likewise on first reading I didn’t realise that Slaine was actually there in the flesh, behind Ukko’s back. For all that anyone present seems to have noticed Slaine walking into the carnival he might’ve been part of an imaginary montage, an allusive visual to go with Ukko’s huckstering pitch, which is what I imagined him to be until, again, a post on a message board commented on the oddness of Slaine’s presence being unnoticed by the other people present.

On the whole, I have too many niggles with this particular Slaine story to enjoy it as anything more than the sum of its parts, and some parts let it down considerably. The many anachronisms (‘Anger Management’ sounds very C20th!) are intrusive and detract from any pretence at authenticity for its pre-Roman setting, reminding us that this is fantasy, not history; and any teenager who has ever run a Dungeon and Dragons campaign could cobble together a murder mystery as entertaining as this.

RC: Slaine is usually a challenging strip these days. It’s a real challenge to think of anything worth saying about it. Carnival has, at least at first, provided something of a new direction. This is because it’s set in Slaine’s world but it’s not about Slaine (yet.) The Carnival set-up is excellent, reminiscent of “Carnivale” or perhaps Todd Browning’s “Freaks.” There’s a variety of interesting characters and Mills quickly sets up relationships between them. I for one am pleased to see that scheming bastard Ukko return. I used to like him before the strip started taking itself too seriously and outgrew the need for a comedy sidekick.

On the artwork side, Langley has gone from “wow, how does he do that?” to “ouch, my head hurts.” It looks good enough to eat but makes the storyline difficult to follow. With so many new characters, this could become a real problem.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time before The Warped Man himself turns up and ruins everything but for now, Slaine is looking interesting for the first time in many years.

Strange Bedfellows

Alpha takes a closer look...

Synopsis: Johnny Alpha, Wulf Sternhammer and Shaggy Fuzz have shaved off their hair to blend in with the people of the planet Halcyon, where everyone is bald, to track down the fugitive criminal Ecto Jonzz, AKA No Bones Jones.

They use Jonzz’s laundry ticket to retrieve his clothes for clues. A dude ranch jacket leads them to the Crazy Mork ranch where tourists pay to live like cowboys, or ‘kneeberoos’, riding morks and herding kneebs.

The Strontium Dogs pay 600 credits each for a week’s board, and masquerade as kneeberoos with the tourists. After nightfall, Johnny uses his x-ray vision to look for their quarry around the campfire, and sees one suspect sneaking away from the party. Johnny, Wulf and Shaggy follow him back to the bunkhouse and challenge him, and Johnny’s mutant eyes confirm that the suspect has a gelatinous skeleton and is definitely the man they are hunting. No Bones Jones leaps out the window, and wriggles free of the bounty hunters’ attempts to restrain him.

DK: I have no complaints at all regarding this series. The fact that I’m enjoying this so much probably just means I want my 2000AD preserved in amber somewhere around the Prog 450 mark. Yes, it’s a remix of John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s Greatest Hits, but there are kids out there who weren’t born during the glory days of 2000AD and Strontium Dog, so it’s nice see old-style thrills like this sitting alongside stories with the more contemporary attitude of Caballistics Inc.

This is a fairly routine bounty hunter job storyline, but with a clever gimmick: the planet of the baldies, requiring Johnny and Wulf (and Shaggy) to radically alter their customary appearance. Although it makes for a lacklustre cover image in which the main characters are barely recognisable to the impulse-buying shelf-browser, it’s a good joke to have in the story. This has a lot of familiar elements: riding morks, the placid populace of a backwater planet, a tricky villain (remember Willy Blanko?); but it’s sufficiently new to hold my interest and funny enough to amuse me more than most strips deliberately conceived of primarily as comedy.

RC: I read this with a constant smirk on my face. I think we all had a laugh at the three baldies last issue but this is in no way a one-joke story. Wagner again shows his versatility to produce a comedy western of all things! A comedy western with mutants, shape shifters and alien creatures. "By de gots! Vulf is going to be sick!"

Ezquerra’s style contrasts very nicely with the moody artwork in the rest of the prog. It’s nice to see some bright colours for a change. Excellent rendering of action. Sound effect of the week: striiiiiiiittt.

It’s also good to see Johnny using his mutant eyes again. They seem to have been neglected recently.

A perfect piece of silliness to end the week.