2000AD Prog 1491 - 07 June 2006
	Judge Dredd (Smith / Fraser) The V.C.s (Abnett / Williams) Red Seas (Edginton / Yeowell) London Fallling (Spurrier / Garbett) Cover: Jim Murray

Synopsis by Gavin Hanly
1st opinion by Martin Charlton
2nd opinion by Pete McCosh

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

Cover Review

MC: A dramatic piece with a sense of momentum and scale. But then again, being a Jim Murray piece it’s always gonna be at the very least ‘awesome’, isn’t it? This really hasn’t been a stand out year for covers, as frequenters of the message board have spent much time debating, but this one would stand out among the very best. Not only that, but it captures the essence of The Reds Seas – good clean swashbuckling fun. Combined with the promise that ‘3 new stories start inside’, this would be sufficient to grab my interest, were I glancing down the racks at my locals WH Smiths.

PMcC: If it didn’t already come through my door in an envelope, this is exactly the type of lush, painted cover which would jump off the newsstands into my hand. A slight question mark over the perspective, but this is a striking and well composed image featuring a pirate being attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex! How else could you describe it but fangtastic.

Jumped - Part 1

An unfortunate twist...

Synopsis: Moxxy and Reefer perpare to jumpjack, a sport which involves bungee jumping with a Boing cord down thousands of feet to street level and grabbing something off the ground. Moxxy goes first, filmed by their friend Richter with his camera eye implants nad watched by Reefer's girlfriend Lola. Moxxy goes first and grabs a rose off the street. Reefer goes second, after their real target and grabs a case off of him. Unfortunatley, his case is handcuffed to him and he bounces back with Reefer, pulling out a gun. Reefer panics, smashing into the glass of the building, unwittingly killing the man with the case on the way back up. They split up and Reffer goes back to Lola's place. They finally get the case open, revealing a severed hand inside.

Meanwhille, investigating the jumpjacking incident, Dredd finds Richter with his eyes torn out by two goons after the case. He dies at the scene...

MC: When I’d finished re-reading this I had to check who it was written by, as I’d been promised a John Smith Dredd by Tharg last week and dammit, I wanted my off the wall, high concept piece with some sort of body invasion and lots of complicated dialogue. It only takes a cursory read to know that’s not what I got here. I suppose a really good Dredd writer has the little stories and the big stories in them. For instance, for every Apocalypse War there’s got to be at least ten stories on the scale of ‘Bury my Knee’. Having checked, this is John’s first Dredd since Meatmonger, and after the poor reception that got, I can see why he’s taken time away from the strip. This is a return to form, however, with some nice concepts and an interesting set up, all depicted marvellously by…

Simon Fraser - anyone who’s read his Dante stuff knows what to expect, and there were points in this were I thought ‘god, this looks just like early Dante’. Not that that’s a bad thing (far from it), but it must be infuriating for the artist if that happens often.

PMcC: Jumpjacking is the latest in a long line of MC1 pastimes with criminal potential. I’m always a big fan of John Smith and here he’s clearly reining in his characteristic verbal excesses to serve up an old-fashioned, noir-style heist gone wrong thriller with a twist. The fact that Dredd himself only appears in two or three panels is a reminder that many of the best stories concentrate on the perps rather than Old Stony Face.

Simon Fraser’s artwork is perfectly acceptable, without being particularly inspiring. In the few panels where we see him, this skinnyfit version of Dredd is a stark contrast to Inaki Miranda’s in the Meg and I like it. Not so keen on the look of slack-jawed incomprehension in the second last panel.

There are a couple of flaws in the story: Dredd seems a lot more interested in the mutilated cameraman than the shredded body of the courier and I didn’t see any actual Boing. Overall, this is an intriguing set-up episode, leaving us with a whole lot of questions that I, for one, am eager to see answered.

Part 6 - The Voice of Reason

Gae'krr introduces his adoring fans...

Synopsis: On Spica Prax, the VCs are heavily outnumbered and have no choice but to turn and flee. They hide out in the ruins while Kali brings in the ship on remote. Smith decides to rethink things, until suddenly someone creeps up on Hoff who's standing watch. He's knocked down by Keege before he can fire, as the mysterious figure reveals himself as Gaek'rr. He has sought out the VCs after he heard the fighting, but the rest of the Geeks aren't far behind them. Kali sucessfully brings in the remote and they all escape in one piece, heading back to base. However, not far behind them are the mercenaries hired by the Polity and they prepare to attack the VCs.

MC: Now, as you may have gathered from my Gerry Finley-Day article, I like the VCs. I think its an interesting piece with some fascinating characters. What I don’t like is the Marvel-style pacing this strip has. For a final book of a future war story you’ve really got to pull out the stops and give us the apocalyptic space opera battle we’ve all been waiting for. Dan Abnett managed to do this marvellously with Durham Red, but seems to be holding back here. Maybe its because he’s trying to say something rather than just show explosions? I hope so.

Anthony Williams has been drawing this strip for long enough now for us to know whether we like it or not. The computer drawn aspects, coupled with Williams’ drawing style show an interesting, if not always entirely comfortable mix of the new and the old, which about sums this strip up, I think.

PMcC: I thoroughly enjoyed the first couple of Books of the revamped VCs, but it’s gone downhill and this current run, if not exactly bad, feels likes it’s been knocked off as a contractual obligation rather than crafted with care and love. Sure, it’s all heading for a big showdown between the VCs and the bounty hunters, with the added possibility of a more philosophical rebuke to The Polity, a la Babylon 5. This instalment kept the story rolling along unimaginatively, although I don’t believe that’s really the guy they were sent to find and I did like the little acknowledgement from Smith that he’s not seen it all before.

The muted palette obviously suits the environment they’re meant to be in, but it does have the tendency to render the whole enterprise muddy and monotonous. The sooner they get back to a brightly lit starbase the better.

The Hollow Land - Part 1

Jack still knows how to win a fight...

Synopsis: 6 months after the last installment, Jack Dancer and his crew are fighting alongside his father and his dino men friends. They are defending their city against a siege by the Empress's troops, all armoursed up and riding huge dinosaurs into battle. Despite the attackers having a huge force at their disposal, the pirates and dino men mange to fight them back, especially when they unveil their cannons and blast the attackers to pieces.

The battle is over and the enemy forces withdraw, but Jack's father fears that it is only a remporary respite. One of the Dinomen tells Dancer Sr that the Ma'hars will regeneate their numbers in days, but the same cannot be said for the casualties they have suffered. Dancer Sr decides enough is enough and it's time to ask his son for advice...

MC: Ok, so who in their right mind starts a new strip with the words ‘six months later’ and expects new readers to know what the drokk is going on? I couldn’t even remember what had happened, which makes this an interesting example illustrating the need for a recap page of sorts. There’s nothing wrong with the strip as such, I just struggled to get past this clumsy opener, which coloured my reading slightly. I’m also not entirely convinced this warranted a double size start. More compact story telling could have done this in 5/6 pages and left room for a Future Shock.

Yeowell’s art shines through here though, as I don’t much care for his art when he draws sci-fi or colours his stuff. Drawing fantasy in black & white is a Yeowell cynic’s dream then…

PMcC: Real top-class, bonkers fun from start to finish here. Rather than use the double-length intro to reintroduce the characters or give a lengthy expository essay on life at the centre of the Earth, Edgington and Yeowell take the much more sensible approach of giving us a fantastic, wide-screen action sequence along the lines of Zulu with dinosaurs.

Add Cockney lizard-men to Yeowell’s beautiful lines (for me, he can create a mood far better with a simple outline than somebody like Carl Critchlow does with his over-detailed style) and we’re transported far more effectively to this strange new place where Jack & Co find themselves than we could be with any amount of words.

I’m sure subsequent weeks will fill us in on what’s been going on, but this is a bravura return for this strip.

MC: It’s funny, but once I got my head round this, it reminded me of Shrek. Not thematically, but for the scene where Donkey is explaining to Shrek that donkeys have layers. (and while we’re on this, This strip also has layers, in that while I’m sure all the characters are based on campfire songs & myths about monsters, I’m unable to reach a solid conclusion on who any of these characters are actually meant to be. But I still enjoyed it massively. The chasing away of the monsters under the bed was a lovely touch, and Lee Garbett’s art really suits the tone of this tale – deceptively clean and crisp, but actually quite evil and subversive when you get up close. Good stuff. Hope this one runs for a while.

PMcC: Another new Spurrier strip, another experiment with narrative voice and this cockney ghost story catches my imagination in a way that Lobster Random doesn’t. I’m not up on my English folklore, so it took a Google to reveal that Capelthwaite and Shuck are both regional names for mysterious black dogs. The hounds of hell, possibly? It’s safe to assume the rest of the cast are of similar provenance and I’m looking forward to seeing where Si goes with this, as it’s a source of inspiration that’s underused these days.

I’m undecided about the art on this one. There’s nothing wrong with it technically, I’m just not sure how well it fits this particular story: the mundane world stuff is fine, but the last page reveal of the crew as they really are is underwhelming in the extreme. Time will tell.