2000AD 1547 - 25 July 07

Cover by Karl Richardson

Charles Ellis : It’s a blue woman with a gun and that’s about it. It’s alright.

Bryan Coyle: Typical blurry-edged 'character shooting gun off-camera' pose that surely the editorial team have amassed a good supply of by now in case of emergencies - this seems tailored to this week's episode of the 86ers, however, which suggests a missed opportunity to capitalise on the Aliens/Predator trappings of the installment with what is essentially an average cover image that isn't very eye-catching.

The Secret of Mutant Camp 5 - Part 1 Script: John Wagner Art: Colin Macneil Colours: Chris Blythe Letters: Annie Parkhouse

Dredd's natural suspicious nature tested to the max...

Synopsis: Dredd’s mission in the mutant camps is proving unpopular with the accountants in Mega City One. Hershey has to personally order that it continues.

Dredd, Beeny and Rico arrive in Camp 5, expecting more atrocities as it has the highest death rate of all. However, they are greeted by singing mutants, a thriving education system and a well-equipped hospital. Only the diseased swamp prevents an apparent mutant Utopia. This only makes the judges more suspicious. It is only when Dredd insists on staying the night that the camp director becomes agitated. Later he discusses calling “it” off with one of the medical staff. It seems Camp 5 has a dark secret after all…

CE : Dredd’s guilt-ridden obsession with bringing justice to the mutant camps continues, and it’s certainly proving an interesting plot. The first page of this strip says it all about how the camps turned out that way, going from a wordless montage of the Judges coming across abuses to an accountant annoyed at how much Dredd is costing them. It’s also nice to see Wagner & MacNeil bringing Beeny over from the Meg. 

The main plot has a pretty fundamental problem: we know from previous stories that if everything looks happy and nice, something dodgy is going on. Even the characters know this, immediately focusing on the mysterious death rate. It does lead to an interesting side-effect of the strip building tension while nothing bad is happening on-panel or being hinted at. Wagner is playing off the fact that we know something has to be going on, and for me it’s working quite well. 

BC: I don't think anyone believes the secret behind Mutant Camp 5 is that it hides a Willy-Wonka-style factory of lemonade rivers and gingerbread forests - the picture in the very first frame of people-parts being boiled in a pot and someone in prison stripes fighting rats as wardens look on helps fuel guesses as to what the secret might be.

This episode is solid groundwork for something bigger, yet offers little at this stage beyond whetting the appetite for the reveal still to come, helped by solid artwork from the ever-reliable Colin MacNeil - although Chris Blythe's muted colouring deserves an honourable mention. Suggesting Wagner is merely on form is seen as criticism by most, but shouldn't be - this is good writing that will likely reward patience as Wagner's slow-burners often do, interspersed with some nice character touches on Dredd himself that might slip past those who buy into the myth that he's a purely surface character lacking depth, rather the deliberately impenetrable icon he's become of late.

I, Jailbird - Part 3 Script: Alan Grant Art: Ian Gibson Letters: Annie Parkhouse

Samantha's wardrobe malfunction...

Synopsis: Samantha Slade attends her appeal hearing. Her barrister recommends that
she pleads guilty and begs for mercy but she refuses on the grounds that she is innocent.
Things go from bad to worse when she discovers Hoagy and Stogie have been rebuilt to give evidence but their incompetence actually helps her case and the appeal is successful.
Unfortunately, Gerald the Scarf has already planned an escape. It attacks one of the guards and drags a reluctant Slade away from the court. Worst of all, Hoagy and Stogie follow…

CE : Some people really dislike Robo-Hunter – well ya boo sucks to them, after the other strips in this prog I can do with some light relief. The sudden change in artist is a bit jarring (though Anthony Williams does extremely well) and for the most part it is pretty funny. And what other strip gives you an aggressive robot scarf forcing our heroine to do a jailbreak? 

BC: This week's episode returns Andy Williams to the Robo Hunter fold, and he does so well enough if you don't mind that he seems to characterise Samantha Slade as more of a stumblebum than the inventive opportunist of Ian Gibson. Luckily for Williams, few writers happily and wilfully write situations of absurd stupidity as Alan Grant, building up from casual playfulness into truly epic levels of idiocy-inspired destruction or just a plain old riot or mass brawl, which is more or less what happens here. All far away from an epic gunfight with an indestructible madman as has been the case with some of Williams' previous entries into Robo Hunter storytelling - OF WHICH WE SHALL NOT SPEAK.

The similarity of 'Gerald' to one of Ace Trucking's more memorable artwork quirks is either a nice touch or too much of a retread of one of Grant's old jokes, but I like to think it's an affectionate nod to the sadly-late Massimo Belardinelli - as such it takes a harder heart than mine to disapprove. Grant happily packs in dialogue that revels in character-comedy, while Williams is competent and clear, but has lost a lot of the distinctiveness in his art with the switch from hand-colouring to digital hues, as he seems to get lost amongst the swathe of anime-inspired illustrators currently working in the comics field. Here, however, he's a good choice as fill-in while Gibson is AWOL.
A good light-hearted addition to the roster of thrills to balance out all the nihilism and angst.

Project Monarch - Part 8 Script: Pat Mills Art: John Higgins Colours: JH & SJ Hurst Letters: Ellie De Ville

Zil tries to wash his hands of Blake...

Synopsis: Zil, a delta agent had a troubled childhood, full of parental abuse and unlikely bestiality. He is selected for “The Spetznaz” and brutally trained to be an agent. Then Project Monarch adds the psychological finishing touches.
Blake’s superiors discuss whether Zil is the best man to take out Blake but reluctantly conclude that he is.

Later, Blake returns home and, despite his security precautions, he falls for an obvious trap and is about to be strangled with his own shower attachment…

CE: I’m not really sure that sheep bit works. Most of the backstory for Zil is quite disturbing – the Spetznaz training, the Project Monarch flashback and the mention of what Zil does to female targets (and what he keeps in his fridge), it’s all macabre and nasty stuff. It builds up Zil as a very dangerous man, and also establishes more about the world of Project Monarch and the institutionalised evil in it. The sheep bit though, that just comes across as a very lame joke and clashes with the rest of the story.  

The last page, however, is great. Every previous part of Greysuit has shown off Grey, given him captions stating his awesome powers and giving him an utterly blank expression when crippling people. Zil’s attack inverts that by interrupting the “Blake can do this!” caption-fest with “So could Zil”, then having complete silence as he does his business, with Blake the one utterly helpless against an emotionless bastard. It’s a moment that you don’t expect and it works very well.  

BC: 2000AD has a long history of offbeat takes on the superhero, but Greysuit doesn't strike me as a good example of one of them. The character as he currently stands reminds me a bit too much of the Authority's Midnighter, and this week's instalment seems juvenile in the same vein of Garth Ennis' Punisher, with Zil reminding me of the teenage-sniggering supervillainy of The Russian from the aforesaid Marvel human slaughterhouse's own books. If this seems like one too many references to American funnybooks, it's deliberate on my part to help highlight that Mills these days seems more comfortable as a journeyman than the innovator he inarguably was in the 70s and 80s.

Despite my feelings of deja vu with the characters and story, Greysuit offers some good moments, like the more subdued villainy of Blake's boss, and the casual settings of some of the strip's more horrific violence. Higgins' art helps on this score, though the lack of psychedelic colours on the brainwashing pages is lamentable.

It's all very familiar, but not terrible - just not exceptional in any particular area. Also - I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at the sheep-shagging jokes.

Grendel - Part 4 Script: Gordon Rennie Art: PJ Holden Colours: Eva De la Cruz Letters: Simon Bowland

Stak! indeed...

Synopsis: While Rafe and the Norts hunt the Grendel in the depths of the Citadel, at Milicom Souther Command discuss the Nort attack and threat to Nu-Earth. Rafe is seeing hallucinations of her Rogue memory implant. He reveals that he was also infected by the alien virus and has his own agenda.
Suddenly the Grendel attacks, killing two Norts and seriously wounding another. Stalov has no qualms about executing the wounded man and continuing the operation. He has a flashback to six years ago…

CE: After a rather dull first story, this strip has shot up in quality. Since that one dull strip focused on Rafe the GI Doll, I was a bit worried when she came back. She’s still the less interesting part of this story and I’m a bit wary about her still having a Rogue look-a-like in her head (though him gaining his own agenda could be interesting), but luckily the focus is on the Grendel and the Norts. The Norts were always an intriguing part of the strip and its great seeing them fleshed out. Did Stalov betray his clan-lord way back when? It could go either way and I’m interested in the outcome. But that really interests me is the growing threat, unknown to our heroes, of a major Nort assault on Acoma. The plot drip-feed Rennie’s known for on Caballistics is working well here. 

Special note should go to Eva de la Cruz’s colouring. While PJ Holden’s art is always great, Eva’s colouring really adds to this – the luminous green in the tunnel makes the whole scene really eerie. 

Bryan Coyle: An otherwise solid setting is undermined on two fronts with this Rogue Trooper spin-off: 1) it's set in the Rogue Trooper universe, which hampers it slightly in that it strays too far from the usual RT milieu to justify not being it's own series, especially given the amount of exposition for setting and character backstory that appears in many episodes. 2) it's gone terribly Battlestar Galactica of late - probably not deliberate, but the appearance of Rogue as an intangible foil for the anodyne Rafe is yet another similarity that drags it into being seen as something that's ripping off an existing property, which I'm not fully convinced is the case. If the last two episodes were condensed into one, I have the feeling this would read a lot better, but as it is, it's a pretty slight story lifted by some occasionally-inspired art touches that highlight PJ Holden's swift grasp of characters.

It's not a bad strip by any stretch, but it seems more akin to filler than anything else in the prog at the moment.

1666 - Part 8 Script: Pat Mills Art: Leigh Gallagher Letters: Ellie De Ville

Cromwell enjoyed a good laugh...

Synopsis: King Charles’ fornication is interrupted by Cromwell. His decomposing
head has been raised on his pole to his window by an undead hoard. When Charles shoots him, Cromwell only laughs. Meanwhile, an army of stenches is rising from the Thames. Defoe uses the“Porcupine” but there are too many to drive back. Isaac Newton gives a disgruntled journalist an unhelpful interview. Defoe dons his armour and weapons and prepares to go into battle against the stenches once again…

CE: Some of this strip is a bit confusing if you don’t know much about the time period, but the general violent insanity makes up for it. The zombie violence with pre-steampunk weaponry, the sinister conspiracy with Isaac Newton and the alchemists (who is Mene Tekel?), the historical background and the character of Defoe himself (his distaste of Grubb over how he ran Bedlam is a nice touch) all make for a very fun six pages. And now we get King Charles II shooting an evil cackling severed-head undead Cromwell who wants to do in the rest of the royal line! Very old-school 2000AD.

This week is harder to follow because of the way the zombies move about; they go from directly menacing the King, to seemingly being in a different part of London threatening to menace the King. Still, it seems we’re going to be getting a massive zombie-killing battle next prog, and I can’t wait! 

BC: A brilliantly OTT zombie-horror aided by some fantastic art shows Mills on intermittently top form - some episodes drag, while others fairly rocket along with retro-technology and infodumps between the carnage and mass dismemberment. Thankfully one of the latter, this week's episode has the protagonists posse-up for a smackdown with noted mass-mick-murderer Oliver Cromwell - or part of him, at any rate. Leigh Gallagher's art reminds me of something, but I'm damned if I can put my finger on what or who it might be - there's the odd touch of EC Comics' styling to the zombies, but that's about all I can offer as I write this.

Certainly it's not the most original of premises in and of itself - hints of Lifeforce and Night of the Comet, for a start - but there's a joyful mish-mash of settings and story that gives Defoe a charm reminiscent of the best of 2000ad's cheery knock-offs of well-known properties as seen in Ant Wars and MACH 1. A great way to round off the prog.

CE: It’s a pretty strong line-up and should see us through until 1550. I’d put Greysuit as the best strip if not for the sheep bit, so for consistency and sheer fun it’s going to have to be…

Best Story: Defoe

BC: An average prog with a decent - if not stellar - mix of grim and light-hearted thrills. Tharg threatens more Shakara on the Input pages, and less fear-inducing, also more Caballistics inc in the near future. Defoe and Dredd are the standout moments in the issue, but nothing else falls below par in any noteworthy manner.

Best Story: Judge Dredd