Review by James Mackay

Life was hard in the early 1990's. John Major had been re-elected, the economy was swirling down the plughole, and the girl I fancied really wasn't interested. 2000AD was swirling down the plughole marked "Let's give Mark Millar's Robohunter a second series!", every other artist was painting in faeces, and the editorship appeared confused about the meaning of "zarjaz" - apparently it was to be redefined as "nasty, stupid and violent".

Much attention has been paid to the prodigal sons who abandoned the comic during this Ragnarok of the Thrills, and how they are slowly finding their way back now that the cloud has passed. But what on earth motivated those, like me, who stayed behind? Why slog through something like Prog 827?

Let's have a look at the line-up, shall we? "Keith the Killer Robot" - a Millar Robohunter, which condones the death of women for the heinous crime of, um, being ugly, with appalling and virtually indecipherable Ron Smith art. "Bradley's Bedtime Stories" - Ok, I quite enjoyed some of these, but the repro really isn't up to the challenges of Simon Harrison's art, with the result that you have to quint as you read. Judge Dredd fights, um, Barfur the deadly kangaroo. A poor Future Shock with the bonus of, er, a second helping of Ron Smith's perspective-free black and white art. And let's round it all off with the payoff to "Kelly the Indestructible Man" - oh look, after 10 weeks of not being killed in any of the cliffhangers, he isn't killed again. Because he's still indestructible. Gosh. Brett Ewins clearly can't be bothered to draw this mush and it's difficult to think of any good reason to read it.

For me, this was the low point, the moment that I seriously considered giving up 2000AD, and with it reading comics altogether (superheroes be damned, and I never really got that Deadline/Toxic/Crisis stuff). Luckily, the very next issue brought what remains one of the best 2000AD stories I've ever read - Firekind.

The strip is, in a sense, a gigantic shaggy dog story, with an excellent McGuffin. The reader was lead by the pre-publicity, by the covers, by the name, and by the very title, to expect a tale of dragons, warring dragons, breathing fire and causing destruction, Anne McCaffery in comic-book form. Instead what you get is a meditation on otherness, cultural difference, the ethics of anthropology... oh, and, for anyone about to nod off, intergalactic drug-traffickers, torture experts, poachers, hunter/killer drones and some John Smith trademark extreme ultraviolence. Just about the only things NOT in the mix are dragons. The Kesheen may be big flying lizards, but they don't breathe fire, and do little more than serve as transport.

Henrik Larsen is an anthropologist, on a mission to the mysterious and largely uncharted planet. His job is to live with the Gennyans, observe their folkways and catalogue plants and animals. The tribe among whom he arrives (teleporting from his ship in a first episode that must count as one of the best-written six pages in any 2000AD series) grudgingly accept him into their lives. They allow him to attend mating rituals and story tellings, and he begins his work of taxonomising the beautiful, deadly world of Gennyo-Leil.

In this work, Smith has been hugely aided by the work of Paul Marshall - clean, crisp, and with a gorgeously balanced colour palette that really brings the world alive. Two stand-out panels illustrate this, one set deep in the jungle with a carnivorous plant and the other in a rockpool on the beach, with a queen ant attacking a wheelfish (“She spits out a thin lasso of silk and sidles forwards, assassin-soft”). Completely alien life-forms, but created with an in-depth attention to detail that wouldn't, for my money, be seen again until Henry Flint's Shakara. Among the many comic dystopias we've seen over the years, this work examines the idea of "unspoilt paradise" with depth and maturity – “Death is everywhere on Gennyo-Leil”.

Of course, the grexnixes at Egmont Fleetway, who then owned 2000AD, couldn’t let this perfect, beautiful piece of writing just slip past the censors. No, in one of the worst blunders in the comic’s history, they managed to omit Episode 7. Not just any chapter, this was the one that explained everything that came after. Larsen ended episode 6 slipping into death and started the next one… in a somewhat different state.

As you’ll have gathered by now, I’m urging you to have the good sense and taste to go out and buy the 2000AD Extreme Edition 8, which collects Firekind for the first time in the correct order. The reproduction seems to me to be flawless, and you’ll have noticed by now that I’m deliberately not giving away any plot details, so you can come to it just as fresh as I did, way back in 1993. The collection is bulked out with some fairly throwaway Bill Savage tales, which make particularly little sense following the subtleties of Firekind, but heck, Bill’s always good value in his own right.

And there you go. Between Firekind, Slaughterbowl and the unmatchable Revere, John Smith’s scripts kept me going through those dark times. I can’t pay a higher compliment to this series than to say that reading it actually made paying money to read Babe Race 2000 bearable. Re-reading it entire, without the dross surrounding it, I’m pleased to be able to say that it’s still one of the best stories I’ve ever read.

Oh, and the girl I fancied? Well, we had a long chat, and it turned out she still wasn’t interested.