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¦ Reviews ¦ 2000AD
Extreme Edition 11-12
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19th
November 05 |
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Covers
by Cliff Robinson |
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2000AD
Extreme Edition 11-12
By Alan Hebden, Massimo
Belardinelli
What to Expect:
Meltdown Man: SAS agent Nick Stone is transported to an alternate
reality populated by talking animals kept as slaves by their human masters...
Originally Appeared
In: Progs 178 to 227
Review by Bryan
Coyle
Meltdown Man, despite being a sizeable chunk of classic 2000AD and one of the
longest-running stand-alone series in the comics' history, completely passed me
by.
Despite a hefty slap of 'Best Of 2000AD' cluttering up my attic, I managed
to miss SAS officer Nick Stone's adventures in an alternate Earth populated by
talking animals ('Yujees') and what looks suspiciously like Nick's evil twin,
who chases him over the planet in campy fashion, until being blasted into Nick's
reality by an atom bomb that was several thousand years old and not a bit rusty.
And still full of fuel.
It's probably better
that I didn't read this when I was younger, as it would really bug me that we
never saw what happened to the occupants of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, who - since
getting blasted sky-high by a nuke sends you to and from this alternate world
- were presumeably somewhere on this bizarre future-Earth eking out an honest
living, keeping their heads down and not forcing their socialist views on a society
that was getting along fine without them - unlike some SAS types I could mention.
I've yet to actually see the sense in a great deal of the Extreme
Edition material - the stuff that's modern (the Judge Death issue, Darkside, Firekind)
will certainly stand a chance of snaring fence-straddling comics buyers used to
a diet of Spider-Man, but the classic stuff is perhaps anachronistic, and too
niche-friendly to attract casual readers with three quid to spare. It's a bloody
shame, as the tendancy towards decompressed storytelling in modern comics is a
rip-off compared to the 'throw it all at the wall and see what sticks' mentality
that saw a great deal of classic 2000AD material burn through more ideas in a
single run of stories than most sci-fi tv shows manage after several years.
Meltdown Man, if anything,
resembles some strange prototype Hercules - The Legendary Journeys, but with a
Planet of the Apes setting. Meltdown Man is a classic example of good and bad
storytelling, but taken in a single dose, it's flaws are less apparent, while
its energy and surfeit of ideas propel it along. It isn't without its episodes
that are quite clearly padding, but even these are written with the understanding
that the reader wants to be entertained. The 'twist' about it being Earth of the
future, for instance, is almost an afterthought that appears halfway through the
series, while the final, almost baffling, twist serves to muddy the waters of
what should be a straightforward moment of triumph for the hero into a moment
of tragedy. Or is it? WE DON'T BLOODY KNOW!
Nick Stone is an
admirable bastard in the classic British sense, too. If this was written for an
American audience, we'd see him delivering a baby Yujee, saving a crying child,
and involved in a 'will they/won't they' thing with the cat-lady who hangs around
with him looking a bit saucy - but this is one of 2000ad's early forays into social
commentary, so what we get is gruesome, lingering scenes around the liquidation
vats, a trigger-happy one-eyed nutter who thinks freeing the people from a priviledged
elite is a great idea, despite spending his entire adult life back on the 'real'
Earth keeping third-world military-types under the heels of priviledged first-world
plutocracatic interests, and the recurrence of the term 'slitty-eyed devil' (in
reference to the cat-lady) that I'm not entirely sure about...
There's a few Meltdown Man covers included, alongside a Dave Gibbons pin-up
and two new cover images by Cliff Robinson that are certainly good works in their
own right, but don't capture the feel of Belardinelli's organic linework. Mind
you, I'm of the opinion that digital colouring kills such linework anyway, so
I suppose that a new composition is a better approach than a recoloured image
from the vaults. The reproduction is crisp and brings out the quality of the original
artwork well, and you can't really knock the value of the Extreme Editions as
a rule, especially if - as is the case with myself - the reader has never been
exposed to the material before.
All things considered, it's a hefty slice of classic comic storytelling that
takes longer to get through than the average graphic novel that'll cost you four
times as much, as well as having far more going on per page. It's a shame that
it looks so dated compared to everything else it shares shelf-space with, though,
as it has far more heart, invention and energy than pretty much everything else
being sold to kids in British newsagents at the moment. Not that Massimo Bellardinelli's
beautiful and hideous art is anything but excellent - it's just without peer on
contemporary British bookshelves, which may just scare away the kind of kids who
might otherwise pick up an issue of the Extreme Editions.
Hebden's script fair rattles along, too, with many a good and bad sci-fi standard
getting an outing between pages one and I-don't-know-how-many-but-there's-a-lot.
Put simply, there's a lot to like (the crazy visuals, the strange cast, the Planet
of the Apes setting), a bit here and there to dislike (the humans coming around
to the idea of racial harmony in a matter of pages, the abrupt resolution, Leeshar's
camp villiany, his lieutenant's deus ex machina 'sudden change of heart'), but
it's either love or hate material. I loved it because I understand the context
of it - that it's reprinted material from about twenty-six years ago - but I wonder
what someone coming to it without that knowledge (and who doesn't read Alan Barnes'
editorial) will make of it.
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