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Extreme Edition 13
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7th
December 05 |
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Cover
by Henry Flint |
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2000AD
Extreme Edition 13
By Tom Tully, Pat
Mills, Dave Gibbons, Carlos Trigo, Massimo Belardinelli
What to Expect:
The future of sport...
Originally Appeared
In: Progs 1 to 27
Review by Bryan
Coyle
Harking back to the very first issue of 2000AD in 1977, Harlem Heroes is probably
most noteworthy in 2000AD continuity for being the starting point for the lineage
of one of Judge Dredd's current backing cast. Before Judge Giant (jr), there was
just Giant the aeroball player, leader of the Harlem Heroes, in 2000AD's first
and only all-black cast, in one of the comic's many attempts at an ensemble cast
in an ongoing story - a format that has proved less than successful with the readership
over the decades since.
You can
tell the cast is all black by the fact that they all wear shirts with their names
on so that us white readers can tell them apart. Am I joking? Because of a few
instances in the book, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. The term 'Japs' is
probably tossed about with far too much abandon for modern audiences, for a start
(the editorial page could have been better placed at the front of the book, if
only for the purpose of illustrating to the more knee-jerk PC types that the material
is twenty-eight years old), the reliance on national stereotypes for opposing
teams is a quick way to introduce varied visuals, but is ultimately lazy writing
at work, while the shoehorning-in of a joke (I assume) about Japanese kamikaze
pilots even serves to contradict what was established as the rules of the game
in an earlier chapter.
Is Harlem Heroes
a bit dodgy in a modern context? Sadly, yes. It's nowhere near as dodgy as it
should be in order to make the material enjoyable in an anachronistic way, it
just has one or two moments that might cause the reader to pause, but otherwise,
there's plenty to recommend. I remember playing some Harry Potter game, for my
sins, and the complicated rules for fictional game 'Quidditch' were explained
to the player by Stephen Fry, but it ultimately amounted to nothing more complicated
than flying through some rings, and was quite enjoyable. It's an odd analogy,
but apt, I think.
Most early 2000AD
is about visceral thrills, be it stylised violence or clever ideas, and HH has
plenty of the former, and more of the latter than might be suspected by a casual
read-through. Tom Tully makes good use of the mob mentality of spectator sports
in the form of terrace-chants and the traditional British comic staple of having
the commentators and spectators narrate the action - a necessity in those heady
days of non-decompressed storytelling, where as much as possible was forced into
the pages available requiring the writer to tell as much of the story verbally
as the artist had to in terms of visuals. Not that Tully is sold short on the
art front, as the cherubic pencilling skills of Dave Gibbons display a scope still
unseen in most comic artists. The Atlantic Tunnel cutaway is a good example of
this, as is the great depiction of humans in flight, helping to show how Gibbons
would go on to some acclaim as a superhero artist on the other side of the pond
later in his career. The depiction of the world the characters inhabit is probably
most dated - the dubious depiction of Harlem aside, the continued existence of
the Soviet Union in 2050 doesn't help.
The rhyming 'next
prog' blurb is quite fun to see, as well. There's a sense of the early 2000AD
feeling its way and being playful with elements of the comic format in little
touches like this, and I always like to see them, especially when modern 2000AD
seems devoid of much of such inventiveness and playfulness. It has become a little
too po-faced to completely appeal to modern youth in a way that reprinted superhero
comics do. It's this po-faced approach that perhaps made Second City Blues (Harlem
Heroes' most recent would-be successor) a rather mechanical entry to the sports-comics
lexicon, and not a patch on its forebears.
There's a great
line in the usual melodramatic soap-operatics that comprise the off-pitch action,
and although the final aeroball battle between the Heroes and the Teutonic Titans
is rather abrupt (especially in light of two cast-members buying the farm during
it), it is, at least, satisfyingly done, and not as underwhelming as it could
have been.
The cover has Henry
Flint doing a passable job that eschews the more obvious pitfalls of digital colouring
and looks more organic than digital colour usually does, and there's a nice Kev
O'Neill filler on the back cover of the Harlem Heroes' equipment that fills space
nicely, although a few more classic covers would have been appreciated on the
inside. All in all, a good, cheap package of vintage comic thrills combined with
the curiosity value of seeing a white guy (noted for stiff upper-lipped British
comic action potboilers) having a stab at doing a blaxploitation version of Rollerball
with nothing more to go on than episodes of the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon show.
I don't know if Tom Tully ever felt he succeeded at doing so, but he certainly
put together an entertaining yarn.
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