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Home ¦ Reviews ¦ 2000AD Extreme Edition 18

Cover by Cliff Robinson

3rd November 06

Who's behind it?

• Shako by Pat Mills, John Wagner, Ramon Sola, Arancio, Dodderio, Lopez Vera
• Future Shock by Grant Morrison and John Stokes
• Project Overkill by Kelvin Gosnell, Ian Gibson and Jesus Redondo

What should I expect?

A psychotic polar bear! What, you want more? OK, have a classic Future Shock and Project Overkill too...

Where did these stories first appear?

Shako (progs 20-35); Future Shock (prog 477); Project Overkill (prog 119 - 126)

What did Bryan Coyle think about it?

I've never read Shako up until this point.

I do recall (I think it was) Gordon Rennie giving it a bashing in a Megazine column, in a bit of a departure from his normal sunny outlook on the work of those writers who went before him (at least the ones who can't track him down), and I took him at his word that it was a bit of a throwback to when ideas were just tossed into the pages of 2000AD, without any great level of development to hone and refine the characters and story to trim off narrative fat and streamline the funny-pictured beast to perfection. It was a strip about a bear who went around killing people - there's only so much that can be done with such a story before the average reader (even if, at the time, 2000AD's readership was comprised mainly of kids) started to notice that the story should go something like this: Bear eats pilot of crashed plane, accidentally swallows secret capsule, CIA chase bear, CIA BLOWS BEAR INTO MEATY CHUNKS. But he was kinda wrong. Kinda.

There IS an awful lot of padding in Shako, there's no denying that - with the titular main character veering from playful to vicious as the current five-page story dictates as necessary, like mother nature's own version of a mean drunk, on one occasion, he even laps up whiskey from a puddle on the ground like a common wino. Shako as a main character is a bit like Shako as a comic - over the place, a bit unconvincing, and not vicious enough for kids these days to maintain their interest.

Shako has also dated in many respects, the most obvious factor being the inclusion of the Soviet menace, a superpower so declawed in these post-millenial years that many kids have no idea what the hell you're talking about when you bring it up in conversation. The primitive technology on display with Shako's pursuers is a giveaway, too - something as valuable as the capsule would undoubtedly be fitted with a tracking device - no matter how secure it was - as a matter of procedure, rendering the chase a short one - if nasty old reality got in the way of a good yarn again, like it seems to quite a lot these days. Curse you, procedural tv shows!

But procedural drama does not make a good comic (writers struggle with the dialogue that makes the live-action versions watchable), and Shako is a good comic. When all's said and done, there's more going for it than there is the average 12-issue run of some godawful American superhero travesty. Within the first ten pages, Shako has murdered two American pilots, stolen a deadly virus, made the CIA death-list, and drunkenly mauled a fisherman to death. Soon he's alternating between fleeing for his life and laying in ambush for his pursuers, all the while a third-person narrative lays oddly-human motivations at his door as he stalks his human prey - at one point even pushing a mound of snow before him so he can sneak up on some unsuspecting humans, in a manner not dissimilar to Wile E Coyote sneaking up on sheep.

Helping pad out the rest of the Extreme Edition, Project: Overkill is a very 1970s beast - a paranoid conspiracy thriller movie, but with all the subtlety removed and lots of stuff blowing up every other page. Competently done, it seems a lot more dated than Shako does, possibly by dint of showing so much 'cuting edge' technology later on, the concepts being a bit dated now in much the same way that holograms, nanotechnology, and that way characters have of holding a gun on one side will seem incredibly dated in years to come. The setup is sound, though - a pilot crash-lands a passenger plane on an American highway in the middle of nowhere, only to be aided by mysterious government agents who spirit away both the plane and passengers, leaving the pilot alone with only the words 'Project Overkill" as a clue to what's happened. From then on, it's thriller by numbers time - the main character is framed for murder, on the run from the law, has had some sort of implant that tracks his every movement, and a tanker truck blows up. I don't know why that last one is so important, but it does recur in these things quite a lot.

The art is solid enough, but the story peters out badly in the final episodes, as the whole thing seems to be wrapped up ridiculously fast, actually making me think at one point that the whole finale was perhaps the delusion of one of the main characters, as also happens in the odd paranoia thriller. Fun, but not gritty or convincing enough for modern audiences, and only retro-comics fans will get much out of it.

To help pad out the package, there's a Future Shock that seems like one of Grant Morrison's off-days, and more similar to the type of thing that saw print in British small press anthologies in the days when they amounted to nothing more than a showcase for rejected Future Shock scripts. But there was a reason they were rejected in the first place, and I'm surprised this is one that made the cut, as I've seen better scripts grace the pages of the independents from the likes of Al Ewing or Paul Glasswell. But this was embryonic Morrison, before he became an ego-monster and a bit of a loon, so it's probably a good thing it was accepted, otherwise we might not have got Zenith.

Cliff Robinson's cover rounds the whole thing off, and looks a bit too inorganic to gel with the contents it represents, but otherwise is sound, if not graphically violent enough for my liking.

All in all, a good slice of classic 2000AD.