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Home ¦ Reviews ¦ Rogue Trooper - Realpolitik

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What to Expect: A new era of "untold stories" begins...

Review by Martin Charlton
20th September 06

“I imagined somebody on a quest to find out where they came from and who they were, but it didn’t turn out like that. It was more like, “Eat leaden death, Nort scum!” That’s never been my favourite kind of war story…”

These are the words Rogue Trooper Co-Creator Dave Gibbons uses to explain his decision to leave the strip early into its run. He goes on to say that the concept had so much more potential than the initial stories tapped into, leaving him disappointed. Having recently read the first five volumes of Rebellion/DC’s Rogue Trooper reprints, and having written a piece about the lasting impact of Gerry Finley-Day for this very site, the significance of reviewing this particular book doesn’t escape me.

Many of the old Rogue stories, while rightly considered ‘classics’ of the 2000AD canon simply don’t hold up to the more recent iterations of Rogue’s contemporary classic characters such as Dredd or Strontium Dog. Neither do the War Machine or Friday iterations of the strip match ‘modern’ classics of the galaxy’s greatest. What Realpolitik represents is not a complete reboot of the Rogue Trooper legacy, nor is it merely a continuation of the original continuity or even an attempt to ret-con the whole thing. Rather, what Gordon Rennie & Ian Edginton present us with is a series of Rogue Trooper tales set within original continuity, fitting into gaps in the original series.

For my money at least, the best Rogue Trooper stories prior to this edition weren’t actually written by Gerry Finley-Day. Rather, I would suggest tracking down the Rogue Extreme Edition and finding Alan Moore & Pete Milligan’s contributions to the Rogue pantheon. Much of Finley-Day’s work, as Gibbons himself implies, is too simplistic in its use of ‘good’ & ‘bad’, with Norts often being a simplistic play on Nazis, presenting us with the rather unproblematic binary opposite and distinct moral divide of ‘Rogue Trooper as World War 2’.

More interesting are the stories that avoid this route, offering to discuss not the glory of war, but rather the horrors of war, and what it says about and does to the human psyche. That’s the true power of a good war story such as Platoon, the Vietnam asides in Garth Ennis’s Preacher or the latter episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth. An even more critical dissection of Finley-Day’s Rogue stories comes from the main scribe of this book, Gordon Rennie, suggesting that “I remember the Fort Neuro story being a real classic, but on re-reading it… I realised it wasn’t half a load of old bollocks.” Having recently read Fort Neuro myself, I have to admit, he’s not wrong.

And so, with all that in mind, in early 2002 the mantle was still to be taken up by a writer who could prove themselves capable of consistently writing a sophisticated, intelligent Rogue Trooper series (I exclude Tor Cyan from this as, while I liked it, I know a lot of people didn’t…).

So does Gordon Rennie, relatively fresh from Future War story Glimmer Rats, a tale that pushed the sub-genre as far as it has been taken in the prog, manage this?

Yes. And No.

Over three acts Rennie tells an interesting, well constructed, dynamic story with plenty evidence of fore-planning and a sense of continuity typical of his work on Dredd & Caballistics inc., adding a level of sophistication befitting the last G.I., adding depth and thickness to the background of the war between the Norts & the Southers. At the same time, he tells a story of political machinations, bluff and double bluff which uses Rogue Trooper as little more than a hook to hang it on. Books 2 & 3 (titled Ghouls & Realpolitik respectively) feature some of the most focused, tightly scripted Rogue Trooper action in memory, leaps and bounds ahead of what came before, but at the same time fail in some indelible way to capture the spirit of Rogue Trooper, the X factor that made the character one of the most loved on 2000AD’s roster.

For my money, the best Gordon Rennie Rogue Trooper story ‘Lions’ follows these somewhat introductory tales, placing Rogue inside a command bunker during a heavy Nort assault. Rennie’s masterstroke here is not to have Rogue single-handedly save the day, but rather to humanise the other characters trapped alongside Rogue, showing that not everyone in war is a warrior and that the real villains are those who play with innocent lives. In creating a sense of the universe around new Earth, in creating characters not character types, Rennie reaches for that previously untapped vein of potential in this strip. Read it yourself and make up your own mind as to whether he grabs it fully. Also, in referencing World War 1 rather than its sequel, a whole different set of connotations are raised, with the moral ambiguity of that war providing stark contrast to ‘Classic’ Rogue Trooper’s simplicity.

Overall, Rennie’s work on Rogue, almost collected here in its entirety (I say this because the story from the recent Winter special is absent, probably due to being printed in color) stands as perhaps the finest concentrated run of Rogue Trooper stories ever seen. As Rennie said, ‘I don’t think he’s ever been particularly well-written’. Well Gordon, for my money, he has now.

Ian Edginton’s ‘New Model Army’, by comparison, bears the hall marks of a completely different comic author (auteur?), focusing more on the grotesque side of Genetic Modification, with a more typical (albeit Souther) mad scientist and his deranged experiments providing a background to this tale of what differentiates the Rogue Trooper, a weapon of war from merely being a ‘weapon’. This isn’t really articulated all too clearly in the story, and while every author might have one great Rogue Trooper story in them, this isn’t Ian Edginton’s, unfortunately for this book.

The art throughout is of an exception standard, with Staz Johnson’s work in particular invoking the classic feel of those original Rogue stories. Simon Coleby produces an interesting hyper-masculine take on Rogue, while P.J. Holden’s grey scale work on Realpolitik display a real sense of feeling for the character, although there is a slight continuity glitch in his retelling of the pivotal moment of Ghouls, where in a flashback Rogue wears Helm, when in Ghouls he specifically wasn’t wearing him as part of the storyline. Shame, that, as is the lack of fruition that the teasing that Cam Kennedy would return to the strip. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

The release of this volume is indicative that perhaps for now Rogue has strode off into the chem-mists once more, awaiting a new scribe to put his or her spin on the strip. However, while this book is still in print, they’ll have a hard job matching the quality found within. Think of it to the original Rogue Trooper canon what Dark Knight Returns is to Batman. If that isn’t a recommendation, I don’t know what is.

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