Cover by Karl Richardson

Synopsis by Gavin Hanly
1st opinion by Martin Charlton
2nd opinion by Adam Crabtree

Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

Cadet - Part 3

The end of Robert...

Synopsis: Dredd continues his investigation, feeling that he’s missed something.  He suddenly discovers that Bertram Delong has had an electronic voicebox fitted – and that would have been enough to fool the lie detector.  He tries to track down Beeny, unaware that she’s staying at her Dad’s old place for the night. 

Beeny still can’t work out how to crack the case and she decides to look in her dad’s old music room, which was always locked.  Inside, she discovers that Bennet Beeny had himself stuffed and animated by Sardini when he took over America’s body – it even has a voice box implanted so that he could sing. 

Suddenly Beeny realises that Delong kept his throat covered, just as Delong himself breaks into her house.  She has Delong in her sights, but her robot Robert gets in the way and is destroyed, knocking Beeny to the ground.  Meanwhile, Dredd has tracked down her location through Jobey and sends Judges to the location.  Delong admits to Beeny that he was the fifth member of the cell, and is just about to kill her when the animated Bennet Beeny starts singing.  Delong is distracted enough for Beeny to shove a bootknife up his arse.  The judges arrive, followed by Dredd.  He tells her that his evaluation will be positive, and that the judges are her family now…

MC: Three parts and it’s over. And how was it? By turns masterful, glorious and a logical follow up to Fading of the Light. The things that niggle? It’s been ages since part two, and now part 3 is over so quickly.

I’m sad in many ways. I’ll miss this now, as beyond bloodline stories, this work is really the defining point of Dredd in recent years, and we deserve more. The sooner America 4 rolls round the better, as this has been another classic in the making. Many people don’t rate America 2 as highly as the original, and while it perhaps isn’t as good as ‘The Greatest Dredd Story ever’, it’s up there with the best if you read it and judge it on its own merits.

Likewise, compared to the opening few panels of Dredd, part three of Cadet can seem somewhat pedestrian. Presented here, however, is an interesting look into the private lives of the judges, personalising them in a way that deliberately has been avoided in the past. Bennet Beeny suggested that the Judges have to change. With this one story, their presentation in this strip has done just that. It would appear they’re only human after all. 

AC: Three. Stinkin’. Parts.

Actually, y’know what? It’d be better if it WERE stinkin’. Then it wouldn’t be so frustrating to bid a hugely premature goodbye to America III (named for the aforementioned number of parts no doubt).

No matter. This still retains the bite and quiet, assured competence that I for one have come to expect from the writer in question. Look out for our poor old Mr Delong, taking a knife in a vessel that was never meant to contain one.

Dredd in particular is a highlight, with Wagner giving his creation a soul, however hidden and decidedly granite-like; this has been a good story for him. While the focus should have been on Beeny, a rather cold but impressively assertive character (will she return), Dredd’s (no other word for it) grumpy approach to paperwork and somewhat self satisfied perpifying for show have been the main attractions.

Nonetheless, there is a feeling that there was some back and forth about how long this story should be; that it started out as an epic and ended up being ignominiously trimmed down so it could be fit into the pre Christmas turnover (mmmm… pre-Christmas turnoverrrr…). I was expecting fireworks, but instead we have our police procedural brought to a conclusion tidy enough for CSI, with a resolutely low casualty rate.

Ho hum. 

Stalingrad - Part 8

Constanta joins IMF ...

Synopsis: Charnasova is unable to get a straight answer from Richter as to whether Constanta is dead, but he tells her that if they hand him over to the Germans, he’ll be a dead man.  Her superior bursts in telling her that the Germans have arrived for the exchange and demands from Richter to know where the Golem was – executing him when he did not get an answer.  He takes a pendant from Richter’s neck and asks Charnasova if she believed Richter.  She says she didn’t, worried that she might be killed too.  He takes Richter’s uniform and his place in the prisoner transfer – ripping off his face to reveal himself as Constanta after all – and escapes back to Germany. 

Charnasova discovers the real lieutenant’s skinned corpse later and manages to retrieve the Golem’s heart intact – keeping it safe for 20 years, but finally implanting it in the statue on the top of the Mamayev Kurgen…

MC: I didn’t have a summer holiday this year. At least, not in the usual sense. Instead I journeyed to a parallel universe, differentiated from our own simply by its House of Tharg scheduling procedures. Instead of running David Bishop’s Fiends of the Eastern Front in its Meg, it instead placed it in the prog over 8 weeks. Commended for its tight scripting, pacing and use of original source material it will be up there in the running for Prog story of the year on the parallel 2000AD R eview website. Imagine my disappointment when I returned home to find ‘Red Tide’ syndrome had struck again. Poor Colin Macneil. 

AC: Eight months of slow burn; it’s not for everybody. So, does it come to a satisfactory finale? Well, if nothing else, it’s in keeping with the rest of Stalingrad, a series that has been big on the horror but not necessarily forthcoming with the action.

The strip, I noticed a month or two back, relies on a predominantly aspect-to-aspect approach to storytelling, never more prominent than in battles being depicted in a series of segments, and in the jumping to and fro through time. All very well, indeed it contributes to the ambient sense of this being a traumatic reminiscence, but it can lead to the story suffering a lack of kinesis, of action-to-action, moment-to-moment transitions.

Part seven was really the climax to this, with the Golem being dispatched in stylish but, as I say, a somewhat distant and unceremonial manner. Papering such cracks however, Colin Macneill’s marvellously smoky monochrome lends the piece a greater sense of mystery and of silent, insidious oppression, and David Bishop’s imaginative power is irrefutable, even if the delivery is flawed.

This instalment fizzles out, to be honest; the conclusion is lifted from the original Fiends quite scandalously, and worse, I rather expected that it would. It’s not always a good thing that 2000AD always shoots for that final twist. Sometimes it’s better off without! And why does Constant even reveal himself? He seemed eager enough to keep things schtum one page previous!

And yet, I still can’t commit myself to decrying it!

The final conclusion involving the legacy of the Golem shows a lot of what Fiends of the Eastern Front ’06 had in spades; heart. Quite literally it seems. I seem to recall hearing that this was Bishop’s first tenure as a script droid, and if so I heartily congratulate him for taking the characters of old and treading that proving ground, displaying that essential skill that seems to be the life blood of contemporary comic scribes as high up as The Moore; to make it seem new again.

Return of the Jester - Part 8

School fun with Jester Kanak ...

Synopsis: Siddha and Kanak fight, but Siddha gets the upper hand. 

Kanak tells him of his time at school, when he was caught doing a charicature of one of the teachers.  The teacher took him for a beating, and then continued to abuse him.  Kanak was changed forever and later on found the teacher and stabbed him to death on the street. 

With the story over, Siddha and Kanak fight once more, but the Siddha wins as Kanak is finally crushed by a falling statue. 

Rohan’s finally rid of his bad karma, is back with Mirabai and his adventures as the Black Siddha appear to be over.

MC: I’ll read any old rubbish, I really will. If I’ve paid for it, I’m consuming it. My dad always used to say ‘finish your plate, there’s a war on’, and I roughly apply this to my comic reading habits. So yeah, I’ve read this for the past 8 issues. The first issue was an acceptable self rip off of Mills’ single best 6 pages of story telling in over a decade, but since then it’s been shit. Utter rubbish, rubbish that if I’d submitted to the editor of the Meg would have been returned faster than poo off a stick.

So let’s consider Black Siddah evidence that in comics it’s not always what you are, but in the case of Pat Mills, who you are that determines your ability to get published. Good riddance to this strip. 

AC: Oh, but this little beauty had them tearing each other to pieces on the message boards! Eight months ago, this started up alongside our faithful Fiends and they’ve been a staple in our lives, for better or for worse for the best part of a year. None were more controversial than Pat Mills’ Black Siddha.

The task (and some thought of it as a task) of deciphering the non-linear, hyperactive and (no other word sings quite so beautifully in this instance) downright wacky nature of this one has seemed to be more than a match for the readership… and as such, we can expect no more Indian themed fun from the Lords of Karma and their golden boy the Siddha.

Yes, it seems that proceedings have been brought to an abrupt end, with Mills closing the book(s) on one of his more challenging creations of recent years. We see the, all-told, poignant destruction of Jester Kanak, our main antagonist and the real star of the strip, and to commemorate we’ve got Simon Davis, not only delivering a gothic graveyard and a beautiful skyline at the end, but stepping away from his typical palette to give us a gleefully macabre and visually enriching dream sequence.

The juxtaposition (the best word in the world but good, especially if you’re in higher learning) of the cartoonish imagery (it’s anything but simple, or infantile) with sheer creepiness is effective, even if Mills gets out his usual trick of shrugging off any deviance in behaviour with some kind of sexual misdemeanour. Yes sir, one music room fiddling and you’re an insane, invincible street killer! It’s a harmful and somewhat stupid attitude to be putting across, and needs to be added to the list of things that need to be said to this perhaps TOO respected veteran.

What else is there to be said? I’m gonna miss it, though I doubt if Jester were no longer in it (and I think a falling masonry will do it nine times out of ten) I’d feel that way. Here’s to the Siddah. 

Shades of Grue

Justin meets his currently adoring fans...

Synopsis: In Mega City one, the biggest singing sensation of the day was a singer from Brit City called Justin Sharp. He was loved for his shunning of electronica and sticking to acoustic music – and also because of his sensitive personality.

But his manager wanted a change and desperately tried to get him to take on a new persona – as he was afraid that the sensitive shtick was going to get old fast.  He gives Justin a new images and as a last touch, the sunglasses of a dead DJ.  As soon as Justin tries on the glasses, he undergoes a personality change and starts playing muzak.  His once adoring crowd turn on him and rip him and the manager to shreds. 

Apparently the glasses belonged to the most hated DJ in Mega City who was also a powerful Psi Talent and managed to turn the whole city against him, before he committed suicide – but not before his glasses were imbued with his obnoxious identity…

MC: I remember when I was a fan of wrestling, and the promoters would illustrate the quality of a wrestler by having him destroy utter no hopers in opening matches, which over time would only devalue the wrestler’s stature by grinding him down to the level of those other opening match bums in the eyes of the fans. The same thing is happening here. Al Ewing, for all his undoubted quality has now been treading water in opening matches, and deserves a crack at the main event, namely a long running strip with involved characters and a sense of purpose. Go on Tharg, you know he deserves better than this.  

AC: Man… what a series! It’s just been hit after hit for the menagerie of talent that has introduced us to Henry Dubble, tour guide par excellence.

More on that in a bit, first we’ve got Shades of Crue, Al Ewing’s second month in a row on scripting duties, with the very talented Dean Ormstrong the latest to take an almost exclusively monochrome strip (last month’s Rufus effort being a shining exception) and accept the challenge of artistic innovation.

It’s not all good news; like last month’s this refers directly to events that occurred in a singular one-off Dredd story at some point in the past thirty years, except that last month’s Meg bothered to reprint the relevant story. So we’re going along nicely, trying to puzzle out the secret of this mysterious shades, when we get a final page infodump, and I mean dump most emphatically, about some story… that I’ve never read…but this continues on from…

Prog 740, you say? Oh cheers, when I’ve got two weeks and a few quid going spare, I’ll check it out!

Still, we do get some high-lairy-ass pseudo pop dialogue, courtesy of the Ewing droid, surely the latest in a long line of criminal geniuses to take a place on the script roster.

Not the send off I’d have picked for this wondrous series, but it’ll serve. Don’t be gone too long now. 

Miscellaneous Material inc.

• Horror Movie Remakes
• Small press
• New comics - Kidnapped
• New movies
• Classic Dredd
  

MC: A nice small press this month, although this section has probably already peaked with Mr Amperduke, everything else seeming somewhat slight. Kidnapped looks intriguing, even though I’m not convinced of the importance of the scribe in this instance, given that the story already exists. Elsewhere, a bizarre piece of scheduling seems to have missed the point of the horror themed article and reprint, while the film reviews continue to frustrate. 

SW: Well, whatta you know, I actually enjoyed the articles this month. The critique on the trend towards horror remakes actually carried some genuine insight, and although I was admittedly reading it between lulls in work and a periodical on pruning shears might have sufficed, that doesn’t change that!

I do have some small acquaintance with the admirable work of Paul Gravett, and have had a limited occasion to peruse his works on British and Japanese comics; the feature was well merited. Arguably a little mellow for the rough’n’ready Megazine, the article on the Kidnapped adaptation was a worthy distraction too, and it’s truly heartening to see comics as a medium being put to broader use, with a broader audience.

But the real gem this month came in the form of our small press story; The Strange Fate of Doctor Roberto Tesla (!). Opinions on the small press section introduced this year have been all over the place, but to be fair, so has the material. We’ve had the unmemorable and the confused (I’ll name no names here) sitting side by strange with the vivacious (Monsters) and the wonderfully strange (Mr Amperduke, you old dog!); personally I’d love to see it bumped up to two strips a month, because I’ve gotta tell ya, every good one, every really good one, is worth putting up with the mediocre ones for.

“Strange Fate” could be best described as a truly excellent Future Shock (or one of its derivatives), or hopefully described as the jumping off point for a lasting character! I for one would love to see our dear Doc Tesla in other adventures in his current state!

Impeccable writing, excellent art, inventive concept payoff, and a damn fine sense of humour (check out the mains plug for the telekinesis machine!), this will be the second time that I award the “Best In Show” award to the small press boys.