2000AD Prog 1615 - 3 December 08

Cover by Steve Cook

Hugh Platt: It’s an interesting one, certainly. Photo-covers can go wrong so very, very easily, but this is a good, striking image. Although “Jena’s” hat adornment is distinctly Romanov rather than Makarov emblem….but then having read Dante inside, maybe that was the point? 

Floyd Kermode:  Strewth, that's different, thought I to myself as I dutifully ripped open the envelope and got reviewing.  The cover picture of Jena Markov makes 2000AD look like a serious women's magazine or maybe the modish Australian lefty/smartpants publication The Monthly (imagine a cooler looking Prospect with fewer articles and better covers and you'll get the idea). 

I like this a lot.  I wouldn't want it to be the face of the future for the comic, but as a oncer it's awesome – different, arresting, visually well done.  Is it just me or does the model for Jena Makarov look like a young Annie Lennox in a big hat? Go cover artist, I say!  Go model Valeria Dragova, who gets my prize for sounding most like the person you're modelling for.   Three cheers for Eastern European women in military uniforms! 

Birthday Boy - Part 3 Script: Pat Mills Art: Vince Locke Colours: Chris Blythe Letters: Annie Parkhouse

Klesa handily fills in some plot points...

Synopsis: The judges shoot Klesa, but to no effect. Klesa is an immortal and can only see his loved ones every 150 years at the "crossroads of time". Klesa appears to kill the other judges and covers himself in candles - preparing to sacrifice Dredd...

HP: Vince Locke’s grim scratchings seem much more at home in the Undercity than his sparse depiction of MC-1 in past weeks. If only his drawing of the Judges had improved too. They still like sickly thin, like weasely strips of human gristle.  

Mills’ mystical nonsense – I don’t care by this point if it’s based on “research” or anything, it still reads as Millsian guff – makes bizarre leaps in logic that I can’t quite fathom. Why will the sacrifice of a Judge be more powerful than a “normal” human?  

Also, could someone please tell Pat to stop trying to show off his music collection in his work? He was doing it in ABC Warriors a few weeks ago. Whether the reader picks up on it or not, it still comes across as a pointless addendum to the story at hand. 

FK: Before even getting to Dredd, there's a brief glance at Droid Life. There have been times when it looked like it. The 'stupid punny story' idea was running a bit thin, although I will always cherish P14s idea for Dredd learning proper handwriting in the 'Cursive Earth' handwriting school.  Here's a fresh-ish story, turning on the droids all being obsessed with videogames since Rebellion took over.  It's a funny little strip.  Mind you, it  the change of ownership was ages ago  (unless another videogame company has taken over more recently while I wasn't looking), but a successful Droid Life is a gem. 

But almost immediately, we have something to wipe the Droid Life-induced smile of good humour off my face and replace it with a frown of  mild distaste.  

An unstoppable killer who talks a lot, Dredd showing none of his usual presence and playing a supporting character to the unstoppable, immortal gabby one? It can only be a Pat Mills story.  I do realise that Dredd is often a supporting character to various interesting things in his world (other Judges, fun future fads and so on) but there's support and there's support.  Here Dredd has about as much presence as that Judge who said a few things and then disappeared from view five years ago. No, I can't remember them either, that's my point.   Don't go counting the words, it's just a feeling I get.

Not that the killer comes out of it much better off. He exposits about his superiority, immortality and reason for holding a gripe with the Judges, gives us a bit of lip about conformity in MC1 and regenerates twice.  Here's where my lack of context and access to the combined wisdom of the 2000AD messagebaord come in. Am I missing out on the excellence of this story because I haven't read episodes I and II?  It's possible, but going on this episode I doubt it.   I wonder if Mr Mills shouldn't just leave Dredd alone for a while, if this story and his Blood of Satanus are anything to go for.  I'm all for different takes on a character, but Mills just doesn't seem interested in Dredd.

The art ranges from competent to awkward. To be specific, there are a couple of panels in which the judges look like their heads are too big for their bodies and one in which a female Judge appears to have a head coming in from another panel, like she's the Headless Judge and someone is leaning over her shoulder. 

Script & Art: Bob Byrne

Low tech rat extermination...

Synopsis: A one-off tale about a sadistic writer who meets his end at the hands of some resourceful rats...

HP: Bob Byrne’s Twisted Tale is a marked improvement over the infamously confusing insects one in 1599. Like so many of his stories, it explores the relationship between our world and another, almost secret miniature world that exists alongside. 

Unlike past times where I’ve had to read, re-read, re-read again, before asking helpful passers-by if they can interpret what’s going on, this tale of frustration and revenge was much simpler to grasp. And the ending…well, it showed a grasp of how twists should be done. Cracking stuff. 

FK: Man versus mouse.  Absolute genius. 

Really it's impossible to say much more about it without spoiling it for the readers. Can I stop now? (No, Ed). Oh alright, In sixteen black and white panels per page, Byrne gives us a taut funny little tale which threatens to wreck my sentences because I also want to say that it's a bit suspenseful and sad as well. 

What's more, the story thoroughly deserves the exclamation mark that Tharg uses to mark the end of one-off stories. Usually that '!'  is misused. It should mean excitement or surprise but most often signifies that it's time to turn the page. you've finished another Future Shock. In this prog, this is the only story that made me forget I'm writing a review while I was rereading.  I took my time, got into the characters, saw how the story finished up.  Wonderful stuff.   

I dislike stories about writers with deadlines on principal because it seems a bit lazy for writers to write about their own lifestyles – it would be like me teaching an English Language class about preparing for a class – but here everything works.  Let's have a lot more of this please Tharg and are there any other people out there who can do good wordless stories?   

The Volgan War - Vol 3 Part 10 Script: Pat Mills Art: Clint Langley Letters: Simon Bowland

Mongrol's breath was atrocious...

Synopsis: As the ABC Warriors finally get ready to save Zippo, Blackblood reveals his treachery and lets zippo fall into the molten smelting pool - then heads off to join Volkhan. Steelhorn realises that he's the only one how can save Zippo and dives in after him...

HP: This, this right here, is the ABC Warriors I’ve wanted for so long. Boom! Bang! Bash! Explosions! Now that the story is actually moving forward, rather than leadenly consolidating this new Mars setting, it’s actually becoming interesting again. 

There’s something oddly fitting about their bungling of the rescue mission though – it wouldn’t be an ABC outing if everything went according to plan. With Blackblood off the leash, and Steelhorn (and maybe Zippo….) heading towards possibly a new future as The Mess, it’s as good as any modern ABC caper. 

Special mention has to go out to the repeating page layout, showing off each Warrior doing what they do best. It’s a nice little feature that will look magnificent when this gets a collection edition release. 

FK: Disclaimer: Just as my heart always sinks when I see Simon Davis' art forcing me to don the helmet of objectivity to see his good points, so does my soul always soar when I see the ABC Warriors.  The Helm is no good to me, there simply is not an ABC Warriors story I don't enjoy.  If you want to see them ripped apart or even looked at fairly, look elsewhere.  The art doesn't matter (although there'd be a grinding of mental gears if Simon Davis ever drew them), nor does how much I can follow the story. You have been warned.

Well, what a wonderful ABC story this is!  Too short though. Very little exposition here, Mills must have used up all his characterly gabbiness on the Dredd story. The characters do what they normally do: Blackblood is funny and treacherous, Pineapples shoots things, Hammerstein is brave, simple and frustrated, Mongrol is, well really we get two Mongrol's for the price of one here. The Mongrol in the action is the mindless smusher of old and his story is being told/remembered by the thoughtful reflective new Mongrol.

Oh and Deadlock is mystical and says 'Nourishment'!  I should find all this frustrating – I've read Deadlock saying 'nourishment' as often as I've heard the guy from Little Britain I say he's the only gay in the village.  However, due to my ABC blind spot, I don't. Hooray, I think, Deadlock is saying 'nourishment' and talking portentously about Magick.

The only other things to it are Steelhorn being sacrificial and a nifty picture of two of the relatively new bad guys, The G Men.  All this is wrapped up in some gorgeous just right Clint Langley art: vivid, not too dark (which is important if you've read any of Langley's murkier work).  Short review: moves along nicely. 

Vile Bodies - Part 5 Script: Ian Edginton Art: Simon Davis Letters: Ellie De Ville

Redfers takes things in hand...

Synopsis: Cromwell and Ampney are attacked by the creatures but they are stopped by the intervention of Redfers himself. Redfers telly Crucis that he's been looking for a higher life to take charge of mankind and appears to have found it in a huge alien/venus flytrap living in his house...

HP: For all Simon Davis’ luscious painting, I can’t bring myself to enjoy this too much. For an opening tale, I’m finding Ampney Crucis to be a little bit pedestrian – only in 2000AD could a story involving giant inter-war human-wasp monsters feel so humdrum.  

It’s partly because it feels like it’s taken a single lick from so many other sources – Bix Barton, Devlin Waugh, Caballistics Inc, Necronauts, and so forth – but afterwards I feel like I’ve not tasted anything substantial, merely a morass of whiffs. Ian Edginton’s script doesn’t fizzle enough to make Ampney Crucis stand out – he’s just a cypherous toff, that I couldn’t give a hoot over if he ends up bug food or not.  

FK: People are turning into insects in the 1920s. Well, upper-class ones are.  It's Edginton time!  

The fun line of the week has to be 'unhand that man you wretched proletarian bastards!'.  This isn't a classic or anything, just fun.  Lots of inventiveness here as the plucky overdrawn-yet-serious upper-class hero, his manservant and the equally overdrawn upper class bad guy go through their paces.  Edginton is good at giving cliched characters a bit of extra depth just after the cliché has hit the reader.  You're in mid dismissal of the character when they say something that shows a bit more reality. It's unnerving, if good. 

The story doesn't thrill or amuse me a lot; yes upper class twits mixing it with hideous menaces from beyond, how incongruous!  I have the feeling of having had a lot of this recently, most recently in a Dr Who story.  So, while Edginton is always a Good Thing, this story is no Red Seas or Scarlet Traces. Looking on the bright side, it's not that godawful story about aliens invading a prison, but it fails to thrill.  I could live to change this opinion, if some authorial brilliance turns up in subsequent progs, something I wouldn't put past Edginton, but it's not here.

Simon Davis' art never does it for me, apart from the occasional blacked out character.  By 'blacked out', I mean  his trick of occasionally drawing a character so that you only see their mouth and eyes yet know who they are (there's probably some proper comics artist term for this that I don't know).   Apart from that, my reaction to a Davis story is 'oh no, not again'.  However, donning the Helm of Reviewerly Objectivity, I can see that he does a nice 'a bit like Beardsley/Klimt bit with some naked ladies and , draws the ginger-bearded baddie quite vividly.  For Davis it's a pretty good job.   
 

Prisoner of the Tsar - Part 3 Script: Robbie Morrison Art: John Burns Letters: Annie Parkhouse

The Tsar gets ahead of himself...

Synopsis: The Tsar launches an attack on Dante's mother's base and forces Dante to watch via vid link. Meanwhile, the torturers prepare to continue Dante's Torture, but Jena comes to the rescue. She knocks out the guards and frees Dante - but Dante's in no condition to run anywhere...

HP: And so to Dante. The Tsar turns the screw, and Jena makes the choice we all knew she was going to do. Predictable? Yes. Disappointing? Never. 

I find it hard to believe this is really the end of Dante’s plotted rebellion – I certainly don’t think that Escondia is going to be destroyed ‘off camera’. I don’t care that Dante’s spent the last month hanging from his wrists and doing little else. If Dante was a tea-time serial adventure – which arguably it has its roots in – then this is where the hero starts to win. I can’t wait. 

FK: You know, when Dante killed the Tsar and was killed himself, I knew it wouldn't last.  But it's still disappointing to see everyone back again. 

The guy who created Doraemon said that cartoon characters lives are like the stripes on a barbers pole. There's a lot of movement, but  nothing ever really changes, otherwise the story is over.  One of the strengths of 2000AD is that it at least gives the illusion of not being subject to this rule the way American comics are (how on earth stories about Batman or Superman dying get any interest at all is beyond me). Here in Dante the rubber band has well and truly snapped back.  No, I'm not demanding that Dante be killed off. I'm just recording my impression.  I'm certainly not anxious about any of the many threatened supporting characters (I don't think it's giving too much away to say that that means just about all of them).

Anyway, here we are, back to Dante being world weary and really really nice the Tsar being a ruthless bastard, Tsar's daughter being in love with D despite herself and that's about it, apart from a rather jolly torturer. I liked the torturer, possibly because we have the same haircut.  Burns' art is a treat for the eyes as usual, he deserves stories this good.   The panel that shows Dante's reaction to the Tsar ordering a bit of nastiness just about tells the whole story.

One quibble/odd thing though.  When Dante falls over, Burns draws him supposedly in mid-fall. To me it looks like Dante is levitating. Am I the only person to think this? I've read it about three times and each time I think 'look, a nude man floating in mid air'.  Have I been watching too many 'hovering things ' scenes in old Star Wars movies? 

HP: As the prog heads towards the final weekly of 2009, it’s yet another week of mixed results to chew on.  A fun little Droid Life and another superbly designed Clickwheel ad give the prog cheeky bookends, but a lacklustre Dredd and a unsatisfying Ampney Crucis, bring down the prog overall.  

Best Story: Dante. Of course.

FK:

Best Story: Twisted Tales by a mile (do I need a worst story?  If so Dredd by the same mile).