By Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra, Henry Flint

Buy ABC Warriors - Shadow Warriors

Review by Peter Adamson

Warning: This review carries some references to the later Volgan War books. And some griping. Sorry.
 
The Shadow Warriors picks up where The Third Element left off, with the Warriors once again an unwelcome presence on a fractured Mars enlisted now by the 'North' to increase the peace. Wary of their effectiveness, the 'South' have enlisted their own team of robots, the self-titled Malevolent Seven, to counter each warrior and end them once and for all.

It's a straightforward story, and Mills tells it without much of the ill-wrought world creating that came before - although there are places where he seems at pains to shoehorn old devices of previous Mars stories -  Cyboons and dinosaurs and even a Humpy make their presence felt without really advancing the plot, for example, and the result sometimes feels like more of a distraction (as does the fate of blubbery hipster B-Boy who we're apparently supposed to mourn despite having only encountered him by anecdote and as a throbbing spot in the sky).

As in the later Volgan War books the carbon copy antagonists to new Mars' civil war - a controlling Union versus a rebel and ostensibly redneck Confederacy, means that the author has little to explain about the conflict or add much by way of characterisation - it's the American Civil War wrought and fought large on Mars with clones, Trimorphs as the slaves and a dash of modern battle tech - particularly Neuropeptide (which Mills explains to some length in his introduction) as garnish. As easy as this backdrop forms however, it's a further distraction, and now that The Volgan War has complicated things by making Mars a casualty of a sort of cod-Soviet-cum-Gestapo society it's difficult to work out how the Warriors' Mars actually stacks up and who is in charge. 
 
So beyond these distractions, what's the interest in this volume? Well, there's some humour again (yay) - Joe's opening solo exploits feature strongly in the Carlos Ezquerra-drawn segment and are a fun aside. As you'd expect the Spaniard laps up the opportunity to make the robot and his counterpart Dogtag's moving among the 'fleshies' a reliably randy prospect. I never thought I'd write a sentence like that.

But the main act are the Shadow Warriors themselves, a concept which is surprising for Mills having not really used it before, and unsurprising in Mill's likely repeat in The Volgan Wa- sorry, there I go again. The difference here to what we've seen of Volkhan's mob to date is that the Shadow Warriors are a proper group of individuals as well as nifty names. They have their own personalities for the most part, although leader Dogtag loses some of this when his original highwayman shape is rebuilt as a humanoid dog... it's because his name's Dogtag- d'you see?

That aside it's hard not to like some of the Shadow Warriors, especially where Mills pushes the envelope with regard to his world of robots - the Rev, Blackblood's counterpart and his Church of Judas colour in a little more of Blackblood's personality, rehabilitating him to the sinister hissing bully we know him now after the early nineties comedy version. Bootleg, the robot that has no past and is estranged from his maker is a great concept, fitting neatly with the fun new robot swear words the cast use against one another 'Asimov!' 'Manufacker!' - Mills must have had fun with those.

It was a surprise for me to observe that this volume is the first time since the Volgan War flashbacks of the first volume that the Warriors have been specifically set up against others of their kind (i.e. robots), and in doing so we learn more about them as robots and by extension, their culture. I love the intuitive concept of the robotic Church of Judas and 'bootlegging', and the implied problematic nature of the robot/human creator relationship, a theme we've seen covered in the pasts of Mongrol of course and Hammerstein, but now neatly inverted by Blackblood's religion.

But of the Shadows again, the most fun is surely the certifiably insane robot paramedic Doctor Maniacus, butchering his way through wards of his human patients to feed on their pain (I'm not sure how...), and of course his robot snakes who eat robot brains and control... I can't explain that one, sorry. It's utterly barking, and the better for it. It's a shame little more was made of the incorporeal Deus Ex Machina though, a sentient program which inhabits a reanimated human corpse is genuinely creepy, but amongst the rest of the action and Mills' pacing he's treated as almost a throwaway. 
 
But make no mistake, the robots are still the stars and as ever the humans are a duplicitous and at times anonymous lot - so much so that you almost feel sorry for the likes of Bootleg and some empathy with Blackblood. The Warriors themselves get a good outing apiece with minimal character development - Steelhorn is the notable exception with a few new tricks on show and a new crystalline body revealed at the end of the story (now seemingly ignored for The Volgan War). Of all the Warriors he is the one we know least well, so it's fitting that he gets a little more to show off, but it's not enough to overwhelm the story or upstage Hammerstein, for example.

Where The Shadow Warriors works is its insularity compared with other volumes. There's a sense that having painfully brought the Warriors back to Mars and retouched their world, their creator is enjoying the telling of a straightforward story, and to its credit I would say that this is the first volume since the first that a casual reader could pick up. Sure, there are a couple of Medusa references, but there's no Khaos guff (Deadlock's magic is reliably old school - behind closed doors as it was back in the really early days), Hammerstein's in charge again, and it doesn't really matter who the enemy is. Looking forward again we know that's not strictly true, as much as we know now that Mek-Quake needing a daily software reboot and the possibility that he may have to be dropped off at an unnamed location (presumably Broadband Asylum) was really more than a running gag on Mills' part, and looks set to be a significant chapter in the history of the Warriors.

However, as we also know too well, Mills isn't above the old reset switch himself with duplicate bodies and resurrections - there are two in this story alone. It may be enough to convince that here the author was continuing his world-building - reassuringly, the cranes above Marineris City in Henry Flint's section are ever present, as they are in the current storyline.
 
Of the artists we're back down to two, following the mixed bag of The Third Element, and they're both masters (perhaps even master and pupil?). Flint's artwork is gorgeous, and he is clearly the go-to guy for visually rendering weird robot characters (though I'm curious to know if Ezquerra ever did any concept art for the later Shadow Warriors). If I had one complaint it's that en masse the large amount of greyscale toning (and maybe the reduced page size) lets it down a little. Ezquerra's return to drawing the Warriors for the first time since The Meknificent Seven shows how little his artwork has changed over the years, and how comforting that is. It doesn't explain why he reduces Mek Quake to the size of the other robots though - it's just weird, and poor Mek-Quake looks strangely weedy and vulnerable for it. Also of note on the art front: the end pages of this volume feature greyscale reproductions of (most of) the themed covers. Missing in action however is Henry Flint's astonishing inside-out Blackblood from Prog 1483 - surely an oversight, this is the sort of cover that the word 'scrotnig' was made for?
 
Also not so good: what could be interpreted as Mills' homophobia in the 'rent man' analogy. Let it go, Pat.

And that's yer lot for pen and ink Warriors for the time being. As a fan of this style, including the painterly Walker volumes, this volume is a bittersweet closer for me as from here on it's the somewhat murky and busy busy world of Clint Langley's art droid tenure. Due to the format change and the accompanying price hike, this is where I get off the train. It's not a bad place to end though, and the mean-time there's the newly reprinted Deadlock series to look out for attached to the Meg, and my own vain hope, printed too many places elsewhere, that someone might see fit to compile the Pineapples/Blackblood/Hammerstein one-offs in one volume. Spread the Word, eh?

Buy ABC Warriors - Shadow Warriors