The 2000 AD Prog Slog
The re-encountering of the first one thousand and eighty eight editions, referred to as "programmes" or "progs" for short, of science fiction weekly comic 2000 AD by Paul B Rainey. This time, The Slog reaches 1992.
Property of Who?
Action Special, posted Mon Mar 2nd 2009
The Action Special is an interesting curiosity. A one off companion to 2000 AD, these are new stories featuring old IPC characters from the sixties written and drawn by Tharg’s new wave of creators. It means we have the Steel Claw painted by Sean Philips, The Spider written by Mark Millar and, shortly after his recent guest appearance in Universal Soldier, Kelly’s Eye by the same team of Alan McKenzie and Brett Ewins.
At the time, despite unfamiliarity with the characters being reinvented here, I thought the special was interesting and I was intrigued by the possibility that this could lead to a new regular comic from Fleetway. Crisis and Revolver were noble experiments but it seemed to me that a title modernising these old comic strips stood more of a chance of being successful. Upon my revisit, I suspect it wouldn’t have worked even if it had turned out that the characters Fleetway are using here actually legally belonged to them. The overall tone of the stories is flat and lifeless. The Steel Claw and Mytek the Mighty (with art by Shaky Kane) might look great but there’s little else to them. The Spider is overly sadistic and Kelly’s Eye forgettable. The only strip that has any vibrancy as far as I am concerned is Doctor Sin, by John Smith and John Burns.
Like I say, it turns out that this special was published by Fleetway under the mistaken belief that they owned the characters which is why we never saw anything more of them, mainly. DC now owns them where they have appeared in a couple of limited run serials but that’s about it. Wouldn’t it be cool if one day DC decided to do something more substantial and British with them rather than continuing to leave them as under utilised.
MACH 1 Sick Day
Prog 780, posted Tues Mar 3rd 2009
There’s nothing quite like a re-launch prog, although, according to Tharg, this now happens thrice yearly so, I suppose, now there is. My copy still has the free gift attached which is a "Security Clearance Unit" or, more accurately, one of those cheap wallets you get when you buy a rail card but with a couple of 2000 AD corporate logos printed on it. I guess the guy I bought the collection off of on eBay had outgrown the excitement that accompanies a free gift by this stage. Personally, I seem to remember thinking, "at last, something I can use", and keeping my cash-point card in it until it fell apart one month later. The last free gift I had any use for were the MACH 1 transfers which I tried to get a sick day off school with.
Next week’s free gift is two ID cards, meant to accompany the SCU given away with this prog. In theory, these sound pretty cool, but in reality, it’s just designs for cards printed on slightly thicker cover stock. They don’t even have perforated edges so you can remove them easily; you have to cut them out with a pair of scissors. Any overseas readers reading this now, let me tell you something; you aren’t missing out. If anything you are better off; at least your cover doesn’t have a big sellotape mark on it.
Zig and Zag
Judge Dredd The Magazine 2.1, posted Thurs Mar 5th 2009
The Slog is going to have to zigzag back a forth between 2000 AD and Judge Dredd The Megazine over the next couple of weeks. Normally, when faced with having to flip between the main event and its auxiliary publications, I like to wait until a natural break but it isn’t possible on this occasion. This is thanks to upcoming epic, Judgement Day, running between the two. The result might be a bit dizzying, for me at least.
Anyway, Fleetway has decided to restart The Megazine, this time as a fortnightly. I don’t really know why they decided to do this. Perhaps the increased frequency is down to better than expected sales of the monthly and renumbering it is a way of encouraging curious sceptics to give it a go.
Those curious sceptics might be unsure of how they feel about the new Magazine. On one hand, all of the stories, Judge Dredd, Devlin Waugh and Armageddon, make strong starts but when you consider the comic strip page count to price ratio you’re not exactly getting value for money here. For twice the price you get 28 comic pages which is the same as you get most weeks in 2000 AD. The centre of The Megazine is puffed out with mock news pieces repeating exactly what we’ve just read in the main strips, an article on the creation of Devlin Waugh which seems a bit premature given that we’ve only seen one episode of it so far and reader survey results. Next issue does see the start of The Soul Sisters which, if memory serves, isn’t exactly good news.
Judge Loon
Judge Dredd The Megazine, posted Fri Mar 6th 2009
There was a time when Judge Dredd was responsible for just twenty four new pages of comic a month. Now we’re getting closer to forty and that’s not including peripheral strips such as Soul Sisters, Devlin Waugh and Armageddon. It’s sometimes easy to forget amongst all of this output the simple joy of reading a John Wagner penned Dredd tale.
In Texas City Sting, Dredd has gone to Texas City to have extradited known perps back to Mega City One. However, because the Chief Judge there has an aversion to Big Meg types, Dredd has to exploit a loop hole in Texan law by operating as a debt collector and duping those on his wanted list into returning home. It’s a story told with such perfect pitch that you can’t help but feel joyous at the experience of reading it.
Yan Shimony is an artist I just about remember from Blast magazine. His work (I presume Shimony’s a he) here is packed with expression, characterisation and momentum. He draws good machinery and cityscapes too. My only criticism is that, at least once, he draws Dredd grinning like a loon which, as all Squxx dek Thargo know, isn’t something the character ever does. I can understand that perhaps Shimony isn’t immersed enough in the character to not know any different but surely editorial should have firewalled the art and sent it back to be redrawn. Unless the editor doesn’t know this either.
The Slog Confesses
Prog 784, posted Mon Mar 9th 2009
Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, I need to tell you that I no longer read most of the Nerve Centre and none of the letters for The Slog. I’m not interested in Ig-Roid’s promotion of related 2000 AD product while the reader’s letters and art have lost their pizzazz. I guess this might be down to the average age of the Squaxx dek Thargo being higher than it was ten years ago. There’s something charming about a ten year old engaging with a shared joke with the editor. It’s a wonder that I even read Tharg’s editorials any more given that he seems to be tiring of the whole process too.
Korporate Kalamity
Prog 786, posted Tues Mar 10th 2009
Big faceless corporations seem to be the common enemy at the moment in 2000 AD. In Rogue Trooper, it’s a big corporation that’s responsible for the war. In Button Man, "The Voices" who sponsor "the game" are the super rich, some of who probably gained their fortunes from running corporations. But the meanest of them all is perhaps the Okay Kola Korporation.
In Kola Kommandos, unassuming office worker Hector Doldrum is being thrown from pillar to post after uncovering illegal animal experiments on a hidden floor of the Okay Kola Korproation’s head office. He’s been fired from his job, dumped in the middle of a war zone by a robot taxi driver and beaten up by a super terrorist’s sidekick.
The thrill is being written by Steve Parkhouse who I usually remember as an artist on strips like The Bojeffries Saga. I sometimes forget that my first encountering of his work was as a writer for Marvel UK’s Hulk Comic during the late seventies where he wrote The Black Knight and Night Raven, both strips I loved. For Kola Kommandos however, I don’t feel as if I’m connecting with the story as successfully as I should despite my own personal issues with large corporations. It feels as if the gaps are there due to oversight rather than deliberately existing to create mystery.
I’m curious to know why it is that Parkhouse never seems to both write and draw the same strip. Kola Kommandos is drawn by Anthony Williams whose loose cartoon style gives it a zany quality. As much as I enjoy his work here, I wonder how much different the strip might be if it were also being drawn by Parkhouse.
Now and Then
Judge Dredd The Megazine 2.4, posted Wed Mar 11th 2009
I’ve found a lot of the promotion for new mega-epic Judgement Day a little off putting. The big deal seems to be that three billion people will die. Why is it that whoever came up with this tag line thinks that global death tolls is what Judge Dredd readers like from a mega epic. The Apocalypse War saw 400 million die, Necropolis 60 Million; once you start hitting these sorts of numbers my mind can’t comprehend the difference between the amounts. Three billion is a lot but then so is sixty million. They would have been much better off promoting Judgement Day as Judge Dredd teams up with Johnny Alpha again.
The promise of global extinction hangs over Armageddon The Bad Man as well. By Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra, it’s set in the 1990s against a backdrop of global political unrest and is meant to bridge the gap between 1992 and Judge Dredd’s time. The strip seems to be about a young woman called Lori LeMayne who, after being forcibly made homeless, is on the run from a stone cold killer who wants her for some reason.
It reminds me of the Terminator films. A mysterious, seemingly unstoppable killer hunts down an innocent woman against a backdrop of inevitable global destruction. Ezquerra’s art is great, as usual, and Grant’s script seems slightly more invested than much of his other recent work that I’ve seen for The Slog. However, once The Bad Man finishes, I don’t remember the creators returning to Armageddon to finish the job that they had started.
Perhaps this is a good thing. Do we really want to see getting from here to there being mapped out in such detail? We’re better off with that ambiguity regarding the origins of Dredd’s world being present, I think. Once certain aspects get over rationalized, what were once just fun elements start to receive too much scrutiny and the whole thing begins to wobble.
The Peak
Prog 789, posted Thurs Mar 12th 2009
Sometimes in your comic reading life you encounter a strip that is a union of creators at the peak of their craft and anything you say about it fails to represent it anywhere near accurately enough. One of those strips is Button Man by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson.
Harry Exton used to be a mercenary. Now he’s a Button Man; a hired killer paid to take part in "the game" where people like him come up against each other. That round of "The Game" is only over when you’ve collected your opponent’s token, usually by causing their death. Now Harry wants out but his "voice", the mysterious man of privilege who hires him, doesn’t want him to leave. Now Harry is up against four other players, with only three bullets left.
Wagner’s writing is so tight. I imagine him composing the dialogue and then going through it again with a pot of Tip-Ex stripping it down to its absolute minimum. Ranson’s art is perfectly detailed, insightfully spaced and rich with atmosphere. The whole thing feels like a BBC drama from the seventies, classically acted and shown after my bedtime so I never got to see it. I half expect to see it repeated on BBC 4 soon and all ten thousand viewers marvelling at how good it is.
There, see? Very word I wrote took something away from how good it is.
Fonze Chaos
Prog 790, posted Fri Mar 13th 2009
ABC Warriors Khronicles of Khaos Book Two ends this prog with a big party followed by all the robots lying around with hangovers. I thought droids drank oil when they wanted to let their cables down but now, thanks to Deadlock’s teaching in the ways of chaos or to artist Kevin Walker, they drink Pina Coladas. I must admit, I’ve not been a hundred percent engaged in the story. This could be down to the wearying affects of The Slog but those moments I was alert for I enjoyed.
Last prog, the Warriors completed their mission and collected seven severed heads for the planet of chaos, Hekate. These heads, belonging to a tax man, a chaplain, a tycoon, a scientist, a politician, a colonel and "the emperor of order himself", could have done with being contemporised a bit and including a tabloid journalist, a reality TV producer and my boss (if I had a job, that is). This prog, Deadlock seems established not just as spiritual leader of the team but as actual leader as well. When he tells them what to do a surly Hemmerstein quips back, "Swivel, baby". Deadlock could have commented on how his idea of chaos seems influenced by early episodes of Happy Days in some way, but instead he acts outraged saying, "What? How dare you question my orders?" Later, Deadlock congratulates the warriors on "passing the final test", as if Hammerstein rebelling is what he had planned for all along now that the entire team has joined their former leader in his mutiny.
Sometimes Khronicles of Khaos has felt too educational, even preachy, so it’s been the character moments that I’ve really perked up for. Like when Joe Pineapples became a transvestite or Deadlock admits that Ro-Jaws is the true master of chaos. Despite my moments of inattention, I feel that it’s right for the ABC Warriors to have a presence in 2000 AD and I’m pleased that this story exists.
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Paul Rainey