2000AD - Prog 1858

Cover by Clint Langley

I'm not a huge fan of Langley's artwork when it appears in the prog, but I do love his covers and this is no exception. Fantastic image that will pop on the shelves and hopefully tempt some new readers. Having said that both the alternate covers shown on Pete Wells' blog look great as well. Either of them would have been fantastic.

Thrills of the Future

Absalom is coming back and it looks like it's going all Life on Mars back in the 1970s. I love Absalom and can hardly wait for this one shot story that is set to appear in Prog 2014.

Judge Dredd. Ferals part one by Emma Beeby, John Burns and Annie Parkhouse. 

A nice little prologue to something wicked this way coming. I like the idea of groups of feral children establishing their own law in the aftermath of Day of Chaos, and regarding the Judges with suspicion. The first pages reminded me of an old Thunderbirds episode where a boy who was playing International Rescue managed to call them out repeatedly on false alarms. John Burn's art looks lovely for the scenes of the kids playing and I like his interpretation of Dredd's helmet which gives him more peripheral vision through the visor. Not sure why he turns blue in one panel but that is probably meant to be some ambient lighting effect. All in all a nice opener which promises much, and notice how I got right through this review without mentioning the writer's sex once? It shouldn't be the talking point it has become, let's get past it and concentrate on the stories.

Brass Sun. The Diamond Age part nine by Ian Edginton, I.N.J.Culbard and Ellie De Ville.

A change of worlds and a change of scene. The idea of all these different planets with splendid names like Plenitude, High Dudgeon and Hot Air is intriguing. I've been a bit bored with their adventures on the world they have just left so hopefully Hot Air will seize my attention again. Interesting that the colour scheme has changed with the setting.

Flesh. Badlanders part nine by Pat Mills, James McKay, Lee Townsend and Annie Parkhouse

Gorehead finally breaks loose, the black and white scratchy art makes me feel young again, and Pat Mills' dialogue is terrible. That about sums it up. I know we're not allowed to say a bad word about 2000AD's godfather Mr Mills but I'm not sure that he is giving this strip his full attention. At least next week we get Cowboy vs Dinosaur again, and that's usually entertaining.

Tharg's 3rillers. Rewind part 3 by Robert Murphy, Jesus Redondo, Eva De La Cruz and  Ellie De Ville.

So last time I got the details of how time travel works in this story all wrong and missed the bit about "time blisters" created by traumatic events. It still doesn't make much sense to me. I'm not sure what happens to the undead cop's chest wound when he returns to base. Nor how the murderer gets left to live out his life in the 18th century but can also be spirited away to serve an eternal punishment. Are the cops some form of purgatory police, and if so why do they need the science fiction technology trappings? To drag in another TV show comparison this felt a bit like the final season of Lost where all the sci-fi stuff was explained by a certain plot twist that the writers had been vigorously denying right from the first episode.

However Redondo's artwork looks great and the colours by De La Cruz are fabulous so it's nice to look at. Let's hope the next 3riller works better as a story.

Damnation Station. The Howling Beast on the Borderline part one by Al Ewing, Mark Harrison and Simon Bowland.

I went back and read Tordelback's primer to this series on the 2000AD boards and it begins to make more sense. Humanity is paying off a debt to one lot of aliens by fighting another alien force, and the beanie wearing Commander Joe Nowhere is some sort of undercover alien agent who is leading the resistance. The humans work out how to get a missile lock on the invisible alien ships but not before a bunch of nasties break through an airlock. At least I think that's what is happening. It all looks absolutely spectacular, I'm guessing that Mark Harrison is working mostly with digital artwork and colouring. However he's doing it this is the best looking strip in the prog at the moment.

Pick of the Prog could be any one of Dredd, Brass Sun or Damnation Station for the artwork alone. Although the Thought Bubble image of Judge Flask on the back cover, and Ezquerra's picture of Johnny and Wulf in the Strontium Dog advert look even better. No medicine to report on this week but I'm watching out for that adrenaline.

Big Finish - Project: Destiny

Big Finish number 139 Project: Destiny by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright, directed by Ken Bentley.

Hex has been shot during the Crimean war in The Angel of Scutari. The Doctor and Ace rush to get him to the familiar medical surroundings of St Garts, the hospital they first met him in. However something is very much amiss, London is empty and quarantined because of an infection that turns its victims into huge insectoid "Contaminants", and the mysterious department C4 are investigating. Except that C4 is The Forge by another name and soon the Seventh Doctor is locking horns with Nimrod again. Meanwhile Hex is discovering some unpleasant truths about his family history.

At the end of Thicker than Water I said I wanted more bangs and crashes and this story delivers. Right from the start the Doctor and his companions are dealing with an army of the infected trying to get in at them, helicopter gunships, and the malevolence of Nimrod and his Forge troops. Stephen Chance is more restrained as Nimrod and appears all the more more evil for it. I liked that all his Forge agents have codenames from Greek mythology, Maggie O'Neill plays a character called Aristedes. The story also dips in to the Dracula mythology from Hammer horror films to regenerate agent Artemis who appeared in earlier Forge stories.

Continuity is a knotty problem for fans of any long running characters. We like history to be respected, and for elements from older stories to be referred to in newer adventures. But we also want to hear new stories, and to conveniently ignore some of the more outlandish moments from the past. Personally I have a fairly flexible approach to continuity but it is fantastic how Big Finish is building their own version of the Whoniverse with recurring characters and groups like The Forge. This continuity comes back to haunt Hex, almost literally in this case.

This is a terrific conclusion to the Forge arc of stories and I hope it is not the last time the Doctor will encounter them. 4 out of 5 phials of the Twilight virus antidote. Next will be the story this has all been building up to: A Death in the Family has a lot to live up to. Will it meet the challenge?

Day 11 - Fave space film series

I can't really choose the Star Wars or Star Trek movies as so many of them are rubbish. I think this question is asking me for a film series mostly set in space and I can only think of one other. I wish there was a Serenity series to pick but sadly that seems unlikely to happen. So that leaves me with the body-horror bad guys. With Colonial Marines who, if you were paying attentions, got their asses kicked. With shaven headed prisoners and a dog/bull beastie. And finally with the strange mix of Joss Whedon, the director of Amelie, and Ron Perlman.

I really like the Alien movies and I'm looking forward to the forthcoming Prometheus. Those creepy Giger monsters are my favourite space series.

Day 22 - favourite villain

It's very tempting to choose the Master preferably played by Roger Delgardo, or maybe in his brief but memorable incarnation as Derek Jacobi. I could stick with my current Gerry Anderson theme and pick the Hood or Captain Black. There's also another memorable character but they are in the running for another category.

So as ever I have looked at the long list of shows we have covered for British Invaders and one villainous character stuck out. It's a very theatrical performance in a sumptuous BBC production of a cult book (actually two books). He's a creepy, master manipulator who climbs up the social ladder "faster than Ivy".

Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike in the BBC Gormenghast is my favourite villain at the moment.

Day 15 - Your favourite writer

This is a choice between scary and funny, between the writer who has given me the creeps more than any other and the writer who has made me laugh more. Douglas Adams wrote intelligent and hilarious stories but I'm not sure that his best medium was television. The BBC adaptation of Hitchhiker's that we covered on British Invaders was good but the books and the original radio show were better. One of the books was so funny that I remember falling off my student bed from laughing so much. I could talk about Adams' work as a writer and script editor on Doctor Who but again I'm not familiar enough with that period of Who.

On the other hand Nigel Kneale was perfectly at home on television. Along with Rudolph Cartier he practically invented event television. Quatermass has had an enormous effect on British science fiction TV and his show The Year of the Sex Olympics was remarkably prescient for the future of reality television. Then there's his work on 1984, The Stone Tape and Beasts to consider. All with plenty of really creepy moments. Kneale's projects outside of TV like Halloween III were less successful but he was great on the small screen and is my favourite British Invaders writer.

Those Battling Apes

It's the last of the original Planet of the Apes films. Number five is Battle for the Planet of the Apes from 1973, directed by J. Lee Thompson.

Even though this film came out only a year after number four we start with a recap of the last two films. This is delivered by the Orangutan known as the Lawgiver who is played by John Huston. Let's just say that again, John Huston dons the make up, wig and orange suit and plays an ape. Hollywood was really taking this stuff seriously in the early 70s.

It's ten years since the slave uprising in the last film and a raggedy group of apes and humans are trying to scratch out a living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. They are led by Caesar (Roddy McDowell again) who has won the war and now has to win the peace. He's got dissent in his own ranks coming from the gorillas led by General Aldo, and he has to deal with attacks from a group of human survivors living under the ruins of a radioactive city. This bunch of scarred, gun crazy loons are well on their way to transforming into the mutants who we saw in the second movie. So at least there is a suggestion of building the continuity of the whole time loop that links all the films.

This is probably the first Apes film I saw when I snuck into a cinema under-age in 1973 or 1974. But it was the film I couldn't remember anything about at all. So it all came as a complete surprise to me. Caesar has now moved from the revolutionary we saw in Conquest and here he more resembles Nelson Mandela trying to build a peaceful community after a terrible war and a reversal of fortunes for the oppressed apes and their human masters. Of course we know the peace won't last. The clue is the word Battle in the title. So soon he has pissed off the mutating human neighbours and then there are plenty of guns and explosions, including one shot of an exploding tree that they liked so much they kept using it over and over again.

Style notes: in the ten years since the last film the apes have all adopted the familiar coloured outfits that we remember from the original film. The mutants have started to wear their skull caps. And the rest of humanity get to wear rather grubby, grey uniforms. Clearly the apes get all of the soap in this post-apocalyptic society.

It's a short film with not a lot to say either for or against it. However it is very nice to see Austin Stoker who played the police lieutenant in the brilliant Assault on Precinct 13.

So if I had to rank the ape films in order of greatness then the original is still the best and then it goes Conquest, Escape, Battle and Beneath in diminishing order.

Next up, the apes documentary and then it will be time for Marky Mark

Stand and Deliver

Finished The Dead. Much as I predicted except the set up for the third book in the trilogy suggests it is going to turn into Stephen King's mammoth post-apocalyptic novel The Stand.

However, respect to Charlie Higson for the clever introductory video on his web-site. Nice author interview!