2000AD Prog 98 retro review

Haven't done one of these for a while but here's a recent acquisition: Prog 98 from February 1979 with a Klegg-eclent Brian Bolland cover.

Inside Dredd is up first and this one has it all: Bolland sequentials, Dredd up to his shoulder in a Klegg's mouth, Chief Judge Cal doing his Stan Laurel impression, the full Klegg chorus line, Tom Frame's lettering, and Judge Fernandez going out in a blaze of glory, and looking remarkably like Carlos Ezquerra in the process. The only downside is Judge Giant's rather regrettable and stereotypical speech patterns but apart from that this is golden age stuff for Dredd as the epic hits keep on coming.

Next up is Angel by Chris Stevens and Carlos Pino and I have no recollection of this one at all. For anyone else in the same boat it's about a test pilot who survived a crash only to find that his plane's computer had melted into his body and given him super powers. Used to happen all the time in seventies comics but looks very formulaic now and the four pages fly past faster than you can say Mach 1, at least there is one circular Whittle panel to provide some compensation.

Future Shocks: The Four-Legged Man by Mike Cruden, Mike Dorey and Peter Knight is a page and a half of nonsense before we get to the cut-out and keep colour centre pages of the Flesh Files.

Which runs straight into Flesh book two by Geoffrey Miller, Carlos Pino and Steve Potter, and it looks like Claw Carver is making Bill Savage walk the plank over some genetically engineered Icthyosaurs who have fricking laser beams attached to their heads (or something like that). It's actually Peters not Savage but he just has the looks of a generic dark haired action hero from the comics of those halcyon days. Again Pino's art is pretty basic stuff but this time he slips in two Whittles.

After that the artwork jumps up several levels and Dave Gibbons even kicks off with a circular panel in Ro-Busters. Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein are absent but Gibbons more than makes up for it with the giant ship's pilot robot Charlie getting ready to fight it out with the Terra-Meks. His human figures and the background cross hatching are lovely but his giant robots are a revelation. Earlier this year I heard Dave speak at the London Super Comic-Con of his love for the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby space comics and here he produces work that echoes and even surpasses Kirby's mastery. It's just stunning black and white art for a kids' comic

The back page of the Prog is a Futuregraph of a Mars bound space shuttle by Bill Le Fevre. The total Whittle count is four and the Pick of the Prog is a stand up battle between Dredd and Ro-Busters with Gibbons' art just tipping the scales for the win. The rest of the comic is largely forgettable but those two stories stand out as examples of the best that British comics could produce back in the day.

Predator, Aliens and Dredd!

Here's another competitor in the 2000AD hardback market, a joint publication by Dark Horse and Rebellion that collects Dredd's encounters with two of cinema's most memorable beasties. I confess that I caved in and bought this one on a recent trip to Forbidden Planet even though I already have the soft cover Dredd vs Aliens Incubus book. The addition here is Dredd's three issue battle with a Predator that first appeared in a US release by Dark Horse in 1997 and ran in the Megazine from 97-98.

The Predator story runs pretty much as you expect when one of them lands in Mega-City One and decides that the most dangerous prey has to be the Judges with Dredd at the top of the tree. Pretty soon the body count is rising and golden badges are appearing in the Predator's trophy room. There's a nice nod to the original movie when a member of Psi division turns out to be a descendant of Dutch Schaefer, although she seems to have forgotten her ancestor's advice about smearing herself with mud at every opportunity.

The artwork is by the Argentinian artist Enrique Alcatena who does a fair job of representing Dredd and his world although there is an odd moment when the Versace cod pieces from the Stallone movie make an appearance but they disappear as quickly as a Predator activating it's cloaking device. John Wagner's writing is also a little bit off in places with Dredd musing in unfamiliar thought bubbles which were fine in the early years and suit the intended US readership but seem a bit strange now. Likewise the Predator's behaviour doesn't seem quite right (because, obviously, I'm a noted expert on fictional alien psychology), particularly in the scene where it trusses up a captured Judge and then kills him. Aren't these vicious alien killers supposed to be all about the thrill of the hunt and not just dispatching helpless victims? (Someone is now going to point out a scene from the movies where they do exactly that.)

The Wagner, Diggle, Flint Aliens story is much more enjoyable but I've covered that one already. Henry Flint also turns in a tremendous cover although it should come with a slight health warning that no such scene appears within. The other covers from 2000AD and the Dark Horse comics are included with powerful images by Brian Bolland, Jock, and Frazer Irving standing out from the crowd.

It's another nice hardback, this time in the traditional US comic size, but whether it represents value for money just to get hold of an average three part Predator story is questionable. Most 2000AD fans will probably be looking to spend their Christmas money elsewhere but hopefully it will sell well in the States and pull in some more new readers. A middling 2.5 out of 5 stars for the whole thing although the Aliens story would score better on its own.

The Bojeffries Saga

Reams have been written about Alan Moore's two main stories for Dez Skinn's 1980s Warrior magazine. But while Marvelman and V for Vendetta were tearing up the rule books and redefining British comic books he also created a third, often overlooked strip for Warrior. The Bojeffries Saga first appeared in issue 12 and was illustrated perfectly by Steve Parkhouse. The set-up was deceptively simple as a boring, bureaucratic rent man attempts to collect long overdue back payments from the family who live in a nondescript British terraced house.

The Bojeffries are a bunch of madcap individuals including a werewolf, a vegetarian vampire and a daughter who may be the most powerful being in the universe. It was as if the Adams family had come to England and moved into a house on Benefits street. Only four episodes were printed before Warrior folded but over the years Moore and Parkhouse have published extra stand alone tales in a variety of other books. Earlier this year all of these stories were published in one reasonably priced volume giving us a chance to catch up with this weird oddity.

The early episodes set in Moore's home town of Northampton are the best and the most bizarre. The Bojeffries family appear to inhabit a version of a much earlier Britain with council houses, rent collectors, works' Christmas parties, and the remnants of light manufacturing industries it seems that Moore is recreating the life he grew up in during the fifties and sixties. The later add on tales bring the family into the 21st century and the world of reality TV and ASBOs. I have to say although Parkhouse's art is still marvellous these episodes seem more forced and have less of the weird wonder of the originals.

Still this is a great opportunity to discover these strange tales from two 2000AD droids, especially if you get the Kindle version which is currently cheaper than a cup of coffee.

2000AD - Prog 213 Retro Review

I visited that London again to get Ben Willsher to sign my ongoing Art of Dredd charity project book and popped into Orbital comics to check out their Pre-Code Horror gallery exhibit and to buy a couple of ancient Progs from their £2 box. Here is 218 from May 1981 with a Brian Bolland cover that is linked to a simple half page text story buried in the middle of the comic. It's not one of the iconic Bolland images but it does have a nice Flash Gordon feel to it.

The first strip is Strontium Dog: Portrait of a Mutant part 11 by Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra and Steve Potter, and it's lovely to see those jagged black edges on the panel borders that have made a major reappearance in the current Judge Dredd story. It's an all action episode as young Johnny finally comes up against the oppressor of mutant-kind, Nelson Kreelman.

After a full page ad for some amazing train-spotting binoculars there's a Steve Moore Future Shock with art by Mike White and letters by Pete Knight. The twist can be seen a mile off but it's all done with the usual black and white verve and ends with a bit of fun.

The Nerve Centre has some high praise for Meltdown Man as well as details of the Buck Rogers stickers given away with this issue. That explains why every cover image I can find had sellotape on it, mine own included. There is also a half page ad for the battle holiday special which was probably worth picking up for Charley's War alone.

Ron Smith gets the colour double page centre spread on Judge Dredd who is after Umpty dealers in a story written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, with lettering by Tom Frame. Classic Ron Smith mayhem ensues with one particularly lovely image of Dredd and a host of fellow Judges all on their Lawmasters.

The half page text story that explains the cover follows, along with a listing of the comic and science fiction convention going on in 1981. Now if only I had gone along and bought some original artwork back then.

Return to Armageddon is next by Malcolm Shaw, Jesus Redondo and Bill Nutttall and I've blogged about this elsewhere. And then it's the weirdness of Meltdown Man as Nick Stone uses some unorthodox techniques to board a train to Snow City which he has to reach for some plot point or other. Written by Alan Hebden, art by Belardinelli and letters by Tony Jacobs, it's more whacky and wonderful stuff from those heady days of the Prog.

On the back cover we get more Brian Bolland art although I suspect they are two images lifted from the first Judge Death story and then neatly coloured for this pin up version. The pick of the Prog has to be Judge Dredd with that wonderful Ron Smith art, and there is a Whittle circular panel count of two.

Going Viral

Satan's Island by John Wagner, Kev Walker, Ben Willsher, Paul Marshall, Cam Kennedy, Chris Blythe and Tom Frame.

Here's another collection from my 2000AD gap years, and it's one I picked up after a suggestion from Flintlockjaw from the ECBT2000AD podcast about other Dredd stories which featured biological warfare. This one concerns the arrival of the floating Sin City in the waters off the coast of Mega-City One. With no laws on board it allows visiting citizens to gamble and debauch themselves to their hearts content while the Judges can only look on with disapproval. Chief Judge Hershey ostensibly allows it because it brings in much needed revenue for the Meg's coffers but her ulterior motive is the hunt for a wanted terrorist agent rumoured to be on board the pontooned palace of perversion, and naturally she sends Dredd to head up the investigation.

As ever the civilians get up to all kinds of futuristic nonsense and inevitably the terrorist is revealed and there is mayhem aplenty as one of Dredd's oldest foes steps out of the shadows. Look away now if you don't want any spoilers but it's that man again, Orlok the assassin is back and he's carrying vials of another deadly microbe to unleash on the unsuspecting citizens of the big Meg. This time it's a bacterium as opposed to the block mania neurotoxin that kicked off the Apocalypse War but it does seem that the Sov Judges are a bit repetitive in their attacks. Presumably all meetings of the Polit bureau feature some bright spark asking if they have ever considered weakening their enemies by poisoning their water supply first?

The recent IDW collection of the Apocalypse War led me to muse on how these comic book stories reflect society's fears at the time they were written, and made me almost nostalgic for the nuclear paranoia of the 1980s. Even further back in the 1950s when the space race was just getting started comics were full of mysterious invaders from other planets, and all sorts of heroes were gaining powers from strangely glowing meteorites. In 1963 the amazing Spider-Man, like most of his fellow Marvel superheroes, gained his powers from radioactivity but by the time it came to his first big movie in 2002 we seemed to have all lost our fear of the power of the atom and the spider that bites Tobey Maguire represents another branch of scary science, genetic modification. Although ten years later when they rebooted we seemed to have decided that GM was no big deal after all and it was, once again, an atomic powered arachnid that led Andrew Garfield to don the red and blue unitard. Maybe it was the fear of some terrorist with a dirty bomb that pushed radioactivity back to the top of the lethal list, or perhaps the writers just loved that line about radioactive blood from the cartoon show song. And to continue my theme I bet there were all sorts of comics in the 1970s about environmental concerns, Swamp Thing was created in that decade and he would go on to be at the forefront of Alan Moore's stories about man's careless attitude to his home planet.

One of John Wagner's great talents is how he uses the Dredd strip to satirise so many of the stranger aspects of our own modern lives, and he certainly knows what frightens us. Whether it is the horrors of nuclear war or the flesh eating terror of a contagious disease with a 90% mortality rate. This series originally appeared in 2002 so possibly Wagner had New Labour's plans to introduce super-casinos to the UK in his mind rather than our fear of a microbiological catastrophe, but reading it now when Ebola victims in Africa are literally bleeding from their eyes is a sobering experience.

In the case of Orlok the agent he releases here is said to be a bacterium which means that Wagner has run the full gamut of different microbial menaces. It was a virus with the catchy name of 2T(FRU)T which infected Mega-City Two and led Dredd to make his epic trek across the Cursed Earth. In 1982 the Judges had to deal with a lethal Fungal infection that left victims growing a nasty crop of mushrooms on their skin. And to bring things right up to date the Chaos Day organism was based on a Protozoa called Toxoplasma Gondii. The Block Mania agent is, I think, just referred to as a toxin so I presume it was something pharmacological that sent the citizens crazy and not a bug. That only leaves a few rare wee beasties for the Sovs to try unleashing on the big Meg.

Turning back to this volume there is terrific art from the accomplished Kev Walker and some very early Ben Willsher on the sequel Orlok story from Prog 1303. Then Paul Marshall and Cam Kennedy illustrate the last stories which puts Orlok on trial. All three of these back up stories are coloured by Chris Blythe and the whole volume is lettered by Tom Frame. It's another fine Dredd collection which was a pleasure to read, and so cheap and easy to download on the iPad app. Four stars and recommended.

Apocalypse Now

IDW's licence to produce Judge Dredd comics for the US market includes some reprint material. They have produced a number of impressive hard backed volumes including this one which collects the classic Apocalypse War story. The creators involved represent most of the 2000AD hall of fame: it's written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, the artists are Mike McMahon, Ron Smith, Steve Dillon, Brian Bolland and Carlos Ezquerra, and the letterers are Steve Potter and Tom Frame. The majority of the original pages were black and white so here they have been sensitively coloured by Charlie Kirchoff and Tom Mullin, and the whole thing is topped off with a striking new cover image by Jim Fern and Charlie Kirchoff.

The large format allows the pages to be reprinted pretty much in their original Prog size instead of the reduced format of the black and white Case Files, and they certainly look fantastic. Kirchoff and Mullin have done a lovely job with the colouring. They have clearly taken their palate from the original colour centre-spreads so that the colours perfectly suit all the different artists. And the artistic lineup is unbeatable: McMahon begins the Block Mania story and then Ron Smith takes over before Steve Dillon and Brian Bolland introduce the character of Orlok and reveal the truth behind the craziness afflicting the citizens of Mega-City One. And then in steps King Carlos Ezquerra returning to the character he co-created for the first time since his original designs. He drew all 25 successive parts of the Apocalypse War and it's an absolute artistic tour-de-force, and his pages beautifully coloured by Tom Mullin are worth the price of admission alone.

Wagner and Grant wrote an intense story line which swung from some typical Mega-City madness to the overwhelming devastation of nuclear war and then the resistance fight back led by Dredd. My memories of this epic were mainly about the Block Mania episodes and then Dredd's mission to East-Meg One. I had forgotten the horrors that Wagner, Grant and Ezquerra depicted in the middle section when the nukes fly back and forth. It is strange to think about now but in 1982 we were living in the shadow of the Cold War and the real possibility of nuclear war. The protest at Greenham common had started in 1981 and membership of CND was almost compulsory for me and my fellow students at university. It seemed an inevitability that one of the two super powers would at some point be pushed to the brink of war. Wagner and Grant took all of this unease and gave us a devastating portrait of a nuclear holocaust in the pages of a simple comic book. Two years later television viewers would be terrified when ITV broadcast the film Threads. And in 1985 the BBC finally had the guts to release Peter Watkins' The War Game which it had kept on a shelf for 20 years. But before all that 2000AD showed us the full horrors of nuclear war in the Judge Dredd strip. Reading it now is a genuinely unsettling experience and it really makes this epic tale stand out from the crowd.

And that is all before Dredd gets to do his stuff and save his city in his usual stoic and unstoppable fashion. Dredd is particularly brutal in this story as he wipes out Sov Judges, dying citizens and collaborators alike without even a flicker of emotion crossing his stony face, And of course his no negotiation policy with his retribution would return to haunt him in later life as that faithful button push would lead to the events of Day of Chaos. There's also a disdainful attitude to the citizens of the opposing Mega cities as both the East-Sov leader and then Dredd are asked about making announcements to the public about the war. Their replies are remarkably similar along the lines of "What has it got to do with them?". This is despite knowing that millions of the citizens were going to die as the missiles flew.

There is a long running debate about which book is best to hand to a new reader who wants a good introduction to the Dredd character. This beautiful hardback gives us the artwork at pretty much the original size and with the colouring job that the artists themselves would have done, and it has Wagner and Grant writing the epic tale against which all future Dredd epics would be judged. All this is available on Amazon for a mere £16 so this is the book I will be recommending to new readers from now on. Well done to IDW for a beautiful presentation of an immense story. Five stars to everyone involved.

Return to Armageddon

Here is an nice collection of one of the weirder strips to appear in the early years of 2000AD. This ran in Progs 185 - 218 from 1980 to 1981 and the short version of this review reads: "Brilliant. Buy it".

Written by Malcolm Shaw with superlative art by Jesus Redondo and lettered throughout by Bill Nuttall, it also has a very cool title font on each of the 34 episodes that makes me wonder if it was designed by the late Jan Sheapherd. The plot is fiendishly complicated with a deep space vessel encountering some form of wormhole which transports it to a planet covered in frozen bodies, some of which look like horned devils. Proving that the crew have never seen John Carpenter's The Thing they carve out one of the bodies, defrost it and then somehow manage to produce two clone kids from it. One of them rapidly evolves to became The Destroyer, a creature of pure evil, while the other appears to be a normal human called Amtrak who may be the only person who can end his malevolent twin's reign of terror. Along the way Amtrak will pick up a one-armed robot sidekick called Seeker, a good looking human companion named Eve and, of course, a magic sword.

That sounds all just bonkers and I haven't even mentioned the space pirates yet, it moves on in a frenetic fashion packing miles of story into each five page episode and proving that you can tell a sprawling space opera epic in this limited format. It's so complicated that the introductory text box in the first panel of each installment soon fills up with smaller and smaller text trying to bring the new reader up to speed. Return to Armageddon is tremendously exciting for a children's comic book story from 34 years ago and Mr Shaw was clearly a scribe with a very vivid imagination. Some of the stuff is quite terrifying, proving that kids do love a good scare in the safe environments of their comics, books and films.

And all of this is beautifully presented in Redondo's stunning black and white line work. There is one colour two page spread where this story made the centre pages for one prog and the colour adds very little, in fact I prefer the monochrome pages. Redondo was another Spanish master in these early Progs and I hope we learn a little more about him in the forthcoming Future Shock documentary. 

Of course the art does suffer in places from being shrunk down from Prog size to fit a trade paperback which makes some of the panel layouts look a little dark and cluttered. There are also a couple of lettering glitches where words seem to have dropped out or be missing letters and I'm not sure if that is due to the originals or the reproduction. In terms of extras we get the four colour covers that Return To Armageddon appeared on at the back of the book, the usual one paragraph creator bios, but no introduction. I know the margins must be tight on these Rebellion trades but could they not find room for a one page introduction? I'm sure there would be fans from the forum queuing up to write one for free.

Minor gripes aside this is a lovely trade collection of one of those bizarre gems from the halcyon days of 2000AD. Give Rebellion your money and get a copy, you won't regret it. Five star stuff.

Send in the Clones

If you have read any of my previous reviews you will know that I had a long break from the galaxy's greatest comic and only took out a subscription about five years ago.Yes I was a black sheep but now I have returned to the fold. So I have been using Rebellion's fine collections to fill in some of the gaps, and here we have a trade full of Wagner stories with the common theme of Dredd's family, or what passes for family in the disordered world of Mega city One. 

The opening stories are about the clone who takes the name of Dredd's brother Rico and who seems most likely to replace the old man if and when he finally retires. Dredd supervises him as a rookie and sees echoes of his own younger self. Rico then joins his first sector house and gets involved in an investigation that recalls the police procedural style of The Pit. Rico's introduction is followed by some stories about Dredd's niece Vienna and how she comes back into his life. Finally we have the introduction of cadet Dollman as he tries to decide whether to leave the Justice department.

The theme of identity runs clearly through these tales. Dredd muses on his eventual replacement by a clone and wonders how many versions of himself are out there now. Rico learns about his heritage and questions what made the original Rico go bad and whether the same flaw exists in all the clones. Dollman has probably the most extreme response to the knowledge of what he is and the future that his creators planned for him, and he really struggles to come to terms with who he is. Even his name suggests he is merely a synthetic representation of a real person.

And then there is Vienna who sits calmly at the centre of it all. Much of her identity and memories have been taken from her by a satanic cult, as she rebuilds her life she acts as an almost matriarchal presence for Dredd and the two younger versions of himself. The old man find  this relationship awkward while Rico and Dollman seem much more at ease with the notion of family in Vienna's presence.

Androids may dream of electric sheep but do clones think for themselves or are they just literal carbon copies of the great.man? Rico tells his sector house colleagues that he gets occasional flashes of what Dredd is doing although it is not made clear if this represents some paranormal telepathy or just the fact that he acts and thinks like the younger Dredd so can intuit what his clone father might be doing. This works for the story but does not address whether a clone can be their own individual person or if they will just always be just a slightly different version of another person.

This is more classic stuff from Wagner and I am more and more impressed with the way his writing matured from those early kids' stories, and how he brings in these subtle themes of family, or looks at the issues of celebrity and human rights in other tales from the big Meg. Of course there is plenty of action with the clones breaking heads on the street in their usual brutal style. There is also the detective story of Rico's investigation of another corrupt sector house. But I found these elements secondary to the clones' dilemmas and their one link to a real human family member.

Artwise there are expected star turns from Ezquerra and MacNeil but the real surprise of the collection for me was Charlie Adlard's dynamic work on one of the stories. Like many others I have recently jumped off the Walking Dead book and apart from that I had only seen his art on a couple of 2000AD covers. His work on Dredd is totally different from his style on walking Dead and it was revelation. I wish we could get him to do some more.

Overall this book is another top thrill from the house of Tharg. Wagner and his artists are on top form and the characters are fascinating, particularly Vienna and the disillusioned Dollman who I hope returns to the Prog soon. Recommended reading.

The Machine Stops

Another quick Dredd trade review. Mechanismo by John Wagner, Colin MacNeill, Peter Doherty and Manuel Benet, published back in the early days of the Megazine from 1992-93. With Justice department desperately short of Judges after the catastrophes of Necropolis and Judgement Day here are the first attempts to use robots to dispense justice on the mean streets of the big Meg.

Judge Dredd's distrust of robots and machinery dates all the way back to his first appearances. At the same time as other characters were comparing his own actions to those of a machine he was fighting robot rebellions and musing on the catastrophes to come if Mega-City One continued to use technology to replace human beings. So no surprise to find that Dredd is opposed to the Mechanismo programme and is vigorously registering his objections with the somewhat eccentric Chief Judge McGruder. And of course things have to go wrong to drive the story along so it's not long before the robots go rogue and Dredd has to act to stem the rising death toll.

There are some nice touches and references to Robocop with Peter Weller block appearing early on in the first chapter. Wagner's writing is good but seems much more wordy than his more recent stripped down work. We get plenty of thought bubbles from Dredd reflecting the stream of consciousness monologues of his early adventures instead of the older character where we have to intuit his thoughts from his actions and words alone. Likewise the artwork is more basic than we have come to expect in current 2000AD. This is very early MacNeil and Doherty, they are both good but you can see there is much better to come from them in the future.

The three chapters do get a bit repetitive with a series of unlikely events putting the flawed robots back on the streets so that Dredd can take them down again. However there is some good background detail going on with the increasingly fractious relationship between Dredd and McGruder which leads old stony face to do something rather out of character. This sets up the Wilderlands epic which I remember being pretty good.

Mechanismo is fun but it is one of the shorter trades I've read recently and there is better value Dredd out there. Entertaining but not essential.

Waiting for the Man

The Chief Judge's Man by John Wagner, Will Simpson, Colin MacNeil and John Burns. Originally published in three instalments in 2001 and 2003. A deadly assassin is picking off pro-democracy figures and appears to be getting his instructions from Chief Judge Hershey herself, but as ever with a Wagner script there is more to this than meets the eye. There is some nice police procedural stuff that means that Dredd almost gets his man only to take yet another beating from a super soldier who appears to be better at hand to hand combat than he is.

This is Hershey in her first stint as Chief Judge and it's interesting how her character has grown and changed since Wagner first introduced her in the Judge Child saga all the way back in 1980. It seems that just about all of Mega-City One's Chief Judges have been flawed in some way and the two who have probably been best at the job have both been women, although McGruder went completely bonkers in the end. Meanwhile as all the disasters have come and gone Barbara Hershey has managed to maintain her integrity and keep plugging away as an honest Judge. In recent years we have seen how she wrestles with the dilemmas of managing a huge city state, and in particular how she accepts that that the buck stops with her. It's fascinating that Hershey was once subservient to Dredd but is now his boss, and that she has the guts to tell the city's number one lawman the harsh truth about himself, particularly how he has always dodged the Chief Judge role for himself.

However all that is still to come and here we have Chief Judge Hershey going about her day to day business while Dredd hunts the killer and tries to set up a rematch, as he has done several times in the past with a variety of martial artists who have put him in the sick bay. And it's not giving too much away to note that there is another corrupt Judge high up in the Justice department who is responsible for sending the killer to knock off prominent critics of the Judges. It ticks away nicely as it builds to the inevitable climax.

Three top 2000AD artists deliver the different chapters and are all great but, as ever, MacNeil rules the roost with his stylish and noir inflected depiction of the seamy side of the Mega-City. It's still a little too colourful for me as the garish painted 1990s look starts to move into the darker and more suitable artwork of the 2000s.

It's a pretty good trade collection, and while it's not up there with something like The Pit, ManDroid, Tour of Duty, or the recent Day of Chaos books it is still an enjoyable slice of Dredd action.

2000AD Retro review - Prog 32

From 2000AD's first year 1977 here is a slightly battered but still lovely Prog 32. The cover image is by Trevor Goring and has nothing to do with any of the strips inside. Still a fab picture though.

Invasion by Gerry Finley-Day, Mike Dorey and Bill Nuttall.

A new Invasion story starts with Bill Savage in the Scottish highlands trying to get rid of the dread Volgan Colonel Volgaska only to end up a prisoner himself. I have no familiarity with Dorey's work but his thick blacks and detailed faces are pretty good, although Savage does seem to be leering quite a lot. And there are two whole Whittle circular panels in the first five pages.

Judge Dredd by Robert Flynn, Mike McMahon and Tony Jacob.

Dredd attends the opening of Komputel, Mega-City One's first completely automated hotel, and is typically suspicious of computers and robots. He is, of course, proved right when halfway down the second page Komputel starts killing residents and Dredd has to break in and do what he does best. Again the writer Robert Flynn is a new one on me but it's interesting how even in these early stories Dredd demonstrates his distrust of machines taking over the functions of men and women. It's curious that these themes would come back many years later in stories like Mechansismo and ManDroid. No circular panels here but some lovely giant McMahon boots.

Shako by John Wagner, César López Vera and Jack Potter.

The giant Polar bear that led the CIA such a merry dance as they tried to retrieve the capsule of a deadly virus that it had swallowed. Just four pages of lovely black and white art by López Vera as Shako discovers some of those nasty men clubbing Seal pups and restores the balance of nature in bloody fashion.

Dan Dare by Gerry Finely-Day and Dave Gibbons

Thirty two progs in and Dan Dare is still thought to be the main event and gets the colour centre spread. Dare's men are lured into a celebration dinner with some Roman emperor style aliens who turn out to be Vampires. Fortunately Dare has kept his wits about him and leads the escape back to their ship the Eagle, and how lovely to see the logo of the Eagle comic on the fuselage. A quick space battle and all that remains is for Dare to sign off by musing that the Vampires bit off more than they could chew. Boom boom!

MACH 1 by Pat Mills, Carlos Freixas and John Aldrich.

John Probe is in backwoods America to investigate a UFO landing where it turns out that aliens are forcing "white stuff" down human throats to take over their brains and lead the invasion. So nothing suggestive going on there, at least not until Alien's oral rape two year's later in 1979. Meanwhile the flying saucers use flame death rays to mop up the uninfected and Probe is caught in a cliffhanger which looks set to give him a close encounter of the final kind. A bit of 1970s paranoid alien invasion mixed with the bionic man and all fairly gruesome too.

Tharg's Future Shocks: Excursion by Peter Harris, Horacio Lalia and Jack Potter

The first two pages of a Future Shock with some loathsome thrill seekers time travelling to witness great catastrophes. Next week they head for the Salem witch hunts and you can see where this is going.

The last two pages have an advert for a 4T Spacefone communicator which looks like a crap joke shop scam, then there is a text piece explaining the cover image before some adverts for Tiger comic and the Valiant annual, and that's it. Dan Dare deserves its centre spread for Gibbons art which is clearly well above even McMahon at this stage, and thus easily wins pick of the Prog. Meanwhile I'm left wondering why there were so many great Spanish artists in British kids' comics at this time. Maybe the upcoming Future Shock documentary will tell us more about the Spanish invasion.

The Whittle panel count is four but there are some very funky shaped panel lay outs in Dan Dare as well.

Retro review - Progs 72 and 77

So there I was in Orbital comics getting some of the Droids to sign my copy of Day of Chaos: Fallout when I spotted these two on the wall and just had to buy them. The infamous 'banned' story-lines that nearly got 2000AD into serious legal trouble and have never been reprinted in any of the trades. They received the late 1970s equivalent of a 'cease and desist' letter from one of the companies involved and had to make an agreement to print an apology and never reprint the stories rather than face what could have been an expensive lawsuit. On a recent podcast Keith Richardson claimed that the stories themselves were not all that good and fans would be pretty disappointed by them if they were reprinted. Was he right?

Cover comparison. We have Dredd getting chomped on a Mike McMahon cover versus a dangling Dredd by Brian Bolland. Both covers feature the trademark characters that provoked the trouble. Although McMahon produced some of the all time great Dredd covers this isn't one of them and Bolland wins out.

Inside Prog 72 we have the second part of the Burger Wars storyline with Dredd and Spikes Harvey Rotten in big trouble before Judge Jack and the Land Raider save the day, In Prog 77 Dredd is plucked out of long grass by the Jolly Green Giant in the first part of the Soul Food story. Several other copyright characters appear as well. Neither of them are that bad as episodes in themselves, and certainly no more crazy than anything else in the Cursed Earth saga, or the Judge Child quest. Although Bolland wins the cover battle the interior art from McMahon and the fact that it's John Wagner on script duties for Burger Wars just gives this one the edge.

Elsewhere in these two issues we have a Mach Zero story by Steve MacManus and Mike Donaldson, Ant Wars by Gerry Finley-Day and Jose Luis Ferrer, Inferno by Ton Tully and Belardinelli, two episodes of Dan Dare by Chris Lowder and Dave Gibbons, a Future Shock by Chris Stevens and Pierre Frisano, and another Ant Wars by Finley-Day and Alfonso Azpiri,

Prog 77 also features the second episode of the Robo-Hunter: Verdus story by John Wagner, Ian Gibson and Jose Luis Ferrer. This is the one where faster than light travel de-ages Sam Slade and also turns the ship's Commander Kidd into his cynical, wisecracking baby sidekick. An important moment but Ferrer's straight forward artwork lacks the punchy humour of the Ian Gibson stuff.

Honestly they are both pretty good issues by themselves and I haven't even got to the beauty of Dave Gibbons' art on Dan Dare yet. Prog 72 has a Whittle score of three, and 77 has a solitary one. Worthy additions to my (or anyone's) collection.

Retro review - Prog 175

I took a trip to London's Orbital comics for the Day of Chaos Fallout signing and as ever I picked up a few old Progs from the back issue bins.

This one from August 1980 has a cover by Dave Gibbons, back from when they ran images that were not connected to anything inside the prog. So we have a piece of pure science fiction loveliness from Gibbons. Of course there doesn't seem to be any good reason why a robot warrior would need to ride a huge, golden robot dragon, or to carry a sword and an axe, but who cares, it's a great image and worth 14p any day of the week.

The Stainless Steel Rat saves the world by Kelvin Gosnell, Carlos Ezquerra and Pete Knight.

More of the time travelling exploits of Jim DiGriz and his wife, Angelina, all perfectly rendered by King Carlos. He certainly draws a sexy looking lady and does some impressive rain swept scenes of devastation including one that seems to be a nod to that famous Gericault painting of the Raft of the Medusa. Pretty cool in a comic for kids.

The Mind of Wolfie Smith by Tom Tully, Jesus Redondo and Paul Bensberg

Wolfie is on the trail of a crime lord and has a run in with the Hairy Bikers before realising he has to save Lena Zavaroni, well not exactly but that's the general gist. Nice to have Redondo back on art duties, he would be the main reason for getting this if it was ever collected in a trade.

The V.C.s by Gerry Finley-Day, John Richardson and John Aldrich

The final four pages of the V.C.s sees the Geek fleet defeated and Smith gets a medal from a Sontaran, or at least that's what he looks like. I can't remember anything about the V.C.s and can't say that the story or art here makes me want to find out any more. Sorry.

Judge Dredd by John Wagner, Ron Smith and Tom Frame.

Dredd gets the colour centre spread again as the Wagner-Smith-Frame knock out combo provides some more marvellous moments from the Judge Child epic. The colour pages are great but Smith's detailed black and white shading is even better. It's still hard to believe he was drawing these pages with a timer to tell him when it was time to move on to the next one. 

There is a guy riding a dragon in there but it's the real flesh and blood variety and not the robot from the front cover. Yes, that's me making a distinction between robot dragons and real ones.

Ro-Jaws' Robo-Tales. The Contender by Gary Rice, Brett Ewins and Jack Potterr

A robot boxer wants a shot at the title but can't cope with the consequences. Five pages of early Ewins artwork looks good although I prefer his stuff in colour. He does deliver one classic Gil Kane flying backwards towards the camera punch panel. The story is OK with a classic Future Shock twist but nothing to write home about.

The prog finishes with a Garry Leach star scan of the V.C.s and some back cover gag panels from the galactic Olympics drawn by Steve Maher.

Dredd is easily the top thrill but Ezquerra's version of the Raft of the Medusa is a surprise delight. Meanwhile there's a Whittle count of five,

Retro review - Prog 134

From October 1979 and still just twelve earth pence.

Brian Bolland provides an iconic profile on a cover that announces that Judge Dredd won top British comics' character at the Eagle awards, a category that seems have come and gone in the Eagle awards over the years. Inside Tharg's nerve centre announces the other awards 2000AD won and there is a rather odd letter demanding that it's a boys only comic and should never publish a story with a heroine. Halo Jones and Anderson: Psi Division stories are five years in the future at this point.

Judge Dredd: The Invisible Man by John Wagner, Ron Smith and Tom Frame.

Dredd investigates a series of crimes pulled off by an apparently invisible perp and resorts to fire extinguishers, riot foam and random shots from both of his Lawgivers to try and nail him. It's high class nonsense from Wagner with six pages of beautiful black and white artwork by Smith and some lovely images of Dredd in motion.

Blackhawk by Alan Grant, Kelvin Gosnell, Massimo Belardinelli and Jack Potter

I don't recall ever reading Blackhawk and still haven't picked up the trade papaerback. This story is from his lost in space era when the Roman gladiator was fighting weird aliens creatures. Blackhawk and a huge were-bear creature called Ursa practice their moves in their version of the X-Men's danger room before the hero prepares to go up against a real nasty. Belardinelli's human figures are pretty good here with more nice dynamic motion, but as ever it's his weird beasties that really deliver the business. Who doesn't want to see a gigantic armoured bear monster swinging an axe and picking off flying creepy crawlies?

A one page Flesh file recaps the descendants of Old One-Eye and sets up:

ABC Warriors by Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra and Pete Knight.

The colour centre spread launches Hammerstein and Co. on the trail of some rogue Tyrannosaurs which have been trained for man hunts. It's unusual to see Ezquerra doing the ABC warriors but his characteristic jagged black outlines look pretty good on Hammerstein's helmet, while the colour pages of dinosaur mayhem are just marvellous. Check this one out in the recently published Mek Files vol 1

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The Mind of Wolfie Smith by Tom Tully, Vanyo and John Aldrich

Wolfie seems to be involved in the shooting of a low budget horror film but his psychic powers are picking up some real horrors. Four pages of more generic looking art here with a bad guy who seems to be Skeletor from He-Man. Bit of a dud to be honest.

Disaster 1990 by Gerry Finley-Day, Carlos Pino and Steve Potter.

The Invasion prequel serves up something that feels like an episode from the 1970s TV series Survivors as Savage and Bamber run up against a local Squire who rules his roost and doesn't take kindly to visitors. Not sure how this possibly fits in with the world of the Invasion strip (answer: it probably doesn't), so it's just another bunch of hard blokes with shootahs, and another minor thrill.

Ro-Jaws pops up on the last page to answer some more readers' letters and tease us with next week's line-up, and the back cover is a Green Cross code advert.

The cover and the first three stories are great but it really tails off towards the end of the comic. 

Pick of the Prog is the ABC Warriors two page splash, and the Whittle count of circular panels is a tragically low one and that's probably cheating because it's Dredd looking out of a porthole. But the Green Cross code man gets two on the back cover.

Scarlet Traces

This is 2000AD related as it appeared in the Megazine, and it's by two of Tharg's finest droids, Ian Edginton and Matt 'D'Israeli' Brooker. The front cover of the edition I have describes it as a murder-mystery sequel to H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds and it is a rather splendid bit of sinister steampunk.

Set about ten years after the events described in the original novel the British Empire has harnessed all the technology left behind by the Martian invaders and used it to ensure that Britain remains a world superpower with flying machines and advanced weaponry. Major Robert Autumn and his redoubtable butler Archibald Currie are two retired soldiers who investigate the case of a number of young women who have gone missing, but of course they are going to discover much more than that.

The original idea and the execution by Edginton is nearly flawless. Not all of his 2000AD projects meet with universal approval but his writing here is superb. The clever integration of Martian technology into everyday British life is extremely good, and the murder mystery is also very well done. Meanwhile fan favourite D'Israeli delivers lovely coloured art which is full of vibrant details. If you enjoyed his recent work on Ordinary then take a look at this.

The steampunk world that they create is just great fun, so much so that it deserved and got a sequel called The Great Game which advances the story into the 20th century and adds a new twist. Both books are also filled with lots of clever references and nods to various other classic science fictions ranging from Quatermass to Thunderbirds. Some might find these in-jokes intrusive or tiresome, others will just love that kind of thing. I am so much in the latter camp that I went so far as to compile a website listing all of these references which you can find here.

The only downside to Scarlet Traces is that the original book is now out of print but second hand copies are reasonably easy to get hold of. The sequel The Great Game is still available, as is the pair's comic book adaptation of Wells' novel itself.

If you like a bit of the old steampunk delivered with D'Israeli's lovely art then track this down. Recommended.

Starlord #1

Here's a moment from British comics history that I picked up at the Lawgiver convention. I don't really know much about Starlord and certainly don't remember getting it at the time, we were a 2000AD house. All I know is that Strontium Dog and Ro-Busters started here before the inevitable merging that was so common in UK comics back then.

Cover is by Ramon Sola and combines some tough looking characters with acres of free space so the title, blurbs and free gift can fit on. It looks very different from anything we'd get on 2000AD until the much later painted era. At first glance I might be hard pressed to pick out Johnnie and Wulf but more of them later.

Planet of the Damned by R.E. Wright, Lalia and Bill Nuttall.

It's a classic science fiction trope about the routine passenger flight that crashes through some inter-dimensional portal and ends up in a barbaric world with the passengers fighting for survival. Stephen King has done it, DC comics have their Warlord character, and on TV we've seen both Land of the Giants and Lost.

Thick, dark inks and some typical 1970s artwork with no less than 3 circular panels in these 6 pages alone. Interestingly the creators named are featured in little credit boxes so the experiment which began in 2000AD prog 36 was carried over into this title.

Timequake by Jack Adrian, Ian Kennedy and Peter Knight

This one seems like a variation on the Invasion theme with the twist being the invaders are the alien Droon from the future and time-travelling scientists are putting together a Time-Control team and need a Bill Savage like hard case from the 20th century to complete the gang. I don't know what happened to this strip from here on but I suspect it involved Blocker and some shootahs.

Strontium Dog by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra and Jack Potter.

Johnny Alpha's first appearance gets the colour centre-spread as Alpha uses his mutant eyes to track down the bad guys so he and Wulf can wipe them out. They then have to explain themselves to the local police which gives them a chance to fill us in on the background of the search and destroy agents.

There's some odd stuff in this first episode, Johnny's helmet gives him a more reptilian look than we are used to. He uses a time drogue to resurrect a body and get a clue to their next target from him. And then Johnny uses his eyes to look at the electro-patterns of the perp's brain and see if he is lying. I don't know if they stuck with this power for very long. It's a bit like the birdie lie detector that Dredd uses which Wagner now admits was a bit of a mistake as it removed one element of tension in interrogation scenes.

But it's still a thrill to see Johnny and Wulf for the first time, and to have no explanation of the pairing of the weird looking mutant with a huge Viking. Top thrill (if I'm allowed to say that about Starlord).

Ro-Busters by Pat Mills, Carlos Pino and Tom Frame.

Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein along with Mr Ten Per Cent and Mek-Quake all make their first appearances, and there is a gorgeous colour splash page by Pino. Clearly it's meant to be International Rescue with robots but it's brilliant and so much 2000AD goodness will result from this opening episode.

Star strip goes to Strontium Dog even though his look hasn't been finalised yet. A fascinating trip down one of the 2000AD side alleys, and an astonishing Whittle circular panel count of 12!

Retro review - Prog 310

Prog 310 from April 1983 and looking pretty good for a comic that is 31 years old.

Cover is by Mike McMahon and it's another arresting image which tells us all we need to know about the story inside.

In the Nerve Centre Tharg breaks the grim news that the price is going up to 20 pence an issue. Those were the days.

Invasion of the Thrill Snatchers by Tharg, Massimo Belardinelli and Steve Potter

Tharg's body gets invaded by the pesky blighters and we get an alien version of the Fantastic Voyage movie all done with Belardinelli's usual charm. It's nonsense but it looks lovely.

Time Twisters: Chrono Cops by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

One of the all time classic single stories that Moore wrote for 2000AD with Gibbons' lovely figures and beautiful backgrounds to behold as well. The multiple time lines involved and the importance of keeping an eye on what is going on at the back of the panels was something that this pair would later weave into the world of Watchmen. It's almost like this is their try out for that later epic, while at the same time serving as an amusing parody of Dragnet.

Then we have an Action Video two page text piece about the latest cutting edge games from Atari. Shame they all ended up in landfill sites.

Judge Dredd: The Starborn Thing part 2 by John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra and Tom Frame.

Here is an earlier version of Dredd versus the beastie from Alien, or a thinly disguised version thereof. This one is not orally fixated and prefers to stick some nasty brain controlling spikes in your spine instead so Dredd's investigation of the crashed alien spaceship goes horribly wrong, leading to the scene played out on the cover.

The colours on the centre spread are so vibrant that they bleed through onto the next page and you know what, that's quite all right with me. Wagner, Grant, Ezquerra, Frame and a vicious creepy crawly makes this one a winner again.

Rogue Trooper: Fort Neuro part 19 by Gerry Finley-Day, Cam Kennedy and Bill Nuttall

This is the final chapter of a Rogue epic as the GI leads the successful defence of the Fort and Nort General Vagner is carted away in a strait-jacket raving about blue warriors. There are some typically 2000AD whacky robots and the story ends with the solitary Rogue once more striding off into the mists of Nu Earth. Not too dissimilar from what's currently happening in IDW's Rogue Trooper title.

Skizz part 3 by Alan Moore, Jim Baikie and Tony Jacob.

I've recently reviewed the Skizz trade so can't add much more other than to say this is the episode where Roxy first finds Skizz hiding in the garden shed and gets to utter the classic line "You're not from round here, then?" I love Skizz, always have,always will.

Back cover is a Cam Kennedy Rogue Trooper pin-up.

Pick of the prog is Chrono-Cops, partly for its future significance but also because it's a really funny story. And the Whittle circular panel count is again 3.

Judge Dredd Big Drokkin' Treasury Edition

Bit of an oddity this one. IDW comics as part of their project to introduce Dredd to American audiences have produced a treasury edition of some classic stories from the good old days of 2000AD. So here are eight stories all written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, in large format black and white, which means that they have actually removed the colour from some of the two page colour centre spreads that Dredd used to get.

And it is big, about A3 sized so bigger than even the current prog. The A3 proportions don't match the old progs so there are quite large white margins at the top and bottom of the page. Even so the pages are bigger than we are used to compared with the progs themselves or the case file reprints, and the black and white reproduction is pin sharp with none of the issues that marred the recent Halo Jones edition or Skizz. The result is the chance to admire some beautiful line work by the acknowledged masters of early Dredd art. Kevin O'Neill, Mike McMahon, Cliff Robinson, Ron Smith, Ian Gibson and Brian Bolland are all here with only King Carlos not making the final cut, and that must have been a tough decision to leave him out.

The only puzzle about this book is what it is setting out to achieve. IDW's own take on Dredd, or Heavily armoured special cop as we might have to call him from now on, is very different from the version shown in these classic strips. And I'm not sure if American readers go for these oversize reprints in a big way, plus they have a fairly well known resistance to black and white comics. It all comes back to that great mystery (to me anyway) which is how many copies do comics actually sell these days. I can look up on the Diamond website what the top 100 selling books are but neither Judge Dredd or Rogue Trooper are troubling the scorer there. Perhaps something like this will increase recognition of Dredd in American comic stores, or maybe the Free Comic Book Day prog would do a better job of that. And perhaps this is just putting out some more classic stories to be snapped up by us hardcore fans who probably have all these stories already.

Having said all that is costs less than £7 here in the UK so if you want to see some eye-wateringly beautiful Dredd art hunt down a copy. Pick of the Prog goes to the Judge Minty story which has grown in significance and impact with time and now has a terrific fan film to go with it, and I'm not just saying that because I got to wear Minty's jacket at the Lawgiver convention.

2000AD Free Comic Book Day Prog

This is 2000AD's fourth Free Comic Book Day issue and  they approach it in their usual anarchic style. So we get a lovely parody cover by Henry Flint and then a nice mix of old and new stories which hopefully will attract a few new readers to the weekly joys of the Galaxy's greatest comic.

Flint's homage to the classic Spider-Man No More issue really does the business as ever. If I was a Marvel reader then this cover would make me curious about 2000AD. I hope it grabbed some new readers but I suspect it was mostly snapped up by all the existing fans. Hopefully they all bought some other stuff in their comic store at the same time.

Judge Dredd: The Badge by Matt Smith, Chris Burnham, Nathan Fairbairn and Pye Parr.

Now having Dredd talk a rookie Judge through a tough situation is a neat idea and one that I wish I'd thought of for the forums short story contest. There's also plenty of nods to the past with the Blobs and the out of control Mek-Quake like machine that Dredd is tackling.

Chris Burnham's art is lovely, I haven't seen any of his Batman stuff so don't know if this is his usual style but it is great fun and Fairbairn's colours are lovely. I also like having a Judge named Hartnell, especially in a story written by Matt Smith (no, not that one).

Slaine: Lord of the Beasts by Pat Mills, Rafael Garres and Ellie De Ville

Another artist that I am unfamiliar with and my first impressions were rather confused, it looked a bit dark and messy. But closer examination reveals some lovely images and a neat little prelude from Uncle Pat. I'm sure it would make more sense if I followed this on to the Lord of the Beasts trade but I'm buying too many 2000AD books at the moment and Slaine will have to wait. But the FCBD sampler has done its job and tempted me.

Rogue Trooper: Glass Zone by Gerry Finley-Day, Dave Gibbons and Bill Nuttall.

A classic moment from the early days of Rogue as he tries to get some rest and then has to improvise weapons when he is surprised by a Nort patrol. Having read Seth's reviews recently I am curious as to how much Dave Gibbons still believed in the strip at this stage but his artwork is always rewarding. Looks lovely in black and white as well.

Anderson PSI Division: Golem by Alan Grant, Romero and Steve Potter

Another old story and another unfamiliar artist who does that flicked up hair thing I associate with newspaper strips like Modesty Blaise, and of course, when I look him up I find that he is one of the definitive Modesty Blaise artists. Must have been lodged in the back of my brain somewhere. The Golem storyline is fairly familiar and Anderson solves it in her usual style. Very pretty though isn't she?

Absalom: Noblesse Oblige part 1 by Gordon Rennie, Tiernen Trevaillion and Simon Bowland

I was really hoping we might get some new Absalom in here. There's nothing wrong with this short intro but I've read it a few times already. Roll on the new stuff.

Durham Red: Running out of Patients by Leah Moore, John Reppion, Jan Duursema, Dylan Teague and Ellie De Ville

Brian Blessed and his mutant pirates hi-jack a blood wagon and it's up to Durham Red and her sidekick Scampi to save the day. Things go from bad worse and just when it looks like Scampi may end up as a basket case (yes, I did) the voluptuous vampire vigilante does her thing and it's type O all round.

Apart from her obvious charms I've not really got into Durham Red yet and this effort by the Alan Moore younglings left me unmoved.

Then there is that full page advert for the Mike McMahon statue. Must try and resist, I have so much stuff already.

Future Shocks. It's a Dog eat Dog Universe by Barry Hammersmith (AKA Robo-Keef), Henry Flint and Pye Parr

Gluetanic channels Galactus, Flint does Jack Kirby, and Robo-Keef gives us his Al Ewing. It's a bit of a throwaway gag that's been done once or twice already but it's still funny and awfully pretty.

Two pages of Ron Smith Daily Star strips and then we're into a last page gag by Henry Flint that rounds out a tremendous issue. I hope you all had as much fun as I did on Free Comic Book Day.

Rage against the machine

This ran in Progs 1453-1464 and 1555-1566 back in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Sergeant Nate Slaughterhouse returns to Mega-City One with his family after been horribly injured in an off-world conflict, but he is not the man he was. Most of him has been replaced by advanced military prosthetics so that he has become the Mandroid of the title. When his wife disappears and his son is brutally murdered he decides to take the law into his own artificial hands.

Once again Dredd is largely a peripheral character in this story with Slaughterhouse's drama taking centre stage as he kills his way towards the truth of happened to his wife and son. Dredd's conversations with Nate are mostly sympathetic although he is much harsher with his junior colleagues here, particularly with a Judge Wittle whose screw ups allow Slaughterhouse to escape from the iso-cubes. Yes, Wagner has to arrange another break out from the ultimate prison and while the medical details of the escape seem somewhat improbable it does allow the Mandroid to return for a second chapter after presumably being a big hit on his first outing.

Dredd's relationship with machines and technology is interesting. In his early appearances other characters would speculate that he appeared to be more robot than man. And of course he famously influenced the Robocop movie, but for a science fiction character he is notoriously distrustful of machines. Obviously he relies on his lawmaster and lawgiver, although he often seems to prefer his daystick and boot knife, and he uses the various other bits of tech that allow him to do his job. However his distrust rises when dealing with machines that are designed to replace humans in some way. This is most obvious in his longstanding opposition to the Mechanismo program of robot Judges which turn up briefly in the second story here. Dredd places his faith in human decisions, particularly those made by well trained Judges, he does not believe those decisions should be delegated to machines.

Early in the Day of Chaos epic the council of five ordered a remote drone strike on the rogue Sov judges' bunker, Dredd wanted to put troops on the ground instead but was outvoted with disastrous consequences. Dredd's decision to trust humans over machines could have prevented the decimation of his city. I wonder if that other cybernetic Judge Gerhart will take that into account if he ever succeeds in bringing Dredd to trial.

Of course by this stage of his career Dredd himself is partly bionic although he regards his implants as just tools to allow him to dispense justice. And here he comes face to face with a man who has had to have most of his body replaced with machinery. Slaughterhouse is bitterly unhappy about his replacement parts, and spends time debating whether he is still a man. This philosophical debate as to how much of us we can replace before we are no longer ourselves is fascinating, and how great to find it in a weekly throwaway comic (I don't really throw them away, honest). So it is perhaps not too surprising when Dredd meets what he could become himself that he empathises with Nate to some extent. Of course there can only be one winner, although the way Dredd handles the final showdown is calm and unexpected.

I can't get enough of Wagner's writing when the standard is as high as this. He so thoroughly understands Dredd's character by this stage that he is just turning out gems every time he returns to the character he is most closely linked too. Here he mixes Dredd's detective work, a vengence vendetta, and a political conspiracy thriller but the thing that shines out is the human element of Nate's terrible plight. It seems to me that as Wagner has gotten older his interest in the ordinary citizens of his future city has grown and he has portrayed them in a more sympathetic light.

The art is split between Kev Walker, Simon Coleby and Carl Critchlow and they are all top notch. I'm hard pressed to chose between them but Walker's work on the first chapter just edges it. This is the first complete story by Walker that I've read and it's lovely stuff. I'd like to see more of this in the prog. The only bad thing about Mandroid is that I missed it when it first came out, this is one of those stories that I would have really enjoyed to read on a weekly basis. Another top thrill from the house of Tharg and I'm really digging my journey through the Dredd trades available on the iPad app.