Big Finish - Judge Dredd: Solo

This is the last in the regular series of Big Finish audio dramas about Judge Dredd. Solo by Jonathan Clements, directed by John Ainsworth.

Dredd is investigating a murder but the body was found on the line between space port immigration and Mega-City One and Dredd is forced to team up with a green skinned alien known as Blarg the Mighty (you can see where this is going already) to track down a shape-shifting alien assassin.

There are two distinctive features about this last story. Firstly it is packed with references to science fiction and comics. Blarg is clearly Tharg himself, with all the usual catch phrases and irritating smugness, but there are also nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robocop, the Stallone movie, and even the Clangers. Secondly all of the speaking parts are played by Toby Longworth in an impressive display of his vocal prowess.

So this is all terribly clever but the story is fairly predictable and the only highlights are some of Longworth's voices incuding a rather impressive HAL 9000 on board an alien spaceship. It's a bit like one of those one man bands where you admire the virtuosity but the music isn't great.

It's a shame that Big Finish weren't able to maintain the standards of their earlier stories such as Death Trap, Get Karter and the first two Strontium Dog releases. As they went along the adventures seem to have become a bit sillier, and although Longworth sounds great in the part Dredd himself seems less imposing than he is in the comics.

That's not to say that this isn't fun because it is and Longworth is good value for money. It's just not a real Judge Dredd story. 3 out of 5 bike cannons. Next up will be four stories in the Crime Chronicles range which I think are more like audio-books then full cast dramas.

If you are interested in the rest of my 2000AD audio reviews you can find them all here.

Big Finish - The Space Race

The second release in the Big Finish 1963 series: The Space Race written by Jonathan Morris and directed by Nicholas Briggs.

While the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa are in England investigating pop music the Sixth incarnation and Peri arrive in Russia and find themselves caught up in a Vostok rocket mission and a mystery surrounding the earliest history of space exploration. The Russians are sending a mission to the moon but they may not be the first to get there and one of their capsules has returned to earth with a very strange occupant.

Actually this one is rather good. Colin Baker is in fine form and his Doctor seems childishly excited to get on board a rocket. Meanwhile Peri is left behind to figure a way through all the different levels of intrigue at the control centre. Someone is a spy but who? There's some great sound design work as well and the rest of the cast are terrific. It's nonsense of course but great fun for all that.

4 out of 5 space dogs and on to The Assassination Games.

2000AD - Megazine 342

This week's Prog 1859, can be summed up pretty quickly:

Dredd.

Good second episode. Dredd's face looks a bit weird in some panels and he gets disarmed too easily, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this wraps up.

Future Shocks

If you have read any Ray Bradbury story ever then you know how this one is going to end. It's no coincidence that the kid is called Troy. Lovely art by Nick Dyer though.

Brass Sun.

It's capture time in the continuing cycle of events for Wren and the other two whose names I keep forgetting. Looks very pretty.

Flesh.

Now the art is going off the rails as well as the script. And the Dinosaur rampage is really being dragged out.

Damnation Station.

Starting to get into this now, even if this episode is in Spanish. Pick of the prog this week.

However, this was a Megazine week so let's look at that in more detail.

Cover by Colin Macneil.

Beautiful image. 2000AD has always done future war and made it look weird and terrifying at the same time. This image is no exception. The razor wire gives it a world war one feel which is very appropriate for a comic published in November.

Judge Dredd: Duty Calls by Alec Worley, Ben Willsher, Gary Caldwell and Annie Parkhouse.

I love Willsher's kinetic artwork on Dredd. It helps to know that he is such a fan-boy himself and the photo of him getting a book signed by Ron Smith at the Free Comic book day event in May was a lovely thing to see. The story about a rogue sniper is a pretty good one, and it gives us a chance to see more filed teeth cannibals roaming the ruins of Mega-City One. The final image also takes us right back to Dredd's very first appearance in Prog 2. Classic stuff

Insurrection part nine by Dan Abnett, Colin Macneil, John-Paul Bove and Simon Bowland

Atmospheric black and white artwork, an army unit betrayed by their command, and terrible scenes of battlefield desolation. All this and an enhanced talking gorilla in battle armour, how can you go wrong? The first volume of Insurrection came out while 2000AD and I were on a trial separation so I missed it completely and the trade paperback is now out of print. I'm going to have to track down a copy to go along with this final chapter because this has been fantastic. And it really feels like a powerful anti-war story that reminded me of the last episode of Blackadder.

Ordinary by Rob Williams, D'Israeli and HV Derci

Another thing you can rely on 2000AD for is super-powers with a twist. Here we have a world falling apart as everybody suddenly acquires special abilities, everyone apart from one ordinary plumber who incidentally looks rather like the artist D'Israeli. Rob Williams is perfect at capturing that streak of dark comedy that 2000AD has always done so well. His Low Life stories were great and this is shaping up to be another great story. Having Michael the plumber trying to get across New York to reach his son allows D'Israeli to fill the background with all manner of strange super powered characters, the vast majority of them are just throwaway gags but it's all beautifully done with his trademark detail. It's unusual to see D'Israeli colouring his own work, I'm more used to his black and white stuff in the prog, but here his colouring just leaps off the page and reminded me of the great work he did on Scarlet Traces.

Dredd: Underbelly part three by Arthur Wyatt, Henry Flint, Chris Blythe and Ellie De Ville

The comic sequel to the Dredd movie concludes and left me strangely unmoved. Flint's art is great and the two page spread showing the Judges moving through the drug factory is fantastic, but I'd rather have him drawing regular Judge Dredd. I expected this story would be more about Anderson but she just popped up for a couple of cameos. It also seems strange that they chose to do another drug bust story for the sequel, there was the new angle with mutant trafficking but I would have thought they could have chosen a different aspect of Mega-City crime for the sequel. I am left feeling underwhelmed which is a shame as the rest of the Megazine has been great.

Lobster Random: Tooth and Claw by Simon Spurrier, Carl Critchlow and Ellie De Ville.

So there was a long period when I wasn't buying any comics at all. I know, what was wrong with me? So here is another story that first appeared in the Prog while I wasn't looking. Normally these floppy collections that come with the Megazine don't really interest me but this was great fun. Spurrier is clearly a very clever writer and while I found his Simping Detective quite hard work Lobster Random is a terrific creation. A grouchy old man with "anger management issues, surgically bonded Lobster claws, an inability to sleep or feel pain, and a sexual attraction to pieces of intelligent machinery". Add to this Carl Critchlow's weird science fiction art and you have something with a European comics feel that looks like it came from Heavy Metal magazine. Splendid.

Pick of the Meg is a really tough call but I'm going with Insurrection.

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 - The Revenants

The Revenants by Ian Potter and directed by Lisa Bowerman.

This was a free extra that came with the special edition version of The Light at the End. It's a First Doctor story narrated by William Russell as Ian Chesterton. I don't normally like the companion chronicle stories where there are only one to two characters telling the tale instead of a full cast audio drama but this was splendid.

It helps that it has a framing device of a much older Ian telling the story to a woman he meets on a ferry. This also means that William Russell doesn't have to try and sound like his younger self. The writers have cleverly included several chemical references which makes the most of Ian's background as a science teacher. And it has an eerie ghost story feel to it. All this plus William Russell's only performance as the First Doctor which is lovely stuff.

An unexpected delight and a great bonus, 4.5 out of 5 stars.  

Big Finish - Judge Dredd: Grud is Dead

Judge Dredd: Grud is Dead by James Swallow and Simon Jowett, directed by John Ainsworth.

A bizarre faction of the Catholic Church are involved in a plot to create a new God and Judge Dredd has to travel to Rome and team up with Devlin Waugh to prevent them from unleashing chaos.

The whole subject of religion in Mega-City One is a bit complicated with characters using Grud as an exclamation instead of the word god, which the editors wanted to avoid in a children's comic. And here we have the church trying to restore the concept of God to the world of Dredd. On top of the that we have the renegade, vampire exorcist Devlin Waugh who, I confess, is a character who I know nothing about but he is played with considerable relish by Peter Guinnesss.

I'm running out of Big Finish Dredd stories and it seems unlikely that I'm going to find anything to rival Death Trap or Get Karter. This plods along nicely and I could happily hear more of the Waugh character but again it was all a bit humdrum, another middle of the road 2.5 out of 5 crosses.

Big Finish - Fanfare for the Common Men

Let me get this blog back on track with three quick Big Finish reviews. first up, Fanfare for the Common Men by Eddie Robson, directed by Barnaby Edwards. The first in the Big Finish 1963 trilogy.

The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa are in 1963 to see the Beatles but no one seems to have heard of them. Instead the band that was mentioned in passing by Susan in the very first episode of Doctor Who have taken their place in history and the Doctor wants to know why.

On the plus side the music in this story is fantastic. Howard Carter has come up with some catchy pop tunes that sound just right for the period and he's helped by some great performances by Mitch Benn, Andrew Knott and David Dobson as the band members with those familiar Liverpudlian accents. Having said that the rest of the story rather left me cold. The Doctor and the Nyssa investigate and discover the inevitable alien who is meddling with time, and although it is the standard four episodes long it just whizzed past without leaving much of an impression on me.

Not a terrible story but the pairing of the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa is one of the least interesting teams that have Big Finish currently have. Let me be generous and call it a 3 out of 5 mop top haircuts story.