Prog 871 21/01/94

Item: In Soul Gun Warrior by Shaky 2000, the artist formally known as Shaky Kane, Robert Oppenheimer uses his experimental new invention on patriotic American test pilot, Tim West. Kane’s story is just an excuse for him to draw Jack Kirby inspired machines and brawls in space which is fine by me as it’s what he does best, or second best, and is much more fun than , say, if it were being written by someone like David Bishop.

Item: In Revere Book III, the angst ridden boy wizard travels beyond the veil to find his dead girlfriend this time. Clearly, John Smith is laying on the purple prose and Simon Harrison’s art is aesthetic stunning but I just can’t get into it. I think Book II ruined Revere for me.

I would like to correct something I wrote previously though. Before, I said that Smith writes what he does irrespective of who is drawing it. In the case of Revere at least, this is one of the most obviously wrong things I’ve ever written for The Slog. Everything ever drawn by Harrison seems to have been written to accommodate his style, tastes and eccentricities. What a duh-brain I am.

Item: Let me ask you a question. If you were a young man and you had the choice between sleeping in a nice, comfy bed every night with the woman you love or on a hard, stone floor under a single undersized sheet with two young women, which would you choose? That’s right, the second one every time. In Earth Mother, that’s exactly what Dex does, although I must point out that there is no suggestion of any impropriety going on.

The characters might need work on their motivation and, although strengthened since I last mentioned it, the concept remains shaky, I’m enjoying Earth Mother more than I feel I should, none the less. It’s like a guilty pleasure.

Prog 869 08/01/94

Item: Big Dave is back, and this time he’s being drawn by Anthony Williams. Normally, I like Williams but I much prefer Big Dave more when it was being drawn by Steve Parkhouse. Williams makes it slightly too grotesque for my liking. In Costa Del Chaos, Dave goes on holiday to Tenerife. What I want to know is, if Big Dave is unemployed, how is he able to afford to go on holiday in the first place? (That question has been kindly provided by The Daily Mail).

Item: I’m fascinated by an ad that appears in this prog for Fake IDs. I imagine the purpose of a fake ID is to enable its underage carrier to get served alcohol in pubs. It’s surprising to me that a service like this can legally exist as recently as 1994 but then, for all I know, it might still be available. Apart from being credit card sized and laminated, how authentic looking these IDs are I have no idea. I have a suspicion that some Del Boy type has bought a laminating machine and turned it into a business.

Item: Mother Earth is a curious new thrill. The concept seems to be that ‘Mother Earth’ travels back in time to prevent the occurrence of ecological disaster in her own time but when she returns to the present, she finds all new eco-atrocities occurring in the line she’s created. The concept for the strip at this level presents all sorts of interesting paradoxes and moral dilemmas that creators Bernie Jaye and Cliff Robinson decide to ignore altogether. Instead, she kidnaps three random young people to help her in her raids on multi-national companies. Personally, I don’t mind that Jaye and Robinson have decided to strip the thrill of all intellectualism, but I can’t see it lasting more than six episodes before its conceptual foundations give way and Mother Earth collapses in on itself.

Prog 867 25/12/93

Merry Christmas, and to celebrate, one of my favourite thrills of recent times comes to an end this prog. In Canon Fodder, Judgement Day has nearly arrived. All of the world’s dead are alive again but God is nowhere to be seen. Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty have killed themselves (I didn’t know that they were ever really alive in the first place) to gain access to heaven with the intention of killing God. Doctor Watson has enlisted the help of Fodder and Holmes’ mad brother Mycroft to find a way to stop them but when the cast arrive in Heaven they find that it’s been invaded by Lucifer and his army. Apparently, God is already dead. All this in just seven episodes; It makes Millar’s co-written Day of the Dead look like the puffed out eight-parter that it is.

Chris Weston’s art is absolutely brilliant. Canon Fodder is designed to look like an earnest Freddie Star. During the scenes set in the eras-clashed London the thrill has this great sense of claustrophobia. However, it’s the episodes set in heaven that excel. The leather clad Lucifer has an insect quality and God, who isn’t dead after all, has multiple faces but remains continually recognisable as he unleashes his wrath amidst the surreal chaos of Paradise in flames. You try drawing that!

During a period when many comic writers hold on to their ideas or release them at a painfully slow rate, Mark Millar’s pop sensibility is refreshing. He doesn’t seem precious about them. In fact, he seems absolutely sure that as soon as he gets one idea down on paper another five will rise to take its place. I know that there are a lot of you that probably disagree with me but I think he’s exactly what 2000 AD needs at this time.

Prog 865 11/12/93

In Book of the Dead, Judge Dredd goes on a cultural visit to Luxor where he learns that his invite wasn’t made to improve relations but because the local judges want to add his genetic purity to the essence of the immortal Ankhhor and make him whole again. Well, we didn’t see that coming.

Some Slog readers who comment regularly here have referred to this story as being the one that ultimately drove them away from reading 2000 AD. Having just re-encountered it, I don’t see entirely why. Sure, it’s a story that doesn’t seem to go anywhere but there have been several adventures in the past by more respected Dredd that have been equally flat. In fact, Day of the Dead still has enough moments, such as Dredd’s “soft landing” at Resyk, for it not to read like a disaster. Joint writers Grant Morrison and Mark Millar might have been coasting when they wrote this one but I find it hard to be overly critical of it as it doesn’t seem to come from a particularly cynical place. In fact, I almost respect its attempt to introduce something new to the world of Dredd, even if it is a bit rubbish.

In Timehouse, a new thrill by Peter Hogan and Tim Bollard, a family try to clear up anomalies in time by moving creatures of myth, such as Big Foot, aliens and Father Christmas, to places where their presence no longer creates contradictions. It’s an okay idea that, if Alan Moore had been writing, would have been over and done with inside five pages of Future Shock. Instead, its run for six weeks so far, and consequently, reads overly twee and inoffensive.

I’m worried that Hogan is more Neil Gaiman than Alan Moore. The time travel is more fairy tale than pulp sci-fi and all of the characters are nice and seem to get along well. There’s no place for this sort of thing on 2000 AD. This is where grim faced law enforcement officers fall into buckets of guts. It’s not where Santa turns up for a party with a bunch on cuddly sasquatches in a forest.

Prog 863 27/11/93

It feels as if Garth Ennis has taken his time getting us there but, at last, Feral Jackson and The Gronk make it to planet Lyra to enact their revenge against the bone faced necromancers that killed Johnny Alpha. Personally, I feel that if you’re going to kill off the main character but continue the strip without him with a new creative team then the best thing to do would be to draw a line after what has gone before rather than dwell on it.

Strontium Dogs The Darkest Star has seen Feral sent down to hell to retrieve the soul of head necromancer, Charn-el, while The Gronk has spent weeks climbing out of a blood filled pit he fell into earlier in the story. At one point he encounters a contorted, tortured frame that claims to be Johnny Alpha fused into a mass of writhing figures begging for death. In a scene that proves more successfully moving than his first death (and I wonder if this is the moment that Simon Pegg’s character refers to in Spaced), The Gronk reluctantly obliges him.

Despite my reservations, Garth Ennis again writes a Strontium Dogs story that features all of the right triggers while Nigel Dobbyn’s art just gets better and better with each new thrill he draws.

ANNOUNCEMENT: This prog features a couple of advertisements for Judge Dredd The Poster Prog. This is the first of a short series of poster magazines that 2000 AD release which go on to include Strontium Dogs, Slaine and Rogue Trooper. I refused to buy these at the time as they were priced £1.50 each and only featured six pages of strip. However, this isn’t the only reason why I won’t be covering them as part of The Slog; it’s because I’ve been unsuccessful getting any for a reasonable price on eBay.

Prog 861 13/11/93

Mean Arena is back, although it’s not the series that ran in the early days of the comic with which I had a turbulent relationship. It’s a reinvention, written by Alan McKenzie and drawn by Anthony Williams, in which convicts are forced to take part in battles with each other for the entertainment of the television viewing masses.

You might remember that the original Mean Arena was a problem for me but, in the end, I grew to both respect and enjoy its exuberance. The new Mean Arena just hasn’t got very much going for it and that’s not just because it has appeared so soon after a similar idea, Slaughterbowl. There’s just not much, if any, plot and any characterisation that exists is down to Williams’ strong cartooning skills. There might be an inkling of a tribute to or parody of WWE (probably known as WWF in 1993) but the soap opera threads that could be trying to establish themselves are confounded by McKenzie’s spacious writing style.

Prog 859 30/10/93

There are some thrill runs from 2000 AD that I am surprised to have completely forgotten and Slaine Demon Killer is one of them. It’s fully painted by Glen Fabry who, for many, was the definitive artist on the character before Simon Bisley came along. (Although, for me, the definitive Slaine artist will always be Mick McMahon.) I can’t believe I have no recollection of his return to the character.

Fabry’s art compares favourably to Bisley’s. In fact, it looks altogether more considered, detailed and substantial. It certainly benefits from the improved reproduction of 1993 compared with when Slaine the Horned God originally ran in the weekly. Interestingly, this prog’s final episode is painted by new guy, Dermot Power, due to, according to Tharg, Fabry having recently got married. (Art robots are allowed to do that?). Had it not been pointed out, I wonder if I would have noticed the difference as Power seems to do an extraordinary job of mimicking Fabry’s style from earlier episodes. In fact, this is where we are now with Slaine; Thanks to Bisley’s interpretation, all subsequent versions are obliged to be fully painted and refer to his heavy metal influenced designs as a template, even if, as in the case of Fabry, the artist predates him. This is so unlike the early strips which alternated between Belardinelli’s short spiky hair Slaine and McMahon’s long hair tipped with caked mud version.

In Demon Killer, Slaine and Ukko the Dwarf are sent forward through time by the Goddess to aid Boudica in her battle against the Caesarians and Elfric. It’s a story, written exclusively by Pat Mills, that doesn’t really get its hooks into me, if it has any hooks at all. This probably explains why it had completely slipped my mind.