Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is THIRD WORLD WAR by Pat Mills and a variety of artists, including co-creator Carlos Ezquerra, John Hicklenton and Sean Phillips. Borrowing from the listing I wrote for the Touched by the Hand of Tharg fan site, the series "concerns a near-future where corporations have grown so powerful that they can conscript soldiers to assist them in clearing the native populations of south and central America from regions necessary for their economic stranglehold over Western consumerism. "



Third World War was one of two series chosen to launch the twice-monthly anthology comic Crisis in 1988. The plan was to present a pair of 14-page color episodes in each issue, and these would later be shrunk and compiled in the smaller American comic format. It gave Carlos Ezquerra the opportunity to work in full color for the first time in his career and so, already unsatisfied with the long-term plans to conclude his ongoing series Strontium Dog in 2000 AD and now having the chance to work with Pat Mills, the artist jumped on board.

It's a real shame that it's not a better series, but it's certainly a polarizing and fascinating one. As I said over at Hand of Tharg, "Truly, it's hard to disagree with the points raised in this series, especially as companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks continue a stranglehold on the marketplace, but it's done with such po-faced pretension that the final product is incredibly disagreeable. Mills depicts Christian characters, not for the last time, as two-dimensional retards, and the 'open-minded' heroes, Eve and an eco-terrorist named Paul, who would later resurface as the titular character in 2000 AD's Finn, are only open-minded insofar as they reject conventional society in favor of paganism and rebellion."

There's a lot more to Third World War than most American readers saw. Ezquerra only stayed with the series through its first phase, set in Central America, and opted for a return to Judge Dredd rather than illustrate the wild adventures awaiting Eve when she returned back to a very ugly, near-future Britain where economic collapse has sent most of the nation's youth to find the only work available, as gunmen for corporations. Without a consistent artist, the strip as a whole suffered, but individual installments by Hicklenton, Phillips, Glyn Dillon and others were fascinating. Joined by co-writer Alan Mitchell, Mills put Eve through the ringer in a long battle of wits against a drunken police inspector obsessed with her.

It's tempting to use my blog as a platform to prop up unavailable comics as really being gems of overlooked brilliance. Third World War is not one of those. It's highly flawed and very dated, but that's actually what makes it so very interesting from a present perspective. Pat Mills has long been an iconoclast of a writer, bucking convention and presenting antiheroes as protagonists. This was the first time, though, that he really threw caution to the wind and really railed against the social injustices that he perceived. It's Mills without restraint, as the editors of Crisis stepped back and let him have his platform. The result is never subtle and it almost every page screams "right on!" like an undergraduate on a free speech platform, but every page is equally fascinating, and the artwork is often just amazing.

Plus, you know, it makes you think.



Third World War originally ran for 49 episodes, each about 14 pages, throughout the first 53 issues of Crisis. With nearly 700 color pages in total, this looks like a good bet for a three-volume paperback collection. I've been crossing my fingers that Rebellion would begin licensing the material from Crisis, and give it the same high-end treatment that they do with 2000 AD's stories. It's long overdue, but what do you say, Rebellion? Why not put this back into print for a new generation to consider it?

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The Reprint This! features:

Ambassador Magma
Angel and the Ape
The Angry Planet
Armitage
Axa
Axel Pressbutton
Black Jack
Black Orchid
Cat's Eye
Cobra
Steve Ditko
Doctor Who Adventures
Doonesbury
The Inferior Five
Johnny Red
Judge Dredd in the Daily Star
Jungle Emperor
Major Eazy
Marvelman
Missionary Man
The New Adventures of Hitler
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Pussycat
Rat Pack
Robot Archie
Sapphire & Steel
Shade the Changing Man
The Stainless Steel Rat
Steed & Mrs. Peel
Sugar and Spike
Tales from Beyond Science: The Rian Hughes Collection
Third World War
Thunderbirds
Tippy Teen
UFO Robo Gurendaiza
Urusei Yatsura
Gahan Wilson
The World's Greatest Superheroes
Zenith

Sam's Strip was the third newspaper comic devised by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, the team better known for Hi & Lois and Beetle Bailey. It ran for a little less than two years before the creators, unable to make much headway selling it, pulled the plug. It really is an odd little strip. Sam is a well-meaning grouch who's very much aware of the fourth wall separating his four panels from the rest of the newspaper funnies, and periodically interacts with his peers, with cameos by everybody from Charlie Brown to the character who'd later become Grandmama on The Addams Family.

Naturally, the strip became a fast favorite of comics afficionados, who enjoyed the in-jokes and what we might term as "metatextual commentary" if this blog was any more po-faced than it actually is. With regular asides to the readers, light commentary on current events and trips to a prop closet stocked with a variety of word balloons, Sam's Strip was lost on many comics page editors, and the strip never had more than 60 client papers.

Well, it might have been a failure in its day, but Sam's Strip has grown into a cult classic over time. Fantagraphics recently released a very nice paperback edition which compiles the series in its entirety. It includes annotations to explain some of the topical references of the early 1960s and commentary by Jerry Dumas. This may not be a book worth going too far out of your way to sample, but if you enjoy newspaper funnies, then this might be a very nice addition to your bookshelves. Give it a try!

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Read more of what I've written about the publishers at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of this book:

Chris Barat at News and Views
KC Carlson at Comics Worth Reading
Allan Holtz at Stripper's Guide
Chad Nevett at Comic Book Resources
Andrew Williams at Den of Geek

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The biggest news of the last month comes from the good folks over at Titan, who have finally confirmed the rumors - hardback editions of the terrific Johnny Red are in the works. The long-running series by Tom Tully and, initially, Joe Colquhoun, ran for a decade in the pages of Battle Picture Weekly. This is a big favorite of mine, and one of BPW's best series. I've been rereading the John Cooper-drawn era lately and it's a consistently wonderful strip which you should all check out. The first in what we hope will be an annual collection is due in September.

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The second biggest news of the month - and any other month, it'd be the biggest - is that Steve Holland of the wonderful Bear Alley blog has formally announced he's going into the publishing business with Bear Alley Books, looking at doing small print-run, complete editions of classic British comics, done right. Holland has the knowledge and the commitment to make certain his collections are as comprehensive and good-looking as bookshelf editions can be, and I wish him all the success in the world with his new venture. First up from Bear Alley, later this summer: complete collections of the time-travelling war yarn The Phantom Patrol, with art by Gerry Embleton, and the excellent late sixties occult thriller Cursitor Doom, with art by Eric Bradbury and Geoff Campion. Steve's commissioned new covers by Chris Weston and John Ridgway for the titles.

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In other news, as if you didn't have enough books to buy this year, the long-rumored Groo Treasury has finally been scheduled by Dark Horse. This 336-page collection of the earliest episodes of the comedy strip by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier is due in October, which is nice, because I was not keen on filling up on those little 80-page collections of the old Epic Comics series. That'd get a little expensive.

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DC has announced they're releasing what might be the first-ever collection of Mike Grell's weird 1970s swords-and-lasers fantasy The Warlord, a title I enjoyed for about seven weeks when I was twelve, in their Showcase Presents line. The 528-page book, scheduled for September, reprints the character's debut in the anthology 1st Issue Special and the first 28 issues of his own book. If I was still in touch with a couple of guys I went to middle school with, I'd let them know, but I'm not, so I'm telling you.

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So ten days ago, I was talking about how somebody needs to release more old Osamu Tezuka comics in the US. Well, the company Digital Manga Publishing is way ahead of me; there's a complete, done-in-one omnibus collection of Tezuka's 1968-69 serial Swallowing the Earth due in July! Great news, I am looking forward to seeing it. For more Tezuka, the wonderful Helen McCarthy is putting the final touches on a big, image-heavy coffee table biography of Tezuka for Abrams, the company that brought you Mark Evanier's wonderful tribute to Jack Kirby last year. The book is due out in October. And speaking of Abrams...

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In another example of what's either a late April Fool's gag or definitive proof that everything that ever appeared in a newspaper is going to end up in a hardcover collected edition before much longer, Abrams is bringing out a collection of Stuart Hample's Woody Allen comic strip. No, I never knew there was a Woody Allen comic strip, either. It ran in the 1970s. The book is entitled Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as a Comic Strip and is due out in November. With an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Oh, now I know this is a gag!

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Finally this time, a couple of interesting Judge Dredd collections from Rebellion are in the pipeline for November. The 14th volume in their Complete Case Files series will include all the 2000 AD strips up to prog 700, including the epic "Necropolis" and all of its lead-in stories, drawn by Carlos Ezquerra. The collection won't include the separate serial The Dead Man, which ran for a few months prior to "Necropolis" and dumped readers on their heads with the beautiful revelation that the two strips were intricately connected. Happily, The Dead Man is getting its own trade collection alongside CCF 14, so new readers can enjoy all of its beautiful John Ridgway artwork and read it at the same time as the main Dredd strip.

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That's all for this month! See you in July!

The trailer autoplays, so I've hidden it behind a cut just for you!

( Read more... )

In 1981, Marvel Comics got the license to release a three-issue adaptation of the hit film Raiders of the Lost Ark. The comic turned out to be pretty terrible, even if goodwill and curiosity turned the three-parter into a commerical hit. You know how Indy figures things out silently in the movies, and acts without telling people what he's up to? That's not how Indy works in that comic. Anyway, Marvel continued their license and released a pretty successful series of follow-up stories under the title The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones from 1983-86. This was a pretty uneven title, but it was occasionally very entertaining. The book seemed to suffer from the lack of a consistent creative team, but even if some of the contributions were a little underwhelming, you can tell from rereading the stories that veterans like John Byrne, Denny O'Neil, Howard Chaykin, Archie Goodwin and David Michelinie all enjoyed working with the character, and doing something a little different than the typical Marvel title.

Dark Horse has been Indy's comic home for several years now, and last year, they landed the rights to the old Marvel series, which had lapsed. The publisher has a really interesting reprint line, principally used for their licensed properties like this, Aliens or Buffy, which repackages about 350 pages in color for $25 in a format a little smaller than a standard American comic. Dark Horse had already released two of these Omnibus editions for their own Indiana Jones miniseries in 2008. This is the first Omnibus to reprint the Marvel series, and it collects the three-part Raiders adaptation and the first 12 issues of the ongoing series. Despite some genuinely awful coloring (as noted with examples in February at my LiveJournal), the comic has aged pretty well for something with so many thought balloons on the page, and the creators put Indiana through some pretty thrilling and fun paces. It's certainly worth checking out!

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I have not seen any substantive reviews of this book. If you see any or have written any, drop me a line and I will list them here.

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In other reprinting news, Yen Press has announced the release dates for the next three volumes of Yotsuba&!, the addictive family comedy series by Kiyohiko Azuma which had previously been published by ADV Manga. Volume six is due out in September, with the next two following in December and in April 2010.

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There have been rumors for ages that DC Comics will one day be releasing a complete collection of the 1940s Captain Marvel storyline "The Monster Society of Evil," a much-loved serial that ran for several months and was recently revisited by writer/artist Jeff Smith in a very fun new version. Looks like we'll finally be seeing this classic in December. The Amazon listing is right here if you'd like to pre-order it.

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In other DC news, looks like they've finalized plans for their Showcase Presents volumes through the end of the year, in a mix of $17 regular 500-page books along with ten buck 300-page "Skinny Showcases" in the summer, although it does appear they are slowing the number of titles released to allow people to actually catch up to them. Titles include Super Friends in May, The Creeper in June, the long-awaited Western adventure Bat Lash and the fourth collection of 1960s Batman in July; Eclipso in August; Warlord in September; House of Secrets volume two in October; DC Comics Presents the Superman Team-Ups in November; and the third volume of Wonder Woman in December.

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News of some other new releases from the good fellows over at Titan have crept out. October should see a sixth collection of Charley's War along with new sets of stories from Dan Dare ("Safari in Space") and Modesty Blaise ("Death in Slow Motion," with the previously-announced October collection, "Scarlet Maiden," moved forward to August). No announcements yet about a third set of Jeff Hawke adventures - the second collection was reviewed last month over at my bookshelf.

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Viz has not formally announced it yet, but it looks like they've got a plan for Rumiko Takahashi's InuYasha that I can get behind. The series, her longest-running but, to my mind, the least compelling, recently concluded and the 56th digest collection was issued in Japan in February. I picked up a few of these cheaply, but the prospect of having 56 of the darn things on my shelf was a little unappealing. Fortunately, it looks like they're going to begin issuing the series in their "VizBig" line, which collects three digests in a thick package priced about the same as two of the smaller ones, starting in November. They've already had some success with Dragon Ball, Rurouni Kenshin and Fushugi Yugi in this format, and I'm much more likely to follow InuYasha to its conclusion if I can spend less money on it, and not have to devote shelf space to 56 little books.

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Finally this time, Rebellion looks to have settled on October for release of the fifth Sinister Dexter collection - the fourth volume was just issued in England - and the first proper collection of the excellent Judge Dredd epic "Mechanismo." This should include the first two arcs, with artwork by Colin MacNeil and Peter Doherty, which were once compiled by the previous book publisher Hamlyn in an incomplete package, but ideally this one will also include the never-before-reprinted third arc, with art by Manuel Benet.

See you next month! Thanks for reading!

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One reason that Rian Hughes is not on enough bookshelves is that the guy didn't - for some mad reason - spend very many years working in comics. He's found greater flexibility and reward working in design than in sequential art, and that's great if you collect XTC albums and want them to look good, but it's a real downer if you like great-looking comics. Fortunately, most of Hughes' comic work was compiled by Knockout in their fine 2007 collection Yesterday's Tomorrows, which I reviewed last month over at the Bookshelf. That volume does include one of his pieces for 2000 AD, the Grant Morrison-scripted Really and Truly, but that's only about a third of his otherwise unreprinted strips from that comic. If you're sitting comfortably, I'll tell you exactly how Rebellion needs to put together a simply excellent volume that will put all of Hughes's 2000 AD work in a single tome.



Tales from Beyond Science was Hughes' first series in the venerable British weekly. It was a little anthology series in which strange fortean tales are related by some elderly gentleman from the comfort of his club, and all the stories are very fun. Six episodes appeared in the spring of 1992, and were followed by two others in special editions. Half of these were scripted by Mark Millar, and while I'm generally no fan of his work, it would be churlish to suggest there's anything wrong with these early efforts, which are remarkably creepy and effective. You can certainly catch the lingering fumes from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol influencing Millar, who told stories about strange government agencies, radios to the dead and missing chunks of time, but with Hughes bringing his own unique sensibility to the presentation, the stories feel very unique and unlike anything else in comics. Alan McKenzie and John Smith each also contributed two stories apiece. McKenzie's are a little whimsical, Smith's more grounded in modern horror, but they're all winners, and it's a genuine travesty that the series wasn't continued after this wonderful beginning.

Really and Truly arrived in the summer of 1993. This eight-part story is a psychedelic rollercoaster about drug smuggling, only it features a fabulous car, a dust-covered Russian cosmonaut, sumo gangsters and giant flying houses. It's like a sixties Saturday morning cartoon blown up to widescreen. Morrison boasted that he wrote the whole shebang in a single night while tripping on E. If we're brutally honest, it sort of shows, but Hughes makes the script's deficiencies look like brilliant ideas. The experience of reading Really & Truly is spiced up with its very clever lettering and unconventional design choices. It's certainly a very nineties strip, and unquestionably dated, but the same can't be said of Hughes' next, and thus far, last contribution to 2000 AD...



I've talked about Hughes' time on Robo-Hunter at pretty good length before, including an article at my Thrillpowered Thursday blog. To recap, the writer Peter Hogan was brought in to salvage the John Wagner / Ian Gibson classic after it had fallen into some disrepair at the hands of some other, lesser, talents. Hogan wrote five stories of varying lengths, four of which - thirteen episodes - were illustrated by Hughes.

Friends, I'm telling you, comics just don't come better than Ian Gibson Robo-Hunter. But Hughes, he's up there, too. Peter Hogan really knocked these stories completely out of the park. They're whimsical, silly, incredibly inventive and clever, and Rian Hughes was absolutely the best man in England not named Gibson to illustrate them. He created a wonderful world for Sam Slade and his nutty associates to run around in. It's a slightly decaying technopolis populated by bubble-headed droids who've walked straight out of 1950s advertising calendars, armed with space-age zap guns, widgets and gizmos. For lighthearted, unexpected, whimsical detective adventures, this strip is the business, and if you have never seen it, you are missing out.



So that's the story: Hughes' work for the prog comes to 29 episodes, plus six cover illustrations and a star scan on the back of issue 842. Rebellion typically issues collections based on the many ongoing series from their titles, but there are a few precedents for a creator-centered work. Both Alan Moore and Frazer Irving have had releases devoted to their work, and I suggest to you that Rian Hughes certainly deserves similar consideration. They should also see what he'd charge to draw "La Revolution Robotique," but that's another pet obsession of mine. So how about it, Rebellion? Feel like making the world beyond science a glorious reality?

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The Reprint This! features:

Angel and the Ape
The Angry Planet
Armitage
Axa
Axel Pressbutton
Black Jack
Black Orchid
Cat's Eye
Cobra
Doctor Who Adventures
Doonesbury
The Inferior Five
Johnny Red
Judge Dredd in the Daily Star
Jungle Emperor
Major Eazy
Marvelman
Missionary Man
The New Adventures of Hitler
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Pussycat
Rat Pack
Robot Archie
Sapphire & Steel
Shade the Changing Man
The Stainless Steel Rat
Steed & Mrs. Peel
Sugar and Spike
Tales from Beyond Science: The Rian Hughes Collection
Thunderbirds
Tippy Teen
UFO Robo Gurendaiza
Urusei Yatsura
Gahan Wilson
The World's Greatest Superheroes
Zenith

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

Welcome back to the little ol' sub-blog at my LiveJournal, for another few weeks of looking back at the run of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic! I already know that I'll be taking a few weeks' break again at the end of the year, but, as Kermit the Frog often said, "before we go," I'd like to finish up the issues that originally saw print in 1999. Prog 1162 is a very, very good comic. I'm not completely keen on the cover, by Dylan Teague, which spotlights the imminent conclusion to the Judge Dredd epic "Doomsday Scenario" (creators this week: John Wagner and Charlie Adlard). I was also a little underwhelmed by the Pulp Sci-Fi one-off written and illustrated by Allan Bednar, but the rest of the lineup includes Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, the completely brilliant Nikolai Dante romp "The Courtship of Jena Makarov" by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser, and more of Devlin Waugh by John Smith and Steve Yeowell.

One thing that I can't help but experience when I reread a bunch of old comics is that occasional sense of nostalgia for the original moment. And who'd have it any other way? Of course, now we know that Devlin Waugh survived the apocalyptic events of this epic storyline and would go on to several more stories. But back in 1999, John Smith had quite a reputation for killing off or maiming his wonderful characters. The casts of Indigo Prime, The New Statesmen and Tyranny Rex had met bloody demises throughout the 1990s, so how could you fail to be concerned that Devlin would join their number with so much at stake in this adventure?

So it was with no small amount of fanboy thrill, and no small amount of fanboy terror and paranoia at the possible death of a much-loved character, that I took up an offer from the fanzine Class of '79 to interview John Smith. The interview, available online here, is, I think, quite remarkable for how much Smith was willing to talk about the background and stories behind his stories. I'm not sure how many people will, before we're all good and done with fandom, be interested in piecing together histories of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, but since Smith was so forthcoming and so full of information, this is honestly one of the better secondary sources currently available to amateur researchers.

It's also, embarassingly, a face-in-hands gushfest on the part of the obnoxious interviewer. I still stand by my conviction that the final Indigo Prime series, "Killing Time," is one of comics' most thrilling moments, and I can't wait to see what Paul at the Prog Slog has to say about it in a couple of weeks, but Jesus, what an over-the-top fanboy I was with those questions. The format was kind of unfortunate; rather than a proper e-mail interview over an evening, Class of '79 asked that I compose all of my questions quickly, and I hammered them out with the help of my girlfriend-of-the-time, Victoria, typed 'em all up at UGA's Memorial Hall computer sweatshop, mailed 'em in and never saw them again until the finished piece appeared a few months later. I don't think I ever spoke with John Munro, who added some very good questions which appeared at the end, after mine.

Well, Tom Spurgeon I am clearly not. Although I remain convinced that Tom'll find room for some British talent sometime soon, and do his peerless job of interviewing them, and not look like a complete spazz when he does, unlike certain LiveJournallers you might be reading. (Check out Tom's interview with James Kolchaka from last month if you haven't; all of Spurgeon's interviews are really fascinating reading, and a highlight of every weekend, even if I've only heard of maybe one creator in five.)

In other news, I decided to take a break from the What I Just Read feature/tag in my LiveJournal, mainly because I've grown tired of finding new things to say about my reading pile. But I did want to continue spotlighting the 2000 AD books, because many occasional readers miss the announcements elsewhere, and they are, as ever, very poorly promoted in the comic news-blog-world.

Back in '05, DC released a collection of Anderson: Psi Division which compiled the three 12-part adventures that originally appeared in 1985-87. Rebellion did not follow up on this book until recently, and they've made the curious decision to make this book an artist-focussed trade. Shamballa is a nicely satisfying chunk of a book, and it contains something like forty episodes, originally published throughout the nineties, all featuring fantastic color artwork by Arthur Ranson. It is not a complete Ranson collection; his first story, the black and white "Triad" serial, is not here, and neither is some of the more recent material from the Megazine, the stuff with the strange demon Half-Life, and Psi-Judge Shakta and Juliet November. But what is here makes for some pretty good reading. Ranson is a wonderful artist and some of these stories are very good. Well, apart from the brow-furrowing, disappointing damp squib of an ending to "Satan," a story which was very promising for many pages before petering out.

However, I can't completely get behind this book because while an incomplete Ranson collection is understandable, an incomplete Anderson collection is completely baffling. Alan Grant navigated the character through a fascinating series of stories, with character growth you certainly do not see with Judge Dredd, and there are, as a natural effect of the character-based continuity storytelling, several maddening references to the things skipped by this reprint. For example, between the incidents of "The Jesus Syndrome" and "Satan," there were three lengthy Anderson stories in the Megazine, all of which are missed in this collection but are nevertheless referenced in the stories that Ranson illustrated. The result is very piecemeal and felt very frustrating to me. Honestly, it's less of a spotlight for Ranson than it is a missed opportunity, regardless of how gorgeous the artwork is.

Next week, some serious thrill-circuit overload. Nemesis returns. Drawn by Flint.

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

If the only measure of success in 2000 AD was "how often Tharg reprints your work," and mercifully it is not, then Nigel Long might get the booby prize for least successful of all of Tharg's script droids. Writing under the oddball pseudonym "Kek-W," he worked for the House of Tharg for about a decade, but try as I might, I cannot think of a single story of Long's that has ever been reprinted, collected, dusted off or even recommissioned for a second series, unless it was in one of those godawful American-sized reprints in the mid-90s. And that's a shame; when garbage like the Michael Fleisher Rogue Trooper and Harlem Heroes was able to find new homes outside of the weekly, there was no reason for Long's whimsical and quirky stories to be ignored. Of course, I'm writing this at work, and I could go home and look him up on Barney and have a face-palm moment when I realize I've overlooked something*, but the promising Kid CyBorg was nowhere as awful as its reputation suggests, and the strange little throwback story Second City Blues, his last 2000 AD offering, from a couple of years ago, was charming if unnecessary, and he also contributed several good Vector 13 and Pulp Sci-Fi one-offs.

In fact, Long did the impossible in the spring of '96 and took Mark Millar's completely brain-dead Canon Fodder into a second series which was miles better than the first (see My Dinner With Einstein), but, bafflingly, it was the first series which was reprinted as a bonus "graphic novel" bagged free with the current Megazine, and Long's second, superior, offering was left on the shelf.

Long also gave us Rose O'Rion, the final episode of which appears in prog 1158 (August 1999). Now this really was a shame, and an awful missed opportunity.



Rose first appeared in a June 1998 Pulp Sci-Fi episode called "False Profits," which was not at all bad. But her second appearance, in December's "Hot Rocks," felt like the pilot for what should have been a fantastic, over-the-top, downright wonderful series. Rose is a thief and treasure hunter in the most delightfully pulptastic, goofball world of throwback sci-fi, where thousands of planets are just a few days' warpflight away, and each one of those wild worlds was once the home of a thriving civilization which was lost in some cosmic calamity, except for one lone relic of unimaginable power and value. Cherry-picking the universe of its lost treasures is the work of greedy, backstabbing, improvising brigands, tough guys and sassy broads, who forge alliances at the card tables in backwater casinos.

It's one part Raiders of the Lost Ark and one part Maverick and eight parts every schlocky '50s potboiler you read when you were twelve. "Hot Rocks" demanded a series. Unfortunately, the series we got was really, really dull, and nowhere as fun as the lively universe suggested in the Pulp Sci-Fi one-offs. It's full of big, boring galactic threats, and the dialogue sounds wrong. At one cliffhanger point, some giant alien with a big manly gun shouts "Intruder, identify yourself! Your actions have been designated hostile... prepare for immediate physical disincorporation!" This might just be the worst pair of sentences ever written. Just try speaking them out loud!

Rose never gets the chance to redeem herself after this misfire. The series is quietly shelved, and a promising character and universe derailed. Periodically, fans would mention they'd like to see her again, but the moment passed and Rose passed into obscurity.



Incidentally, the eye-catching cover to this issue by Steve Cook announces the second phase of the lengthy Devlin Waugh storyline and introduces several new characters, including the mysterious and wealthy actress Anji Kapoor, in another episode by John Smith and Steve Yeowell. Other stories in this prog include more of Judge Dredd's "Doomsday Scenario" by John Wagner and Colin Wilson, Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Chris Weston, and Mazeworld by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson.

*note: I looked up Long's credits at Barney, and see that I didn't overlook anything.

Thrillpowered Thursday will be taking a week's break while my young co-readers take a Thanksgiving vacation in Kentucky. See you in December for more Dredd, and a graphic novel review or two.

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

I had a moment of very odd coincidence when I read Judge Dredd Megazine # 57 last night. See, I should explain that while this feature appears on Thursday mornings, I do the writeup and the scanning on Wednesday afternoon, meaning that I read the featured issue on Tuesday, which of course was Veteran's Day. The Meg lineup is the same as it was the last time I stopped by; it contains a new, extra-length Dredd episode (here, part two of "Doomsday" by John Wagner and Colin Wilson), some pages of Daily Star Dredd newspaper strips by Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, and an issue of Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. And so it was, on Veteran's Day, that I read one of the most stunning episodes of that series, in which Jesse bumps into an old army buddy of his dad's in an airport bar. The vet, who was called Spaceman to John Custer's Texas, still holds onto his "FUCK COMMUNISM" lighter that the actor John Wayne had delivered to their unit on a goodwill tour to Viet Nam. Jesse still has his dad's lighter as well. It is the only thing he has of his father, who died while he was four, in events recounted in the earlier Angelville storyline. I still stand by my assessment that Preacher is just too unpleasant and too unrestrained for me to like it, and this violent installment of shit-talking soldiers won't change the mind of anybody who has written it off. However, this episode, which closes with a quote from Mark Baker's Nam, is unbelievably effective and moving, and a heartfelt tribute to all the men and women who've given time and blood for freedom.

Interestingly, around the time this issue was in production, 2000 AD's present owners at Rebellion made their first, unsuccessful, bid to buy the comic and all its intellectual properties from Fleetway. The events are recounted in Thrill-Power Overload by David Bishop, who explains that Rebellion's Jason Kingsley was, surprisingly, rebuffed in his efforts to license Strontium Dog for a video game, and so made the offer to purchase everything outright. The negotiations were carried out in secret, but Bishop and Diggle were unwittingly clued in, and encouraged Kingsley to give it another try once his effort was turned down. Perhaps even more surprising than Fleetway's reluctance to license Strontium Dog is that it's been almost ten years, and Kingsley owns the character, and yet we've got no game. Hey! Get a move on, will ya?




As for the actual Dredd content, Colin Wilson's return to action in Mega-City One has been really effective. Wilson had been among the artists in the rotation for both Dredd and Rogue Trooper in the early '80s before finding jobs with various French publishers. His best known work was for the Western series Blueberry, but Wikipedia notes that he also penned several volumes of Dans l'Ombre du Soleil. At any rate, he returned to 2000 AD for a pair of Pulp Sci-Fi one-offs before rejoining the Dredd rotation for about three years at the suggestion of assistant editor Andy Diggle, who also booked him for a few issues of The Losers in 2005. Among other work, in 2006, he illustrated that excellent Battler Britton miniseries by Garth Ennis that I enjoyed greatly.

As far as I'm concerned, any comic which gives you fifteen pages of Wilson art and twenty-odd pages of Dillon art is doing the right thing, but of course the reprints of the Dredd newspaper strip, about which I spoke at greater length in a Reprint This! feature last month, are bringing you wonderful artwork by Ian Gibson. Really, if you're going to have two-thirds of the comic reprint material, this looks like a lineup worth following, doesn't it?



The newspaper strips that I provided last month looked awfully small and cramped, so this one is a little larger, but in deference to those people who have me on their LiveJournal friends' pages, I left the full version behind this cut tag in order to not warp their page views. You can click the link to see the full strip. ( Read more... )

And now, an appeal from your host.

Gang, I still need to track down nine issues of the Megazine - volume three # 69-77. Either the issues themselves or scans of the Dredd / DeMarco / Mean Machine episodes. These are issues I used to have, but lost when my house flooded three years ago. Can you help? I've got a giant stack of double progs, and some graphic novels, that I can swap, or PayPal you some cash... please drop me a line ASAP!

Next time, the Doomsday business continues in Mega-City One, and Devlin Waugh continues the hunt for the Herod. See you in seven days!

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Button Man: The Confession of Harry Exton, Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar and Stickleback: England's Glory (all Rebellion, 2008).



Rebellion's been continuing a program of about two reprint collections a month. I buy almost all of them, and these are some of the latest ones. The second Button Man book reprints the second lengthy story of this sporadically-published tale by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson. It first appeared over four months in 1994, and the third wouldn't appear until 2001. In it, the mercenary Harry Exton, whom we thought dead at the end of his first adventure, wakes up in upstate New York, having been rescued and conscripted by a wealthy benefactor to serve as his new hired gun. Genuinely thrilling and full of sharp, unexpected plot twists, I still think the first two Button Man stories will make one hell of a great movie one day.

The seventh Nikolai Dante book features several shorter adventures, 26 episodes in all, published sporadically over an eighteen month run from 2005-06. It wraps up the long run which had Dante, the most wanted man on Earth, hiding out with his mother, the most notorious pirate queen of the Pacific, but there, as always, working both sides of a con. The downside to this book is that almost all of it features John Burns on art chores. Burns is a superb artist, but I simply don't enjoy his work on Dante. The character's co-creator Simon Fraser returns for the final storyline, which sees Dante pulled out of what looks certain to be the worst scrape he's ever been in and dumped in one that's even worse - a new job in the tsar's employ - and sets up a pile of new subplots and problems that are driving the strip in its current run in 2000 AD. It's very good, but Dante is at his best when he's dealing with ugly politics in the Russian court, and there's not quite as much of that in this book as I'd prefer.

I think most American readers have not yet heard of Stickleback, and, good Lord, are you ever missing out. The brainchild of Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, this misshapen, vulgar gentleman with the hunchback, hideously deformed and visible spine and long nose is the Pope of Crime in Victorian London, a place beset by Lovecraftian nightmares, secret societies, ancient evils, Chinese dragons and undead cowboys. He's appeared so far in two series, starting in 2007. These are compiled here along with supplemental material from D'Israeli's sketchbook, and if there was any justice in the world, I could take myself an apple to work in a Stickleback lunchbox. To be fair, I was pleased but not blown away by the first series when it initially ran; the creators made the unusual decision to frame Stickleback and his world through the eyes of his antagonist, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey, and several episodes passed with only the briefest glimpse of the villain. But it gels perfectly in the end, and the second series is just thunderously weird and wonderful, with a new, left-field jawdropper every five pages or so, as Stickleback and his crew match wits with Wild Bill Hickock and his travelling freakshow. Absolutely essential stuff - now when the heck do we get a third series, Tharg?

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

June 1999: Greg Staples' absolutely wonderful cover to prog 1149 features the long-overdue return of Devlin Waugh, following the path of his stablemates Missionary Man and Judge Anderson and making his move over from the pages of the Megazine to 2000 AD. It's the prologue episode to a really remarkable series, almost unique in 2000 AD's color era. This lengthy serial, known by the umbrella title "Sirius Rising," is by John Smith and Steve Yeowell. While it will be broken down into three separate stories, it will run without a break for six months.

It's the only time since Wagner and Ezquerra's 31-week run on the Dredd epic "Necropolis" that a writer-artist team has kept a six-month residency in the prog, and nobody since has come within spitting distance of their tenure. Other stories in this issue include the continuing Dredd storyline "The Doomsday Scenario," by John Wagner and Simon Davis and with the action now moved to the Mediterranean Free State, Downlode Tales by Dan Abnett and Calum Alexander Watt, Pulp Sci-Fi by Robbie Morrison and Siku, and, most importantly for future commissions, Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and guest artist John Burns, who will, in time, replace Dante's co-creator Simon Fraser as the strip's regular art droid.

For those of you that have never met Devlin Waugh, he is a paranormal investigator in Judge Dredd's world, working chiefly in the employ of the Vatican. Certainly among Smith's finest creations, one reason he works so well is that while Mega-City One is extremely well-defined, to the point that the city is almost as much of a character as Dredd himself, readers just don't know much about the Europe of the future. Actually, most of what readers know about the rest of the planet is kept to tantalizing glimpses and references, but it's clearly not all radioactive deserts surrounding totalitarian dictatorships. Smith has helped define most of the rest of Dredd's world, a place where most people have the sense to avoid the lunacy of what used to be North America.



Devlin's world is populated by bon vivants and celebrities, with both a thriving middle class and mega-cities where the unemployment figures don't make you cry. It's a world of violent occult phenomena and freaky aliens. Taking a cue from both the strange exploits of Psi-Division in the main Dredd strip and from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, it's a world of bizarre collectors of paranormal oddities and supercriminals with amazing technology. It's a world, in short, that's too weird for Judge Dredd. But you drop Waugh, a steroid-abusing gay vampire with a Terry-Thomas grin and a Noel Coward way with words, into that world with his sharp suits and fisticuffs, and you've got one of 2000 AD's best series ever. That it doesn't appear for at least thirteen weeks every year is completely criminal. In fact, Devlin has only appeared in five stories since the end of '99, with a new one apparently due sometime in 2009.

The Sirius Rising storyline was collected in the second of DC and Rebellion's two Devlin Waugh collections, Red Tide, in 2005. Unfortunately, this would be the only one of all the Rebellion books that deserves to be skipped by buyers. The best anybody can figure, the films provided to the printer featured about sixteen pages towards the end of the storyline which were some sort of preliminary or interim drafts, and are each missing about half of the word balloons!



This was reported to DC early on, but DC was already in the process of backing out of the deal after flooding the market with too many (three a month!) books with no advertising support, and evidently didn't feel the need to issue a revised, corrected edition. Since taking over production and distribution themselves, Rebellion has not redone this book either. It's a shame, but the line has close to a hundred volumes in it at the time of writing, and this is the only one that I know of that has a production error that egregious. They do a pretty good job overall!

Next time, the Doomsday business continues in Mega-City One. See you in seven days!

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

I'm afraid work caught me at a bad time this week. I would have composed an entry yesterday, but my job sent me on a site visit (at last!) to Riverdale all day yesterday, and I didn't get time to, and now I'm behind on my desk duties. For those following along, I did want to note that this prog's cover reveals the new direction for Sinister Dexter. In the wake of "Eurocrash," the title of the series is changed to Downlode Tales as the former partners work opposite sides of the law to find out who was responsible for the incidents of that epic, and the death of their friend. So Finnigan Sinister begins assembling a cadre of like-minded criminals and gun hands, but Ramone Dexter turns himself in and is commissioned to work as an advisor to a new police initiative to combat organized crime, hoping they can find whoever had the resources to pull off that event.

Next week, evil rears its beastly head! I will definitely find more time to write about the spectacular return of Devlin Waugh...

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Slaine: The Horned God (Rebellion, 2008) and Popeye: Well, Blow Me Down (Fantagraphics, 2007).




The Slaine epic "The Horned God" was one of the biggest events in British comic publishing in the late '80s. Originally serialized in three chunks across eighteen months, the series by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley was repackaged into three albums and republished throughout Europe and America, turning Bisley into a star and making fully-painted art all the rage in Britain. So how does the story, in which the wandering warrior-turned-tribal king seeks to unite all the tribes of ancient Ireland to war against invading sea demons and the nightmarish army of the Lord Weird Slough Feg, hold up?

Surprisingly well. Contrary to its popularity, "The Horned God" is certainly not the greatest of Slaine stories, but the novel use of the dwarf Ukko's long-after-the-fact narration allows Mills to retell events from the earlier stories from a new perspective, and what you get in this volume feels less like the fourth book in a longer series than a solid, satisfying read in its own right. Bisley's inventive, perhaps mercurial use of different styles throughout the saga gives it a sense of really huge scale, that what you're reading is an epic greater than something from a twenty year-old comic. I think that there are certainly better Slaine stories, and its impossible to separate "The Horned God" from all the heavily-musculatured painted posing that would bury Bisley's talent in time, never mind impact the look of British comics for at least the next seven years, but it's very solid in its own right, and should be judged very positively on its own merits.

There have been several editions of the story over the years, but Rebellion's new edition knocks them all out of the water. They have been really setting the bar with their 2000 AD books, but this one might be the best one yet. The cover and paper stock are as good as ever, but Pat Mills contributed a remarkable set of annotations to close out this volume, and they had me looking over pages to see things I'd never noticed before. Simply great stuff, and something you really need to order right away.



Hold the phone. You're going to want this as well.

Popeye is another series where I'm well behind the current editions - this is about a year old and the third book is due out soon, but as I'm not gettin' comp copies from anybody, you just have to take 'em as you get 'em. This second edition of Segar's old newspaper strip features Thimble Theatre stories from the early 1930s, and is about equally split with about 90 pages of dailies and 80 pages of Sundays. The dailies tell one amazingly fun continuity where Popeye and Olive go west to manage a ranch deep in criminal badlands, and get drafted to stratergerize a war between two dingbat kingdoms somewhere in the Mediterranean or someplace. The Sundays tell a separate continuity on the homefront where, when he's not being set up for another completely ridiculous prize fight, Popeye's wooing his lady love and eating at the greasiest greasy spoon you've ever seen, and arguing politicks with the owner while the friendless layabout Mr. Wimpy tries to get hamburgers on credit.

It is completely addictive, totally silly, and some of the most emphatically laugh-out-loud material I've sat down to read in ages. I knew this going in; the first volume completely knocked out that considerable stack of skepticism I'd built up over the years, thinking the comic was anything like the mediocre cartoon series. I wish it was not worth wasting space restating in the future, but I fear it'll take a while for the word to get out: don't judge these comics based on all the immunity you'd built up over the years to those godawful King Features cartoons stacked up on your UHF channel afternoons in the late 70s when you were waiting for something good to come on.

The print Popeye was a totally different beast, full of bizarre wordplay, plot twists, spectacular sight gags, and the fantastic lead character, swaggering without compromise as he socks and bludgeons his way through an unbelievable enemies' list. Two-fisted violence never looks quite so hilarious as when Popeye lays somebody out among the swee'peas, and the panels of Wimpy standing on a lunch counter shouting "HEY!" while Popeye and Roughneck scream at each other how Congress never helps either sailors or restauranteurs make me chuckle just thinking about them. Actually, the best thing in the book might be a surprising, yet simple, Sunday strip in which Wimpy pilfers sixty cents from the cash register. Jesus, this is a good book. Does the third volume ship this week?

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

April 1999: Megazine Vol. 3 # 54 brings us the third episode of the Judge Dredd story "The Narcos Connection," a four-parter by John Wagner, Andrew Currie and Stephen Baskerville which is told from the perspective of Galen DeMarco, the former judge and now private investigator. This is an incredibly interesting story that serves as the first chunk of a series of interwoven Dredd serials which will run through the summer and into mid-October. The overall title for this epic, engaging mess is "The Doomsday Scenario," and it is very much unlike the standard 12 or 26 part Dredd stories seen in years past.

Twice before, in "Judgement Day" and "Wilderlands," the action of a Dredd epic was split between 2000 AD and the Meg by having episodes appear in each comic. But those appeared when the Meg was published fortnightly. In 1999, the Meg is monthly and aimed at mature readers. So the Doomsday epic in 2000 AD runs for 24 episodes (prog 1141 to 1164), and in the Megazine for eight episodes (# 52 to # 59), and each comic can be read completely independently of each other. In fact, reading it in 2000 AD alone actually worked a little better for me, as working the material into DeMarco's P.O.V. is occasionally awkward and reveals dramatic moments before they happen in 2000 AD.

There is more to it than just the final assault on the city by the crimelord Nero Narcos and his robot army, although that's quite amazing in its bloody, violent chtuzpah. Narcos was behind a munitions company that was awarded the judges' new firearms contract, and, as was shown in a one-off in prog 1122, all of their sidearms were fitted with the standard "unauthorized user" self-destruct feature familiar to any longtime reader of the comic. But Narcos controlled the self-destruct system, and as soon as any judge drew his gun to fire on one of Narcos's robots, the gun exploded. The casualty figure for judges in this series is pretty astonishing.



But there's another element to Doomsday: the old Soviet assassin Orlok. He had crossed paths briefly with Judge Dredd in the early 80s before becoming a recurring foe for Anderson and, finding Earth too small for the two of them, taking his single-minded, violent life to a frontier planet. He learns that the East-Meg One government-in-exile has offered a 10 million credit bounty on Dredd for war crimes and returns to Mega-City One to bring him to justice. So seven (2000 AD) episodes into the proceedings, Dredd is captured and taken out of town while it falls to Narcos. When the action moves to Europe, the Megazine episodes breathe a little easier, no longer needing to relate the same incidents from two perspectives.

At 32 episodes, "Doomsday" is the longest of all the Dredd storylines. It is not currently in print, but it was collected into two books by Hamlyn in 2001, Doomsday for Dredd and Doomsday for Mega-City One. More detailed information can be found at the really excellent Wikipedia page for the story, which I probably should've looked at before I typed all that stuff out.

It has been some time since a Megazine made it into Thrillpowered Thursday, and perhaps I should point out that the format has changed just a little bit since then. Half of the comic is still made up of Preacher reprints - they're at the point where everybody's got together at Jesus de Sade's depraved party to beat the hell out of the smack dealers who killed Cassidy's girlfriend - but the black & white reprint pages no longer belong to American comics but to reprints of the Daily Star's Dredd comic from the mid-1980s by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson. Wasn't I just talking about this two days ago? Oh yes, I was.



The Daily Star Dredds - focussing on the Ian Gibson episodes - ran for about a year and a half in the Megazine and are the closest thing available to a complete, proper reprint of them. In Meg # 54-55, we have the story "Bride of Death," in which the actress in a film about the alien superfiend is convinced that she is being haunted. Naturally, bodies start turning up. It is great stuff!

Next time, Ramone Dexter gets a new job. See you in seven days!

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

One missing gem is the JUDGE DREDD newspaper strip which originally appeared in the pages of The Daily Star. Various teams worked on the series, initially John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ron Smith, and later Ian Gibson. Three samples from the Wagner-Grant-Gibson team are included here. The strip ran for about sixteen years under various teams, concluding in the late 1990s, but it's the first few years of material which is most crying out for a reprint.



Judge Dredd was, of course, created by Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra in 1977 for the pages of Britain's new sci-fi comic anthology 2000 AD, debutting in the second issue. He's a gruff, impartial, impatient policeman-plus who patrols the mean streets of the lunatic future megalopolis of Mega-City One, located on what's today the eastern half of the US. Thirty-one years and 1600 issues later, Dredd is still going strong, with a very nice reprint program going to keep his regular weekly adventures in print. But Dredd has appeared in several other outlets over the years. In 1981, the Daily Star commissioned a weekly episode of the strip. These were produced by Wagner, Grant and Smith and many, but not all of them, were collected in an annual series of five slim Judge Dredd Collections published by Fleetway, and many of these were then recompiled into a hardcover Judge Dredd Mega-Collection in 1990.

After a few years, Dredd was transitioned into a regular Monday-Friday continuity slot, typically telling tales across nine to fifteen weeks. Gibson began alternating with Mike Collins in 1988 before Collins became the regular artist. In time, the strip lost its regular team and a large number of different writers and artists contributed - Andy Diggle, Gordon Rennie, Mark Millar and Carlos Pino all put in time telling stories of Dredd and his world.



The weekly Star Dredd was pretty entertaining, but the daily version is the real treat. Admittedly I'm incredibly biased - even moreso than usual - because it combines two of my favorite things about comics: reading daily strip sequences and Ian Gibson's artwork. Readers never got the idea that Wagner and Grant were just hacking this out while saving their best ideas for 2000 AD. There's a great one that deals with the stupid Mean Machine Angel trying to convince some criminals who have built robot replicas of his dead criminal family that no, really, there never was any lost Angel Gang loot; they really did spend it all. Another features the talking horse from the classic "Black Plague" story getting Dredd's help to deal with some Cursed Earth slavers, and it's all done with that classic tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top mix of black comedy and violent melodrama that nobody does better than John Wagner.

Rebellion has been doing some really wonderful collected editions of 2000 AD series, but the slightly smaller dimensions of these books wouldn't flatter the material as well as something a little larger. Titan Books has, of course, been earning praise for their large-format collections of classic British newspaper strips like James Bond, Jeff Hawke and Modesty Blaise. I suggest that something in that format, with supplemental interviews and background material, as well as a complete "stripography" in the back, would be exactly what the daily Dredd needs. With a decent page count, Rebellion could conceivably reprint all the Wagner and Grant episodes in two books before evaluating whether to continue with the other material. I'm enough of a completist that I'm all in favor of seeing everything, but two's a good starting point. How about it, Rebellion?

---

Before I leave you this week, I do have a couple of other notes about some reprints my readers might find interesting.

I first heard of Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas's 1960s feature Sam's Strip - a comic strip about comic strips - in Walker's book Backstage at the Strips, a great book which I obtained and read years ago and did not realize was missing from my shelves until a couple of weeks ago when I went looking for it. Anyway, Fantagraphics will have a complete collection of this oddball and charming strip, which ran for less than two years, on your shelves in December. Read more about Sam, and the current fad of prestige reprints, over at Westfield Comics.

Also, davemerrill had a pretty good suggestion at his Let's Anime blog: the long-running 1970s-80s crazy future ESPer action of Chojin Locke. I'd like to see more of that, too!

And, I probably didn't do Richard Bruton justice when I mentioned The Uncollecteds a couple of months back, but if you enjoy people talking about rare old comics that need new editions, you'll really like this series over at Forbidden Planet's blog, so check that out!

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The Reprint This! features:

Angel and the Ape
The Angry Planet
Armitage
Axa
Axel Pressbutton
Black Jack
Black Orchid
Doctor Who Adventures
Doonesbury
The Inferior Five
Johnny Red
Judge Dredd in the Daily Star
Jungle Emperor
Major Eazy
Marvelman
Missionary Man
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Rat Pack
Robot Archie
Sapphire & Steel
Shade the Changing Man
The Stainless Steel Rat
Steed & Mrs. Peel
Thunderbirds
Tippy Teen
UFO Robo Gurendaiza
Urusei Yatsura
Gahan Wilson
The World's Greatest Superheroes
Zenith

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

March 1999: Prog 1138 marks the third and final time that the entire comic was given over to a single episode from one of 2000 AD's series, which doesn't do you much good if you're not a fan of the feature. In early 1998, there was an all-Judge Dredd issue, followed by prog 1100's feature-length episode of Slaine, and now episode twelve of the Sinister Dexter epic "Eurocrash."

I realize that very few of my readers are interested in this sort of trivia, but from the production / editorial side, "Eurocrash" is a very odd storyline. Had it run one five-page episode a week, then it could have been a 17-part epic, but it was apparently decided early on to compact its climactic episodes into one mammoth-sized part, like an omnibus edition, instead. I don't know that it is a tactic that should be employed ever again, but the sequence of spiralling, escalating drama that has fueled "Eurocrash" for the last three months deserves an epic climax which this issue provides. Dan Abnett and Simon Davis don't disappoint; it's a terrific story with more than one shocking moment in this issue.

"Eurocrash" begins with the confirmation that Downlode's queenpin, Demi Octavo, does not have as firm a power base as she had suspected. Her decisions have led the criminal underworld to mistrust her enough to begin consolidating power against her. Add to this the revelation that one of the city's principal sources for black market weapons has a mole in his office allowing long-illegal neural control units into play, and a confrontation with several gun sharks at the formerly neutral territory of their favorite diner, and the sprawling city has become a powder keg.

When it ends, it really does feel like the grand finale. There's an argument to be made - I've made it - that Sinister Dexter should have concluded here. Of course, there are still some fantastic moments to come down the line. "I Say Hello," which surely must be the best episode of the series, is about three years after this episode. And then there's "...and death shall have no dumb minions," which features at least two of the most heartbreaking scenes of the whole series, and that was just a couple of years ago, I think.



But there's also a lot of padding and failed humor to come. And had "Eurocrash" been the series finale, it would probably be better remembered, and its reputation would not have been tarnished by what will be shown to not work very well.

When DC and Rebellion had that ill-fated alliance three-and-a-bit years back, they released three collections of Sinister Dexter, right up to the point before "Eurocrash," leading fans to suspect Rebellion would soon continue with a fourth book compiling this story. Well, they took their time, but "Eurocrash" is finally on the schedule for March of next year. The book is tentatively listed as 160 pages, but I'm not sure how much additional material that will contain. Prog 1139's conclusion to "Eurocrash" (part 13) appeared to be the final episode of the series, with the protagonists going their separate ways into another series, Downlode Tales, that deals with this epic's aftermath, before reuniting in December '99. I imagine that at least a good chunk of Downlode Tales will make it into the book, but I don't know that 160 pages will be enough to cover it all.

Next time, we'll pop back to the Megazine for the first time in a while, to see how these Dredd subplots have been shaping up, and to see whether I can tie Thrillpowered Thursday into Reprint This! successfully...

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Finnigan gets his ninth hit of the series in this prog, a bullet to the left shoulder. It doesn't slow him down much, but there's a lot of blood.

See you in seven days!

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

February 1999: Prog 1032 has a pretty lovely cover by Greg Staples announcing the new Anderson: Psi Division six-parter, even if it's interrupted by a Babylon 5 promotion with some postcards from that year's TV movie. Staples is not the artist for the new story; in fact, I don't believe that he's ever drawn Anderson other than on this cover. It is instead handled by Anderson's semi-regular artist Steve Sampson. It's not quite his swan song, as a one-shot called "Semper Vi" will appear in the spring, and then Anderson will take a lengthy break from the comic. I don't believe that Sampson has worked for 2000 AD since. (It's a little difficult to check, as Sampson does not have a Wikipedia page, although a fellow by the same name who used to coach the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer club does...)

Judge Anderson is, sadly, quite poorly represented in graphic novel form. In the 1980s, Titan did a decent enough job by the standards they'd set for themselves. 64-page collections were pretty common then, and the annual 12-parters that ran in the summers of 1985, 1986 and 1987 were well-suited to that format. But as her series began more sporadic appearances, with one-offs, three-parters or longer adventures, drawn by a variety of artists, the collected editions really fell behind. There was a one-off Dredd in 1988 called "Night of the Brainstem Man," by Alan Grant and Barry Kitson which did not feature Anderson but which served as a prologue to Anderson's 1989 storyline "Helios," which cries out for a reprint, as does "Leviathan's Farewell," a critical one-shot which appeared in the 1989 Sci-Fi Special and whose ramifications are felt in a number of subsequent Anderson adventures.

But as Hamlyn got the rights to 2000 AD material in the 1990s, they released some trades which, haphazardly, just collected work by a single artist, so there's a Kevin Walker Childhood's End book and an Arthur Ranson Satan book, but not a compilation of "Postcards from the Edge," the interesting, episodic adventure with six or seven different artists.

And sadly, Rebellion seems to be following suit. While their graphic novel line is pretty amazing overall, as I will mention in just a moment, their first Anderson collection, Shamballa, is another assortment of Ranson episodes. It's more comprehensive than Hamlyn's Satan was, but it skips so many episodes that it doesn't seem like it could possibly read well, although admittedly I have not picked up my copy. I confess to being annoyed just enough that when four 2000 AD books were in my shop's box last visit and I only had enough cash for three, Shamballa was runt enough to warrant staying behind. It sure looks pretty, at least.



On the other hand, Rebellion's other lines mostly get it emphatically right. I started reading the seventh Nikolai Dante book last week and it's tremendous fun from start to finish. Rebellion have collected all the episodes, in order, and periodically found room for a little supplemental word or two from the creators or their sketchbooks. Plus, of course, the books are printed on gorgeous paper with very nice matte glossy covers and look fantastic. The image here is from the "Tour of Duty" serial, reprinted in the second Dante collection, The Great Game. "Duty" is the fourth of five short serials, written, as always, by Robbie Morrison, in which Nikolai is teamed with one of his half-brothers and sisters on some mission for the Romanovs. Simon Fraser handles art chores on the stories with Andreas and Lulu and Charlie Adlard illustrates the stories with Nastasia and Konstantin. Andy Clarke drew the first one, featuring Viktor.

"Tour of Duty," the adventure with Konstantin, is quite interesting from a production standpoint, as it is actually three separate stories run as a three-part adventure. Actually, I suppose I could get amazingly trainspotterish and tell you that the second Konstantin story was intended as a two-parter - that's the original cliffhanger above - but it was decided to run both parts so that each story would appear as a single chapter, but I think that level of trainspotter detail just makes my readers' eyes roll, so perhaps I shouldn't. Oh, too late.

Anyway, apart from Anderson and Dante, the prog also includes the concluding episode of the Judge Dredd eight-parter "The Scorpion Dance" by John Wagner and John Burns, and the continuing Sinister Dexter epic "Eurocrash" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis...



...about which, more next week.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Speaking of whom, our heroes each take a couple of wounds in parts three and four of this story. They're both very minor and almost instantly recovered from, but that still makes eight confirmed hits on Finnigan and two on Ramone.

See you in seven days!

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Charley's War: Blue's Story (Titan, 2007) and Judge Dredd: Complete Case Files Vol. 10 (Rebellion, 2008).




In the fourth of Titan's collections of the amazing Charley's War, the action shifts to the home front. On leave in London, Charley Bourne meets a deserter from the French Foreign Legion. As the military police pursue them, the man who calls himself Blue tells Charley the story of the battles at Verdun and Fort Vaux.

The detour from the principal Charley's War narrative into this look at the rest of the war originally ran for six months in the pages of Battle Picture Weekly and was notable for a number of innovative cover pages. Most memorable of these is a great image of the trapped, starving soldiers, their supplies cut, holding Fort Vaux and looking out helplessly while a German taunts them, pouring a canteen of precious water onto the muddy ground.

If you've been reading Charley's War, as of course you all should, then you already know that Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun managed something genuinely amazing and moving in every installment. If you're new to the series, this is actually a fine place to start before you go back and pick up the first three books. The reproduction is a little dark and fuzzy in places, and greyscaling the color covers does not always work as well as we would like, but the presentation is great, with introductory material and lengthy afterword commentary by Mills. Highly recommended.

(Note that the fifth book of Charley's War is actually supposed to be in US shops today. Diamond was extraordinarily late shipping this book to my store of choice, hence the belated review.)



The tenth Case Files edition, featuring around 50 episodes originally published in 1986-87, is among the best in this series. Oddly, Judge Dredd is all the better for the lack of a consistent, regular artist, even the good ones like Ron Smith, who, I understand, had taken a sabbatical to do advertising work around this time. With so many great artists all vying for space, there are more opportunities for individual work to shine.

Brendan McCarthy makes a huge splash with the four-part "Atlantis," for instance. Kevin O'Neill gets three episodes in this book, and they really are something to see. "Varks," a story about aliens that reproduce by turning other lifeforms into creatures like them, would have been a creepy and gruesome story in anybody's hands, but O'Neill really turns it into a freakfest. Other artists with standout work include Steve Dillon, Ian Gibson, whose "Paid With Thanks," about a ghost who does not appreciate innovative accounting, is a riot, John Cooper and Cam Kennedy.

John Wagner and Alan Grant were reaching the end of their celebrated regular partnership around this time, but hindsight doesn't show any cracks or tension in these episodes. They are having a ball coming up with more and more goofball citizens and criminals, and letting Dredd reach the end of his patience with their quirks and foibles. Absolutely essential reading, and highly recommended for everybody from longtime fans to newcomers.

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Preacher: Ancient History (DC/Vertigo, 1998) and Strontium Dog: The Final Solution (Rebellion, 2008).




As I mentioned in Thrillpowered Thursday a few months back, I really don't enjoy Garth Ennis's Preacher and its uncensored, over-the-top brutality and ugliness, despite its wealth of incredible ideas. However, I decided to give a used copy of this a try to get even more Carlos Ezquerra on my shelves. The book compiles a mini-series and two lengthy special editions which tell stories of some of the main title's supporting cast. The mini-series looks at the violent history of the Saint of Killers, the first special gives us the pathetic origin of the tragic Arseface, and the last story recasts the loathsome Jody and T.C. as protagonists in a parody of an action film.

Steve Pugh is not my favorite artist, but he is perfectly suited to the violent western tale of the Saint and the incident that sent him to Hell. Pugh illustrates the first two episodes and they're fantastic, a studied mix of Western tropes and ideas that suggests he and Ennis would be well-matched on Jonah Hex. In episode three, the Saint awakes on the road to Hell. Ezquerra illustrates this episode, and man, does he ever bring his A-game. With the story now shifted from pulp Western to myth and fantasy, Ezquerra turns in some work that's so amazing that when Pugh returns for the final part and the return to the mortal world, it's an unfortunate and unfair disappointment. Still, it is a great story.

Arseface's tale, illustrated by Richard Case, is an oddly affecting parody of mid-90s suburbia, with outcast teens, uncaring parents and rock and roll. I'm not certain whether the story needed to be told, but I really enjoyed reading it, and any chance to see Richard Case at work is worthwhile. Ezquerra returns for Jody and T.C.'s story, and it's played for laughs. You can't call these two monsters "heroes," but the clever recasting of roles lets the superhumanly powerful jerks take control of a spiralling, ridiculous situation while Ennis mocks the tropes of modern action thrillers. If you enjoyed Ennis and Ezquerra's work on Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, you'll probably like this one.

Overall, I ended up preferring these escapades to the one in the main Preacher storyline. The collection is very reasonably priced, and the Saint of Killers story is so darn good that everybody should see it, regardless of your opinion of Preacher. Recommended for mature readers.



The story goes that in the late 80s, as the fight for creators' rights hit British comics, some of 2000 AD's talent and editorial and publishers all began crossing swords over royalties and loyalties, and it was decided that one of the comic's most popular features, Strontium Dog, would be cancelled and its lead character, the bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, killed. It was a traumatic event for many thousands of readers - see episode 2.6 of Spaced - and one which Alpha's artist and co-creator, Carlos Ezquerra, declined to draw, electing instead to work with Pat Mills on Third World War in the new biweekly Crisis. So Johnny's concluding storylines were taken over by writer Alan Grant and up-and-coming artist Simon Harrison.

There is probably a very good story in the mammoth, 28-part "Final Solution," but Harrison's artwork is so incredibly unappealing that we can't swear to that. To his credit, he's a novel and inventive artist, full of energy and the shock of the new. On the other hand, his anatomy and his faces are so poor, and his storytelling so confusing, that what could have been a great tale of Great Britain finding a terrifying solution to "the mutant problem" becomes a chore to decipher. It's a tragic missed opportunity.

At the time, "The Final Solution" was an even greater chore, as Harrison's workload only allowed him sporadic opportunities to complete the art, and his 23 episodes were printed in four chunks over the course of a year. There followed a thirty-week (!) break before the great Colin MacNeil was drafted to complete the story. So the last part of this epic looks remarkably superior to the first 100-odd pages. Rebellion has assembled the story in a very nice package along with three bonus episodes from old annuals and specials, including the incredibly fun story in which Alpha tries to collect a couple of bounties in Mega-City One under Judge Dredd's nose, but while it is nice to have a complete set of the original series in such nice editions, really, the only thing this book proves is that Strontium Dog without Ezquerra is like a day without sunshine. Recommended for completists.

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

January 1999: In the grand scheme of things, The Balls Brothers, which begins in prog 1128, is really just a minor footnote. The remarkably wild series by John Wagner and Kevin Walker runs for just eleven episodes - two short stories which are wrapped up by the summer, and never to be seen again. Comedies have always been difficult for 2000 AD to manage. On those occasions where a straight-up comedy is tried, it invariably divides the readership in two, with the ayes rarely having the last word.

Each detail of the Balls Brothers' backstory is revealed via a completely ridiculous and hilarious gag, so it's not fair to explain too much. The simple version: the superhumanly powerful and stupid Rocky and Eggy Balls are told it is time to leave the asylum where they have spent all their lives and make their way in the world. They conclude that pretty much the only thing they're any good at is fighting, so they make their muscles available as superheroes for hire, much to the dismay of costumed do-gooders like Captain Incredible, who is dismayed at the over-the-top violence that the Balls Brothers display in any given situation. Eggy, ostensibly the smarter of the duo, cannot even add up their bills without putting his finger through the calculator.

And there are Nazi jokes and superhero jokes and care-of-the-community jokes, oh, and a canary that's always flying around shitting everywhere. It's triumphant.



I could be wrong, but I think that this series is just about the only long-form example (in 2000 AD) of this art style that Kevin Walker was using at the time. He'd made his name with his lush, painted ABC Warriors stories in the 90s, but was now experimenting with pen and ink and an apparent desire to draw everything. The pages are completely full of little background detail, piles of debris and tiny sparking wires. In time, Walker would leave behind this style and adopt one reminiscent of Mike Mignola, with strong, solid colors and shadows, and so Balls Brothers, and a one-off ABC Warriors which will appear in December 1999, are probably the only examples of this style in this title. Did he use it in some of his other work, for Warhammer or whatever? I'm curious.

At any rate, editor David Bishop confirmed in 2002 on alt.comics.2000ad that Wagner felt that the series had run its course after just two stories, and that was the end of this superb comedy. But I'll tell you... somewhere, in some parallel universe, the Balls Brothers took up periodic residence as a back-cover gag strip for many years after these eleven episodes ended. And those pages are the funniest things we'll never see.



The Balls Brothers has never been reprinted, and since there are only about 55 pages of it in total, it is unlikely to be seen again. That's another reason it should have come back at least once - just one more four-parter and there would have been enough of it for a thin, 80-page graphic novel. What a missed opportunity!

Also appearing in the prog, Judge Dredd in another major continuity epic, "The Scorpion Dance" by Wagner and John Burns. This one continues the various threads of the Frendz, DeMarco and Jura Edgar subplots, all intersecting in a very good story. It was reprinted by Hamlyn in 2001 but is currently out of print. And there's Sinister Dexter by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis, Pulp Sci-Fi by Dave Stone and Ben Willsher and Nikolai Dante by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. Not a dud in the deck, I'd say. 1999 started out strong.

See you in seven days!