And So, Farewell!

Most every Monday from next week onwards, as long as my subscription copies arrive, I'll be posting a review of the new editions of both 2000 ad and the Megazine on my other blog, TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics. I hope anyone who's found something of interest in the pieces which have been published here will consider dropping in there at some time in the future. But this blog will be closing down from today. For awhile, I'll post the new weekly pieces here after I've put them up on TooBusy, with the comments disabled on ThatRemindsMeOfThis, but there'll be nothing new published here from now on.

I'm tremendously grateful to everyone who has on occasion dropped in on this blog. Thank you for popping over. It's been an absolute privilege to have you visit.

I can't say how much I appreciate the comments that some folks have been so kind as to leave. If I were to list names, it'd make it seem as if I thought those good people were part of the story of this blog, but of course, this blog was just an infinitesimally tiny part of theirs. What's more, I'm absolutely honoured that that was so.

Finally, for whatever little it's worth, my gratitude and sincere admiration is owed to the creators who've been so good as to leave a comment here, who've Twittered a gracious word or posted a link or mentioned the blog in a podcast and suchlike. To write your names would be to namedrop, and your tolerance and support, to whatever much-appreciated degree, shouldn't be turned into an advert for this blog's once-existence. Thank you very much for being so kind.

A splendid time is wished from me to everyone who's reached this last line in this last entry on this little blog, of which I find I've been very fond. I shall miss it.

Thank you and good night!


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Two Fine Moments: "Low-Life" from 2000 ad 1707 & "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands" from the Megazine 303

1. from 2000 ad 1707:- "Low Life: Hostile Takeover" part 8, writer:- Rob Williams, artist:- D'Israeli

I. I'm with Dirty Frank. There's definitely more going on than even this week's showdown with Thora has revealed. Them bad 'uns of the Yakuza may be a powerful presence in Mega City One, but it's hard to see how they could outfight the Justice Department. After all, the Judges aren't merely a massively-armed military force, they're the state as well, and history tells us that well-organised, fascist states that are willing to kill without restraint tend to win the argument when those criminal elites not within their ranks challenge their power.

So, why is Thora claiming that continuing to work within the Justice Department won't result in the defeat of the Yakuza?

But that conundrum feels like a legitimate snare rather than an unintended confusion, and it's remarkably easy to have faith that "Low Life" will deliver on its unanswered questions after last week's excellent episode that set the strip solidly on course after a somewhat shaky start.


II. From set-up to page-turner, the sequence of five panels on the first page of "Low-Life" this week is undoubtedly one of my favourite single sides of work by a creative team in 2010 so far. Describing as it does the beginning of an incredibly tense meeting between Dirty Frank and Thora at the top of a vertiginously-tall skyscraper, it proves once again that fine comic-book storytelling needn't rely on the likes of mass brawls and eye defocusing special effects to capture the reader's attention. In fact, it's undoubtedly a scene that ought to be placed in a text-book entitled "How To Write And Draw Comic Books", and placed under the heading of "How to choose a setting to emphasise the drama of events". After all, Mr Williams could have chosen for Frank and Thora to have their conversation anywhere, but placing it in such an unfamiliar and isolated setting, and one so very high in the air, clearly establishes what an exceedingly dangerous game it is that both Judges are playing. For whoever loses in this apparent conflict between loyalty and expediency, it's a very long way down.

What's more, setting events so far above the streets of the Low Life also highlights how disconnected Thora is from the people she's claiming to represent and protect, as well as how isolated Frank is from his natural element of the hard and broken world below. Everybody's out of their element, and there's the overwhelming sense that no good at all can come from the situation.


III. The establishing shot at 1:1 is perhaps Mr D'Israeli's best of the series so far, though his opening panel in Hostile Takeover's first chapter is perhaps a more elegant piece when taken in isolation. Yet here his design is so precise and compelling that the reader's eye is carried from speech balloon to rooftop, before it's plunged downwards to the complex of buildings and chimneys above the episode's logo and title, a fall which accentuates how very, very far down it is to street level. Then the eye is caught and guided upwards again by the smoke trails until the reader fixes once more upon the tiny, terribly exposed figures on the landing-pad far above the world.

It's a textbook example of how an apparently static panel can be brought to the fullest measure of life by using a careful composition to guide the reader's attention around what might at first glance appear to be something of a passive and uninvolving scene.


IV. The panel-to-panel continuity is similarly carefully structured and discreetly effective. Dirty Frank's look of utter disconcertment at his distance from Terra firma in the second panel is a further wonder, emphasising his insecurity as he stares downwards into the man-made abyss that's the city in the page's first frame. And the placement of his windblown locks so that they're breaking through the border of the frame to his left and being caught and pulled on by the clouds at the top of the first panel seem to indicate that he's about to be blown, or thrown, or pulled off of the rooftop, a suspicion intensified by presence of the mocking Judges in the background behind him.

Finally, Mr D'Israeli and Mr Williams surely deserve top marks for the least kinetic and yet most compelling page-turner of 2010 at 1:5. With Thora's head to the left of the panel, and poor heart-broken Dirty Frank stranded and surrounded to the right, and with that endless city waiting beyond and between them, the reader's left in no doubt that relationships are being quietly but utterly shattered here. Even the way in which the panel reads, from Thora's silent and sorrowful expression to Frank's bowed body, to the sparse and deeply moving words "Thora...This is ... disappointing", and then back to Thora again, helps to trap the reader in the awkward and upsetting moment. (*1)

There's not more than 50 words on the whole page, and yet those five panels, individually and in sequence, are so elegantly saturated with information and emotion. Look again and there's something else worth noting that the reader didn't notice on the third or fourth pass ....


*1:- In fact, looking at this beautiful page again as I scanned it this morning, I realised that it's one of the relatively few pages that I would love to own, or even a good copy of such. This is no badge of sycophancy, as I've been something of a consistent critic of this run of Low-Life up until last week, but this is such good work. In fact, since I'm obviously into the "imagining-selling-a-kidney-or-two" school of thought to be able fund my acquisitions, I'd also invest in the script too; can't have one without the other. One day, and a few original Low cartoons too, perhaps.


from Judge Dredd:Megazine 303:- "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands" writer:- Al Ewing, artist:- John Higgins

Look, there's a group of sword-carrying, stage-makeup wearing terrorists from an "Over-Achievers Club" charging into a stadium full of tens of thousands of slovenly folks who're curious about a new religion that legitimises idleness. The Over-Achievers, with a motto inspired by Ovid and members dedicated to the act of murder while simultaneously writing bodice-rippers and longing for their watercolours, skip and sway their way to the slaughter dressed as the Gentlemen Nobles from "The Mikado" while singing that opera's opening lines.

It's clever. It's funny. It's silly. It's well staged and it made me laugh.


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What Was Once Violent Is Now Nice:- A Passing Comparison Between "Judge Dredd: Megazine" 303 & 2000 ad prog 2

In which the blogger takes a moment to begin a comparison between this month's Megazine and 2000 ad # 2, which marked, as everybody reading this will know, the first appearance of Judge Dredd.

1. Violence And Brutality

I. For most of the lead characters in 2000 ad prog 2, the business of being a hero involves little that's more complex than being able to humiliate and then kill your opponents. What's more, it's the humiliation that often seems to be the most important part of representing the forces of virtue and order against barbarian intruders, aliens, cop-killing criminals and the like. In "Invasion", for example, the patriotically oak-balled Bill Savage is dedicated to riding Britain of the invading hordes of Johnny Foreigner, but his taunting of the enemy Volg before he kills them off seems to be an unduly important part of the ritual business of resistance to him. "Laugh this off, twinkletoes!" he shouts as he takes his shotgun to a pub where dastardly Communist-Fascist forces are making loyal Englishmen, and one sole woman, sing for their bottles of brown ale. Later, there's an even less imaginative "You want some too, eh, sunshine?" spat out by Savage to set up another brutal killing, but it's obviously an important component of hard man etiquette, to mock before murdering, and any jape is no doubt better than none at all.


And much of 2000ad prog 2 is concerned with the pleasures of verbally emasculating the foe, any foe, before wiping them out regardless of whether the enemy is resisting or not. Dan Dare, for example, enters the fray in his strip with a cry of "Cowardly scum! Fight like a man -- hand to hand!", and this despite the fact that the creatures he's facing down aren't men, but human-looking aliens, and that they're only doing their job as security on the alien spacecraft that young Dare's stowed away on. But this insulting before shooting is a code of practise that's honoured by Judge Dredd too, who, having cunningly distracted his criminal prey by sending his Lawmaster after them without him on it, then rather counter-intuitively announces his presence by asking if they're "Looking for me, lawbreakers?"

The killing that inevitably follows such japing is astonishingly blood-free, but the humiliation of being taunted first is obviously what really hurts. The Cossack that's gunned down by Savage in the process of what looks like folk-dancing sustains the tiniest sprinkling on blood on his tunic, while the scum of the earth shot by Dredd have apparently fallen painlessly to the ground before the fatal bullets have hit their unmutilated bodies. Even the dinosaur-hunting cowboys of "Flesh" meet their terrible end, by being crushed by dinosaurs and minced in giant lizard-burger machines, in a goreless fashion; we see their terror, but never the pink and scarlet insides of their skin.


II. These are stories where much of the reader's pleasure is presumed to lie in the moment between the signalling of a terrible end and its arrival. Hidden from sight for so long in children's comics, as much as books and TV, the very fact of a unkind death in the early 2000 ad, along with fellow weeklies such as "Battle" and "Action", seems to be expected to function like a rude noise in a classroom or a stupid face pulled at a church service; it's very existence mocks the rules and seriousness of a child's everyday life. And so it doesn't matter what the protagonists are actually fighting for, and whether the heroes will survive; the stories themselves aren't particularly important at all. What matters is the mockery and the violence that's quite literally on the page for violence's sake. Mach-1, for example, a cyborg super-agent, hurls a terrorist out of a plane without the very slightest attempt having been made to restrain him and bring him home for debriefing. No, this is the 6 Million Dollar Man with a 00 license, after all, and so when he warns his enemy in the last panel of page 3 that "Right, chum, you've got about 20 seconds to learn how to --- ", the reader knows that something illicitly thrilling's going to follow, and quickly too. And, of course, the page is turned and the reader is faced with a a sentence-finishing cry of "Fly!", as in "... you've got about 20 seconds to learn how to fly!", and there's the antagonist being hurled out of the plane and into freefall above London.


III. There are only two exceptions to this rule of jest and slaughter. In "Flesh", the brilliance of the strip's set-up is that the story contains not one but two set of victims set against each other, meaning that death can arrive at any moment to any side and the reader can always enjoy the murder of cowboys by dinosaurs, or dinosaurs by cowboys. The endlessly dinosaur-chewed cowboys who're earning their pay hunting burger meat for a beef-denuded future can be associated with as they're ripped, gored and crushed, while, on the other hand, the great dinosaurs themselves, as innocent as they're blood-thirsty, can elicit our sympathy as they're harvested, processed and sent by time-machine f0rward towards tomorrow's dinner tables. The wisecracks may be less prevalent in "Flesh", but there's more than enough death to compensate for the lack of them.

Only in "Harlem Heroes" is there an absence of men with guns threatening terrible deaths and issuing macho wisecracks. Instead, the violence in Harlem Heroes is ritualised into sporting combat, and the jeopardy in the strip is focused on winning, and indeed surviving, the game of Aeroball rather than blasting some faceless enemy into the dirt. There would be death and cruel mockery to come, no doubt, but for now the strip's enemies were poverty, dangerous equipment, and impulsive street children enticed into professional sport.



IV. Violence in the Megazine is of course a quite different matter to that presented in its parent publication from 33 years and more before. For where violence is shown in the Megazine, it tends to be either presented humorously with some restraint, such as in the deaths of the light-opera singing Overachievers Club in "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands", or placed before the reader with no attempt to hide the horror of the business of bloodletting.

Certainly, no lead character in the Megazine appears to be going out on their adventures with the deliberate intention of mocking and then killing their opponents. Instead, and regardless of whether the genre of the strip involved is more serious or humorous, death is a serious matter which protagonists only deal out when there's no other choice at all. In "Hondo-City Justice", for example, the climax to a long-running serial brings but two panels of gore and death, of a head exploding and then of a decapitated torso bleeding out on the pavement. There's no sign of bravado or good humour on display from Cadet Asahara after she's finished off her enemy either; killing is here neither funny nor exciting, but simply necessary if sadly unavoidable. And in "Lily Mackenzie", a six page firefight is portrayed in the least heroic light possible. The business of killing is, again, forced upon our protagonists, and it's a fearful and disturbing business. Nobody is throwing around banter when the firing begins, and they're certainly not doing so when the carnage is over. Lily, for her part, and despite her being the most effective fighter on the field of battle, is absolutely devastated by the consequences of her actions in the slaughter. Death, it seems, isn't funny or thrilling to Lily at all.


V. But it's not just that the business of comic-book fighting and killing is so different today from the 2000 ad of March 1977. Equally noticeable is how little violence there actually is in relative terms in the pages of the Megazine. Where most pages in 2000 ad prog 2 end with either a violent page-turner or the promise of bloody acts to come, entire strips in the Megazine pass by with very little attention being given to fighting and suffering at all. "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands", for example, may contain two panels showing a riot, but the point of those scenes is to accentuate how irredeemably disorderly Mega City One's citizens are rather than to take pleasure in watching citizens maim each other.

Violence may be regularly shown and used to a variety of ends in the Megazine 303, but violence in itself isn't the point of any of the strips on show.



VI. It's a desperately unrepresentative business, picking two comics separated by almost three and a half decades, and at random too, and then comparing them as if definitive judgments about the passing of time and the development of the craft can in any way be established. And I'm well aware that if one of the strips in the Megazine this month had been, for whatever reason, similar to the recent Sinister Dexter or Savage strips from recent 2000 ad's, the conclusions I'm about to make would have been radically different.

But I suspect that the general truth is that the nature of the hero, and of course the definition of heroism itself, has changed quite fundamentally since those very first experimental issues in 1977. For one thing, the role of protagonist is no longer reserved for men. As we've discussed here recently, male leads are actually outnumbered by female ones in today's Megazine, with only Dredd of four strips this month possessing an X-Y chromosome. Furthermore, it's a far, far more common business for lead characters to come from something other than a wholly-Caucasian background, as Lily Mackenzie and the entire Japan-based cast of Hondo-City Justice would testify. (The Harlem Heroes strip in 2000 ad was laudably a strip about Black Americans, but it functioned unconsciously as something of a ghetto within the comic, wherein non-White communities might be respectfully portrayed without coming into contact with the White worlds elsewhere in the comic. *1)


But just as important as the widening of the range of representations that can be cast as "heroic" has been the change in what it means to a heroine or hero. There's something both laugh-outloud absurd and disturbing about the machismo of those early strips. It's not just the almost-total absence of women, who appear as just two background figures in the whole comic. In truth, it's the gleefulness in which male violence is celebrated in public spaces, the relish by which the purpose of a strip is not to develop character or resolve plot so much as to show men laughing about hurting and killing other men. The second issue of 2000 ad presents today a nightmare land where the snares built into pages in order to maintain reader's attention are more often than not constructed around unexpected, meaningless and supposedly-chucklesome deaths. Dinosaurs fall on men, men shoot men, men shoot dinosaurs; those actually are the stories, rather than components of them.

But there's no enthusiasm for the depiction of cruel if bloodless killing in this month's Megazine. Heroes don't kill there at all unless they have to, and the idea of joking before shooting seems for awhile at least to have fallen out of style. And so, for all that there's a remarkable sense of continuity between the comic with the very first appearance of Dredd and the magazine which bears his name in October 2010, a most fundamental change in the morality of the tales appears - appears - to have taken place. For it's not simply that the unreconstructed male hero has, at least for this month, largely disappeared from view. It's that 2000 ad and the Megazine have become, forgive me, a far more pleasant and a quite frankly far nicer kind of comic book.


I know. A sweeping generalisation from a very limited amount of research. Still ...


*1:- A risky statement, I know, but I'm only discussing that single prog, and, yes, I'm aware of the debate about Dredd's intended racial origins.

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How Dirty Frank Won My Heart:- Rob Williams & D'Israeli's "Low-Life" In 2000 ad Prog 1706

1.

Like a man who's survived all that fuss with the red and green lenses and is finally presented with an optician's prescription which makes the world look far clearer than it'd been for a long while before, the seventh chapter of "Hostile Takeover" by Rob Williams and D'Israeli provided this now-happy reader with three moments that've transformed the serial from being less than the sum of its parts into a convincingly beguiling tragi-comedy.

2.

It was laughing at the panel to be found at 4.2 - below - that made me realise I was changing my mind about "Low Life". And it was a great howl of a laugh, actually, the kind of unexpected and joyous whoop that marks a change of heart if not yet opinion, because no story that's quite as funny as that in part can be entirely disregarded as a whole.


It was a laugh rooted in the incongruity of Dirty Frank rolling off a brilliant punchline immediately after a panel depicting a gruesome massacre, a bloody business which was instantly revealed as the straight man for Frank's gag as much as a grisly plot-point in its own right. And just as the fact of the massacre set up the black comedy of Dirty Frank's joke, so does his apparent buffoonery provide the comic-book jaded reader with a means to engage with the butchery. After all, mass-killings are far, far more prevalent than everyday kindnesses in comic books, and as a consequence the slaughter of all those dubious gentlemen from the East is unlikely to move an audience more familiar with comic book bloodshed than comic book kisses. But by grounding Dirty Frank's outburst in humour, in the reader's grinding experiences of Twenty-First century air-travel, the audience is elbowed out of the banal business of another bloody scene of future butchery. Instead, memories of the casual callousnesses of budget airlines compels a strange and sideways measure of sympathy for the victims of the Judges' execution squad; we've not been sprayed with bullets, or anything in any way comparable to that fate, of course, but it is possible at a not-too-considerable stretch to imagine those cheap-fare companies joking about how such a problem-solving strategy as machine-gun fire might resolve their never-ending struggle to dehumanise their wretched customers. As Mr Williams has Dirty Frank say;

"Heavy Firepower! Murder! Screams! The culling of the innocents!" (Beat: new speech balloon) "Economy class at its natural solution!"


Well, it is, isn't it, and for the first time I was convinced that Frank was worth listening to, that he was more than merely a vehicle for some rather sad outsider humour. His ludicrous cry of "Gott In Himmell!", for example, issued at his first sight of the bloodbath, only makes the whole business more amusing as well as more shocking. More amusing, because Dirty Frank is revealed as man who's so disordered he's reduced to expressing himself as an SS officer stereotype from a Sixties war comic, and more shocking, because he's the only character on view who can make the Mega City One of 2132 ad as affecting for us as any human enterprise should be for a reader.

Or to put it another way, he's the Fool, the audience's co-conspirator, who knows what he can't express and who expresses it clearly to the gallery, who's too disordered and too wise in his madness to inhabit his world without revealing its hypocrisies and its sufferings too, and who stands for "us" in the midst of all of those who belong to "them".


Which is not, I'd contend, as a reader new to Dirty Frank and "Low-Life", a role he's been effectively fulfilling in "Hostile Takeover" up until this point. Until now, he's just been a fool amongst many others, not The Fool, more pronounced in his foolishness than his fellows but hardly a character that might be used to illustrate Fo's belief that "Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible."

For in truth, Dirty Frank has come across too often in "Hostile Takeover" as a gelded, disordered eccentric used mainly to deliver up drollery, as if mental disorder was funny in itself, and the strip's suffered for it.

3.

Of course, a joke's just a joke, and even a well executed one doesn't of itself bring a comic strip into focus and make it function as it might. But then, that single joke isn't the only element of "Hostile Takeover" that helps ground the story and compensate for whatever confusion and underachievement has come before. For this week has also brought with it the emergence of Dirty Frank as a point-of-view character who's more than a confused and rather emasculated bystander. Rather than being a baffled and rather piteously peripheralised figure, Frank is here shown both taking the lead and grasping truths that his more typical fellows can't. In that, he's more than just the outsider who can communicate the meaning of his world humorously to us in ways denied to the other citizens of 2132 ad. He's also starting to fulfil the role of the knight errant, and far more a Chandleresque protagonist than a Cervantian one too, and so now he's become our hero as well as our representative in the strip.


It's a point that can be illustrated at 7.2.5, where our disordered hero is shown being tailed by several of his fellow oddities from the Wally Squad. There we're at last shown in clear focus that, despite his mental infirmity, Frank has skills which his fellows lack beyond his unquestioned bravery, dedication to the job, and unintended predeliction for quipping. Alone as he is in the sensory overload of a Big Meg street, Dirty Frank has the capacity to focus his attention upon details which escape all of those around him. He can spot and categorise the corruption that's escaped the unthinking observers, that hidden and unpleasant truth that the more respectable and supposedly sane members of society can't. Indeed, even his fellow members of the Wally Squad can't fully grasp what he perceives and processes. "Why does Thora want is following Frankie anyway?" asks Judge Coil at 1:3, "Aside for the obvious reason: to observe a complete lunatic at large in order to avoid eventually becoming like him?" But Thora, and presumably those lined up with her, know that Frank's a more substantial man than Coil suspects, a truth that's evidenced by the "complete lunatic"'s private investigations.

And if he's at his lowest ebb by the last page of this tale, there's also the sense that our Frank's got everything he'll need to close this matter successfully. He's his skills, his conscience, his unconscious ironic distance, and now, through daring and sacrifice, he's earned his chance to deal with the dragon in her lair.

4.

So, Dirty Frank's now more precisely placed as our representative in 2132 ad, and he's explicitly established with the unfamiliar reader as a protagonist of some substance. More than just a loyal if mind-battered foot-soldier, he's the Detective Fool, and the balance of the strip has shifted from being a rather muddled narrative to one in which Frank is placed centre-front and worthy of being there. And, in combination with those two components, there's a third matter to be found in "Hostile Takeover: Part Seven" which defines Dirty Frank as a figure of greater substance than he previously seemed; his untypical and uncompromising integrity. "These are Dirty Frank's comrades of longstanding. Justice should be their myopic goal", Frank records in his "case notes" at 2:5, and, as a result of displaying such probity, he's transformed into Serpico and Avila and Ciello, "our" man against all of "them". Before he was one of a gang, or he seemed to be, and now he appears to be the only one capable of stopping his "comrades" from the worst of crimes. And though there's a great deal of reason to doubt whether Thora's game is as nefarious as it's seeming at the moment, it's effectively Dirty Frank against everyone else, which of course marks him out as the last honest gunslinger in town.

In truth, he's a believer, a man committed to his service and its principles, clear-minded in the terms of his duty even as he's somewhat confused as to everything else. The very presence of that word "comrades" in his notes reveals both his naive integrity and his vulnerability, his desperate need to trust those around him just as he surely can't rely on Mega City One's citizenry itself. And regardless of what I might think of the fact and principles of the Judicial State, the expression of Frank's devotion to his duty while others fatally betray their comrades lends him an absolute dignity that ennobles the character and ensures that I'll be reading carefully next week.

5.

It's not that Dirty Frank should have by necessity stood revealed as "Hostile Takeover"'s sole apparent hero from the tale's first chapter, strong and competent and shiningly decent. After all, heroes need to be confused, and sidelined, and rendered helpless, so that the pleasure of their fightback and the catharsis of their victory is intensified. But this story was confused in itself, and particularly for the new reader, as we've discussed before, and the need for a clear heroic centre to the tale increased as "Hostile Takeover" became more challenging and opaque. After all, if a plot is slippery and hard to make sense of, an engaged and sympathetic point-of-view protagonist gives the reader something to hold onto, as any who love the occasional mystery or thriller can testify. But to provide a tale without either clear plot or straight-forward protagonist when chapters are being doled out in tiny weekly installments is to risk losing both the momentum of the tale and the enthusiasm of the reader.


But a Dirty Frank who's suddenly active, if somewhat beaten-up, and following his own agenda, who's uniquely competent and fiercely honourable, who's Serpico-ised to the degree he has no allies at all, and who's a Fool that speaks for us all rather than a fool in his undies eating popcorn, is a character that serves to lock every other narrative component securely and satisfyingly around him. After all, we'll put up with any degree of confusion if the likes of a Marlowe or a Shardlake or a Rebus is there at the centre of things, or actively searching for the centre of things.

Up until this week, Dirty Frank has seemed placed more at the edge of events than the heart of the tale itself, and perhaps that's where he'll be when next Saturday rolls around. But for the moment, "Hostile Takeover" seems like his story rather than a series of plots occuring to a large number of characters which will, eventually, be tied together in one fashion or another, and the tale is all the stronger for being more obviously that of Dirty Frank's.


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"But, Why?" :- Some Concerns From The Blogging Margins Concerning 2000 AD prog 1706

1.

What is this thing, this "2000 ad", that it should sold using the cover to this week's issue? What is its target audience, and how might they be attracted by this latest in a rarely-interrupted sequence of bizarrely unenticing covers?

What other science-fiction adventure comic, full of werewolves and zombies, future-cops and space-opera pulp shenanigans would so consistently present itself to the world with such a lack of commercial ambition, such an absence of zest and zip, such a strange counter-intuitive passivity where the business is surely the grabbing of the reader by the throat while insisting that they must now, right now, read this comic!

Indeed, what mainstream science fiction product from any medium fighting for its life in today's marketplace would consistently position images such as the above on its cover? After all, it's not just this is a relatively limp, if pleasant and competently-executed, painting, it's also that it doesn't even accurately describe what's inside the prog itself.

2.

What is it that this cover is telling the reader to expect from the interior of this comic? Well, there's a castle, a blasted heath, a ghostly and yet handsome head looking fondly on, a windswept and heart-heavy man in 19th century dress aiming a gun; why, it's a gay Gothic romance about to end in tragedy! (Perhaps the owner of t'mill is about to be shot for letting the floating head die when he tried to protect his ancestral land from the encroachment of industrialisation?) And though I really would buy a gay comic book Gothic romance tragedy, I really would, for its audacity and its difference as well as its capacity to annoy the homophobic irritants of this world, a gay Gothic romance is not what awaits the reader herein.

Perhaps, the thought occurs, this cover is a homage to those strange girls comics which once haunted the newstands, The Buntys and Mistys, the contents of which some kind folks have been good enough to explain to me on this very site. But, then, why would anybody do that? Why would an editorial team sign off on a cover that hearkened back to a genre which died long ago for want of readers? Surely that would be evidence of the kind of mouth-swallowing-tail inter-textuality which marks a decadent and commercially unambitious enterprise?

3.

It is, I fully recognise, quite a lovely design in many wistful and nostalgic ways, but it does seem to be the product of a mentality which has abandoned the business of catching the eye and quickening the pulse of the casual buyer, given that the only hint of action is buried at the bottom left-hand corner of the piece, the area of a cover most likely, I'd've thought, to be most obscured on a rack or shelf.

It's a strange business, this cover. The chap at bottom-left isn't even immediately identifiable as Dante, for he looks older and bereft of humour and dash, so it's obvious that the cover isn't aimed at diehard fans who know what they like and insist on getting what they recognise. And yet, the cover is so locked into a long-dead romance genre that it's hardly reaching out to anyone beyond the hardcore reader who'll buy the comic regardless of what's on the front of it.

In essence, it's neither directly targeting the established fanbase nor designed to attract a new one, and it seems instead to exist in a strange non-commercial space where the self-referential objet d'art might exist and not prosper.

4

But what most concerns me is that the cover seems to be not only disconnected from potential audiences, but from the content and indeed traditions of 2000 ad. For surely the pages of "The Master Of Kronstadt: part 2" herein contained more than enough arresting, exciting and quite frankly absurd images for the least engaging of artists to create a eye-shocking and exciting cover from. (*1)

Consider; there's a beautiful blond vampire in military jodhpurs who's trying to bite to death a science-fiction villain with heat-projecting powers while one-pilot laser-firing bombers attack a castle between two towers of which Dante is swinging, as Dante of course would, to save the day!

*1:- that's no coded slight directed at Mr Davis and his art, which I've consistently expressed a strong liking for within these entries.

5.

Now, what is going on here, that such an incredible source of quite frankly fun imagery is being ignored for a cover which can't even gather the force to portray the antagonist as anything other than rather handsome and ghosty in a dead Mr Darcy way? (You'd never guess that that apparition of a face represents the bad guy of the piece, would you?) Is it that folks are ashamed or even ignorant of the magazine's pulp roots, and of the vigour that a fusion of low culture and high ambition generates? Has research indicated that open conflict or an accurate reflection of the comic's contents serves as a purchasing turn-off? Is the bottom left corner of a page really the place to put the only tepid hint of threat on a cover? For, to be frank, this is just the latest in a fairly long, rarely interrupted sequence of covers which would be pretentious if they weren't so lacking in ambition and content and verve.

It's a science-fiction adventure comic book, this 2000 ad. If it's Dante's turn for a cover, I'd say that it'd be a good idea to have;

(1) an immediately recognisable Dante,
(2) an eye-catching and arresting design which doesn't have such a subdued pallet,
(3) a beautiful uniformed and teethsome vampire, a cruel heat-firing villain and our hero half-flying to the rescue,
(4) and a laser-firing plane and exploding castle too.

Because the sense of a comic book which has abandoned the search for casual buyers and indeed much of its ambition and subversive daring shines dully off a great many of these recent covers. It's as if nobody wants to reach out, laugh heartily, demand the reader's attention and reaffirm that some kinetic and profane enterprise is still being carried through here.

For it's not that the illustration isn't competent. Of course it is. It's just dull compared to the form and content that might be there, and it feels weary as well as stylish, unnecessary as well as considered, and irrelevant rather than vital. It belongs in a coffee-table book where gifted artists pay their respects to 2000 ad by imagining what the comic would have been like if it'd been a western, or a crime book, or, yes, a gay and rather fey Gothic romance.

6.


After a year of psychopaths torturing and killing people in small rooms, of Maybe and Skinner and the remarkably predictable if at times entertaining behaviour of their breed, now we have, oh dear, another apparent psychopath torturing people in a small room in "Judge Dredd". Worse yet, for the sake of the reader who's wearily familiar with the whole trick, here we have another bad guy strapping down and torturing a Judge, which also happened, oh, exactly two weeks ago. In fact, it was just two weeks ago that we were also shown Dredd taking responsibility for a Cadet too, meaning that the various rushes of deja vu that are jumping me at this moment are struggling to do anything more profound than baffle their victim with their many competing cries for attention.

And it doesn't matter if next week shows that everything isn't as we think it may be, because the effect of a cliffhanger promising more of the same after so much more of the same is to neuter the mind's ability to want to engage with what's coming. And this is especially so after last week's tale by AL Ewing, which shockingly didn't actually have one of these damn psychopathic villains so much as a group of typical Big Meg citizens behaving, in a finely exaggerated way, as typical people do, with all the jealousy, ambition, desire, and stupidity of the unpsychopathic life. Once, the key business of "Judge Dredd" was to show how the world imposed by the Judges upon the ordinary woman and man was taking typical human frailties and intensifying them even as Dredd and his breed claimed they were protecting law and order. Now we're so often away from the realm of the typical and so regularly lost in the well-worn paths of the pathological that, quite frankly, Judge Dredd's adventures are becoming, whisper it, somewhat boring.



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Six Things I'd Like To See Happen In "Age Of The Wolf"

1.

I'd like to see Rowan develop more of a substantial and individual personality. It's laudable and brave to create and present a lead character who, beyond an untypical degree of skill on a motorbike, is as everyday and unremarkable as most of us out here in the real world are. But Rowan is so very, very average that she's very, very uninteresting, and giving her magical powers doesn't of itself make her any more compelling a character. She's passive unless she's forced to act, she seems to lack an interior life, she has no apparent desires or ambitions, and she's not spoken a single witty line or expressed one out-of-the-ordinary idea in the six chapters we've known her. As a consequence, it's particularly difficult to empathise with her character or sympathise with her situation.


2.

I like to see the individual chapters of "Age Of The Wolf" constructed so that there's a more substantial change of mood both within them and between them. At the moment, disaster follows disaster without any intervening change of pace or mood except for the fact that events keep becoming bleaker and more destructive. In truth, there's only two types of scenes that we've seen in the 30 or so pages that've been printed so far. In the first, Rowan doesn't understand what's happening to her, and she's passive. She might be confused or upset, comforting a friend, talking to a stranger or weeping before her dead mother, but she's essentially an uninspiring bystander. In the second, she's running away from wolves or running towards an island, which at least is an active business, but it's not an inspiring one, because there's a limit to how interesting a chasing wolf can be when it can't ever win, or a beckoning island when we've little idea of what's waiting there.

I'd like to see moments of humour as well as those of terror, respite and reflection as well as escalation and fear, victory as well as defeat, and, particularly, some moments of light to break up all that darkness.


3.

I'd like to see "Age Of The Wolf" evolve away from being the comic book equivalent of a chase movie. For there's a sense that the reader is simply watching a woman running away from a wolf towards an island, and there's little to make us think that Rowan won't survive the pursuit, give or take a hand or two. After all, there's a limit to how many times a big wolf can be thwarted before the wolf itself seems like an embarrassment rather than a menace, and after 6 episodes, the business of always running and yet somehow never being caught has become rather wearing.



4.

If Rowan would benefit from being fleshed out and made more interesting, then the tale as a whole could do with a supporting cast beyond the similarly flat Pete. The brief appearance of Rowan's whinging, deceased Mother provided some other focus of attention, though it can hardly be said that she was a character so captivating that the readership might long to see her again. She was, in truth and I believe by intent, thoroughly irritating, and it's to be hoped that the big bad baddie of this tale isn't just effectively a self-involved and uncaring middle-class sitcom mother.

And given that all we have to represent the forces of disorder are Rowan's mum and a mute and conspicuously ineffective wolf, the introduction of some more compelling antagonists would greatly excite the interest, just as Rowan as a heroine would benefit from some friends and allies who were more engaging than the one-note, London-Eye-climbing Pete.


5.

This has been an end of the world story where so few people are on show that the battle seems already lost. It would very much help to get a sense that life beyond Rowan and Pete is still extant and, in particular, worth worrying about. The little we've seen of the survivors so far has left them seeming both emasculated and unworthy of making it through this catastrophe, which is a shame, because if we can't care for the mass of the victims in a tragedy, we can't care for their world or the possibility that it might one day be restored.


6.

It would very much help this reader if each individual chapter of "Age Of The Wolf" was constructed in a way that was more deliberately calculated to compel the audience's attention. For example, the key final panels on each page in Chapter 6 are remarkably uninvolving and unenticing. The trick of an effective page turner, of course, is that it presents an enigma of some sort within the context of a scene that's interesting in itself. But consider, for example, the final panel of page one, where we're shown two faces looking fearful, but we're not provided with any clue about what they're frightened about. Two frightened people in an already fraught situation doesn't constitute an enigma so much as business as usual, and that panel required more than that to inspire the reader to turn the page with some alacrity.

Page five, for one, does at least end on a genuine enigma, but it's a mystery that's diluted by the fact that the reader can have no idea what's happening. Blood seems to be causing flowers to grow, but is it the blood from the wolf's mouth or from Rowan's stump that's doing this? And why might we be interested in flowers growing from blood, when we've been given not a hint of why this might be important? It's as if we're supposed to be fascinated in a strange phenomena simply because it's strange, but the reader needs more information in order to care about the likes of fast-growing flowers, because, in themselves, they're just not that interesting a chapter-closing incident.



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It Made Me Laugh Because It Made Me Laugh:- Al Ewing & Andrew Currie's "Judge Dredd: Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour"

1.

I laughed out-loud at "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour", and several times too, something I rarely do where comic books are concerned. I laughed when Harry spat out his drink at 2:6, and when he set up Doonan at 3:4/5; at a ratio of one laugh-out-loud moment for every three pages, this has to be, in its own undemonstrative fashion, one of the most amusing stories I've read this year. And yet, for all that it reads as the broadest and least consequential of farces, it well deserves its punning title too. For underneath the ribaldry, it's a story of how life is, yes and with mournful sighs, a procession of unhappy endings, a litany of self-destructive longings, and a process of common sense being constantly overpowered by petty ambition and belittled by the weight of history.

Take out the gags and the murders, add some war footage and a few more poignant silences, and there is indeed a rather miserable black and white art-house movie here.


By which I don't mean to say that "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour" isn't actually funny. Quite the contrary, for it's far more Runyan than it ever is Resnais. But, as always, there's a keen sense that Mr Ewing is a man who's found that neither good will nor license has furthered his long-term happiness. Look, Mr Ewing's stories seem to keep saying, people are stupid and self-destructive and then they're stupid and self-destructive all over again! Can you believe it?

It's a sense that's reinforced by Dredd's denouement, where the Judge expresses a fierce, if again punning, relief that he and love are strangers to each other, as if the business of feeling and wanting and the process of acting accordingly will inevitably end in buckets and buckets of tears.

2.

I. Part of what I enjoy so much about Mr Ewing's short tales is that he writes to the page. By that I mean that each side of story functions as an independent chapter of a longer piece, with its own introduction, conclusion, and sequence of plot-points leading without digression from the first panel to the last. Each page, therefore, has its own identity, and there's rarely if ever a sense that plot is being strung together without reference to structure. It means that Mr Ewing's individual pages, let alone each completed story, always feel satisfyingly constructed without being too skinny on plot, or, indeed, too over-elaborate either. In "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour", for example, only the final page feels slightly too static and story-heavy, with too little happening visually while a great deal is explained rather than being illustrated. (The re-animate-the-dead computer programme certainly appears out of the blue here and feels a touch tacked on because of that, despite explaining the events that have gone before.) It's a common problem with mysteries, of course, of which this tale ultimately reveals itself to be one, the talkative final scene full of explanations and twists which can feel somewhat stodgy after all the action and reversals that have come before.

Perhaps more play needed to have been made of Dredd's closing statement by Mr Ewing and Mr Currie, of his response to the shallow ambitions and fatal consequences of the whole business, so that the force of his contempt and perhaps even bafflement closed proceedings with a greater degree of dynamism. In the absence of some final twist to achieve such a closing punch, the last page feels, despite its virtues, somewhat more like an epilogue than a climax.


II. It is well worth, however, flicking back through "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour" from the conclusion to note how beguiling the last panels on nearly all of the proceeding pages are, a much under-valued trick that writers and artists often pay too little attention to. Others may produce final panels which encourage the reader to turn the page by generating an enigma or two without remembering to make those panels interesting in and of themselves. But the first four page-turners here by Mr Ewing and Mr Currie are absolutely compelling, and there's a change of tone from each to the other, from suspense to good-humour and back again, which helps to keep the story from feeling monotonous. Page one, for example, closes on the serious note of Sheemer impending murder, page two on the cruelly-amusing death-plunge of Darren, page three on Sheemer's fantastically inappropriate attempt to hit on Suspect after her boyfriend has been shot dead, and so on.



3.

I. I don't think I've come across the work of Andrew Currie before, but at his best, he shows himself to be that rarest of creatures, the artist that can be very funny without reducing the world he's depicting to a cartooneque absurdity. The Mega-City One of this tale might be an absurd environment, and the events that occur within that locale quite farcical, but we take the whole business far more seriously than we might because his characters are always ones we might recognise from our own experience. For example, Vernon's both laughable as well as thoroughly intimidating, and Harry's a faithless little weasel who's still shown to be crafty enough to earn some measure of respect to garnish our contempt for him. That raised eyebrow, for example, on Harry's self-satisfied face at 3:4 is a wonderful touch, just as Harry's rigid focus on his ashrodisiomania at 3:1 counter-balances how daft he looks in his grey smalls. As ridiculous as Harry's ambitions and actions are, we're always being reassured by the art as well as the script that his life is as serious a business to him as it is a squalid and murderously self-obsessed existence to the reader, which means that the tale always successfully feeds a little tragedy into the chuckles.

What's more, Mr Currie's command of his character's body-language is a treat, such as at 2:5, where he shows a capacity to delineate two bodies in a state of relaxation, a rare skill indeed among many modern-day artists, who as a breed often find it hard to draw anybody that isn't tensing up as if to leap through a wall at the slightest provocation. (That relaxation just makes the following panel, where Harry and Doonah are utterly shocked by the screams of Darren as he plummets to his death, all the funnier.)


Most pleasingly of all, Mr Currie and Mr Ewing as a team know that comedy isn't about words and silliness so much as words and actions occurring within a specific environment that the reader can picture for themselves, and trace out the progress of events within. So often, comic book humour relies on talking heads or explanatory captions to convey the meaning of supposedly-humorous events. Artists, it seems, can sometimes mistake the presence of confused characters and situations in the scenes they're drawing with a requirement to make their art confusing too.


A perfect example of the clarity of the storytelling to be found in this collaboration can be found at 3.5, above, where the action proceeds from right to left even as the story progresses from left to right. The first thing we see is Doonan, his screaming face appearing before us straight after a panel in which his "friend" Harry has set him up, then Vernon throwing Doonan across the street, and then Dredd aiming a gun at Suspect's lover; everyone's moving, and yet the action is never confusing, and the space in which the events are occurring is clearly described.

Essentially, we know what's happening, to whom, in what order and where, a rarer luxury than might always be recognised.

4.

One of the clevernesses that I most admire about "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour" is the fact that it ends up being all about Dredd. For though the Judge is in barely a third of the tale, his capacity to survive and even prosper in Mega-City One is neatly illustrated by the contrast of his cloned and self-contained nature with the self-indulgent and passionate mindlessness of those he's supposedly protecting and serving. Everyone else sees Hayley for what she appears to be, whereas Dredd, freed from much of the obsessionally sexual drives provided by nature and amped up by culture, perceives her in terms of what she's actually done rather than what she looks like. Only he can start to live up to the law, it seems, because only he's been bred to do so, to be seperate from the people and the society he polices. The rest of humanity, who haven't been so constructed, are out there living their lives as Harry and Hayley did, shallow, and usually, if perhaps not always, rather idiotically too.

It's funny, you see, because, in the end, there's nothing funny about it at all.


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