Bad City Blue question

[stront73]

Hello all

This has been bugging me for 20 years and it's been really great to discover this forum. In my foreign neck of the woods it was quite easy to miss a copy of 2000 AD and consequently an important story installment. Case in point: Bad City Blue. I had been following it from the beginning and had reached the point where he was running from 3 buttonmen after he had gone to investigate the missing class A's. I think he said something about "Sooner or later it would be buttonman Blue down the tubes".The next issue never arrived and when I picked up again with the issue after that, it was obvious that I'd missed a critical issue. Blue had changed pretty drastically and seemed to have trouble stringing a coherent sentence together.

Would one of you chaps please put me out of my misery and clue me in as to the events that took place in the missing issue. How did Blue lose the buttonmen and why did his IQ suddenly tumble?

[Richard]

I don't have my progs to hand, but if anyone else does it was in progs 468-477.

[Buttonman]

I'll give you the old faded memory version and we can see how it holds up...

After a fight he's left for dead by the 3 baddies. He is revived by an old scientist and his daughter. He learns the truth about the station in that it's been abandoned and he's been fed automated junk for years. With the blueprints he has to go to the central core to reprogramme the station away from the sun into which it's falling.

After a few scrapes he arrives too late to save the day and the city is destroyed. 'Bad City blew...'.

[Leigh S]

Doesnt he kill the button men, but his "programming" finally fails him and he reverts to his true personality - He was once one of the gang members before being reprogramme d to be a buttonman.  The neanderthal speech is his gang slang    

[Wils]

And the whole thing happens to be collected in EE 14.

http://www.2000adonline.com/covers/reprints/hires/extreme14.jpg" width="350px">

http://www.2000adonline.com/?zone=reprint&page=profiles&choice=extreme14" target="_blank">Linky: Extreme Edition 14

[The Adventurer]

Bad City Blues was was pretty good, right up until that point. When the guy reverted to a clueless punk the story just tanked.

[stront73]

Thanks to all of you for your prompt feedback. The programming failure makes sense. My memory of the story is pretty good (despite not laying eyes on the progs in question for some time) and I recall Blue starting to crack when he realized he was watching repeats of the news. His handlers made some comment about program degradation or program breakdown and summoned those mechanical jellyfish.

I agree that the story was better before he changed but I still enjoyed it and was a bit disappointed by the final image of the city being torn apart in the black hole. Came close to Chopper coming in second in Supersurf 10.