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2000 AD in Stages

Started by Funt Solo, 23 July, 2019, 10:57:01 PM

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JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: Dark Jimbo on 02 July, 2020, 11:30:33 AM
The really interesting thing about Niamh's, er, 'fate' (with apologies for the further derailment) is that [spoiler]it had already happened to her twice before - but I've never seen those other instances so much as mentioned.

In Name of the Sword she's gang-raped (as Marian) by the Norman guards after her trial, and in The Secret Commonwealth it's strongly implied she's been sexually assaulted (or worse) by Slaine's impostor. Which does rather put paid to any defences of what happened in Moloch, given it was the third occasion for the character. [/spoiler]

This never sat well with me either.  In the Secret Commonwealth, her encounter with Sláine [spoiler] directly after she is raped by something she believes is him [/spoiler] is pretty much played for laughs.  And yeah, her ordeal in the Robin Goodfellow one isn't really treated as a huge deal. 

The Moloch scene was ugly but at least characters seemed to take it seriously.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Dark Jimbo

Aye, by comparison her encounter in Moloch is by far the 'best'* use of the ordeal - at least it has dramatic  consequences rather than just... happening.

*ugh
@jamesfeistdraws

Tiplodocus

Be excellent to each other. And party on!

Funt Solo

Stop discussing comics, you lot! It's time for another installment of...




2000 AD Stage #33: Wilderlands
and
Meg: Vol. 2.6 (Wilderlands)

The obvious big event here is the Wilderlands crossover, although the mash-up had been building up through a back and forth set of linked stories (the latest of which had been Conspiracy of Silence in the prog leading directly into The Tenth Planet in the meg).

Whilst that's the most obvious cross-pollination, there's also the less manifest (and probably less fondly remembered) move for Red Razors from meg to prog.

It's possible that Tharg goes through a shedding towards the end of the Wilderlands run, changing his earthly sobriquet from Alan McKenzie to John Tomlinson. The editor of the meg remains ... [checks notes] ... a Mr. D. Bishop.

The festive prog 920 is a page count landmark and, at 52 pages, the largest prog so far (against the standard 36pp). The Megazine joins in the seasonal page count extravaganza, giving us 68pp in meg 2.70 against the standard 52pp of the time. This idea of extra pages during the non-denominational winter gift-giving period will surely never catch on.




Judge Dredd: Wilderlands
With this era's meg running fortnightly, Wilderlands' seventeen episodes run two in the prog then one in the meg throughout the extra-planetary epic. Ezquerra (with what seems to be some experimental computer-assisted art) is supported by Mick Austin on art duty in the prog sections, with Hairsine in the meg.  This provides a graphically disjointed tale that doubles down on the Death Planet vibe introduced in The Tenth Planet.

The wider arc story beat is that McGruder comes to realize her judgement is flawed and stands down as Chief Judge.

---

In The Prog...
The prog of this era, rather than being famous for launching new brands, is instead cleaning house with the final instalments of several series which in the longer term are not generally well thought of: we say farewell here to Big Gave, Pseudo-Hunter, Red Razors, Skizz-lite, Bix Barton, Timehouse and Soul Gun [Noun]. Surely this is a good sign of things to come.


Judge Dredd
The fall out from Wilderlands (The Candidates & Voting Day) see both Dredd and Hershey run for the position of Chief Judge, but it goes to Hadrian Volt. The Big Sleet sees Odin do battle with Hela in a Mega-City museum, and the 9-part The Exterminator has Dredd playing The Terminator as he travels back in time to stop something from the past destroying his future.
Wagner shelves himself and Millar, Morrison & Ennis return to Dredd duties in the next stage...

Big Dave: Wotta Lotta Balls
It really is just a lot of bollocks. Soccer features, and Nelson Mandela raises zombies. That's poorly researched, as the idea of voodoo and zombies is West African in origin rather than South African. But what was I expecting?
Gone, but not forgotten: this is the end of Big Dave's infamous performance in the prog. In an odd example of life imitating art, a posh version of him was recently voted in as the new prime minister of Great Britain.

A.B.C. Warriors: Hellbringer
The ABC Warriors are brought back together to fight a new threat to the galaxy: the First Order has risen from the ashes of ... sorry, the Hellbringer battle station must be stopped! These first episodes are really just a comedy extravaganza, with the real mission yet to come. You get to enjoy Kevin Walker's lush full colour art and Mills on top form with his bickering bots schtick.
Returns for the second half in prog 964...

Robo-Hunter(*) [*REBOOT]
A robot kidnaps Manhatten by attaching an enormous pair of legs to it. Truth.
This marks the final series of the rebooted Robo-Hunter, but there's a one-off in prog 1023...

Button Man II: The Confessions Of Harry Exton
Button Man in the USA! Harry still wants out of the game, but just when he thinks he's out, he gets pulled back in.
It's a long wait, but Harry and his penchant for collecting other people's fingers returns in late December 2000 for a third series...

Red Razors: The Hunt For Red Razors
Razors does an Alex (from A Clockwork Orange) and stops being nice (he wasn't), reverting back to his criminal psycophathy (but there's no difference). The gimmick here is that a defrosted Judge Dredd (recall this is set way in Dredd's future) is brought in to tackle RR. Add in a giant, unstoppable, murderous cyborg and you've got a three-way, multi-prog, city-spanning battle that ignores the laws of physics  - at the end of which, someone (anyone, really) wins.
As with the rekindled Robo-Hunter, this almost marks the end, but there's a pop-up one-off in prog 971 still to go...

Skizz III: The Gunlords Of Omega Ceti *NOT BY ALAN*
Bazzer and Roxie are somehow eternally youthful, Skizz has a kid, Cornelius is dying and a couple of teddy boy Gunlords (like evil Skizzers) are up to no good on earth driving a submersible VW Beetle with a pop-up Brummie killbot. And then it gets confusing, for ninety-eight pages. The core concept of the first book (that Skizz is from an enlightened race) is not apparent here. The Dredd/Chopper crossover is ill-advised: another sign that this is rambling way out of its comfort zone.
This marks the final adventure for Skizz.

Bix Barton: Nigel - The Napoleon Of East Finchley
A horrible man must be stopped ... by Bix cross-dressing. (Michael Cane dies, and is buried in a small coffin.)
Almost the end, but there's one more helping of Marmite to be had in the 1994 Winter Special's Violent Night, Holy Night...

The Corps *NEW THRILL*
Space Judges vs. a Sino-Klegg alliance! The deeper story is one of dealing with brutalized squad members who feel free to murder out of hand.
Tis a one and done, although the idea gets rekindled in Maelstrom starting (starting in meg 2.73) and can be seen as an early inspiration for the modern classic Insurrection.

Timehouse: Century Duty
A farce in which various times are visited and paradoxes encountered but for the life of me I can't find a plot: it just meanders from scene to scene entirely reliant on the value of its premise. I'd forgotten that at one point Tharg and Burt show up and there's a swipe at Revolver.
This is it for the eternal mansion dwellers.

Soul Gun Assassin
A sequel to Soul Gun Warrior, this sees a sentient moon that recruits a spectral assassin in order to take out a warmongering space bastard who's attempting to profit (in human souls) from an engineered middle eastern war.
The soul gun nouns are here put to rest.

Finn: The Origin
Telling the story of how Finn became an eco-terrorist. Basically, he started a sexual relationship with a woman he met in the woods, who persuaded him to drown his boss in a pool of chemicals for the crimes of sexual assault and wanton pollution. Then he joins a gang that kidnaps and tortures some chicken battery farmers. Beautiful art: childish morals.
Back next stage with Interventions...





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In The Meg...
Meg 2.63 is a jump-on and offers an exciting ... scratch card. Oh well. The next issue is more interesting (and of its time), with perhaps the first floppy ever: the Femmes Fatale Supplment. This 16-pager deliberately sexualizes six female characters whilst also providing each with a full-page bio. The six are Cassandra Anderson (in yin yang panties), Becky Steel (in silver bikini, with pet lion), Psi-Judge Karyn (in lingerie as a pulp fiction femme fatale), Bolland's Brit-Cit Babes (no bio), Aiko Inaba (red bikini, reclining on her Judge bike), Harmony Krieg (pouty and reclining but the least overt) and Treasure Steel (in a Union Jack sex outfit).

Ironically, two of these characters at least (Becky and Inaba) have as part of their stories the objectification of women, and their struggles with sexism within their careers. The back cover of the supplement shows that the same treatment will never get meted out to the men: it's In Bed With Dredd by Frank Quitely. Dredd is cuddling his teddy and has a cute little nightcap over his helmet. His Judge helmet: behave! It's great art, but there's an obvious juxtaposition here with how the genders are treated.

The last meg in this sequence starts to throw up stills from the forthcoming Stallone Dredd movie (foreshadowing some design changes to come).


Judge Dredd
Following Wilderlands there's a sequence of weaker one-offs in Farewell To The Chief, Crash Diner, the very atmospheric Fall Of The House Of Esher, the last Creep-outing of A Very Creepy Christmas, Addiction and the (then) current affairs commentary of The Strange Case Of Bill Clinton.
In a surprise twist, Dredd returns in the next stage...

Missionary Man: Treasure Of The Sierra Murder
Occult supervillain The Undertaker battles Preacher Cain in a stylish tomb raider style treasure hunt. There's that problem here that the enemy gets to be reused ad infinitum because they're possessed of otherwordly regenarative powers.
Yer next fixin' o' grit ain't due till meg 2.81...

Mean Machine: Son of Mean
This one's an oddity, as the first two parts (12pp) were already told in the Judge Dredd Yearbook ('95), with art by Chris Halls (but it looks like Simon Bisley). Those are then redrawn here in the meg, mostly panel for panel, by Carl Critchlow. Then we get another 48 pages to complete the series. Mean is broken out of a psychiatric institution by his very young, kind-hearted son (partly explained by the story The Mean Machine Gets Married from the 1983 Judge Dredd Annual) and there ensues a highly comedic battle of wills as each tries to mould the other in their respective image.
More solo dial-up action of the butt variety swings menacingly your way in meg 2.82...

Calhab Justice: Family Snapshot & False Dawn
The hero (MacBrayne) is sidelined as the focus switches to the evil super-empath Schiehallion, who is becoming unpredictably violent. Brit-Cit Brute cameos. Uhm ... I think maybe Schiehallion becomes Galactus at the end, or something.
This marks the end of Calhab Justice. Lang may yer lum reek!

Armitage: City of the Dead
A weird body horror action thriller, in which Armitage goes up against an army of bio-demons.
You must wait a mere five years for Armitage's return in meg 3.64...

Karyn, Psi: Concrete Sky
Karyn's up against a vampiric Psi-Judge which leads her to an Undercity coven. The denouement leaves some of the coven free to roam the Cursed Earth. Time for a sequel?
Karyn senses her own return in meg 3.08...

Wynter: Cold Justice
Judge Wynter of Mega-City One has been sent to the Antarctic Territories as part of a judicial punishment and must rescue an influenza vaccine that's been stolen by bandits. Great black and white art from Kevin Walker and a tight action thriller vibe from Morrison make this stand out from the crowd.
Criminally, I thought, tis a one and done. It might be limiting to have a hero named after their biome, though.

Shimura: Fearful Symmetry
Two rich bitches kidnap Shimura to spice up their lives, only to regret their hubris. There's a sense here of the themes that strongly influence and inhabit the later Nikolai Dante, with the bio-weapons and the lone wolf characterization of the lead. Duke Mighten's art isn't a million miles from the style of Simon Fraser, either.
Shimura's singular adventures continue in the very next meg...





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References:
- Barney
- The 2000 AD ABC
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

JayzusB.Christ

Fair play to you, Funt. Above and beyond.

Wilderlands for me was kind of a long, middle-of-the-road buildup to a short, much better story - the fate of Mechanismo and McGruder, and the election of a new Chief. 

Other than that, not the finest era of the prog's history. And I remember that Finn story being unusually full of nudity and sex for the time, but a bit light on story.  Wasn't it originally planned for publication in Crisis?  Hence the explicitness of it all, I suppose, and there was too much of it too realistically censor for the prog.

I thought Peter Hogan did a fairly decent job with Robohunter - the thing was, I didn't remember a whole lot about the original Robo-Hunter at the time and wasn't as pissed off as most about Millar's admittedly fairly awful job on it.  But the Hogan stuff was better, and Rian Hughes was a far better fit than Casanovas.

I always had a soft spot for Bix Barton - it was, for me, more in the tradition of Blackadder than anything else (without trying to be exactly like it - looking at you, Deathwatch).



"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Colin YNWA

While its hard to deny a word you type Funt Solo I look far more kindly on many of the thrills here. I love Hogan and Hughes' Robo-Hunter. Bix Barton has moments,  Soul Gun Warrior is good,  I like SkIIIzz and of course Button Man II is great...

... but again ever word you say is right...and this is a very curious period for the Prog.

...just goes to show the subjective nature of these things.

Funt Solo

I also love Button Man II - that probably didn't come across with my brief summation. I don't know that I'm doing a sterling job of maintaining a non-judgmental narrative, but I'm making something of an attempt!

Rian Hughes' art on Robo-Hunter is superlative - I can see why anyone who was introduced at this stage could easily fall in love with the lightness and humour. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed both Soul Gun Warrior and Soul Gun Assassin this time around. On original publication, I wasn't ready to enjoy the abstract art style or the surreal narrative, but (especially on Assassin) I thought it was opening up some really interesting avenues of thought.

SkIIIzz is (from my perspective) okay, but I'm not sure it's really of the same universe as the original, and I find it difficult to drop the comparison and just go with it. So, we'll need to agree to disagree on that.

I've always known Bix was loved by many - it's why I keep referring to the well known yeasty spread. No disrespect to the artist, but it just sits well outside of my comfort zone, visually.

Anyway: apologies if I inadvertently diss your favourite gig from the progs of yesteryear. (Even though, objectively...)
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

Colin YNWA

Quote from: Funt Solo on 04 July, 2020, 10:45:53 PM
I also love Button Man II - that probably didn't come across with my brief summation. I don't know that I'm doing a sterling job of maintaining a non-judgmental narrative, but I'm making something of an attempt!

Oh I assumed that - its a given isn't it? Just wanted to say it definitively since I was listing things I liked!

Quote from: Funt Solo on 04 July, 2020, 10:45:53 PM
SkIIIzz is (from my perspective) okay, but I'm not sure it's really of the same universe as the original, and I find it difficult to drop the comparison and just go with it. So, we'll need to agree to disagree on that.

Again I absolutely agree its not close to the original and it a shambling mess of a story... but heaven help me I enjoy it... it seems I'll forgive much for the sake of Jim Baikie art!

Quote from: Funt Solo on 04 July, 2020, 10:45:53 PM
Anyway: apologies if I inadvertently diss your favourite gig from the progs of yesteryear. (Even though, objectively...)

Never apologise for this - its what makes the comic fun, so many different options on so many different things... and your are funnier than mine!

Oh and there's nothing favourite here. I just wonder if the stories I enjoy from this time are elevated by comparison with what's around them!

Dark Jimbo

Quote from: Funt Solo on 04 July, 2020, 10:45:53 PM
I've always known Bix was loved by many - it's why I keep referring to the well known yeasty spread. No disrespect to the artist, but it just sits well outside of my comfort zone, visually.

I always wanted to like Bix Barton more than I did. The art just never had any clear sense of place - where was any given adventure meant to be happening? And then the choice to have one adventure riff on cameos of the Carry On stars, when caricature is decidedly not Jim Mccarthy's forte...
@jamesfeistdraws

JayzusB.Christ

 
Quote from: Dark Jimbo on 05 July, 2020, 11:57:07 AM
Quote from: Funt Solo on 04 July, 2020, 10:45:53 PM
I've always known Bix was loved by many - it's why I keep referring to the well known yeasty spread. No disrespect to the artist, but it just sits well outside of my comfort zone, visually.

I always wanted to like Bix Barton more than I did. The art just never had any clear sense of place - where was any given adventure meant to be happening? And then the choice to have one adventure riff on cameos of the Carry On stars, when caricature is decidedly not Jim Mccarthy's forte...

I liked it a lot more before it went colour.  Everything got very messy then.  And yeah, you're right about the caricatures - like Big Dave, it kind of needed a good caricature artist but all too often was a case of 'oh, ok, THAT'S who it's meant to be.' (King Carlos, on the other hand, effortlessly drew a perfect Reagan in a story that rarely needed caricatures of anyone.)

But I still enjoyed Bix.  Some really nice little jokes (it was about ten years before I got 'Steve Ditto') and a unique main character. 
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

The Monarch

yup if i recall the finn story was indeed planned for crisis thats why the pages are smaller with a weird panel border on them. this is def the beginning of the era of printing anything waating away in the coffers. The red razors and robohunter one offs mentioned were planned for a yearbook that was canned. Pretty sure whats left of Fleisher and Millar and Morrison are left overs too.

Funt Solo

Interesting insights.

---

I just noticed that the cover of prog 920 features Tharg, Dredd, Rogue, Hammerstein & Slaine, but inside the comic the stories are Dredd, Skizz, The Corps, Timehouse & Soul Gun Assassin. I want to read the comic that goes with the cover.

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

davidbishop

Quote from: The Monarch on 06 July, 2020, 05:07:24 AM
yup if i recall the finn story was indeed planned for crisis thats why the pages are smaller with a weird panel border on them. this is def the beginning of the era of printing anything waating away in the coffers. The red razors and robohunter one offs mentioned were planned for a yearbook that was canned. Pretty sure whats left of Fleisher and Millar and Morrison are left overs too.

All true.

Funt Solo




2000 AD Stage #34: Bad Trip

The new Tharg has found himself with a poisoned chalice - on the one hand, he's shed his way into the position of editor of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, but on the other, there's a drawer full of submissions which his previous incarnation had buried at the very bottom of the pile. Whilst your mileage may vary, there's an argument to be made for this stage marking the comic's nadir.

Hope lies in a Hollywood blockbuster version of Judge Dredd, with Sylvester Stallone in the starring role, and we see covers and features playing up to that event as we head towards a combined design relaunch of Tharg's stable of comics (but that's for next stage). I feel safe in avoiding controversy by reviewing the film like this: the city looked great.

As ever with 2000 AD, despite some arguably disappointing storylines, there's a lot of top notch art and design on offer. Dermot Power does a great rendition of Kirk and Picard on the promotional cover of prog 928 (see below), there's Chris Weston's Star Scan of Max Winwood on the back of prog 929, an Arthur Ranson Dredd back of prog 943 and great strip work from the likes of Simon Jacob (Gideon), Henry Flint & Steve Tappin (Fr1day), Dave D'Antiquis (Doom), Paul Johnson (Terror Tales), Nigel Dobbyn & Mark Harrison (Dogs) and Nick Percival (Dredd's Kiss).




Judge Dredd
Crusade is like Battle Royale on ice, with Judges! Vatican-Cit Judge Cesare has a cape: he's a caped crusader! Mix in Judges from Oz, the Emerald Isle, Brit-Cit, Hondo, East-Meg Two, Luxor, Indo-Cit & Pan-Africa and you've got your high concept all lined up waiting for the axe to fall (and the lava to flow).

Goodnight Kiss is the other long-form Dredd tale this stage, and features Ennis creations Jonni Kiss (superpower: being gorgeous!) and the Brotherhood of Marshals (superpower: capes & kick-assery). Actually, Jonni's big jacket is drawn like a cape as well. What's with all the fucking capes?

In an artistic aside, the Brit-Cit Brute's Judge badge is shown as one of Jonni's victims: suggesting that he was killed off-page at some point. Anyway: they're all ganging up on Dredd because they've got a death wish or something. Dredd is played as too tough to crucify and does that whole Western revenge thing.

Wagner's back full-time in the next stage as Dredd double's down...


Armoured Gideon: Trading Places
Some evil types murder Frank Weitz and then swap his consciousness with that of Armoured Gideon. So, Frank is a giant stompy robot, and AG becomes zombie Frank. Following the rule that more stompy robots is always better, there's also newcomer Armoured Maximilian to contend with before the plot gets down to trying to set things right again (which includes an extended Vietnam sequence).
And that's the final outing for the big stompy robot that likes to eat demons for breakfast. If there was any justice, he'd be back at some point, in the same way that there were resurrected characters of yesteryear during The Collector.

Rogue Trooper [Fr1day]
In Blue On Blue, Fr1day becomes a mediator for a potential ceasefire but then war breaks out (which is like "war squared" or something), but the big news here is that he then runs into the original gangsta, Mr. Rogue Trooper! Not only that, but the OG's got a gang made up of Venus Bluegenes, and the regened Gunnar, Bagman and Helm. There's never really been any suggestion prior to this that these characters actually exist in the same universe, so (if you're keeping count, and insanely I have been) this is a retcon of a retcon of a retcon of a retcon of a reboot! (There's also a female merc name of Midge that I don't remember, on the side of Fr1day.)

In Mindbombs we strap in for some VR exposition that explains that there are two Nu Earths (thus explaining the two Rogues), but the ending given by The Hit sequence is rewritten here so that we end up with the regened Bagman, Helm & Gunnar (who, in a nod to Blade Runner, have a built-in expiry date).

Ascent throws everyone at the olde Scavenger of Souls satellite, in a bid to stop the digitized personalities being used in an ongoing war. I think we're spoiler safe in here, but the end result is that Rogue, Bagman & Helm suffer permanent death, but Gunnar gets chipped into Rogue's gun, which is then gifted to Fr1day. It's like a future war version of Eastenders. Oi! Kath! Let's knife!

Returns in the very first issue of the next stage...


Finn: Interventions
I wasn't really paying attention to the setting of Finn as being near future, but the intro here lays it out as being set in 2005, where the UK is a presidency and there's an open civil war in ... Plymouth. Taking up almost the entire stage, this is a mighty book at 120 pages of Finn and his machine pistol vs. swathes of militarized security forces and the odd Shining One. Never less than interesting, this also features Eve from Third World War as a reporter.

Like a sort of pagan 007, Finn snogs and shags his way through every female he meets: Mandy the lying witch, Trisha the sadistic nympho cop and then Eve (who protests a desire for fidelity but then can't resist his machismo). Make of all that what you will.

More Finn next year starting in prog 991...


[The] Harlem Heroes: Cyborg Death Trip
Definite drawer fodder, this crops up almost exactly three years after the previous side story from the softly rebooted Heroes. The four remaining Heroes are on the lam from the law and trying to keep a low profile: by starting murderous bar brawls.

Because they're comic characters, they all have clear visual traits (like specific haircuts, HH t-shirts and even in one case a HH tattoo on the side of the head) which makes any attempt to blend in superfluous. The other built-in story problem is that they don't actually play aeroball anymore, so excuses to use jet packs (which they're magically wearing under their clothes whenever the plot requires it) have to be shoe-horned in.

Plot: the Heroes are forced to stop a drug gang who are pushing an economically terrible product that makes the user get really high but then their brain explodes. In a shock twist, the bad guy is Artie Gruber (from the prequel series Inferno).

This is it for the second generation Heroes. I think the next future sport story to get tried is maybe that one with the guy with the head of an ass ... Second City Blues (2006)? Although: the denouement has Artie Gruber's mind in an escape pod, so there's time for a sequel yet. Tharg? Hello?


Brigand Doom: Account Yorga-Vampire
Stretching the credulity of allegorical storytelling to breaking point and then beating us over the head with the remains, this has vampire accountants both drinking the blood of their victims and then magically absorbing metaphorical but also literal value from their bank cards. Brigand Doom turns out to be a friend of the economic system and so joins forces with Investigator Nine to foil the fiendish financiers. (I'm guessing this is at least partly inspired by the Count from Sesame Street.)
More a concept than a character, and having been with us since 1991, this marks the last of the zombie freedom fighter's malodorous musings.

Strontium Dogs:
The Alphabet Man sets up that the previous couple of odd villains (bald professors with letters tattooed on their foreheads) are actually part of a twenty-six strong gang who (for no apparent reason) have it in for Feral and the Gronk. They kidnap and then decide to murder the goblins from The Final Solution. This high concept leads us to High Moon, which is an eight-part sequence that brings in Bullmoose Jackson, Feral, the Gronk (as Rambo), Frinton Fuzz, Middenface McNulty and Durham Red. All of this just seems to be set-up, though, because the antagonists and the protagonists don't get to dance (as the professors never turn up in High Moon).
Perhaps the pay-off comes in prog 957's one-off, but otherwise we've got to wait till a final series starting next year in prog 993...

Mambo: Fleshworld
As it's been almost a year since the first book, this opens with a recap. The hero is a cyborg-ish cop (Rachel Verlaine) who's just discovered that she's also got an alien parasite in her head that gives her the power of mad, spikey, retractable tentacles. It's a body horror space opera, where she's some kind of chosen one on a squishy cyber-organic planet that's trying to find itself. This joins the likes of Fr1day's Apocalypse Dreadnought and Blackhawk in leaving the hero floating magically in a space bubble because there's nowhere else to put them at the end.
There's more Mambo next year starting in prog 1014...

The Grudge-Father: Skin Games
The titular G-F is an insane, megalomaniacal religious zealot in a skin mask. He's on a mission to stop some ugly bastich from doing even more evil and so body-swaps (and head-floats) his way out of trouble like an invincible idea (as opposed to a character in a story).
The Grudge-Father retires here.

Tracer: High-Wire Days
After a one-off six pager in the 1993 Winter Special, we get this two-parter where a grumpy, wise-cracking fixer in goggles and a bandana rescues people for money.
And that's it for Tracer.


It's all media tie-ins, these days...



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References:
- Barney
- The 2000 AD ABC
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

TordelBack

I don't believe I've ever read any of this, bar the Dredds, and thank Grud for that. Finn copped off with Trisha and Eve (again)?  What the actual feck? I knew I didn't enjoy Finn,  I never knew I hated it.