Main Menu

Looking back

Started by JohnW, 14 October, 2022, 12:49:13 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

broodblik

JWare the 90s was when the prog world really got turned on its head. We all here agree the 80s was golden and it is always more interesting to talk in retrospect why things went haywire :)
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

norton canes

Hang on... I stopped reading 2000 AD at prog 670, March 1990 (before returning to the fold in 2017). I know it was prog 670 because that's the last prog in the last box in the loft. The wiki says The Final Solution concluded in progs 682-687, but I can definitely remember Johnny Alpha's death. Was there a protracted epilogue, or are there more progs somewhere in the loft that have lain undiscovered all this time..?

JohnW

Have you checked what the wiki has to say about your loft?
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

sheridan

I'm glad I stayed, but looking at some of those 1990s line-ups, I do wonder how I managed it through that decade.  There was usually at least some good art in each prog, and maybe one well-written story, but it got pretty threadbare at points...  Editorial didn't help when they dismissed one letter writers musings with a reply along the lines of "it's only comics, don't overthink it" (can't remember the exact details, but I remember the day I read it, thinking this was the comic which had published Halo Jones, fallen so low now).

broodblik

Quote from: norton canes on 25 January, 2023, 11:57:02 AM
Hang on... I stopped reading 2000 AD at prog 670, March 1990 (before returning to the fold in 2017). I know it was prog 670 because that's the last prog in the last box in the loft. The wiki says The Final Solution concluded in progs 682-687, but I can definitely remember Johnny Alpha's death. Was there a protracted epilogue, or are there more progs somewhere in the loft that have lain undiscovered all this time..?

Final Solution Part 1 600-606, 615-621, 636-641 and 645-647 (art by Simon Harrison)
Final Solution - Replay 682 (art by Colin MacNeil)
Final Solution Part 2 683-687 (art by Colin MacNeil) - Johnny is killed @ the end of part 27
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

norton canes

Weird. Either I chucked a few progs out (I know!), or some Mandela effect thing is going on

AlexF

The Harrison portion of Final Solution ended with Alpha's eyes being burned out and him lying on the ground in a fairly dead-ish pose - maybe that's the imagery you now associate with his actual, later, death?

I'm another that loved FS, up until the Colin Macneil portion. Partly because I didn't like his style at the time as much as Harrisons's, but mostly because the story before then had been quirte a lot about Sagan's take-over of the UK government, which was sort of ignored at the ednign, like Alan Grant had got bored - Alpha destroys the dimension portal, McNulty and crew kind of defeat the bad guys, but there's not really a satisfying 'and then another government took over and they were a bit less horrible to mutants' moment. I remember really hoping that 'Strontium Dogs' would explain a bit more about what Britain was like in that new regime but not to be.

Closest we came to that was decades later when Wagner tackled 'The Life and Death' storyline - in which I HATED the Feral bashing storyline but rather enjoyed the evil government mutant sterilisation storyline.

JohnW

Nobody's Making Me A Nobody Again

Here's an easy one.
What was your first impression of Marlon Shakespeare? I mean what did you see in him right back in his first appearance, when he was just a feather-haired juvenile delinquent?
Antisocial haircut. Pierced ears and nose. Military insignia on his jacket. Spots, even! All of it shorthand for one of those kids with no damn respect.

We didn't have juvenile delinquents in my neighbourhood, so we thought that young Chopper was pretty cool. Sure, there were bullies and bootboys who'd break things and maybe hop on you if you strayed into their path, but they were a far cry from the juvies involved in MC1's scrawl wars. Those characters had style. Chopper – even if you wouldn't be caught dead with that hair – was a contender for King Scrawler, and therefore the coolest of them all.

We'd had plenty of Dredd stories in which the perp was the focus, but it was rarely someone you'd root for. Chopper wasn't some disturbed loser like the guy who spiked the drink of The Man Who Drank The Blood Of Satanus. Chopper was someone we could easily relate to. He was a bored kid who wanted to do something special and be someone special.
And he did it, and he did it in style.
Sure, he got busted, but he made his mark. His tag on the Statue of Judgement was the most poetic vindication of a character I think I'd ever seen – a perfect expression of vandalism as a legitimate rebellion against authority.

I was barely paying attention to 2000AD at the time, but Chopper's magnificent defiance stuck in my memory. You bet I recognised him when he came back.
His comeback was a classic underdog sports story with the emotional stakes of all the Rocky movies put together, but faster. Much faster.
Wagner, Grant and Kennedy invented a sport out of nothing and made us fans. In episode one we'd never seen a sky surfboard before. By episode four we were so invested in the sport that we weren't just cheering: we were practically laying bets.
And out of all those contestants – the bravest fools on earth – Chopper was the guy we were cheering for.

In Unamerican Graffiti Chopper was the protagonist. In Midnight Surfer he was the hero.
His spots had cleared up. His hair was better. The stakes were higher.
Not paint this time, but speed and glory, life and death.

The two stories end the same way: with Chopper on his way to the cubes, and a fist raised to show that they hadn't beaten him. The difference was that the first time it was Chopper's fist on its own. The second time? It was the whole city acclaiming the King Surfer.
It was everyone's fist – yours and mine included.

Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Trooper McFad

Been a while since your last look back. At the time he appeared in the prog I wasn't reading it regularly so I don't have the nostalgia of reading it in my youth. However reading Chooper later in life didn't diminish the tale for me - still enjoy it so much so he's on my "figures to do" list
Anyway as always another great look back. 👍🏻
Citizens are Perps who haven't been caught ... yet!

Barrington Boots

Enjoyable as ever JWare.
You're a dark horse, Boots.

AlexF

Honestly, my first encounter with Chopper (in a Best of... monthly) I was not so taken with the man (boy) himself. I was more excited by the lunacy of his parents and their specific, niche hobbies, the idea that 'unemployment' was a major school subject, and the secret identity of the Phantom. Love a story about a rogue robot with human personality foibles, me (see also Phantom of the Shoppera - a cousin, perhaps?).

But after reading Oz, then finding Midnight Surfer in back progs, you can bet I went back and re-considered 'Unamerican Graffiti' from Chopper's point of view, and you're so right about how triumphant his rebellious attitude is.

JayzusB.Christ

Lovely write-up as always,J-Ware. I have very foggy memories of Un-American Graffiti, but Supersurf 7 I remember very clearly - it was brilliant.  The awful balls-first collision with the spiky pole still makes me wince.

And John Wagner is still writing great skysurf stories today.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

sheridan

I'm not old enough to have caught Unamerican Graffiti first time around so was introduced during The Midnight Surfer, in my first year or so as a squaxx.  Concievably I may have seen the name mentioned in a quiz in an annual or special, but it was all new to me.  I was an instant fan of skysurfing and Chopper :-)

JohnW



The Judge Child's Children

There they are. That's the first anyone saw of them.
It wasn't the first I saw of them, mind. By the time I came upon this prog, maybe a year late, I knew what I was looking at. The Judge Child had been a little bit legendary. Older boys spoke of a story that had run for twenty-six weeks, if you could believe it. The aftershocks would be felt for years to come. The characters – even those that didn't make it out alive the first time – would be seen again.
You don't run a story for six months and neglect to do spin-offs.

There's a lot going on in The Judge Child, and the Angels are only a small part of it. That's the surprising thing – how little we see of them.
They get their big entrance (but not until Part 5); they get their death scenes; and in between they are barely visible amid all the weirdness that John Wagner was pulling out of his big bag of weird. It's as if he was saving up all these odd ideas for ages and finally, rather than letting them go to waste, he just shook them all out into a Judge Dredd space opera.
The Judge Child is no epic: it's a collection of episodes. They may be fun, but they only drive the plot forward (if at all) in contrived ways. Just look at how many episodes are linked solely by the quest for oracle spice which is, you have to admit, a fairly unconvincing plot device.

Owen Krysler, the child himself, is one of the less interesting ingredients in this mix. He starts off as a psychic McGuffin and evolves into a nasty little kid. That's pretty much it.
He comes back as a nastier little kid attempting to twist destiny in Destiny's Angels and then is mutated into the Mutant for City of the Damned, and I put it to you that neither story was the best.
In Destiny's Angels we have the dead raised with something out of a bottle. I'll wager that bottle came out of the same cupboard as oracle spice – a cupboard marked 'Lazy Storytelling'.
And City of the Damned? Famously, the writers themselves gave up on that one.
Don't get me wrong: I hugely enjoyed these stories at the time. The Judge Child itself might have been an overlong mish-mash, but you won't hear me say a word against it.
I mean, hungry planets and Neanderthal folk songs aside, it gave us The Fink.

It was The Fink that introduced me to these sci-fi hillbillies; The Fink that was the first Dredd story I read where I had an idea what was happening. It has a special place in my heart.
First impression? Violence. Icky violence. Real gooshy pull-out-all-the-stops bodily harm.
A man is eaten alive by sewer rats. Lethal spiked balls shoot out of nowhere and catch people in the neck. A heavy-duty poison is poured into a hotel swimming pool just to create a diversion. A paralysed women is dumped alive onto a conveyor belt where corpses are processed. Eyes and teeth will be popped right out. Slicers'll slice, suckers'll suck, crushers'll crush, and acid'll disolve what's left into a chemical sludge.
This was the story that hooked me.
And somewhere in the course of it all we meet the family – the most vicious, orneriest, baddest family the world's ever seen. Dang tootin.
Elmer 'Pa' Angel writes 'Gone to Hell' on his wife's grave marker, chains young Link up in the yard, congratulates his boys on their murderous instincts and, most memorably, has Mean turned into a real Angel.
Mean, of course, was the unlikely survivor of all of this. Killed by head-butting a petrol pump, brought back to life in implausible fashion, and making comedy reappearances for ever after – each time dumber and maddern' a horned toad.
And to think he could have been left a-mouldering on Xanadu under a stone saying, 'Rot His Soul'.

And there's one other secondary character who might have been left where we found her if not for the vengeful inclinations of the fifth Angel. In The Judge Child she's just 'the girl' who accompanies Dredd when the plot requires it. A bit more than a pretty face, perhaps, but not anyone memorable either. But Hershey comes back, hard-faced under McMahon's pen, and showing no more weakness than her mentor Dredd might.
Longer even than Mean would be butting, Hershey would be reminding us of what Fink first noted:
These Mega-City Judge wummen is tough.

To sum up then.
Owen Krysler? Hardly missed.*
All those associated with the hunt for the boy Krysler? More, please.





*The year 2120 was sufficiently far in the future for Krysler's fate to make no difference to us. I mean c'mon – that would by 1998 in real time.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Dash Decent

Link always reminds me of Steve Jones on top of a boat in Brazil.

- By Appointment -
Hero to Michael Carroll

"... rank amateurism and bad jokes." - JohnW.