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2000 AD in Stages

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

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sheridan

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 10 September, 2019, 10:41:55 AM
Quite bizarre to think that a "Graphic Novel No. 6" is the only print this thing's ever had, as far as I can tell. At 64 pages, it's slim. I do wonder how people would respond to a new hardcover that literally reprinted it in two versions, and then added a bunch of sketches and interviews (if the former exist and the latter are viable). That said, Miracleman HCs sold well enough, and those were quite a lot of not-strip.

Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill were among those disappointed when it wasn't reprinted a year or two ago - so I'd imagine they'd be more than happy to contribute.

TordelBack

Seems to me that pending rights agreements you could also pad it out a bit with the Comic Rock stuff (Gooney birds etc) and Secret Life of the Blitzspear, playing to the techno-organic theme.

Swerty



QuoteRogue Trooper, [The Hit Man]
The Hit was bloody awful. Notable that they cut it short, wrapped it up in a Winter Special(!), and then rebooted the strip entirely.
[/quote]

Sorry! I loved The Hit back in the day.Steve Dillion on Rogue.

Funt Solo

Steve Dillon's art was always a favorite for me, as well.

It's interesting when I think of a bad movie, or a bad comic - I often am thinking purely of the story, rather than the constituent parts.  So, a movie might have great cinematography, acting and lighting: but still be a pretty awful story.  Like Terminator Salvation.

For example, I really love Balardinelli's art, but I think of Mean Team, the latter Ace Garp stories and Moon Runners as pretty weak stories.  Artistically, the story is being well told and presented, but the concept is lacking in some other aspect.

Of course, there are perhaps some Mean Team, Garpetbaggers and Moon Runners fans out there.  Perhaps another key point is when people start reading.  The Garpetbaggers probably doesn't seem as tired to someone who just walked in and hasn't already been through several years of adventures with those characters.
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

IndigoPrime

Dillon's always great, but the basic premise behind The Hit was – to mom a bit rubbish, and the ending was abysmal.

Like Funt, I'm in that space where I can put up with iffy art as long it's coherent – the story is what matters. Pretty pictures and a duff script don't really do it for me.

broodblik

I am a fan of both Rogue and Dillon but for me whole Hit thing was just plain stupid. His talents was wasted on a very weak story
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.

TordelBack

Moonrunners just pisses me off so much Great premise, weird little ideas and the *perfect* artist for multi-species space pirate dynasties with an hallucinogenic means of FTL and it all just spirals into nothing.

O Lucky Stevie!

Quote from: Funt Solo on 01 September, 2019, 06:04:31 AM
Mean Team
Blackhawk meets The Mean Arena, in that it's got aliens but also an urban future sport.  Oddly, it's more reminiscent now of computer games: so like a cross between League of Legends and Call of Duty.  This may mean it was ahead of its time, but it's an odd fish.  The lead character, Bad Jack Keller, is a murderous asshole and the best thing that can be said about the melodrama of one of the player's having his brain transplanted into a panther is that his reaction when he wakes up and looks in the mirror is pure comedy gold.

It feels like it loses its way, having the team transplanted to what seems like an entirely new story (itself a sort of Meltdown Man meets Death Planet) at the end of this opening salvo, but the first page lays this out as the intention all along. Can perhaps be summed up well with this quote: "Just one man - and a cat with a man's brain, but they were too much for the Black Swamp Dragons."

Reading that original run of Mean Team you can't help but feel that it is a cracking interstellar caper story in the making. Until you remember the first page & promptly lose interest in the strip at the same time that script droid John Wagner does. A genuine missed opportunity, that.

"We'll send all these nasty words to Aunt Jane. Don't you think that would be fun?"

Funt Solo

Stage #13: Bad Company (progs 500-519)

Celebrations for landmark prog numbers had been hit and miss through the years: prog 100 went with a four part Dredd poster in the centre, and the relaunch of Dan Dare.  Prog 200 had Tharg presenting his six-part Future Worlds poster.  Prog 300 went with a Dredd badge and a multi-part collectible prog 1 replica.  Prog 400, well, they just kind of ignored that. 

Clearly feeling guilty, Tharg went all out with the special prog 500: it had a special glossy cover featuring a pantheon of characters and art droids, an extra four pages and the spiky, censored, owner-baiting sign of droid malaise that is Tharg's Head Revisited.



Back-stage, it's not just that some creators are heading onto pastures new, but the Tharg that's been driving the bus since the Starlord merger in 1978 is passing the keys over to a new incarnation. Change is on the horizon...



Slaine the King
Hit by a scheduling glitch, this twelve-parter suffers an eight-prog hiccup as it tells the story of Slaine returning to the tribe from which he was banished and becoming the Sun King of the Sessair. Something of a poisoned chalice, the job comes with a seven-year time limit and a retirement gift of ritualized execution.

Prog 506 provides an excellent run-down of the story so far, as Slaine reunites with Niamh (his one-time lover, who had been the former King's wife) and their young son Kai. She is none to pleased with him, because when he left the tribe she had to give birth alone, and she knows that whilst she struggled as a single mother he's been larking about doing his barbarian thang. So, she exits stage left to take Kai to a druid school while Slaine goes to rescue his tribe from the Sea Demons.

Find out what Slaine does with his Kingship next in prog 582...

Bad Company
Starship Troopers meets Apocalypse Now starring Robert Smith from The Cure and directed by George A. Romero. This very-fish-out-of-water tale sees the ingenue squaddie Danny Franks recruited into the titular Bad Company, a squad of psycopathic veterans battling the alien Krool on the planet Ararat.

As Apocalypse Now is less the story of Benjamin Willard as it is that of Colonel Kurtz (layered with the madness of war, an examination of what one might consider sane or insane and the passing of the torch from one generation to another), Bad Company is very much embroiled not just in the journey of Danny Franks but also in understanding the motivation of Kano (the seemingly morally bankrupt leader of the Company).

Bad Company, with its roster of crazies and amazing art design was a tour de force that shook the foundations of the comic and provided this stage with a stable all-out classic when most other stories were to some extent treading water or suffering from scheduling glitches.

The story ends well enough here but a second series starts in prog 548...

Judge Dredd
A relatively uninspiring sequence of shorter Dredd tales with the clearly superlative exception of The Taxidermist (Mega-City One meets The Godfather) running in progs 507-510.
Dredd continues to be a mixed bag in the next stage...

Nemesis the Warlock, Book VI.II: Torquemurder
The second half of Torquemurder (after a 12-prog gap) is basically a big fight with the aim of disentangling the huge cast of characters that have been chasing Thoth. The ABC Warriors are sent off on a mission (minus Hitaki, plus Mek-Quake) to fix time, Torquemada is left to die but quickly usurps expectations and is left back in charge of Termite, Thoth is busy hunting through time for incarnations of Torquemada to murder and Nemesis is trying to track him.
The ABC Warriors finally head off for their own series in 1988's Black Hole starting in prog 555. Prior to that, we get Torqemada the God in the next stage.

Tharg's Head Revisited
The first time that creators were asked to get a bit meta and write about how they felt ... was then heavily censored. The details of that are covered elswhere (see Thrill-Power Overload) but the key themes were the talent drain to the US, and the issue of plagiarism.
This sort of introspection perhaps stung and stories featuring Tharg become sparse, cropping up in specials (Judge Dredd Annual 1988 and 1990's Winter Special) a couple of times before prog 719's Galactic Greetings in 1991.

Tharg's Future Shocks
A mixed bag, as usual: standing out, formerly for all the wrong reasons and latterly because it's beautiful (and both scripted by Grant Morrison) are prog 507's Maniac for Hire (starring Ulysses Sweet, who segues immediately into his own mini-series, below) and 515's The Invisible Etchings of Salvador Dali, with startling art from John Hicklenton.
More in the next stage...

[one-offs]
The Ark, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World and the legal-department-baiting Star Traks.
We don't see another spate of un-framed one-offs until 1989...

Ulysses Sweet
Ulysses Sweet has a business card: Maniac for Hire, Have Riot - Will Travel. He proceeds to utilize nuclear-level solutions to corporate conflicts. The first Future Shock has him deal with lazy caricatures of Japanese business folk (somewhat excused, perhaps, by the fact that it was 1987 and others were doing it too). This is followed by the two-part Fruitcake and Veg, which picks on vegetarians. Some of the internal monologue makes it clear that this is attempting to channel D.R. & Quinch, but there was something about their friendship and sometimes innocent-seeming chaos-mongering that let you forgive them. Conversely, Ulysses just seems like a bit of a Scunthorpe.
A completely one-dimensional idea that entirely exhausts its central premise and therefore, unsurprisingly, never returns. Entirely predictably returns for at least two full series, twenty-seven years later, starting in 2013's festive Prog 2014.

Strontium Dog
Johnny Alpha teams up with Durham Red (who has the mutation of being a make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along style vampire, which sits oddly in the narrative) and they spend a lot of time tracking down a time-kidnapped President Ronald Reagan. Re-playing the idea of famous people from history being kidnapped (as in The Schicklgruber Grab from 1980) but also introducing the new potential side-kick in Red, the story itself is quite sparse, but somehow gets extended out to twenty-five episodes.
With Tharg clearly on vacation from editing duties, this continues in the next stage...

The Dead
Humanity has evolved to a point of immortality, but a lack of death has lead to demonic entities taking over limbo and invading the world of the living. Our hero, Fludd, is murdered in order that he might find a solution. A really odd tale of existential angst that suggests that while your existence might suck, it's probably better than non-existence. Chin up!
It's one and done.

---

References:
- Barney
- Nemesis the Warlock: A Potted History (part 2)
- Strontium Dog : A Potted History (part 3)
- The 2000 AD ABC
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

Frank

Quote from: Funt Solo on 14 September, 2019, 06:00:20 AM
Slaine ... Something of a poisoned chalice, the job comes with a seven-year time limit and a retirement gift of ritualized execution.

Drawing Slaine is certainly a tough gig for any artist.


really enjoyed this overview - you write very well and you're funny

Richard

I love The Dead! Such a great story, with such great art. Must be due for a reprint by now!

Dark Jimbo

I love this thread so hard.
@jamesfeistdraws

Colin YNWA

Yeah we are hitting the change hard and fast now.

Love the fact that you have 'Bad Company' as its own phase as it really feels the start of the transition from the orginal 2000ad to the (then) new. And while 520 is the more obvious marker for that transition I see 500 and Pete Milligan's Bad Company as the real apex.

DrJomster

When this excellent thread is all done, it might be worth PDF'ing together. Gold star, that droid!
The hippo has wisdom, respect the hippo.

Funt Solo

Stage #14: Transmute! (progs 520-531)

The 10th birthday Prog 520 came as a bit of a shock with a prog of different dimensions printed on higher quality paper and edited by a new Tharg (although that last wasn't obvious to the readers). This fresh start (although feeling quite punchy and new) contains all existing characters, and some of them are past their heyday.

This begs the question of how 2000 AD will remain fresh as it continues through its eleventh year...




Anderson, Psi-Division, [Hour of the Wolf]
Whilst Anderson is a spin-off from the Dreddverse, here the student has become the master, with this tale easily overshadowing the main Dredd strip in terms of excitement, action and forward momentum. Re-introducing East-Meg agents (including the currently cubed Orlok) as threats, and borrowing Hershey, this sets the Judges and their system up as fallible again. (It suffers a bit from art issues: prog 528 sees pages printed out of order and then the final two and a bit episodes require a different artist.)
Despite this powerful showing, there's a 76-prog wait for the next Anderson story, beginning with Contact in prog 607...

Rogue Trooper, Hit One
Rogue is sent on his first assassination mission for his new alien masters (thus effectively eliminating the moral authority at the core of the character). Amusingly, his first target (a Nort General) has a throne with a statue of pterodactyl on the back, set atop a dais and flanked by flaming braziers. This mixture of what seems like a medieval castle with a D&D villain and Rogue's hi-tech background is incongruous and the ten episodes struggle to solve the core morality issue: ultimately it's just too difficult to balance with the deliberate ambiguity of Rogue's new masters.
Wait 35 progs for Rogue to return in prog 567...

Judge Dredd
Following something of a pattern through recent stages, there are some fairly weak stories in this bunch, although 10 Years On (520), The Raggedy Man (525-526) and Simp (527) stand out in terms of high quality. There's a sense with something like "What if the Judges did the ads?" (521) that gimmicks and meta-humour have replaced story progression and world-building, itself a sign that perhaps the barrel is running dry at times. Revolution (starting in 531 and continuing into the next stage) is a vital part of the democracy through-line, and a welcome respite from the easily ignored (and broadly silly) Fairlyhyperman.
We see a strong uptick in quality for Dredd moving into the next stage...

Torquemada the God
Kevin's back on the illuminations, and he's not feeling well. Tap! Tap! Tap! As pointed out in A Potted History, this is really Nemesis the Warlock Book 6.5, forming a bridge between the escape of Torquemada from Nemesis at the end of Torquemurder and the upcoming Book VII. The idea of Torquemada as being a sequence of reincarnations of evil throughout human history was first mooted when Thoth started hunting them through the time wastes: here, the modern Torquemada is starting to rot as his prior incarnations are hunted down and executed.
There's a Nemesis one-off in the next stage's prog 534...

Strontium Dog
If you don't like Ronald Reagan (see: any even slightly left-leaning British person who grew up in the 80s), then you'll struggle to enjoy watching him dropping the soap in the shower with Johnny Alpha, or getting sucked off by Durham Red (prog 522, page 2, frame 3), or saying "goshdarned", or "ulp" for ten more episodes on top of the fifteen (count 'em) from the previous stage.
The Royal Affair starts in prog 532...

Tharg's Future Shocks
With a Bang in prog 522 features Simon Harrison's first art in the prog. We also get His Name Was Janus, Old Quagmires Never Die, Fair's Fare and Someone is Watching Me.
More in the next stage...

Tales from Mega-City One
A new format that provides a one-page Tale without necessarily needing to involve Dredd (but he's in all three). We get Wreckers, [Marital Disputes] and Quarantine.
More in the next stage...

Mean Team
"They're back!" declares the tagline, after a break of only *cough* 78 progs. The story of a violent future sport team led by mericiless killer Bad Jack Keller [clue: name] ditches the sport and instead strands them on an odd Earth where technology doesn't function (which did for unfortunately robotic teammate Steelgrip last time) and everyone else seems to have teleported in from a Grimm's Fairy Tale. (It turns out that Keller is completely immune to damage, which you think someone would've noticed when he was involved in the galaxy's most violent sport, but logic, she does not live here.)
More (?!) in the next stage...

D.R. & Quinch's Incredibly Excruciating Agony Page
A one-page, back cover, full color, surreal agony aunt forum in comic strip form. It's nice to see drawings of the characters again, but as this is sans Alan Moore, it's not really them, is it?
More in the next stage...

---

References:
- Barney
- Strontium Dog : A Potted History (part 3)
- The 2000 AD ABC
++ A-Z ++  coma ++