Looking back

[JohnW]

Retrospective musings on a wet Friday...Pretty faces and scary thumbs...

Henry Flint can draw whatever he wants, however he wants it, and I'll probably still admire it, but his portrayal in Prog 2303 of Anderson as a high-heeled disco chick sent me back to the prehistoric days and Bolland's Anderson's first appearance – a high-heeled sexy-cool alternative to Dredd's slab-faced action man.
Something I'd forgotten in the donkey's years since I last read this is what a decent horror story it is.
(In respect to recent efforts: Hine's and Percival's Dominion/Deliverance is horrible in the nightmarish way intended, but it's still horrible, and I've got squeamish in my old age.)

The very first Death story was before my time. I didn't come on board until Judge Death Lives, and what impressed hell out of me then was not the spookiness but the carnage. There is, however, that scene where Judge Fear grabs hold of some jovial drunk and gives him an eyeful.* In close-up, Fear's thumbs look like real thumbs, only scarier.
Horse-skull zombies and flamethrower skeletons and the like were great, but it wasn't like I'd have been afraid to run into one in the street.
But those thumbs.
It was easy to imagine a thing with thumbs grabbing you by the face.

The first Judge Death story has something similar. Look at Death's hands. They're long-fingered, long-nailed, sinister-but-believable hands, and they're reaching out to you, and if one of them touches you you're dead.
And then later on we have the thing explaining itself from beyond the grave, with the sibilant esses and the dripping speech bubbles coming from Anderson's perfect face.
I don't know what effect this would have had on me when I was little, but damn me if it's not good horror.
That Mr. Wagner could tell a good story. That Mr. Bolland could draw a fine picture.

So anyway, if anyone wants to turn this into a thread, consider the first appearance of something that has since become an institution, and let 'er rip.**


*You know the one I mean.
https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1476769

**My apologies if this has been done to death in years gone by. If it has, please point me to it so I can while away the weary hours.

[AlexF]

Hey, just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading this piece, would love to repsond in kind but coming up with insightful analysis turns out to take a bit of effort - more power to you!

100% agree that that first Judge Death sotry is an amazing bit of horror (even as it also reaches for some big laughs, too)

[JohnW]

And so, after that slightest bit of encouragement, here is my first impression of the lead story in Prog 330:

A narrator telling us that this is the beginning of something epic.
A Conan the Barbarian type with a stone axe going toe to toe with a particularly nasty dinosaur.
Shaggy things engaging in human sacrifice on top of a huge dolmen which is a gate to the stars.
Great. A lot of interesting ways this could go.
The thing was though, this was 1983, and I expected nothing less from a new 2000ad story but that it should go in interesting ways. I'd been here more than two years and I'd seen Mega-City One nuked out. I'd seen talking animals with AK-47s. I'd seen naked crusaders battling giant spiders.
And I'd already bailed once on the Galaxy's Greatest when, for a couple of weeks earlier that year, it had just about failed to thrill me as it had before. So the burden was on this Sláine to impress me, and do it fast.

The art was something new, and I have to say I liked it from the get-go. There was a children's storybook feel to it, but with a hard edge, and with blood on that edge.
There was also the title font – proper Celtic swirly stuff. It looked great, but I remember having reservations. This was a British comic and it was trying to be Irish. Were they really serious with that long accent over the A of Sláine, or was it the equivalent of metal bands throwing umlauts around for show? (I'd just done three weeks in an Irish-language college and I was feeling possessive.)* I just hoped they weren't going to get all leprechauny.
Reservations aside, this was a good enough story for my tastes, but what won my heart was the last panel. Sláine and Ukko are sitting in a barge filled with dung.
I'd been here more than two years and I thought I'd seen everything, but I'd never before seen excrement so unapologetically rendered.
What really won me though, was the narration that tells us that our heroes are on their way to the Land of the Young.
Had they called it just that, and left it at just that, I'd have been turned off. You see, Irish mythology, in which I was sort of half-versed, tends to portray the Land of the Young – Tír na nÓg – as a fairyland of diaphanous blondes poncing around on white horses and playing sweet music. Bo-ring.
But Ukko tells us that this Land of the Young is so called 'because few grew to be old'.
It's a long way from the storybooks.
And they're sitting in shit.
The tone was set. I was in.

The story did take us in all sorts of directions in the coming years, and I didn't care for all of them. But as someone has already pointed out on this forum, all that time-travelling, dark-gods stuff was advertised right there on the first page.
And the last page is shit-ridden death foretold, so of course I was going to buy the next prog.


*I had no notion as to how the name really should be pronounced until we all went back to school and the other two tooth readers in the class unhesitatingly said it as it was written – 'slawn-yeh'. That was it then. You can't fight peer pressure. 

[JohnW]

Sorry, Alex. I should have started the above by thanking you for your appreciation.
Hard to tell how - or if - our ramblings will be received.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Just to echo Alex, I'm really enjoying these contributions.  I'd totally forgotten why Slaine's Land of the Young was so named - in my schoolbooks Tir Na nOg was a place where you'd stay young forever.

[JohnW]

I'm enjoying writing these, and I'm happy to have an outlet for long-held notions, but please note that while I've started this, I'm not laying claim to it. These are just my impressions, and my day was back in the eighties. There are a lot of squaxx, with a lot of views, and there's a great span of years that I wasn't there for. So if anyone wants to look back at the first appearance of one of the pillars of 2000ad, even if I've already had my go at it, then please feel free. I'd be most interested to hear anyone else's view.
But until then...


If I can pinpoint a single reason why I'm still reading comics at my age, then the name of that reason is Kevin O'Neill.
I'd seen his work – I must have seen his work – plenty of times up till this, but 2000ad was a rich comic and there was always a lot to take in. I spent my money on Battle, where the stories were straightforward affairs of goodies versus baddies and the worth of an artist was measured in how faithfully he could render the military hardware. And then (in a dentist's waiting room of all places) I picked up Prog 223. That was the one with the Alien Pit.
Yikes.
Nemesis the Warlock wasn't like anything I'd seen before. I don't suppose it was anything like anyone had seen before.

The humans were the bad guys. They decapitated cute little helpless aliens. In the first episodes the man wielding the axe was Brother Behell, but even a bad guy of his badness was afraid of Torquemada. Here's badness of a whole different order of magnitude. Here's the apex villain who instantly puts Brother Behell – with his hands-on approach to genocide – in his place, which is to say at the bottom of a hellish pit filled with carnivorous monsters.
And we're supposed to root for the monsters – or at least see things their way.

Boys' comics tended to have a clearer-cut morality. It was accentuated by the good guys being good-looking. Heroes were square-jawed and clear-eyed. That's how we could instantly recognise them as heroes. The hero of this story didn't have anything we could term a jaw, square or otherwise, and there was nothing sympathetic about his gaze. What Nemesis had were cloven hoofs and horns. Smoke came out of his nostrils and he could spew flame from his inhuman maw. I didn't instantly spot him as a devil, but when he describes himself as 'the Lord of the Flies, the Death Bringer, the One Who Waits at the edge of your dreams,' it was easy to see the demonic side of him.
And he was our hero.

Pat Mills at the height of his powers was a master of invention, but the draw for me was always Kevin O'Neill. Case in point: Nemesis Book II was a perfectly good story but it wasn't O'Neill, so I could have taken or left it.* O'Neill rendered the grotesque like no one else. He gave us the most alien of aliens. He gave us the Middle Ages of the far future, where everything had an oily sheen and dripped strange fluids. Given how unsettling he made everything look, I could understand the superstition and xenophobia. I could believe those poor Termites shouting, 'Hail Torquemada!'
Why not? Hadn't we been given a close-up of the alternative? Hadn't we seen Nemesis, 'the Evil One', stripped of its armour, hanged from a gallows, and yet still capable of wreaking seriously sinister vengeance? Having seen that, mightn't you rather opt for your own kind? Well, almost.
The butchery, the fanaticism, and the KKK-shaped masks told the readers what side they should be on.
In Torquemada, Mills and O'Neill gave us a devil we knew, but then got us to cheer for the horned and cloven-hoofed devil you wouldn't want to know.

This is what I was reading when I was ten.
And to think that the older generation blamed our moral waywardness on television.


*Why I had anything against Jesus Redondo when I was little, I have no idea. The man was one of the greats, and I hope that today he is reclining on a big pile of money while attractive people bring him nice things to eat.

[JohnW]

[Today is a sort-of day off. I have some correcting to do, but I don't wanna.]

Was Orlok ever meant to be something? I mean, something other than the secret agent saboteur who explains Block Mania for us and leads us into the Apocalypse War?
I wouldn't have thought so.
On the off-chance anyone was wondering, I'm the one who wrote those Apocalypse War novellas that came out a few months back, and you can believe me when I say that I went over the original progs like they were holy writ. When the story first ran I just lapped it up and asked no questions, but my more recent scriptural studies made me think about this and that.

The appearance of Orlok is a complete change – not in pace but in scale. Everything is still breakneck action, but whereas last week we had a city-wide war, here it's just one guy.
The shift is accentuated by the change in artists. For four episodes we had masses of Ron Smith's citizens fighting it out in Ron Smith's city.* And then it's Dillon's coarser inks and sparer compositions setting a wholly different tone.**
Where are all the crazy citizens? Not here. What about the war on the street? It's somewhere else. For now it's just this one guy, whose name is Orlok. The strapline on the cover tells us he's an assassin. The caption box in the opening panel tells us he's the one behind the block mania. Questions? Too late. Here come the judges.
A couple of pages later we get the wonderfully terse tough-guy line, 'Got him nothing. I've got six dead judges and one on the critical list.'
There we are. The story has to head towards its conclusion now, and to lead us there we have this slick assassin type with facial scarring and high-tech gadgets and a plan for destroying the world.
Just perfect for any James Bond flick you'd care to dream up.

As a matter of fact, before he'd been given a name and a job description, Orlok's credentials had already been established.
In the previous episode he killed that stool pigeon on camera, just as said stoolie was about to spill the beans to Dredd. All we saw of him then, though, were his hands when he did the killing, and his back as he stalked off.
Interesting thing about the hands that I noticed in my scriptural studies. I'd always thought that the as-yet unnamed killer had – I don't know – knuckled his victim to death or something. We see the big studded gloves on either side of the vic's head and the vic dies. The details weren't important at the time. On close examination, however, I realise that we don't actually see the hands making contact with the head. Maybe it was a printing error. Maybe it was censorship. Maybe I'm just thick. But am I mistaken in believing that there is no garotte where a garotte should be?
Episode 6. Prog 241. Go have a look.
But I digress.

Orlok's appearance refocuses the story. Dredd now has a specific target. He has to find the guy and stop the thing or it all goes kablooie. The war story becomes a chase story. No more sonic cannon, no more stumm gas – just two guys duking it out in the rain.
And then Dredd gets his man, and Orlok tells all.
I was new here, so I didn't even know there was an East-Meg One, but I recognised the hammer and sickle when I saw it and I could quickly take on board the idea of a Soviet Judge.
So Block Mania was a Sov plot. No hints, no clues, not the slightest bit of foreshadowing. It just was. Orlok just told us. Now clear the decks for the Apocalypse War.

And that's the last we see of Orlok for more than five years. He was out of the picture because he didn't matter outside of his narrowly defined role.
I have to say he made an excellent comeback.*** We didn't know that Orlok had been on ice all this time, but it made sense, and it made for a helluva story. Hour of the Wolf ends with Orlok in the wind, free to cook up more nefarious plots against MC1. He was now an established villain, and we could expect multiple reappearances, and those reappearances would give the character dimension and history.
But his original appearance? I presume that the creators just sketched in a useful bad guy. He had a scar and a mission: he didn't need a character.

(...But seriously, what is it with the murder of Citizen Lorien Speck? Ninja knuckle technique or invisible garotte? Firm answers or wild speculation welcome.)


*Ron Smith's Mega-City One was the best Mega-City One.

**Early Steve Dillon was the best Steve Dillon.

***Hour of the Wolf was the best Anderson story.

[JohnW]

Red opens her mouth!

This is probably, hands down, my favourite debut of any 2000ad character. Maybe there have been others who've been given better reveals, but I was there for this one, and I didn't see it coming.

My feeling was that Strontium Dog had gone a bit off the boil since Max Bubba had got his comeuppance. It wasn't that I'd tired of the story: it's just that it felt very samey.
So what's new about this one? Well it's called 'Bitch', which is admittedly kind of racy, and acknowledges that the readers aren't kids anymore. But beyond that?
Well, there's a new Stront and – get this – she's a she.
As gimmicks go I'd seen better.

That first episode was nothing we hadn't seen before. Johnny walks into a bar. He's tracking some scumbag. He's taking no guff from anyone. The only variation is that he's being tailed by a sexy dame – all pouty lips and heavy eyelashes like Ezquerra used to draw them.
So there I was reading this wondering, 'Fair enough, but what's her mutation? She's got the SD badge, but what's her damn mutation?'

There's some double-crossing, some gunplay, and some tough talk to prove that this Durham Red is at home in the violent world of sci-fi bounty hunting, but as I say, nothing we hadn't seen before. 
And then Red leads the unfortunate Aberald Rancid out into the street and down an alleyway.

And then she opens her mouth.

Call me simple, but I did not see that one coming.

[Richard]

You're making me want to read all these again and I don't have time!

[JohnW]

Reread? You mean this stuff isn't engraved on the inside of your skull?

[Dash Decent]

The war story becomes a chase story. No more sonic cannon, no more stumm gas – just two guys duking it out in the rain.

Just two guys, he says.  Duking it out in the rain.

That whole sequence is so visceral and immediate.  It's much more powerful than the large-scale stuff; "I shoot you with my gun from over here".  They are no further than arms' length away, in swirling waters, duking it out.  It's like the lens has zoomed in from an overhead view to this direct part of it all.  And absolutely amazingly drawn.  Just perfect.

[JohnW]

And absolutely amazingly drawn. Just perfect.

And Bolland's swan song on Dredd, just as the opening episodes had been McMahon's last hurrah.
Block Mania was the end of an era – no two ways about it.
(Now that I think about it, those swirling waters could be all sorts of symbolic...)

[davidbishop]

Happily, McMahon was lured back to drawing Dredd strips 13 years later in the Megazine!

[JohnW]

Tell that to eleven-year-old me.
I'd have laughed at the notion that I'd still be reading comics in 1994.

[JohnW]

Muscles – metal and otherwise

I don't think Simon Bisley can qualify as a 2000AD institution. He was more like a visitation from another world – an apparition in the sky that had us gazing upward in fearful awe, wondering what it all portended.
Or perhaps I exaggerate.
I mean, I remember seeing his first go at ABC Warriors and thinking, 'Here's another of Pat Mills's finds. Hmm. Let's see how this one turns out.'
Well, within the next two episodes he turned into Simon Bisley and nothing – and for the benefit of those too young to remember, let me emphasise that I'm not exaggerating now – nothing was quite the same again.

The man came out of nowhere and didn't stop accelerating.
He did four episodes, took a four-week break, and came back even better than before. He was evolving before our eyes, not in years or months as is the usual case with maturing artists, but week on week. And towards the end of that run we watched him disintegrating under pressure, and it was still something to behold. Characters could be reduced to outline sketches and they'd still convey dynamism. In those last rushed episodes there was no suggestion of shoddy work. Instead we were being allowed to see the magic behind the magic.
I don't remember when all the imitators started getting in on the game, but I can see what they were on about. I had pretensions of being able to draw back then, and if I could have imitated Simon Bisley, then damn me if I wouldn't have been imitating Simon Bisley.

For nearly a year after ABC Warriors he just did covers, and not many of them, like some kind of big-shot superstar, and then it was announced that he'd be taking over on Sláine.
I didn't like that. Bisley did robots. He did oiled chrome: not the moors and forests of prehistoric myth.
Bisley on Sláine? No. You must be thinking of Glenn Fabry. Fabry was the guy for hack-and-slay barbarian shenanigans. Fabry – not Bisley.
There was a promo image in the Winter Special, but I missed that one. I only saw the Next Prog teaser that appeared the following spring, showing our hero smashing through a door, veins and eyes bulging. It confirmed my misgivings. You can get cartoony with robots. People – not so much.

And then the following week I took one look at the cover of Prog 626 and radically revised my position.

It turned out that Simon Bisley was the very artist for Sláine: the Horned God.
But you probably knew that.