Goldtiger

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Goldtiger (Rebellion, 2016).


If there's a flaw at all in this very unusual and very fun "collection" - we'll explain why that's not quite the right word - of this long-lost 1960s action comic strip, it's that it might have been even more fun for me five years ago.

I used to do a blog called Reprint This!, and one of the many things that made that kind of tedious in the end - it really did feel like work - was that in making room and news for all the things that I wished to see collected in nice editions, I felt responsible for sharing news about everything else that was being collected. And everything was being collected. IDW has this line called The Library of American Comics that wants to release everything, but it's not just them; there is, or at least there was in 2009-2011, a publisher-in-waiting for every forgotten project. The Heart of Juliet Jones? King Aroo? Who buys all this stuff?

And so naturally, Antonio Barreti and Louis Shaeffer's weird, uncompleted, and rarely-published Goldtiger would finally find a new home on shelves, what with Titan publishing its ninety-ninth Modesty Blaise book, the strip that influenced Goldtiger so very, very much. It was a reaction to Blaise, at least initially, before the paper cancelled it after seeing the first six weeks of strips. It eventually found a home in Malta, but the strip got progressively weirder. Some of the strips that were printed showed Barreti throwing out Shaeffer's script and addressing the readers directly. Some, he didn't bother to finish. Some rough pencils have since been "discovered" to bridge the gaps in publication.

Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton, who are credited with "presenting" this old strip, have included a wealth of additional material, including interviews, selections from Shaeffer's novelizations, Barreti's other artwork, all to make some sense of the material. But... well, you might have caught on to the first big wheeze about Goldtiger. It never really existed, not in our world, and it's all a fun meta game that they're playing, using '60s-styled designs and found photos to create this world.

And, because I'm not as clever as Adams and Broxton, that's about as far as I could take this kind of gag, but they take it farther and farther. There's a method and a structure to how they tell this story, and it doesn't just exist as a simply dumped "fake collection." It's an original, hidden, story that uses this format, and I've read it three times now and found new things with each read. It's absolutely charming and really, really smart. I was looking forward to this book, and, honestly, it's better than I had anticipated. Highly recommended.

(Clicking the link in the image will take you to Amazon, where you can purchase the book. A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.)

Sinister Dexter: The Taking of the Michael

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Sinister Dexter: The Taking of the Michael (Rebellion, 2016).


A little over two years ago, I raved about the return and resurrection of Sinister Dexter, and the series has not done a darn thing to reward my loyalty until now. If you're unfamiliar with this series, I covered its peaks and chasms in that review and won't go into them again. Much.

The problem is that Dan Abnett - who, in fairness, seems to be writing a dozen other stories for a dozen publishers and may not have the time to devote to keeping this series vital - often falls back on comedy and cliche in Sin Dex, and that's amusing to a point but what works best for the series is taking the protagonists dead seriously. Donald Westlake could juggle both jet-black melodrama and lighthearted capers, but he used different protagonists in his stories. Ramone and Finnigan work best when they are frighteningly efficient at their jobs, and when their jobs are really, really serious. But after that triumphant 12-week return in 2013, a handful of subsequent stories were back in the safe arms of gentle parody and mild comedy, throwing away the incredible opportunity that came with the "Witless Protection" story.

But now, oh. We're four weeks into "The Taking of the Michael," written by Abnett and illustrated by Patrick Goddard, and it's remarkable. Ray and Finny are dangerous, ruthless, and completely horrifying in a way that they're rarely depicted. In episode two of the story, one of two bent witness protection agents arranges for our heroes to be abducted in broad daylight, and that turns out to be an awfully bad error. I love the way that Goddard draws the violence. It's depicted with cold, brutal realism and just left my eyes popping.

And I am completely loving the structure of this story. It's told in flashback, as two detectives investigate the aftermath of a huge gunfight on the deck of a yacht. It belongs to longtime series villain Moses Tanenbaum. There are many bodies, many chalk outlines. Each episode opens with a few more words from their investigation, a few more clues as to what will happen as the story unfolds. We're not sure who has died, but each episode shows more of the small supporting cast meeting grisly ends before Ray and Finny even make it to the ship. The second federal agent's wallet has been found. It's possible that she's among the fatalities.

For that matter, our heroes may not have made it out of this one alive. Sure, they probably did, but if any comic in history has ever made readers genuinely question the safety of its characters, it's 2000 AD. The brutality and shock of this story is strong enough that I'm perfectly prepared to place one bet on this story quietly concluding the long-running series (almost twenty years!) with the revelation of the leads' deaths, while also placing a second bet on them making it out alive and showing up in another four-part satire next summer. Fingers crossed for the former, but whichever way, I am absolutely enjoying the daylights out of the uncertainty, and reading each episode with relish. Highly recommended.

(Clicking the link in the image will take you to 2000 AD's online shop, where you can purchase the issue that begins the story. PDFs of these issues were provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.)

Helium

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Helium (Rebellion, 2015).


One of the most interesting things that I've read recently is the latest story by Ian Edginton for 2000 AD. It's called Helium, and it launched in July with a twelve-part opening serial illustrated by D'Israeli.

Helium takes place in the future, when chemical warfare has rendered all low-lying lands poisoned by chemical warfare. Survivors built new civilizations on higher ground, above a toxic cloud that instantly kills. Three hundred years of peace and trade and progress later, and airships start disappearing. Something is active underneath that cloud, with its own technology.

Edginton does his usual job creating a unique and awesome lead heroine. Her name is Constable Hodge, and she's a no-nonsense officer who puts the safety of her community first, and, as the story unfolds, is revealed to have a pretty interesting rogue's gallery from prior arrests. She's accompanied by a very curious cyborg called Solace and there's a lot we still have to learn about him, and I can't wait. On the other hand, I was really disappointed that Edginton fell back on an old trope of having the heroine's warnings that something really needs to be investigated falling on the deaf ears of a council obsessed with orthodoxy and not wanting to cause panic. If I never read such a thing again, I'd be grateful, especially since the structure of this story would barely change if the government had said this was worth investigating.

I really enjoyed the first serial despite this, thanks in part to D'Israeli's amazing artwork. He's an artist who doesn't take shortcuts, and this time out, he gets to use a beautiful color palette. I love his designs for absolutely everything - the homes, the staircases, the cyborgs, the big floating ships, the tanks, and the lightweight aircraft. It's a gorgeous series and I can't wait for more of it.

That brings me to the other flaw. Unfortunately, as he often did in some of his other series, especially The Red Seas and Brass Sun, Edginton ends this first 12-parter on a cliffhanger, but these are never the best structured cliffhangers. Since, by 2000 AD's design, each individual episode ends on a shock or a revelation, I wish that he'd always move the story to a good place to leave it. There's clearly a lot more going on in Helium that we've not learned yet, and I'm very keen to know more, but building each published chunk of the saga as a story in its own right, to a defined conclusion to each part of the narrative, will make each chunk much more memorable. Especially since the vagaries of 2000 AD's publishing schedule means that it will probably be quite a few months before this cliffhanger is resolved. Dang it!

Strontium Dog: The Stix Fix

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Strontium Dog: The Stix Fix (Rebellion, 2015).


It has been a long time since I really enjoyed a Strontium Dog adventure. Five years ago, creators John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra began one of the series' biggest-ever epics, a 40-episode beast called "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha." It was divided into four ten-part chunks and I only liked the first of them. I liked it a whole lot, mind you, especially the really interesting, revisionist death of a supporting character, which was the sort of thing that you never, ever see in mainstream American comics. (You can read my take on that fabulous turn of events over at my defunct blog Thrillpowered Thursday.)

But after that, I felt that the story lacked punch and energy, and meandered its way to a shrug-inducing, rushed conclusion. That's why I'm so happy that the newest Johnny Alpha adventure, a ten-parter called "The Stix Fix," is flatly the very best Stronty Dog story in ages. I loved this completely, and it's been the runaway highlight of the last three months of 2000 AD. Well, the latest Grey Area stories have also been terrific, yeah, but each absurdly thrill-packed chunk of this story had me immediately flipping back to read it again, because just so darn much is happening in every six pages that I was certain I was missing bits.

The story opens with some members of the stone-cold, taciturn Stix clan abducting a high-level government muckity-muck from a thinly-veiled North Korea analogue. So the British government, bastards all, ask Johnny Alpha to get on the trail, because Alpha's had dealings with Stixes a time or three before. From there, it's an absurdly dense rollercoaster of a story, with aliens and clans and bad guys all drawn with broad brushes, a trick which always works with Wagner and Ezquerra. The Jong family, you won't be surprised to learn, are all trigger-happy lunatics with very short tempers, and there's certainly a Stix who will discreetly sell out his kinfolk.

But despite the tropes and generally comfortable beats in the characterization, this story goes everywhere and it moves incredibly quickly. It's one of the fastest-paced of all the many Strontium Dog adventures, and that's saying something. As I began reading the eighth episode, I was completely baffled as to how in the world it was going to wrap up with only another eighteen pages to go, until that episode ended with a wonderfully brilliant twist. It was punch the air perfect, the best kind of twist, the one you didn't know was coming, built from very fair clues that I just didn't think were clues at all.

Recommended? Absolutely; it's flawless, one of the very best, funniest, most entertaining and unpredictable Stronty Dog stories ever. Click the image to buy the issue with episode one from 2000 AD's online shop and continue from there.

The ABC Warriors: Return to Mars

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The ABC Warriors: Return to Mars (Rebellion, 2015).

There's a bit in the introduction to the latest collection of 2000 AD's The ABC Warriors in which writer and creator Pat Mills takes a passive-aggressive swipe - yeah, another one - at the comic's former editor Andy Diggle, and I read it and just rolled my eyes and said "Let it go, guys, you're all brother robots under the synthi-flesh." But if it weren't for the circumstances behind that swipe, this book wouldn't exist in the form that it does, and that would be a great shame.

I really enjoy reading what Mills has been doing with this timeline of future Earth over the last several years. As I mentioned when I wrote about the most recent book of Savage a couple of months ago, a lot of it seems to come from Mills stepping back and looking at the canvas of a quarter-century of stories and finding places where he can connect odd little trinkets and throwaway continuity points into sweeping stories. For example, a big chunk of Return to Mars, which originally appeared across three months of 2000 AD early last year, stems from a one-off line in a 1984 story explaining that, as the ABC Warriors reassembled as supporting characters in the pages of Nemesis the Warlock, one of their members had been killed in a bar fight.

Return to Mars shows us that fight, and the character, Happy Shrapnel, meeting his grisly end, and then, centuries later, being resurrected along with every other dead thing on the planet - a plot point from a one-off episode that was published something like fifteen years later and had nothing to do with Happy Shrapnel. And then Happy, working as armorer and mechanic for his robot comrades, is seen to be working in the background of all the subsequent stories that Mills has written over the last decade and change, including the one that sparked the argument between Mills and Diggle.

The amazing thing is that this doesn't feel at all like obsessive continuity porn from some lunatic obsessed with finding every last point that needs a resolution. Happy's tale weaves in and out of many previous adventures, but familiarity with them isn't at all necessary to following - no, loving this story. It's marvelous. Mills takes a character who hasn't been used since 1979, treats him as brand new, not counting on nostalgia, and recasts him as the cowboy who does not want to kill again but is forced to. When, against his wishes, a human teenager adopts him as his "father," you'll be counting the pages until the boy's murder will bring Happy out of retirement - it's an obvious enough trope that this shouldn't be a spoiler - but the circumstances are sure to surprise everybody.

The artwork is by Clint Langley, who's illustrated all of the Warriors' more recent adventures. As with the previous story, it's a mix of his beautifully bizarre computer manipulation for the "present," with pen and brushwork for most of the flashbacks. He's equally comfortable with his own outlandish designs for new characters as he is reusing, for example, Mick McMahon's old "humpies" from much older stories. It all looks beautiful, and the flow from computer color to pen-and-ink black and white never jars.

It's all packaged in a gorgeous hardback that can be shelved alongside the previous five Langley-illustrated editions, and it sets up the action in the next ABC Warriors installment, which will begin serialization a little later this year. Of course, having said that, there are so many plot threads in this adventure that it might be setting up the action for the next nine or ten installments. For longtime readers, it's a thrill from start to finish, and for new readers, it might even be the best jumping-on point that the characters have ever had. Happily recommended!

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Zenith Phase Three

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Zenith Phase Three (Rebellion, 2015).


There's a bit very early on in the third, longest, and very best of the Zenith adventures which lets readers know what they're in for, and which might - with the right cultural background - be one of the all-time best cliffhangers in comics. Grant Morrison has always been really amazing with cliffhangers, but he set the bar really high when Zenith, his spoiled brat of a pop star with super powers, opens the door of his apartment and Robot Archie, the star of a long-running but mostly-forgotten clunky old kids' adventure, is standing in front of him bellowing "ACIEEED," which was the catchphrase of a hit dance song of the day that has also mostly been forgotten.

So in 1989, you had this twenty year-old robot everybody forgot about shouting along to a dance song earworm by D-Mob that everybody reading the comic couldn't get out of their head, and readers of the far-flung future of 2015 are now seeing a forty-five year-old robot mostly known to the world from his appearance in this particular comic, shouting along to a "you had to be there" one-hit wonder, and yet it's strangely still compelling and ridiculous. Even not knowing the pop cultural touchpoints, you can see that there's a contamination of Things That Should Not Be standing at Zenith's door. It could have perhaps been the Robot from Lost in Space singing "I'm Too Sexy" and we'd recognize it a little better, but hate it for its garishness. Robot Archie, instead, points the way toward the secret history of comics that unfolds over the next 140 pages, a glorious epic that swallows the narrative and leaves Zenith a supporting player in his own story.

"Phase Three," also known as "War in Heaven," originally appeared in 26 episodes across nine months of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, 2000 AD in 1989-90, and has newly been released in a lovely hardback edition for the first time. It's an incredibly fun story which draws its inspiration from DC Comics' ongoing use of parallel universes and superheroes from other timelines all working together to beat some impossible threat. That's what happens here, with long-forgotten characters from older kids' comics all banded together for the first time to save the Multiverse. Some of them have been tweaked a little - "Big Ben" is a moody, Soviet version of the cowboy Desperate Dan - and some, like The Steel Claw, The Leopard of Lime Street, Electroman and Electrogirl, came straight from the 1960s intact. The result was thousands of readers raising their eyebrows in surprise, learning that once upon a time, there were indeed superhero comics in England.

At the same time this was running, Morrison was actually working in American superhero books for the first time, writing Animal Man for DC and exploring many of the same themes, as Animal Man ran across forgotten characters like Sunshine Superman and the Green Team from long-discarded and "unimportant" old comics. It's downright criminal that "War in Heaven" has been out of print for so long, because the similarities between the stories are really amazing. Animal Man has been dissected and praised for such a long time, and for readers to finally get to play compare and contrast with how Morrison approached the concepts for each publisher from nice bookshelf editions is long overdue.

It's a heck of a fun story, with so many superheroes - most of them are not named, and a heck of a lot of 'em get killed off, so there's not a lot of point in slowing down and trying to figure out who's who - at work against impossible odds, and Zenith, smugly thinking this all looks like a convention for pervs and leather fetishists, not taking things seriously until the body count rises. The story is admittedly dated somewhat by the grisly narrative and fates for some of the characters. It's one of many (many) superhero stories to take inspiration from earlier works by Frank Miller and Alan Moore that depict the "realistic" take on what would happen if super-strong people actually punched each other.

The story's illustrated by Steve Yeowell with buckets and buckets of black ink. Many years later, I'd be among many who complained about the sparse inking of Yeowell's The Red Seas. That's probably because we were spoiled by these incredibly dense pages, with so much excitement going on, deep shadows and detailed linework. It's just a huge pleasure to look at the angular, sometimes abstract work in this comic, and not just because you want to play the incredibly silly and fun game of identifying all the characters. The collection's also got a one-off tale featuring one of Zenith's co-stars, Peter St. John, that's illustrated by Jim McCarthy.

Over the last couple of years in 2000 AD, they've been resurrecting some of their old properties like Ulysses Sweet and Orlok for new adventures and making them semi-regulars in the comic. The nicest compliment that I can pay "War in Heaven" is that it's impossible to read this and not ask where in the hell the publisher's put the Blue Wizard and Oakman series that damn well should have appeared by now instead of Yet Another Rogue Trooper spinoff. Happily recommended.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Savage: Grinders

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Book Nine of Savage: "Grinders" (Rebellion, 2015).


Thirty-eight years ago, writer Pat Mills came up with a fun idea for a gritty comic series set in the not-very-distant future. It was 1977, and Mills posited that in the year 1999, the "Volgan Republic" would invade Great Britain, and that the guerrilla resistance would find a home for a former truck driver named Bill Savage and his shotgun. Over the next six or seven years, Mills would set other stories in the aftermath - some in the centuries-later aftermath - of the Volgan invasion of the UK. Since these were stories in 2000 AD aimed at imaginative eight year-olds, there were many contradictions and plot contrivances between all the tales, but it never really mattered at the time.

Except... in 2004, Mills returned to the character of Bill Savage in a more nuanced and mature take on the invasion, and also began filling in the blanks in the very popular cousin series The ABC Warriors. Stepping back to the canvas after so long away, Mills began to see how he'd flung so very many things at the wall to see what stuck, and that it was now possible to actually draw a spiderweb of connections between all of the events that previous stories had only mentioned.

And so, in recent ABC Warriors stories, Mills and artist Clint Langley have been working backward, addressing old questions about what happened to certain characters. And in Savage, which is wrapping up its ninth and final story, we're seeing the 2010 conclusion of the second Volgan occupation, and, at long last, the explanation of how the unscrupulous defense contractor Howard Quartz, got himself transplanted into a robot body.

The first three Savage stories, set in 2004 and illustrated by Charlie Adlard, were an amazing, real-world take on how this invasion might have played out. Starting with the fourth, Patrick Goddard took over art duties and it's there that the wild sci-fi elements of ABC Warriors and the robot wars that it referenced begins. These tales begin in 2007 and see the rudimentary use of robot soldiers and some wilder-than-reality technology.

The six books of Mills-Goddard Savage, despite all the fun technology, weirdness, and great cast of characters, not to mention that great little sidetrack to recruit the former hippie rock star who'd been researching teleportation, never quite made their way out from the long shadow of the original three stories. (Honestly, not nearly enough has been written praising the climax of book two, which is one of the crowning achievements of Mills' long career and One Of The Damndest Things I've Ever Seen In A Comic, Ever.) But they've still got so much to recommend them, and this latest book caps off a great series.

I think one reason that Savage works so well is that, certainly after the first three, 2004-set stories, Mills let the character evolve into something close to Parker, from the Richard Stark/Donald Westlake novels. He's lethally dangerous and frightening, but he keeps his emotions in check and can think his way out of any problem before he needs to pull his gun. Plus, Mills never, ever makes it easy for him. Savage's enemies are not stupid, and keeping the hero one step ahead of them is a remarkable balancing act. When his enemies do make slips - and Quartz makes a big one in this story - Savage is able to quietly step in and change the narrative. There's a brief bit in this story involving a mute button, and one of the rules of comic book foreshadowing tells us that we're going to see this plot point again a few chapters later. When we do, even knowing there was more to come, I still punched the air. It's cold, brutal, and completely wonderful.

A case might be made - though I certainly won't make it - that the surprise return of Bill's brother Jack is one coincidence too far. It's terrific. Readers learn early on in the story something that Bill, for all his cool planning and insight, misses: that Jack cannot be trusted. It builds to an amazing confrontation involving insurgents called "grinders" who've taken on cyborg enhancements in order to override the American combat robots, and Bill losing his temper for the first time in a very long time, and possibly the last time.

"Grinders" is an excellent story, and runs for thirteen episodes. You can get it in serial form from 2000 AD's online shop by purchasing progs 2015 and 1912-23. The smart money's on it being included as a collected edition with books seven and eight, but that's not yet been announced; maybe next year? But yes, this is certainly recommended however you purchase it.

Judge Dredd: Dark Justice

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Judge Dredd: Dark Justice (Rebellion, 2014-15).


John Wagner did not make this easy on himself. In the 1980s, the supernatural Dark Judges were recurring, albeit overused foes in the Judge Dredd strip, culminating in the epic, gruesome 1990 serial "Necropolis." That really should have been the end for the characters, but they spent the 1990s showing up way too frequently, their horror sidelined for broad black comedy. They've only appeared very sporadically since, played straight and played horrific, but the malady lingered on, you know? I mean, did the world really need another Judge Death story?

Well, Death and his gang have returned in an eleven-part story that began last month and is about at the halfway point now, and it's amazing. The art, very old school fully-painted, is by Greg Staples, and it's just gorgeous. This story was announced in 2013 and some of us - like me - started grousing about the time it took to appear, but this was really worth the wait. It's exceptional work across the board.

The story picks up some dangling plot threads and, halfway through, has just barely addressed them, leaving me hungry for more backstory. Judge Death himself was last seen nuked into another dimension, but a brief flashback showed him back in Mega-City One, looking for his trapped brothers. There's a world of intrigue behind that that I could go into but won't; briefly, he pilfers their spirit forms and takes off on a colony ship bound for a distant world.

Judges Dredd and Anderson are about two weeks behind, unable to stop the carnage when Death and his gang all resurrect themselves with their bizarre superpowers and start mass slaughter. At about the halfway point, our heroes finally catch up to them, but too late to save the colonists, and are trapped on board the spaceship, cut off from resources and help, surrounded by the dead...

It's not all doom and gloom, but in this story, Wagner very sensibly let the humor arise from the colony ship and their foibles, keeping reader attention and sparking some smiles before things go straight to hell, and it's been a mean and ugly action-adventure thriller ever since the third episode. As things get bad, there are still dozens of questions to be addressed, including the whereabouts of another one of Dredd's old enemies, who I'd have guessed would have appeared in this story by now, and what the Dark Judges were thinking, engineering a ssssssituation where everybody's trapped on the stranded colony ship. I have the ugly feeling that this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

"Dark Justice" is appearing weekly in 2000 AD, beginning in Prog 2015 and continuing through progs 1912-1921. Click the image above to visit the comic's online shop and order your thrillpower!!

This story is written in memory of my pal, longtime squaxx dek Thargo Mike Horne of Boston, who passed away last weekend after suffering a stroke in November. Mike wasn't able to read any of this story, which is a damn shame. We'll miss you, Mike.

PDFs of these issues were provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Brass Sun: The Wheel of Worlds (Rebellion, 2014).


I have not been as engaged with 2000 AD in the last couple of years as I had been for a really, really long time. Part of that's because while the comic is, bluntly, the very best comic that money can buy, there's been a certain staleness to the procedural routine of it, and I've become bored, not with the stories, but with the experience of how they're presented. I never wanted to turn into "that fan" who's constantly moaning about how imperfect it is not making special snowflakes like me happy as clams (although I sort of did), so I kind of shut up about things. I just read quietly to myself these days, mainly.

That said, when a series comes along that partially addresses one of my complaints, I feel like I owe it to the comic to brush myself off and tell the world how good it is. It's called Brass Sun and it's very special and often amazing. It's written by Ian Edginton and drawn by INJ Culbard, who's given the pretty thankless chore of redesigning environments and technology several times over the course of the three stories-so-far. Culbard basically has one hell of a tough challenge and meets it beautifully. There are maybe four panels in this entire book (195 pages of story, plus endpapers and backmatter and such) where Culbard's solid and vivid coloring might have benefited from something more subtle. Otherwise, this is a remarkable story that looks amazing.

Brass Sun is set in a clockwork solar system, an orrery with dozens of full-sized planets connected to each other by metal spars. Centuries before, there had been travel and trade between the planets, but most have been cut off for so long that their populations know nothing about anybody else. And the system is slowing down; winters are getting longer. The story begins on one particularly backward planet, the sort of boring place you've seen in stories before and never enjoyed. Strict religious orthodoxy rules, science is outlawed, heretics are burned alive, the religious nutball in charge talks in "Bad Shakespeare" - you know the language; it's when the bad guy uses phrases like "Speak not to me of--" instead of "Don't talk to me about--" - and you, the reader, will want to leave this silly place as quickly as possible.

Happily, the way out is provided by Wren, one of far too few female protagonists to lead a 2000 AD series that doesn't have her origins in some other, male-led, series. Wren's grandfather had retired from the religious order of stereotypes, figured out something close to the truth about their world, and tasked Wren with saving the day. So fortunately, we're only on this boring, albeit beautifully drawn, backwater world for about thirty pages before things get completely wonderful and unpredictable.

I'm not spoiling much to reveal that Brass Sun becomes a travelogue, with Wren visiting other cultures and learning the secrets of the Orrery. If there's any kind of complaint to be made, it's that Wren sometimes becomes a supporting character in other people's stories, and while we accept that her mission and quest will occasionally be delayed while she gets involved with various intrigues, there are occasions where Wren is too much in the background. I do like how everybody else underestimates her, however.

For all the quickly-penned selling words of "steampunk" that some reviewers use, the real influences on Brass Sun are a couple of mid-1980s films by Hayao Miyazaki, specifically Nausicaa and Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Wren herself is very much like Nausicaa: an ordinary and incredibly resourceful young woman given a monumental task, which she tackles with resolve and intelligence. Wren is one of the best, most interesting characters in comics these days, and I hope to see her in action again soon.

Brass Sun is told in 65-page stories, serialized across eleven or twelve weekly issues of 2000 AD. We've had one story a year since 2012; these three have appeared as a six-issue miniseries in American comic size, and now this very nice hardback edition. Edginton, like Pat Mills, seems to get a pass to structure his stories this way, which means they don't always fit very well into 2000 AD's thrillpowered rocket-fuel five page chunks. There, Brass Sun is, frankly, an awkward fit, slow-moving and often confusing. Read in one sitting, as three stories rather than as thirty-odd episodes, it's a deliberately-paced gem, something unlike anything else in comics and very, very fun. I certainly hope the next story is serialized in 2015, and so on, and that we'll get a second hardback collection for Christmas 2017. Highly recommended.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Zenith Phase One

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Zenith Phase One (Rebellion, 2014).


I keep telling myself that I should go back and update my old Reprint This! blog. For about three years, I was very interested in seeing some older, out-of-print comics repackaged, and got a kick out of championing these old properties and introducing new readers to them. Eventually, I let it turn into a chore instead of something to touch upon once in a while, and now I have too many other things to do than go back and update all the entries. Miracleman's back in print. So's Shade the Changing Man, and Black Jack, and Stainless Steel Rat, and Tales from Beyond Science, and lots of other things that were on my old wish list. And now, holy anna, Zenith by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell. (Here's what I had to say about it at Reprint This!.)

Last year, Rebellion dropped a limited edition brick with the entire series in one huge hardback. Just a thousand copies. In a PR world, this was a terrific idea. It got lots of people talking and paved the way for this four-book series, the first volume of which is out in a couple of weeks.

Zenith is a superbrat celebrity. In the world of this comic, the British government experimented with super-powered soldiers during World War Two, and, after the Allies concluded the unpleasantness by dropping an atom bomb on Berlin, began tests on pregnant volunteers. These children grew up to be short-lived celebrities in the 1960s before some of them lost their powers and some vanished and some died. Zenith is the only second generation human with powers. His mom and dad were killed in what was said to have been an accident in France nineteen years before. And their son? Well, in 1987, he thinks he has some musical talent and he thinks all his parents' boring old friends have got on with their lives, and all he cares about are getting his face in the papers and smooching cute starlets. Saving the world isn't part of his game plan, but when the Nazi supervillain Masterman reappears - he was the reason the Yanks bombed Berlin - not having aged a day since '45, he's got to get his act together quickly...

Zenith was Grant Morrison's first ongoing series and, perhaps despite the writer's protests to the contrary, it does clearly show more than a little influence from Alan Moore's Watchmen. Like that earlier story, it is a "real world" or "realistic" superhero adventure set in a universe where some alternative history has banged everything on the head, and, like that earlier story, the events affecting the present-day characters are influenced by a very large cast from the past, many of whom we only hear about in passing. In other words, Morrison had to design a very detailed backstory to make the present-day adventure work, but it works just beautifully.

The story is absolutely wonderful, and, unlike quite a lot of Morrison's later books unfortunately, it's clear and straightforward and still rewards rereads with lots of foreshadowing and hidden double-meanings, and the artwork by Steve Yeowell is just sublime. There were four long-form Zenith stories, along with four "interlude" one-offs, and a one-shot that appeared nine years after 1992's finale. This new hardcover collection includes the first storyline, or "phase," along with the first two interludes and several pages of character sketches by Yeowell and by Brendan McCarthy, who had done some early design work on the series. It's very nice to see this terrific series given such a nice collection at last. It shouldn't be missed. Highly recommended.

Judge Dredd: The XXX Files

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Judge Dredd: The XXX Files (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2014).


I wasn't completely sure I believed that a book like this would work, or read well. As part of their co-publishing strategy with Simon & Schuster, 2000 AD's publisher has assembled a really strange collection of Judge Dredd episodes. They basically identified either every story with a bare butt or breasts in it, along with a few others that deal with sex in the 22nd Century, and gave them this very fun and very neat presentation. It's a very nice and expansive 224 pages, and it doesn't drag in quite the way that I thought it might.

By that I mean, sure, there have been longer collections of Dredd before, but they're either linked by continuity, in which you get a long run of episodes from the same time period, or by artist, where you've still got a strong visual link. This book is just barely linked by anything. It has episodes from here and there across a quarter century stretch, with supporting players who were major points of interest for a few years making a single, somewhat strange appearance outside of their context.

The obvious example here is Judge Jura Edgar, the sinister head of Mega-City One's "Public Surveillance Unit," which turned out to be an ominous prediction of our own NSA. Edgar shows up in the triumphantly cool noir story "Sleaze," which was originally published during a curious time in 2000 AD's sister book Judge Dredd Megazine's life. Fleetway, then the publisher, was set to cancel that title for low sales in the wake of that boom that they expected in '95 and the movie with Sylvester Stallone that tanked. In a desperate move to cut costs and make it profitable, for a couple of years, there was only a single, 17-page Dredd episode in each issue, and reprints of "mature readers" comics, principally Vertigo's Preacher, bulking it up. So on the one hand, the creators - this one's written by John Wagner and painted by John Burns - had more freedom to explore darker and more mature stories, and on the other, there was a much greater public interest in government conspiracies at that time. Most of this book is silly, fun, and occasionally a little bawdy, but "Sleaze" is about the judges holding onto evidence of corruption and vice in order to keep the citizen councils under their thumbs. It really sticks out, and I really love that. It should remind readers that Judge Dredd is not a series that can be pigeonholed as an action strip or a comedy or a parody or a procedural. It evolves and changes all the time.

As for most of the book, it's very silly and fun. Most of it is written by Wagner, who has a ball dropping Dredd into situations where human lust and foolishness leads them to make bad decisions. The first three episodes are the three installments of "Love Story," drawn by Ian Gibson and published over a twenty-year stretch. Bella Bagley is an unfortunate, mentally ill woman who believes that Dredd is her boyfriend. Her desperation leads her into becoming increasingly unhinged and violent. I got the feeling that the brilliantly talented Gibson really loved working on these stories and gave them far more than his usual level of great detail, to the point that when Bella meets her inevitable end, he couldn't bear to draw the details of the bullet wounds.

Lots of other really terrific artists contribute to the book. Apart from Gibson and Burns, who does sterling work, Carlos Ezquerra, Greg Staples, Cliff Robinson, and Vince Locke are all here and they all have great stories. Ezquerra's "The Girlfriend" has always been a favorite, and Gibson gets to draw the blazes out of a hilarious story where Dredd is arresting people behind the scenes of a TV dating game. Lots of the stories here are really funny. Sex tends to be. That's the right attitude. I'd say recommended for everybody, but only if you're understanding that boys will be boys, and some of them are going to want to rush their new acquisition upstairs as soon as they get home. For older readers, then.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Ro-Busters: The Disaster Squad of Distinction

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Ro-Busters: The Disaster Squad of Distinction (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2014).


Back in the mid-1980s, when all of the various series within 2000 AD were licensed for collected editions by Titan, one of the must-have books was the first of two volumes of Ro-Busters. This was a terrific series written by Pat Mills and featured the exploits of some squabbling working-class robots used as disposable fodder for very dangerous rescue missions. Two of them - an unruly and cantakerous sewage-shoveling droid called Ro-Jaws and a full-of-himself army surplus sergeant called Hammerstein - were the leads. They worked for an unscrupulous cyborg super-capitalist called Howard Quartz who genuinely didn't care whether any of his property lived or died, because Ro-Busters was just one of hundreds of robot-staffed operations that he had going.

That original 80-page Titan collection of Ro-Busters has been out of print for many years, but Rebellion has reissued it in a new, expanded edition in conjunction with its American publishing partner, Simon & Schuster. Now 112 pages, it reprints the same stories as that original book - mostly illustrated by Dave Gibbons, with a few pages by Kevin O'Neill and by Mike Dorey - but bookends them with some interesting additions. Ro-Busters actually began in a different comic, 2000 AD's short-lived sister title Starlord, and this book has the first four episodes from that comic. These are drawn by Carlos Pino and by Gibbons. In the back of the book are a couple of neat curiosities - two of the three one-off Ro-Busters episodes that were written by Alan Moore rather than by Mills, with art by Steve Dillon and Bryan Talbot.

As far as I'm concerned, any book to feature that much artistic talent - seriously, Dillon, Gibbons, O'Neill, and Talbot under one set of covers?! - could be written by anybody and still be worth buying. Gibbons' epic "The Terra-Meks," in particular, features page after page of giant robots pummeling each other. The third part of that story is just a tour de force. I can't think of too many other artists in comics that have ever drawn a scene of giant robot combat as brilliant as that. It's masterful.

As for the stories, they're just remarkably fun. Perhaps through the new eyes of a jaded adult, these might appear clunky and dated, but they're kids' comics which nevertheless resonate. Ro-Jaws is such a fun character, vulgar, to the point, and totally lacking any circuits of discretion or tact. Hammerstein is such a straight man that Mills would, in much later stories, go a little too far in showing him up as a chump and had to scale things back to make him a hero again. These characters have lasted long beyond the very brief original run of Ro-Busters, actually. The series proper ended in 1979, with Alan Moore's bonus episodes appearing in the old harback Christmas 2000 AD Annuals in the mid-80s, but the characters have resurfaced in the very long-running spinoff ABC Warriors, which still shows up with a dozen or so new episodes every couple of years.

Ro-Busters is simply a great, inventive, and very fun series, suitable for all ages. Buy two copies of this book: one for yourself to keep in mint condition on the shelf and one for a nine year-old of your acquaintance to read until it falls apart. Any nine year-old who isn't wowed by this, there's something wrong with that child. Highly recommended.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Indigo Prime: Perfect Day

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Indigo Prime: Perfect Day (Rebellion, 2014).


Every once in an agonizingly long while, we get a new appearance from one of my favorite comic series. It's a very weird mindblower of a concept called Indigo Prime, written by John Smith and appearing in the pages of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, 2000 AD. The sci-fi weirdness concerns a busy bunch of interdimensional troubleshooters protecting the multiverse from existential and bizarre threats while punching the clock, processing work orders, and watching walls of television with millions of channels across the whole of time and space.

After a 1991 curtain call, the series returned in 2008 and again in 2011 (stories collected in 2013's book version, Anthropocalypse), leaving the faithful and the frustrated anxiously waiting for more. Happily, they're back in action right now in the pages of 2000 AD, a couple of weeks in to what I believe is an eight-part story. It's called "Perfect Day" and it's illustrated by Lee Carter, and it's every bit as wonderful and unpredictable as we'd hoped.

Carter, who had designed the series' current lead characters for what everybody thought was a different series entirely - that's one of Indigo Prime's tricks, popping in and out of different titles altogether - has a tough job in following Edmund Bagwell, the artist who made the 2011 stories so beautiful. Bagwell is a hard act to follow, but Carter, who gets better and better with every new art job, seems up to the task. As was expected, Smith has been throwing a lot of deliciously weird imagery at Carter to realize - time tunnels, taxidermist-stuffed monarchs, Roman legions, that aforementioned wall of television monitors - and, two weeks in, Carter has been nailing it and throwing in some unusual Easter eggs. The 2011 stories showed that there was a strange and malicious force called The Nilhist hiding behind the walls of the agents' reality. We're getting hints here and there that it might be slowly breaking through. Meanwhile, agents Redman and Dak have been escorting a very old Nazi superscientist from his dimension to Prime's base of operations at the center of time. They're probably right not to trust him one teeny bit...

As I've said before, Indigo Prime would definitely benefit, going forward, from more one-offs and short tales letting us know more about the players before things get too weird and ragnarok starts thundering down again. It's interesting that Danny Redman and Unthur Dak have become the series' leads over the characters who were more established in the original run. Those few that have turned up, like the popular Max Winwood and Ishmael Cord, have been relegated to supporting players, suggesting just how very busy this agency is. I imagine that Basalt, Foundation, Fervent, Lobe, and all those other characters from the late '80s are still working cases, just not ones that we're seeing presently.

While I'm glad that the series is back for a couple of months, I genuinely wish that it hadn't been two and a half totally dry years. With a cast as large as any in comics, surely we could have had an occasional one-shot featuring one of the series' minor players or old stars in place of a Future Shock, or a short story in place of one of these often tedious three-week Tharg's 3rillers. Five pages in the annual December 100-page issue isn't too much to ask, surely? "Perfect Day" is great and promising, but Smith and 2000 AD's editor should definitely agree that, where this series is concerned, more is definitely much, much more. Highly recommended with the hopes of extra weirdness and character development to come.

Banzai Battalion: Just Another Bug Hunt!

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Banzai Battalion: Just Another Bug Hunt! (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2014).


I haven't checked in with the world of 2000 AD in far too long a time. I'm glad to see that the venerable comic's association with American publisher Simon & Schuster is still going strong, and that they're releasing good collections aimed at this market. One of the most recent is the 160-page complete collection of John Wagner's Banzai Battalion. This reprints every one of the characters' appearances, along with a few somewhat similar Judge Dredd episodes - similar in that they also feature robots - by many of the same creators.

The cover of this collection, originally used for their second story in March of 2000, features a wonderfully old-fashioned composition by Cliff Robinson which evokes any number of 1980s IPC comics. The little gunmen are the action figure-sized heroes of Banzai Battalion, who had two run-ins with Judge Dredd. They are actually semi-sentient pest control droids who keep finding themselves thrown into situations where human criminals become the pests they need to stamp out

A strip like Dredd requires an astonishing number of new concepts and new scenarios thrown at it every week, and every so often the new supporting players take on a life of their own. Wagner and Henry Flint crafted the Battalion's first appearance in 1999, giving the little robots the over-the-top personalities of older war comic heroes. Captain Bug Stomper - "He's a legend in pest control!," people keep telling us - tries to do things by the book, until his men persuade him to charge into glory for the greater good.

A year later, they returned in another Dredd story, this time drawn by the amazing Cam Kennedy. Since their human owners died during one of the Dredd world's occasional catastrophes, and since they keep making themselves useful, the droids are sent by Dredd to join Justice Department in some capacity, but when they reappeared in their own series in 2001, they had to take the initiative to strike out on their own.

Now drawn, brilliantly, by Ian Gibson, the resulting story is a very silly, over-the-top homage to old war comics, with the blustery, true-blue Captain Bug Stomper leading his troops on an expedition through Mega-City One that leads them to a wonderful new garden in which to fight insects. The garden, introduced more than fifteen years previously in a memorable Dredd adventure, becomes the battleground for rival teams of robots and a cute parody of another old comic character, IPC's General Jumbo. As leads, Stomper and the team were kind of limited, and their appearances run to a total of only 19 episodes, but they're clever and hilarious. The artwork is consistently first-rate, and I love the masterful way that Wagner mixes both knowing parodies and old continuity. Neither is essential for following the adventures, but they are mind-blowing little Easter eggs for old fans.

There are many things to love about the Judge Dredd universe, and one of them is the way that the series can wear different hats and be an action strip one week, a grim drama the next, and detective fiction the next. For readers who enjoy the bonkers, oddball comedy of the future, then this is a terrific book, certain to leave you laughing aloud and very impressed with Wagner's skill at making this weird, wild world work. Highly recommended.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

Ulysses Sweet: Centred

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Ulysses Sweet: "Centred" (Rebellion, 2014).


As problems go, then if one must have a problem, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, 2000 AD doesn't have a bad one. For the umpteenth time in recent memory, one of their strips is flying completely under the radar while something else is picking up all the (justified) hype and acclaim. In this case, everybody is talking about a terrific Judge Dredd storyline by Rob Williams and Henry Flint called "Titan," and nobody is really noticing this incredibly odd and gleefully ridiculous work of the old ultraviolence about a "maniac for hire" named Ulysses Sweet.

Sweet was a throwaway character created by Grant Morrison in 1987. He appeared in two stories over the course of three weeks and was retired. I find it really odd, and, to be honest, slightly eyebrow-raising that 2000 AD decided to resurrect this IP after decades in mothballs, and not long after they finally reprinted the writer's long out-of-print and copyright-controversial Zenith. It feels like, after years of impasse, they finally decided to see who was going to blink. Thus far, Morrison has made no legal challenge to 2000 AD's publisher, Rebellion, revisiting his work. Fingers remain crossed.

I mention this because resurrecting Sweet instead of just creating a new character is something new for Rebellion. 2000 AD has not assigned a new creative team to somebody else's character since the late 1990s, and, then, it was often done almost haphazardly, with mixed results and occasional ill will among writers and artists. As a longtime fan and critic of the comic, I was very apprehensive about this move, but Sweet's new creative team - newcomer Guy Adams and veteran artist Paul Marshall - won me over pretty quickly. Their work is just too fun and too silly to get weighed down in troubles.

In 1987, Ulysses Sweet felt like a parody of Steve Moore's outer space tough guys like Abslom Daak and Axel Pressbutton. Now that Adams has actually given him some backstory, we see that he is typically employed as a blunt-object assassin or thug or anybody who will do when muscle is needed without brains. Somehow, he got the frankly ridiculous assignment to serve as a bodyguard, not for some dangerous supervillain or galactic conqueror, but a pop star who had aspirations of taking some time off at a spiritual healing planet.

Comedy series in 2000 AD are often divisive - there are actually people, living, breathing, thinking people, who did not enjoy The Balls Brothers, madly - and reaction to Ulysses Sweet has been very, very mixed. But I thought it was a breath of fresh air. Unlike many of the book's recent inventory of series, this wasn't bogged down with continuity or subplots, and was miles and miles from being serious. This was just a gleefully violent, meanspirited comedy that worked really well for the most part. I think it was perhaps a bit longer than it needed to be, and hopefully, if Adams and Marshall have any more Sweet stories to tell, they'll be shorter and punchier. Flawed, and not for everybody, but a mild recommendation all the same.

Sinister Dexter: Witless Protection

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Sinister Dexter: Witless Protection (Rebellion, 2013).


I was startled when I heard the news that Sinister Dexter, a seventeen year-old action series written by Dan Abnett and drawn by dozens, was coming back after what seemed like an understated and overdue finale. I thought for sure that beast had been put out of our misery. Then I read that John Burns would be in charge of art duties and, for the first time since the series should have ended in 2005, I looked forward to the new episodes. John Burns painting Sinister Dexter is so obvious a pairing that everybody was amazed that it had not happened previously.

Sinister Dexter is an occasionally lighthearted and pun-filled melodrama about two gunmen for hire in the ugly, futuristic megalopolis of Downlode, a crime-ridden nightmare that sits atop what's today central Europe, and which is controlled by warring underworld factions. Over its first several years, when the series was a semi-regular in the pages of the anthology 2000 AD, we met a huge cast of characters and followed several overlapping and complex subplots. Rather than linger on its fall from grace, suffice it to say that the last essential Sin Dex tale was told in 2005 - I do mean essential; the epic "...and death shall have no dumb minions" is a must-read for anybody who likes good fiction in this medium - and it has been treading creative water ever since. Mercifully, it seemed to end six years later. Nobody mourned it or clamored for its return.

I wonder whether Abnett knew that he'd be writing for John Burns, because the latest twelve-week run of this series plays very much to this artist's strengths. Burns, to my mind, doesn't have a very deep bag of tricks, but what he has, he uses better than most anybody. He doesn't seem to have updated his reference material since the 1970s, and so the best of his work - possibly the really fun Bendatti Vendetta from the mid-2000s - has a deep sensibility of the 1970s to it. The urban grime of Times Square, the squealing tires of action-packed cop shows, ugly fat men with bad moustaches, and, when a little playful sexiness is needed - it isn't, not in these particular pages, but it often was in some of Nikolai Dante - it comes with a late-period Carry On slide whistle.

With that in mind, this new adventure picks up some time after we last saw our heroes Finnigan Sinister, Ramone Dexter, and Dex's girlfriend Tracy Weld. After dismantling one of their enemies' huge criminal operations, they've been taken into witness protection and moved off-planet to a sprawling frontier world called Generica, which had been introduced some years previously. Finny is relocated to a city that, perfectly, looks exactly like Pittsburgh in a 1974 Quinn Martin production for CBS. You can almost hear the bow-chicka-bow as gigantic cars with unbelievable suspension fishtail across wet pavement.

It's almost as though Abnett scripted this adventure in direct response to fan complaints about its six years of meandering. The cast is cleaved down, the subplots start from scratch, and while the heroes still have the seemingly-immortal kingpin Moses Tanenbaum as their main villain, we're actually given a specific reason why they need to hunt this guy down. It's a convoluted and suspiciously convenient reason, not to mention full of sci-fi implausibility, but this time, I'm actually willing to buy it.

The twelve-week run comprises three stories, the first two painted by Burns. In the opening four-parter, Finny looks for work in his new home, discovers that Tannenbaum has also been relocated to Generica, and decides to find Dex and Tracy, who are in some other state. Doing so, he runs afoul of the witness protection agency and an old crime boss from Downlode. In the second, things get majestically awesome as he makes a deal with the devil and takes a job with his old enemy to get the funds to cross the country. Things don't go well.

This second story is in the running for one of Dan Abnett's best stories ever, as it becomes apparent that Finny is teetering closer than ever to a breakdown. He's become the narrator of his story, talking to himself in a sarcastic approximation of tough-guy fiction. Strikingly, he's aware that he's doing it, but he can't stop, and it isn't played for laughs. As if this story wasn't bold enough already, it then climaxes in an unbelievable explosion of meticulously-crafted violence. Finnigan's ruthless killing prowess had previously only been depicted either as black comedy or as a heroic talent. This time, we see him through different eyes and, for the first time ever in the series, he's absolutely terrifying. It is a bold and stunning choice, certain to leave readers wondering whether we can ever go back to the silly quips and puns when we see that this brutal, remorseless murderer is capable of such carefully-choreographed butchery.

This leads me to speculate on where things could possibly go next. The third and last of the new stories sees old hand Simon Davis back on art duties. For the first time ever, putting the great Davis back on Sin Dex, where he had previously been the shining best of all its many artists, manages to disappoint. In part that's because in my daydreams, Davis is diligently working on episodes twenty-three to twenty-five of a six-month Ampney Crucis Investigates story (quiet at the back, it could happen), and in part because Burns is just so damn good that I don't want substitutes. But Davis brings his best and the resulting three-part story, checking in on Dex and Tracy, is certainly really great despite my silly grumbling. As foreshadowed, Dex and Tracy are doing quite fine without Finny in their lives. They've begun their lives together at last, and simply don't need the violence of Downlode and Moses Tannenbaum any more, but of course, they're going to get it...

It's like this: Abnett, Burns, and Davis have done the impossible. They've taken an aging disappointment, slow on its feet and full of fat, and turned it into the can't miss title of the summer. Week twelve came too soon; when Sin Dex returns in 2014, I honestly hope that it's for a lot more than three months. If you'd told me a year ago I'd be saying that, I'd have said you were drunk. It's that impressive. Go buy episode one by clicking the image above.

Nikolai Dante: Sympathy for the Devil

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Nikolai Dante: Sympathy for the Devil (volume 11, Rebellion, 2012).


A few people, not least a couple of the good people employed by 2000 AD's publisher, Rebellion, have expressed a little disappointment that the conclusion of Nikolai Dante after fifteen years did not attract a little more comment from the comic-book-world media. Rereading his final adventures, collected here in the eleventh and last volume in the series, I can't honestly claim to be surprised myself. The American-led funnybook press is built around the world of endless continuity. The notion of a story ending is not just anathema to most of their writers; they don't quite understand what it means for a "continuing" character to reach the end of his journey.

As finales go, not very many come grander than this. Over the course of the previous installments, compiled in Book Ten, we learned that the Romanov patriarch, Dimitri, was still alive, very active, very powerful, and ideally poised to take advantage of the power vacuum at the heart of far-future Russia. As Book Eleven opens, Nikolai and his allies are ready to strike back, rescue Jena Romanov, and finally bring some conclusion to a war-weary world. But things get off to a terrible start when one of the allies pulls a not-entirely-unexpected betrayal and our hero is captured.

The amazing thing about this book is that by this time, Robbie Morrison's story should by rights have been at least a little patience-exhausting, with two twist endings, if not more, too many. As the series continued, it built up a gigantic cast of recurring players, and while its reputation among fans and readers was almost always a good one, it did get occasional teasing for suggesting that quite a few of these characters were dead only to have them resurface, often switching sides. One of the really great twists comes when one of the principal villains, Vladimir, is shown here to escape captivity. There's a sense of "you have got to be kidding; our heroes have to beat him and his loyal forces again?", but what actually happens is wildly unpredictable.

The entire series is completely terrific, of course, but I really enjoyed the pacing and setup of the final stories. The major climax to all of the action comes about two-thirds of the way through this book, leaving plenty of space to say farewells to the characters who made it so far. Katarina Dante and Viktor Romanov each get just about the best send-offs of anybody in the comic medium, and the final fate of the recurring cowards Flintlock and Spatchcock is terrific fun. I love the balancing act of humor and knife-in-your-heart tragedy in these stories, with moments that are completely unforgettable.

Dante was co-created by Morrison and artist Simon Fraser, who handles most of the artwork in this collection. John Burns, who became a principal artistic collaborator as the series continued, got to make his farewells in the six episodes that precede the six-part finale. Both artists are on the top of their game and their work is wonderful throughout. Nikolai Dante has been one of my favorite comic characters since his debut in 1997, and while I will certainly miss the guy, I am very pleased that this epic can honestly be said to have a beginning, middle, and, that rarest of things in the comic world, an end. Highest recommendation.

Dandridge: The Copper Conspiracy

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Dandridge: The Copper Conspiracy (Rebellion, 2013).


As the spring "season" of new stories in the pages of 2000 AD comes to a close, it appears as though the latest adventure for Alec Worley's Dandridge, his longest outing so far, generated the least excitement, although I enjoyed it even more than everything else lately. The series is a perfectly balanced blend of over-the-top melodrama and humor, with its inspirations way out on its immaculately-stitched sleeve.

The hero of this series is Dr. Spartacus Dandridge, “an egomaniac who’ll say anything to get himself on the cover of a magazine,” who looks a good deal like the actor Peter Wyngarde - or, more accurately, like the lead character of the old adventure TV series Jason King - and who, in the far-flung past of the early 1980s, is having a fabulous time living large and saving the Empire from sci-fi criminals.

But there's another layer to this that requires a step or two more concentration to understand it. In much the same way that the "steampunk" genre is built around alternative histories where the Victorians built clockwork robots and everybody wore big goggles, this is "ghostpunk," where the Victorians harnessed the limitless energy of ectoplasm to power everything. Dandridge is a ghost, killed in the early 1900s and kept imprisoned for eighty years. So there's a touch of Adam Adamant Lives! in the premise, and the story tips its bowler to all sorts of influences, including, as is obvious in the picture above, The Avengers.

So in this story, Dandridge is wanted by both the authorities and by a strange organization that's employed some shape-changing robots, made from copper, to track him down. The MacGuffin of the moment is an enchanted blade that can terminally end the existence of ghosts, and our inebriated hero has crashed Roger Moore's Bentley. It takes more than just a note of moxie to start with a concept so high and keep batting to the fences with every swing.

Two different artists have worked on Dandridge since the character's debut in 2009. This time, his co-creator Warren Pleece is back, with the other artist Jon Davis-Hunt presumably busy on Worley's other 2000 AD series, Age of the Wolf. Pleece simply doesn't have the dynamic edge to his work that I enjoy the most, but I love his facial expressions and his designs. That said, either malaise or deadlines seem to have caught up with him before the end. The final two parts, which appeared in issues 1830 and 1831, were certainly less engaging than everything that came before. That's a shame, because the script is huge fun throughout, with Worley correctly noting that all of the adventure TV shows that inform this comic are full of sidetracks and clues and investigations and as many locations as can be managed.

The series is very fun and, now that it has hit 20 episodes, it's time to start thinking about whether we'll get a collected edition anytime soon. Hopefully, the editors will wait until they've commissioned one more story, to give any book the extra pages and heft that we'd enjoy the most, and hopefully that story will be commissioned very soon. Recommended.

(Clicking the image will take you to 2000 AD's online shop, where you can order issue 1824, either hard copy or digital, which features the first episode, of eight, of "The Copper Conspiracy.")

Judge Dredd - Day of Chaos: The Fourth Faction

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Judge Dredd - Day of Chaos: The Fourth Faction (Rebellion, 2013).

I didn't do myself any favors trying to come up with a way to "review" the first of two collected editions that reprint "Day of Chaos," the mammoth 50 (!) episode Judge Dredd epic that ran for a full year from the summer of 2011 into 2012. Taken as a whole, it is one of the biggest game-changers ever seen in Western comics, with a conclusion that just plan screws everything up and leaves the series more shaken and beaten up than almost any similar event in any comic that I can think of. (The destruction of the planet Earth in a late 1992 issue of Legion of Super-Heroes might have counted, but the publishers made everything better and back to normal less than two years later.) But the "you've gotta be kidding" level of rule-changing all happens in the second volume, which will be out in a couple of months. What this book does is set things up by reinforcing reader understanding of how Dredd's world is supposed to work, and then, with an incredibly effective sense of impending doom, starts crumbling the structures that define this world into dust.

When the Judge Dredd comic began in 1977, it was without a firm grasp on its own continuity or world. Over time, new elements would emerge, and odd ideas brought up for consideration. For a few years, the comic, always under the eyes of John Wagner, who has probably written a small majority of the episodes and is acknowledged as the comic's creator and chief architect, placed Dredd in a city-state with a population of 800 million. After five years, this number was halved over the course of the legendary epic "The Apocalypse War," wherein Dredd's home of Mega-City One was invaded by the ruthless Sovs of East-Meg One. Somehow, Wagner considered 400 million a slightly more manageable number than 800 million. Evidently, he's since decided that even that number was too great to control.

From time to time, the events of "The Apocalypse War" have resurfaced to confound our hero. Survivors of East-Meg One were shown to have established a new government on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, intent on convicting Dredd of war crimes, and various sleeper agents and assassins have surfaced from time to time to make potshots at the city. "Day of Chaos" is, naturally, the culmination of decades of episodes, and as such, no simple summary introduction can do it justice. The volume makes a good effort, though. It opens with a couple of pages of introduction that flesh out the long antagonism, and then begins a very effective scene-setting with a reprint of 2010's "The Skinning Room." This is a five-part story (from issues 1700-1704) that shows the political situation in Mega-City One after the events of an earlier year-long epic, "Tour of Duty," and eases readers into things by way of a typical affair of violent future crime. It's written by John Wagner and drawn by Ben Willsher, who provides much of the artwork in the story that follows, and will remind old readers and inform new ones that, as much as this is an action-adventure melodrama, it is also capable of being the absolute finest police procedural in the comic medium, with a wholly successful, cerebral approach to detective fiction that I think many comic fans don't recognize.

The reprint then skips ahead to June 2011, and a three-part story in which Dredd's most cunning ongoing enemy, the serial killer PJ Maybe, escapes from prison. His recapture becomes a priority when "Day of Chaos" properly begins in issue 1743, but there are even more critical problems. Justice Department's Psi-Division has been a deteriorating failure for years, probably since most of their reliable operatives have died in action, but they have a very good prognosticator who foresees her own death and a disaster that will crush the city like nothing before.

With a Sov camp in Siberia preparing a massive germ warfare attack on the city, and PJ Maybe planning to sabotage the city's mayoral election, and suicide assassins at loose targeting key figures, and Justice Department planning for the unbelievable casualty rate to come in such an unthinkable way that... ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. This rapidly turns into a spectacle completely outside of any hero's ability to solve. Wagner and his artistic collaborators, including Ben Willsher, Henry Flint and Colin MacNeil, kept this escalating for the next several months.

"The Fourth Faction" is certain to leave anybody reading it desperate for the conclusion. What you'll get until then is twenty-three episodes of things getting worse and worse, a densely-narrated and subplot-heavy story with multiple antagonists, plotlines that weave masterfully in and out of the story, and a tone so grim that readers will agree that nobody and nothing is safe in this tale. I would have preferred that Rebellion release both volumes together - the second is due in July - but there's no chance that anybody spending the hours it will take to absorb this deep and heavy story will miss coming back for the conclusion. Highly recommended.

Ampney Crucis Investigates... The Entropy Tango

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of the latest Ampney Crucis Investigates story (Rebellion, 2012-13).


In 2008, Ian Edginton and Simon Davis launched a very promising-sounding series in the pages of 2000 AD. Ampney Crucis Investigates is easiest described as "Lord Peter Wimsey versus Cthulu." It's about a between-the-wars toff whose grievous wounds on the Western Front left him able to see hideous interdimensional beasts, and now he spends his time assisting police with their inquiries when their investigations lead them down occult, SF, and paranormal avenues.

It has never quite worked as well as it should, and never lived up to its promise. It's come achingly close on a couple of occasions, but Lord Crucis was poorly served by a couple of adventures that forced him, awkwardly, into the role of an action hero. Now, the lead in a detective thriller should certainly be the hero - Raymond Chandler may have disapproved strongly of the genre that spawned and inspired Lord Crucis, but he was quite correct that our protagonist should be in charge of his destiny - but there's a limit to this hero's powers and abilities. The stories thus far have not quite served those limitations well, whether by the artificial limits of a story that was much shorter than it should have been, or going the 2000 AD way of two-fisted adrenaline melodrama for a premise that does not warrant it.

But with the fifth story, "The Entropy Tango," Edginton and Davis have got it closer to perfect than ever before. It began in December's extra-length "Prog 2013" and continued for the next eleven issues and was far and away the best thing in the comic. This was a very good and very invigorating blend of action and baffling mystery, the stakes very high and the situation truly outre. Within the first few weeks, we had dead pleisosaurs in a field, woolly mammoths in a barn, Martian ambassadors targeted for assassination by disciples of Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing working on a top secret computer project for the British government.

This is the sort of wild kitchen sink approach to storytelling that has typified Pat Mills' work in recent years, but it works much better the way that Edginton employs it here. While Mills throws a hundred crazy concepts at the wall at once and leaves readers thunderstruck by all the madness, Edginton slowly builds to each bizarre reveal, using each as a part of a huge and complex puzzle for Lord Crucis and his manservant Cromwell to untangle. While I doubt anybody ever expected a revelation like a mammoth working as a beast of burden on a rural farm to ever come across as a natural part of storytelling, it's actually done so simply and effectively that "natural" is the only way to describe it. It's an exceptionally well-constructed puzzle, only let down, sadly, by the rushed ending.

2000 AD typically schedules "launch progs" into their lineup, where each issue features the start of all-new stories or serials. I'm afraid that "The Entropy Tango" fell afoul of the most recent one, and what could have continued unfolding naturally and in an exciting way over a few more chapters was quickly - far too quickly - tidied up. I'm not only saying that just because I was enjoying the bejezus out of this story as it continued, but I really feel that this series, more than any other in 2000 AD's lineup, would really benefit from long runs of seventeen or more weeks. There is a flow to the discovery that should not be dictated by the artificial structure of week-to-week scheduling. If that means that a launch prog has four "episode one"s and one "episode fourteen," so be it. The story itself is certain to be served better.

With the caveat that the rushed ending won't please anybody, getting there was a huge pleasure. I am looking forward to Lord Crucis's next adventure and hope that the Mighty One won't make us wait too long. This is his best and most satisfying case so far, and comes strongly recommended.