Greysuit: Project Monarch

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 Greysuit: Project Monarch (Rebellion, 2011).



I end up writing an awful lot about Pat Mills' comics in this blog, because there are so darn many of them and they're so darn good. Also, the older ones keep getting reissued in nicer new editions which I keep buying, that too. But Greysuit is one of the newer ones. Two stories of this brutal super-agent have appeared in the pages of 2000 AD, the first in 2007 and the second in '09. Issue 1540 of that comic was one of its high-water marks, because that featured the debuts of two brand new Mills series, this and the excellent Defoe, which has proven more popular, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that Greysuit is anything less than special, too.

Greysuit is a pretty wild amalgam of secret agent fiction. The protagonist, who goes by the handle John Blake, is a superhumanly powerful agent for Great Britain, his mind and memories wiped to serve as a very brutal enforcer of whatever Her Majesty's government has sent him to do. In many places, it's incredibly brutal. Artist John Higgins doesn't shy from illustrating what would really happen if somebody with this kind of strength punched somebody in the jaw. Oooh, it is a nasty comic. While he's out on a mission, some of Blake's programming and mental blocks break down, and when he subsequently learns that a senior member of the government is responsible for some heinous crimes, Blake hunts him down.

Obviously, this is a comic with lots of obvious sources and influences, even down to the main character's initials (James Bond, Jason Bourne). But none of it is played for laughs or parody, as this is a mean-spirited and inventive storyline with the usual Mills trope of bouncing new and wild ideas at readers as often as the plot will allow it. They don't always work - there's a subplot about a character known as "the ginger ninja" which is just so darn weird that it beggars description - but for sheer volume of wild ideas in a compact space, Mills is in a class by himself.

Rebellion's new collection contains the entire series - two stories - of Greysuit to date. A third story has been suggested but not yet confirmed, and sadly the book leaves a heck of a lot of subplots open for one. There's still a pile of wild ideas that Mills can develop further and readers certainly hope that we'll see it again, and new readers will definitely want to be caught up when that time comes. Definitely recommended.

Chopper: Surf's Up

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 Chopper: Surf's Up (Rebellion, 2010).



The good droids at Rebellion are really doing a great job issuing big, chunky, color reprint volumes lately. Hot on the heels of the Al's Baby doorstop comes this complete collection of Chopper, an antagonist of Judge Dredd who graduated to his own solo series after finally eluding capture, for what we hope is for good. He first appeared as a teenage cut-up in three different Dredd adventures in the 1980s, galvanizing the city's bored youngsters with his exploits as a graffiti artist and, later, as a skysurfer, before escaping all the way to the Australian wilderness. These earlier exploits, reprinted within three volumes of Rebellion's Complete Case Files of Dredd, are summarized in an introduction to this book. This definitely starts this collection off right; I can't tell you how many other books I own that would benefit from pages like this.

Chopper returned in a four-week adventure that first ran in 1988, written by his creator, John Wagner, and illustrated in black and white by Colin MacNeil. This proved to be very successful, and paved the way for a really remarkable follow-up, "Song of the Surfer" in 1989-90. Legendary among 2000 AD's fan base, this serial, again by Wagner and MacNeil (but this time in color) truly is a damned incredible piece of work. In it, Chopper follows his destiny back to another skysurfing competition, this one with the stakes raised to absurd levels by a promoter who has decided to return the sport to the dangerous days of its early, illegal years. He has chosen to make it a blood sport again, and, despite the outrage, still finds enough surfers to make it a reality.

It's a terrific story that touches on the tricky subjects of fate and destiny with an assured hand, wrapping them in a brilliant parody of the absurd world of sports (and, perhaps more accurately, sports commentary, prefiguring Wagner's crowning glory of the form in The Taxidermist, due for a reprint from Rebellion in a couple of months). It's a drama of the highest caliber, with a masterful use of pacing as the stakes are raised and the race begins, but the way that Wagner is able to deftly insert moments of comedy and satire as the story rockets forward is just amazing. This would be a very good story even without the parody; that Wagner was able punctuate it with moments of gleeful, sick absurdity like the smiling sports reporter announcing his own injuries without derailing everything, that's proof that Wagner is one of the very best writers in the medium. Of course, the artwork is completely sublime throughout. Twenty-plus years later, and not one artist in comics has stepped forward to paint exit wounds as frightening as what MacNeil managed here.

"Song of the Surfer" reaches an inevitable and tragic conclusion that definitely knocked thousands of readers on their head and still maintains a visceral power. That, arguably, really should have been the end for the character, but the comic's editors wanted to keep a good thing going. Garth Ennis and John McRea took over the character for a story that appeared later in 1990 in the debut issues of Judge Dredd Megazine.

These and some other stories by noteworthy creators, including the late Martin Emond, Alan McKenzie, John Higgins and Patrick Goddard, have appeared every few years until Chopper's final appearance to date in 2004. None of these stories come close to "Song of the Surfer"s power and energy, but they're all quite good in their own rights, and it is very, very nice to see them all packaged so comprehensively in one book. McKenzie's story is perhaps the weakest by comparison, but even it has a good deal to recommend it, from the vibrant art by Higgins to the curious subplot of the Japanese mega-city rebuilding and repopulating the Californian mega-city, which had been destroyed in a previous Judge Dredd epic story. This was evidently intended as part of the groundwork for a planned storyline in Dredd that, with McKenzie's departure from 2000 AD, was abandoned.

In all, it presents a genuinely fun look at a character aging in real time, from his early twenties and full of fire, to his late thirties and ready to turn down the volume and relax. It was great fun to revisit the character, and Rebellion certainly did him right with this splendid collection. Happily recommended.

Note: I've built up enough of a backlog to resume posting again, but entries will be a little sporadic for a while, probably no more than 2-3 a week. Thank you for reading!

Judge Dredd: The Restricted Files 02

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 Restricted Files Volume 02 (Rebellion, 2010).



This is the second in a two-volume set that covers all of the various Judge Dredd episodes of the 1980s that did not originally appear in the weekly 2000 AD comic. The publishers, at the time IPC, used to release various annual hardbacks and special editions where additional adventures of the lawman of the future could be found, and these stories, long desired by fans to be collected alongside the weekly episodes, have finally found a home in these two books.

Honestly, there isn't anything in book two as wild and fantastic as the better moments in the first volume, but there isn't anything as dire as that book's first ninety-odd pages, either. As I mentioned in my review of that book, the first several annuals and specials for 2000 AD were compiled by various editorial staffers working anonymously, few of whom had a grasp on the still-developing character of Dredd and his growing world. Until John Wagner became interested and took control of those projects, they were patchy at best.

With Wagner, joined in 1983 by Alan Grant as co-writer, in charge and defining a clear world, and worldview, for Dredd, the one-shot episodes maintained a consistent tone. True, with only a handful of pages per story, they couldn't really dig into things with the detail afforded a multi-week serial in 2000 AD itself. In some cases, like a Mike Collins-illustrated episode about a heat wave, the plot is given over to fantasy. But with a consistent approach, a dry wit and a taciturn leading man, the stories are uniformly entertaining, with few or no fumbles across close to 400 pages.

As usual, there's a pile of really great art from many Dredd regulars. Cam Kennedy is well-represented with one of my favorites of his many times drawing Dredd, "I, Beast," and he's in good company with Carlos Ezquerra, Ian Gibson, Arthur Ranson and others. I think my favorite story in the book might be one of the longest, "Last of the Bad Guys," which was painted by John Higgins. Honestly, there's not a bad-looking page in this book, but I think that Higgins, one of the title's unsung heroes of the period, might have done the best work in the collection. Bryan Talbot illustrates a really funny story that shows what happens when Justice Department's undercover division can't rustle up enough female judges for a case, and Brendan McCarthy is psychedelic, wild and mind-blowing on a couple of very colorful episodes.

Again, nothing in these pages is as completely breathtaking as some of the Mike McMahon material in volume one, but that's not to say anything here is lacking. It's a really terrific reprint, full of clever, surprising plot twists and it's long overdue. It's presented on nice paper, chronologically, and very well designed. Darned if I can find a flaw in it at all, to be blunt. Highly recommended!