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.

Indigo Prime: Anthropocalypse

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: Anthropocalypse (Rebellion, 2013).


John Smith wrote the last episode of an occasionally-appearing, and very weird, series called Indigo Prime way back in 1991. Mostly, in the years since it finished, he worked on long-form serials for 2000 AD, such as Firekind or Leatherjack or Cradlegrave. Many of these were highly regarded, and occasionally amazing, but there were always a few readers, myself included, who couldn't help but feel that no matter how interesting these stories were, a return to the bizarre multiverse of Indigo Prime could be even greater.

Somewhere around 2003, on some other website, I once speculated: "On the other hand, all times and places are relative to Indigo Prime; they could end up returning for a 13-week run when nobody suspects." That was kind of the feeling behind the groundwork of the series. It concerns a very strange organization of interdimensional troubleshooters who work as contract agents for the manipulation of empty universes and also police breakdowns of the barriers between worlds. They rewrite space, time, and dreams to keep reality in one piece. It's the best concept for a comic ever, and if it owes an obvious debt to TV's Doctor Who and Sapphire & Steel - repaid with overt mentions at last in these new stories - it also builds on them with a huge cast of intriguing and fun characters.

About five years after I wrote that, Smith was wrapping up a serial called Dead Eyes, drawn by Lee Carter. It's pretty heady stuff, mixing ley lines, ancient mystical sites, stone circles, Agharta, ESP, and neanderthals into a modern military thriller. It starts to reach a very messy, inevitable, and blood-spattered climax when the protagonist, a soldier on the run named Danny, is abruptly removed from his reality - from the very comic serial in which he was starring - by two agents of Indigo Prime. For anybody unfamiliar with what was, then, a concept left unused since its last appearance seventeen years before, that was perhaps a weird and unsatisfying ending. For the rest of us, it was triumphant.

Danny and the two agents next appeared three years later, with Indigo Prime at last resurrected as a feature of its own. 2000 AD presented two short stories by Smith and artist Edmund Bagwell in 2011; these and Dead Eyes are all collected in the new book "Anthropocalypse." A further story, "Perfect Day," with art again by Carter, has since been announced as coming soon. We're all very pleased to see that, because as enjoyable and as entertaining as the stories in this book are, there's something about both the promise and the execution of Indigo Prime that leaves audiences desperately wanting to see more.

So, for those of you coming in blind, this is a dense, dense, dense series. It's beautifully drawn by Bagwell, who gives the technology and the phantasmagoria of the wild destruction of universes the sort of fired, imaginative sheen that was the hallmark of Jack Kirby in the 1960s and 1970s. His storytelling, layout, and character design are clear and straightforward, which is what this previously headache-inducing and complicated concept badly needed for its relaunch. The new Indigo Prime, at last introduced formally through an audience identification figure, is a giant assemblage of scrubs, spies, and super-agents. We meet a heck of a lot of new characters, and, strangely, the best-known pair from the original run only make a very brief appearance. Smith has evidently moved on, and he's interested in playing with concepts like agents operating in very deep cover, hidden away in strange realities for decades. Other new characters, surprisingly, have analogues in "our" reality: William S. Burroughs and Hawley Crippen are agents of Indigo Prime.

Apart from introducing readers to the weird world, there are a couple of big actions for the agency to take. There's the struggle to capture a dimension-jumping bewilderbeast, and the extraction/rescue of an agent from a universe that has reverse-engineered his time travel tech. If there's a legitimate complaint to be made, it's that perhaps a little more time might have been spent on character development than on fantastica; the agency's director Major Arcana, sort of a Kirby/Steranko-age Nick Fury, dominates the proceedings, and an imagineer named Mariah Kiss is instantly memorable, but the series 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.

What we've got, though, accepting the minor quibbles of wanting to know more, is extremely good. The artwork is sublime throughout, and the concept and realization of such incredibly wild sci-fi ideas is peerless. If you've not sampled Indigo Prime before - an earlier book that collects most of their late 80s/early 90s appearances is also available - then this is a fine introduction, and it sets up some new plots that promise to resurface in future stories. About which, John Smith and 2000 AD's editor need to agree to produce at least 39 episodes every year. We have to make up for the two decades that the series was mothballed, you see. Very highly recommended and with wildest hopes for the future.

An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your comics or detective fiction featured here, send me an email.