Judge Anderson: The Psi Files Vol. 3

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 Anderson: The Psi Files Vol. 3 (Rebellion, 2012).


The complete reprinting of Anderson: Psi Division, the longest-running of all the sixty-thousand spinoffs from Judge Dredd, enters its difficult middle period with this volume. It's still very good, and has moments of sheer brilliance, but it raises a lot of awkward and huge questions about Dredd's world that have not really been addressed.

This edition, a big, beautiful 300 pages long, collects twelve stories from 2000 AD, the Judge Dredd Megazine and their related special and annual editions, almost all of it scripted by Alan Grant. The bulk of the stories are from the 1995-98 period and reflect a troubled time for the comics. "Something Wicked," a story in which a cult leader dooms his followers onto an exodus from the city, was originally published toward the end of the Megazine's second volume. At the time, the first feature film about Judge Dredd was nearing release, and the publishers, then Fleetway, did that silly thing that magazine publishers do and did a big relaunch and renumbering for its third volume to accompany the major, and well-remembered story, "Satan." But sales of the Meg tanked after the movie's failure, leading Judge Anderson's stories to be rested for a year and a half before resurfacing in 2000 AD itself. During that troubled time, space in the thinner, cut-to-monthly Megazine was needed for reprints.

Starting from "Something Wicked," much of the artwork for Anderson during this period was provided by Steve Sampson, a really interesting painter who has not worked much in the medium, and who occasionally attracted discussion about his modeling. Occasionally, his photo referencing is a little too obvious, and the star of our story is quite clearly Madonna. I really like his very bright colors and composition, however, and, tasked with the amazing job of setting a story around an exodus of children fifteen million strong, he somehow comes up with some amazing imagery.

So... about those children. "Crusade" is one of the most remarkable and controversial stories from its day, and it still attracts discussion today. The conventional wisdom tends to be negative, but I think it's worth looking at a little more closely. This is a story where some force - an eternally-young psychic child whom Anderson had met in a previous adventure might be either its conduit or its architect - persuades the children of Mega-City One to leave, like a future Pied Piper luring kids onto a Children's Crusade. The judges eventually decide that taking out the leaders of this exodus, to a strange and secret city deep underground in the Cursed Earth, is the best solution. (They do not, firmly, "nuke" them, as horrified critics often repeat - that is a misreading of the situation completely contradicted by the actual incident, where several dozen people are shown to be killed by a missile from a shoulder-mounted launcher, with millions of survivors left to kill the judges in the strike force and enter the city, never to be seen again.)

Pause for a second. That's not just a loss, it's a resounding loss. And in one of the weirdest turnarounds in all of Dredd and Anderson's continuity, it is never referred to again. The story even sees the death of a longtime supporting character, and neither she nor her twin sister are ever again mentioned in the series. The loss of fifteen million children - an astonishing number by even Mega-City One's standards, ranking this among the city's most horrifying disasters - has gone unmentioned in the last sixteen years of stories. What happened to them? Their city is the third-largest in North America, and the judges just let it happen?

I think that the story is really fascinating, and I love Sampson's decisions and use of color, but it really is an amazing missed opportunity. It's also very surprising, since many newer Dreddworld writers like Al Ewing and Si Spurrier have found such success in finding old, throwaway concepts in earlier stories and making them into something wild and new, that nobody has touched on that underground city of 15,000,000 teens, tweens, and toddlers, all now sixteen years older, or the impact on all those poor parents whose kids abandoned them.

Elsewhere in the book, there's the frequently-reprinted "Satan," with lovely art by Arthur Ranson. He's often mentioned as the best of Anderson's artists, but this book covers a period where he didn't work on the series very much; "Satan" is his only story. This story looks so completely amazing that you'll not only overlook the nebulous and slightly confusing climax, but you'll be gritting your teeth in anticipation of a fourth book in this series, which should reprint Ranson's epic two-year "Half-Life / Lucid" arc - 208 pages from 2004-06. Get that on the calendar, Tharg!

Pulling things in my head together, then, this is an uneven collection. At its best, it looks remarkable and reads extremely well, and at its worst, it's still better than most rivals, even with the huge questions that some of the stories leave unanswered. I really enjoy the interaction between Anderson and Dredd, who's a major guest star in the first couple of stories, and the quiet words that they share in the aftermath of "Satan" make for a truly amazing and human moment amid all the supernatural and sci-fi events. The collection also contains a couple of bonus stories with artwork by greats like Mick Austin and Ian Gibson. So it's uneven, but still recommended. You could do a lot worse.

Judge Anderson: The Psi-Files Volume 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 Anderson: The Psi-Files Volume 02 (Rebellion, 2012).


There was an unfortunate and unavoidable problem with the first of Rebellion's Psi-Files collections. Tracking the solo, spin-off adventures of Judge Cassandra Anderson, a regular supporting player in Judge Dredd's stories, the book presented many stories that had been reprinted countless times already. While a definitive edition was very welcome, overfamiliarity in my case bred enough contempt that just about the only thing left to do when rereading "Four Dark Judges" or "The Possession" was to note just how amazingly often artist Brett Ewins conspired to place his camera behind Cass so that he could draw her perfectly rounded, cute little rear.

The second book features stories that originally appeared from 1990 to 1995, many of which have never been reprinted before. It begins with the terrific "Shamballa." This was the second Anderson: Psi Division serial drawn by Arthur Ranson, for many, the series' definitive artist, and the first of his to appear in color. Not long after this story appeared, the feature left the pages of 2000 AD to become a semi-regular in the companion Judge Dredd Megazine. There, Alan Grant began a long storyline that weaved its way through several adventures. Anderson became disillusioned with the judge force, was ordered to provide Justice Department oversight to a scientific expedition on Mars, met up with her old foe Orlok in a major story painted by Kevin Walker during his "palette of mud" period, and quit the judges to go out on a tour of alien worlds.

"Postcards from the Edge" is the central story - and I use that term loosely - in this arc. A collection of short, episodic adventures, each of these tales are illustrated by different artists, with wildly different approaches. If Ranson had set the tone with his grounded and fidgety, detail-packed artwork, all of these guys just throw the model, and caution, to the wind. Someone called Xuasus delights in murky green and purple paintings of hefty, muscular tough guys and broads, and Charlie Gillespie strides a curious and uncomfortable line between American superhero styles with Kevin O'Neill designs. Tony Luke contributes some utterly bizarre and strangely charming collages, and Steve Sampson, who would spend much of the nineties alternating with Ranson, is engaging but downright strange. He takes photoreferencing to a really weird place - his Anderson is, literally, the musician Madonna - combining meticulous facial detail with giant, solid colors. In his hands, Anderson's hair looks like a floppy, canary yellow jester's hat. Unfortunately, all of these wildly disparate artistic elements overwhelm the stories, to the point that they are much more memorable for how they appear than what they have to say.

I got the sense that Grant had much more that he wanted to do with Anderson in space before he had to bring her home to participate in the big "Die Laughing" crossover with Batman. This is referenced in the text by way of trademark-avoiding foreshadowing, psychic flashes of an eagle (Dredd), a vulture (Judge Death) and a bat (you know). The Sampson-painted "Postcard to Myself" epilogue ends the stories here on a very promising note, with Anderson and Dredd teaming again to re-evaluate her for street duty.

As bonus material, the book wraps up with some short stories that appeared outside the ongoing continuity in various 2000 AD annuals and specials. There's one drawn by Modesty Blaise artist Enrique Romero that I adore, but the real draw here is the fantastic "Mind of Edward Bottlebum," which was drawn by Ian Gibson at the height of his talents. With terrific little character designs, very fun layouts, and an uncharacteristically solid line by an artist well known for dropping his inks, this is more than just a tremendously good one-off. Reprinted in the 1980s Eagle line of American-sized reprints, this was the story that stopped me from thinking that Judge Dredd was merely a very fun comic (two months previously) and made me a fan for life. So I have a soft spot for it. You understand, right? Recommended.

Mazeworld

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 Mazeworld (Rebellion, 2011).



In late 2009, a fan campaign started up on Facebook to convince the publisher Rebellion - or somebody, anybody - to reprint a fantasy comic called Mazeworld. I remain impressed and not a little envious that they were so successful; I spent ages and ages suggesting title after title for reprint with a darn low victory rate, and these guys did it right out of the gate.

Rebellion would be the natural home for a Mazeworld reprint, but there was a small extra step to take. The series originally appeared in the late 1990s in the pages of 2000 AD, but the copyright is owned by its creators Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, and the rights to it did not automatically pass to Rebellion when that company bought 2000 AD from Egmont in 2000. Fortunately, Grant and Ranson were willing to work with Rebellion, who, last year, released a fine collection of their story in their excellent line of paperback graphic novels.

The story opens with Adam Cadman, a condemned prisoner - the first man to be sentenced to execution by hanging in Britain in thirty years - hooded and noosed. The lever is thrown, the floor opens and he is suddenly in a very weird fantasy world, full of labyrinths, swordsmen, rebels and demons. Stranger still, neither his hood nor his noose can be removed.

I like Alan Grant a lot, but while the structure of the story is fascinating, this is nowhere close to his finest script. Many of the characters speak in deeply awkward tough guy talk straight out of the fantasy trope machine. It's aggravating when the really good plot stumbles over the dialogue like we see here, because this is an otherwise entertaining and exciting story. Cadman is an interesting character, somebody who does not want to get involved and will throw anybody into trouble to stay out of it himself. Somehow, Grant is able to find some redemption and heroics in this guy, as the strange situation gets weirder and weirder.

But it is with Ranson's artwork that this story really excels. Like most of Ranson's work, it is occasionally stiff, and there are one or two places where the lightbox and the photoreferencing overwhelms the motion of the characters. However, these are just part of Ranson's style, and despite the very slow pace of the first three or four pages, things loosen up remarkably. Ranson draws the absolute bejesus out of this world, with a level of detail and intensity that's just about unmatched in comics this side of Tezuka. The Mazeworld has structure and feels lived-in and incredibly real. In lesser hands, elements like a collapsing scaffolding would just disintegrate into simple lines of ink. Here, Ranson makes it feel like about a ton of wood really did fall down and knock a company of guards into the dirt.

Mazeworld's flaws are noticeable, but they're very minor. The reproduction is as solid as any reader should expect from Rebellion's terrific line of graphic novels, although I'd offer an additional quibble that the introductory essays provided by Grant and Ranson give away some critical plot points, and should have been printed as afterwords. Oh, and the design of the spine doesn't quite match the rest of the line, a point of contention for 2000 AD fandom for ages now. If you can stomach that level of nitpicky belly-aching and you have a taste for fantasy fiction, then this comes recommended.

Batman: Contagion

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 Batman: Contagion (DC, 1996).



There might be two ways to look at this book, but the question of why in the world I own it should probably be raised. When I lived in Athens in the late 1990s, I would occasionally visit the J&J Flea Market a little north of town. There, one vendor had a very impressive room full of very inexpensive comics. Most of them were three-for-a-dollar and probably worth even less, but he also had several boxes of more entertaining 1970s books - Superman Family, Metal Men and the like - for not more than two bucks each. Occasionally, a trade paperback or graphic novel would slip in for the same very low price, and I would usually snap it up, thinking $1 a quite fair price to sample a very long story from comics with which I was unfamiliar.

I also suffered from that foolish malady common to collectors where I wished to have shelves full of books. The quality could come later; first, I wanted the shelves to look impressive and full. This sometimes meant that I would spend an occasional dollar or two on books that I normally would not, just to swell the shelves. You know the greatest thing about swearing off the bloat of my material world a year and a bit ago? I'm no longer tempted by dumb things like that.

At any rate, I suspected that I wouldn't enjoy the book, and I was proved right. I disliked it from the start, as the designer evidently chose to blow his budget on a long lunch. The very first page of the book is the first page of story, and it opens very abruptly, without any kind of scene-setting or even credits. Parsing out who wrote and drew what, and where this material originally appeared, is like a jigsaw puzzle. On the inside back cover(!), there's a list of comics where these chapters were originally serialized. I count twelve, but there are thrteen chapters inside. The twelfth episode is labeled "part ten." The original covers of these twelve comics are reproduced at the size of postage stamps. Alan Grant is credited as one of the five writers on the inside front cover, but because some of the interior credits are edited out, I'm unable to tell what pages he actually scripted.

In other words, this is yet another slapped-together, thought-free, half-assed cash-in to rip off as many Batman readers as can be suckered in by it. Having said that, it is certainly possible that the $19.99 edition presently in print might have addressed some of this volume's deficiency. That is, after all, a price 50% greater than the $12.95 that DC originally charged for this book. We know that DC is capable of so much better - see their astounding series of Starman Omnibus volumes - and so it's just pathetic seeing how they can just crap out books with the barest minimum of work and get away with it.

But really, all the tinkering in the world couldn't turn these comics into anything readable. DC, like its principal rival, often creates "crossover" stories which wind their way through several loosely-related titles over the course of a couple of months. Indeed, "Contagion" was a management-decreed storyline, mostly (apparently) written by Chuck Dixon, and given to the comics' regular creative teams to tell. For my readers unfamiliar with this practice, it would mean that on one week, you could read part one of the story in Batman # 529, and parts two and three the following week in Catwoman # 31 and in Azrael # 15, and so on. There is, bluntly, no way in the universe that this could ever result in a satisfying read for anybody. It never has worked, and it never will. The closest that it has ever come was in a Grant Morrison-led crossover called One Million, and that worked because DC suspended its normal operations for a single month and let the story, as directed by Morrison, take over its entire line through individually-labeled and designed titles, and even that epic was fraught with pointless, unnecessary moments and melodramas that fell on their faces.

Well, maybe it worked somewhere else. Sometime soon, I'll try looking at a similar Superman crossover event from the period and see how well it reads.

This time out, the five writers attempt to tell a story where a lethal, no-known-cure plague called The Clench is brought to Gotham City and many of the city's wealthiest are trapped with it in a luxury high-rise. They send word to the city's underworld that they will pay five million for a cure, leading Robin, Catwoman and a bounty hunter in a race to find one of the only known survivors of the disease. Meanwhile, Batman, Huntress and Nightwing try to keep order in the city after the Clench escapes into the population, and the untrustworthy Poison Ivy, who is immune to all diseases, is recruited to help.

The patchwork story, with its artificial cliffhangers, just does not engage in any way. Dixon's installments are the most energetic, and Denny O'Neil's the most somber and humorless. At one point, Robin starts to succumb to the Clench, leaving no doubt as to how quickly this plague will be cured. Unresolved subplots from these books wander through and just confused me. Commissioner Gordon has been outed from his job when the book opens, and his replacement is a dim buffoon. The Clench has evidently been dumped into the population, deliberately, by a gang of Azrael's old enemies. I'm sorry to spoil that, but telling you that the rogues' gallery of an already-forgotten C-list supporting character is behind this allegedly important story might best explain why this book is not recommended at all.

The Taxidermist

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 Taxidermist (Rebellion, 2011).



Well, I am very happy to see this book finally out. There are so few comics available to star a protagonist as elderly as this one - in the first story of three collected here, taxidermist Jacob Sardini is in his seventies - and I am all for any feature that bucks the trend of dashing macho, he-man lead characters quite the way this one does. Sardini is an aging, overweight widower who figures that his glory days are all behind him, but sometimes events have a way of sweeping even the elderly up in their wake.

This is one of several collections that the publisher Rebellion has recently released that shows just how wonderful the world of Judge Dredd is for launching new characters and ideas. In the weird future of Mega-City One, human taxidermy is not only legal, but accepted enough that it's become an Olympic sport, along with some other downright ridiculous pastimes, as the stories reveal as they unfold. In the opening story, we meet Sardini, who had brought home the bronze for taxidermy twenty years previously, as he is contacted again by a mobster to whom he owns a favor. The mobster's son was killed in the first step of a new gang war, and he wants Sardini to stuff his boy, and the fellows that he brought down, without the law learning about it.

This story originally appeared in 1987, and it was six years before Sardini returned. This much longer tale is one of the finest stories that writer John Wagner and artist Ian Gibson have so far produced, a ridiculous and epic farce that sees Sardini representing his city in the Olympics again, with ugly politics shaping up behind the scenes. Wagner has always enjoyed mocking the world of sports - his and Gibson's brilliant takedown of the World Cup in a 1982 Robo-Hunter story is something that everybody should read - and everything about the Olympics, from the gaudy opening ceremonies to the competitions to the inane commentary by the television crews, is wonderfully and hilariously skewered. I think about this story quite frequently, as every single instance where I am consciously aware that I am blinking, I think of Agnes "Laser Gaze" Boulton, who features in just about the funniest thing I have ever seen on the printed page. Rebellion could probably charge the same price for a reprint of just her short subplot and I'd end up recommending it.

Rebellion's design team has done its by-now-expected excellent work. The book contains all of Sardini's appearances, along with a short cover gallery. Reproduction is just about flawless, on good, heavy paper. Overall, it's a very funny and occasionally touching story that goes off in unexpected directions and it's in a terrific package. What more could anybody want? Very highly recommended.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 16

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 Complete Case Files Volume 16 (Rebellion, 2010).



The last time that I reviewed a Judge Dredd Case File, I said that we were rapidly approaching the point where recommending these comics isn't just a given anymore. These days, Judge Dredd is terrific, even better than it was in its celebrated mid-80s heyday. The recently-completed "Tour of Duty" storyline makes a strong case for being the best Dredd serial ever, and a highlight of any comic serial over the last decade. But in 1991-92, Dredd was a surly teenager of a comic, all mouth and no soul.

Writer Garth Ennis, responsible for the bulk of the stories here, ran out of ideas very quickly during his tenure on the title. The book is incredibly tedious, with overlong chapters of tough-guy nonsense going nowhere fast. Sadly, a lot of the fault is down to artist Simon Coleby, who we must agree has developed amazingly and has, over the last few years, contributed several great-looking pages to the various series that run in the weekly 2000 AD anthology. In 1991-92, however, his work was awkward, blocky, stilted and he was assigned to all of Ennis's worst stories. "The Flabfighters," "A Clockwork Pineapple," "School Bully" and the risible "Koole Killers," a dull one-parter bloated to an agonizing three, would have been awful stories in anybody's hands, but giving them to Coleby was a facepalm of a mistake.

"Justice One" is the longest Ennis story in the book. Painted in various shades of brown mud by Peter Doherty, another talent who has improved tremendously over the years, this murder-in-space mini-epic promises on the opening page that what will happen onboard Justice Department's flagship starliner will be unimaginable. It isn't. After a promising first episode, this story reveals itself as just another "judges in love and trying to flee" mess, the sort of thing John Wagner was doing in his sleep six years previously, albeit with a laughably absurd getaway plan.

It's not all this awful, but enough of it is. Ennis did contribute a couple of amusing one-offs before mediocrity completely overwhelmed him. There's a clever Twin Peaks parody, and a Cliff Robinson-illustrated story about the first guy that Dredd ever arrested making an unwelcome comeback to say hello closes his portion of the book. You can occasionally see Ennis's love of the character shine through, but weekly deadlines on this strip just weren't for him. But at least he liked Dredd. What's coming up when we hit the 1993-95 run really will be tough to get through.

While Ennis was the main writer on the weekly comic, Alan Grant took over writing duties on the strip in the monthly Judge Dredd Megazine. This book collects another clutch of ten installments. Some of these episodes are pretty good, but it really looks like somebody was saving money by just letting anybody draw it. "Raptaur" is a long epic that could have been a good read - there's actually a funny little bit about an eloping couple on gliders - but the artwork by Dean Ormston is just horrible. Same with a one-off drawn by Charlie Adlard - another who'd improve massively over time - and one drawn by American artist Sam Kieth in, apparently, twenty minutes. The policy of putting untried artists on Dredd really was one of the editorial team's worst blunders. Occasionally, some good pages by Robinson, Colin MacNeil or John Burns make it through, but for the most part this is an ugly, ugly book.

Well, that's not completely true. The interiors are mostly garish and undercooked, but the book itself is another example of Rebellion's very classy work with reprints, which puts damn near everybody else in the field to shame. In all, it collects fifty episodes in color on nice paper. The reproduction is very good and if you must have ten months' worth of Dredd from this period, it might as well be in a package that looks as good as this. Recommended for completists, but not with any real enthusiasm.

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!

Robo-Hunter: The Droid Files Volume 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 Robo-Hunter: The Droid Files Volume 02 (Rebellion, 2010).



Back in June, I mentioned that I reread a series called Robo-Hunter every couple of years. It ran in 2000 AD periodically from 1978 to 1986. Written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and drawn by Ian Gibson, it's the absolute best example in comics of what I was mentioning in my article about Chew the other day, how the type of plotting in fiction that appeals the most to me is the type that has to run all over the map of wild possibilities to get from points A to B. I like stories where the protagonist doesn't just have to overcome great obstacles, but mundane, ridiculous, unexpected, downright weird and lunatic ones as well. Throw a kitchen sink at our hero, literally, and I'm in heaven. There's a bit in the very first Robo-Hunter serial where our hero is held hostage in a sewer until he completes a rigged game of Monopoly. That's what I'm talking about.

Our hero in Robo-Hunter is a hard-boiled PI named Sam Slade who cannot catch anything like a break. Unfairly unable to thrive in a world where he might do well (as though 1940s Los Angeles would be much of an improvement for him), Slade works in a far-flung future where a lazy, indolent, soaps-and-sports-obsessed humanity has let lunatic robots take over their lives for them. The human population in Pixar's Wall-E, and the nutty personalities of its robot cast, is not that far removed from what Wagner, Grant and Gibson had come up with for this comic. It's a world where any human with a job is pretty odd; jobs are what people built robots for! They built them to be their prime ministers and their soccer stars, and now the population of future Britain is content to collect welfare checks, visit historical castles and watch the World Cup. From this premise, the creators come up with some of the funniest and most ridiculous comics ever made. It's an absolute gem.

The first of Rebellion's two phone book-sized omnibus editions reprinted a little more than half of these creators' original run. In the second, you get more tomfoolery with Jim Kidd, a character from the first series who had been de-aged to a baby and briefly starred as the hero of a TV series before his own poor fortunes see him setting up shop as a competing robo-hunter. Slade and Kidd are hired in one of the series' most infamous installments, "Football Crazy," which sees some wildly stereotyped comedy. Having already established that future Britain was nothing to be proud of, and giving their own culture both barrels, Wagner and Grant took a few unbelievable potshots at the Italians and the Japanese in this story, which is guaranteed to make the more politically correct members of a contemporary audience wince. I've always figured it's fair for a writer to mock other cultures, provided the writer isn't simultaneously claiming that his own culture is superior. That clearly doesn't happen here.

After that, Slade's story continued through a pair of much longer adventures before the creators completely surprised readers by giving Sam a happy ending. After all these episodes of Sam overcoming unbelievable and ridiculous odds and never getting his reward, he got it. In a just world, the epic "The Slaying of Slade" would have been Sam's deserved finale, but of course, Sam Slade's world isn't "just." The very next episode, set a few years later (most cruelly, it originally ran in the following issue), sees Sam's two idiot assistants ruining everything yet again and giving Sam new problems to fight. Ian Gibson's redesign for the character - he had to come up with two! - is just hilarious.

"Sam Slade's Last Case" and "Farewell, My Billions" are often overlooked by fans, but they're every bit as ridiculous and convoluted and beautifully drawn as the earlier, better-known stories. In fact, as much as I admire the brilliant plotting and sparkling dialogue of the epic "Day of the Droids" (reprinted in volume one), Gibson's artwork towards the end of the run is leagues superior. "Farewell, My Billions" was drawn between the second and third series of Halo Jones, Gibson's celebrated collaboration with Alan Moore, and his linework, design and inking were at a career high. The decayed, decrepit look of future Harlem is just completely lovely, and the hospital scenes with the strangely familiar Dr. Goyah have an absolutely perfect balance to them. I would love to own some of the original artwork from this story.

"Farewell, My Billions" proved to be a finale that Wagner and Grant didn't believe that they could top, and the series was retired. About six years later, however, there had been some editorial changes at 2000 AD and the strip was resurrected. It was given to Mark Millar, then a promising newcomer, and a rotating bank of artists. Enough has been written already about why these failed; no more needs to be said. Suffice it to say that Millar's lengthy run is not included in this collection, however, an episode by John Smith and Chris Weston, set in the same continuity and using Millar's take on the character, is, probably on the strength of the artwork.

The third iteration of Robo-Hunter followed right on the heels of Millar's. In fact, there was some actual overlap in 1994, with one Millar story drawn by Simon Jacob appearing in print after the first by the new team of Peter Hogan and Rian Hughes. I have also written at length about how wonderful the all-too-brief Hogan and Hughes run was, and encourage visitors unfamiliar with it to see what I have written previously at my currently dormant blogs Thrillpowered Thursday (June 2007) and Reprint This! (April 2009 and April 2010). If you'd rather not click, suffice it to say that these are extremely clever and witty and wonderful in every way. This volume, happily, reprints all of Peter Hogan's episodes. The reproduction is not quite ideal - most of them originally appeared in color, and the grayscale versions here don't do Rian Hughes' thick, solid primary colors justice - but just having them all in one place is a dream come true. Well, my dream, at least.

There has also been a fourth iteration of the series. From 2004-2007, Grant and Gibson reunited to tell the story of Slade's granddaughter Samantha, who followed her predecessor into the robo-hunting business and picked up his two idiot assistants. Criminally, these six stories were not as popular with the fan base as they were with me, and even I'll admit that the second story really does take a lot of defending. Sadly, the series was one where the writer was enjoying the experience more than the artist, and it seemed to end, behind the scenes, acrimoniously. Three or four of us are still hoping for a return and greater things. These episodes are also not included; they should appear, in color, in their own volume, shortly after Samantha makes her triumphant return to the comic. Any day now.

Summing up, across the two volumes, you get the entirety of the original Wagner-Grant-Gibson run, one episode by Smith and Weston, and the full Hogan-scripted apocrypha. They're completely terrific comics. Knock down traffic cones and drive across people's yards to get them. Highly recommended.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volume 15

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 Complete Case Files (Volume Fifteen) (Rebellion, 2010)



We are just about teetering on that little precipice where I won't be able to recommend these books quite so wholeheartedly any longer. Even 2000 AD's biggest supporters must admit that the venerable British comic took a quality stumble in the early '90s. This block of 46 Judge Dredd episodes - 36 from 2000 AD and ten from the first installments of its sister book Judge Dredd Megazine (the current issue of which celebrates the title's 20th anniversary) - was produced when the title itself was floundering somewhat. The Slaine saga "The Horned God" and the Dredd epic "Necropolis" had each just ended, and with them went the period that most people define as 2000 AD's "golden age."

This is the first book in Rebellion's Complete Case Files which might really feel a little off-putting to new readers. The stories are set in the aftermath of "Necropolis" and the death of sixty million citizens - wrap your brain around that number - at the hands of Judge Death and his mind-controlled army. Many of the episodes refer back to it, whether by visiting how some of the supporting players, such as the teenage serial killer PJ Maybe, made out while the city was in turmoil, or by showing the desperation of citizens trapped in refugee camps waiting for new apartments to be built.

That's not to say that it's all relentlessly grim. 1991 saw the debut of Garth Ennis, then a promising young newcomer to comics, as Dredd's lead writer in the weekly comic, while John Wagner and Alan Grant moved over to the Megazine to script his adventures there. In time, Ennis would start repeating himself and running out of ideas, but his first few installments really are interesting. He starts out with "Death Aid," in which an old Dreddworld antagonist, Elmort Devries and his Hunter's Club, decides to liven up things in the Necropolis-hungover city with a sponsored mass kill. For charity.

Then there's "Emerald Isle," a celebrated six-parter which teamed Ennis with artist Steve Dillon for the first time, and let the two of them loose on every Irish stereotype that they could cram into thirty-six pages. From singing fish to potato guns ("Spud gun to smash!" is just a lovely line) to a good-natured, hard drinking Irish judge in a green uniform whose idea of getting news from informants is taking Dredd on a pub crawl, they're all here and all ridiculous.

The artwork throughout the book is terrific. Apart from Dillon and old hand Carlos Ezquerra, there are standout episodes by Anthony Williams, Jim Baikie and a tremendously freaky story about a shapeshifting spider-like alien drawn, with the demento-dial cranked up to eleven, by the late John Hicklenton.

Personally, I'm not able to read it without the heavy knowledge that the good times are about to end; probably the next five books in this series are going to be a little rough going before they come back to the episodes from late '95, which is when Dredd would become consistently great again. But this has a lot to recommend it even without that prescient knowledge. From the dark exploration of what the former Chief Judge Silver had done during "Necropolis" to the goofy performance of what passes for Macbeth in the future, it's a really great set of stories, and fans of Ennis and Dillon's later triumphs on Hellblazer and Preacher will definitely want to see their first collaboration. Highly recommended.

Judge Dredd: The Restricted Files 01

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 01 (Rebellion, 2010)



I guess that every so often, things work out for the best. You probably know that Rebellion has been publishing a series of "Complete Case Files" for the long-running Judge Dredd feature. (The first of these was finally released in a special edition for the US market just last month.) These include the stories from the weekly progs and, from the most recent volume, the monthly magazine, but they have skipped the stories from Fleetway's old hardcover Christmas annuals and summer special issues.

Fans had asked at the time to have the annual and special stories added to the Case Files collections as bonus features, but only a handful trickled in. Finally, however, Rebellion has given the stories a two-book collection of their own. The first volume covers the first seven years of extra features from these specials along with stories from the 2000 AD, Dan Dare and Dredd solo annuals. After a pretty shaky start, there is some amazing material in the first book.

About the first quarter of the 400-page collection is really more interesting to archaeologists than to contemporary fans. While Dredd's stories were settling down into a single continuity orchestrated by John Wagner, the annuals were typically churned out by Fleetway editors with just a glance at the source material. Several of the stories are uncredited, and some of the artwork bears just a faint resemblance to the source material. There's a tale about a city called "Mega-Miami" which looks like the city in the 1970s with a future cop running around, and a deeply unfunny, early attempt at a "House of Tharg"-styled crossover where most of 2000 AD's characters of the first couple of years throw a Christmas party in Dredd's apartment. It looks like the artist, Keith Page, knocked those six pages out before lunch.

But a hundred pages in, we get to the point where Alan Grant takes a job with Fleetway editorial and Wagner takes an interest in what's going on with these books. The greatness starts with a Steve Dillon-illustrated episode from 1980 and doesn't waver after that. It includes dozens of fully-painted pages by Mike McMahon and Carlos Ezquerra, along with Brian Bolland's "The Alien Zoo," possibly the only example of Bolland coloring his own work.

Some of these Wagner and McMahon collaborations had been compiled by Titan in a 1985 collection, but most of the book has never been reprinted. One of this duo's stories is a 16-pager called "The Fear That Made Milwaukee Famous," and it's wonderful, simply one of the wildest, goofiest and most inventive adventure comics I've ever read. In it, Dredd rides out in the desert to apprehend a mutant criminal who really does not want to be called "Chickenhead" and the two of them are besieged by thousands of skeletal ghosts of a dead city. Elements of this amazing story would resurface in the creators' later Last American miniseries.

Packed as it is with so many inventive and clever stories, none of which outstay their welcome, it's difficult to point out the highlights or notable moments. Interestingly, John Byrne has a short story in here as well. At the time, the artist was very popular for his Marvel Comics' work inked by Terry Austin. I don't know that there are many other examples from the period of Byrne inking himself, but his line was altogether too heavy back then, as it remains today. On the other hand, Byrne drew a really impressive Mega-City One, and I think it's a shame he did not contribute again.

Byrne at his best, however, is a wholly different prospect than McMahon or Dredd's co-creator Carlos Ezquerra. His pages are really thrilling and full of life and wild, vivid color. The scenes of Dredd and Cursed Earth cowboys warring against giant tarantulas are really impressive, and nobody draws unbelievably obese men eating themselves sick as well as he does.

It's likely that the strange and ill-formed Judge Dredd of the book's first quarter might put off new readers, and so this might not be a good introduction to the character unless you know the circumstances and jump over those stories. Skipping past them, it's a very solid 300 pages of excellent comics at a reasonable price, around $30 in the US. The production is up to Rebellion's very high standards, and the artwork is reproduced very faithfully on very nice paper. It's a labor of love and exactly what the fans had hoped for, and I recommend it very highly.

Robo-Hunter: The Droid Files Volume 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 Robo-Hunter: The Droid Files Volume One (Rebellion, 2009)



Rereading Robo-Hunter, as I do every other year or so, is always one of my favorite pastimes. It's a pity that the character of Sam Slade remains so stubbornly unknown to audiences, particularly in this country, because it genuinely is one of the best and funniest comics ever made.

The series debuted in 1978 in the pages of 2000 AD, and for the first several weeks, appeared to be an off-kilter blend of a private eye series with a science fiction trapping. But slowly, pieces were added to the plot that showed that the world Sam Slade would be investigating was bent at very, very odd angles indeed. Before the saga of his introductory serial "Verdus" concluded, your old pal Sam would be pushed to his limit by a cast of nutball robots who twisted the plot in unexpected and bizarre directions. You remember that Tex Avery cartoon, "The Cat That Hated People," where the cat goes to the moon only to find it populated by sentient bicycle horns and pencil sharpeners? Stick somebody who wants to be a hard-boiled PI in the middle of that, and let the sparks fly.

There are certainly readers who believe that "Verdus" was as good as Robo-Hunter got, but I'm of the school that thinks when he returned to Earth, the strip got even wilder. John Wagner, who, after the second serial, took on Alan Grant as co-writer, crafted a remarkably fun ride where the stakes get higher and the whole shebang escalates into a teeter-totter catastrophe. Every story is just a masterclass in high comedy, beautifully illustrated by Ian Gibson.

Sam himself is a terrific character, a blue-collar joe who just cannot catch a break and is saddled with two fantastic sidekicks. Hoagy is this oddball frog-looking thing who reasons that he can't become a robo-hunter assistant without putting an ad in the paper for one, so he places an ad announcing that Sam has an opening, and then comes to fill it, and Sam can't get rid of him. Carlos Sanchez Robo-Stogie is a Cuban "ceegar" designed to wean people off smoking by reducing nicotine intake, gifted to Sam by Hoagy's "parents" because they don't want Hoagy picking up any bad influences.

Hoagy and Stogie are somewhere between Kramer from Seinfeld and those three dimwits from Newhart, with Sam the straight man trying desperately to keep events from spiraling any further out of control while trying to keep these good-natured incompetents from making matters worse. There's a beautiful bit in the fourth story where Sam sends Hoagy to infiltrate a robot cult, only to have Hoagy refuse to give him any information. After all, the religion is sworn to secrecy and Hoagy could never betray his brothers' trust.

Rebellion has packaged the first five Robo-Hunter storylines in a nice, phonebook-sized omnibus called The Droid Files, adding a later, one-off episode by Grant and Gibson that first appeared in a 2000 AD Annual. The reproduction is nice, the volume is very well designed, and you get a great big chunk of really excellent comics in one thick package. The second book is also out, though I'm not finished rereading it. I'll come back to it in a couple of months' time; until then, just consider this book very highly recommended and give your bookshelf the pleasure of its company.

Batman Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler

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 Batman Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler (DC, 1995)



Here's an interesting case where not only is the book I've read just all over the map, my thoughts on it are equally scattered. This might just add up to an even more incoherent than usual entry.

Naturally, DC Comics would like to cash in on the film versions of their comic books, and so when Batman Forever was released in 1995, somebody compiled this incredibly slapdash 192-page book which collects some of the many stories that featured the film's two bad guys. Each villain gets the spotlight in three tales, and they share space with the Penguin in an interesting additional story called "Original Sins."

"Original Sins" is by far the most interesting thing in the book. It was initially published in the 1989 Secret Origins special edition and was co-written by Neil Gaiman, Alan Grant and Mark Verheiden. Gaiman contributed the frame story about a documentary film crew coming to Gotham to investigate the city's problem with oddball criminals, and the middle story, in which the Riddler explains his life of crime to them. Magically, Gaiman chose to include the Riddler of the 1960s TV series, rather than the comics, and presents a sad, aging man who misses his old colleagues like King Tut and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, and laments the modern version of the Joker, who goes around killing people these days. This story, and Grant's clever look at the Penguin, are easily the best things in the collection, although the two Riddler episodes from his 1960s heyday are each amusing in their audacious, impossible way.

Was Two-Face always such a boring villain that no writer wanted to bother with him unless they were recounting his origin for the umpteenth time? This book includes his two-part first appearance from 1941 and an extra-long tale from 1990, each of which tells his origin. So does Verheiden's segment from "Original Sins." I suppose there is some mild archaeological curiosity in comparing the way that Bill Finger and Bob Kane told the story in '41 and the ways that Verheiden and Andrew Helfer did it more recently, but crowded into this slim volume, it's too repetitive, and makes Two-Face feel One-Note.

The 1960s Riddler episodes are available in the second and third volumes of DC's Showcase Presents line of Batman reprints, where they make a little more sense placed in the high-concept, bizarrely-told pop art world of that time. The Secret Origins Special should be available from many back issue dealers, although demand from Neil Gaiman's fans might make it a little pricy. As for this book itself, I found it at a publishers' overstock clearout store about a year after its release, and felt good paying just two bucks for it. I'd recommend it if you could find it for less than what dealers charge for the Secret Origins Special, but no more.

Judge Anderson: The Psi-Files Volume 1

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 Anderson: The Psi-Files Volume 1 (Rebellion, 2009)



Take three, I think the expression goes.

When Rebellion and DC teamed up to release a couple of dozen 2000 AD collections in 2004-05, one was a splendid little set of 35 Anderson: Psi Division episodes. Some time later, Rebellion issued a set called Shamballa, which contained almost all of the various stories illustrated, beautifully, by Arthur Ranson. Neither of these found a follow-up volume. Now, finding success in their "phonebook" line of great big 400-or-so-page collections, they've gone back to basics and released an omnibus edition called The Psi Files which reprints the DC book in its entirety, along with another forty-plus episodes, including (among them) Ranson's first serial "Triad," which had already been seen in the Shamballa book. Confused yet?

Judge Cassandra Anderson, a supporting character in Joe Dredd's world, graduated to her own occasionally-scheduled series in 1984, following several memorable guest appearances in the main series. She has never had a consistent, lengthy run, nor a regular artist, so quite a few different people have illustrated Alan Grant's scripts. Across these installments, you've got work by Ranson as well as Brett Ewins, Cliff Robinson, Robin Smith, Barry Kitson, David Roach, Carlos Ezquerra and several others.

So visually it's a real mixed bag, but the quality of Grant's storytelling is consistent throughout. Ewins seems more fascinated by Anderson's posterior than anything else on his pages, and I'm completely in love with Roach's inking, but his Mega-City One's oddball fashions and empty streets have more in common with a photoshoot by a New Romantic band from the early '80s than any other artist's take on the city. Happily, Alan Grant ties it all together with some superb stories, the first three co-written with John Wagner, all of which start with a wild premise that requires the input of Justice Department's division of psychic agents and stampedes into who-knows-where.

The book is more hit than miss. The only really sour note is a twelve-parter called "Engram," which I detested at the time and still smacks today of a flirtation with that early nineties' trend of relevancy and giving heroes unnecessarily human weaknesses and tragic backstories. Other than that, everything here has aged very well and proves that Grant does a better job than most in the business at raising tension across a set episode count, with each chunk of every serial a solid building block of classic thrillpower. Plus it's got a great bit where a demonic door calls our heroine an "interfering bitch." Who could resist? Recommended.

The Complete Ace Trucking Company Volume 2

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 Complete Ace Trucking Company Volume 2 (Rebellion, 2009)



One problem American fans have learned about Rebellion's business is that they're forced to work with a deeply inept distributor called Diamond to get their product into American comic shops and, earlier in the year, Diamond elected to cancel quite a few already-solicited books in a cost-cutting measure. Among those impacted: the second volume of Ace Trucking Company, a demented, wild comedy by John Wagner, Alan Grant and the late Massimo Belardinelli which originally ran for five years in the eighties. Fortunately, the collection is available through British bookstores and eBay sellers, and from the 2000 AD online shop, so I eventually landed a copy and was very pleased to reread these lunatic adventures.

Ace Trucking is a barely-profitable shipping company run by a motormouth called Ace Garp, who's just one dirty get-rich quick scheme away from either the big time or a very long prison sentence. In fact, he starts this book in jail, a couple of years after he and his crew were put away at the end of the first collected edition. It's set in a very weird future where few humans can be found. This gave Belardinelli the chance to design a completely alien environment and huge casts full of freaky, comical aliens, strange architecture, bizarre spaceships powering through asteroid belts and gangly-limbed space pirates whose T-shirts smoke pipes.

Belardinelli drew all but two of the sixty-odd episodes reprinted in this mammoth book. While he was recuperating from an illness, an anonymous member of the Giolitti art agency, who represented him in England, stepped in for him. Otherwise, this book is all him, and you've not had the pleasure of enjoying Belardinelli before, you should really rectify that. Almost every page looks like he was really having a ball designing this series, and just laughing himself silly with the in-jokes and weird aliens eating each other. Admittedly, towards the end it gets a little dry. The final epic serial in the book was clearly one where the writers were running out of ideas, and Belardinelli wasn't finding very much inspiration as our heroes endlessly searched across the planet Hollywood and through one parody after another in search of some treasure. Before it started its downhill slide, though, Ace Trucking really was something great.

So the entire series is available in two omnibus editions. Obviously, the first is the more consistent of the two, but the second is still full of essential moments, including Ace's recurring enemy Evil Blood, parallel universes, chicken gangsters, labor unrest, sacred worms, porcine royalty, cargo holds full of space fertilizer and contraband beetles which, when ingested, blow your mind so far out that your eyeballs play table tennis against each other. It also contains the strip's spectacular farewell epilogue, in which Ace learns just how unnecessary he actually is to his company's fortunes. You won't find this book at an American comic shop, but I highly recommend that you track down a copy from England.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

The Chronicles of Genghis Grimtoad

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of The Chronicles of Genghis Grimtoad (Marvel, 1990).



Well, this was an interesting little surprise. I have a few issues of Marvel UK's early '90s anthology Strip, and so had seen a handful of episodes of Genghis Grimtoad, a two-page sword-n-sorcery parody by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Ian Gibson, three of my favorite comic creators. However, my small collection left me with enough gaps in the story that I really couldn't follow it. On the other hand, Gibson's art is so darn great that I had actually pencilled the series in for a possible feature on Reprint This! one of these days. So yes, I was very surprised to find that the full series - a mere 48 pages - had already been collected; I found this early '90s Marvel Graphic Novel for $5 at Knoxville's remarkable Book Eddy.

Now that I can read the whole thing, however, well, the art sure is good. It's really less of a parody than I thought it was, and more of a straight action piece. It's simple, lighthearted and doesn't really do anything different with the genre's set pieces. You've got the heroes on the run from an evil warlord who has usurped the kingdom, and strange beasts in the hinterlands, and really everything that had been done to death in dozens of Conan cash-ins over the decades. The only oddball points are that all the magicians are big freakin' frogs, our hero is a little incompetent, and one of them speaks with a lisp.

If you like Ian Gibson's art, then rest assured that he draws the hell out of this comic and it looks completely terrific. On the other hand, the writers didn't bring their A-games this time around, and even if you like this Lord of the Rings/D&D stuff, you will certainly have read far better than this before. Recommended only for Gibson fans, really.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 13

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 Complete Case Files 13 (Rebellion, 2009)


Back in the summer, Rebellion issued the thirteenth in their series of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files. This reprints all the Dredd episodes that originally appeared in 2000 AD from March 1989 to January 1990 in one very nice package. Most of them are in full color, although these originally saw print back when 2000 AD only had a single color episode each week out of five stories. For ten weeks in the period, the Slaine storyline "The Horned God" got the color slot, kicking Dredd to the front of the comic in black and white. So now you know, it's been twenty years since Dredd was a black and white comic. Lotta pages under the bridge in all that time!

The first of those episodes is the classic "In the Bath," in which Dredd reflects on his battered and bruised body while trying to enjoy one of his rare moments of scheduled downtime, only to find he still can't escape the crazy, ultraviolent city for even a few moments of peace and quiet. The episode, by John Wagner and Jim Baikie, was instantly praised as a classic, expertly mixing quiet pathos with absurdist comedy.

Most of the book is written by Wagner. By this point, he and Alan Grant were working individually, and Grant doesn't contribute quite as many episodes as before, but he does bring some real gems, best among them "A Family Affair." This is a really mean-spirited, hilarious look at things spiraling way out of control when Dredd goes to inform some citizens that a family member was killed in a police shooting. Steve Yeowell paints the episode, and there's a two-panel moment when someone realizes exactly which policeman did the shooting which is the funniest thing ever. Yeowell's third series of Zenith was running about the same time, and it's very interesting to see him apply the same style, but with color.

There are no major storylines or epics in this collection, but Wagner does touch on some earlier threads that carry on from earlier volumes. At this stage, there are still comparatively few recurring characters in the series, but Anderson and Hershey show up again briefly, and we have a return for the disturbed Judge Kurten, now in his new base of operations south of the border, along with Rookie Judge Kraken, who will become a major player in the fourteenth book.

There is a small, unfortunate printing error in this edition. The Colin MacNeil-painted "Dead Juve's Curve" repeats an error from its original printing and has a couple of pages out of order. It's an unfortunate hiccup, but one easily overlooked among so much really good material. Don't let the number 13 on the book deter you if you're new to Dredd: this is a perfectly fine starting point for new readers, and it might do you well to begin here before the apocalyptic events of the volume which comes next...

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

Judge Dredd: Heavy Metal Dredd

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: Heavy Metal Dredd (Rebellion, 2009)



In April, Rebellion released the collected edition of Heavy Metal Dredd, with all twenty blood-spattered episodes of this early nineties series. It's not really essential. There have only been a pair of Rebellion books in the last five years which I would advise readers skip on account of production issues. This is the first one I'd advise readers skip on account of it being completely awful.

Basically, around the time of Judgement on Gotham and Simon Bisley's brief turn in the limelight, the European metal mag Rock Power got together with Fleetway and commissioned a few Dredd episodes by Wagner, Alan Grant and Bisley. These were Dredd one-offs with the volume turned up to twelve; overcharged, simplistic, hyper-violent stories of motorcycle maniacs, testosterone-fueled beatings and over-the-top exit wounds. There's nothing subtle about them, and they're entirely subplot-free. They were designed for thirteen year-old meatheads and filled their gore-and-leather remit with abandon.

These were reprinted in England in the Judge Dredd Megazine and proved popular enough to warrant commissioning a few more episodes. Most of these were written by John Smith and painted by the likes of Colin MacNeil or John Hicklenton, who contributed this collected edition's new cover.

Rebellion does deserve some points for making this a very solid collection on its own merits. It does include all the stories in their original order, with good reproduction, full credits and an introduction by Hicklenton. However, there's very little wit or humor anywhere in these dingbat stories, and there's no reason for anybody other than completists to pick up this book. That Rebellion released this instead of a complete Stainless Steel Rat is a huge shame.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

Kidnapped

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Kidnapped (Tundra, 2007).



I never read Kidnapped when I was the target age for it. I seem to remember enjoying two or three of Robert Louis Stevenson's novels when I was in middle school, but never found the time for this one. Anyway, a few years ago, the city of Edinburgh tried a neat little initiative to get everybody in town reading the same book, and four editions of this classic were prepared. These were the original novel with annotations, an edition "translated" into Lowland Scots dialect, a version for younger readers, and this comic adaptation by 2000 AD veterans Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy.

I'd been intending to try this one out ever since it was announced, but only found a copy last month at Boston's wonderful Million Year Picnic. The story's certainly good escapist fun - it's about David Balfour, a seventeen year-old who learns, after his parents' deaths, that an estate inheritance awaits him, only to be betrayed by his greedy uncle and sold into slavery and bound for the Carolinas. But world events overtake the ship, and a chance meeting with Alan Breck Stewart sees the two released on the mainland, where the politics of the time, just after the Jacobite Rebellion, have Stewarts and Campbells at loggerheads, and soon both men are on the run after the assassination of the king's agent Colin Roy.

As for the adaptation, I think that Alan Grant did the best he could with the page count assigned, but looking over what was omitted from the original novel for space reasons, you can't help but wish the publishers could have paid out to make this a little longer. Yet the price isn't completely unreasonable for 64 pages of such glorious Cam Kennedy artwork. Kennedy's been overlooked by fandom for far too long; this is fantastic stuff, and certainly worth keeping an eye out for a copy. I hope that my son will enjoy it!

Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell!

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! (Panini, 2009)



We've reached the point in these collections of the Doctor Who strip where I originally stopped buying the magazine, so I was pretty interested in checking this book out. I'm kind of hazy as to why I quit reading, but I sort of recall that the price went up and they dropped eight pages back in 1987. I'm also pretty sure that I enjoyed Sylvester McCoy's Doctor more than anybody else that I knew at the time, but my enthusiasm had still ebbed after a couple of years of fandom. I also seem to recall one issue's cover with McCoy and Richard Briers making stupid faces at each other, and lit so they looked like a couple of ugly jack o'lanterns and deciding my money would be better spent on Siouxsie and the Banshees records.

Inside, the comic was going through some radical changes. In the seven pages of commentary in this collection, John Freeman interviews the comic's editor, Richard Starkings, who confirmed that the magazine was going through some belt-tightening at the time, and that artist John Ridgway, who had drawn the strip since the first Colin Baker episode, was passed over in favor of a rotating series of writers and artists.

The intent was apparently to follow the TV series' lead, as of course each serial had its own screenwriter and director. However, this simply doesn't work as well with an ongoing comic. Particularly in collected form, the inconsistent tone provided by having a new team for each story really jars.

As for the individual stories, some fail spectacularly, but some are pretty good. Freeman's two-part "Planet of the Dead" is a really fun romp, and I like the way the Doctor really seems completely lost, yet still in character, but it's undermined by Lee Sullivan's artwork. In time, Sullivan would grow into a favorite on Judge Dredd, but this early work is really rough and his storytelling is confusing, and the story's aliens, a shapeshifting bunch called the Gwanzulum, are just about the dumbest looking monsters in a series known for dumb-looking monsters. It ends up feeling like a rough draft for what should have been a memorable anniversary runaround, just a disappointment.

A lot of the book is like this, with novice artists just starting their comic career undermining a good story or two. Admittedly, neither Kev Hopgood nor Dougie Braithwaite were ever among my favorites when they started on 2000 AD a few years later, but their work here is just terrible. So is "Culture Shock!," a one-parter written by Grant Morrison and utterly ruined by a teenage Bryan Hitch, who would of course go on to far better things in the future, but who barely understands page composition here. It works the other way around in one case, though: veteran Alan Grant turns in a completely awful script called "Invaders from Gantac!" about an alien invasion of Earth totally at odds with anything else Doctor Who has ever presented, but somehow artists Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith make it look readable.

Elsewhere, among the 21 episodes in the collection, are two crossovers with other Marvel UK titles, putting this Doctor in the same continuity as Death's Head and the Sleeze Brothers. Apparently, these really aggravated readers when they originally appeared. Having never read Death's Head or the Sleeze Brothers myself, all I can say is that I am in no rush to go back and read any other Marvel UK series that I might have missed. These are just awful.

The best stories here are the first four episodes by Simon Furman and John Ridgway, before he moved on, a one-off by Furman and the wonderful John Higgins, and a creepy, clever two-parter by Dan Abnett and the returning Ridgway. Everything really meshes with these episodes, and I almost get a sense for what a regular team might have accomplished. While I honestly liked the artwork in this book by Griffiths and Higgins, the collection in some alternate universe where Ridgway got to draw the whole thing would certainly be a superior prospect. Recommended for fans only.

(Oh, one final bugbear about this book: while I realize that exchange rates often make it difficult to price things in advance, if you're out there, Panini, I really didn't appreciate ordering a book solicited in Diamond for $24.99 only to have it arrive costing $31.95. Seriously, are you going to do this with the supposedly $24.99 [see here] edition of "The Widow's Curse" when it shows up in November?)

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 12

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 12 (Rebellion, 2009).



Readers of this blog are certainly aware of Rebellion's wonderful series of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files, which are reprinting every episode that appeared in the weekly. With the twelfth collection, released in February, the publishers have chosen to follow the strip's lead and reprint the color episodes, which began in 1988, as they originally appeared. This does mean that the books have to be a little smaller than previously - what had been 400-page collections are now 320-page volumes on better paper - but given the choice of seeing Will Simpson's beautiful painted art or Chris Weston's earliest professional pages reproduced as muddy grayscale, Rebellion has certainly made the right choice.

Writers John Wagner and Alan Grant elected to end their successful partnership following the epic "Oz," which was reprinted in the eleventh Case File. This collection contains a final handful of their co-written stories, but from there it is mostly Wagner flying solo. Grant contributes some fine one-offs, including one that sets up a later Anderson: Psi Division storyline, along with the expected pop culture parodies. Wagner has the bulk of the action, including some wonderful, moving stories which focus on the citizens caught up in the Mega-City madness. The installments concerning the mutating Eleanor Groth, painted by Simpson, and some John Ridgway-illustrated episodes set in a nursing home where a resident suspects the staff of euthanasia, are truly fantastic. Here, again, is a book that belongs on every comic-lovers' bookshelf.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)