The ABC Warriors: Return to Mars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slaine: Lord of Misrule

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 Slaine: Lord of Misrule (volume 6) (Rebellion, 2011).

Admittedly, this chunk of Pat Mills' venerable Slaine has aged much better than I remembered, but this is still not a book that I can really recommend very loudly. We're at the point in the saga that somebody once described as "Doctor Who with an axe," in which the Celtic barbarian has been traveling upward in time to major historical events. This seems to have been done to allow Mills the chance to totally geek out on researching the incidents that inspired myths and legends from Britain's history. This time out, Slaine's taken the mantle of Robin Goodfellow, with his ladylove Niamh reincarnated as Maid Marian, a nun. Over the course of the two linked stories "The Name of the Sword" and "Lord of Misrule," Slaine needs to get her out of the convent, remind her of "the laughter in the woods," get back to nature and join with the locals in killing the hell out of a lot of boring and straightlaced Christians.

I have a bias against this period in the first place, because Mills was, in the 1990s, going through a pretty repetitive anti-Christian funk, with everything feeling pretty one-note. There are no memorable villains, or, really, any other characters of note. It's Slaine by-the-numbers. He kills a lot, and doesn't think it too many, and it never really matters during this phase who his enemies are.

It is certainly drawn extremely well, but in Rebellion's new collection of these stories, there has been a stunning revision to the original artwork. "Lord of Misrule" was drawn in traditional pen-and-ink by Clint Langley, then a reasonably new name to the comic. He'd previously painted some Judge Dredd episodes and worked with Mills on the deeply odd serial Dinosty, and he explains in an introduction that he found the assignment much more difficult than anticipated, and was never happy with the colorist's finish to his inks. (As an aside, it was a blown deadline for "Lord of Misrule" that led to then-editor David Bishop, in his superhuman guise of Tharg the Mighty, quickly commissioning a short extension to the new series Sinister Dexter; the added exposure led to the series' surprising popularity and probably set the seeds for its 300+ episode run.)

Given the chance to return to his artwork, Langley has recolored quite a few images. I'm of two minds about this, actually. I can appreciate the opportunity to make corrections to comics as they originally appeared when it is something that really needs a modification - the revised lettering of several "handwritten" captions in a Defoe story when it made it to book form was a great idea, as the originals were practically illegible - but here, I just don't like the results at all. Langley's computer-composite fumetti work, as employed on more recent Slaine adventures and on other Mills comics such as The ABC Warriors and American Reaper is, at least, always interesting, and, particularly on ABC, really thrilling. But I found the new coloring of "Misrule" completely intrusive and it never flatters the original work at all. At its worst, the revised pages just look like somebody slapped some lens flares on the page, and at best, it still fails to complement the original.

It's a good effort, and I appreciate all of the design team's hard work, and I also appreciate Langley making the attempt to rework his art to his own satisfaction, even if it didn't work for me. Sadly, the original material is, while better than I recalled and not really deserving of complete dismissal, still pretty mediocre. Everybody involved has done much better work. Recommended for completists only.

The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume 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 The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume 01 (Rebellion, 2011).



Here's a book that I like a lot, but not quite in the format I would prefer. Explaining the situation requires a little backstory. Since British writer Pat Mills found success working in the French comic industry, which is based around annual "album" releases of a 64- or 80-page story, or, if you will, a yearly episode of a much larger story, he's exported the form to 2000 AD, the comic that he created in 1977. As 2000 AD programs strips in weekly six-page chunks, Mills' annual story is further subdivided into, say, ten or so weekly episodes.

Working in this format, Mills is able to tell incredibly long stories across several years, and Rebellion, the publisher of 2000 AD, has two prospective revenue streams for the reprints. Working in conjunction with artist Clint Langley, Mills first used the experiment to craft six 48-page episodes of Slaine. These were paired together and reprinted in three large, oversized, but thin hardbacks with an eye on the European market, where this sort of material could safely be expected to sell by the bucketload in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In these countries, the hardback "album" has long been the default format for the comic medium, much in the way that monthly "floppy" superhero funnybooks from Marvel and DC are the default in the United States.

Mills and Langley's next project was revisiting the writer's classic ABC Warriors, which has appeared off and on since 1979. It's a far-future tale of squabbling robots built for war, with programmed personalities that bring them into conflict with each other as much as the enemy. Some of their adventures are far better than others, but even at Mills' most self-indulgent, the series has always been readable and entertaining.

The project is called "The Volgan War" and it appeared as four annual stories from 2006-2009. In it, the characters reminisce about their original days of combat before uniting, only to find some common threads in their stories, including the strange, classified appearances of a top-secret special forces flamethrower robot. As the series unfolds - and it sags a bit in the third chunk before roaring to a colossal, incredible finish - the events of the old Volgan War come back to haunt the Warriors on Mars in very unexpected ways, leaving the team permanently fragmented and new, dangerous enemies waiting for them.

Overall, I think it's a masterpiece, and easily the best Warriors adventure since 1988's classic "Black Hole," even with some of the head-scratching events of the third volume. It works extremely well in hardback form as well. Following the precedent of the oversized Slaine books assembled with Europe in mind, Rebellion collected the four 80-page stories, beefed them up with some additional artwork by Langley and some extra design work, and released a quartet of 96-page hardbacks.

But there was already an existing line of ABC Warriors paperbacks, all nice and uniform, in Rebellion's attractive "rainbow spine" trim that reprinted all of the characters' previous adventures. To accommodate fans of that line, the publisher has reissued the first two of the four hardbacks in matching design. They look very nice, and indeed the story is a real treat... but why in the sam hill have they gone the route of four separate 96-page books instead of a single 384-page collection under one set of covers? Wouldn't that have been something amazing to see? Recommended, but with the understanding that we would have liked to see something a little more of a knockout when the story came to paperback.

2000 AD's Free Comic Book Day Prog

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 2000 AD's Free Comic Book Day Prog (Rebellion, 2011).



Here's a book that, if I may say so, is long overdue. Every year for about the last decade, the principal comic book distribution company, Diamond, has sponsored this event where retailers order a bunch of comics to be given out freely to customers. The idea is that the comic shops will promote a big event at their store and guests will arrive to reacquaint themselves with how great it was to read funnybooks, and established customers will pick up a couple of new titles. 2000 AD, despite being the most consistently entertaining and rewarding comic book published over the last three decades, has never joined the party until this year. At last, there's a free 2000 AD comic to promote in the US. Free Comic Book Day has come and gone, but it's possible - in fact, it's almost likely, considering the leftover stock that I see in some stores - that there may be a copy or two floating around for new readers to try.

2000 AD is an anthology book, and this issue gives people a reasonably good idea what to expect from any given issue, with a quibble or two. Judge Dredd, as always, is the star of things, and the rest of any given issue is taken up with a mixture of recurring series, serials and short one-off stories. Here, Dredd is ably represented by a short story written by his creator John Wagner and illustrated by Val Semeiks and Cliff Robinson. It's a good introduction, letting people know that Dredd lives in a world where life is violent and technology is downright weird.

The principal backups are Slaine by Pat Mills and Clint Langley, Kingdom by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, and Shakara by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint. Kingdom and Shakara are each very recent and popular series - Shakara actually reached its bug-eyed, mad, memorable conclusion earlier this year - and they are each represented by their initial installments. Kingdom is the lyrically paced (if that makes sense) story of a dog soldier called Gene the Hackman, who, with his pack, is defending Antarctica from huge insectoid aliens. Shakara tricks readers into thinking that it's the story of the very last human, an astronaut who was in space when bizarre aliens destroyed Earth, but then it swerves, magically, and shows off that it is not about that at all. Both are completely terrific, and collected editions of each are already available in England. American editions, distributed by Simon & Schuster, will be arriving in a few months' time.

The Slaine story is a pleasant surprise. Slaine has actually been running since 1983 with a dozen different artists illustrating Pat Mills' scripts. The episode here is the first in a series of adventures called "The Books of Invasions" that was painted / photomanipulated by Clint Langley. Langley's tenure on the strip is available in three hardback editions, with a fourth scheduled for later in the year, but I don't believe that these are planned for separate American release (and, presumably, promotion) at this time.

The comic is bookended by a couple of short one-offs, a Tharg story from 1977 illustrated by Kevin O'Neill that introduces readers to the concept of this comic having an alien editor who programs robots to write and draw the features, and a one-page Zombo short by Al Ewing and Henry Flint which is just violent and ridiculous and wonderful. Frankly, 2000 AD should run silly little single pages like this more frequently.

As an introduction, I think this does a pretty good job, although I might quibble that it emphasizes the over-the-top, hyperviolent side of 2000 AD perhaps a little more than I might like. This led at least one store in Atlanta to restrict the freebie to adults only. (I protested that all Earthlet children should be exposed to thrillpower at the earliest possible age.) While 2000 AD, it must be said, isn't for everybody - and a regularly-scheduled, stereotype-avoiding, female-led series is long overdue and would help there - many of its best series are nowhere as dementedly gruesome as the offerings suggested here, and I'm not sure that this really gives readers a feel for how broad the scope of 2000 AD is.

Another eight pages could have introduced readers to the classical pirate adventure of The Red Seas or the weird Victorian crime drama of Stickleback or the Western-in-Hell Ichabod Azrael or the brand new cops vs. demons Absalom, all of which are certainly violent, but not quite as visceral and outlandish as what's on offer here, and I think that might have been a bit more of a balance. Well, now we know for next year! Certainly recommended.

The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume Two

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume Two (Rebellion, 2010)



"The Volgan War," arguably Pat Mills' most ambitious series to feature his thirty-odd year-old ABC Warriors, finally wound to a conclusion earlier this year in its serialized form. The really nice hardcover editions are lingering a little bit behind, and the second of the four hardcover book versions was released a few months ago.

In it, the Warriors are on Mars, intending to leave the demented Mek-Quake in a rest home for a long convalescence while they recruit a mysterious flamethrower called Zippo to fill their ranks. While some of the robots, who've always squabbled, begin scheming even more than usual, secrets from their military past are revealed, showing it might be impossible for them to ever work together as a unit again after old betrayals are unveiled.

It's very hard to find any flaws with this collection. Mills and Clint Langley, possibly the definitive Warriors artist, really have created a wild, brainstorming wonder of a series, full of double-dealing and bizarre tech. There's an ongoing joke about Blackblood, the robot war criminal programmed for treachery, being unable to understand that the human euphemism "the general public" isn't actually a secret officer who's hunting him down, a rare example of a running gag that turns into an important plot point when we see what his literal mind did with the misinformation years previously. Fun, outlandish and occasionally intense, "The Volgan War" is a real treat, and highly recommended.

The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume 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 The ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume 01 (Rebellion, 2009)



Rebellion has released the first in a planned four-volume collection of the ongoing ABC Warriors saga "The Volgan War" by Pat Mills and Clint Langley. It's part of the company's periodic hardback line, and it is completely wild and wonderful.

Over time, the story of the Warriors has gotten a little continuity-heavy, but this volume goes out of its way to be friendly to new readers. It follows on from the 2003-06 series "The Shadow Warriors" (reviewed a couple of months ago) with the decision to put their small-minded, demented member Mek-Quake into a sanitorium for some long-overdue rest, and this prompts our centuries-old robot heroes to reminisce about their earliest adventures, predating our introductions to them. It turns out there was a lot more to their backstory than we were ever told, and they're each surprised to learn that each of them crossed paths with a mysterious, flamethrowing "special forces" robot called Zippo...

"The Volgan War" really completes the long overdue resurgence of this once-classic title, which spent the 1990s a shadow of its former self. Mills has rarely been weirder or more inventive in throwing completely bizarre concepts at his readers, and while he's writing for a more mature audience than the ten year-olds who gobbled up the original series, with its bazooka-totin' robots on dinosaurs, he's still able to balance an intricate plot with high-wire ideas. So we get armies of multi-armed Hammersteins locked in combat with giant Mecha-Stalins, and taxicabs which can be converted into weapons.

But it's the artwork that drives this one out of the park. I've certainly admired all the great artists who've contributed to the series over the years, from Mike McMahon to Simon Bisley to Henry Flint, but in Clint Langley, the definitive Warriors visuals have at last been found. Langley's computer-created world is unlike anything we've seen in 2000 AD before, fully-realized, three-dimensional depictions of decaying future war battlefields populated by hundreds of rusting mechanical soldiers. In the comic, it looked pretty amazing. On the better paper in this book, the results are eye-popping.

This edition reprints the story that originally appeared in "Prog 2007" and issues 1518-1525 of the weekly, beefing it up with some extra pages - nothing too extravagant, usually just some double-page spreads - along with a long-overdue Warriors' Timeline, explaining things for new readers and clarifying some of the points that have caused some confusion in the past, along with the now-standard introduction and commentary by Mills. It's truly an amazing collection, and on the short list for the year's best book; yes, it's as good as that.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)