Banzai Battalion: Just Another Bug Hunt!

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Dredd - Day of Chaos: The Fourth Faction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trifecta

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free (but not this week), 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 Trifecta (Rebellion, 2012).


Many years ago, some 2000 AD readers were having a game of "what ifs" on one of the message boards or newsgroups, and talk got onto one of the occasional huge events in the pages of Judge Dredd. See, there are dozens of spin-off series that are set in the same world as the hero, and tell stories about other judges in other departments, or plainclothes detectives in other cities, or gay vampire occult investigators in the employ of the Vatican's black ops program, or what have you, but the cataclysmic events in one series are rarely ever referenced in the others. Wouldn't it be lovely if a major, world-shaking thing actually was shown to rock the protagonists of several series at once? The idea was cherished, nurtured, considered, and, as things happen on message boards, quietly filed away and forgotten in favor of new conversations.

The twist in "The Cold Deck" is integral to discussing what happens, so here goes: right under everybody's noses, after a few weeks of thinking three separate series were every bit as separate as 2000 AD series typically are, the three were all suddenly shown to be beautifully interlinked. The twist itself was cute, but the execution was more flawless than any ever seen in comics. Nearly forty years I've been readin' funnybooks, and I've never seen it bettered. The three writers, Al Ewing, Si Spurrier, and Rob Williams, have absolutely blown away every antecedent in the genre, from every time the Avengers have fought the X-Men, or DC's Superman learned that it was Marvel's Galactus that destroyed his home planet, of course it has taken the architects building the world's best comic book to show everybody else how to do it best and make it matter.

Here's the part that I liked the most: the story took advantage of last year's excellent Dredd movie to pull it off. As the film was released, the sister comic Judge Dredd Megazine devoted two of its three slots for new comics to a pair of Dredd episodes, and the other to the movie's co-star Anderson, leaving all the many other recurring Dredd-universe series temporarily homeless. For example, the Meg had been the traditional home of a series called The Simping Detective by Spurrier and, in this new story, artist Simon Coleby. At the same time, it also made sense for 2000 AD to beef up its Dreddworld content to take advantage of moviegoers' curiosity. At most, there might be a second story in any given issue set in Dredd's Mega-City One, such as the popular Low Life by Williams and artist Matt "D'Israeli" Booker.

So everything was announced with the happy understanding that the extra Dredd-world content was scheduled because of the movie. Everybody likes Low Life, which features a somewhat deranged and hygiene-challenged undercover judge named Dirty Frank. And everybody likes The Simping Detective, back in action after a few years away, which features another undercover judge, Jack Point, who poses as a private eye. And everybody has been very pleased with the Dredd episodes by Al Ewing, who's frankly considered to be that strip's heir apparent to its main writer, John Wagner, when the day of his retirement comes, and especially when fan favorite Henry Flint is on art duties. There has never been a time when readers have been lulled into such a false state of security.

Here's the thing: Marvel and DC learned ages ago to hype and promote the bejesus out of their big events stories. They send out the press releases, they let everybody know that nothing will ever be the same again, they provide retailers with checklists to pass out to customers, because a new big event, usually built around the temporary "death" of a major character, will cross over from one main title into sixteen or more subordinate ones. I'd like to think that readers know it's a shell game and don't really appreciate it, but deal with it all the same. I suffered through the intrusion of heaven knows how many crossovers into the American titles that I wished to read, for decades, and enjoyed exactly one of them, One Million. That's not a good batting average. (As I'm writing this, incidentally, I'm enjoying a long reread of the 1980s Legion of Super-Heroes, and I'm right at the point between the last of several intrusions from Crisis on Infinite Earths and a two-part intrusion from Millennium. None were welcome.) The point is: the hype is the key. They start excited arguments at comic news and fan sites, even the good ones like The Beat, and they get the comment threads humming and the advertisement views rising, so the fan media keeps covering new hype projects, because - good Lord! - this time, when Professor X dies, he might stay dead for a whole seventeen issues instead of sixteen. This is serious business! Keep talking about it! Surely, if 2000 AD wanted to get more coverage, they'd announce a crossover and promote it, so everybody on every comic fan site can get excited and get the ad views and clicks, right?

No, they'll just print part two of a Dredd episode that ends with our hero kicking down the door of an apartment and then begin the very next page, starting part four of the Simping Detective story, with the occupants of that apartment seeing their door being kicked down by Dredd.

Wait, what?!

I don't know where to begin with it. The visual itself is amazing: it really looks like Judge Dredd has just broken into somebody else's strip. Of course Jack Point and the criminal that he's grafting are unhappy to see him: they're trying to have their own damn adventure.

In retrospect, there were lots of clues that Dredd and Point were actually working on the same case, but nobody noticed them because, over in Low Life, Dirty Frank had woken up a few issues previously with his memory wiped, and he's on the moonbase city Luna-1 and he's very deep undercover as a billionaire about to have an important board meeting with a half-man half-shark. All of the readers' investigation circuits were so engaged trying to puzzle out the tantalizing clues and hints in that strip that it just flat out did not occur to anybody that we should also be looking for anything unusual anywhere else. So when a transmission from Point is received by Dirty Frank on the moon later in the same issue, it's the second forehead-slapping jawdropper in one week. We've got an insanely large corporation led by a shark-dude on the moon, some sort of Maltese McGuffin business in Point's neck of the woods, and ugly politics within Justice Department with an attempted coup, and all these are the same case?!

This just made the next four issues completely wild and exciting, putting all these pieces together along with our heroes, finding connections and seeing a grandiose and huge conspiracy that somehow lives up to the attention. Put another way, two other very good series were running alongside these three in 2000 AD: Brass Sun, an extremely promising new series written by Ian Edginton, and a long-overdue ABC Warriors story in which Pat Mills, brilliantly and masterfully, starts tying together some thirty year-old loose ends, and "Trifecta" - to call this crossover by the name of the issue-length episode, co-scripted by all three writers and drawn by Carl Critchlow, that concluded it - outshined them both.

Everybody involved can take a bow. Between all this, and the conclusion of Nikolai Dante, and the amazing "Day of Chaos", and the Dredd movie, 2012 was simply one of the finest years in the Galaxy's Greatest Comic's 35-year history. If you read any other comic - any - last year, then you were reading second-rate material. The medium just doesn't get better than this.

Shakara: The Destroyer

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 Shakara: The Destroyer (volume two, Rebellion, 2012).


I am in a very small minority of 2000 AD readers when I say this, but good grief, Shakara slowly rumbled its way to an overlong and frankly conventional conclusion. It shouldn't have been like this. The second and third adventures for this weirdest of protagonists - a skinny, long-limbed, ultraviolent red-eyed beast inflicting almighty hell on a galaxy of equally weird antagonists - were joyful in their embrace of the bizarre and the outlandish. This was a series that was as unconventional as it was gorgeous.

Henry Flint, given the chance to draw a universe of incredibly weird, inhuman beings and technology, shined on every page, thanks to the writer, Robbie Morrison, trusting him to design and execute all of his wild concepts. Engine-driven planets, black hole hand grenades, clones from a million different dimensions, eyeball brains sitting in meditative repose over gangly shoulders... this was a series not at all afraid to think big and deliver.

And this made its perhaps inevitable decline all the more tragic. Shakara was a series that didn't provide many answers. All we needed to love it was to have a company of cyborg tyrannosaurs for the red-eyed screamer to slice in half. What we emphatically didn't need was for the red-eyed screamer to be met by a blue-eyed talker. No, sadly, the third story ended with the surprise appearance of a weird blue-and-black critter who was kind of like our protagonist, and the fourth explained, ad nauseum, that he was the true, lawful descendant of the long-dead Shakara race. As villains go, Cinnabar Brenneka was just about the most long-winded one possible.

David Tennant's third series of Doctor Who ended with Davros and the Daleks planning a convoluted thingumajig to end all of creation with a reality bomb or some such silliness, and, damnation, a dying Shakara in the fifth story is bent on stopping Brenneka from executing the same dratted thing. The comic looks beautiful, and there are ample sidebar weird concepts like an infinitely large arsenal hidden in a tesseract and a prison planet that terraforms itself to kill anybody sentenced to it, but at its core, this is a disappointing story about a bad guy who talks too damn much and speaks in the hoary language of generic sci-fi baddie. Very little here, in point of fact, hasn't been written before. It's recommended in small part for the artwork, because it's not much like anything ever seen before, at least.

Judge Dredd's Day of Chaos

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 Judge Dredd storyline "Day of Chaos." (Rebellion, 2011-2012).


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

From time to time, the events of "The Apocalypse War" have resurfaced to confound our hero. Survivors of East-Meg One were shown to have established a new government on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, intent on convicting Dredd of war crimes, and various sleeper agents and assassins have surfaced from time to time to make potshots at the city. But they've all failed, and frequently been shown up as blunderers, compared to what Yevgeny Borisenko accomplished over the course of the last year.

"Day of Chaos" is, naturally, the culmination of decades of episodes, and as such, no simple summary introduction can do it justice. That said, new readers would do well to begin their approach with prog 1740, from June 2011. This features the beginning of a three-part story in which Dredd's most cunning ongoing enemy, the serial killer PJ Maybe, escapes from prison. His recapture becomes a priority when "Day of Chaos" properly begins in issue 1743, but there are even more critical problems. Justice Department's Psi-Division has been a deteriorating failure for years, probably since most of their reliable operatives have died in action, but they have a very good prognosticator who foresees her own death and a disaster that will crush the city like nothing before.

With a Sov camp in Siberia preparing a massive germ warfare attack on the city, and PJ Maybe planning to sabotage the city's mayoral election, and suicide assassins at loose targeting key figures, and Justice Department planning for the unbelievable casualty rate to come in such an unthinkable way that the citizenry finally has decided they've had enough of their tyranny and rises in full-scale, city-wide open revolt, this rapidly turns into a spectacle completely outside of any hero's ability to solve. Wagner and his artistic collaborators, including Ben Willsher, Henry Flint and Colin MacNeil, kept this escalating for an amazing 49 episodes, wrapping in prog 1789.

A little over halfway through, Wagner calmly played his masterstroke. Just as it really looked like things could not possibly get any worse for Dredd and his city, somebody - I don't know that we ever learned who, or whether they had some particular scheme to control or direct them - arranged for a bent judge to release the three Dark Judges who had been in captivity. Brilliantly, Judges Fear, Fire and Mortis just killed everybody in the narrative who might have explained to the reader what the big idea was, leaving them loose within the much larger narrative as one more titanic problem to overcome.

And the thing that really worked was this: set among this kind of catastrophe, the Dark Judges genuinely don't change things for the worse very much at all. Judge Fear's one-at-a-time killings are visually impressive, but when entire tower blocks of a hundred thousand people are going mad from a lethal plague, there's not a lot that they can do, and their impact on the story turned out not to be a large one. However, they added to the spiraling sense and feeling that this truly was Dredd's darkest hour, their psychological impact almost without equal in the comic's history - I still contend that their original appearance is just about the best cliffhanger in all of the medium - and they left the reader gasping for weeks about how in heaven Dredd's going to win this one.

And he doesn't. The best he can do is survive it. The sun finally rises on a city that has been as ravaged as can be imagined. Of Mega-City One's 400 million citizens, only about 50 million have survived. Almost 90% of the population has been killed.

Where the hell do you go from here?

Unfortunately, most of the episodes that appeared since the conclusion have not really addressed the new psychological state of affairs, and the logistics of managing a world so blighted. There have, of course, been quite a few epics with high bodycounts before, but things routinely get back to normal really quickly, without the eye-popping sweep of death and destruction that this one has brought, and it appears that Wagner's fellow writers misunderstood just how thunderous a change this was going to be, and how readers would want to see "what's next" in a more considered way. "Innocent," a two-parter by Rob Williams and Laurence Campbell, appeared in progs 1798-99 and was the first story to really address just how amazingly bad things are now. There's said to be a comedic-themed one-off by Chris Weston in next week's prog 1800 to celebrate the new feature film, and then, we're optimistic that subsequent episodes will really dig into this new world order.

There's so much more to explore and learn. Mega-City One has effectively been the world's only super-power, and, in many stories scripted by Gordon Rennie, bully, for quite a few years. That's surely not the case any longer. We don't know how other cities have weathered the plague, and whether many of Dredd's gigantic cast of supporting players survived. The smart money's on most anybody who could headline a series of any length returning again, of course, but I contend that a great way to bring the cost home would be to just casually mention in passing somewhere that beloved recurring characters like Chopper, Juliet November, or Galen DeMarco were killed during the outbreak.

For something so wild and unpredictable to come from a regularly-scheduled comic is a real pleasure and a genuine surprise. Watching the status quo deteriorate and disintegrate further as the year progresses is something we are all looking forward to. I highly recommend readers familiar with Dredd start with prog 1740 - linked through the image above - and see what the heck has been going on. Those who don't know the character and world much yet, grab some recent trade collections and hop on board. This is one hell of a ride.

2000 AD prog 1771

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 prog # 1771 (Rebellion, 2012).



One of alien editor Tharg's strangest decisions of late has been to celebrate the venerable 2000 AD's 35th anniversary without the by-now customary launch issue, with the start of several new stories. Instead, with February's issue 1771, we join four stories in progress, a recently-launched, ongoing series begins a new storyline, and two classics from the past get new looks in the form of "what if" adventures, which seem like they're just asking for the publisher, Rebellion, to receive a strongly-worded letter from Marvel Comics about trademark infringement. Nevertheless, even if this isn't the most new-reader-friendly edition, it is still great fun.

But if that terrific cover by Chris Weston isn't the draw for new or lapsed readers, then the two "what if"s might be. The first is a Rogue Trooper one-off by Andy Diggle and one of the classic series' original artists from its 1980s run, Colin Wilson. These two had collaborated on several memorable episodes of The Losers for Vertigo about five or six years back. This story looks at what might have happened had Rogue died early on in his adventures and one of his fellow clone troopers survive instead. It's a very good and very mean tale of backstabbing and double-crossing, gorgeously illustrated by an artist of whom we never see enough work.

While Diggle and Wilson only contribute to 2000 AD very sporadically these days - Diggle, happily, is said to have two series scheduled for the publisher later this year - Pat Mills and Henry Flint are creators that we see fairly regularly. They last collaborated together about six years ago, but have been seen many times with many other stories since. Their one-shot is a completely unexpected return for the gleefully mean-spirited and faintly ridiculous Visible Man, who appeared in a single six-part serial back in 1978. Mills decided to sort of subvert the intent of the "what if" remit, and just asks, basically, "what if the Visible Man returned," and provides a "pilot" for a potential new series. As if the Guv'nor didn't have enough to write already.

The regular lineup includes Judge Dredd apparently about halfway through a major epic about germ warfare in his city, Absalom wrapping up his third story and saving London from a magical threat, Strontium Dog Johnny Alpha hitting the conclusion of the second in a three-story series about the character's resurrection, Nikolai Dante saving his lady love for one of the very last times as this epic series draws closer to its grand finale, and the new Grey Area starting a new story about an alien that's either microscopic or disembodied but who is certainly very, very weird. This is a heck of a strong lineup, without a joker in the deck.

A note about Weston's cover: it's a terrific piece of artwork, updating and celebrating a classic piece that Brian Bolland had contributed for an American reprint in the 1980s, but focusing exclusively on characters who have appeared in the past five or six years. That's as it should be, as 2000 AD is certainly in the midst of a second golden age right now, and should not need to rely on the visuals of oldies-but-goodies such as Nemesis the Warlock, Rogue Trooper or D.R. and Quinch. If, looking at that cover, you don't recognize modern classics like Inspector Absalom, Spartacus Dandridge, Dirty Frank, Stickleback and Zombo, then you, my friend, are definitely missing out.

I think that the only complaint that I have - well, apart from hiding Indigo Prime's Max Winwood and Ishmael Cord up in the top corner where the logo obscures them on the finished piece - is that it's a little too male-heavy, with just Aimee Nixon and Vegas Carter representing the comic's still-too-small female contingent. It's a shame that Weston couldn't have included Maggie Roth, Rowan Morrigan, Mariah Kiss, or Birdy from Grey Area, each of whom are doing something to combat the not-entirely-unfair perception that the comic's a bit of a "sausage-fest." Still, gender politics aside, that's some damn fine art, Mr. Weston. You've got a good droid there, Tharg. I hope he gets to draw Winwood and Cord a lot more often.

Recommended? Of course it is. Why the heck are you reading this fool review when you should be clicking the link and buying the comic?

Low Life: Paranoia

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 Low Life: Paranoia (Rebellion/Simon & Schuster, 2011).



The Low Life is one of the most dangerous slums in Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, a sprawling neighborhood the size of a massive modern-day coastal city beset by organized crime and vice. Justice Department devotes a huge undercover presence here, with several officers of the "wally squad" under deep cover. They're some of the strangest oddballs in the force, but they're all judges.

The series, which has grown into one of the most popular of the last decade, debuted in 2004. Written by Rob Williams and illustrated, initially, by Henry Flint, it focused at first on Judge Aimee Nixon, a one-armed, broken-nosed operative with a scarred psyche. Her wounds are really deep. Most wally squad judges are pretty off-kilter, but the way that Judge Nixon finds herself with nowhere to turn can often get very harrowing.

Rob Williams drew on decades of Judge Dredd backstory in designing this world, building on the wally squad's tendency towards loners and rogues doing whatever it takes to enforce the law. It's very much in line with the established continuity of the main strip and creates an exciting and engaging world of its own from the start. It doesn't always work for me, however. While the series has grown into something really captivating and amazing - appearing as about one serialized story a year, the three most recent stories from 2009-2011 are absolutely highlights of 2000 AD - these earlier adventures are good, but not quite essential.

These earlier adventures are also not served as well by this presentation as an earlier one in England. This book, Paranoia, reprints the first four and the sixth Low Life adventures, skipping a one-off, "He's Making a List..." But all six stories were collected in 2008's Mega-City Undercover, along with a different, short-lived series about a rogue wally squad judge, Andy Diggle and Jock's Lenny Zero. That was an ungainly way to compile two series when it did not seem certain that either would continue - Low Life has become better and more popular and has amassed about forty-odd more episodes, and Lenny Zero is said to be making a long-overdue return later this year - but that book is a much better value for money than this.

I hate to be one of those bores who recommends books with the caveat that the later material is better, but this needs to sell really well before Simon & Schuster elects to produce a second volume, so please buy this even though it's only pretty good and not amazing, but, well, yeah, that's the case here. Unless you've got Mega-City Undercover already, in which case this is just a duplication. So those are the reservations, if they're not too steep.

Lenny Zero and the Perps of Mega-City 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 Lenny Zero and the Perps of Mega-City One (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2011).



I really don't envy anybody's job in trying to introduce Americans to the sprawling world of Judge Dredd. (This collection is among the titles co-published with Simon & Schuster for the American market.) Start anywhere in the present day, and much of the subtleties of such long-running subplots are lost. Start at the beginning and you're looking at something that really takes a lot of effort, primitive stories told in a visual language with which most Americans are unfamiliar. Dredd is always a work in progress, and his stories have leaked out into dozens of other short-run series with other lead characters, set in his universe with rules most familiar to readers who already know Dredd fairly well.

The godawfully titled Lenny Zero and the Perps of Mega-City One collects two of these short series, along with three installments of Dredd that feature a recurring criminal, wrapping up with a fourth memorable character starring in a two-part Dredd tale by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint. There is some very good stuff in this collection, but as a book, it is really difficult to embrace.

First up are the three stories of Lenny Zero by Andy Diggle and Jock. These are hugely fun little adventures about a clever undercover judge who decides that a life of crime is too darn appealing and sets about taking down the assets of a gangster. They're followed by the first three of four stories for Bato Loco by Gordon Rennie and Simon Coleby. Our "hero" here is a weaselly little con artist and very minor link in various organized crime chains who manages more last-second lucky breaks than anybody deserves.

Unfortunately, while these are both fun little series and, as they are too short to be realistically collected any other way, it's good to see them finding space in an anthology like this, they are also the clear standouts of the material, and the rest of the book just doesn't measure up. Three Dredd episodes featuring the villain Slick Dickens follow these, and it won't take a very trained eye to realize that they all have the same plot, and not a particularly good one. The less said about "Street Fighting Man," with its sentimental underpinning and risible, out-of-character climax, the better, although it's certainly drawn well by Henry Flint.

The problems are just huge, across the board, despite the quality of the ten or so episodes that form the six Lenny Zero and Bato Loco stories. These are good stories, but this presentation doesn't make any sense to me. 160 pages simply isn't enough to really dig into the fun of Mega-City One's criminal culture. Slick Dickens is stunningly out of place among the violence and mayhem, and would have worked better as a single episode coda, suggesting how the criminal class of the city would like things to be. A larger book that incorporated, say, some of the classic Mega-Rackets of the early 1980s, or the completely brilliant "Flood's Thirteen" caper from five or six years ago, would have fit much better thematically.

While 160 pages were not enough to really dig into the material that could have been included, most of the stories here are still entertaining, and they're presented with Rebellion's expected attention to detail and excellent reproduction. Curiously, this book retains the interior design elements of the rest of their extensive line, but neither the front cover nor the spine match anything else from the publisher, an aggravating oversight that will annoy completists, most of whom probably have most of this material in other editions already. Recommended, therefore, for new readers only.

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 V.C.s: Back in Action

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 V.C.s: Back in Action (Rebellion, 2009)



A comic as old as 2000 AD thrives by keeping one eye on its past and another on the shock of the new. Once in a while, the editors will revive a dormant feature. The V.C.s is one that thrived well during its decades in hibernation. The original series, whose creators included Gerry Finley-Day, Garry Leach and Cam Kennedy, ran for nine months in 1980 and was fondly remembered by a legion of fans for many years. One of them was writer Dan Abnett, who finally persuaded editor Matt Smith to give his revival the go-ahead. The resulting series ran for five short runs over four years, the first three of which are collected in this edition from Rebellion.

Set decades after the original, this space opera sees Major Steve Smith, the hero of the first series, living a blue-collar life while Earth has been at peace with their old enemies the G'egeekajee. On the anniversary of the armistice, the aliens surprise Earth with a sneak attack, prompting Smith, who's spent the last several years haunted by the ghosts of his dead colleagues from the first series, to re-enlist. What follows is a fascinating action series which involves several alien races in a long guerrilla war against an implacable enemy.

Honestly, I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped at the time, and a reread isn't knocking my socks off, either. You could do a million times worse, but Abnett never really finds voices for the disparate characters in Smith's crew, beyond simply "the girl" and "the obnoxious one everybody hates," and consequently it's almost impossible to become engrossed in what happens to them. The artwork, however, is superb throughout. Henry Flint gets things off to a strong start before regular 2000 AD pinch-hitter Anthony Williams comes aboard with his own, inventive stamp. It only disappoints in comparison with the creators' other projects; this simply isn't as exciting as I had been hoping.

Oddly, it looks as though the story won't be concluded anytime soon. As noted, the book reprints three of the series' five runs in 2000 AD. A follow-up book is advertised on the inside back cover with a December '09 release date, but the collection was never issued, and does not appear in Rebellion's plans for 2010.

This book was originally offered for sale to North American comic stores through Diamond, but was withdrawn and canceled with no announcement. Interested readers will have to order it from a British bookseller instead. Readers looking for some intricate outer space action, or fans of Dan Abnett's work for Marvel's "cosmic" titles, could certainly do worse than to check this out.

The ABC Warriors: The Shadow Warriors

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 Shadow Warriors (vol. 6, Rebellion, 2009)



Earlier this year, Rebellion released the sixth collection of The ABC Warriors. This book, "The Shadow Warriors," contains the longest of all the Warriors' adventures thus far, an epic written by their creator Pat Mills and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra and Henry Flint. It originally appeared in three "books" between 2003-06, and since I'm looking forward to rereading the original episodes as they come up in the rotation (of my other blog, Thrillpowered Thursday), I just skimmed over the book to get a good feel for it.

Honestly, this collection is terrific. The artwork is, of course, wonderful. Ezquerra is one of 2000 AD's best art droids and he really brings a great, dirty sensibility to the dusty sandhole of the terraformed Mars. But when Flint takes over, things somehow get even better. There's a genuine "shock of the new" feel to Flint's episodes, as our heroes' new, imaginatively-designed foes take center stage and the weirdness factor gets ramped up to ten.

Skimming this volume confirmed what I felt about it upon its release: that the Guv'nor was back in town and ready to kick ass and take names. We'll come to this point in Thrillpowered Thursday in a few months, but it's clear that Pat Mills' time away from the comic, during which he created Requiem: Vampire Knight for his French publisher, recharged his batteries to full. The 2003-model Mills was not the same droid as the one from the 1990s. Here, it's one wild idea after another, no preaching, no stagnation, just a constant escalation of mad plot devices and vibrant characters. If the previous few ABC Warriors collections had been frustrating for one political reason or another, then this is the one to get.

It's every bit as wild and excellent as it was when Ezquerra had last drawn the title in 1979, and the robots were riding on the backs of tyrannosaurs, armed with bazookas. This is that Mills - the one with the turbo-charged imagination creating physics-defying freakiness and making downright excellent comics. I strongly recommend you check this book out! (And keep an eye out for more about Requiem: Vampire Knight here in a couple of weeks!)

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

Shakara: The Avenger

A couple of times a week, I put a new book on the shelf and tell you what I thought about it, and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a short review of Shakara: The Avenger (Rebellion, 2008).



As I was mentioning in last week's Thrillpowered Thursday, two new series debuted in Prog 2002. First was Storming Heaven, which is written up in that blog today, but the second was an entirely different prospect, something which was altogether more promising. Oddly, however, by the end of its first series, Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint's Shakara was proving itself to be just as much of a disappointment as Heaven, albeit for different reasons.

Shakara certainly looked like something amazingly new and readers had good reason to be excited about it. The story begins with the destruction of Earth and the raging, vengeful boasting of the galaxy's sole surviving human, an astronaut who was in space at the time and is now a prisoner in one of those fight-or-die sci-fi arenas. And on page four, this fellow, the guy we thought was the protagonist, gets casually murdered by one of what would prove to be a host of completely, wonderfully bizarre alien nasties. And then the killer and everybody else get slaughtered when the series' real protagonist shows up: an indestructible, utterly alien, long-limbed, spindly, mad-eyed warrior with giant freaking swords on the end of his arms who blows the almighty hell out of anybody and everybody in this violent, wild universe. His only word: the mad scream "SHAKARA!"

Well, frankly, if that doesn't get your attention, I don't know what to tell you.

Unfortunately, within a couple of episodes, Shakara had devolved into a dull bore because every installment was exactly the same. It all looked spectacular, with Flint's fantastic sense of design and desire to throw caution and convention to the wind, but it got boring really quickly. It was not an eight-part serial, but rather a collection of one-offs and two-parters, and in each one, some new, ostensibly indestructible super-nasty would do something indescribably over-the-top and evil, and then Shakara would show up, prove that he(it?) was a heck of a lot more indestructible than the super-nasty thought it was, and then open a supernova or a black hole up under under their ass and rocket away, yelling "SHAKARA!"

I was reminded very quickly of my friends in Corn Pone Flicks and their wonderful film Star Dipwads, and how the producer of some space epic couldn't understand why his audience was disappointed, because he'd given them suspense, three exciting battle scenes and the actual appearance of the protagonist, and was aggravated to learn that they wanted a plot as well.

Well, Shakara returned for two more series in 2005 and 2008, and the fourth series will be starting in 2000 AD in one week. The first three stories are all compiled in this book, and it looks like Morrison's plan was to establish something wilder and weirder from the outset, using the patchy 2002 series as a launchpad for longer, more intricate narratives which readers could really sink their teeth into. When that second story started in the summer of 2005, I know a few people's eyes rolled, but we quickly got in line, because "The Assassin" is a thunderously cool little epic which piles on one outlandish SF concept after another as a whole gang of intergalactic bad boys, any of whom could headline their own wild series, gets together to do something about this idiot screaming "SHAKARA!" and fucking with the laws of physics.

And then the third series introduces a mob of robot anti-gravity tyrannosaurs and gives some backstory to everything, and it's utterly perfect, blissfully cool and unlike anything else in comics. Long may it scream.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

Mega-City Undercover

In other news, I ordered one of the recentish 2000 AD trade collections which Diamond should have sent to my shop in the spring of 2008. They didn't, and a reorder also fumbled, claiming that it was no longer available, so I finally broke down and ordered Mega-City Undercover from Amazon UK. It's a very good book, and I'm glad I finally own it, but it must be said that this is a peculiar little collection by Rebellion's standards. It's effectively the first volume of Rob Williams' Low Life, a Dreddworld series about a pair of undercover judges which began in 2004's prog 1387. However, the book actually begins with the five episodes of Lenny Zero, a similar series by Andy Diggle and Jock which first appeared in the Megazine in 2000-2002, and which was prematurely curtailed when the creators signed exclusive contracts with DC Comics.

Despite the nice attraction of having all of Lenny Zero's appearances in one place, it is certainly Low Life which is the selling point of the book. This has been one of the more successful of the recent semiregular series. At the time I'm writing this, the eighth Low Life story, "Creation," is currently running in the prog. The first six of them, totalling 29 episodes, appear in this book.

One thing that makes Low Life so interesting is that it's a "dual-lead" strip. Some of the stories focus on the passionate, liberal Judge Aimee Nixon, and others on the very deep-cover, hopelessly insane Dirty Frank, who somehow manages to work as an effective judge despite having lost his mind some years previously. Usually, the Nixon stories tend to take a more serious approach, while Dirty Frank's are played with a much lighter tone. The characters were created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint, who drew the first 13 episodes in the book. The remaining episodes were drawn by Simon Coleby and first appeared in 2005-07.

Since I'm just now finishing the year 2000 in my reread and would prefer to read these stories in their original context when I reach that period in a few months' time, I only gave the Mega-City Undercover book a brief scan to confirm the quality and contents. The reproduction is fantastic and it includes introductory pages by Diggle and Williams as well as a nice new cover by Jock. After an initial moment of eyebrow-furrowing over Rebellion's choice to use an umbrella approach to collect the stories, I decided I actually prefer this format to issuing a Low Life-only book. Certainly with only one new story a year, it will be some time before we ever see a second collection, but who knows, perhaps Diggle and Jock will return to Lenny Zero before too much longer and future tales of that ne'er-do-well can also be included.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday, March 19 2009.)

The ABC Warriors: The Third Element

In other news, Rebellion recently released the fifth in a series of slim ABC Warriors collections, this one reprinting the 15-part "Return to Mars" serials under the title The Third Element. We haven't made it to this point in the Thrillpowered Thursday reread, and so I'll save the really juicy-but-sad behind-the-scenes drama that fueled this unhappy storyline until then, and just focus on the book itself.

To be honest, the previous two ABC Warriors books were a little underwhelming for one reason or another, and this one really gives off a glow of failed promise and expectations. When it works, it works incredibly well: the return of Mike McMahon to these characters after twenty-odd years and heaven-only-knows how many style changes is an absolutely fascinating curiosity, and Henry Flint, currently illustrating a Haunted Tank miniseries for Vertigo, turns in some terrific artwork. But Boo Cook's first pro job is frankly a mess, miles removed from what he'd later prove capable of creating, and Liam Sharp apparently abandoned all of his professional tools in favor of two Sharpies and a Bic ballpoint.

Pat Mills' script is almost enough to hold it together, because he's once again running with lunatic ideas and throwing lots of them at the wall in furious sequence. But everything that does catch your imagination here is abandoned too quickly, and each three-episode storyline would have greatly benefitted from an extra week to breathe. On the other hand, three episodes for each piece is somewhat appropriate for a story about three-legged tripod critters on Mars, I suppose.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday, Dec. 11 2008)

Ditko, Flint and Kirby

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Essential Doctor Strange Vol. 1 (Marvel, 2004), Judge Dredd: The Henry Flint Collection (Rebellion, 2008) and Kirby: King of Comics (Abrams, 2008).



I picked this up at the Great Escape in Louisville in the spring for nine bucks, and I have to say, if there's a more mistitled book in the whole "essential" library, I haven't seen it yet. Doctor Strange originally appeared as eight-ten page episodes in Marvel's anthology book Strange Tales, and after a hesitant start over the first three or four shaky installments, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created something genuinely weird and compelling. The visuals are just amazing, and there's a sense of a universe so wild and unrestrained that you're willing to overlook the conventions of 1960s comics, like the talky, cod-Shakespearian dialogue. Nobody says "'tis" as much as Dr. Strange. But there's a great cast, highwire ideas and clever plotting, culminating in a lengthy serial where Strange's two chief villains team up to destroy him. It's genuinely great stuff.

And then, after about 300 pages, Ditko leaves. And while Bill Everett, Roy Thomas and others try their best, what follows is not even remotely essential. I gave up on it, frankly. I'd be much happier with a simple "Complete Ditko" edition of this comic on better paper, because that's the Essential Dr. Strange, not all this extraneous mess. By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, make it so, Marvel!



This is the third of Rebellion's artist-centered Judge Dredd collections. (The others spotlight Cam Kennedy and Carlos Ezquerra.) This one presents about a dozen episodes of varying length by one of Dredd's best modern artists, and I can't find a nit to pick with it. It includes the hilarious "Turkey Shoot" and the fantastic "Flood's Thirteen," which starts as a parody of those Clooney-Pitt heist films before falling apart in a spectacular disaster of teleporters, stolen identities and lobotomised terrorists. Highly recommended!



The short version: Boy, this is good, but I'm unsatisfied, knowing that there is much more out there.

Mark Evanier's Kirby: King of Comics is a gorgeous coffee-table biography of one of the medium's great thinkers and talents. Don't let the appalling cover dissuade you; the interior is as flawlessly designed as you could hope for, and features hundreds of wonderful illustrations of Kirby's work on creations ranging from Captain America to the bulk of 1960s Marvel - pretty much everybody you've heard of other than the handful that Ditko designed. The writing is incisive and paints a real, complete portrait of Kirby, but many of the details that appeal to me as a reader and completist are, due to space limitations, glossed over.

I would love to learn much more than this book provides, and happily, Evanier is in the early stages of a more comprehensive bio. This is a more than adequate placeholder until then, and will surely satisfy most readers, or new fans who'd like to have their eyes pop out at the sight of some of these original sketches, cosmic layouts behind the bizarre visage of Galactus, collages, caricatures and ephemera. Recommended on the understanding that something more essential will one day supplant it.

(Originally published July 10, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)