Indigo Prime: Perfect Day

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Indigo Prime: Perfect Day (Rebellion, 2014).


Every once in an agonizingly long while, we get a new appearance from one of my favorite comic series. It's a very weird mindblower of a concept called Indigo Prime, written by John Smith and appearing in the pages of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic, 2000 AD. The sci-fi weirdness concerns a busy bunch of interdimensional troubleshooters protecting the multiverse from existential and bizarre threats while punching the clock, processing work orders, and watching walls of television with millions of channels across the whole of time and space.

After a 1991 curtain call, the series returned in 2008 and again in 2011 (stories collected in 2013's book version, Anthropocalypse), leaving the faithful and the frustrated anxiously waiting for more. Happily, they're back in action right now in the pages of 2000 AD, a couple of weeks in to what I believe is an eight-part story. It's called "Perfect Day" and it's illustrated by Lee Carter, and it's every bit as wonderful and unpredictable as we'd hoped.

Carter, who had designed the series' current lead characters for what everybody thought was a different series entirely - that's one of Indigo Prime's tricks, popping in and out of different titles altogether - has a tough job in following Edmund Bagwell, the artist who made the 2011 stories so beautiful. Bagwell is a hard act to follow, but Carter, who gets better and better with every new art job, seems up to the task. As was expected, Smith has been throwing a lot of deliciously weird imagery at Carter to realize - time tunnels, taxidermist-stuffed monarchs, Roman legions, that aforementioned wall of television monitors - and, two weeks in, Carter has been nailing it and throwing in some unusual Easter eggs. The 2011 stories showed that there was a strange and malicious force called The Nilhist hiding behind the walls of the agents' reality. We're getting hints here and there that it might be slowly breaking through. Meanwhile, agents Redman and Dak have been escorting a very old Nazi superscientist from his dimension to Prime's base of operations at the center of time. They're probably right not to trust him one teeny bit...

As I've said before, Indigo Prime would definitely benefit, going forward, from more one-offs and short tales letting us know more about the players before things get too weird and ragnarok starts thundering down again. It's interesting that Danny Redman and Unthur Dak have become the series' leads over the characters who were more established in the original run. Those few that have turned up, like the popular Max Winwood and Ishmael Cord, have been relegated to supporting players, suggesting just how very busy this agency is. I imagine that Basalt, Foundation, Fervent, Lobe, and all those other characters from the late '80s are still working cases, just not ones that we're seeing presently.

While I'm glad that the series is back for a couple of months, I genuinely wish that it hadn't been two and a half totally dry years. With a cast as large as any in comics, surely we could have had an occasional one-shot featuring one of the series' minor players or old stars in place of a Future Shock, or a short story in place of one of these often tedious three-week Tharg's 3rillers. Five pages in the annual December 100-page issue isn't too much to ask, surely? "Perfect Day" is great and promising, but Smith and 2000 AD's editor should definitely agree that, where this series is concerned, more is definitely much, much more. Highly recommended with the hopes of extra weirdness and character development to come.

Indigo Prime: Anthropocalypse

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


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

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

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

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

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

Apart from introducing readers to the weird world, there are a couple of big actions for the agency to take. There's the struggle to capture a dimension-jumping bewilderbeast, and the extraction/rescue of an agent from a universe that has reverse-engineered his time travel tech. If there's a legitimate complaint to be made, it's that perhaps a little more time might have been spent on character development than on fantastica; the agency's director Major Arcana, sort of a Kirby/Steranko-age Nick Fury, dominates the proceedings, and an imagineer named Mariah Kiss is instantly memorable, but the series would definitely benefit, going forward, from more one-offs and short tales letting us know more about the players before things get too weird and ragnarok starts thundering down again.

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

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

Indigo Prime: Everything and More

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Indigo Prime: Everything and More (Rebellion, 2011).

Of all the deliciously high-concept series and serials that have appeared in the pages of 2000 AD, John Smith's Indigo Prime, which weaved its way in and out of its own and a few other stories from 1986-91, is just about the wildest. Briefly, it's about an organization located at the nexus point of all the countless parallel universes and is responsible for policing them from the reality-altering damage caused by things like time travel or breaking-the-laws-of-physics experiments. Basically, if the scientists of your world have split enough atoms to cause jackbooted reptilian Nazis from the Earth's core to emerge and conquer the Roman Empire, these are the guys who come and fix things. For a price.

The original run of Indigo Prime, despite one or two stories that rank among my favorites told in the medium of comics, was a mindbender of a series, with its high concepts frequently told in a deliberately obscure and challenging way. Part of the thrill was guessing what was happening one or two minutes away from the action, learning the background of the action and the relationships of the handful of characters that we met. A much, much larger cast was always hinted at, and even higher stakes suggested, but as Smith retired the concept in 1991, these were left to readers' imaginations. (I discussed the series in much greater detail over at my Thrillpowered Thursday blog a few weeks ago.)

A 2008 Smith-written serial called Dead Eyes revealed, stunningly, that agents of Indigo Prime were still at large. It's been far too long a wait, but September saw the formal return of Indigo Prime in a new four-part adventure that, as patiently as the mercurial and restless Smith can manage it, eases new readers into the incredibly weird and thunderously wild world of this bunch. This reintroduction - actually, it's the closest thing to an introduction that the series has ever seen, as they originally just sort of snuck in like infiltrators and weirded up the place - ran in 2000 AD issues 1750-1753. A second story began in issue 1756 and, at the time that I am posting this blog, is a couple of weeks into its run. Digital copies of these comics, as PDFs or CBZs, can be purchased from Clickwheel or from better comic shops.

Smith's way of easing us into things is to show us the cataclysmic destruction of one reality as a result of Science Gone Wrong. Agents Winwood and Cord, whom we met in the original run, arrive, but this time they are accompanied by a first for the series, an audience identification figure, to whom the characters can explain what the heck is going on. Unfortunately, the in-at-the-deep-end approach is not working for Indigo Prime's newest recruit, and so a gentler way is called for, courtesy of a curious old friend of the new recruit, and two agents who can manipulate dreams.

Settling the new fellow in is just one of the agency's problems. Two agents have just returned from one universe that has been decimated by a planet-killing fungus, and in a prison at the heart of a star, there's some old villain cunningly plotting his escape, and talking directly through the fourth wall to the reader. If this doesn't thrill you and leave you wanting more while simultaneously ordering you to reread every page, something's just downright wrong with you.

Smith is ably assisted by one of the best artists with whom he's ever been teamed. Edmund Bagwell, in turn, has been possessed by a spirit of Jack Kirby the likes of which all of that great artist's many acolytes have just been trying to grasp. With planetary extinctions, crazy phantasmagoria, double-page spreads of impossible technology crackling in the void between stars and a sense of bewildering excitement, Bagwell has knocked this work completely out of the park. His design sketchbook must be twelve inches thick by now.

With a mix of older characters and new ones for new readers to meet - one of whom, in a moment certain to cause double-takes, is a notorious criminal from our world - this first story is certainly busy and full of things to demand readers' attention. But, and I say this as honestly and as objectively as I can, the payoff is completely enormous. The last time that I looked so forward to seeing what would happen next in an ongoing series, it was Grant Morrison's celebrated run on DC's JLA more than a decade ago.

2000 AD's editor has been characteristically tight-lipped about what the future holds for the series, and whether we can expect far more cosmos-exploding fun in 2012 after the second story of this too-short return wraps in December, but I've got my fingers crossed. The story's title, "Everything and More," is remarkably apt. It is truly everything that I wanted from Indigo Prime's return, and a whole lot more. Highly recommended, and I hope it runs forever.

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.

The Best of Tharg's Future Shocks

Speaking of Tharg's Future Shocks, in a nice bit of timing, we hit their return in this reread [over at my Thrillpowered Thursday blog -- grant] just as I finished Rebellion's new collection of several dozen classic ones. The title stretches the truth ever so slightly: rather than somebody's subjective take on the actual best one-offs from the comic, excepting the ones by Alan Moore which have already been compiled, this is a collection of episodes from four of 2000 AD's best-known writers. So it contains a pile of John Smith Shocks, a majority of Peter Milligan episodes, all but one of Grant Morrison's offerings ("Candy and the Catchman" is omitted), and everything that Neil Gaiman ever wrote for the comic.

Certainly the resulting book is uneven and choppy, but there are some real gems to be found in its pages. Grant Morrison's early attempts at channelling Alan Moore are pretty revealing, and not just from an archaeological standpoint. "The Shop That Sold Everything" is really funny, even if the end isn't so much a twist as it is an inevitability. I've also always enjoyed John Smith's "A Change of Scenery," which was the first appearance of some of his Indigo Prime characters, among many other strips in this book.

Seeing characters like Indigo Prime and Ulysses Sweet here actually makes me think that the book's only real flaw is that it didn't collect the five or six one-off adventures of Joe Black by Kelvin Gosnell from the early eighties. That's just quibbling, of course, those are outside the perview of the book, but one of the many things that did make 2000 AD interesting in the early 80s was the existence of characters who only showed up in one-offs or very short series. Dr. Dibworthy and Abelard Snazz were compiled in the big Moore book from a couple of years ago, and it's a real shame Tharg doesn't have any characters like that today.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday, Feb. 19 2009.)

Science Fiction edition with Leatherjack and Star Wars

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



Leatherjack is the story of an assassin, working thousands of years in the future for a disgusting crime lord and employed to retrieve a book which unlocks human consciousness, and which is in danger of being destroyed, along with all the other books on a library planet, in a galactic war.

It sounds agreeably engaging, but it all somehow fails to gel. We never get to know any of the characters, but those we do meet just seem like templates from John Smith's playbook - depraved dictators, foppish killers, observers watching from the sidelines seeing events spiral out of control and saying "no no no no." Add in a climax in which an ancient power rises to wipe out the technology of the warfleets that threaten it, and the whole thing feels like a longer, shallower incarnation of Smith and Marshall's earlier, excellent Firekind. And what are we to make of the comedic Spinster Empire, and its space-faring censorships, who are amusing, but seem to have wandered in from an entirely different strip altogether? Not really recommended.




I guess everybody over the age of 32 remembers that period before The Empire Strikes Back, when George Lucas was licensing out the job of telling Star Wars stories to just about everybody. Even if you don't recall the details, you remember how you could follow the adventures of Luke Skywalker and company in Marvel Comics, in novels like Splinters of the Mind's Eye, on TV in The Star Wars Holiday Special, and in a syndicated newspaper strip.

Frankly, I'd forgotten about the strip until I found a used copy of this at the Book Nook and realised that the unusual panel layout inside had to have come from reformatted newspaper comics. A little research at a Star Wars Wiki (called [groan] Wookiepedia) informs me that the strips in this book were written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Al Williamson, and originally ran from Feb. 1982 to Jan. 1983, and which were later colorized, reformatted and run by Dark Horse. This comic series was called Classic Star Wars. This, "The Rebel Storm," is one of at least five books which compile those many Dark Horse reprints.

The strips themselves are great fun, classic space adventure very much in the Flash Gordon mode, without all of the ponderous Jedi mythology that would later weigh the films down, and without all the overanalyzed counting-Stormtrooper-helmets debates on milporn and "canon" that makes the fandom so off-putting. These are just darn fun stories, told by a veteran like Goodwin who really made the characters shine and came up with some very clever situations. Also amusing, in retrospect: the presence, however tame, of a Luke-Han-Leia love triangle also totally shows up Lucas's claim that he'd always known Luke and Leia were siblings.

I'd totally buy a proper collection of the strips as they originally appeared. You'd think that in a world where you can buy geegaws ranging from every possible remastering of the movies down to short stories about those bounty hunters in Empire that didn't actually do anything beyond standing around posing for the action figure people, you could get some nice hardback collections of the strips like Titan does with British newspaper comics, but these bastardized, reformatted versions are all that's available. Recommended for people who enjoyed the colorized version of Casablanca.

(Originally posted April 09, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)