The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2347: Burn The Freaks? Saying Farewell To ‘Portals And Black Goo’

Since 1977 2000 AD has been the UK’s greatest sci-fi weekly comic, and every week we give you a glimpse inside the new Prog… it’s the Weekly 2000 AD.

This week, it’s time to say goodbye to Portals & Black Goo, yet another great new series that we’ve had over the year of 2000 AD. It’s been intriguing and thrilling, a great concept brought magnificently to the comics page by John Tomlinson and Eoin Coveney. I’m already hoping that we’ll be getting a second series soon.

As for the rest, we have a new Tharg’s 3Riller, Die Hoard by Eddie Robson and Nick Brokenshire. There’s more of the final part of the Kyle Asher trilogy in Judge Dredd: A Fallen Man, more of the strangeness of Azimuth where Dexter is beginning to get to grips with just what’s been happening to Downlode, and of course, we get to see more of Hershey in the thrilling The Cold In The Bones, as Dredd comes to Antarctic City to save the day.

Prog 2347 is out in the UK and on digital on Wednesday 30th August. In the USA things are, of course, different, and you’d be best to insist your local comic shop orders you the regular monthly bundle of Progs through the distributor. Meningitis recovery continues for dear wifey. It’s not the easiest of things. Add a load of grief in there over the events of earlier this summer and it’s all very difficult here. But we are getting there, slowly and surely.

Okay, enough… let’s have a look inside…

First of all, let’s have a look at the latest Art Stars winner, another one of 2000 AD‘s unique things, the contest to do a single page tale of Dredd, open to all online, with the winner turning up, paid, in the Prog. Here’s the winner, Alan Kerr, who I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of in the Prog sometime soon, because this one’s a really great single page…

 

JUDGE DREDD: A FALLEN MAN – PART 6 – by Ken Niemand and Tom Foster, colurs by Chris Blythe, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Part six of a truly great Dredd thriller, as the net closes in on Kyle Asher, the ex-Judge, ex-Titan inmate, now somewhere in between the good and the bad of MC-1. Is he a mob killer who Dredd’s going to bring in, or is he on the side of the Justice Department, working his way into the criminal gangs to break them apart from the inside as an informer? Or is he both? And if so, how’s Dredd going to deal with him? (Okay, okay, it’s Dredd, we know how he’s going to deal with it. Brutally.)

 

Dredd’s piecing it together, going after the young girl Asher’s been looking after, the daughter of the victim that sent him to Titan, the way he’s working out his guilt.

Like I say, a fine, fine Dredd. The way Niemand and Foster have worked together on the whole Asher trilogy has been classic Dredd. And this end part isn’t letting up at all.

 

PORTALS & BLACK GOO: NIGHT SHIFT – PART 7 – FINAL PART – by John Tomlinson and Eoin Coveney, colours by Jim Boswell, letters by Simon Bowland

Kroy’s out from the Dybbuk’s parallel dimension, Nona’s sorted out her stalker problem. Time for a little bit of relaxation and recovery perhaps?

It does mean Nona asks a question that you can’t help feel is setting up the second series of this one…

 

And then there’s what’s been going on with Magister Dain. He’s convinced there’s bad things coming, “an ancient fire rages anew in the land, a scourge that threatens to consume all who tread the occult paths.”

And that’s the reason he made that phone call to his dear brother. Who’s the brother? Well, the clues have all been there all through, but let’s just say it’s a character from deep in British comics history and a nice surprise from Tomlinson to end the series.

All I can say, now that it’s come to an end of part one – when are we going to be seeing series 2? It’s definitely done more than enough to warrant a second series, another wonderfully original strip in a comic that’s been full of them recently.

 

HERSHEY: THE COLD IN THE BONES – PART II – EPISODE 6 – by Rob Williams and Simon Fraser, letters by Simon Bowland

It’s all moving to the end now. The end of ‘The Cold In The Bones’ and, maybe, just maybe, the end for Barbara Hershey. Although, Hershey does live something of a charmed life sometimes and sometimes it’s a case of never say never.

After all, we thought she’d died the first time. We thought she’d never come back to MC-1. Both, by the end of this episode, have happened. Surely that’s not a spoiler – we all knew that when Dredd came as the cavalry, we’d find a link back to MC-1 and the Enceladus problem, meaning Barbara would be back in her city once more.

Sure, Joe’s not exactly happy about that but, as normal, Hershey’s got the perfect comeback for him…

 

It is, as you’d expect by now, a little masterpiece in five pages of tonal art from Fraser and crisp plotting and dialogue from Williams.

Hey, there’s even time for a gag –

 

See, Dredd might be a fascist bastard but at least he appreciates a good dog. So he can’t be all bad, right?

So, is it the end for Barbara? Frankly, who knows? Part of me would like it that she’s still around. But a bigger part of me thinks that having her still alive at the end of this would be a little bit too much. The thing about the Dreddverse that makes it different from every other universe is that death happens, everyone here ages in real-time, a year in Dredd comics is a year in Mega-City One.

Hershey, through all the three series, has been outstanding stuff. The sort of thing that deserves the proper ending and I’m here each week just loving what Williams and Fraser are doing.

 

THARG’S 3RILLERS: DIE HOARD – PART 1 – by Eddie Robson and Nick Brokenshire, letters by Annie Parkhouse

We’re in the 22nd Century, in the aftermath of a brutal war with an alien race called the Imishio. One huge impact of the war was that humanity’s data-storage systems were attacked, as well as libraries, museums, and archives. Vast swathes of culture and history have been lost.

So, when a team of scavengers/salvage experts go into a dead man’s house and find enormous amounts of historical data, analogue and digital, it’s an important find.

 

But the last living relative doesn’t care. She wants the house sold and the contents gone.

And then they find the locked door. And things go very bad from there.

As with all these 3Riller 3-parters, the first part has a lot of heavy lifting to get through to set it all up and make what comes after. It’s the same here, with the first page seemingly there just to give us the background to the war and what looks like a staggeringly obvious Chekhov’s Gun of that Propaganda virus vial that gets dropped as he dies.

But the concept is a neat one, focusing on the forgotten aspect of wars through history – the loss of knowledge that has always occurred when a city is sacked or destroyed is invaluable after all. This one’s a slow grower but it’s also one thats gets a jolt on that final page. A decent start to a 3Riller. Let’s see where it goes from here.

 

AZIMUTH: THE STRANGER – PART 5 – by Dan Abnett and Tazio Bettin, colours by Matt Soffe, letters by Jim Campbell

Dexter faces off with one of the Lords of the New Flesh, as the continuing mystery of what Azimuth is gets slowly revealed.

Why is Azimuth sealed off? Why does no one have any idea of the concept of ‘outside’? And what do you think’s going to happen when Dexter shows the Lord just what reality is?

 

Deeper and deeper we go, the concepts of reality in a digital world are explored, Tazio Bettin really does get to show off all of his skills here – and there are plenty of them.

When it started, the idea of yet another new series in a year full of excellent new strips was wonderful. And Azimuth really played into the strange and mysterious new realm. The twist that it was/might be Downlode in another form, all the cause of the rogue AI that Dexter’s been on the run from for so long now, well that was a neatly played trick. Of course, the question now is just how Abnett’s devious mind’s going to resolve all this. Should be fun to see.