The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2365: Alien Invasion, What On Earth Are We Going to Do?

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.

As the cold bites hard into the bones as we get into January, things are hotting up here in the Prog, with five strips to beat those January blues. Starting it all off, we have the second episode of the ‘Defund the Judges‘ storyline that looks like it’s going to send ripples through Dredd for many years to come – ‘A Better World ‘- where Judge Maitland’s revolutionary plan to fight crime finds things are never so easy as to simply work.

After Dredd, we have more chills in the new Thistlebone series, the aliens finally come to Earth in Enemy Earth,  and we’re heading towards endings for both Feral & Foe and The Devil’s Railroad – all perfect examples of the breadth of storytelling you’ll find in the pages of 2000 AD.

Prog #2365 is out now in the UK. You North American readers should get to their local comic shops and demand they get the four-weekly Prog bundles in – you really are missing out on a treat! January finds us realising that wintering in the UK is a bad, bad idea. Yeah, family’s great and all that, but damn, it would be nice to do the family thing somewhere your breath doesn’t freeze.

 

JUDGE DREDD: A BETTER WORLD – PART 2 – by Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Yep, still calling this as what could be the most important Dredd of this or many years.

It’s defund the police time for Mega-City One as Maitland’s revolutionary plan of educate and build-up rather than beat them down and lock them up proves to actually be working – working so well that they’re expanding it to another 10 sectors.

But of course, there’s plenty out there who really don’t want this to work, plenty with their own skin in this particular game, inside and outside the Justice Department.

You see it right there on the first couple of pages, as Robert Glenn, “ordinary guy just like you,” puts the boot into the trials that go against everything he knows, everything he wants from MC-1, he simply won’t believe it could ever work – “fake news” indeed. Yes, satire. Lots of satire.

He’s not alone in railing against it. It just happens that he has a hell of a lot of money to fight it. And money… well, money can buy you access and people…

 

Oh yes, you just knew that Hernandez was going to be neck-deep in all this from the moment you saw him in the first episode. But the reveal isn’t spoilt one little bit by the fact you saw it coming, such is the way all concerned here are pulling this off.

And that’s not even really touching on what’s going on with the threat of Major Domo, once of the Red Queen’s organisation but now pitched up in MC-1 with something in mind.

Damn, this is superb. Williams and Wyatt have been percolating this for so long that it’s had all the time it needs to really have the sense of something big, something important. But it’s by no means your normal Dredd epic, playing far more to the political, the social, the hard satire that’s been such a part of Dredd for so long.

And then there’s Henry Flint and what he’s doing on every page here. There’s a difference to his art here, a changing of how he’s working, not a huge change but a really effective one. On top of that, we have the decision to base the pages on a 3 x 5 panel grid system, something that stretches things across the page and creates so much storytelling to allow the writer’s to really do great things. He’s not rigidly sticking to the 15-panels thing, but he is sticking to a three-tier look, with every page having at least one tier of five panels. It just looks and feels tight and tense, a brilliant example of how much a great artist can add to an already great story.

 

ENEMY EARTH: BOOK THREE – PART 6 – by Cavan Scott and Luke Horsman, letters by Simon Bowland

Aliens have come to Earth and they’re the aliens who started prepping the Earth for invasion by twisting and mutating all the fauna and flora to decimate the human population. And now they’re back and headed directly for where Zoe, Jules, and the rest are hunkered down in possibly the only place with any chance of beating back the mutations.

It’s aliens on one side and mutants on the other, closing in… except Jules’ has a mutation of his own going on and it’s a completely different mutation, one that might be the saving of them all…

 

But then again, it’s only roughly the halfway point of this one and it’s all a bit too soon to be getting finale-like moments like this. So I reckon there’s going to be plenty more twists and turns before the end of this.

Sure, it’s all a bit rushed and there’s very much a sense of things working out very conveniently for little reason – Jules’ mutation being the classic example of something that happened without reason and appears to be able to do whatever is needed for the plot. But even so, it’s all a rather entertaining thing with some really great looking, very kinetic, very different sort of art from Horsman.

 

THE DEVIL’S RAILROAD – PART 13 – PENULTIMATE PART – by Peter Milligan and Rufus Dayglo, colours by Jose Villarrubia, letters by Jim Cambell

Two parts to go now and The Devil’s Railroad just isn’t letting up in making our heroes’ lives absolute miseries. We have Palamon undergoing death after death, in the dying chair, but that’s just not enough for Sister White’s revenge for Palamon’s killing of her beloved son. So… just what could be punishment enough for Sister White? And just how terrible is that going to be for Palamon?

You can bet it’s going to have something to do with Constance and his new-born baby girl, freshly delivered last Prog by Sister White’s other, not-so-beloved son, the one who’s determined to marry Constance – who might have no other way to get out of this alive and with her baby girl.

This one’s always had the potential to go very, very dark and, thus far, it’s avoided it with a mix of Milligan’s storytelling and Dayglo’s art taking us just the right side of misery and always keeping things light and even slightly wacky at times – even Palamon’s soul selling and the multiple death’s last Prog were handled with a bit of lightness to it.

 

Now though, well things do seem to be taking a distinctly horrific turn. Nothing completely horrible yet, but there’s a darkness closing in, a real sense of all is not going to go well for this pair. After all, Romeo and Juliet wasn’t exactly one with a happy ending, was it?

But as the end rushes towards us and things get distinctly dark, it’s testament to just how good both Milligan and Dayglo are that they can pivot this way and do it this well.

 

THISTLEBONE: THE DULE TREE – PART 2 – by TC Eglington and Simon Davis, letters by Simon Bowland

Back to the movie set for ‘The Dule Tree,’ retelling an incident in Harrowvale in the 18th Century witch trials, and it’s no surprise that things aren’t going too well.

But straight from the off, Davis just drenches this one in blood and nightmarish imagery…

 

But it only gets worse…

 

Oh yes, thanks to Simon Davis for putting that image in all our heads.

We meet Callum, the screenwriter, and one of the witches, Yvonne, and get a bit of an idea what’s going on with the film. But not too much, not yet. Last episode it was all about introductions and the present-day, now it’s all about the past and the movie set, where Davis just gets the vibe of the ’70s just right, creepy and just that little bit freaky.

But there’s no rush to get anywhere with Thistlebone, and that’s just the way I love it. Instead, we’re getting chills down the spine already, dark deeds and gruesome moments are the order of the day here after all – and it’s something that Eglington and Davis do so well.

 

FERAL & FOE: BAD GODESBERG – PART 13 – Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, letters by Jim Campbell

The fight is on, as the handy band of misfits have to battle their way to the top of the Godesberg ziggurat or the world dies. [“You say that,” says Bode, necromage and reluctant warrior, “but it’s, like, a lot of stairs.”]

And all because some moron buried the undead skull of Sloke right underneath the place and that same Sloke is now breaking through into the world. There’s malignkind all over the place and only a few of our band of not-so-happy warriors in the way. And they’re finding it hard going…

 

Yes, another rather frantic episode of Feral & Foe sees it all really kicking off with this fantasy comedy, with Abnett and Elson just showing us all a damn fine time.