The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2366: No Happy Ending For Those On The Devil’s Railroad

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 sees two strips ending – we have a very downbeat, heartbreaking ending for two young lovers in The Devil’s Railroad and the nightmare of Godesberg ends for Feral & Foe, only for a whole new idea of bad to rear its head.

 

Alongside those two coming to an end, there’s the continuation of the incendiary changes happening in Mega-City One in Judge Dredd: A Better World as Maitland’s mission to change the law gains traction – and enemies. Seriously, this is one that will be talked about for so, so long.

Then we have Enemy Earth, barrelling towards its conclusion with the aliens behind the flora and fauna mutations down on Earth, and more incredible chills take hold in the nightmarish folk horror of Thistlebone.

Prog 2366 came out on Wednesday 24th January 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! And yes, I am very late getting this one out to you, my many apologies. I’ll be taking myself out back and having some strong words with myself.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD: A BETTER WORLD – PART 3 – by Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Again, this will be the most important Dredd of many a year, Williams and Wyatt combine to give us a story of change, real change, the whole defund the Judges thing going on – and all given rich, incredible, quite amazing life on the page by Henry Flint and possibly his finest work yet, work that truly sets him up as THE definitive Dredd artist of this generation.

Seriously, this one is one you shouldn’t miss.

So, Maitland’s big idea, the whole defund the Judges thing, is actually working. Her sector 304 is seeing real results and crime is dropping, things are changing – with the result that it’s now being expanded to another 10 sectors.

Of course, this brings with it its own problems – But of course, there’s plenty out there who really don’t want this to work, Judges included…

 

And there’s plenty around with their own skin in this particular game, inside and outside the Justice Department, pro-Justice, pro-change, and they’re all lining up to make their own points, utterly fixed in the views, hating the idea of change. Plus you have the issue of Judge Hernandez leaking info to the media mogul Robert Glenn to allow him to stoke the fires.

Frankly, it’s a damn powder keg and all it’s going to take is that one thing to go wrong in Sector 305 to really set things off. This episode – something kicks off.

And that’s without the whole thing of Major Domo, formerly the Red Queen’s man, in MC-1 and recruiting for who knows what – although there is that massive smart contract out on Maitland still to be claimed… something Dredd’s well aware of…

So, we have absolutely brilliant satire of modern-day antagonistic politics and intractable viewpoints, we have the real-world liberal versus conservative notions of law and order and punishment versus education and rehabilitation. And all of this political manoeuvring going on has turned this into an absolute nail-biter of a thriller.

And then, of course, as you can see on every panel of this one, we have the amazing work of Henry Flint. It is career highpoint artwork in a career where there’s already been plenty of highs.

A Better World really is everything I was hoping it would be – punchy, political, satirical, not a hint of action and absolutely not needing it to make this totally thrilling and the most compelling tale of Mega-City One in so long.

 

ENEMY EARTH: BOOK THREE – PART 7 – by Cavan Scott and Luke Horsman, letters by Simon Bowland

With the mutated fauna and flora banging down the walls and the aliens that are meant to have caused those mutations in the building, things seem to be coming to a head here in Enemy Earth.

We’ve got the freshly mutated Jules being used by General Huang as their last line of defence, Jules’ dad trying to stop that happening, their protector droid Nanni under someone else’s control, and all-out war going on outside. So yes, things are pretty busy right now here.

But suddenly we get that little bit of a tease that all’s not as it seems…

 

But before we work out just what’s happening there, there’s the small matter of General Huang’s plan for his new world order coming out – yep, you could always tell that he was going to be the bad guy here, no matter what’s going on with the aliens and their mutations.

So, we’re on the way to the finale and things are moving fast, with Luke Horsman’s artwork still impressing all the way through, a different sort of style than anything else in the Prog right now. Sure, it might be a little divisive and some won’t like it, but I’m a fan for the difference here.

 

THE DEVIL’S RAILROAD – PART 14 – FINAL PART – by Peter Milligan and Rufus Dayglo, colours by Jose Villarrubia, letters by Jim Cambell

Well, it started off as a politically charged thing, another 2000 AD strip that leaned hard into real-world issues through a sci-fi filter. Then it seemed to back off somewhat from the darkness contained in the premise and went for some over-the-top action where, no matter what happened to split our lovers, Constance and Palamon, up we had a sense that it wasn’t going to be enough, or serious enough to really affect things.

Well, not any longer. As the weeks have gone on and we’ve been building to the end of this journey along the Devil’s Railroad, things have been getting darker again.

 

Now that we’re at the end though… well, this one’s just gone absolutely bleak and brutal, with an ending that knocks the wind out of your sails. Downbeat? Oh, this is the sort of downbeat that will break your heart.

It’s 14 parts and done now. I won’t give away anything of the ending away more than you’ll see in the art here but Milligan and Dayglo have given us a definitive end to it all here. And, like I said last time, we should really have expected this one to end badly for all concerned – after all it was a Romeo & Juliet style tale and that certainly didn’t end all that well for all involved.

 

THISTLEBONE: THE DULE TREE – PART 3 – by TC Eglington and Simon Davis, letters by Simon Bowland

The village of Harrowvale has horror deep in the ground, whether it’s the horrors of the 18th Century witch trials or more recent horrors that we’ve read about in the last two Thistlebone tales, where the madness of the place seems to have a way of getting into people’s heads and making them do terrible things.

Here, we’re back in the ’70s and there’s a film crew in the village, making something overblown and drenched in blood about those same witch trials.

 

We’ve already met some of the film’s cast, both in the present day and back in the 70s and we’ve seen that things are not going to run too smoothly for the cast and crew.

Here, we get a little more, as screenwriter Callum and one of the actors playing a witch, Yvonne, are off out for a quiet drink down the village pub. But extravagant ’70s film types and the locals propping up the bar are just oil and water.

So, where’s it going? Honestly, I don’t know. But as with the last couple of series, it’s not really about the narrative unfolding so much as it’s all about Eglington and Davis just enveloping us in mood, tone, and then letting things get creepy and weird. And that’s just what’s happening here. There’s that delicious sense once more of things going dark and mysterious, strangeness around the corner, madness around the corner. We know it’s coming we just don’t know how or why – and that creates a gloriously exciting sense of anticipation here. And that’s what makes Thistlebone work so well.

 

FERAL & FOE: BAD GODESBERG – PART 14 – FINAL PART – Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, letters by Jim Campbell

Another series of Feral & Foe comes to a close and it’s been, as have they all, a load of fun. Abnett and Elson really do have a handle on how to mix up the humour and the high fantasy, and it’s something they do get very right every time.

Here, we have a very quick ending to Bad Godesberg, in that it’s all over and done with by the end of page 2. The mysterious golem grabs Slock’s skull and just… vanishes.

That’s it. Problem over, world saved, and none of our heroes have any real idea why or how.

 

After all, they had no clue what the golem was in the first place and now the things disappeared. But the mystery only gets stranger – because the golem managed to disappear without magick, and that just isn’t possible.

Or is it? Depends where the golem came from really. And all that leads us into the final couple of pages and the set-up for the next series, complete with a new danger from well outside everyone’s idea of what their world’s like. And it’s a real doozy of a twist in Feral & Foe to build on what we’ve seen and enjoyed so far. But that’s one for next time.