The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2367: Is Dredd Riding A Wave Of Change In Mega-City One?

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.

 

Okay, here we go with a new Prog — and there’s two new strips this time — a return for Alex De Campi and Eduardo Ocana‘s epic space opera Full Tilt Boogie and a new Tharg’s 3Riller tale by Paul Cornell and Laura Helsby with an exploration of the bizarre world of The English Astronaut.

Alongside those debutants. there’s the continuation of the incendiary changes in Mega-City One happening 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. And we also get the sci-fi thrills of Enemy Earth and the absolute chill-you-to-the-bone folk horror of Thistlebone.

Prog 2367 comes out on Wednesday 31 Jan in the UK. You North American readers should get to their local comic shops and demand they get the 4-weekly Prog bundles in – you really are missing out on a treat! Well, last week I was well late with the Prog preview and this week I’m not quite as bad. Not quite. But I am really cutting it close, right up to the wire, last-minute stuff. right the way up to the wire and all that. I really am going to have to have a serious word with myself if this keeps happening.

 

 

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

Change has come to Sector 304, and Dredd’s just not sure what he feels about it – as we get to see on another absolute masterpiece of an opening page there from Henry Flint with Williams and Wyatt’s words over the top of it. It just sets the tone and sets it hard, perfectly, with Dredd questioning what Maitland’s experiment is doing to his idea of the law – after all, it’s no longer as simple as break the law and you pay the price any more.

The greatness of the first page is there in so many ways but chiefly it comes down to a couple of things. First, having Dredd reflect on it this way puts it all into perspective, summarises the entire argument for us, crystallises it in our (and his) head and makes it so easy to understand, empathise even, with those who are so against something like this. Sure, they might be wrong, but you can see from this just why they think the way they think. So, there’s the sort of writing that does that whilst keeping the tone and the mood and the tension so good. And the second thing… well, that would be this…

 

Damn, Henry Flint is doing career-defining work on this one. It’s just seemingly effortlessly beautiful stuff that Flint’s doing here. Not effortless of course, but it’s perfection on a Dredd page. And I could have picked any blow-up of any page to get the same point across. It’s just… wow.

As for what’s going on here, Dredd’s come to Sector 304 to fill Maitland in on the fact that Major Domo, ex-aide/second in command to The Red Queen is in the City, which is surely something to do with the bounty that’s still on Maitland’s head. Isn’t it?

Still, Maitland’s got far too much shit to deal with right now to even take a breath to deal with that sort of thing…

 

She’s got pro- and anti-protests for what she’s doing going off all over, all whipped up into a frenzy by the types of assholes who run the sorts of news media sites that we’d never be dumb enough to listen to here and now – right? Oh, wait… yep, Dredd’s always been somewhere unafraid of throwing a hell of a lot of satire with sci-fi mirroring the worst of the problems of the world the readers live in, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a hell of a lot of it in the defund the Judges storyline.

So, on the one side, Maitland’s plan is working and crime is down. Against her, agitprop media outlets like Glenn News spewing hatred and division with a biased agenda, citizens missing the whole damn point of it all and taking to the streets to commit violence in the name of Maitland’s plan, and Judges resistant to all she’s trying to do,.

Meanwhile, as Dredd pointed out, there’s even Judge Hernandez, one of Maitland’s biggest supporters on the Council, who’s making a political move out of betraying her. But Dredd only knows the smallest bit of that and has no idea – yet – of the fact that Hernandez is in Glenn’s pocket on this one, feeding him info all the while, conspiring to bring Maitland and her vision down.

Yep. to say I’m enjoying this one is really underselling it. It’s a great, great Dredd and I hope it rolls on and on, slow build after slow build, where we get to see all the political plays unfold.

 

THARG’S 3RILLERS: THE ENGLISH ASTRONAUT – by Paul Cornell and Laura Helsby, colours by Matt Soffe, letters by Jim Campbell

And now, as they say, for something completely different. And this one really is different – different narrative, different art style, different everything. And remember, when you read all those gatekeepers of 2000 AD telling you they hate this – and I think they might – different is not only good, it’s absolutely essential in an anthology as forward-thinking and essential as 2000 AD.

So, there’s the British Experimental Space Programme back in 1963 and they’ve uncovered a threat to the future – specifically that something in 1977 happens to the British future, and again in 1989 and 2005. Then, from 2016, their future starts to shut down completely.

Well, the big plan is to strap plucky Major Thomas Anderson into the injection seat, pump him full of a cocktail of experimental demat drugs to make him ‘psychedelically navigate time and space, check out the scene and get back in time for tea.’ He’s off to 2024 and that’s when things get very, very strange.

 

Yep, we’re talking meta-fiction, editor’s voices where editor’s voices aren’t allowed, captions that aren’t allowed, and Major Anderson landing and finding things all a bit of a Future Shock.

He’s altering time in his personal space and it’s all going to get even weirder as he finds himself in front of a certain type of shop that many of us will be very familiar with as comic fans.

Yes, it’s all very meta and it’s all very good for me. The sort of playing around with things that this sort of short three-parter can do so well, inhabiting the idea space of all the best Future Shocks and Time Twisters of old, I think Cornell and Helmsby have a great thing going here.

 

FULL TILT BOOGIE: BOOK 2 – PART 1 – by Alex De Campi and Eduardo Ocana, colours by Eva De La Cruz, letters by Annie Parkhouse

It started out as a Regened one-off and then graduated to the Prog for a longer first book, and now Full Tilt Boogie is back to give you a fast and furious bit of entertaining sci-fi action with book 2.

“If you don’t already know Full Tilt Boogie, here’s the run-down from the contents page of this Prog – ‘Teenager Tee is a bounty hunter/hired help, operating out of her ship, the Full Tilt Boogie, and assisted by her grandmother and a cat with transdimensional abilities. Tasked with rescuing Prince Ifan of the Luxine Empire from debtors’ prison, she crash-landed on a moon where she discovered a resurrected Anubite warrior, Black Dog – one of the Luxine’s most hated enemies. Luxine knights were dispatched in pursuit, including Ifan’s sister Nix, who was injured as she refused to carry out Luxine’s orders. While Tee and co flew off in search of safe harbour and a hospital, Luxine is preparing for war…”

There you go, you get the idea – it’s full-on space opera with a diverse and interesting cast of characters. That first adventure was a hell of a lot of fun, Ocana’s artwork lovely and light of line, beautifully coloured, creating a universe full of intriguing characters and scenarios, world building done real well.

This time round, we’re with Tee and the expanded crew of the FTB as they make landing on Tanzagar. Although the welcome isn’t exactly what they’d hoped for – ‘Welcome to Tanzagar, and how will you be paying for your visit?’ – their request for a hospital is met with far more hopeful answers…

 

Yes, who the hell charges to keep people alive indeed? Well, that would be a suitable dig at the US I’d imagine from De Campi. And quite rightly so.

So, having caught up with Tee and the FTB, we head off to the Luxine Empire, in a beautifully done double-pager from Ocana, showing off all the beauty of his artwork, where the Luxine are preparing for all-out war ‘against the unaligned planets for harbouring the anubite menace’ – and yes, that’s the Anubite menace that Tee et al are harbouring right now. Oh, you just know it’s going to be getting very bad for the crew of the FTB very soon. And then there’s the whole thing of just how the Empress of the Luxine makes her new children… oh yes, curiouser and curiouser indeed.

So, another adventure begins and it’s full of the sort of things that made the first series of Full Tilt Boogie so much fun – space opera writ large and full of fabulously fantastical worlds to explore.

 

ENEMY EARTH: BOOK THREE – PART 8 – by Cavan Scott and Luke Horsman, letters by Simon Bowland

I’ve talked before in these mentions of Enemy Earth about how good Luke Horsman is and how far his art’s come in the course of these three books of the series.

So, here’s the opening panel of this episode, just perfect to illustrate exactly what I mean…

 

There’s just so much going on there in Horsman’s artwork, all of it with this eye-popping style, abstracting things to make the whole image work as one, full of details, full of action, the colours he’s adding making it oh so much better.

Yes, he’s definitely one to watch, a new breed of 2000 AD artist who’s pushing things into different places, his art deliberately non-figurative, going towards, for the want of a better word, cartoonish – and I mean that in all the best ways.

As for what’s happening in Enemy Earth, we have General Huang’s plot to establish himself as leader of a new world order once these aliens that are behind the mutations that have devastated the Earth are dealt with.

But suddenly we get that little bit of a tease that all’s not as it seems… something only Zoe seems to have any idea of. Suddenly, we have a complete 180 on the aliens, where things just aren’t quite what we’d been led to believe, all of it going back to everyone’s favourite sci-fi trope, with something happening to the dinosaurs.

So yes, maybe Enemy Earth isn’t the most original thing you’ll ever read but it’s something that’s been done really well and features a young artist doing some amazing things to raise this one above the tropes we’re seeing.

 

THISTLEBONE: THE DULE TREE – PART 4 – by TC Eglington and Simon Davis, letters by Simon Bowland

Four episodes in and the chills are just creeping down your spine right now, as Eglington and Davis keep doing the things that have made Thistlebone work so well through. It’s all about the feel of things, the slow creep of that sense of things not being right, of the madness getting inside us all.

That’s what makes every episode of Thistlebone work so deliciously well. There may not be all that much going on episode by episode, but it’s the tone and the mood of it, the horror of it getting to you that makes this another great series.

 

As for what is happening, well we have more on the film set, the director manipulating Yvonne into doing things she never signed up for, the power imbalance pointing us to a personal horror and a different sort of nastiness happening, as we hear about certain changes to the shooting script.

After that, we get to see more of the things that just seem to be making this one into the sort of movie that’s cursed from the off – right now it’s cursed in the everything that can go wrong will go wrong sense, but there’s that sense deep down that we’re going to see an altogether different type of cursed before the series is over.