The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2369: Bringing ‘Enemy Earth’ To Its End

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.

 

It’s all the same as last week in the Prog but we do have two strips coming to a close, as we say goodbye proper to Cavan Scott and Luke Horsman’s Enemy Earth, finishing this third and final series here. Plus, we have the third and final episode of Paul Cornell and Laura Helsby’s Tharg’s 3Riller, ‘The English Astronaut’.

As for the continuing strips, well you know by now how great I think the current Judge Dredd series, ‘A Better World‘, is – stunning work from Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt, and Henry Flint telling a tale of defunding the Judges that has this real sense of being something monumental. Then there’s more thrills to be found with the crew of the Full Tilt Boogie and plenty more chills still to come in the third book of Thistlebone: The Dule Tree.

Prog #2369 came out on Wednesday 14th February 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! Now obviously, I’m back to being late with these Weekly 2000 ADs – but this week I do have a great excuse… honest. After four years of managing to avoid Covid, both myself and my much better half finally got that dreaded positive test and came down with a rather nasty case of the Covid this week that put us both out of action.

So, time to get on with things, I can feel the mucus building up and threatening to drown me again, whilst my head’s threatening to explode, it’s back to the sickbed for me…

 

JUDGE DREDD: A BETTER WORLD – PART 6 – by Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint, letters by Annie Parkhouse

It just keeps getting better and better and better. It really does. That first couple of panels here with the surfer and that graffiti scrawl – ‘A Better World Is Possible‘ – that’s everything that I’m talking about with how all involved are pulling this one off.

It’s political, it’s very much of the now, reflective of the worst of our world, especially in this, election year in both the USA and the UK, highlighting the undue power afforded to bad actors in the media, telling the masses what to think, regardless of something as inconsequential as evidence or truth. And the art. Well, the art is Flint’s finest point on Dredd thus far – and this from someone universally acknowledged as a modern master of Dredd already.

Last episode saw this happen to Domo, the Red Queen’s right-hand man of old, in MC-1 for some unknown purpose, possibly tied to the price on Judge Maitland’s head…

 

Incredibly, he’s alive and relatively unharmed. Not something either Dredd or Maitland are all that bothered about, in a moment that’s, again, the epitome of why A Better World is just so damn great, the tone, the style, just perfect.

 

As for Maitland, well she’s really got her hands full right now. Trying to keep the lid on the unrest fermented by the agit-media in her sector and the other test sectors, threatening to undo all that she’s accomplished.

And then there’s Hernandez… well, it turns out that Maitland had his number all along, knows his support for her is simple show, all about opportunism. So now she’s on his case, looking and finding the connections – they’re all there in the numbers after all. And Maitland is so damn good with the numbers.

So we’ve seen the experiment working. We’ve seen the predictable backlash to anyone changing up the status quo. And now we’re seeing the fallout to it all. But there are so many questions remaining for this one – just what is Domo doing in MC-1? What’s Hernandez’s endgame? And how on Earth are we going to see this one end? Whatever, this one is one that can have as long as it wants. Quite wonderfully brilliant.

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

In the first two parts of the English Astronaut, we’ve seen one brave military type fired forwards in time from 1963’s British Experimental Space Programme in an attempt to rescue the world, as there’s been weird disturbances in 1977, 1989, and 2005. He’s brought some very familiar fictions to life and brought reality crashing down. And now, for a finale, it’s time to try to put things right. Yes, because it’s obviously going to be that easy.

Frankly, it’s been a three episode blast of wonderfully silly insanity, 2000 AD sci-fi doing Brit comedy surrealism doing meta-fictional references doing so much else. It’s been fun.

Now, as sometimes happens with these 3Rillers, we have an ending to ‘The English Astronaut’ that just feels that little bit too quick. Let me make it clear this isn’t a criticism of the storytelling at all, just that there’s way, way, way too much in here to be constrained by 15 pages. The sheer scale of what Cornell was doing here was ridiculous and you have Helsby putting so much detail into things alongside the story, all of it giving you the sense that this one could have easily gone longer.

However, as it is, you get three episodes of absolute insanity, something that harks back to the finest of Time Twisters to play upon all the madness and absurdity to produce something that wasn’t afraid to go out there.

 

FULL TILT BOOGIE: BOOK 2 – PART 3 – by Alex De Campi and Eduardo Ocana, colours by Eva De La Cruz, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Taking this one from the wilds of space to the very different environment of being planetside has really brought a new aspect to this one. Ocana seems to be playing with the organic shapes more and De La Cruz really is pushing the colour palette so beautifully. Plenty of great European sci-fi comic nods in here as well, plus plenty of little details before we explode into a final double-page spread that is just magnificent.

We’ve left the crew of the Full Tilt Boogie on Tanzagar getting some R’n’R and hospital treatment and are with Tee doing that job for our still unnamed eyepatch-wearing Tanzagar native, that something off the books and personal that’s meant to be paying the required port fees. And as our mystery man leaves Tee alone for the night, you can’t help thinking that this is a really, really bad move.

 

She’s after a crystal and is into a restricted zone, something in another ship, a ship full of anomalies, where the crystals are growing on the engines. So it’s off to explore, again with us noticing all those great details in Ocana’s artwork, the flight visor deactivation, the multiple-headed owl, the increasing strangeness of the surroundings with the flora all seemingly following Tee and the rocks just hanging in the air… all of it beautifully done.

 

And then boom, into those two expansive, incredible pages of Tee getting her first sight at where she’s got to go. It’s just great art and colours – so different in tone and palette from the first series, just as lovely to look at of course, but really playing so well off the storyline.

Of course, with two of your five pages taken up with essentially a ‘wow, look at this’ moment for the artist, there’s not all that much happening here this episode. Or rather there’s not that much happening in terms of big story movement – there’s a hell of a lot of the clever world building stuff going on here, the little things in the script and the art that add so much texture to the whole tale and all contribute to making FTB a hell of a lot of fun.

 

ENEMY EARTH: BOOK THREE – PART 10 – FINAL PART – by Cavan Scott and Luke Horsman, letters by Simon Bowland

Three books of Enemy Earth are over and done with here – this is the finale, the resolution of all that we’ve been leading up to, where we get an ending for all involved.

Well, we sort of do. Throughout the three series of this one, starting a while back as a one-off in the pages of a Regened Prog, Enemy Earth has shown us a world transformed by what turned out to be alien spores, ages-old spores that should never have been released. But once they were, the Earth was seemingly doomed, humanity ravaged, population decimated, all your usual post-apocalyptic stuff going on.

But then we get that little bit of hope here in Book 3, a possibility of turning things back to how they were before the mutations. And that’s exactly what’s happened here in the final episode of the final series of Enemy Earth.

Sure, there have been small problems with it throughout the run. There’s times when it simply came off as a peril of the week strip, other times it’s gone into the perpetual quest sort of storyline. And then here, in the latter part of the story, we have that problem of it all just happening too fast, everything rolled back thanks to the aliens’ intervention.

You could even accuse Enemy Earth of doing a false ending here, with so many questions left for Zoe et al, of where the Earth and its remaining population will go from here, a new world order, new friends, new enemies. But I think that would be wrong. Because Enemy Earth was never really about the mutations or the new world, it was all about Zoe and found family and new chances. And that’s what Scott and Horsman deliver in this final episode, ending it just right.

 

And before we leave it for good, one final word on Horsman’s artwork that has just been so enjoyable to see grow and evolve, from something raw and fresh in that first Regened episode, all the way through to this final series where there’s still all that freshness and punch to his work but there’s also a real style to it all, a style that puts his work amongst a rich vein of 2000 AD artists doing it differently – something that makes the comic, again and again, a visual delight of invention and experimentation.

 

THISTLEBONE: THE DULE TREE – PART 6 – by TC Eglington and Simon Davis, letters by Simon Bowland

And speaking of completely different art styles… you couldn’t get a bigger change from Luke Horsman on Enemy Earth to Simon Davis here on Thistlebone, could you? All of which, again, is a marker of the quality of 2000 AD.

We’re still drifting around things here, no definite main thread of horror has come forth yet – but then again, Thistlebone’s not actually about that, it’s always more about the slow build-up of terror through all the little moments, seeing the madness take hold through whatever means, big or small.

For example, at the end of the last episode, we had this….

 

That’s Yvonne being pushed into doing far more than she signed up for and being pushed into it deliberately by the director for the purposes of the film and getting a more authentic reaction – no matter what the damage done to the actor, which is itself its own particular brand of horror. Or you could read it, knowing that Thistlebone is lurking there somewhere, the spirit of the place enveloping all, as the director being possessed by that same spirit. It was just a damn fine cliffhanger that goes to show you just how brilliant the series is.

As for the outcome to that cliffhanger… nope, not this week. This week we switch back to the all too out and proud for this little backwater town screenwriter Callum after the beating from one of the lovely locals. But there’s also the return of the strange language stuff that we’ve seen before in Thistlebone. Again, it could be something supernatural, darker, a possession, or it could be just the distorted moments as Callum comes round… all part of those little moments of chill-inducing tension that this is full of.

Quite wonderfully dark, inventive, full of those little moments of possibility, with Eglington and Davis leaving us guessing just what’s happening and just when the nightmares will truly begin. It’s pure class is Thistlebone, it really is.