Preview: ‘The Best Of 2000 AD Volume 5’ — Another Volume Giving You The Perfect Entry Point

by Richard Bruton

The penultimate volume to this whole Best of 2000 AD series here, something that’s been a perfect gateway into the comic, giving you an expertly curated way in to nearly five decades of classic comics…

As before, this fourth volume of The Best of 2000 AD does it all just so right, mixing up modern and classic bits of 2000 AD to great effect, resulting in a wonderfully eclectic selection that really gives you a proper feel of just what the comic’s always been about for all these years.

It’s all too easy to just think of 2000 AD as Dredd and a few other strips, all in the same vein. But these volumes have shown, continue to show, that nothing could be further from the truth. 2000 AD is packed with all sorts of diverse storytelling and artwork. It’s way, way more than just Dredd and the rest, and these volumes have been excellent ways of getting that through to new readers. So, here in volume 5, that means that we have a great mix – two Dredd tales, one modern, one classic, plus plenty of that perfect diversity I’ve been talking about in a nearly 200-page volume.

The Dredds are a recent classic of classism in the Mega-City, ‘Elevator Pitch’, with the perfectly detailed art of Chris Weston and excellent writing of Rob Williams showing us the divide between rich and poor in Mega-City One in all its horror with the billionaires living it up in style up in the exclusive environs of the Posh Tube. But with all that richness in one place, it’s a prime target for perps… we just weren’t expecting these perps…

As for the Dredd from a bit further back, it’s the absolute classic, ‘The Art Of Kenny Who?’ one of those brilliant tales of the put-upon everyman finding himself done in by the troubles of Mega-City law. This one very pertinent for now, with its tale of Kenny Who? coming to the Big Meg with his dreams of fame and fortune as an artist, only to have it all ripped away from him as AI takes his work and makes him redundant.

Also from Dreddworld, we have Gordon Rennie and Frank Quitely‘s Missionary Man, an rather epic bit of sci-fi western stuff featuring some absolutely glorious artwork from Quitely as they tell the tale of the Missionary Man, Preacher Cain, bringing law and the word of God to the masses and the muties of this radiated wasteland.

And then, for something completely different, we have the complete four-part Tribal Memories by Peter Milligan and Tony Wright, under the pen name of Riot, a complex thing dealing with identity, racism, exploitation, the commodification and commercialisation of culture, something that went very much under the radar at the time but has grown in importance and acclaim with the passing of years.

Set on a human-occupied planet in the future where personality transfer technology has resulted in humanity being a mess of memories and cultures, some real, some artificial, we’re with Mohammed ‘Mo’ Robinson, who deals in extracting and inputting personalities, as he travels back to Earth looking for something more authentic to profit off. And he finds it with ‘the last real man,’ a Maasai, wanting to extract those pure, authentic, unaltered, unadulterated memories and make him famous and rich in the process. So when the Maasai is taken back to Mo’s planet, he’s paraded in polite society as a curiosity, a savage to be gawped at. But when the Maasai discovers this planet has its own disadvantaged indigenous non-human population, Mo’s plan is torn to shreds and he finds himself in the middle of a near insurrection.

It’s powerful stuff, full of anger and energy from Milligan and Wright, something very, very different and, again, just that perfect strip for these Best Of volumes.

The complete graphic novel in this volume comes in the wonderfully wrong, deliciously insane, and perfectly funny first book of Zombo – Can I Eat You Please? by Al Ewing and Henry Flint. It’s just one of the funniest things that’s been in 2000 AD for a long time.

Beginning with flight 303 crash-landing on the lethal deathworld known as Chronos, the passengers soon start to be picked off one by one in ever more horrific ways by a planet that seems out to get them all. Luckily (maybe) for them, the flight also held a top secret government experiment – Zombo; part zombie, part human ghoul, who really wants to eat you but will ask you very politely if he can. Ewing and Flint go over and above through this one, laying silly and brilliant atop ridiculous and genius, all with plenty of laughs along the way in the inventiveness of the depravity – just so damn good.

And speaking of depravity, that brings us on to the next feature-length graphic novel, Devlin Waugh: Swimming In Blood, the very first time Megazine readers were introduced to the bon viveur wonder that is Devlin, one of modern 2000 AD’s most popular characters.

Here, it’s back to the beginning, as John Smith and Sean Phillips bring you the very first Waugh tale, introducing us to the Vatican City spiritual envoy from Brit Cit whose mission in life is to keep the forces of darkness at bay whilst having a damn fine time doing it, gloriously over the top, magnificently camp, utterly brilliant stuff. So, it’s off to the underwater prison of Aquatraz where Vatican precogs have sensed some unspeakable evil with rather pointy teeth that’s about to be unleashed. Heavens, he might not even have time for elevensies with this one.