The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2376: Dredd Ready To Go WIld In The Country For Rend & Tear With Tooth & Claw

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.

After last week’s perfect end to Thistlebone, there’s a slot opened up in the five strips – one that’s filled rather perfectly by a Terror Tale, the debut of writer Jon Lock here in 2000 AD. Joined by artist Richard Elson, they tell us a tale of a specialist government division investigating strange goings-on in what is a rather impressive debut.

 

Alongside that, there’s the new Judge Dredd series, running on from last Prog’s one-off prologue, with Dredd and his hand-picked team straight into action, death, and nightmare in a survivalist tale in the frozen North – ‘Rend & Tear With Tooth & Claw’ by Rob Williams and RM Guera.

Plus we have three more great strips inside – more adventures with the crew of the Full Tilt Boogie in the penultimate episode of Book 2, another look at the very strange world of Indigo Prime, and more galaxy-spanning sci-fi wonder as we go looking for a missing Proteus Vex in Devious.

Prog #2376 comes out on 3 April in the UK. You North American readers should get to their local comic shops and demand they get the four-weekly Prog bundles in – it’s the right thing to do.

 

JUDGE DREDD: REND & TEAR WITH TOOTH & CLAW – PART 1 – by Rob Williams and RM Guera, colours by Giulia Brusco, letters by Annie Parkhouse

After last week’s Prologue we are straight into things here – no telling us how Dredd and his hand-picked team, including Cadet Moon, got up here in the frozen wastes of the Northern Radlands, what used to be Alaska, instead we’ve got a downed ship and a team already suffering injuries.

Someone hit the ship with a missile and the five survivors are stuck with a dilemma – do they risk getting the equipment off the ship to fave whoever’s going to be coming for them, even though the ship’s in the middle of an ice sheet. Trouble is, they’ve soon got even bigger problems…

 

Down to just four of them, the nearest Justice Department outpost a hundred miles away, no help, and a bunch of Radlands muties all ready to kill them all. Things are looking bad… and they’re only going to get worse.

So, why is Dredd out here on this mission? Just what brought him and the ever-dwindling team up here to this frozen wilderness? And how the hell are they going to make it out?

 

This one looks very much like Williams flexing his action muscles again and really going for it after the (brilliantly) pedestrian politics of ‘A Better World’. Six pages where we get moment after moment of breathless action, Judges against the world, already taking serious casualties. Oh, I bet Cadet Judge Moon’s really regretting saying yes to this one already.

So, it has all the hallmarks of a survivalist horror tale, Deliverance done Dredd style, with RM Guera’s very distinctive and very different art suiting things to a tee. No doubt some will bemoan the fact that Guera’s Dredd and Judges have their own style, forgetting that Dredd’s always been drawn by artists who adapt the uniform and the standards to their own – whether that’s McMahon or McCarthy, Ewins or Hicklenton. It’s a pure visual feast of action from a great artistic addition to the character here.

 

TERROR TALES: ANTUMNOS – by Jon Lock and Richard Elson, letters by Simon Bowland

A one-off Terror Tale and a debut from Jon Lock, a writer I’ve known of for years and whom I’ve told you about when looking at his self-published Afterlife Inc. (there’s a big idea of what that’s all about here)

It was an unexpected but very pleasant surprise to see his name on this one – and just as good to see he’d been teamed up with Richard Elson, with a different and darker style that perfectly suits this bit of X-Files-ish horror.

We have a government organisation, Herne, sending Agents Hob and Sharpe into ‘the back end of nowhere’ (or Wales to you and me) after reports of missing hikers and strange lights and sounds. Hob’s the experienced one, Sharpe’s new, promised helicopters, terrorists, and end of the world stuff at the academy – right now he’s just wondering how he ended up in ‘Her Majesty’s Ministry of the Unexplained’.

Up here though, they’re in one of the soft places, according to Hob, looking at the ‘Antumnos’, the ‘otherworld of Welsh myth’ the sort of place where fairy tales and legends have a habit of becoming real and things slip between the cracks of the realities.

So armed with a guide, they’re off into the hills. And Sharpe’s right to think that something is wrong – very wrong…

 

It’s a great little Terror Tale, really well put together by Lock and Elson, but it’s also one that ends on a bit of a cliffhanger if you want to read it that way – could it be a bit of a pilot for something a little bigger? I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing more of Lock and Elson’s Antumnos in here.

 

FULL TILT BOOGIE: BOOK 2 – PART 10 – PENULTIMATE PART – by Alex De Campi and Eduardo Ocana, colours by Eva De La Cruz, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Ten parts in and we’re reaching the end of this one, as Tee’s adventure on this backwater leads into the third (and final) book of Full Tilt Boogie. And it’s setting it all up to be an absolute belter of a final book given the events going on here.

As the crew gather together in the aftermath of Achilles’ misguided attempt to rescue and resurrect his husband, only to create another Anubite soldier instead, Grandma turns up with all that lovely mahjong money and Tee gets a job offer…

 

Well, in many ways this book of Full Tilt Boogie has been something of a diversion, taking us away from the Anubite empire problem and the massive space-set worldbuilding we saw in the first book and it sounds like we’ll be seeing again in Book Three.

But it’s also given Ocana space and time to really go large with his art, all that lovely linework, a beautifully rendered and subdued palette by Eva De La Cruz, and De Campi writing plenty of action amongst the quieter moments. Think of it as the scene-shifting middle act of a three-act play and that works just fine.

 

 

INDIGO PRIME: BLACK MONDAY – PART 6 – by Kek-W and Lee Carter, letters by Jim Campbell

Starting off with the 4077th Mash-ups of realty 0001/054 and a very different take on on of the 70s finest TV shows, Indigo Prime is going deep into the black-and-white art of Carter and the increasingly out-there ideas of Kek-W. It’s a massive incursion moment and is suitably bonkers.

Coming into this we have Mickey Challis, in glorious technicolour, with Carter using a completely different style and depth to his character, and the alternative Clive Vista, him of Void Indiga and not Mickey’s dad, riding into things on a pedalo – because why the hell not?

 

There’s talk of toxic realities, shape tailors, unstable entropy levels, something nasty manifesting as Ayn Rand, and a doomsday clock striking midnight with only Vista and IP able to fix it.

It’s all very over the top, all very deliberately so, but it’s also some classic weirdness that does sit very nicely here in the Prog, as it always has. And I’m loving what Carter’s doing here with the shifting art styles between b&w and colour.

 

 

PROTEUS VES: DEVIOUS – PART 2 – by Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch, colours by Jim Boswell, letters by Simon Bowland

Okay, back to a regular five-pager here after the double-sized opener last Prog, but there’s still time for Carroll and Lynch to pack the pages absolutely full of wonderfully alien things here. It’s that that really marks this one out, it’s a strip where that sense of the alien really comes through, this has never been a tale of some human-like hero doing his or her thing, it’s always been all about the alien – alien heroes, alien villains, completely alien worlds and politics, creating something that always feels incredibly fresh and reads so well.

It’s also one that requires your attention. There’s no skim reading Vex, this one puts so much out there on the page and does it so well.

Here, we’re in a galaxy where the news is that Proteus Vex might nor be quite as dead as first thought, even though no one has a clue where the hell he might be. It has brought a lot of attention to the remote outpost of Barriero Anchorage though where, rumour has it, there’s been part of Vex’s ship found. And of course, a lot of visitors, particularly visitors like Dran Gexemed, aren’t shy of getting in trouble themselves when it comes to the search for Vex…

 

Again, we have Carroll using the voiceover as an all-seeing, all-knowing future narrator recounting the events we’re watching in real time as the galaxy’s past. An alien historian telling us of the things that became legend, the legend of Proteus Vex.

Everything about Proteus Vex is just great – I love the deliberate awkwardness (for want of a better phrase) of Lynch’s artwork, all unusual angles and character designs ever bit as outlandish as you’d want for this sort of tale, the whole galactic empire thing and the worldbuilding and legend building that’s going on here is superb, and the whole slow build here of the serach for Vex is just perfect reading to end this particular Prog with.