The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2380: Riding Into Battle With Aquila

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.

Again, same as last week here in the Prog, which means there’s five more strips, all different, all good, some absolutely great. I’m absolutely loving the wilderness horror that Rob Williams and RM Guera have been delivering every week in Judge Dredd with ‘Rend & Tear With Tooth & Claw‘, the brilliance of Brink continues with its fabulous melding of sci-fi, police procedural, and horror cooking nicely in these early episodes, we have more stunning sci-fi on a grand scale in Proteus Vex, mind and reality-bending thrills in Indigo Prime and some more hack and slash happening in Hades as Aquila takes the next step to freeing himself from the curse of Ammit the Devourer.

Prog #2380 comes out on Wednesday 1st May 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. Four months into the year already and we’re all wondering where the year’s going.

 

JUDGE DREDD: REND & TEAR WITH TOOTH & CLAW – PART 5 – by Rob Williams and RM Guera, colours by Giulia Brusco, letters by Annie Parkhouse

More of this absolutely breathless journey into the snowy wilderness. It’s basically Dredd pursued by a very big, very pissed-off bear. But that little encapsulation just can’t contain all of the brilliance to be found in the pages here. It’s just Dredd, Cadet Moon, and the one radlander left and the bear’s slowly but surely tracking them down. There’s a desperation to it all, that slow inevitability that they’re losing ground and a real sense of peril. Sure, this is Dredd and you know it’s all going to come good for the old man in the end, but the skill in the writing is that you do feel the terror and that sense of desperation so well. And right now, Williams is on fire with Dredd, really nailing the tone, the captions so terse and final, the thoughts of a man really up against it…

 

And then you have RM Guera’s artwork which has just been quite brilliant. He’s taken this on and given us very much his version of Dredd, styled differently – just as all the great Dredd artists do – and really understanding that this one’s all about the flow of the story, keeping that breathless rush going. Yet like I’ve said before, there’s a real joy to be found in re-reading this and taking your time to really immerse yourself into this freezing cold world Guera’s giving us.

I mean, just take a look at this panel from that sequence I just showed you… glorious…

 

Then there’s the switch halfway through this one that’s handled so well by both, the moment we’ve been expecting yet it’s still damn good when it does happen, Dredd finally deciding enough’s enough and he’s sick of running and it’s time to ‘kill the bastard’. He will you know, but it’s going to be a hell of a fight to do it.

‘Rend & Tear’ is proof, if proof were ever needed, that there’s still loads of room for every possible Dredd tale, whether that’s complex political stuff, epic villainy and city-level threats, clever one-offs, comedy moments, the take a deep dive into the wonderful insanity of Mega-City One tales, and something deliciously old school like this, just the man against something nasty.

And that’s thanks to a few things – a great writer who’s on top form, an artist doing wonderful things on every panel, every page. And critically, it needs to have a character so perfectly adaptable to every possible storyline as you have with Dredd. That’s why we’ve nearly 50 years of stories and there’s no signs of things getting old with Dredd any time soon.

AQUILA: THE RIVERS OF HADES BOOK TWO – PART 4 – by Gordon Rennie and Patrick Goddard, colours by Dylan Teague, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Well, it’s all been leading up to this, where Aquila descends to hell looking for the route to finally confront Ammit the Devourer and free himself from his curse, with two opposing armies of the damned rising up in Hades, the Battle of Hades, the Battle of the Rebellion of the Dead.

And that means it all opens with a few absolutely packed pages of Patrick Goddard at his finest, really going to town on the detail and not skimping on the sheer amount of stuff he puts on the page. Seriously, just look at this…

 

Yep, that all rather sets the tone of things, wouldn’t you say? And we go all in here, hack and slash and loads of limbs flying off in all directions. Just a couple of pages but in your head you’re revelling in the carnage and the sheer scale of it all.

In the middle of all this, Spartacus and his army carve a path to the river for Aquila to continue on his mission. All of which doesn’t bode well for poor Felix, whose luck looks like it may have finally run out here in Hades.

I say it practically every time, but there’s a hell of a lot to enjoy with Aquila and it’s all writ large in this episode. First and foremost, Goddard’s drawing the hell/hades out of it right now and it’s a sheer joy just to take in the pages. But Rennie’s deliberate approach to just incessantly moving it forward, pushing Aquila on to the next bit of bloodshed along the way, that’s a load of fun in itself. Again, 2000 AD is all about this, mixing up the genres and the styles, where there’s plenty of room for something like Aquila that’s all about the action and the pushing the story forward, just as it is about something like Brink where the pacing can feel (perfectly and wonderfully) relaxed at times. And that’s all to the good if you ask me.

 

BRINK: BOOK 6 – CONSUMED – PART 3 – by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, letters by Simon Bowland

Well, by now I’d hope you all know just how incredible I think Brink is. It’s been like it right from the very beginning – something I’m currently treating myself to as I have a re-read of the whole series, brilliant reading in and of itself but also perfect for getting me to remember all the important little details that I know will be coming in this sixth book.

There’s just something truly magnificent about the way that Abnett and Culbard have put this together over the last few years, a synergy between writer and artist that shows in every single episode of every book. The way that every series has that slightly different feel is perfect, the way we’ve gone through so many genres, often all rolled into one, whether that’s hard sci-fi, police procedural, horror, or just damn strange goings-on is what makes it such a stand-out strip. Myself and many others would say it’s up there already in the greatest of all 2000 AD strips of all time.

Anyway, book Six, ‘Consumed’ – we’re still firmly in the realms of early Brink episodes here, with HabSec Officers Bridget Kurtis, Pasqual Bonner, and financial analytics officer Lars Lind, now seconded to the Special Detail Taskforce, currently on a 10-day stopover on Belleholme Hab. There’s golf here, don’t you know.

Now, as far as that Special Detail Taskforce, we get a little more of what it’s all about here, with HabSec finally able to start their investigation into the Mercury Event. That’s the huge background thing that happened right back in Book 1, as Mercury and all its Habitats and all its people ‘went dark’. Since then, there’s been nothing.

We find out that Kurtis, Bonner, and Lind are on their way to Luna Hab where the Special Detal Taskforce is being put together, the biggest HabSec project there’s ever been – which sort of explains why Lind, as a financial officer, is here, the budget is huge and HabSec want it carefully controlled. The reason it’s come to HabSec finally is all to do with the Salma incident and Kurtis is there specifically for the Sect-Crime aspect – because we know, as do most folks in HabSec it seems, that there’s a Sect-Crime component to Mercury.

 

And of course, Kurtis being Kurtis, even a 10-day R&R stay on Belleholme has her doing something Sect-Related – she really just can’t help herself can she? But then again, after we’ve seen whatever that nasty with the teeth and the blood bags is that we’ve caught glimpses of, there’s definitely something that’s going to really screw with Bonner’s golf game.

As always, absolutely beautiful work from Culbard, who makes five pages of people in a room as visually involving as Abnett makes it edge-of-the-seat stuff to find out just a little bit more of what drives Brink right now. Oh, Brink, it’s so damn good to have you back in the Prog.

 

INDIGO PRIME: BLACK MONDAY – PART 10 – by Kek-W and Lee Carter, letters by Jim Campbell

We’re obviously getting to the end of this one now, as things are beginning to get pulled together,

We have Johnny Depth playing Jack Startling and battling the nasties with Fervent at ICP’s board meeting only to have Dwayne Lobe and Tyranny Rex show up, first in an assemblage of plastic body parts and then with a little bit of a spacetime problem…

 

Oh yes, it’s reality breaking down and Indigo Prime breaking down with it.

10 parts into Indigo Prime and I’m still having the same reaction to it that I did when this latest saga began – a sense of enjoyable perplexity that just washes over you, where the fun is grasping just what you can of what’s going on and just leaning into it, accepting that the best way to have fun with it is just to go with the flow.

And as I keep saying, that’s a method that’s working just fine for me and a strip I never really connected with is now one that’s an enjoyable multiversal romp and a half.

 

PROTEUS VES: DEVIOUS – PART 6 – by Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch, colours by Jim Boswell, letters by Simon Bowland

It’s been a long time without its lead but here we finally get more than a glimpse of what’s going on with Proteus Vex… and it’s not all that good, as the final panel of last Prog showed you…

 

Yep, under the knife and under pressure, it’s time for a bit of memory extraction from Vex’s head – with Count Lythas Tiorn doing his best to reconstruct things. There’s a glimpse into Vex’s childhood and plenty from the Modahas campaign and the assault on the Obdurate Armouries three decades before the end of the war…

 

Yep, that was a younger Vex being thoroughly sliced up – you’ve got to agree with Tiorn here, there’s no way he should have survived that… but there’s plenty more to explore in the world of Vex, past, present, and future.

As always, absolutely excellent sci-fi on a massive scale from Carroll and Lynch, giving us something absolutely epic. The way that Carroll blends the narratives is superb, with the now of Vex’s adventures in the present given gravitas by the unseen narrator talking to us about Vex’s exploits in the past tense, giving us hints of what’s coming and building up the legend. And now we have yet another string of events as we head back to the past and Vex’s personal history. And congrats to Lynch and Boswell here for doing beautiful things with the pages and those flashbacks – gloriously designed and executed stuff.