The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2381: Bear. Dredd. Fight. Damn Right.

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.

All the same here in the Prog this week – five really great and very different from each other strips. Two come to a conclusion this week though – we have the rather brilliantly perplexing Indigo Prime: Black Monday coming to an end and there’s a final episode of the quite brilliantly action-packed Judge Dredd tale, ‘Rend & Tear With Tooth & Claw’.

Alongside them, we have the continuing greatness of sci-fi procedural Brink, more absolutely epic space opera with Proteus Vex, and all out gladitorial sword swinging in Hades in Aquila.

Prog #2381 is out from today, Wednesday 8th 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. All rather quiet in Bruton mansions USA for a change. Lots of getting stuff done and lots of small puppy being unbelievably cutely demanding. But hey, who’d have it any other way?

JUDGE DREDD: REND & TEAR WITH TOOTH & CLAW – PART 6 – FINAL PART – by Rob Williams and RM Guera, colours by Giulia Brusco, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Well, this one’s just been absolutely brilliant, don’t you think? After the more cerebral and dramatic work of ‘A Better World’, Rob Williams seems to have said to himself, ‘Fuck it, time to go all out action-packed for the next Dredd.’ And if he did, if that was his plan, well he’s pulled it off so very well.

Of course, it’s a hell of a lot more than Williams that makes this one really work as well as it has. Seeing RM Guera’s work just explode off the page each week has been something very special indeed. All I can really say in addition to what I’ve already said of the past five episodes is that I hope he’s already working hard on the next Dredd. He’s come onto the strip and really given us a very special Dredd and we have a great new Dredd artist to join the likes of Flint, Cornwell, Percival, Holden, Lynch, and the rest as part of a new group of classic Dredd artists – it’s just he’s done it immediately and quick effortlessly it seems.

Each week the disastrous mission to the frozen northern radlands has been something that just flows beautifully, a breathless action thriller that you simply race through the first time. But it’s worth it to head right back and do it all over again to really appreciate how good Williams and Guera have been in packing it with detail, getting the tone so right, and making it so fast, so good, so high stakes all the way from the very first panel of part 1.

Anyway, this week it all comes to a head, Dredd versus damn big bear. Dredd with a plan and a determination to just stop running and sort this one out, treating it like any other big bastard thing he’s put away in the past. We get more of Guerra’s magnificently grizzled Dredd, more of the quite stunning landscapes, and even more action to end it all with. Because the bear’s not backing down any time soon.

AQUILA: THE RIVERS OF HADES BOOK TWO – PART 5 – by Gordon Rennie and Patrick Goddard, colours by Dylan Teague, letters by Annie Parkhouse

After last week and the Battle of the Rebellion of the Dead, time to take what suffices for a pause in Aquila. By which I mean we have a few panels of relatively quiet stuff, of Aquila and his party making their way towards the exit to Hades. Unfortunately, said exit is blocked by witchy Cruciata and rather big and rather pissed Hannibal.

Fight? Well, you’d expect so wouldn’t you. But no…

Seems Aquila’s getting less bloody and more thoughtful as the centuries pass by.

Again, it’s a series that just does exactly what it says, a classic quest with plenty of twisting and turning, Rennie writing up a storm and seeming to be rather enjoying himself, all ably assisted and then some by Patrick Goddard’s classically solid, damn fine artwork.

INDIGO PRIME: BLACK MONDAY – PART 11 – FINAL PART – by Kek-W and Lee Carter, letters by Jim Campbell

And now we have another ending, as the twisting and turning and multiversal insanity of Kek-W and Lee Carter’s version of John Smith’s Indigo Prime comes to a close.

As I’ve said again and again, this one’s one of those strips where it’s best enjoyed with a sense of letting it happen, letting the madness and the multiple characters across multiple universes just do their things. Well, it’s a method that’s worked for me anyway. In the past, IP rather passed over me in a worse way, and I rather ignored it. This one though, well Kek-W and Carter have crafted something that’s confusing, silly, huge of scale and full of pretty much everything they could throw at it – knowingly so. And for me, it’s worked a treat and I’ve been along for the ride enjoying it all.

Anyway, as we draw to a close here, it’s all going increasingly strange. We have Claire Vista, Clive Vista’s sister from another reality shown to be behind ICP and its takeover of IP through multiple neighbouring realities. But because of Vista’s planning for such an eventuality, it’s all going very, very wrong and it’s all falling apart.

Our merry band of heroes/misfits/ex-IP etc have got to pull things (and themselves) together, quite literally, and save the day. That they do isn’t a surprise, nor is it the point, the whole point of Indigo Prime, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that it’s just been a damn fine, wonderfully out-there adventure.

BRINK: BOOK 6 – CONSUMED – PART 4 – by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, letters by Simon Bowland

Well, this week I did the Brink re-read I’d been promising myself – Books 1-5. Oh boy. It’s one that just gets better with every re-read, where the plotting seems slow (in the best ways) week by week, when read as a whole it comes together just beautifully and really makes the whole thing a fabulous piece of writing that’s just gorgeously illustrated. The whole thing actually moves really fast when read as one, testament to the ways in which both Abnett and Culbard have just absolutely nailed this as one of the finest strips to feature in 2000 AD ever.

As for what’s going on with Consumed, well it’s all beginning to come together, deliciously slowly, perfectly paced, absolutely nailing the set-up of HabSec Officers Bridget Kurtis, Pasqual Bonner, and financial analytics officer Lars Lind, now seconded to the Special Detail Taskforce, being on a 10-day stopover on Belleholme Hab. They’re on their way to begin, at long last now they’ve got jurisdiction, of the Mercury Event. Something which sits over everything that I read from the end of Book 1 through to now in Brink, something huge, mysterious, and horrifying.

But right now it’s that 10-day extended stopover on Bellehomme, where there’s something very nasty, something with vicious teeth and plenty of bloodbags that we keep getting glimpses of, something that has its latest victim on the slab and screaming.

Incapable of having time off, Kurtis is off looking at a few cold cases with a view to investigating them for evidence of sect crime. And, as usual, Kurtis has a knack for uncovering the nasty stuff, the sect stuff… and there’s a lot…

Meanwhile, Bonner is busy playing golf – something you see on page 2, with Culbard’s switching of the usual Hab colours from claustrophobic greens and blues to just spectacularly artificial wide open spaces and a bright, bright colour palette. Again, Culbard aces the art on every single page of Brink and just keeps getting better.

Then there’s private investigator Regina Castanada, working a case with a mystery client, something you just know is going to intersect with Kurtis’s investigations and that toothy nightmare.

Again, just fabulous work, a great, great series. Do yourself a favour and go buy all five collections, devour them, and then set about loving Consumed.

PROTEUS VES: DEVIOUS – PART 7 – by Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch, colours by Jim Boswell, letters by Simon Bowland

You know, in the same way that the re-read of all the Brink collections thus far is a joy and brings so much to the ongoing series, I reckon next up in my reading should be the first Proteus Vex volume. Just as with Brink, it’s a series that may seem disconnected when reading it episode-by-episode but one that just flows magnificently when read in one go.

After last episode where we found out just what happened to Vex and see the trouble he’s got himself into right now, we’re switching back to the events of Part 5 here and discovering what happened to Midnight Indicating Shame, the secret star of the series if you ask me.

End of episode 5 and we had this happen…

Yep, you go around preaching revolution and freedom and Hive Regalis is going to get very pissed off about it.

But this is MIS we’re talking about, the rival queen with all the power and speed and capabilities, meaning that soemthing as devastating as all that is merely a small setback. Indeed, as we open episode 7, she’s already healing.

The answer? Well, isolate her in a specialised cell being towed behind your ship. Even if she gets out of that, the vaccum of space will destroy her. Right?

Hmmmm, maybe not. After all, MIS really is something very special, more powerful perhaps than any of her race have ever been. And watching her recover and then become massive, monstrous, and very dealy is just a perfect end to this episode, all captured by Lynch so very well, an artist whose ability to unleash something absolutely alien is up there, say it quietly, with the great Kevin O’Neill.

Again, Carroll and Lynch have crafted a true epic here, another one that is essential reading.