The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2384: Folktales & Fear In The Undercity For Dredd

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.

Everything continues this week, another week of five very different strips, just as you’d expect from 2000 AD. Week in and week out, there’s a staggering display of diversity of work on display. And it’s all pretty damn good as well!

 

So, more underground Judge Dredd horrors in ‘Iron Teeth’, more gastrointestinal gasps in Intestinauts, more far-future apocalyptic showdowns between man and machine in the middle part of the three-part Tharg’s 3Riller: Blue Skies Over Deadwick, more brilliant and beautiful slow burn in Brink, and more fabulous alienness abounds in Proteus Vex’s epic scale sci-fi.

Prog #2384 came out on 29th May in the UK. You North American readers should get to their local comic shops and demand they get the 4-weekly Prog bundles in – it’s the right thing to do. Late again I’m afraid. I always intend to get these previews out before the release but lately it seems that it’s a mission impossible. At least the puppy-attacked wi-fi is sorted now. You want to be mad, but then she gives you that puppy look and everything’s forgiven. Anyway… onwards into 2000 AD…

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JUDGE DREDD: IRON TEETH – PART 3 – by Ken Niemand and Nick Percival, letters by Annie Parkhouse

The kids are deep in the undercity and deep in trouble. Dredd and his annoying robot companion linked to the Prof specialist in all things Mega-City folklore have found youngest of the group, Lex, and it’s now just Dredd, with the Prof in his helmet comms, heading down deeper in search of Iron Teeth.

As I said, he’s not exactly keen on what she does, but it does mean we get some wonderfully pointed barbs thrown his way. And oh the tales she tells, Niemand and Percival conduits of what she’s telling Dredd, two pages of quite brilliant ideas for future horror tales from MC-1…

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Yes, any of those quick glimpses of horror could be the next Niemand/Percival thing. But right now it’s more descent into the darkness and wondering just how Dredd and Iron Teeth are going to come together.

Truly stunning work from Percival here, the colours working from a cold palette through to the more vibrant and hot palette when we get to Iron Teeth, his art just full of such deliciously grotesque detail all the way through.

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INTESTINAUTS: BUSTED FLUSH – PART 3 – by Arthur Wyatt and Pye Parr

Imagine you were one of the Bowelbots and had found yourself somehow reborn into the nano-bot body of your most hated enemies, those damn Intestinauts? Then imagine you’d been kept in a virtual prison, forced to die and be reborn into an Intestinaut body again and again and again and again? That would make you pretty damn pissed off wouldn’t it?

And that’s just what’s happened to make Omega-Genocide-Four really, really, really pissed off with the world – and particularly with anything to do with the damn Intestinauts.

So, what do you thinks going to happen when OG4 finds themselves in the nutrient channels of Intestolabs and able to be a contaminant through all that vital infrastructure? Yep…

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So, great stuff from Wyatt to make it all work on so many levels, but also from Parr, who’s really going above and beyond with this series with the visual flourishes and trickery throughout.

We’ve already had cutaway diagrams, schematics, the wonderful choose your own adventure last episode, and now we have an extra special extra page tacked on to the end of this one… ‘The Origin of Dr Globulon’…

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Yep, love the switch, love the conceit of making it a different strip within a strip, dropping into sepia, a different style from Parr. It all works a treat.

And that’s what Intestinauts really is – an absolute treat. It’s been a ridiculous joy seeing the Intestinauts go from out-and-out gags about poop to something that’s actually a riotous bit of adventures on the microscopic scale. Still funny, still wonderfully ridiculous of course – we’re dealing with nanobots designed to sort out tummy troubles after all – but with a real sense of a grand adventure.

Anyhow, by the end of this one we have a new batch of prototype Intestinauts on the case after OG4 and we’re about to get the big (well, you know what I mean) battle of the nano-bots – but that’s for next time…

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THARG’S 3RILLERS: BLUE SKIES OVER DEADWICK – PART 2 (OF 3) – By David Baillie and Nick Brokenshire, letters by Annie Parkhouse

So, last week we got the introduction to this latest 3Riller, where there are just three short parts to deliver a story, and this one opened with the set-up, a really well-done slow reveal of a centuries-long war between man and mecha. And yes, you can have slow reveal in just six pages if you do it as well as Baillie and Brokenshire had done in that first part.

We had the mystery of the climbers slowly working their way up the maga-structure, only to have the reveal that these were part of the last outpost of humanity and that the thing they were climbing happened to be the enemy – a snow-capped mecha monster…

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So, with that first episode done, you’d figure that this second would build on what we’ve just seen and dive deeper into the conflict. Well, sort of. It certainly does go deeper into things, but hardly in the way you’d expect. Instead of picking up where we left off last time, this one opens from the point of view of one of the Mecha, telling things from their side.

It’s unexpected, really switches things up and makes you start to question if this will really be the sort of Transformers v Humans slugfest thing we were expecting. And then Baillie and Brokenshire really throw the story spanner into the works with this…

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Yep, that’s Dilemma from the first part and suddenly it all comes clear, we’re a fair bit into the future here, after Dilemma’s spent years plotting and planning, testing what he’s learned of the mecha – and now he’s going to put all those plans into place.

Yes, it’s a really fascinating twist on things, a completely different sort of 3Riller from what we normally get – and it works a treat. Now, to part three and we’ll see if they can nail the landing.

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BRINK: BOOK 6 – CONSUMED – PART 7 – by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, letters by Simon Bowland

Another five pages of this absolutely great bit of Brink. HabSec investigator Kurtis has three different conversations and private investigator Regina Castanada has a nightmare featuring the meat bank killer thing.

Of course, strip anything down to its simplest description and you lose a lot. With Brink you lose all the things that make it so damn great. For example, whilst the interlude of Castanada’s nightmare is just a tantalising glimpse into things and makes you wonder just when we’ll be getting any further into that and just how Kurtis is going to stumble on it all, the conversations are the absolute meat and bones of what makes Brink so good.

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Great drama doesn’t have to depend on the big stuff, the action, the epic. No, really great drama like Brink is all about people, character, interactions, conversations – the moments that build and build and draw you into things.

And that’s what every conversation in Brink does. First there’s the opener between Gibrani on Luna Hab and Kurtis on Belleholme for her 10-day stopover, still three months away from meeting up for the Special Taskforce investigation into the mercury Event. Two friends chatting? Sure, but also taking us deeper into Kurtis’s character and her dogged refusal to leave the sect angle alone, no matter what it’s going to cause.

Then there’s the comedic moments of Bonner, taking a moment off from his golf game and coming to check in on Kurtis. It’s played for a laugh perhaps – and a good one – but there’s still dramatic moments here in all the best ways. And then it’s the final chat, Kurtis grabbing Lind and drawing him into her sect investigations.

All of these seemingly quiet moments, these little conversations – they’re nothing of the sort. They’re the little pieces of the story that Abnett and Culbard move around the board simply, easily, and so effectively. It all ends up with something so naturalistic and believable, meaning that you just get immersed in this world of Brink – and there’s nothing quite as enjoyable as that.

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PROTEUS VEX: DEVIOUS – PART 10 – by Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch, colours by Jim Boswell, letters by Simon Bowland

We’ve settled into the weekly switch between the twin threads here in Proteus Vex – one week it’s what happened to Proteus Vex and then the rebellion against the Citheronians and Hive Regalis by rogue queen Midnight Indicating Shame.

This week, we’re with Vex, actually on his feet after quite some time. Indeed, thanks to Tiorn, we get a whole catch-up for Vex (and the reader) of just what’s happened in the year since the end of the Scorcher War. Mysteries unfold, deepen, and generally perplex (but so wonderfully so).

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There’s that delicious sense of it all beginning to be drawn together – the search for Vex might be over, Midnight’s rebellion is gaining momentum, and then we have the mystery of the Flesh Pilots – and why the Imperium want to find them and their sanctuary. So many little threads pulling together and all building up the tension.

Yep, Proteus Vex is another of those strips that it’s tempting to call unconventional, but in the context of 2000 AD, it’s perfectly at home – after all this is a comic that’s been making the unconventional and the brilliant work week after week for decades now. Proteus Vex is merely one of the new breed of greatness.

Oh, as far as re-reading goes – I went back and read the whole saga to date, including the first 10 parts of ‘Devious’, and it really is just a superb thing, all that epic scale and thrilling sci-fi action but, with the structures that Carroll has put in place, it’s also this huge historical thing, empires rising and falling, devastating wars across galaxies, all of that. A really, really great read for sure.