The Weekly 2000 AD – Prog 2386 – A Bumper Prog Including The Return Of Rogue Trooper

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.

It’s a bumper 48-page Prog this week, adding in two complete tales in a Future Shock by Laura Bailey and Stewart K. Moore and the one-off The Lord Provides by Gemma Sheldrake alongside four continuing strips and the start of a new multi-part Rogue Troooper.

That Rogue Trooper is ‘Souther Belle’ by Geoffrey D. Wessel and Dan Cornwell, ramping up the Rogue coverage after the announcement of the animated film helmed by Duncan Jones. As for the four that continue, well they’re all rather damn good – with Judge Dredd: Iron Teeth reaching a penultimate episode, those Intestinauts finding out just how much trouble they’ve landed themselves in with Busted Flush, and more absolutely epic sci-fi of two very different yet quite magnificent flavours with Brink and Proteus Vex.

Prog #2386 comes out on 12th June in the UK. You North American readers should get to their local comic shops and demand they get the 4-weekly Prog bundles in – you really won’t regret jumping onboard. And look at me – finally properly back on track and getting this to you ahead of publication day. Olly probably needs a lie down after realising that.

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JUDGE DREDD: IRON TEETH – PART 5 – by Ken Niemand and Nick Percival, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Well, we finally get Dredd and Iron Teeth in the same room – well, not so much a room as a stygian chamber in the Undercity, but that’s Nick Percival for you, he turns everything he touches into a horror show. A damn good-looking horror show of course.

Yes, Percival’s art throughout Iron Teeth has been superb, every bit the horrific backdrop that this one needed, and packed with so much detail in every panel, the work involved is something that really does beg much closer attention.

You know, just like this…

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Oh yes, beautifully grotesque indeed.

As for where we are, well it’s Dredd shielding one juve and Iron Teeth holding another. Of course, Dredd being Dredd, his sole purpose of getting the juves out of this hellhole is so he can drop them into an iso-cube. But at least alive. Such is the way Niemand has nailed that essence of his thinking.

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As for Iron Teeth, we’ve not really too much idea of what he/it is and why it’s/he’s doing what he does apart from a simple ‘I’m due tribute’ sort of thing. But in many ways it doesn’t matter, there’s a sense that the villain of the piece doesn’t need a huge backstory and reason for existing more than the one Dredd gives to him.

Last episode next week, and the horror will wrap up until the next time Niemand and Percival decide to give us the nasty side of MC-1 once more.

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INTESTINAUTS: BUSTED FLUSH – PART 5 – by Arthur Wyatt and Pye Parr

So, more fun and nonsense with the nano-bots designed to solve all your tummy troubles. Well, at least that was how Intestinauts used to be. Now, still fun and a half but also in the middle of a really great little adventure. Full credit to Wyatt and Parr for how they’ve developed this one into what it is now.

Okay then, as for where we’re at now, we had this glorious gag at the end of the last part…

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So how wrong is really, really wrong?

Well, if you’re a group of nano-bots on a mission to battle the experimental conglomeration of Omega Genocide Four, a deadly and angry bowel bot accidental creation, something that hates all things Intestinaut, while trying to save the Intestolabs doc with an hour until lockdown protocols end with a fatal decontamination, and you’ve now been injected into the nutrient fluid channels of Intestolabs to chase down OG4 before it gets to Dr Globulon, the literal brains behind Intestolabs, only to find out that Dr Globulon has already been infected and now wants all Intestinauts recalled and destroyed…

…well, that’s really, really wrong with a cherry on top.

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It’s not just a delight seeing Pye Parr’s art go into so many different directions here, all of them real good, but the way that Wyatt’s turned what was essentially a silly, one-off gag at first into something much larger is a joy.

Yes, we’re deep into a really damn fine adventure where the tiny scale and fundamental silliness of the concept has been gloriously transformed by Wyatt and Parr into a real thriller that works so well.

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THE LORD PROVIDES by Gemma Sheldrake, letters by Jim Campbell

Now, with the end of the quarterly Regened Progs, I’d have put this – new creative team, different art style, 10 pages as opposed to the usual five- as an already commissioned Regened strip that had to be used somewhere. But that doesn’t exactly fly with the tone of this one.

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Because this is deliciously dark and, by its end, damn nasty. There’s all sorts of body horror stuff going on here, hinted at throughout before the twist where it’s made very real, albeit absolutely not how we, or the new Priest protagonist in this strange western town, thought it would be.

No matter, what you have here is a done-in-one 10-pager that’s just plain creepy and, by its end, just plain nasty. But it’s also damn good.

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BRINK: BOOK 6 – CONSUMED – PART 9 – by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, letters by Simon Bowland

I think the absolutely finest bit in Brink is where it all starts to come together and things start to accelerate. Don’t get me wrong, the early bits of building up the storyline are fantastic, as is the finale where everything that’s been building up over however many episodes (and for me, Brink can never have enough episodes) finally comes to a perfect conclusion. But that bit where all the threads start being pulled together might be my favourite bit.

And that’s just where it feels like we are right now.

We have Kurtis and Wade taking over a case from murder, all because Wade’s convinced it’s got sect crime written all over it. They’ve got a body, they’ve got an interrogation to start, and the interrogatee is none other than Regina Castenada, the PI who happened to be following the victim for months. Threads drawing together.

And then there’s this….

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Oh yes, threads pulling together indeed. And it’s absolutely fabulous the way Culbard and Abnett do it.

Brink is – stop me if I’ve said this too many times already – one of the absolute best of 2000 AD strips of all time. And that’s a big call for something that, over nearly 50 years, has had its fair share of really damn fine comics strips. But yes, Brink is good. Very, very, very good.

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ROGUE TROOPER: SOUTHER BELLE – PART 1 – by Geoffrey D. Wessel and Dan Cornwell, colours by Chris Blythe, letters by Jim Campbell

Well what do you know, another Rogue after the Ennis/Goddard strip a while back – almost like there’s a movie in the works.

As for the Ennis/Goddard version, there’s news this Prog…

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But as for this one, well it’s doing the ‘set it during the war and don’t give us any indication when it’s set’ sort of thing. But then again, that’s where all the best Rogue stories happen anyway. No need to ground it in some definitive timescale, best to just call it as some ‘during the days of the war’ thing. After all, this is a war that’s never-ending to the grunts on the ground so there’s plenty of space to just tell stand-alone tales of the last GI.

As for what we get here, there’s Dan Cornwell on art, which is always a good thing. As for the story, it’s Wessel dropping Rogue and us into a something nasty from the Norts type storyline, where the nasty is a very persuasive propaganda broadcast.

How nasty?

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Yep, that’s nasty and very effective propaganda.

The trouble comes for me late on when we get Bagman recognizing the transmission as a ‘Doll’. Now I know a fair bit about Rogue but I’m, like many, no expert, which means I’m either missing the reference or it’s a new thing Wessel’s dropped in. A little Google solves that, I was missing the reference. But to drop something so deeply entwined in Rogue history… is that really a good way to open things? Well, time will tell.

As it is, sure is fun to get more Rogue in the Prog, especially if they are doing it right and just treating the character as a means to drop a sci-fi war take off and not bothering with fitting it into the constraints of something bigger.

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FUTURE SHOCKS: HAPPY WIFE – by Laura Bailey and Stewart K. Moore, letters by Annie Parkhouse

First of all, a Future Shock with SK Moore artwork, bound to be something that looks fabulous. And it does.

But more than that, it’s a fine Future Shock, Laura Bailey telling a tight five-pager of a man who gets what he wants but still isn’t happy, a man who’s just not as nice, not as grief-stricken at the sudden death of his wife as he makes out.

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The shock of his wife’s death means the powers that be have assigned a new AI-generated wife for him, with all the personality and memories of his dead wife.

Except the new wife looks a little too deeply into the memories and the life of who she was before she died – and that’s not going to go real well for the grieving widower, if that’s what he really is.

Yes, a really good little Future Shock, full of all the things that have always made the best Future Shocks work.

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PROTEUS VEX: DEVIOUS – PART 12 – by Mike Carroll and Jake Lynch, colours by Jim Boswell, letters by Simon Bowland

Tiorn’s in Imperium custody and they want answers, from Tiorn and Vex, all about the flesh-pilots, who are intricately tied up with the Imperium at the highest levels. It’s all to do with those conspiracy theories that Vex was looking into.

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Plots and secrets and conspiracies across the whole galaxy – that’s what Proteus Vex is all about, well, that and creating an epic bit of sci-fi of alien cultures doing alien things

Meanwhile, the Citheronian ship of Chorus is taking heavy damage and things are looking really bad. They need something incredible to save them. And if you can’t work out what, or who, is coming next episode then you haven’t been paying attention to what is truly a great, great strip.

Like Brink, Proteus Vex is just so perfectly complex, making you think of all that’s going on, with Carroll and Lynch both right at the top of their game, crafting this excellent slice of really big, really important, really epic sci-fi.