The Weekly 2000 AD Prog 2419 — Hawk The Slayer Doing The Slaying Thing

Taking a look inside the UK’s greatest sci-fi comic, the Galaxy’s Greatest… it’s the Weekly 2000 AD…

This week we’re continuing with everything. That means it’s the second part of Ken Niemand and Nick Percival’s The Shift, where they’re diving deep into all the horrors of Dredd’s world. There’s also plenty of swords and plenty of sorcery with more Hawk the Slayer, more big sci-fi adventures in Full Tilt Boogie, more politics meets strangeness in the world of Portals & Black Goo, and even more Wild(e) West mythic stuff in Fiends of the Western Front. Again, all part of the history of 2000 AD bringing us decades of variety and diverse reading.

It all starts under a typically perfect cover from Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague…

2000 AD Prog 2419 is out in the UK on 12th February in the UK. If you’re in the Americas or anywhere else the Prog’s sold, the release date’s not quite as fixed … get yourself to a comic shop and put in an order. I know you won’t regret it. This week was mostly filled with trying to find a USPS line that wouldn’t take two hours to get to the front of. Seriously, it’s only going to get worse if 10% of them take the Trump/Musk redundancy offered. It’s only just started and it feels like we’re headed into Dredd’s fascist dystopia already.

So, onwards and upwards, let’s show you what’s happening inside…

JUDGE DREDD: THE SHIFT – PART 2 – BY KEN NIEMAND & NICK PERCIVAL, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Dredd’s got a message from the future, of him asking for help, talking of being trapped in ‘The Shift’, and it’s all tied into a missing student of Prof Marsha Hobbs, one who was researching the myths and legends around MC-1, concentrating on juve ganes that could open up portals to other worlds.

So, of course Dredd’s on it. Even knowing what he’s heard. We get Dredd playing the elevator game, Niemand bringing in Korean legend to this one, constructing this one to take Dredd someplace strange, someplace Niemand and Percival have been plotting for a while now, bringing that element of the supernatural and the grotesque and the nasty back. Because it’s always been there, that dark corner, the magical freaks, the demons, the things that slither. It’s good to have them back.

But let’s talk about how brilliantly Percival sells this one. His art’s always been full of beautiful grotesques of course. But here he takes it up many notches. The storytelling and figure work is perfect, but it’s the extra touches here that make this one work, really give the story that push into greatness.

Look at those first two pages below to see just what I mean. It all starts with one poor, tired, scared kid, that student Dredd’s looking for. She’s inside a Mega-City Block that just looks off, not right, disturbingly different, with monsters tracking her down. Next page, Dredd outside the same Block, but looking more like the normal MC-1 post-Chaos Day derelict and abandoned Block. The mirroring of the Blocks, one in ‘The Shift’, one in MC-1, that’s the brilliance that Percival brings to this.

It keeps running all the way through this one, as we get the background on this particular Block, memories of the horrors of Chaos Day, again with Percival giving us panels of horror to perfectly summarise it all.

And then we get this…

Dredd’s doing the elevator game, one page where Niemand hands it all over to Percival to give us everything.

Look at that page, look at the way things change across the page, shifting from the normal MC-1 to Shift MC-1, that’s just so subtly and wonderfully done, everything you need to know to sell it all to you.

No real plot points here, just the art doing it all to move from where we were we where to where the story needs us to be — and Percival makes it all happen in a single page.

Oh yes, this is really something great.

FULL TILT BOOGIE – BOOK THREE – PART 2 – BY ALEX DE CAMPI & EDUARDO OCANA, COLOURS BY GIULIA BRUSCO, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Back with the third and final volume of Full Tilt Boogie. There’s a lot of backstory to this one, huge galactic empire stuff, but right now all you need to know is that bounty hunter Tee, along with her grandma and her cat, was paid to rescue Luxine Prince Ifan from debtors prison. The Luxine Empire are the huge galactic empire in all of this and, as is the way, aren’t all that nice. Which is why, right now, Tee — along with grandma, cat, and various other waifs and strays they’ve picked up along the way — have a price on their heads, a bounty that many want to get their hands on. All this while the Luxine Empress gears up (far too gleefully) for war.

There’s a lightness to Ocana’s line that makes all this so fluid and flowing, only added to by the subtle colours of Brusco. Every page has this lovely choreographed style, fight scenes like ballet, a great example of a writer stepping back and letting the artist do their thing. I mean, look at this bit when they requisition another ship to get to Luxos — the great expression of weightlessness, all of it due to Ocana and Brusco…

It’s fast and furious stuff, loads of action happening, all of it really beautifully shown by Ocana. De Campi is great at letting her artist’s have space to show what they can do, and that’s perfectly expressed here, as Ocana spends the pages showing us Tee and the gang first escape their bounty-hunting pursuers and then figure out just how they’re getting their hands on hell out of here.

It’s going to be a fast finale with a hell of a lot happening on both the huge, empire-level scale and the personal scale. But it’s also going to have a lot of great things to look at along the way.

HAWK THE SLAYER: THE LAST OF HER KIND – PART 7 – BY ALEC WORLEY & SIMON COLEBY, COLOURS BY GARY CALDWELL, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

We’re on familiar ground here, sword and sorcery done right, a simple enough tale of the hero (Hawk) that you might have seen in the cult 1980s movie, a villain, the Lady Morlaine who rules over Valensfort with her supernatural powers. It’s one that ticks all the boxes for you S&S fans, but it’s also a lot of fun for those of us brought up on the likes of Robin Hood and King Arthur.

And seeing as I’ve been talking about artists in the Dredd and the Full Tilt Boogie strips, let’s take a moment to appreciate Coleby’s art here. It’s just a bloody great thing, full of all the darkness his line usually gives, all playing into the theme of the Lady Morlaine succumbing to evil, but there’s also this great openness to what he’s doing, packing the panels and pages with characters and details. And this episode gives Coleby a great chance to open up into all that detail with this…

Yes, look at that, the whole of Valensfort turning out for the tournament that you just know Hawk’s going to crash — again, shades of Robin Hood coming through. It’s glorious stuff, Coleby really taking the moment to show us such great art.

So, we’ve got Morlaine overseeing this tournament, Hawk breaking in to get close once more, talk of champions and chivalry, proper historical stuff mixing with all that sword and sorcery stuff.

PORTALS & BLACK GOO: A QUORUM OF FIENDS – PART 7 – BY JOHN TOMLINSON & EOIN COVENEY, COLOURS BY JIM BOSWELL, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

It all connects you know. Remember the couple of pages last episode dealing with the trashy TV show starring ridiculous versions of both Cursitor Doom and Magister? Well, it might have seemed just this silly little thing but here we find out that the producer of said TV show happens to be Sir Basil Chrichton, the same Sir Basil we’ve seen here at Dunweald Manor, the same Sir Basil of the Quorum of Fiends. We still don’t quite know what that is but there’s this sense that it’s really not going to be all that great.

Tomlinson is pulling all these strands together here really well. The first series was all about Kroy and his Deliveroo job, a way of introducing us to this strange little world where all the nasty things of myth and legend are integrating into this England. But this second series has thrown a bigger net around things, taking in so much more, with all the little threads from the first series being explored.

And, keeping with the look at the artists here, Coveney is doing really great things here in Portals & Black Goo, dealing so well with so many characters, so many storylines, yet keeping a really solid look to it all, never losing the thread of where things are going. It’s clever, it’s great art, serving the story so well, great art serving a great story so well.

So, it’s all drawing together, all these little threads — Cursitor and Magister and the oncoming nightmares, the Quorum of Fiends, the sad little dead guy with a hard-on for killing vampires, those vampires dealing with a new deadly infection and the promise of a vamp cure.

But above all else, there’s that hatred building everywhere you look, the far right on the rise, just here in Portals & Black Goo, it’s the humans being inflamed by political agitators after more power to fight against those supernatural minorities amongst them. It’s an allegory for everything we’re seeing in the world right now and it’s just really great reading.

FIENDS OF THE WESTERN FRONT: WILDE WEST – PART 7 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND TIERNEN TREVALLION, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

To end this Prog, we get Fiends, and it is just really, really great. It all comes from Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra’s original, a short and sweet thing that just gave us the simple but brilliant idea of a vampire at war, finding plenty of blood on the battlefield. Such a great concept, but never explored. Not until now. Here we have Edginton and Trevallion taking that initial (brilliant) concept and just going with it. Over the last few series of Fiends, they’ve explored the ideas behind the idea of an immortal warring vampire and brought in a whole history tied into ancient mythologies and made it damn great to read.

Now, we have a very strange idea — what if an ancient vampire warrior and one of the greatest poets and writers of his age happened to get together in the Wild West of America as they’re both being hunted by some seriously bad things. The vamp is Constanta, the poet/writer is Oscar Wilde, and they’ve got this whole thing going on, funny and honest and really lighting up the page. Edginton’s writing up a storm on this one, making the whole thing run so well – the whole back-and-forth between them is just perfect.

But let’s talk about what Trevallion does here. We have a thing where the pair of them have walked into a literal ghost town to face this…

And there we’ve got Trevallion walking into Mike Mignola territory, and doing it oh so well. His art here just leans into all the ancient mythology at play here, an ancient frog thing, immigrant supernatural magics at play. Trevallion does it all so fabulously well, the linework and subtle colours just perfect for this.

Its five pages of an ancient vampire versus ancient frog demon thing, mythic things going at each other, Trevallion giving everything and making it all just work brilliantly.