The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2424; Dredd’s Nightmare Shift Continues

Taking a look inside the UK’s greatest sci-fi comic, the Galaxy’s Greatest, now 48 years young —it’s the Weekly 2000 AD.

48 years young, consistently the finest sci-fi anthology you could wish to read. There’s so much in store for you inside the pages of the weekly Prog, it’s about time you dived in!

This week, it’s just the four strips, with Alex De Campi and Eduardo Ocana’s space opera, Full Tilt Boogie, doing a double shift. Alongside that one, there’s more horrors for Dredd to deal with in ‘The Shift’, plus the excellent Portals & Black Goo races to a conclusion. Finally, there’s a new occasional series of one-off stories from the world of Rogue Trooper, Nu Earth War Tales. It’s not going to feature Rogue every time, but Rogue’s world has always been a fascinating one, and this series promises to dive deep into the strange war world of Nu Earth.

All of that comes under another nightmare-inducing cover from Nick Percival…

2000 AD Prog 2424 is out in the UK on 19 March. If you’re in the former land of the free and home of the brave, currently finding out, no surprise, that the economic upturn isn’t happening the way it was promised, you’ll be wanting an escape, and there’s no better way than with 2000 AD – although you’d best get your local comic shop to order it for you.

So, away we go – let’s show you what’s happening inside…

JUDGE DREDD: THE SHIFT – PART 7 – BY KEN NIEMAND AND NICK PERCIVAL, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Dredd’s deep in The Shift, this strange, supernatural place in the middle of Mega-City One, where his rescue mission has put himself and his city in terrible danger. Because The Shift is reaching out, nightmarish tendrils extending into the city and infecting minds.

At ground zero, outside Elisa Lam Block, home to The Shift, the Judges looking for Dredd are bleeding from their eyes, knowing that the air strike to raze Lam to the ground is imminent, with two minutes before Dredd’s on the receiving end.

So, it’s a frantic race to get out for Dredd and the girl he went in to find, the real horrors of The Shift all around them – and with Percival’s art, those horrors are very, very real, every episode he seems to have gone out of his way to scar us even more. But there’s a true beauty and incredible skill in what he’s doing here, littering the series with visual invention, a menagerie of the monstrous at every turn, all done in a style that means you can feel the terrors creeping in.

Dredd’s race to escape brings him face to face with more horrors of course, but it also gives us this tantalizing little tease of something else…

The Oubliette – oh, you know that’s going to be important in tales to come.

There’s a lot going on in The Shift, with Niemand and Percival going all out to establish their new take on the outlandish and terrifying to be found if you just scratch the surface of Mega-City One. It’s damn good stuff.

PORTALS & BLACK GOO: A QUORUM OF FIENDS – PART 12 – BY JOHN TOMLINSON AND EOIN COVENEY, COLOURS BY JIM BOSWELL, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Everything that’s been building in Portals is coming to a head here. All that simmering political and social tension that’s sat cleverly behind this one is coming to the boil, as we watch the results of all that lowest common denominator, stir up the hatred, give the people the excuse to go after the others in society. Here it’s the monsters that live amongst normal Londoners. But, as with all good sci-fi, you don’t have to look too hard to find the analogies to life here and now.

So Battle Hill is on fire, those immigrant monsters running for their lives, chased by the hate-filled true monsters lashing out at anything they don’t understand, guided to their target by Tommy Willard, just another power-hungry politico stoking the flames of hate.

Meanwhile, over with the Quorum of Fiends in Dunweald Manor, the roots are fuelling the mystical energies as the real fiends come out to play, a demonic summoning centuries in the making. But there are extra players here, other agendas at play. There’s Kroy, there’s Nona, and there’s Cursitor Doom – oh yes, it’s all coming to a climactic end, completely with a big, big twist.

It’s another one of those 2000 AD series that’s surprised, doing the clever thing way, way beyond being what was initially a thing with the funny hook of playing off the ubiquitous food delivery McJobs of the now in a world where the monsters needed grub. It’s gone so much further than that, bringing in fine allegory, putting up a mirror to our increasingly hate-filled world where those in power scream at us to punch down on the weak and the vulnerable, while they take more and more and more. Portals & Black Goo may have started life as a fun thing with a delicious food-based supernatural hook, but here, at the climax of series 2, it’s transformed into something that all great sci-fi can do, make us look at ourselves and our world and question. That’s a great thing to be able to do.

FULL TILT BOOGIE – BOOK THREE – PART 7 – BY ALEX DE CAMPI AND EDUARDO OCANA. COLOURS BY GIULIA BRUSCO, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

We get a double-length FTB here, giving de Campi and Ocana the space to really go big, in an episode that plays so much into Ocana’s strengths. It’s 10 pages of such beautifully choreographed action, an extended fight scene all so gorgeously done in Ocana’s deliciously light stylings.

We’re in the heart of the Luxine Empire as it gears up for war against the Anubite horde. The Luxine Empress hungry for war and for food. And those closest to her plotting and planning in the manner of which all empires are always enmeshed in.

Into this comes Tee and her gang of disrupters, along with their friendly AI Horus, who’s been busy doing its best to get into the Luxine systems.

On the one side of this final storyline, you have the big stuff, the empires at war stuff. But that’s not what De Campi and Ocana have concentrated on here in this double-sized episode. Oh no, not at all. Instead, in a great decision, they’ve made these 10 pages mostly focused on the moment when Tee et al come into contact with the Luxine Empress. It’s just a perfectly executed moment of fighting amongst the huge events around all this, a double-length episode making the most of the extra pages. Full credit to Matt Smith, 2000 AD editor, for the impossible task of scheduling all the stories of the weekly Prog to be able to fit in something like this, a mid-series moment that demanded the double-length episode.

Whereas the first few episodes of this final FTB series may have seemed just too big, playing against all that has come before in terms of storytelling, here we’re resolutely back to what makes FTB so much fun. Yes, it’s all still in the shadow of the giant warring races, but getting into the personal has always been where FTB entertains the most. It’s 10 pages of perfectly done comics, where the epic gives way to the immediate and we focus in on the fight, up close and personal, giving Ocana the time and space to really impress.

NU EARTH WAR TALES: OVERWATCH – BY GORDON RENNIE AND MIKE WALTERS, COLOURS BY MATT SOFFE, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

As I said up there at the start of this, Nu Earth Tales is a new occasional series diving into the world of Rogue Trooper and the never-ending war between the Norts and the Southers. Over the years, it’s become obvious that Rogue Trooper’s story is a closed-off thing, yet the bigger picture of the war is packed with tales to tell. Nu Earth War Tales is the natural extension of that, one-off stories of the war between the Norts and the Southers, unhitched from the closed-off story of the last genetic infantryman. Of course, the interest surrounding the upcoming Rogue Trooper animated movie is driving the increased attention 2000 AD is showing to the world of Rogue, but that’s okay, because it gives us things like Overwatch.

This first Nu Earth War Tale features Rogue, but he’s merely a means to tell the story, the last GI fighting the never-ending war. The real story comes from another GI, a prototype, a failure of the program who’s looking over the war, manipulating and influencing things, independent of its Souther masters. So, we get a tale of something rejected that’s taken an overseeing position in the war, looking down on the combat and interfering to allow Rogue to carry on his mission. It’s a quiet thing, the hidden influencer on the war, affecting things on the ground, unseen by both sides, but it’s a very well done intro to what could be a very intriguing series.