Review: ‘Shakara: The Complete Collection’ — All Out Alien Mayhem Never Looked So Good

Okay, to give you an idea of the scale of this one, the first three pages gives us the destruction of Earth by some unknown alien race, with the final human onboard the international space station picked up by space scavengers, dumped onto a slave planet, and squished by something way bigger and stronger. That’s just pages one to three, just to get over the idea that this one’s way, way bigger than just your normal sci-fi.

No, this one’s huge, epic, big and nasty stuff, a quite brilliant tale of vengeance and carnage across the universe.

Anyway, after that little diversion of the first three pages, we get to see the one we’re all here for, the star of the show, the killing machine on a mission — Shakara! Shakara! Shakara!

That’s most of what it says all the way through. Shakara. This is a seemingly unstoppable killing machine out for vengeance for the death of its people, the Shakara.

After that, we’re on a non-stop, super fast ride, carnage and devastation on practically every page, the fastest, most frenetic thing you might ever read. Shakara.

Now, a confession. I only really started with 2000 AD from 2012. I’d dipped in and out before then, sure, but I have to say that Shakara had slipped by me. So this is my first contact with this one. And bloody hell, I regret missing out first time round. Oh, Shakara.

I mean, something like this, it could get tiresome after a while. The non-stop action, the incessant push forwards, the never-ending carnage, it’s something that could grow old very quickly.

Except it doesn’t, not a bit of it. Robbie Morrison’s writing is such that each new vista of devastation, each new alien race to inevitably fall to Shakara’s unstoppable destructive force, has enough to it to make things forever interesting.

And then there’s Henry Flint.

Bloody hell, Henry Flint. This might not have been his first 2000 AD work, that came back in (I think) 1996, and Shakara started in 2001. He’d already done Rogue Trooper, Dredd, ABC Warriors, Missionary Man, and Nemesis by then. But here he seemed to come into his own, here was perhaps where Flint first became the stellar artist who’s since gone on to be quite a brilliant artist across so much, but particularly on Zombo and Judge Dredd.

Whilst we’re talking all things art here, let’s just track back a moment to one of the series Flint did before starting Shakara — Nemesis. There’s a lot of Nemesis in this – story and art. All for the good as well. The first Shakara story arc in this complete collection is very much like early Nemesis. Lots of disconnected episodes, Shakara and his very alien-looking ship facing a new alien civilization each week — and inevitably wiping them out, very much like that early Kevin O’Neill-drawn Nemesis. And of course, Flint’s art, the continual invention of coming up with strange new alien shapes and life forms immediately reminds you of the manic invention of O’Neill’s Nemesis, both of them full of these quite wonderfully unlike anything you’ve seen before – pure alienness.

Oh boy, Flint really did launch into this with a relish you can see on every page, so much that’s just so different, so fast, so kinetic, so alive (well, quite a lot that’s not so alive after a meeting with Shakara… but you know what I mean.) It’s really the series when you see an artist ascend to greatness. What he’s done post-Shakara has been magnificent, but this is just over-the-top gloriousness in artistry.

The black and white and grey-shaded art is visceral and alive, with the splashes of colour, red early on, greens and blues later, really giving Shakara a look that’s just perfect. Flint captured the mood Morrison’s after so well, his artwork alien, spiky, unreal, never more so than Shakara itself, an truly alien thing, the blank red eyes always present throughout all the carnage.

After the brilliantly disjointed first book, we dive deeper into things in book two, Shakara the Assassin. The killing machine beginning to think for itself, despite its programming. We get a first idea of it being something created, a thing of vengeance put out there by something else. Whatever created it now demanding of it ‘You are not a sentient creature. Free thoughts are not yours to have. You live because of our death, our destruction. You were born to kill.’

Whatever they are, they seem insistent on bludgeoning out any semblance of free will or consciousness on behalf of their killing machine. This second book finds a pushback against Shakara, with the killing machine targeted, bounty hunters after it, a whole book of the pursuit followed by the confrontation. It’s page after page, episode after episode of just the best kinetic storytelling, the story simple, the effect quite wonderful. Perfectly fast-paced, never letting up at all. It’s just bloody great.

By the third book and onwards, we’re deep into it all, looking back to the race of the same name, empire builders, like gods giving their knowledge to lesser worlds, the most powerful race in the galaxy. The initial revenge tale becomes something of empires and myth, the Shakarans creating a golden age, only to have it all fall, as all empires do.

Again, Flint’s art just perfectly showing us throughout the tale of an alien empire falling, the clever use of red, gone from the pages in time of peace, bursting back in as the Shakaran empire falls.

And once it’s all gone, we’re back with Shakara, the last vestige of the empire, the single-minded destroyer working through worlds, leaving devastation in its wake. But there’s more to it now, a consciousness beyond what it was programmed to be. The machine of vengeance begins to think for itself, and that’s not allowed.

What follows is a battle for what that empire meant, with Shakara at its heart, revealing that the purity of the Shakaran empire was nothing of the sort.

Things get big. Very big. Empires are fought for. Mythologies fall, truths are revealed. It’s all very, very important. And it’s all damn good. Morrison ramps things up really well, Flint keeps on doing the whole alien as hell thing so perfectly.

Shakara! Shakara! Shakara! It’s big, it’s epic, it’s just such a great ending to a really essential 2000 AD strip.

Damn, I wish I’d have read this as it came out. Thankfully, I can experience it all here right now in this complete collection. This is the perfect example of all that 2000 AD can offer, incredible sci-fi adventures you just won’t find anywhere else.

[And hopefully, I think I’ve managed to get through all this without mistakenly writing Shakira, the diminutive Columbian singer. It’s quite the achievement given that autocorrect fought me all the way.]

Shakara: The Complete Collection – by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint, letters by Ellie De Ville. Published by 2000 AD.

Contains the stories —
Shakara – Originally published in 2000 AD Xmas Prog 2002, Progs 1273-1279
Shakara The Assassin – Originally published in 2000 AD Progs 1441-1449
Shakara The Defiant – Originally published in 2000 AD Xmas Prog 2008 and Progs 1567-1573
Shakara The Destroyer – Originally published in Progs 1650-1661
Shakara The Avenger – Originally published in 2000 AD Xmas Prog 2011 and Progs 1715-1727