The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2427: Chimpsky Swings Into Action

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, we’ve got cover star Chimpsky carrying on his investigation that was last week’s surprise debut. There’s a new Judge Dredd series kicking off and more one-off Nu Earth War Tales bringing us more from the world of Rogue Trooper. Plus, we get the start of the second series of the excellent Silver, Mike Carroll and Joe Currie’s tale of an alien invasion and one ancient vampire’s key role in taking back Earth. There’s also the start of a completely new strip, Ghosted, by Guy Adams and Megan Huang, which looks rather intriguing indeed.

It all starts under a typically brilliant cover from Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague that looks rather a lot like this…

Cover by Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague

2000 AD Prog 2427 is out in the UK on 9th April. It will be out in the Americas at some point in the future. But it was never that easy or simple to find out when, and that’s just been made so much more difficult with the current distributor chaos in the comics industry. So, my suggestion to you would be to get yourself down to your friendly local comic shop and get them to order it for you. Honestly, you’ll be joining so many of us who took the plunge and haven’t regretted it once.

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

JUDGE DREDD: BLITZERS – BY KEN NIEMAND AND DAN CORNWELL. COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

A new Dredd, starting off with an exploding commuter, one with his chest hollowed out and filled with bombs, triggered by his own stress levels. It’s a familiar MO for Dredd, old-school mob-blitzer tactic.

So, who is it? Not the regular cit he seems, and he’s not the only one either. A young woman wakes up with the memory of her brother going out the same Blitzer way. And she’s got the same thing inside her, waiting to explode.

It’s a case of old sins coming back to haunt you. Lives left behind that you can only escape for a while. She’s one of them, there are others out there in the City, all of them living their ordinary, boring lives, taking whatever meds/drugs they needed to hold the bomb inside them at bay. Except now it seems the meds/drugs aren’t working anymore.

It’s got that classic Dredd procedural feel about it already. An intro episode that’s particularly Dredd-lite. Instead, it’s one that dives into the oh so many weird things that are here in Mega-City One, the sort of story Niemand does so well, concentrating on the poor bastards living in the Big Meg, setting up the story real well.

And with Dan Cornwell on art, you know it looks really good. For an artist who first burst onto the scene less than a decade ago with Rok of the Reds, he’s now firmly established as one of a number of really damn good Dredd artists were lucky to have right now.

CHIMPSKY’S LAW: THE TRUTH CONUNDRUM – PART 2 – BY KEN NIEMAND AND PJ HOLDEN. BY JACK DAVIES, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

So, last week we had a Dredd story about the ‘Truth Bomber‘, the mystery perp exploding their truth bombs of psychoactive gases across MC-1 that have the Cits and the Judges unable to speak anything but the truth.

Dredd’s on the case of course, looking to stamp down hard on whoever’s behind it. But, in one of those great surprises, it turns out that Chimpsky’s on the case as well. And we had the Dredd strip immediately continued in the first Chimpsky strip. Always so much fun when that happens.

Oh, and if you didn’t already know, Chimpsky’s an ape in the city blessed with a 240 IQ and a burning desire to make things better. Think of him as the Spider-Man of MC-1, where Dredd’s the Batman with fascist leanings. Chimpsky’s a hero, a real hero, whereas Dredd’s the jackboot of the oppressive regime. Chimpsky fights for the people, wants to make the world better, whereas Dredd’s the law, unfeeling and unmoveable.

Yes, we love Chimpsky. Niemand and Holden have given us a real hero in the mold of Chopper here, just a bit more ape.

Last episode, we had Chimpsky already track down just who the Truth Bomber is – because he’s just very,very smart. And he sees the droid Truth Bomber as a kindred spirit, similar origin story, same sense of wanting to change things, albeit not exactly the way Chimpsky would do it.

As with every Chimpsky story so far, this one’s just best described as fun. So much fun. Both Niemand and Holden love the character, you can just tell, and that’s love comes through in every panel, every page of this one.

Again, it’s something perfectly suited to Holden’s art, art I’ve loved for many years now, the sense of the silly high in the mix, but based in the real grime and misery of life in the Big Meg. Holden gets all that in so simply but so cleverly, every page full of such great character beats.

Basically, Chimpsky is just damn good fun, a proper hero for the Dreddverse.

SILVER: BOOK TWO: PERFIDIOUS (PART 1) – PART 1 – BY MIKE CARROLL AND JOE CURRIE. LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Silver burst onto the scene last year, a truly brilliant tale from Carroll, designed by him to give Joe Currie something to draw that would play to his strengths – and those are some impressive strengths indeed, gorgeous linework, heavily Euro-influenced, and just looking very fresh and new.

As for the story, well, it’s 2001 and Earth’s been taken over by the alien Sepsis. Against them, there’s a ragtag band of resistance fighters, who’ve recently unearthed the Baroness DeSilva, an ancient vampire who now fights with them. Thanks to her, they’ve just screwed with the plans of the Sepsis, destroying part of the infrastructure designed to enslave humanity. And that’s where we come in now.

Silver is a strip that moves fast. The whole of series 1 happened over the course of just two days – from 8:22 pm Friday 24th August 2001 to daylight hours on 25th August. This second series kicks off straight into the action at 10:30 pm Saturday 25th August 2001. Oh yes, very, very fast indeed, a fascinating way to play out a series, something very different and done really, really well.

Right now, the Baroness is moving against the collaborators on her ancestral land- and moving with mayhem…

It’s just non-stop from the off, the Baroness absolutely deadly at night, raging through the Sepsis ship leaving nothing but blood and corpses in her wake, all just so beautifully done by Currie.

At the end, we get an introduction to a colleague of Bishop, one of the resistance leaders. Well, maybe. That’s the thing when things go this fast, there’s not that much time for backstory. We’re waiting for it to be teased out as things move on. Anyway, the new guy, Wilson/Red, has a job for the Baroness.

So, this one begins just how the last series ended, fast and furious, so much action, fast-paced, bloody, vicious, a neat spin on the aliens take over the Earth thing, with Carroll doing great things with a really fascinating setup and all contained in this story structure of getting it all done in 24 hours. And of course, you get Currie’s artwork, this deliciously thin line affair, perfectly different, beautifully coloured, looking like nothing you’ve seen for quite some time. A great start to what looks like it’s going to be everything the first series was – and that’s a very good thing indeed.

GHOSTED: BOOK ONE: PART 1 – BY GUY ADAMS AND MEGAN HUANG. LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Another new strip, and in the last couple of years we’ve had quite a number of them, all of them pretty damn great. I mean, take Silver as an example, a really bloody great debut onto a second series. And there’s been many more in the last few years. Right now, we’re in a bit of a golden age, with new and old delivering.

So, here’s Ghosted, described in the intro as:

“Taking place in Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and into the far future. Here, Kinshasa is one of ‘the fastest-growing mega-cities in the world, where this metropolis is now a walled city-world at the centre of the African continent, so vast and divorced from the rest of the planet that it’s virtually its own realm. Rich and diverse, it prides itself on being the perfect place to live — but not everything is what it seems on the surface…”

So, in we go… as party girl Benu gets a real comedown thanks to a possible kidnap…

Why she’s targeted becomes a secondary concern for her, her first thought once it’s all over and she’s brutally dealt with her would-be kidnapper is how the hell did she do that? So where the hell did these new fighting skills come from?

And what connection do they have with this?

In fact, just who is that and where are they? Is it really happening in Benu’s head? That’s the obvious assumption we’re given, especially with the final health alert of ‘unexplained cerebral disfiguration.’ Psychic projection? Physical manifestation? Right now – Who knows? I’m sure we’ll find out in the next couple of episodes of this one.

Instead of being frustrated by the strangeness and the uncertainty of what’s happening, think of this as the tempter, a scene-setter, the fast-paced bit in the movie or tv show before the titles. Don’t come here expecting immediate answers and just enjoy this debut as it explodes into life around you through the five pages here. And it is a damn good opener, full of energy, full of colour, and yes, full of questions.

It looks great too, with Huang’s first art for 2000 AD looking fresh and full of youthful energy, her colours absolutely bursting off the page. A real mix of styles too, from the relatively low-key future tech cityscape of the first page straight into the almost cartoonish exuberance of page 2 and Benu’s drug-fueled partying.

It’s too early to say where it’s going yet of course, but Ghosted really announces itself in this first episode.

NU EARTH WAR TALES: NU ROMANCE – PART 1 – BY GORDON RENNIE AND GARY WELSH. COLOURS BY GARY CALDWELL, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

Another visit to the world of Rogue Trooper, with the first multi-parter of Nu Earth War Tales focusing on the stories happening in the seemingly never-ending war between the Norts and Southers, where Rogue is just one player.

Here we’re focusing on those untrustworthy arms dealers Bland & Brass, introduced to us way, way back in the earliest Gerry Finley-Day written Rogue tales.

Mr Brass is the tall one with the moustache, Mr Bland is the short one. Brass was a Nort, Bland a Souther, until they met and put aside those loyalties in favour of the pursuit of money, whether that’s from looting bodies on the battlegrounds or dealing in arms. Anything that they think they can make cash on, they’ll get involved in, a pair of absolutely amoral characters, they’ve long been the darkly comedic double act of Rogue Trooper.

Anyway, here in Nu Romance, we’re away from the war, on the planet Byzant, independent of both Nort and Southers, this is a planet where those who feed off the war come to make deals. And here we get to meet Mr Bland and Mr Brass separately, their very first meeting, and the start of the partnership that will find them all over the battlefields of Nu Earth in the future.

In the meantime, we get to see them both in action here, both with different partners, both involved in some very dodgy dealings. It’s a fun start to wherever this one takes us.