The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2428: The Wings Of War, The Baroness Is Back In Silver

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, everything carries on, meaning more exploding cits in Dredd: Blitzers, more simian capers in Chimpsky, more resisting the alien overlords in Silver, more stylish future strangeness in Ghosted, and the second and final part of Mr Bland and Mr Brass’s origin tale in Nu Earth War Tales.

All of it takes place under a Joe Currie cover for Silver…

2000 AD Prog 2428 is out in the UK on Wednesday 16th 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 – PART 2 – BY KEN NIEMAND AND DAN CORNWELL. COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Last episode we dropped into a typically Dredd-lite Niemand opener, concentrating instead on a group of former mob stooges, all of them loaded with blitzer tech, implanted suicide devices to stop them being taken alive. This little group were taken by the Mega City Mob and turned into disposable and explosive weapons.

But the thing is, that was all before Chaos Day. In the fallout, as we see in flashback here, everything changes. Suddenly, you’re four mob-blitzers whose bosses are dead and gone and now you’re left with their crap in your blood that turns you into a human firework if you’re not careful.

It’s now years later and we’ve seen one of them blow in episode 1, the drugs they’ve been taking to stop them blowing no longer working. The rest of them have no choice but to leave their lives behind and run. But you know how that goes in the city where this guy’s on patrol…

Damn, Cornwell does a really great Dredd, and a seriously good Lawmaster to boot. In fact, he’s been staking a claim, these last few years, to join the list of artists who just do Dredd right these days.

It’s another great looking Dredd, another good reading Dredd, where Niemand does the procedural thing, with Dredd used sparingly in favour of setting up the characters and making this all about the poor bastards living in the city.

CHIMPSKY’S LAW: THE TRUTH CONUNDRUM – PART 3 – BY KEN NIEMAND AND PJ HOLDEN. BY JACK DAVIES, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

The fun continues, and it’s really just so much fun. Niemand and Holden are obviously having an absolute blast with Chimpsky, and it shows in every moment. The story is almost secondary to the silliness and the gags, and the gags are great, all coming from Chimpsky’s voice over and the plentiful captions peppered around.

You know, like this…

… and this…

Plenty more besides, all of it happening as Chimpsky works alongside the robo Truth Bomber to gas the city, thanks to the Truth Bomber’s cocktail of chemicals making Chimpsky his unwilling help.

So many things to love with this episode, as with every episode featuring Chimpsky, but my absolute fave is page two below, that great sequence where Niemand and Holden show us Chimpsky fighting against the drugs in such an absolutely perfect way, clever plotting, even smarter art, just doing things other media can’t imagine.

Anyway, Chimpsky’s got two plans. Plan A involves his assembled team of companions. It’s his preferred plan but it depends on this gang of misfits and idiots being able to save the day. And tff he at ain’t gonna work. So, plan B it is, which is all about this guy…

Yep, Dredd might have been a little behind Chimpsky in figuring this one out, but not too far behind. Again, the visual invention at play as Dredd does the investigation, the very clever way Niemand shows is just how damn good at his job Dredd is, as he multitasks his way through a riot whilst also running the Truth Bomber case is an absolute bit of brilliance.

So yes, absolute gold. Like I’ve said already, Chimpsky’s that rare thing in Dreddworld, an honest to god hero, always doing the right thing, wanting to make his city better.

And with Niemand and Holden delivering the gags, the silliness, and a truly great, fun tale, the character just gets better and better and better.

SILVER: BOOK TWO: PERFIDIOUS (PART 1) – PART 2 – BY MIKE CARROLL AND JOE CURRIE. LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Another great strip back for its sophomore outing now, as we settle into series two of Silver. Although, truth be told, Silver’s not a strip that has time to settle in at all. It’s just all-out action from Carroll and Currie, never letting up one moment, yet still cleverly managing to spin out the whole worldbuilding thing.

That’s how we know that this particular Earth of 2001 is under the rule of the Sepsis this last few decades. While most of the world accepts, even collaborates, a few plot and plan. And under the leadership of the mysterious Bishop, they’ve recently unearthed (literally) the 500-hundred-year-old vampire Baroness DeSilva, who’s already aided the resistance in their war against their captors by destroying crucial Sepsis infrastructure intended to further enslave the planet.

Well, that was series one, all brilliantly taking place over a long day. Now we’re into series two of this glorious mix of sci-fi and horror, something unrelenting in pace, where writer Carroll designed the strip to play to artist Currie’s many, many strengths.

Here in series two, we’re with the Baroness working, always reluctantly, with Everett ‘Red’ Wilson, an acquaintance of Bishop, who’s got another job for the Baroness, one that he promises will really hurt the Sepsis. First though, a little betrayal, a lot of hurt for the Baroness, and the reveal that the Sepsis know about the Baroness and have ‘The Hunter’ to track and kill her, the one teased in episode one as ‘someone who specialises in tracking and killing your kind.’

Oh yes, there’s a hell of a lot to Silver, a whole saga already taken place, that we’re only now getting to see from this here and now perspective with occasional flashbacks. He and Currie have taken a familiar trope of alien Empire and small rebel forces fighting back and given it something new and really interesting it’s fast and it’s bloody, but it’s also bloody good.

GHOSTED: BOOK ONE: PART 2 – BY GUY ADAMS AND MEGAN HUANG. LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

In the debut episode, we were introduced to Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the far future, a rich and diverse walled-in city that’s meant to be the perfect place to live. But appearances can be deceptive.

We met young, privileged party girl Benu, who discovered she had strange new abilities she never had before, enabling her to fight off potential kidnappers. Could it all be connected to the strange things happening in her brain, some very strange things indeed…

So many questions that will get answered no doubt, but so far it’s all been about the tease, scene setting and world-building. This second episode goes deeper into the weird stuff happening in Benu’s head, where there now seems to be the soldier we met last time, plus the enemy, and even Benu making a confused appearance. There’s more of an idea of how this is happening now, just not the why – although the last page promises that’s coming.

Right now it’s all either confusing or intriguing, depending on your take. I’m definitely in the intrigued side of things, with the ways Adams has set this up giving us just enough to keep you wanting more and not get frustrated. It’s bold and bright, vibrant art from Huang creating something new and fresh, something that I get the feeling is about to take a big twist.

NU EARTH WAR TALES: NU ROMANCE – PART 2 – FINAL PART – BY GORDON RENNIE AND GARY WELSH. COLOURS BY GARY CALDWELL, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

It’s Messers Bland and Brass- the origin story. They’re frequent flyers in Rogue Trooper, untrustworthy arms dealers, body looters on Nu Earth when we first met them, but Rennie and Welsh have taken us back before we first met them in classic Rogue Trooper to the moment they first meet each other.

As to be expected from this anorak pair, Rennie plays it as a caper, just perfect for them, setting them up nicely for the darkly comic double act they’d become.

In Nu Romance, we get to see them before they headed to Nu Earth, each of them independently bidding on a GI chip on the merchant planet of Byzant.

It’s a neatly done two-parter, the comedy high up in the mix, and showing us, yet again, that there’s plenty of tales to be told around the world of Rogue Trooper.