The Weekly 2000 AD: Prog 2434 — Dredd Does The Akira Slide 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, the second of the three-part Dan Abnett and Colin MacNeil Dredd takes us further into every new Judge’s nightmare, getting Dredd for The First 100, there’s the penultimate part of Rogue Trooper: Tides Of War, more fascinating strangeness in Ghosted, another great episode of Silver with the Baroness taking more of a beating, and the continuing steampunk adventures of Scarlet Traces taking us back to the days following the failed Martian invasion of Britain. All in all, rather a great little line-up (again).

It all takes place under a rather splendid Toby Willsmer cover…

2000 AD Prog 2435 is out in the UK on 4 June. As always, you’ll have a harder time finding it if you’re in the Americas – might I suggest popping into your local comic shop and asking them very nicely if they can order it for you? All things air conditioning are working nicely here now, which is good, as it’s regularly hitting 100 degrees now. Of course, there’s the small matter of paying for it – bread and water is the order of the day.

But enough preamble, let’s get into all things 2000 AD this week…

JUDGE DREDD: THE FIRST 100 – PART 2 – BY DAN ABNETT AND COLIN MACNEIL, COLOURS BY CHRIS BLYTHE, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

If you’re a rookie Judge, six months on the job, and lined up for your mandatory 100 hours accompanied by a senior Judge, imagine just what it would be like when that senior Judge turns out to be Dredd? Well, that was just the situation Judge Gable found herself in years back. And now she’s out on her own 100 hours ride-along, this time as the senior Judge to rookie Judge Macie.

But this is all about Gable telling of her own 100 hours, her the young thing practically in awe of Dredd, watching as he executes his justice on the streets with clinical effectiveness. The few pages here are just a perfect lesson in artistry, MacNeil and Abnett’s collaboration really working so well, showing us the way Dredd deals with a riot, whilst all the time we have Gable’s commentary giving us her first hand view of it all. Perfect stuff.

But in the background, we’ve got the Ignace Drumm case, something that’s got Dredd gnawing, the dog with a bone, unable to let it go. Back then, Drumm was a crimelord with a lot of Judges on the payroll, and Gable can almost feel Dredd’s obsessional desire to bring him down, something the Justice Department just haven’t been able to do yet.

Two episodes in and this really is a perfect procedural Dredd, the dual viewpoints of the two first 100 plotlines giving us the in to watching Dredd as he works, something Abnett’s just doing so well here. And MacNeil’s artwork is just a sheer joy, the command of the scenes, the way he uses shadows so well, the controlled action sequences, the sheer heft of his lines on the page – gorgeous.

ROGUE TROOPER: TIDES OF WAR – PART 7 -ANDI EWINGTON AND PAUL MARSHALL, COLOURS BY PIPPA BOWLAND, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

As the disguised as junk Souther ship Dauntless creeps into the range of the Nort superweapon, the Iron Leviathan, Rogue’s .plan plays out – get close enough and then attack. It’s what he does, it’s all he does, the ultimate Souther killing machine doing his thing. Once they’re onboard, it’s time to place the explosives, 20 minutes before they blow.

So, just enough time for Rogue to do what he does. The Norts just don’t stand a chance really, do they? But along the way, there’s death for the Dauntless crew – just more casualties of this never-ending war.

This is the penultimate episode of what’s been a very straightforward, very simple little Rogue tale. And that’s worked just fine. No complicated plotlines, just one Rogue, one mission, gathering a group of damaged Souther sailors in his own little Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now adventure. I’ve enjoyed it.

GHOSTED: BOOK ONE: PART 9 – BY GUY ADAMS AND MEGAN HUANG. LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

So, from the simplicity of Rogue Trooper to something absolutely at the other end of the scale. Where Rogue is linear, simple, a straightforward war tale, Ghosted is anything but. It’s complicated and complex, multiple storylines, deliberately obtuse, never revealing what’s really going on, not even this far into things. In the wrong hands, this would be frustrating, but Adams is doing it just right, it’s confusing in a fascinating and enthralling way, so many different storylines coming together, Adams almost cut-in captions suiting the nature of the confusing (in al the right ways) tale being told here.

In the world of the glorious African kingdom of Kinshahsa, where the rich live their lives in glorious ignorance of the war being fought elsewhere, with the vulnerable poor of the kingdom used as cannon-fodder for the alien threat, we have things happening, a woman seemingly knowing what’s going on and trying to change things. Elsewhere – ‘a world away’ – the ghost warrior that was haunting rich kid Benu is strung up, a hook through her calf, the agonising pain overloaded by the implants loaded into her body. But the mission, kill the aliens, is still there.

And all the while, we have the overarching threat of ‘The Trust’ – always there, in the background, running things, for reasons we still have no clear idea about. And that’s just what’s good about Ghosted, a perfectly done thing, all smoke and mirrors, complex storytelling, multiple characters, a bigger picture that remains just out of reach for us. Damn, it’s good to have a challenge, and that’s exactly what Ghosted gives the reader. And all of this done against Huang’s artwork, beautifully bright and colourful, a pop art accompaniment to Adam’s writing, where the artist takes the sensible option of letting the story do the difficult, shifting thing, and lays the images out with style and clarity, bold and bright and in a really attractive fashion.

SILVER: BOOK TWO: PERFIDIOUS (PART 1) – PART 9 – BY MIKE CARROLL AND JOE CURRIE. LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Again, back to (relatively) straightforward stuff in Silver, where Carroll and Currie are showing us an Earth conquered by the alien Sepsis, and the few members of the Earth resistance doing all they can to hit them in whatever way they can. Resistance leader Bishop was the one who unearthed the centuries-old threat of the Baroness da Silva, a vampire more used to preying on the human cattle than she is saving it – but war makes strange bedfellows after all.

Although, at the end of the last episode, Bishop’s obviously figured something out, and he’s realising that maybe, just maybe, he’s not got the full picture he thought he had…

But anyway, back to the action – and there’s a hell of a lot of it in Silver – with the Baroness sent into another mission to disrupt the Sepsis birthing grounds. But the Baroness has come up against a foe she can’t just roll over and destroy in Louise Chamberlain, one of the Sepsis’s human collaborators who we’ve found out has a history with the Baroness – a long history – just one of many dangling plot threads we’ve had cropping up in Silver. And here’s where Carroll has really outdone himself. Although Silver is incredibly fast and seemingly straightforward, there’s obviously a hell of a lot of worldbuilding that he and artist Joe Currie have done here, and even though the main thread of the story is action-based and so damn fast, Carroll’s managed to very cleverly get in enough of the backstory to flesh this one out so well.

Anyway, bac to the now, where Chamberlain has the beating of the Baroness. Her rage manifesting as she decides to keep the Baroness alive as long as she can, just to inflict more damage and work out her own issues as she’s doing it. She’s a zealot, obviously, so wrapped up in her hatred and her revenge that she won’t listen to reason. The smart thing is to just destroy the Baroness now, but the zealot just won’t listen, and Chamberlain’s about to discover how big a mistake that’s going to be.

Because she’s made a terrible mistake has Louise Chamberlain, in letting the Baroness live this long, one that means she’s discovered just how the Sepsis breeding grounds work. And letting the Baroness live is really going to bite her in the ass. Big time.

Silver just keeps bouldering on, this huge action-packed thing that speeds along, the whole thing here in series two taking place in a couple of days at most. Yet there’s so much contained within it, and that’s how clever Carroll’s writing is in this – Silver is one that, I really hope, will run and run, a great action thing that’s loaded with so much else.

SCARLET TRACES: EMPIRE OF BLOOD – PART 4 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND D’ISRAELI, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Now, if we had a linear war story with Rogue Trooper, incredibly strange and complex storytelling with Ghosted, and a super fast yet oh so fulfilling thing in Silver, Scarlet Traces is something different from all that. It’s been, thus far, practically sedate in its storytelling. And that’s to its credit, of course. After all, there’s many, many ways to tell a damn good story.

Again, if you didn’t know, Scarlet Traces is Edginton and D’Israeli steampunk adventure taking its starting point as HG Wells’s War of the Worlds. There, the Martians invaded Victorian Britain and we’re eventually laid low by Earth viruses. But in Scarlet Traces, we get to imagine the world after that, where the British Empire takes the Martian tech and uses it to create a new Empire, taking full advantage of the Martian tech and heading off on an adventure that took this new Empire to the stars. But that was then, this is now. And now is in the immediate aftermath of the Martian conquest’s failure. Down on the ground of London in the aftermath of the failed invasion.

We have Detective Sergeant Bey investigating a robbery, tasked with hunting down a fellow copper who may be involved. On top of this, we have the threat of the Germans who look at the Martian tech with envy, determined to get in on the action and who’ve sent forces of their own to make sure they’re not left behind in this new arms race.

But right now, as this episode opens, we get strange machinery, done in D’Israeli’s impeccable style, as one of the remaining Martian’s oversees his human captives. Meanwhile, the German spies observe the British storage facility where they’re keeping the bodies of the Martians, and a plan is hatched.

It’s slow storytelling done really well, Edginton and D’Israeli fleshing out the world they’ve already created, and doing it with fine style.