The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2439: All Is Not Well With The Search For A New Earth In Far Below Eden

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.

Yes, 48 years young and 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 have endings and beginnings. The ending comes with the final part of the current Nu Earth War Tales, the irregular series taking a look at the world of Rogue Trooper. The beginnings come in two forms. First we have a brand new Rob Williams-written and RM Guera-drawn Judge Dredd: Tunnels, promising us all the action we previously saw in their first Dredd collaboration, Rend & Tear With Tooth & Claw. Then there’s the Future Shock this Prog, featuring the art of Adam Stone, one of two artists winning the 2000 AD/Thought Bubble art talent search in 2024. It’s a beginning for an exciting new artist. And we’ve also got the continuing adventures in the latest Tharg’s 3Riller three-parter and the steampunk delights of Scarlet Traces.

All of it happening under the latest rather typically gorgeous cover from Cliff Robinson and Dylan Teague…

2000 AD Prog 2439 is out in the UK on Wednesday, 2nd July. 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? So, is it truly peace in our time? Mr President certainly thinks so. But hey, who knows, the world’s a crazy, crazy place and it’s getting crazier by the day. Next week, God only knows.

But anyway, time for a quick spin through this weeks big Prog…

JUDGE DREDD: TUNNELS – PART 1 – BY ROB WILLIAMS AND RM GUERA ,COLOURS BY GIULIA BRUSCO, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Well, their first collaboration on Rend & Tear With Tooth & Claw was something special, so of course there’s high hopes for this one. Frankly, any time Rob Williams’s name is mentioned as a Dredd writer, it’s a damn good day, he really is one of those who can craft incredible epics and equally great action-packed adventures.

Now, this one has all the feel of the latter, another action-packed thing like Rend & Tear was. It all starts woth Dredd on a boat, a truly beautiful bit of an opening moment from Guera and Brusco. The lush greens, the shafts of sunlight bursting through the trees, the classic Dredd chin, and then Dredd on a boat, looking…. well, a little broken. Quite gorgeous to see.

And then it’s back six days, to Ciudad Barranquilla, South-Am’s Mega-City, where the Judges are most likely as corrupt as the perps. And it’s Dredd jetting in, travelling the choked city roads in a Barranquilla Justice Department armoured car, making its way through Romario Favela, all to get him to see ‘Silva’.

The ambush is practically inevitable, but there’s some great tense moments in the armoured car, the sort of tension Williams is so good at. And then the ambush happens, and from then on we’re just racing through the panels, Guera just totally in control of pacing, giving us the tight scenes in the confines of the armoured car, opening out into the street scenes.

And we’re off on another action Dredd from Williams and Guera, this one’s looking like it’s going to be all fast and furious, Dredd versus the entirety of Ciudad Barranquilla, on his own, as determine as ever to just get the mission done, whatever that mission turns out to be.

NU EARTH WAR TALES: THE MAJOR – PART 3 – FINAL PART – BY GORDON RENNIE AND JAKE LYNCH, COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

You know, until I read the Rogue Trooper Complete Collection, I had no idea that The Major was an established character in Rogue Trooper. Major Magnam’s got history, and it’s that history that Rennie is dealing with here. And dealing with it rather well.

These Nu Earth War Tales are perfect little things, allowing us to explore the rich world of Rogue Trooper beyond the tight, maybe too tight, confines of the simple revenge tale at Rogue’s core. All of them so far have been great little things, diving deep into the history of the Nort-Souther war, showing us that, yes, there’s a hell of a lot of stories down here on Nu Earth.

Anyway, the proto-GIs are in the middle of things down on Nu Earth, with their Milli-Com masters deliberately putting them in harm’s way just as a test of their little science project, overseeing them like kids watching their ant farm. There are Kashan elite Nort forces looking for them, and the GI known as Switch has his ‘Major’ persona leading his GIs into battle, a battle he’s just desperate to have.

But in this war, the higher-ups always have the upper hand, leading us to more betrayal and more traitorous actions, tying things neatly into the Quartz Zone massacre that we all know is coming. Why, it even ends on a nice little moment with the discovery of the Major’s chip by a certain couple of rogues. Yep, these Nu Earth War Tales are doing a great job of fleshing out the world of Rogue.

And, of course, kudos once more to the art of Jake Lynch here, doing such a sterling job of giving us all that Nu Earth action in his own perfectly different style. Like I’ve said before, it’s all just pushing anatomy just enough to make it all look so stylish, angular forms done just so right.

THARG’S 3RILLERS: FAR BELOW EDEN – PART 2 – BY ALAN KERR AND IAN RICHARDSON, COLOURS BY PIPPA BOWLAND, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Okay, so this one started with a simple set-up, a dying Earth looking for new planets to terraform to create that mythical new Eden, just so that vile little humanity could find somewhere else to infect. And on one potential planet, we had a team of exploratory soldiers and scientists doing what they were meant to do, wiping out whatever lifeforms existed to make the world the new Earth.

Except one of the terraforming party has her doubts, the biologist Kimura, whose warnings that the ‘Bugs’ they’re wiping out are coordinated and intelligent, not to mention that she’s somehow getting flashes of the bugs communications in her head.

So far, so familiar, right? That was where I was at the end of the first episode. It looked really great, thanks to the solid kinetic art of Richardson, but it was just a pretty simple and straightforward thing, nothing we’d not all seen before.

Now, in the middle episode of this three-parter, Kiimura’s discovery of alien intelligence that could scupper all plans for this planet being Earth-2, means she’s under attack from the asshole alpha male of her team, just that guy who wants to do the job and get the terraforming underway, and if Kimura stands in it’s way, too bad for her.

But then Kerr does a neat little switcheroo on us. It’s not the bugs that are the threat; it’s the plant life, the megaflora that’s as big as a city. Suddenly, there’s an extra dimension to this one, something that elevates it above what it started out as. When we get to the end, things are a lot more interesting and a lot better than the stereotyped opener. Just goes to show that sometimes you’ve got to just give a series a moment to develop.

FUTURE SHOCKS: INFILTRATOR – BY ED WHITING AND ADAM STONE, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Every year, 2000 AD runs a one of a kind talent search at the Thought Bubble convention to find a writer and an artist to feature in a Future Shock, getting their first paid professional work in a future 2000 AD.  Well, at 2024’s Thought Bubble, the quality was so high that, alongside the winner of the script contest, Evie Roebuck, they chose two artists, Lucas McCoy and Adam Stone. You’ll see Roebuck and McCoy’s Future Shock sometime in the future, but right now we’re looking at the art of winner Stone on this Future Shock, written by the 2023 script winner, Ed Whiting.

So, here we go, two 2000 AD/Thought Bubble winners combining for a decent Future Shock, one of empires and killers, an infiltrator sent in to do the bidding of his masters, the Zern. His mission is simple, kill the King of Akraylia Prime. And it’s a job he does simply for his masters. Kill, and get out. It’s just that that get out bit is proving a troublesome thing. Captured and tortured, the Zern’s infiltrator finds himself an unwitting part of a nasty little plot.

Yep, it’s a decent Future Shock, with Whiting showing all the promise that won him the script prize back in 2023. I’d definitely like to see more of his writing in future Progs. As for the art, well, you can definitely see just why Stone was picked as the overall winner of the 2024 art contest. Glorious black and white tones, a real command of the panels, loads of interesting layouts, all keeping things flowing so well. I can’t wait to see more work from Stone in the Prog. Based on this first example, there’s a fine future for his art here.

SCARLET TRACES: EMPIRE OF BLOOD – PART 8 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND D’ISRAELI, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

At the end of the last episode, we had Gunnery Sergeant Edward Penny, late of the Thunderchild, turn up in the London markets to have words with Detective Sergeant Bey, whose investigations into a robbery spree in London we just know are going to tie into all of the intriguing thread that Edginton and D’Israeli have been running in this Scarlet Traces prequel that takes us right back to the immediate aftermath of the failed Martian Invasion of England.

He’s a callback to events we’ve seen in Scarlet Traces, but here he’s got his tale to tell. of the Thunderchild and its meeting with the Martians, Martians that he says are still here – and that’s something we, the reader, are ahead of the game on, we know there’s Martians down in the depths of London, we just don’t know what they’re planning.

Again, the joy of this Scarlet Traces is that things happen so slow, everything building up so well, all those threads pulling together, all the intrigue of what the Germans are planning, all the questions over whether the Martian we’ve seen is part of a bigger plan or just a one-off threat. We don’t know anything really yet, even eight parts in. But the joy of it is in the slow finding out of things, watching how Edginton and D’Israeli control it all so very well.