The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2453: Passing The Peace Pipe Takes A Dangerous Turn

Taking a look inside the UK’s greatest sci-fi comic, the Galaxy’s Greatest, fast approaching 50 years of brilliance —it’s the Weekly 2000 AD.

Same five strips in the Prog this week as last, but that’s damn good because they’re five rather fine strips, five examples of just how diverse and just plain great things are with 2000 AD. It really is a fine, fine publication that you should all be reading.

So, that’s more of the current Judge Dredd, a chiller out on the edges of the big city in ‘And To The Sea Return‘, Rob Williams and Henry Flint giving us prime Dredd. Then you’ve got Williams again, this time with Steve Yeowell and Patrick Goddard exploring the world of Grant Morrison and Yeowell’s Zenith in Red Dragon, David Hine and Boo Cook bringing cosmic intrigue and psychedelic delights in Void Runners, Ian Edginton and INJ Culbard returning to the mechanical marvel that is Brass Sun with suitably epic adventures, and finally, Alex de Campi and Neil Edwards taking us back to Nu Earth for a tale of the big blue GI himself, Rogue Trooper.

Yep, five great strips, another really impressive week of sci-fi thrills, all under something suitably trippy from Boo Cook…

2000 AD Prog #2453 is out in the UK on 8 October. As usual, if you happen to be in the Americas, run down to your local comic shop and ask them real nicely if they’ll order in the four-weekly packs. You really should you know, it’s still the finest anthology out there.

Anyway, time to take a peek inside…

JUDGE DREDD: AND TO THE SEA RETURN – PART 4 – BY ROB WILLIAMS AND HENRY FLINT, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

This one really did start off so well, and it’s just getting better and better with each episode. Williams and Flint just knocking it out the park, a truly chilling tale of strange happenings on the edge of Mega-City One, the forgotten places where the land meets the Black Atlantic.

Right at the end of last episode, we had this…

A Judge sacrificed to the sea, to Scolex, the locals all infected by those strange black worms. It’s all full of intrigue and portent, Williams bringing in that sense of something dark and ancient, playing into ancient folk horrors of the sea, Lovecraftian in many ways, but all of it rooted firmly in Dreddworld – and after all, Dreddworld’s always had plenty of room for the strange, the otherworldly.

Anyway, we open in this fourth part back with Anderson, following the mutant boy, Enoch, and her team experiencing their own worm-infection visions. Meanwhile, Dredd and his team, experiencing their own particular troubles. For a start, they’ve found all the citizens, which is not a good thing. By the end of this one, we have Dredd and Anderson in real trouble, a villain revealed, and we all get to discover where the Barge is.

Like I say, there’s great things going on in this one. Through it all, Williams and Flint have imbued this one with a sense of dark things, strange things, the ominous tone of it all captured in words and art so perfectly, all of it shrouded in the green mists rolling in from the Black Atlantic, Flint giving us the necessary chills on every page. It’s all rather fabulously done, a real bit of dark Dredd.

RED DRAGON – PART 3 – BY ROB WILLIAMS, STEVE YEOWELL, PATRICK GODDARD, COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY SIMON PARKHOUSE

The pattern is set by now, six pages equally split between the adventures of Red Dragon, a ’60s hero out of step with his comrades-in-arms in Cloud 9, and the modern-day investigations of journalist Martin Howe, heading back to the Welsh valleys to research the origins of the Red Dragon.

Both are fascinating, not least to see the ways that Williams has taken the characters from Zenith, the backstory from Zenith, and gone back in time to flesh them out. And he’s doing it rather successfully as well, giving us broad hints of the rift between the counter-cultural Cloud 9 and the Welsh orphan rooted in his homeland, then pivoting to the journo researching just that, the links between the tales building as we get deeper into things.

Here, Red Dragon finds himself on a government mission to Aden, on the brink of independence, his job to provide the air support to get the Brit Embassy staff out. Poor Red Dragon, assuming the rest of Cloud 9 are already there, only to be told they all refused, no longer playing the Government’s game, Siadwell the odd man out. Not just that, though, Cloud 9 already know he’s the one who won’t go along with their plans… as we saw in the end of last episode…

The second trio of pages takes that idea of Siadwell’s isolation and runs with it, Howe giving us the poor little Welsh kid’s tale, one of sadness and loss, getting to be a kid as part of Payne’s experiment and then having it all ripped away. Poor, tragic little Siadwell.

And all of that leading into a final page full of questions, strange things happening… but more on that next week. Suffice to say that there’s more going on here in the present day than just a haunted man looking to the past.

If you’ve never read Zenith, you really should. Not because it’s essential for making sense of this one, no, not at all, Williams has been careful to give you all you need to make it work, but because it’s a damn fine superhero with a difference series. And knowing what paths these characters take in Zenith brings an added depth to it all.

VOID RUNNERS: BOOK TWO – PART 4 – BY DAVID HINE AND BOOK COOK, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

So, how goes Captain Alice Shikari’s plan to bring enlightenment to the masses, freeing them from the tyranny of Ankorite rule?

To be honest, things have been better…

Well, that was the end of the last episode, the leader of this group of the enslaved servant race on Rigel-16 taking a toke on Shikari’s peave pipe of Kali Dust and then promptly falling over dead.

Not the best way to build up trust with the species you’ve come here to try and save, perhaps.

On the plus side, Shikari does get to spin things out in their own head, going from blood sacrifice to martyred legend in two gorgeous Boo Cook panels … oh, this one’s vanity/positivity knows no bounds….

Well, once that little flight of fancy is done with, time to get to business. After all, it’s not the Kali’s Dust that killed that Manjukak, it’s all to do with the nasty little plan the Ankorites have put in place, the one that’s designed to ensure the supply of Perfidium for the Federation. Of course, this being far more than it might initially come off, Hine and Cook have their own nefarious plans for Shikari and this whole thing, something very bad for all.

Yes, once you get past all the trippiness and the over-the-top delights of Void Runners, there’s real darkness creeping into it all. And it’s all shaping up to be a second series that’s as good as the first.

BRASS SUN: PAVANE – PART 4 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND INJ CULBARD, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate what INJ Culbard is doing here. It’s an episode getting, literally, inside Wren’s head, a nightmare of sorts, one that starts off in the snowy wastes of Hind Leg, all in beautiful blues, cutting into an apocalyptic wasteland, the colours jarring against what we’ve just seen. It’s so beautifully effective, and that’s without mentioning how wonderfully he composes these pages, the mix of close-up and longer shots, the detail of the backgrounds, the sheer variety of imagery and tone. Again, it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

So anyway, like I say, it opens with a nightmare, Wren going from Hind Leg and a loving reunion destroyed, to a meeting with the Blind Watchmaker and Merlin’s villainous Arthur. But all that pales into insignificance when she delves deeper and gets to meet Laurel…

Of course, given Brass Sun is long-running and quite the most deliciously complex thing, you might find yourself a little lost. But trust me, it’s all there if you delve deep. Go back to part 1 and the page of the story so far. Or, even better, hunt down the collections.

But, as a catch-up… The Blind Watchmaker was the creator of the Orrery, the entire existence Wren’s a part of. Wren’s bonded with an aspect of the Blind Watchmaker, something that helps and infuriates her in equal measure. And as for how he/it’s portrayed, well, I could kick myself. I know in the past, he’s been shown as Mark Twain and Robert Oppenheimer. But I just couldn’t place exactly who he’s meant to be here. I knew I knew it, but it just wouldn’t come to the front of my brain. Thankfully, Ian Edginton came to my rescue when I shot him the question late one night. Of course, it’s Kurt Vonnegut. How dumb do I feel that I couldn’t bring that one from the depths of memory? Is there a reason he’s portrayed that way? Possibly, possibly not, but it’s still a great image.

So, yes, there’s The Blind Watchmaker and there’s Merlin’s Arthur. Merlin, that’s the vast computer set to oversee the Orrerry by the Watchmaker, and Arthur is one of his agents, previously set to hunt and kill Wren. Let’s just say Wren’s life has been an interesting one.

As for Laurel, well, that’s Wren and Septimus’s daughter, who died at sixteen months old. So, Wren is rather shocked to be talking to this Laurel, grown up, an impossible thing, but one that soon proves to be no ordinary dream/nightmare, with Laurel hinting at a link with her mother similar to that of the Blind Watchmaker in her head, plus a warning of dangers to come.

Oh, we’re only four episodes in, and it’s already giving all the epic nature that we had in the first run of this one. Complex, possibly confusing, but something that, trust me, you’ll want to dive into, because it’s so damn good.

ROGUE TROOPER: GHOST PATROL – PART 4 – BY ALEX DE CAMPI AND NEIL EDWARDS, COLOURS BY MATT SOFFE, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

Here we are, 10 years on from the Quartz Massacre, where all the Genetic Infantrymen, bar Rogue, were wiped out by the actions of the Traitor General. We see flashbacks to that time dropped in through Ghost Patrol, but the main story focuses on the now. And that now involves Souther veteran, Gordon Macinrow, back on Nu Earth with a mission to investigate the loss of one of his comrades 10 years back, Sergeant Huxley.

He’s been brought back into things by the shadowy Nygaard, a man who obviously knows more than he’s letting on. He’s feeding Macinrow titbits, just enough to get him involved, just enough to pique our interest, talk of Fob Azure, where the GI program originated, the idea that Huxley may well be alive, the fact that this one’s off the books. It’s all building and building to something intriguing and rather good by now.

After the initial difficulties where there wasn’t the delineation between what was then and what was now, things have progressed. De Campi makes it plain where we are, and this is all the better for it. Sure, it may be called a Rogue Trooper tale, but, as with so much of Rogue’s more interesting outings, this one’s more about the war itself and the plentiful tales that can be well spun out of that, of which this is turning into a fine, fine example.