The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2454: Blue Is The Colour Of Lurve In ‘Rogue Trooper’

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:

As last week, and the week before, and the week before that… the same five strips this week. But hey, given that they’re five really good strips, showcasing just how much variety you’ll find every single week for the past near five decades in 2000 AD, there’s absolutely no problem with that.

Inside – Dredd and Anderson have a big old Barge problem in ‘And To The Sea Return‘, we go back to the days of hippies and superheroes in Red Dragon, Void Runners finds Shikari looking to save a planet, the epic Brass Sun sees Wren and Ariel faced with Inquisitors, and in ‘Ghost Patrol‘, the latest Rogue Trooper, we have love and betrayal down on Nu Earth.

All in all, it’s all pretty damn great. All of it kicking off under a Rogue Trooper cover by Neil Roberts:

2000 AD Prog 2454 is out in the UK on 15th 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. So, how is it the middle of October? Aren’t there rules about time doing weird things like that? I mean, soon we’ll be at Thanksgiving, meaning the increasingly speedy transition to Christmas and another birthday to make me feel even more ancient in January is coming. Oh, I may need a lie down.

Anyway, time to take a peek inside…

JUDGE DREDD: AND TO THE SEA RETURN – PART 5 – BY ROB WILLIAMS AND HENRY FLINT, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Well, big things are happening in this folk horror-infused Dredd. For a start, the Barge has returned, and we had the reveal of Carver…

Dredd’s missing, presumed dead (okay, spoilers, not dead), Anderson’s been taken to Carver for who knows what. And then we have the worms. The Black Atlantic worms, they’re the truly chilling thing driving all this, they’re the thing that gives you the chills here, as all folk horror should do.

I mean, this…

Yes, chills.

And whilst Williams has got the tone of it all just so, a perfect blend of Dredd and Lovecraft, old sea tales making landfall, a green mist rolling through, the worms infecting everyone left, Flint’s art sells it to us, makes it as real as it gets. Every page just drips with menace and that unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach, all thanks to Flint’s exquisite art – just as you’d expect from the finest Dredd artist right now.

RED DRAGON – PART 4 – BY ROB WILLIAMS, STEVE YEOWELL, PATRICK GODDARD, COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

A second Williams-written strip, completely different, yet sharing a little of those same chills. Absolutely not what I was expecting from this prequel to all those great Morrison and Yeowell Zenith stories (and again, you should really get hold of those – a great alt-superhero story that only adds to your enjoyment of what’s happening in Red Dragon.

We lead off this time with Patrick Goddard’s bleak and miserable (it is Wales after all) black and white art in the present day, as journalist Martin Howe digs into all things to do with poor, doomed, friendless Siadwell Rhys.

I didn’t show it to you last time, but last episode just has that perfect final page. First, you get Howe talking about Red Dragon’s party piece, the lighting of a cigarette from half a mile away, as Howe tries and fails to light one himself. Then there’s the mystery man in the car, shrouded in shadow…

And then there’s the final panel…

That cigarette catching light. What the hell? What does that mean? Well, we’ll have to wait. It’s just another little element that makes this so much more than simply a Zenith prequel, same as the moment a couple of episodes with the Lloigor graffitti we saw (and it’s here again this episode) – it just gives a little chill to things, and that’s what I mean about the elements of folk horror that are creeping into the plot here.

As for the other part of the Red Dragon tale, the full-colour, back in the ’60s part with that great Steve Yeowell artwork, well, we have Siadwell reacting not too well to being left high and dry by those he thought were his super-friends. We saw and heard about it last time, the way Rhys was the outlier in Cloud 9, the one who wasn’t into all the spiritual, magical stuff, the one who didn’t go along with the plans to reimagine the Earth with a new species of superhuman masters. Oh yes, poor, doomed Siadwell.

Again, there’s so much more to this than just being a Zenith prequel. In fact, as things go on, it’s the present day tale that’s proving more interesting, more laden with threat. Not that it isn’t fun seeing Red Dragon’s life in the colourful ’60s, but there’s that sense that Williams is guiding this to be more of a memoir of a poor little lad from the valleys who could never really find his place. And it’s that sense of profound sadness that’s coming through more and more.

VOID RUNNERS: BOOK TWO – PART 5 – BY DAVID HINE AND BOOK COOK, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

Well, after folk horror Dredd and miserablist Welsh heroes, time for Void Runners to make everything fun and sillly again, right? Well, no, not this time. Hine and Cook’s psychedelic ride into far worlds of wonderfully bizarre things continues, but now we’re back with the Ankorites, yet these aren’t the all-powerful rulers here, these are Kali’s Dust addicts, their last hopes of finding more dashed, and their plans seemingly in ruins, their leader exposed as a delusional, hallucinating addict…

Yeah,

So, bit of a downer, really. But a bloody fascinating downer, and one that looks, thanks to Cook’s artwork, suitably alien and completely, wonderfully strange.

Meanwhile, back on Rigel-16, we have the Ankorites responsible for poisoning both the masters and the servants, all for a deal which is seemingly worthless given what we know and they don’t. And as for Capt Shikari, well, they’re still doing their damndest to free the oppressed, which has now turned into saving them from a cruel and painful death. Cue using their friendly liberators to discover where the vaccine is, something which will no doubt get the attention of the Ankorite liberators and reveal Shikari the traitor to those who mean them no end of pain.

It’s all ridiculously over the top in its themes is Void Runners, loaded with layer upon layer, Hine and Cook telling their epic tale through the medium of a good old-fashioned evil Empire versus a small band of plucky rebels that you may well have seen before. But this one’s not so much about the content, although it is turning into something far deeper and meaningful than I’d ever have expected, it’s about the way that Hine and Cook are spinning this fabulous tale.

BRASS SUN: PAVANE – PART 5 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND INJ CULBARD, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

And speaking of epic sci-fi, as we were – here’s Brass Sun, the absolute epitome of an epic slice of sci-fi mixed with good old-fashioned pulp adventure.

I mean, I still have to take a step back in wonder at the whole set-up for Brass Sun even whilst I’m reading the latest episode. The whole overarching concept of everything taking place on a massively-scaled mechanical Orrery with spars connecting each world is such a sublime bit of imagineering that it’s too good not to be epic. And then you have the tale that both Edginton and Culbard are spinning in front of our eyes that takes that initial fantastical concept and just gives us so much more.

Again, the masterstroke with this second phase of Brass Sun, so many years thought lost to us, is that Edginton and Culbard have chosen to run with the too-long gap between the last story and this, giving us a now-adult Wren, beaten down by her experiences, hurting from her loss, something that adds such emotional weight to things.

Here in episode five, we have Wren and Ariel O’Connor crash-landed, with Inquisitors on the ground around them, a very real manifestation of just how shit the world of Brass Sun has become.

Like I say, absolutely epic, writer and artist doing such great things, making Brass Sun the absolute highlight of this latest run of Progs. Oh, and I shouldn’t need to say it, but you should really go out and find the collections.

ROGUE TROOPER: GHOST PATROL – PART 5 – BY ALEX DE CAMPI AND NEIL EDWARDS, COLOURS BY MATT SOFFE, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

‘Ghost Patrol’ brings up the rear in the Prog here, and, not because it’s not good – because it genuinely is – it’s suffering in the light of four absolutely brilliant strips that preceded it. ‘Ghost Patrol’ is more grounded and simple than the four we’ve already had, less epic in scale, more a straightforward war tale.

It’s a good, straightforward war tale nonetheless. Flicking back and forth between Gordon Macinrow’s present, where he’s taken back to Nu Earth to search for a lost comrade by the shadowy Nygaard, and the time, 10 years prior, when he was on Nu Earth at the time of the Quartz massacre and the betrayal of the Genetic Infantrymen, the action that left Rogue Trooper as the last of his kind. As such, it’s a pretty basic tale of war, filtered, as is always the way with Rogue Trooper, through that sci-fi lens.

As it is, most of this episode is spent in Macinrow’s memories – of being captured by Norts and seeing Rogue stage a rescue. All of which leads us to the next stage of things in the present, as Macinrow hears tell of a sighting of Rogue himself. Well, it would be churlish of him not to do something about that, wouldn’t it?