Review: Mission Over, What’s Next For Rogue In The ‘Rogue Trooper: Complete Collection’ Book 3?

Okay then, you know the drill by now, surely? Created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons in 1981, Rogue Trooper is the last of the Genetic Infantrymen created by the Southers to be their ultimate soldiers in the never-ending war with the Norts across the irradiated wasteland of Nu Earth.

The reason he’s the last of his kind is The Traitor General, the Souther who sold out his Souther comrades and engineered the massacre that left just Rogue, together with Gunnar, Helm, and Bagman, three of his fallen comrades implanted in biochips in his rifle, helmet, and backpack.

During the initial run of the series, collected in the Complete Collection Books 1 & 2, Finley-Day delivered a tale that had one simple direction – Rogue’s mission to find and kill the Traitor General, exacting revenge for the Quartz Massacre. And that simplicity was what made Rogue essential, the relentless driving quest, single-minded as it was, still let Finley-Day explore complex themes as Rogue met the diverse cast of characters populating Nu Earth. Yet all the while, there was no forgetting just what Rogue Trooper was all about, a single-minded revenge mission, a war tale with sci-fi overtones.

So, seeing as Rogue ended the Complete Collection Book 2 with the death of the Traitor General, where on Earth would the series go next, having lost the constant that defined everything that made Rogue Trooper so damn good?

Well, the answers are here in the Complete Collection Book 3. Finley-Day quickly introduces a new quest, as Rogue’s biochip pals get new bodies, only to find they’re contaminated with a virus. and the mission to find the cure takes him up against the higher-ups of the Souther military and the many alien races he comes into contact with in the search for a cure.

Artistically, it’s wonderful. We have Cam Kennedy doing his final strips on Rogue, punctuated with some gorgeous (as always) work by Jose Ortiz.

But Finley-Day’s run was coming to an end, and there’s a sense that things have run their course. It was inevitable really, the whole set-up of Rogue Trooper always meant that once the Traitor General storyline was done, the series lost its direction. That’s not to say there isn’t good stuff in Finley-Day’s final act, after all, he’s a writer who knows how to make a war story tick. But there’s always that spectre here of a series gone past its logical end.

As Finley-Day’s time ended, Simon Geller took over writing duties, giving Rogue a new mission, this time as a Souther hitman looking to end the war by targeting anyone deemed important in the war effort. You can see the logic of the idea, give Rogue a new thing to do, a new mission capable of giving us the sort of interesting character-driven stuff that we’d seen previously.

But Rogue as an assassin never really worked; it was too far from the character’s origins, too much of a leap from driven soldier to cold-blooded killer taking out the bad guy of the week.

Of course, as with the final Finley-Day tales and how Kennedy and Ortiz made the formulaic beautiful, these Hit stories are made beautiful things with Steve Dillon‘s artwork throughout the Hit tales. Damn, he was an artist who could just dazzle on every page he touched, and he elevates these stories far beyond the limitations of the stories here.

Along the way, we get to see new writers and artists taking a swing at Rogue, often away from the Prog. Peter Milligan‘s two tales in here from 2000 AD Annuals are fine things. There’s the weird Dice Man ‘choose your own adventure’ tales in here – a strange diversion that jumped on board the CYOA trend of the time. And it all ends with Grant Morrison and Will Simpson taking a turn at all things Rogue, giving us a Venus Bluegenes tale that’s just gorgeous to look at, with Simpson’s art giving us a hint of tales to come and Morrison’s storytelling tight and rather damn good.

So, The Complete Collection Book 3, rather a mixed bag. Packed with some fine, fine art from all involved, highlights being Kennedy, Ortiz, Dillon, and Simpson, but pretty much every artist here is giving their very best. The problem is, they’re giving their very best to illustrate stories that just don’t have the one thing that made those earlier Rogue tales so essential, the perfect mix of war and sci-fi, all set to a perfect tale of revenge.

ROGUE TROOPER: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION BOOK 3

PUBLISHED BY 2000 AD ON 24th SEPTEMBER

WRITTEN BY GERRY FINLEY-DAY, SIMON GELLER, PETER MILLIGAN, PAT MILLS, STEVE MACMANUS, GRANT MORRISON

ART BY CAM KENNEDY, JOSE ORTIZ, MIKE COLLINS & MARK FARMER, STEVE DILLON, WILL SIMPSON

LETTERS BY BILL NUTTALL, TONY JACOB, GORDON ROBSON, STEVE POTTER, TOM FRAME, RICHARD STARKINGS

ROGUE TROOPER CREATED BY GERRY FINLEY-DAY & DAVE GIBBONS

ORIGINALLY SERIALISED FROM 1985-1988 IN 2000 AD PROGS 401-406, 410-419, 422-432, 444-449, 495-499, 520-531, 567-572, 574-575, 2000 AD ANNUALS 1986 & 1987, 2000 AD SCI-FI SPECIAL 1986 & 1988, DICE MAN ISSUE 3 & 4