The Weekly 2000 AD Prog 2457: Into Battle With 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.

With this 2000 AD Prog, we’re deep into every single one of these tales we’ve been enjoying for the past 7 – 8 weeks now, all of them ramping up things as they come into the midway points of most of them. And damn, it’s rather a great quintet of stories, showcasing all that’s so good with 2000 AD, all that wonderful variety of genre and style.

I mean, just here, you’ve got a Judge Dredd that’s playing with folk horror and has a real dark, creepy vibe to it. You’ve got a Rogue Trooper where you get some old-school sci-fi war action wrapped up in a mystery across the years. Then there’s the all-out psychedelic trip of Void Runners that’s transformed into something of a treatise on masters and servants. If you want something truly epic on a massive scale, with imaginations to match, you’ve got the grand quest of Brass Sun. And finally, a very different look into the history of a tragic superhero in Red Dragon. Five very good, all so different strips for you this week.

It all starts under a typically damn great John McCrea and Jack Davies cover:

2000 AD Prog 2457 is out in the UK on 5th November, Bonfire Night in the old country, remember, remember the 5th of November and all that. As for the Americas, well, head to your local comic shop and ask them to get the four-weekly packs for you, as distribution has always been a little patchy over there/here. Now, the only change this Prog is that they/ve switched the running order around – always interesting to see it change, but not sure why that would be. Hmm….

Anyway, time to head inside the latest Prog…

JUDGE DREDD: AND TO THE SEA RETURN – PART 8 – BY ROB WILLIAMS AND HENRY FLINT, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

So, the folk horror Dredd picks up the pace, going full on into the horror as Tan heads off to the Barge to stop it making dock in Mega-City One. Meanwhile, Dredd’s off to get to Anderson, hopefully before Carver can use her to put out a powerful psi-call to Skolex.

Trouble is, from the finale of last episode, it might be a touch too late for that.

Tan’s not having what anyone could call a good day. On the plus side, he’s no longer off his tits, the drugs in him just enough to take away the paralysing fear that he knows he should be feeling right now. On the minus side, the worm people choose now to attack him. Lots of them.

Meanwhile, Anderson’s not exactly to keen on Dredd’s plan, and we get one of those absolutely incredible bits of Henry Flint art that gives us the first proper look at whatver the hell Skolex is. It’s about as nasty as you can get, Flint tapping into the whole Kevin O’Neill thing of monster design. far too many tendrils and teeth for anything but nightmares.

It’s all very nasty, perfect for Flint’s artwork. Then again, pretty much everything Dredd is perfect for Dredd’s artwork. He’s just so damn good. As for the story, I honestly have no idea where Williams is taking this. It could go one way and just end with Dredd taking down the latest threat. Or it could be so much more. Either way works. I trust Williams to make the ending to this every bit as satisfying as all the deliciously nasty chills we’ve had so far.

ROGUE TROOPER: GHOST PATROL – PART 8 – BY ALEX DE CAMPI AND NEIL EDWARDS, COLOURS BY MATT SOFFE, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

Well, I did say, after last episode and the introduction of the viral Nort load that can take over all the Souther weaponry, not to mention Nort supersoldiers akin to the Souther GIs, that we’d be tying this into the mission Souther vet Macinrow was brought back to Nu Earth for, a decade since he saw the Quartz massacre.

And here it is, spelt out for us on the first couple of pages you’ll find below. They’re off to Fob Azure, where the GI program began, where the GI chips were loaded with combat experience from the elite Souther commandos, commandos like Macinrow’s buddy, Nate Hurley, who might just be the provider of Helm’s memories. So, first it’s time to see just what might be in Helm’s chip, and then it’s off to Fob Azure to sort all this out.

Although there is the small matter of that Nort virus that’s still hanging around in all the Souther tech. That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it? Well, yes.

Okay, so, we’re all linked up now. And once more, we’re deep in some enjoyable Rogue history. This was promised as a story that would take us way, way back to the origins of Rogue and the GIs, and it’s certainly living up to that. It’s all rather good fun, although the obvious faux pas of the Nort virus not being dealt with sort of stands out like a really dumb move, and laughing it off on the final page with a throwaway gag doesn’t quite alleviate that one. But hey, sometimes, you’ve just got to roll with these things and enjoy things for what they are rather than pick holes.

VOID RUNNERS: BOOK TWO – PART 8 – BY DAVID HINE AND BOOK COOK, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

So, the beautiful and charismatic Captain Shikari’s somewhat optimistic plan for giving the downtrodden Manjukaks the truth about how their masters have been using and abusing them all these years always had a teeny tiny little flaw. And that’s, as all except Shikari could see coming, rather torpedoed the grand plan to bring about, as they put it here, ‘truth and universal love,’ has rather gone a different way. Or, as the end to the last episode put it….

Yep. Not what Shikari had in mind at all. Still, he has got to have a nice moment with his dead mum, not to mention communing with Marc Bolan as a god.

Which, all in all, about sums up all that Void Runners is about. Cosmic madness on a grand scale, a classic tale of good versus evil, plucky rebels versus tyrannical empire, all wrapped up in a brilliantly over-the-top psychedelic package and quite a bit of fine comedy to boot.

BRASS SUN: PAVANE – PART 8 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND INJ CULBARD, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

Well, Edginton and Culbard left us with rather a cliffhanger last episode, Wren and Ariel’s all too quickly put-together plan literally blowing up in their faces, taking the inquisitors out, but leaving us wondering just what the hell happened to them.

But that will have to wait for at least one episode, as this one finds us travelling across the system, to Tall Green, back to lush landscapes that Culbard does so beautifully, and back to catch up with Wren’s once-love, her comrade in her quest, and, latterly, father of her child, Septimus. As we saw back in episode 3, he’s now back with the Prime Numbers order, ascended to the high rank, the highest perhaps, of ‘the mighty Inquisitor Pontifex Septimus,’ doing all he can to avert the disaster of the Brass Sun being extinguished. We’ve seen the things he’s prepared to do, terrible things, but he’s here as the still grieving father to his and Wren’s lost child, a quiet moment away from the scheming and the plotting.

Yet, it doesn’t last long, his companion, his lover, there with him, the sense that she’s manipulating him. It’s there in that moment, that panel focusing tight on her eyes, treachery seemingly implicit through just a few masterfully drawn lines.

The idea of her pulling strings, putting Septimus in a position where he has to hunt down Wren, it’s all really quite beautifully done here in an episode of five pages of quiet contemplation and subtle manipulation.

Or is that just the clever way Edginton and Culbard have set this up? Whatever it is, I’ll be loving the ways Edginton and Culbard continue taking us down this epic quest.

RED DRAGON – PART 7 – BY ROB WILLIAMS, STEVE YEOWELL, PATRICK GODDARD, COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

It’s really difficult to make a storyline like this one in Red Dragon work. The very idea of creating something happening in two different times and having them link up, with just six pages a week to play with, well, it shouldn’t work as seamlessly as it does here. Kudos to Williams for making Red Dragon just a brilliantly dark mystery with both time frames playing out so perfectly. Using original Zenith artist and co-creator Yeowell for the 60s-set scenes in full-colour and have Goddard’s present-day art presented in stark black and white merely adds to the brilliance of it all.

You’ve got the sad little life of one of the most powerful humans on the planet being explored, first in the 60s where we see, here, his isolated life, constant betrayal of being one of Doctor Payne’s weird children, of the only friend he cared about ending up with someone else, White Heat becoming the mother of Zenith as Cloud 9’s plans for world domination took shape. Later, we revisit the young man Siadwell became, already succumbing to the drink we know – or you would if you’d read Zenith (and, again, you should) – will turn this oh so powerful man into a shell of what he could have been.

And then there’s the other strand, here in the present day, where the journalist Howe is meant to be getting research for a TV thing on Red Dragon. But instead, he’s been seemingly dropped headlong into something of a Welsh folk horror. There’s far too many strange things happening, too many references to the Lloigor, too many little moments of spontaneous combustion… and it’s all very, very chilling in the way it’s playing out.