The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2458: The Battle For Brass Sun Continues

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.

Again, the same five strips as there have been for the last however many weeks. But that’s not a problem, as they’re five very, very good strips, a perfect distillation of just what makes 2000 AD so damn good, this year and through its near 50-year history.

So, that means we’re deep into tales of sci-fi in so many different forms, whether that’s the folk horror masterpiece turned action adventure that is Judge Dredd: And To The Sea Return, the off-kilter superhero retrospective of Red Dragon, the psychedelic delights with socio-political overtones in Void Runners, the pulp-infused epic quest that is Brass Sun, or the back to basics with a twist tale of Rogue Trooper in ‘Ghost Patrol’. Yep, all five are, what we used to say, proper bangers.

All that underneath a suitably fabulous INJ Culbard cover for Brass Sun…

2000 AD Prog #2458 is out in the UK on 12th November. As for the Americas, well, right now, as I understand it, there are a few issues with getting the 4-weekly packs that your local comic shop used to be able to order in for you. Why, you’d almost think the mad king’s regime had something to do with the increasingly isolated land you ‘Mericans live in. I mean, your first port of call is, as always, your comic shop and see what they say. But failing that, until things are sorted, have a look at the 2000 AD web shop for digital ordering? Here at Bruton Mansions, NV, it’s hard to believe it’s November. Seriously, I’m almost beginning to miss seasons. Almost.

Anyway, time to head inside the latest Prog…

JUDGE DREDD: AND TO THE SEA RETURN – PART 9 – BY ROB WILLIAMS AND HENRY FLINT, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

This one opens with Williams doing that thing he does so well, establishing the doom of it all with a page of captions, all telling of the coming of ‘something supernatural, something religious… this is how new worlds have been born into history, a ship full of brave pilgrims coming into land. Eager to spread the word. Well, the pilgrims are the inmates of the Barge, infected by the worms, and the coming of a new religion is Skolex, the whatever it is dredged up from the depths of the Black Atlantic. Things are bad, very, very bad.

Case in point. Judge Tan’s been infected by the worms, his mission to stop the Barge making landfall off the too-long-neglected coastal regions of Mega-City One going south.

Case in point 2. Dredd’s attempt to save Anderson, to stop her becoming the psychic amplifier for Skolex looks like it’s failed, no matter how hard he hits Carver – and he does hit him hard.

Seriously, ‘Die you wormfood bastard’ is the sort of thing you should be seeing on t-shirts.

But, like Tan, Dredd’s finding himself overwhelmed, the infection too easily spread, the odds stacked high against him.

After that, there’s a stunning page of historical imagining from Flint, we see how this appears inevitable, from the very point the original Americans saw the sails of ships off their coast. Again, Williams working in metaphor and allusion to this latest, really damn good Dredd.

What can I say, things look really, really bad. As in the City’s about to fall bad. I’d like to say we know how it’s going to end, with Dredd punching out the bad guy, or unleashing hi-ex rounds, or something, anything, to win the day. And it probably will happen like that. Or, then again, maybe not. After all, there’s a long history in Dredd of things going very wrong, the victories of the ‘Apocalypse War’, ‘Judgement Day’, and ‘Chaos Day’ showing us just what a pyrrhic victory looks like. So, who the hell knows where this is going and how bad things are going to get. But, when you step back, isn’t that the joy of Dredd? That something this big, this bad, can have long-lasting effects?

RED DRAGON – PART 8 – BY ROB WILLIAMS, STEVE YEOWELL, PATRICK GODDARD, COLOURS BY DYLAN TEAGUE, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

I thought Red Dragon would be several things: an exploration of what it meant to be a flawed superhero, a dive into the history of Siadwell Rhys and how he came to be the alcoholic shell of a superman we saw in Zenith. But what I didn’t think was that Williams, Yeowell, and Goddard would be able to create something that’s just overflowing with menace and chills, creating a really dark and genuinely chilling thing. But that’s what it’s been, both in the technicolour past of young Siadwell at a time when the only friends he’s ever had are plotting the subjugation of humanity and in the now of the miserable black and white scenes of the Welsh valleys, where things are spiralling out of control for Rhys’s biographer and a quick trip for TV show research has turned into something far more horrific than anyone, in the strip or reading it, would have ever imagined.

So, yes, deep into things and both Siadwell back in the ’60s and journalist Howe are finding out that nothing is as it seems.

Here, we have Siadwell very much in contact with the CIA, and then finding out things that he really doesn’t want to know, the things that may well have led him to retreat back to Wales and back into the bottle.

Meanwhile, the increasingly folk horror trappings of Howe’s little research trip to Wales turn the final few pages into a paranoid nightmare. After all, when the copper has this to say at the end of the last episode, how is Howe meant to trust anything…

By the end of this episode, things get way, way worse for Howe, and the glimpses of strange pyrotechnical happenings we’ve been getting all through this enthralling saga really do, for the want of another phrase, blow up here.

Frankly, Red Dragon is doing so much that’s unexpected, so much that’s turning this into something very special. All concerned have taken the initial brief of telling a tale of one of the planet’s most powerful men, a man who, we know, is doomed to die in the early pages of Zenith, and created something way, way more interesting than I’d have thought possible.

VOID RUNNERS: BOOK TWO – PART 9 – BY DAVID HINE AND BOOK COOK, LETTERS BY ANNIE PARKHOUSE

As Captain Shikari bemoans at the opening of this episode:

Why can’t everyone just get along?

After all, the plan was very, very simple. In the face of worlds subjugated and enslaved by the Ankorites, what could be simpler than going around those worlds as some kind of psychedelic peacebringer, spreading the love, freeing the people. All would be beautiful, all would be easy. Well, let’s just say it hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

Prima City’s full of the newly liberated Manjukaks, and full of their dead former masters. Hardly the peace and love transformation Shikari had in mind when they set about this plan of bringing enlightenment to the galaxy, eh?

Although, as Moondog does point out…

Here’s a perfect example of one thing – of many – that I do love about Cook’s artwork on Void Runners and, well, everything else he does, he’s never afraid to go loose with the art, still getting over the essential elements of the page or the panel, but dropping out detail to give us almost a sketch of what’s happening. In that panel above, there’s very little actual detail when you look closely, just perfectly composed minimal lines to get over what’s needed. I love the looseness there…

As for where we’re going, well, the Ankorite plan to force the ruling race on Rigel-16 to sign over their supply has gone south with the uprising of the Manjukaks. But Shikari’s got bigger problems by the end of this episode, as the Ankorites calculated murder of the young Pleroma sends shockwaves and a distress call across worlds. Yes, it’s obviously a trap to get Shikari back into Ankorite clutches, but it’s a trap he can’t help but fall into.

BRASS SUN: PAVANE – PART 9 – BY IAN EDGINTON AND INJ CULBARD, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

You get an idea where we’re at this episode from that gorgeous Culbard cover. After a moment’s pause last episode, where we caught up with Septimus, we’re back to the cliffhanger of Wren and Ariel making it out of the attempted rescue a couple of episodes back.

And the way they got out of it…

Wren’s not too convinced with Ariel’s explanation behind the miraculous escape: “Magic? Really? Are you high?'” But there’s certainly something going on, something stranger than normal in this world of plentiful strangeness.

As for quite what it is… well, I’m not spoilering that for now, but it’s, as you’d expect from Brass Sun, something intriguing.

Again, this is a strip that you don’t need to have read all that’s gone before (although it does fill out so much of the backstory) but you do have to pay close attention to what’s happening in past episodes of Pavane to really get everything out of this bit of epic sci-fi.

ROGUE TROOPER: GHOST PATROL – PART 9 – BY ALEX DE CAMPI AND NEIL EDWARDS, COLOURS BY MATT SOFFE, LETTERS BY JIM CAMPBELL

It’s a strange thing is ‘Ghost Patrol’. What started off as a political thing – all about the revisiting of Nu Earth for Souther veteran Macinrow, a man who’d seen the Quartz massacre firsthand a decade ago – has turned, over the last four episodes, into something that careers around the action. It’s become a thing where we’re getting side quests for Rogue as a part of the bigger quest he’s involved with, each one a two-parter feeding into the main storyline. You can read it two ways. Either it’s something that messes with the pacing of it all, or, as I’d imagine De Campi has in mind, it puts you in mind of the way that so many early Rogue Trooper tales were short things, exactly this sort of side quest thing, really manic pacing all against the backdrop of the bigger quest for the Traitor General.

Here, we’re at the second part of the necessary dodgy plan of whacking Helm into the Souther computer system to see what he can find out about Fob Azure, where we all know we’re headed by the finale of the whole series. I say dodgy purely because it did take a little bit of writerly ignoring the obvious for the sake of getting the story from A to B, as pointed out right at the end of last episode…

But hey, sometimes you’ve just got to step back and go along with it, right?

What it does mean is that Helm is locked in there, alone, fighting off the Nort virus, again giving Edwards another chance to do a load of suitably Rogue Trooper action sequences. haven’t talked all that much about Edwards through this series, but he’s doing an absolutely great job of it. Throughout it all, he’s been mixing it up, as the story called for, between talking heads, which he made enthralling, and big action stuff, the likes of which abounds in these past couple of two-episode mini tales. He’s got that classic Rogue look going on, echoing the work of greats like Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, and Brett Ewins, but giving it all his own twist, a twist that makes it all look very up to date and rather good indeed.