The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2484: The Baroness’ Bloody Sibling Rivalry Heats Up In Silver

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.

So, Prog 2484, back to the usual five strips this week, with the four absolute top-notch tales, plus a one-off Future Shock.

So, this week, we get more from Judge Dredd, down in ‘The Oubliette’, isolated, far away from the familiarity of Mega-City One, and only beginning to realise the scale of what lies before him. Of course, you should all also be reading the other side of this one, as the Black Tower rises in MC-1 in the Judge Dredd Megazine. Two strips, one really big Dredd tale that looks like it’s going to be rumbling on for quite a few months if you ask me. Why, it’s really giving us all of that epic nature that we haven’t had for quite some time.

After that, there’s the aforementioned Future Shock, and then we get three absolutely top of their game strips. First, you’ve got more from one of my all-time favourites, as Abnett and Culbard’s Brink keeps doing all the things it does so well. Plus, there’s Carroll and Currie conquered Earth with a vampire twist tale, Silver, and Edginton and D’Israeli’s Helium, more cracking pulp fiction thrills. Yep, five strips, just a shining example of why 2000 AD is the best sci-fi anthology out there, packed with a diversity of strips you just won’t find anywhere else.

All of it starts with a cover from Silver co-creator Joe Currie …

 

2000 AD Prog 2484 was out in the UK on 27th May. Which means I’m a little late getting this preview out this week. Although now that the weekly Prog is available in the Americas, with this Prog coming out on 10th June through Lunar Distributors, you could argue that I’m actually well ahead of that particular release date. Yeah, I’ll take whatever olive branch I can get.  But if you are in the Americas, you can, you should head to your local comics shop and ask them to order it in for you. Every single week, all that great thrill power comes directly to you.

Right then, with all that done, time to take a little look-see through this week’s Prog …

Judge Dredd: The Oubliette — Part 2 — By Ken Niemand and Dan Cornwell, Colours by Chris Blythe, Letters by Annie Parkhouse

Okay then, with last week’s double-length opener and the first part of ‘The Black Tower’ in the Judge Dredd Megazine, we know a few things.

First, here in  ‘The Oubliette’, Dredd’s woken up to find himself in a strange, strange place. No gun, no comms, no idea of where he is or why. He’s already taken a beating, cast down into the depths of this prison. Basically, hell.

Meanwhile, over in ‘The Black Tower’ running tight now in the Megazine, Mega-City One’s Dredd-less, not just physically, as no one (or nearly no one) in the City remembers him, and it’s down to Judge Rico to puzzle things out as The Black Tower causes havoc.

Both of these strips play into everything that Ken Niemand and Nick Percival have been doing in the Prog and the Meg for some time now, bringing back the horrors that were always there, right from the beginning. It’s just this time, Niemand’s big, big Dredd epic is bringing in threads from not just his and Percival’s Dredd horrors, but from a lot else besides, including Citizen Fargo from Niemand’s various multiverse-spanning strips. More on that next week.

But right now, we’re back with Dredd deep in the Oubliette, battered, beaten, waking up in an unfamiliar world. For a start, there’s a Gronk in his face (it’s a Strontium Dog thing, Niemand showing us, again, that the Oubliette is a weird place, not constrained to time or place).

The news isn’t great — with Dredd told that no one escapes, that there’s no way out, and that everyone who once knew him has long forgotten him.

Except, this is Dredd, as one of the spectres from The Shift points out, telling him that she knows a way out, that the City needs him …

And that’s all he needs. Beaten and bloodied, he might be, but he’s not a broken man, and he’s now got a purpose. Sure, the odds are bad, but he’s faced down those kinds of odds before.

Oh yes, this one really smacks of the BIG story, the sort of big, changes stuff thing that we’ve had throughout the long history of Dredd. Niemand’s on top form, finally drawing in all those threads he’s been seeding across so many storylines from the past few years. And Dan Cornwell, well, he’s doing the sorts of things that have made him one of a key group of modern Dredd artists who always bring brilliance to the strip.

Brink Book 7: The Call Of The Void — Part 13 — By Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, letters by Simon Bowland

Last week, we had a perfectly played-out bit of super tense drama, as we built up to a moment when we were led to believe that IAA (InterHab Intelligence Agency) higher-up and general nasty, Leedon/Reardon had the drop on Bridge and Maslow, two targets he didn’t think he’d ever get together and in his sights.

Except, just as the trigger was about to be pulled, we had this …

Yes, Abnett pulls the switch on us yet again. Other, lesser writers were doing this, it would annoy. Abnett is doing it, and doing it so well, it’s all just part of what makes Brink work.

The death on BRV1 is important, seeing as that’s the ship on its way to the Mercury Event site, meant to get there and investigate why Mercury and all the associated habitats suddenly went dark. It’s all part of the long, complex history of Brink – but it’s a history you really should be reading. Seriously, go and pick up all five books published thus far, and I’ll meet you back in a moment after you’ve read the best thing you’ll have read in so many years.

Right, you’re back. So, you’ll know that Brink‘s all about humanity onboard the habs, after the evacuation of a devastated Earth. Packed into way too cramped environs, humanity is all too susceptible to falling prey to extremism and strange cults. Bridge Kurtis has been right in the middle of all this, becoming, not that she wanted to, the expert on cult activity for the Habitat Security Division. And those investigations into the sects all tie into the Mercury event, with HabSec butting heads with IAA, who’re working to their own nefarious agenda. And now that HabSec have been given the go-ahead to investigate Mercury with the HabSec Special Detail Taskforce, IAA are stepping things up.

Brink‘s this wonderful mix of incredible strangeness, and the all-too-familiar storytelling of the very best cop show procedural. Artistically superb, with Culbard finding ways to make every scene bristle with drama and with Abnett’s dialogue just sparkling, both of them creating a long-running storyline that’s genuinely one of my all-time great comics.

So, in the wake of the death, there’s a meeting — and yes, even the meetings are magnificent. It’s pure drama, done so well, as we find out that the death’s an apparent suicide, but nothing’s certain right now. Everyone’s on edge. After all, suicide’s bad enough, but if it wasn’t suicide, then that means that those wanting HabSec’s Taskforce to fail can get to them even all the way out towards Mercury.

Again, five pages of the most perfect drama. But that’s Brink. It’s just so, so good.

Silver: Malignant — Part 8 — By Mike Carroll and Joe Currie, letters by Simon Bowland

Right then, we’re deep into Silver now, where Carroll and Currie’s tale of an Earth conquered by the alien Sepsis just gets better and better, Carroll’s story really opening out in this third series, taking us beyond the tightly done (and damn well done) super-fast action events of the first two series. And it’s all for the good, with the expansion of the storylines beyond the tight focus on the latest Resistance mission really giving us a sense of the wider world, a world under Sepsis control.

Past episodes have given us way more of a look at the Resistance side of things. Previously, we’ve seen just how brutal, how vile, how alien the Sepsis can be, the very epitome of the evil alien overlord thing. Yet the focus on the Resistance this series has shown us that the Resistance is, in its own way, every bit as vile, as nasty, as willing to do anything to get whatever small victory they’re after as the Sepsis.

But this episode, we’re solely focused on events in Switzerland, where the Baroness is currently the guest of her brother, another vampire. The Baroness is an integral part of the Resistance, literally dug up in the very first episode of the first series, pushed into service for the Resistance, the whole the enemy of the enemy is my friend thing happening. After her last mission for the Resistance, she’s crashed back down to Earth, spent time recovering, and is now reunited with her brother and fellow vamp, Alderman Estaban Nicoli Calandro. Just as she’s fallen in with the Resistance, he’s been brought in by the Sepsis, become a slavemaster, doing bad things in return for a supply of fresh blood.

The tension between the two of them is palpable, and being on opposite sides of the war only makes it all the more tense. And that tension boils over here, the Baroness and the Alderman realising neither will back down on this, and the inevitable happens.

Of course, the inevitable is a chance for Currie to show us, once more, just how damn good he is at the kinetic stuff, as we get a few pages of real violence, the Baroness and her brother going at each other, and Currie obviously revels in it all, a couple of pages of it all kicking off, and kicking off in such fine style.

As always, Silver delivers the goods, Carroll and Currie giving us something that really works, a whole world being built, yet still taking time to focus tightly in on the immediate, the personal. Another great episode from another great strip.

Future Shocks: An Alien Invasion Alphabet — By James Lovegrove and Steve Roberts, letters by Rob Steen

This is one of those ‘list’ Future Shocks, the sort of thing pioneered in the past by Alan Moore. The greatest living comics writer cut his teeth on Future Shocks, as recently seen in the new omnibus collection, The Complete 2000 AD by Alan Moore: Future Shocks & Other Stories. (You can read more on that here.)

The problem with Future Shocks is, and always will be, no matter what you do, the odds are that Moore will have got there first. And so it is with the list Future Shock, something Moore did a fair few of.

But of course, those Moore list Future Shocks were many decades ago now, and that means there’s a whole new set of readers who may not have seen them done. And for those folks, An Alien Invasion Alphabet will come across as silly and clever and just damn fun. Sure, it’s been done before, but what the hell, Lovegrove and Roberts do it very, very well.

From page 2, we get every panel as a new letter of the alphabet, all rhyming, showing us an invasion of Earth by some particularly nasty little alien species …

It’s silly, and it’s fun, and it’s funny. Roberts’ art is perfect for this sort of tale, and Lovegrove is getting plenty of pathos in amongst the surface silliness. Sure, it’s been done before, but it’s still done with style and done well.

Helium: Red October – Part 9 – By Ian Edginton and D’Israeli, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Completely different to anything else in the Prog, Helium is a great strip, very much based on pulp adventuring, all based on a perfect premise: that Earth has been rendered pretty much uninhabitable, with the only survivors of humanity living either in airships or the highest peaks, all above the toxic Poison Cloud. Except, as Edginton and D’Israeli have shown us, with some glee, there’s still life beneath the Poison Cloud, clinging on, underneath giant terrariums.

Right now, Hodge, Sol and Bloom are in the usual amount of trouble in one of those terrariums, down in the bowels of Londimium. Hodge has nearly been made a brood mare for the corpulent King of the realm, Sol’s been dissected for his robotic parts, and Hodge was meant to be the main course for the next Royal meal.

Of course, given that this is all about those wonderful cliffhangers and that sense of peril postulated, peril overcome, we’re here at Part 9 with Hodge and a newly put together Sol down in the kitchens where Bloom’s been busy fighting off those that would have him parboiled for supper.

Again, there’s just so much to love here. D’Israeli’s art, for starters, just that perfect mix of things. Character work is great, facial expressions wonderful, detailing just perfect, and the deep and rich colour work is always a treat. He genuinely makes anything and everything he draws look so good.

It’s a rip-roaring adventure indeed, each episode giving us that little bit more, always building up to the final page, the final cliffhanger. Each episode is constructed as an old-fashioned pulp serial. But there’s more to it than that; there’s this sense of Edginton and D’Israelii building a world here that’s every bit as big as the one they built for Scarlet Traces. So, as we have the trio of heroes making their way through Londinium, there’s not just the threat of the Poison Belt’s fugue seeping in, contaminating everything here, but there are those bigger issues of just why they’ve been sent down here — remember, that obviously not-to-be-trusted Prime Minister above the Poison Belt. Plus, there’s the continuing reveal of Hodge, Bloom and Sol’s connection to the worlds beneath the Poison Belt. All that raises it above the adventure serial every week and makes it yet another great 2000 AD strip.