The Weekly 2000 AD Prog #2501: The Vamp’s Back, And She Has No Idea Where She Is

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.

The second Prog full of all-new series, including the rather incendiary Judge Dredd: The New Future, following up on the events of the must-buy A New Future, where accounts Judge Maitland’s radical fix for all of Mega-City One’s ills was cut down, as was she. It’s Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt sharing writing duties again, and joined, once more, by Henry Flint, surely the very best of a great crop of Dredd artists at the moment.

Alongside that rather essential Dredd tale, we’ve got second parts for all the rest. That means there’s more strange tales of a strange future in Ghosted II. There’s more from everyone’s favourite vampire mutie, Strontium Dog in Durham Red: Hungry City, more from the AI threat to Dexter as he gets to the bottom of the weird techno world of Azimuth in How To Train Your Dagon. And bringing up the rear, we’ve got more magical happenings as raggle-taggle magician Herne steps up in his latest thing, Storming The Stone.

Five rather great series going on in 2000 AD right now, all leading off with that must-read Judge Dredd series. So, why the hell don’t you jump onboard and see just what the hell 2000 AD is all about? It’s been the greatest sci-fi weekly for nearly 50 years now, and it just keeps delivering.

All of this begins under a gorgeous bit of Lee Carter artwork for Durham Red …

2000 AD Prog #2501 was out in the UK on 23rd September, a whole week ago now, and I can only apologise for my tardiness here. What can I say, sometimes living the life of luxury of a writer about comics takes a strange turn, even here in the wilds of Las Vegas. I mean, we’ve had toilets needing replacing, dentists to go see, and a dog that’s refusing to eat anything. Life, huh?

Anyway, the Prog’s also out in the USA on 7th October. Which technically means this one is only half late. It should be available in every good comic shop. If yours isn’t getting it in, I’d suggest you go up to the counter and ask them, very nicely, why the hell they’re not ordering it.

Right then, all that done, shall we get into it all?

Judge Dredd: The New Future — Part 1 — By Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt, Henry Flint, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Okay then, last Prog we had the Prologue to all this: Dredd, Beeny, Logan, and Hernandez under investigation from the SJS Judges about what happened with the Maitland experiment.

Well, that was just the opener. Here, we get into it proper. And it’s every bit the sequel that ‘A Better World’ demanded.

If you don’t know, ‘A Better World’ saw Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint give us something so very special, a prescient thing: politics of the now transposed to the world of Dredd in the future, where Judge Maitland had figured out the way to solve all of Mega-City One’s problems. Her new social engineering solution was rolled out, and it worked; it really worked. Her vision of a new, better world coming good. Only to see it all ripped away, as the forces of the establishment, the controlled media, the self-serving voice of Hernandex, Street Judge Boss on the Council of Five, and the too easily manipulated citizens brought Maitland’s dream of that Better World down.

We’re now two years on, and the idea of what she created lives on. The citizens have tasted a form of that better world, and they want more. Self-serving media baron, Robert Glenn, has gained even more power. Judge Hernandez, head of the Street Judges department, is still in the pocket of Glenn, potentially the next Chief Judge if and when Logan gives it all up or is forced out (both look likely right now). And Dredd, well, Dredd knows of Hernandez’s complicity, knows he’s dirty, knows that Maitland’s downfall was at his and Glenn’s hands. He’s just got to prove it, got to get the evidence, got to make it all happen. But that’s going to take a lot of work, especially difficult as Hernandez is the one with all the power right now, as is Glenn.

Which brings us to this first episode of ‘The New Future’, opening with one of those quite incredible Henry Flint pages, 25 panels, all of it packed with dynamic tension, all of it drawn so perfectly. My God, he’s absolutely the finest Dredd artist of his time, isn’t he?

We’re in Sector 304, Maitland’s Sector, where the people were given hope, that better world realised, only to have it all cruelly snatched away. That first page is just perfection itself, each panel just the epitome of just how comics is the greatest medium there is. We have the focus on a shooter, going in close, unsure of who and what we’re looking at. Is it another assassin, we just don’t know quite yet.

Then, page 2, we pull back a little, to see the target is there with a gun in the middle of a school, terrorising the kids there, and the potential shooter is Justice Department, there to take out the hostage taker. Again, just Flint doing the best work of his already stellar career.

Cut to Judge Beeny, still presumably reeling from the SJS Judges’ remarks that she’s one of two who could step into Chief Judge Logan’s job — presumably the SJS reckon the other one is Hernandez. She’s been given a special tour of a new facility in the company of Logan, who’s well aware he’s vulnerable after first the Mechanismo troubles and then the whole thing over Maitland. Seems Logan’s been taking steps to address the Judge shortages …

Again, just take a moment to linger on that, look at just what wonders Flint’s doing on the page, where it’s all so perfectly done, beautiful, menacing, perfectly paced. He really is the very best of the Dredd artists, and certainly has ascended to the lofty ranks of the greats over the past few years.

And then, finally, to end this first episode, we check in again with Oswald Roth, the journalist who received Maitland’s data at the end of A Better World — you know, just like this …

Well, A Better World was just that perfect bit of Dredd, absolutely sublime in its execution from writers and artist alike. A ferocious piece of fiction, doing the thing that sci-fi does so very well at its best and reflecting our current situation back at us. A Prologue and one episode in, and ‘The New Future’ promises to be every bit as incendiary, as important, as incredible as ‘A Better World’ was.

We’re back to that moment when I simply have to open every new Prog as it arrives and immediately read what Williams, Wyatt and Flint have in store for us with the next episode, and then impatiently wait for the next episode — now that’s the very definition of a must-read tale.

Ghosted Book Two — Part 2 — By Guy Adams and Megan Huang, letters by Simon Bowland

And here we are, back into the world of Ghosted, where Adams is being as obfuscating as possible, giving us a very weird world, drip-feeding us the info to make sense of it all. Yet where it could have been supremely frustrating, it’s not. It’s actually something fascinating, engrossing, and very readable, the frustration of not knowing what the hell is going on merely feeding into the desire to uncover the truth and the secrets of Ghosted.

Book 1 saw us in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, somewhere in the far future, along for the ride with young, rich Benu on a journey of discovery of the place she calls home. Her pampered little life was disrupted when she found herself neurally connected to a warrior fighting an alien war, and then shattered when she discovered, right at the end of Book One, that said war was right outside Kinshasa’s borders, aliens at the protective walls that shielded Kinshasa from the outside world indeed.

Then we had episode 1 of Book 2, a trip back in time, 14 months prior to Book 1, where those shadowy leaders of Kinshasa, The Trust, were given faces and names — well, one name, Chant, seemingly controlling it all, watches as the world is devastated in the wake of first contact, and gives the order for Kinshasa to lock down, to observe as the world falls, for it to learn from the outside.

Here in part 2, we’re back to the now, back to Benu, her last words from Book One echoing on the first page — ‘The war’s right here.’

Then we get a page of Adams bringing us into her new reality. And it’s something out of a nightmare. Adams giving us cut-up fragments of thoughts, memories, pain, and then the camera focus pulls back, and we see just what’s happened to Benu …

Not just Benu either, next to her on the slab is Acksley, the warrior she was in neural connection with. And then her purpose is revealed, she’s to be turned into a spy for the aliens, a means to get into the walled city of Kinshasa. Except she’s read it wrong, misunderstood the fragments of media the alien is transmitting, and her real predicament becomes plain by the end of this episode.

I shouldn’t like Ghosted as much as I do. The problems with it are obvious; Adams is hitting the Alan Moore/Grant Morrison comics 101 playbook quite hard here, all those Burroughs-ish cut-ups, the fragmented speech and thoughts, the media used as the message. Add to that the fact that Adams is being deliberately obfuscating here, really making it difficult, forcing us to tease out meaning from what we see on the page. Thing is, I don’t hold any of that against Adams, as he’s managing to make Ghosted do that one essential thing — I want to know what’s happening, I want to get to the bottom of the mystery, I want to know what the hell is going on, and I’m bloody well enjoying it every week.

On the other hand, Huang’s art is simple, in the best way. The decision was obviously made at the outset to have the art do the difficult thing of simple showing us what was happening in a complex and difficult tale. And Huang has pulled it off perfectly, her storytelling flow is just perfect. She hits all the beats, shows us the story, gives us the horrors, delivers it just right.

Yes, Ghosted might be difficult, complex, frustrating as a story, but it’s a damn compelling one.

Durham Red: Hungry City — Part 2 — By Alec Worley and Ben Willsher, letters by Simon Bowland

So, we’re back with Worley and Willsher doing great things with the Strontium Dog mutie vamp, one of the Search/Destroy Agency’s most feared bounty hunters. They’ve been doing a number of these now, and they’re always just a hell of a lot of fun, Worley getting the character right, and Willsher’s art a real treat.

Last episode, Red woke up to a scene of carnage, a drunken night on a planet she doesn’t know, surrounded by the dead, blood dripping from her face. Basically, a drunken bender, vamp style.

Now it’s all about working out where she is, why she’s here, and why the hell people are already trying to kill her.

So, off she goes, out walking in the rain — and I do, as I’ve told you — love a bit of rain in comics, and Willsher really does do a magnificent bit of rain-soaked comics work.

Turns out she’s in Mondo Carnivallo, Hungry City, and, through a bit of a hangover haze, she remembers she’s been here before. It’s a resort station, where every syndicate has a presence here, a dirty place where the various mobs all try to play by the self-imposed rules.

That’s the where. The why she’s here … well, it’s gloriously mundane … she’d been sent on a mandatory R&R on some lovely vacation spot. With nothing but lazing by the pool and relaxing on the agenda. Naturally, Red had other plans …

So, yes, that’s how she got here on the Hungry City, escaping her mandated downtime in the pursuit of her idea of a good time. Really, she’s got no one to blame but herself here.

So, the mystery at least partly unravelled, we’re now left with Red on the Hungry City, all that mass-murder to be discovered, and a price to pay.

Like I say, these Durham Reds by Worley and Willsher are one of those simple pleasures, a great character, too often underserved by previous stories, finally given the stories she’s meant to have here. They’ve taken the character and given her great things to do, great stories, great art, just a hell of a lot of fun.

Azimuth: How To Train Your Dagon — Part 2 — By Dan Abnett and Tazio Bettin, colours by Matt Soffe, letters by Rob Steen

Azimuth, the strange tech city created by the very same AI that’s taken over Downlode, the city that Sinister Dexter called home. One half of the gunshark team, Finn, has been subsumed into the AI and is on the trail of the other half, Ramone Dexter, who’s currently running as fast as he can here in Azimuth.

It’s been the reinvention of the long-running Sinister Dexter series has Azimuth, at first seemingly a new strip of strange techno weirdness, only to have the reveal of Ramone appearing in this strange data-based world of techno kingdoms. He’s been joined in this quest against the AI taking over Downlode by Suzi Nine-Millimetre, one of the cadavatar warriors native to Azimuth, and a certain Cassandra ‘Andi’ Anderson, who, yes, is absolutely Judge Anderson from the Dreddworld. How she got here is still a mystery, one of so many that Abnett and Bettin are playing out here in Azimuth, to grand effect.

Currently, they’re sailing the hypotheseas, onboard a small boat, on their way to Funderland to locate Krugerrand. Their biggest problem is that they’re now unmasked, visible to the AI, and they know they’re being tracked — all it takes is someone to give them away. Say, the skipper of the boat they’re on…. this from the end of last episode….

Of course, the heroes of the piece have no idea, yet, that they’ve been sold out, so it’s time for a little RNR … well, until things go, oh so predictably wrong …

And then, of course, it goes even more wrong.

Like I say, Azimuth has breathed new life into the long-running Sinister Dexter storyline, and done it with so much damn style. Sure, we knew Abnett was a more than capable storyteller to switch everything about on us, give us a whole new world to explore, full of fabulous ideas and imagery, but having Bettin as the regular artist has meant that there’s a continuity in Sinister Dexter here in Azimuth that had been lacking previously. What it means is that we get two creators creating a gloriously strange world of their imagination, and it’s one that I’ve been enjoying since that first episode.

Herne & Shuck: Storming The Stone — Part 2 — By David Barnett and Lee Milmore, colours by Quinton Winter, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Herne & Shuck, a Levellers-coded magician and his demonic dog, with Barnett and Milmore telling us a long tale that stretches back to their first appearance in 2000 AD where they were hired by a creepy little village, a job that turned into a rescue mission, ending up with saving young Caris from some kind of ritual sacrifice, backed by the St Michael group/ And now, that same St Michael group have Caris once more, and it’s down to Herne to mount the rescue mission.

Here, we’re with Herne and Jordy as they go back into Herne’s past, a lost soul left in an asylum because Herne just didn’t show up that time. And that lost soul, Terry, wasn’t the only one to come out of that one damaged either …

That’s everything about Herne & Shuck in a few panels there, mixing the darkness and the comedy and doing it all rather well.

Anyway, Herne needs Terry to take a little psychic looksie into the facility under Stonehenge, the place where they’ve taken Caris to join the other special children, all under the watchful eye of a certain someone we met previously — and, from the final panel, it seems the whole fallout from the exorcism hasn’t completely played out quite yet.

As I say, Herne & Shuck really does a delightful mix of blending the comedy and the horror, just enough of each to give this something above the simple tale of rogue, unpredictable, slightly crap magician type attempts to do the right thing and invariably screws it up. Barnett and Milmore are both playing something of a blinder with this one, full of Milmore’s art that’s been a pleasure to see getting better and better as the series have gone on.