1356: Last Rites

Grant Goggans fave prog!

I kid Grant, seriously though this is something I have been dredding to cover. Not quite Repo-mex bad but god…repo mex wasn’t written by John Wagner.

Let’s start with the awful cover. I gave Charlie Adlard stick recently during my ongoing look back at Nikolai Dante on the everything comes back to 2000ad blog. But he is a good artist. I like the walking dead and some of his other 2000ad work (barring some awful early Meg stuff) is wonderful. But look at that cover…

He does the inside art which is nice but John Wagners plot for this story hurts it. Dredd is trying to save his niece Vienna from some devil worshippers but is tricked when Vienna reveals she has been brainwashed to be one of them. Now as the cover shows Dredd is tied to a rock and is being prepared to be sacrificed.

Head baddie is possessed by a demon and I am not sure if it’s me but I really…don’t like supernatural stuff in the Dredd strip. It just feels off, I wonder if that’s why I don’t like Anderson…

Anyway head demon raises his knife ready to stab and God strikes him down!

I am not kidding god friggin fries him with lightning and Dredd quips that someone up there likes me! He takes down the rest of the cult and ends the story wangsting about Vienna…

I hate doing this blog sometimes…I hope next issue has something decent…

Next: falling from grace….shit

1205: Squids in 9/8/00

You would think a story which involves a double dealing backstabbing crime lord and his attempts to rule all crime in a futuristic city would be interesting wouldn't you?

Unfortunately it really isn't and it sadly is another lemon in Steve Moore’s 2000ad comeback (believe me there’s a fair number of them coming up....)

It is truly sad in Red fangs case. Some of the characters are genuinely interesting and could have worked in stories of their own but they are truly wasted in this story...

As Grant Goggans points out though there is a truly nice table in the story...

The fact that I am talking about another bloggers thoughts on a piece of furniture kind of shows you how much I felt about this story...



Elsewhere inside the prog Steve Moore writes a genuinely cool future shock which involves Jesus crashing onto an alien planet and attempting to get the aliens (which look like the monkeys from 2001....) to be more civilised. There is more to it than that but it’s just too funny to spoil....

The big news on this future shock is a genuine comic superstar artist made his first appearance in the prog with this story and that superstar is the fantastic Frazer Irving...

Just check out his art...


It was clear Dig-L knew he had found talent as he commissioned Frazer to do a second future shock (and a cover for the story, A rarity in the past few years) but more on that next slog.

Next prog slog: Insanity in the quite nice bar and another Steve Moore car crash (literally)

1200: There's nothing quite like a relaunch issue...5/7/00

Unless of course it’s this relaunch issue!

New editor! New owners! New cover logo! New stories!

Pretty much a new beginning for 2000ad!

Inside this issue are new stories for sinister/Dexter, Nikolai Dante and judge Dread. Alongside them is new story Red fang. I shall go into more detail on each of those in the next few slog entries but for now I shall talk about the Dredd story

In SABS a group of citizens who don't like being watched by surveillance cameras decided to band together to destroy all forms of surveillance. They go on night runs using sky surfing gear and call themselves the surveillance action brigade or SABS. Tonight’s run is complicated by the fact that one of the members brings her baby on the run after the babysitting service lets her down.

In a world where security cameras are all over the place I can sympathise with these people although bringing a child on a run this dangerous is something I can’t sympathise with…

Seriously….



The art is by the glorious Cam Kennedy and its fantastic….


Finally another link to Grant Goggans thrill powered Thursday (seriously he should start paying me for free advertising LOL_) in his entry for prog 1200 he included some interesting background info on the run up to the new owners taking over so here it is…

http://thrillpoweredthursday.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html

Next prog slog: Missionary man returns and Dante faces love on the battlefield in the second salvo of Tsar Wars