Drokktober 2019. Day 14

Today's mission: Favourite Cursed Earth Scene

This was a toughie because Pat Mills' The Cursed Earth - Dredd's first mega epic outside his city, is broad and packed with craziness. Flying rats, mutants carved into Mount Rushmore, Ronald McDonald warring with other fast food icons out in the radioactive desert. And vampire androids nursing the frozen-in-suspension body of Bad Bob Booth, the last President of the United States of America. So that's what I went with - drawing from McMahon's take on Kinski's Nosferatu

Carlos Ezquerra

Some very sad news to wake to this morning: Carlos Ezquerra has died, after a ten year battle with cancer.

This is a huge blow for UK comics fans, and in particular fans of 2000AD and Judge Dredd. The affectionately-named 'King' CarlosEzquerra can be fairly described as one of the fathers of Dredd, providing the first designs of the future lawman, a mix of Death Race's Frankenstein and Conquistador - fitting for a Spaniard, perhaps. And to me, somehow, Carlos' work evoked a Mediterranean sensibility more than any other artist in Tharg's stable.

Carlos draws himself as one of Tharg's art droids

Ezquerra's work is there from Prog 1, and continued through to 2018, with very few breaks. He was a warhorse, from the likes of Battle (Easy Company) and Starlord (gifting the world of comics the brilliant space western Strontium Dog and its mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha), and even ventured to other IPC/Fleetway titles - a brief stint for Eagle, plus Crisis and inevitably the Judge Dredd Megazine. As the ubiquitous Dredd and Strontium Dog artist Ezquerra surely occupies the highest triumvirate alongside Bolland and McMahon. Speedy, prolific, and still eminently collectible, we'll see his work for some time to come.

The phrase 'making it your own' is a cliche, but so applicable to Ezquerra's adaptations. Dredd is such a robust character that he's endured countless interpretations, but despite occasional flirtations with other considerable talents, there's really only been one Strontium Dog artist, and even in prose I can't picture anybody in the role of Harry Harrison's 'Slippery' Jim DiGriz than Carlos' James Coburn lookalike in the Stainless Steel Rat series.


For me, though Ezquerra's  style barely changed, that was its greatest strength. Instantly recognisable, effortlessly consistent, but with a worldly, carnal appeal. His dredd and Alpha are virtually the same cloth - burly and tall, but not ridculously muscly, while his women (vampire bounty hunter Durham Red, femme fatale Angelina DiGriz) are pultritudinous, leggy and unapologetically curvy. Like many of the Dredd artists he delights in grotesques - besides Strontium Dog's colourful cast of mutants, Carlos drew a mean brace of Fatties for Mega City One. Even the robotic Blackblood on a rare outing in ABC Warriors is given an idle killer's pot belly. All with a knowing wink, each consistent and so meaty you could slice them like salami.

I still can't quite get my head around the Dredd mega epics entirely to his name: Apocalypse War, Necropolis, Inferno, Wilderlands - not to mention all those epic Johnny Alpha tales - Portrait of a Mutant, Wanted, The Killing. Phew.

My early collecting of 2000AD can be summed in Ezquerra covers: my earliest 2000AD cover by Carlos: Prog 181 (Johnny Alpha "It's taken my best shot - and it still won't die!), my earliest Dredd cover by Carlos: Prog 245 ("Let the Apocalypse Begin!"), and many more followed, of course. There'll likely be a huge tribute in the pages of 2000AD to come, and in the mean-time heartfelt tributes from the likes of Pat Mills, Karl Urban, and a good number of Thargs and Megazine editors past and present.

The King is dead, but his legacy will live forever.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

It is the distant future, the Year Two-thousand. The US is an autocratic state with an alleged enemy in France, and a nation has an obsession with the Death Race, a coast-to-coast rally where pedestrians, zealots, onlookers and even one's pit crew are fair game for vehicular carnage and point-scoring along the way. Race favourite is the shady Frankenstein, a patchwork man in black who is close friend with Mister Pesident, and wants to get closer still...

I've been thinking about watching this movie for years on curiosity value alone, and now I have - job done. And do you know what? I really enjoyed it!

I'm sure that a lot of this is down to timing. Twenty years ago I'd likely have taken this film in as a dated piece of seventies tat, much as I did Rollerball or The Omega Man. Ten years ago I'd have been a little more forgiving, but now, with my extracurricular activities involving kitbashing model cars into Mad Max-styled vehicles of pedestrian destruction, its time seems finally annointed. What a movie. Also, teenage me was an idiot. I might be edging towards the actual 100 points in Death Race's arcane scoring system, but I'd like to think I know the value of a decent Roger Corman movie.

But teenaged me was also a comic reader, and in particular a 2000AD reader. The DNA of 2000AD is all through this movie - future dystopias? Check. Ultraviolence and amoral heroes? Check. It's long been said that the initial look of Judge Dredd was based on the image of Frankenstein on the movie's poster; how satisfying then for a fan of the comic and films to see Dredd's spiritual godfather beating several layers of unholy crap out of Sylvester Stallone - Awesome! I swear that this is more a comic brought to life courtesy of Corman than the likes of Fantastic Four or Battle Beyond the Stars, and it seems fitting that the comic sequel was the work of 2000AD's Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, when their previous creation Marshall Law bears more than a passing resemblance to David Carradine's Frankenstein. 

There's just a real anti-authoritarian, gonzo vibe throughout that transcends the occasional performances, the low low budget, and the small cast. in places it is outlandishly violent, but it is by and large he violence of cartoons, and it shares the gleeful twisted humour of Mills and Wagner's best works. The themed cars and outlandish identities (Nerothe Hero, Machine Gun Joe, Matilda the Hun) are fun, the design work a little bonkers - especially Stallone's gangster suit pinstriped helmet, and although the cast is perhaps a little too white-bread, it serves its female characters pretty well, and I must admit I felt quite sorry for Calamity Jane's lonely three-point-tun into oblivion when her time came. Plus, not knowing the twist in the story meant that I was quite taken in by Frankenstein's concluding gambit.

Time's been rather kind to this film, making the movie's more outlandish plot points almost self-fulfilling in real life, from the Fox-style cynical TV coverage, the vilification of France as the enemy of 'Amurrikkin freedom', and even the President accusing a foreign power of sabotaging the telephone network has to be the Seventies equivalent of cyber-terrorism.

So yeah, a big thunbs up from me, and a nice wee birthday present for me over the weekend as I contemplate getting closer to the age when I too might be wheeled wheezing out into the street in front of a hospital, perhaps to meet my maker under the wheels of an oncoming novelty cat-shaped death machine or something. In the mean-time I rather fancy catching this again, perhaps in a double-bill with Rollerball.

Fakes Seven

This is the second of three synched blog reviews with Jamas and Al - check them out!

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

It is 1980 and I am ten. I have never heard of this movie. In 2014 I finally see it. Can I stop now?

Oh, alright then.Three years after Star Wars borrowed elements of Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, another 'noted' name of Hollywood sysnonymous with low-budget, profit-making schlockbusters did the same, purloining the master's Seven Samurai - and setting it in space!

Of course, between Kurosawa and Corman there was John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, and it shold be said that Battle owes much more to the Western version, stealing dialogue and one of its stars - Robert Vaughn playing virtually the same character, as it does. I haven't seen Sturges' film, but I have seen Kurosawa's, and I'm biased, because my ideal sci-fi adaptation of Seven Samurai features robots (the Meknificent Seven) and was written by Pat Mills Tharg.

Corman's robots aren't bad - all disco moves and all, but they're no Hammerstein and company, and so the rest of the movie falls - too many humans in bad makeup, not enough sci-fi spectacle, and a space ship with a really distracting rack.

You have to give props to an actual spaceship to try to upstage Sybil Danning, but the organicaly-designed Nell does - for the most part, helped along by the very very thin character given Danning's Valkyrie, secreted somewhere between her Thor-lite costume and increasing innuendo. Seriously - Google will provide what I won't: fill your boots.

Our hero is Richard 'John-Boy' Thomas and a rag-tag bunch of desperadoes - the aforementioned Vaughan (taciturn gunslinger - nice idea, but phoning it in), Danning (The Howling II is only five years away!) and an affable George Peppard as an actual space cowboy ("I'm from Earth - ever heard of it?") alongside some nice but frankly squandered ideas - a female robot technician who technicians no robots, Nestor the gestalt entity who has a really nice jellyfish-like spaceship, and Cayman - a lizardman who is the last of his kind (awww.)

All have reasons valid and spurious to off chief baddie Sador, a limb-replacing, shiny-faced megalomaniac who farms civilisations, destroys planets and never leaves his ship (maybe he's in another movie? I wouldn't put it past Corman.) Honestly - would it have hurt Corman to actually have a end-level fight with the big bad and the hero on their feet and properly duking it out rather than all these interminable dogfight scenes? I don't care if they were the work of James Cameron - this is one of many wasted opportunities!

I'll draw this thing up. I'm glad I've finally seen Battle Beyond the Stars, but I fear a year of film studies and The Galaxy's Greatest Comic may have spoiled the novelty for me. This movie is just too contrived and cheap - its spaceships made from butchered Star Wars models, its dialogue lifted from another movie. As it turned out, I do believe I have seen this movie - or bits of it at least, aged fourteen watching the daggy ends of Tom Hanks opus Bachelor Party, where segments feature as part of a 3-D movie at the film's climax (still my favourite part of the movie - both movies!) Had I seen this aged ten, chances are my memories would be as fond or at least as vivid as those I have of The Black Hole. But at fourty-four I'm officially Getting Too Old For This Sh*t. And that's my review of Battle Beyond the Stars by Roger Corman.

Vegas Judge

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the creation of the Nevada territories, so why not mark it with a picture of a Vegas Judge?

Yes, they have judges in Vegas, and yes, Vegas exists in Dredd’s world. Or rather, both did. We can thank Pat Mills for both via his epic The Cursed Earth, which is a lot more anarchic and disjointed than its reputation might otherwise suggest. Like The Judge Child Quest it’s essentially a line of small adventures for Dredd and cohorts en route to a greater destination – in The Cursed Earth that destination is Mega City Two, and Vegas is, as you might expect, pretty much right on its doorstep, the penultimate obstacle to the completion of Dredd’s mission of mercy. It even shares the MC-2 skyline of floating debris.

Like a lot of the places in the story, Vegas in Dredd’s world is none too subtle. The implication is that this is a smaller city that had a judge system modeled on its neighbours, but organised crime being the very bedrock of the place, the mobs take over the justice system itself, turning the whole place into a parody justice, where the condemned take part in life or death games to clear their name, and citizen and Judge onlookers alike place bets on the outcome. It sort of fits the wonky and black satire of the Dredd strip, but as I say, it’s laid on pretty thick with its ‘God-Judge’, gangster machine guns and vintage cars, cod Mafioso accents and characters like ‘Judge Fingers’. Mick McMahon brings it to life in his early, sketchier Cursed Earth style, but it’s a short life, and the location and its judges once put right by Dredd don’t bother the main strip (nor indeed the Dredd World map) for nearly thirty years. Even Garth Ennis forgets to nuke it in Judgement Day.

The Vegas Judges eventually returned in the climax to John Wagner’s My Name is Death and its follow-up The Wilderness Days, itself a rehabilitation story in bringing back seminal undead baddie Judge Death for some genuinely despicable exploits during his wanderings in the Cursed Earth. Fraser Irving is on art duties here, and it’s rather spectacular; grim and ghoulishly funny in places. Once Death makes it to Vegas Wagner overturns the rather pat (sorry) decision of Mills to have had Dredd effect a change to Sin City’s moral heart, and the Mob have reasserted itself. Of course, with Death now there and his own living nemesis (not Dredd) in pursuit you can’t expect a happy ending. And so Vegas gets the nuke that Garth forgot to drop, and is officially no more.

My Vegas Judge uniform is an amalgam of McMahon’s original with Irving’s curvier modifications. You never actually see their helmets – perhaps they’re a rare judge system in not having one, but I’ve taken inspiration here from a jackpot machine in McMahon’s strip that looks like an existing helmet may have been put to less law-abiding function. So there you go. I didn’t intend to be covering the Vegas Judge, but I had this pencilled from the days of Irving’s story being serialised, so it’s finally done.

A Box of Progs

My trip down south coincides with the clearing of my Dad's place, and with it (somewhat inevitably), some rediscoveries of old, long-thought disappeared treasures. I've found quite a few now, but chief among them has to be my collection of early 2000ADs. Hooray!!! Every home visit for maybe the last ten years has been frustrated by me not being able to find two large cardboard boxes of issues (or 'progs' to use the magazine's own futuristic vernacular), but this month with what seemed the last ever attempt to find them by hand, they let their hidden presence be known.

As expected, and then some more, these boxes have turned out to be as much a time capsule as my own juvenilia. A friend once went into a virtual state of mourning after our flat was burgled and he lost his entire music cassette collection; his reasoning being that among those often redundant and patchy collections of albums and dubs he could name the times he first heard certain songs, the places he'd visited or the mood he was in. The act of consuming media is a weird two-way street sometimes; it seems to me that the more vivid or visceral the experience of reading or listening, watching... is, the more that experience takes in and 'records' other experience around it as an unconscious contextual backdrop. And so in that regard I've memories of when I first read in the pages of my progs the series Helltrekkers, discovered the histories of the various 80s ABC Warriors,  got into Slaine (on a train, as it turned out), followed Dredd and Anderson through the City of the Damned, had my mind blown by the likes of Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill in Nemesis the Warlock and Metalzoic. It's all there, and flowers like fireworks in my brain when I open those pages again after twenty-five to thirty years of simply getting on with life. It's remarkable.

My boxed progs are only part of my collection - it's not complete, but may now number over a thousand, and the process of integrating these old issues (I've only brought up around thirty so far) with my collection here will be a slow but interesting one. I've been selective with the ones I've brought up - two boxes, one of my earliest progs (I think Prog 180 might be the oldest of them?), and another of a selected run comprising the aforementioned Helltrekkers, some of Bryan Talbot's stint on Nemesis, and all of Metalzoic (on which I'll post soon). Of course, the issues I left behind will eventually make their way here (fingers crossed). In them is the end of my 80s infatuation with 2000AD, petering out somewhere past Prog 500 and, as it seemed to me, the end of the magazine's early golden age and its short transformation from adventure comic for boys into ephemeral accessory of the Acid House set. I did reacquaint myself with 2000AD during my Uni years, and those progs are also at home, but the prospect of having all of these issues together at last (still incomplete, I must stress) is an exciting one. Happy times and places in every issue, and, of course, the stuff of Jetsam.

Doodle a Day: 16/10/2013

Another quick biro job: the 'Hammerheads', weird, lrgely mute primitive creatures of wood and bone who rose out of the Everglades to destroy the world of men, or something.

I was sixteen or seventeen when I created these guys, putting them in a comic strip that lasted all of one A3 page before I lost the thread of where I was going - presumably something great;y inspired by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neil's Nemesis the Warlock, I'd say.

For All Your Land Raiding Needs...

Time for another toy from the vaults, and this one's pretty commonplace. Hands up who can name this?

Yep, it's the Matchbox Adventure 2000 Raider Command model, or as 2000AD readers of the time may have known it, Judge Dredd's Land-Raider from Pat Mills' first great Dredd epic The Cursed Earth, itself a Dreddworld riff on Damnation Alley.

The toy was a deliberate tie-in, the first and only one I can think of with 2000AD. Yes, there was at least one serialised video game comic ad in the 90s, but this one is a legit 'canon' appearance, and boy did Judges Dredd, Jack and press-ganged biker punk Spikes Harvey Rotten make good use of the Land-Raider's various features, including of course its unique ability to shoot the raider vehicle from the Command Module or, as it was dubbed in the strip in typical Mills patois, the Killdozer.

"The Killdozer links up with the Land-Raider to form a MODULAR FIGHTING UNIT - capable of covering any terrain and giving battle under all combat conditions. Ooh! I get all EXCITED just looking at its Multi-Level Kill Power!" 

"Calm down, McArthur. This is unseemly behaviour for a Judge... 

and kindly remove your hand from my uniform."

My friend Derek and I certainly made good use of ours, as the wear and tear above shows (the fact that you could launch the Raider off any elevated surface may have contributed to that), although the years have been a little unkind to the model. I've lost all the rockets and the spring-loaded missile launcher may have seized up.

Gone too are the three-man crew in grey plastic. But, miraculously, both tracks on the Command Module survive and are in pretty god nick, having not been left to perish in the sun. And I think I could restore most of it to its former glory. And I might do it - after all, it's collectible, but not in a collect-able condition. There are plenty around, as seen on other, better blogs here and here. One modeller even started making a larger one to scale with his Dredd figures.

So, readers - should I restore this beauty or keep it with its battle scars?

[BTW, I swiped the strip pic from the rather splendid page on Cyber-Wizard's blog, which has more of the beauties)

The Return of the King

News in the past fortnight that Arnold Schwarzenegger is to return to the role which made his name, that of Conan the Barbarian, prompted a fair amount of commentary on genre blogs and websites - most of it cautiously positive, if a little on the dismissive side. In 2014, the projected year of release for The Legend of Conan Arnold will be 67. Still, if anyone can fill the role that the first, best, Conan movie left us with of an aged king of the Cimmerians, it's Schwarzenegger - certainly it wasn't without trying, but was without success, that Jason Momoa tried last year. Ouch.

Which really just goes to say that Arnold invented the cinematic Conan, as separate from Robert E Howard's literary version as, say, Sean Connery's James Bond from Ian Fleming's. Howard's Conan is lithe, tall and muscular, but in a non-body building way; John Milius and Dino de Laurentis' version of the Barbarian is more about the bulk and the eye candy - the model for the Eighties cinematic barbarian. 

The barbarian was big in the Eighties, as much a reinvention of a previous movie type (the cowboy) as its other Eighties counterparts the 'road warrior', the ninja, and the cyborg. And it wasn't just movies, as the immediate appeal and recognition factor of the heavily-muscled, tanned and oiled Californian-style hero allowed the type to translate to other visual media - fantasy art, video games, album covers and videos, and of course comics. It may be that Milius' Conan was brought about in part by Marvel's line of Conan comics, but of course the baton was well and truly taken up by European titles like Metal Hurlant as well, and in the UK and in 2000AD Pat Mills too the Conan story and his Celtic roots in another direction again, combining the hero with those of Irish legend, Finn and Cuchulain to create Slaine.

Slaine was a genuine offshoot from Conan rather than a poor relation - Mills took great care in his appropriation of British and European folklore and legend, establishing his hero as a 'warped' warrior, capable of a battle frenzy that would transform him into an erupting, swollen, vicious monster in battle, reminiscent of Cuchulain himself. Here he is drawn by the great Mick McMahon, but through his life in the comic the titular hero would g on to be illustrated by some equally great names - Massimo Belardinelli, Glen Fabry, Dermot Power and most notably Simon Bisley, who would use the Seventies styles of Frank Frazetta and Casaro Renato (who produced the poster art for Conan the Barbarian) to nod back at his own influences. Like Conan, Slaine was never realised as a fully muscle-bound mountain of a man, but he sure as hell turned out that way, and arrived at around the same time as that type was being justly ridiculed by such  strips as Carl Critchlow's Thrud the Barbarian, first published in White Dwarf.

Not that there was anything wrong with Thrud - quite the opposite  I loved Thrud from his tiny pea-head to his massive furry boots, his tiny intellect and Critchlow's sharp satire not only of fantasy literature but of the tropes of RPGs. Which sort of neatly brings us to the other Eighties phenomenono, the role playing game. Both Conan and Slaine got the treatment, though Slaine's came much later, and for a while many of the popular fantasy games seemed to begrudgingly attempt to incorporate the Barbarian (and the ninja, for their sins) as a playable class. I never thought it was a great fit, even if Dungeons and Dragons is based largely on trying to fit disparate element together before handing them over to players and DMs to try to establish some final cohesion. I think that outside their own games, the barbarians of the RPGs I played were better off either as NPCs in their own world, or actually in their own game. maybe it was the way we played them as teenagers, but in a popular sense at least there's the real risk of treating characters like Conan as being one-note, and that's maybe why they never hung around for long in the games.

And so too the barbarian of cinema, as much wish-fulfillment to a generation of awkward teens as their more physically-inclined peers. There's something quite universal about the likes of Conan, his place as a wanderer in an untamed world, that befits a cinematic treatment, and indeed a revival. And just as Clint Eastwood was able to return to the western to portray an aged gunslinger brought out of retirement for one final glorious battle, I hope that those behind The Legend of Conan, Arnold included, will be able to do the same.

The Future of the Fourth- er, Force

By which I mean the police force, armed forces, judiciary and legislature. Anybody looking at the title above expecting something to do with George Lucas should quickly move on. Today is July 4th, so what better date than to present another hastily-scribbled Judge from the world of Dredd? This time it's the daddy state of them all, Mega City One.

I’m currently re-reading Judge Dredd: America, a mid-era (circa 1990) miniseries that launched the magazine and provided a reboot to the idea of Joe Dredd as a force of implacable justice, administered brutally and dispassionately. In its first three pages it reminds the reader twice that America is dead, and Mega City One is all that remains. Such was the premise of the first episode of Judge Dredd back in 2000AD Prog 2. It wasn’t long before we heard about a Mega City Two (stretching across the opposite West Coast of the continent), a smaller Texas City (nee Mega City Three, before its secession), before a global network of city states small and large were introduced in the series. Most have a Judge and justice system paralleling that of MC-1’s, and many of the uniforms are clear adaptations (the notable exception being that of future Japan, Hondo City, which retains the silhouette but somehow looks far more visible and practical.) It’s an odd quirk of the strip, because the Mega City One Judge uniform is a strange thing indeed. Modelled in part after the character of Frankenstein in Death Race 2000 (a Pat Mills ingredient, I assume), but designed by a European (Catalan) artist, the mighty Carlos Ezquerra, it’s notable for eschewing many of the trappings of other international Judge uniforms. First, it’s really not that nationalistic: eagles are an American symbol, but not uniquely so, and the stars and stripes are largely kept to the badges (breast, belt buckle – very early strips toyed with a trio of stars at the edge of one shoulder pad); there’s red, but no white or blue. Compare that to the Emerald Isle judge, effectively wearing a tricolor, or Brit-Cit’s quasi-Carnaby Street-meets-Trafalgar Square ensemble and it’s positively muted. Which isn’t to say various artists haven’t upped the ante of outrageous proportions and scales over the years – especially the wonderful Mike McMahon, who opted for a lean Dredd inside improbably large pads and boots to impress the scale. It worked. The makers of the new Dredd movie have opted for a more realistic look, something we could expect from what appears to be a ‘twenty minutes into the future’ setting (the original strip opted for two hundred years). It’s less imposing, but bulkier and looks harder. It’s matte instead of shiny – even the badges look dulled, and Dredd’s own helmet looks battle worn. It harkens back to the Frankenstein look, or that of a motorcycle cop, or a riot policeman. In short, it’s a real world take as opposed to a heightened gladiatorial look, the same played on and emphasised in 1995 by the Judge Dredd movie costume design by that most lurid of designers, Gianni Versace. Like Dredd's creator John Wagner I’ve warmed to the new look. It’ll be great for the big screen, allowing a lot of speed and movement, with no shoulder pads to get stuck in doorways, slow down bike pursuits, and no great chain to give feisty perps something to hang onto. I like it’s practicality and functionality, and I like the silhouette. So here it is – a re-booted vision for the future.

The OTHER comic for boys

If you were to ask me what my formative experience with comics was, I'd tell you without blinking that it was 2000AD. And I'd be lying. There were a few comics I read casually before The Galaxy's Greatest. Usually they were one-offs, because I didn't have the pocket money or the stamina (or the town's bookshops didn't seem to have the get-go for sequential ordering?) for a decent run. One or two disparate Star Wars comics, ditto Ghost Rider, and the one success, a two-shot Blade Runner adaptation which I still have. My actual comic collecting however began in 1982, with Eagle magazine.

Eagle is, was, and was again, a time warp. Initially launched in the Fifties and spearheaded by the still iconic Dan Dare, it was rested a year before I was born, and then was resurrected fresh-faced for my teens. Dan Dare was back, alongside a host of new heroes and topical features, and recalling the title now it seems to me that if the original comic was a naive throwback to more innocent times, the comic of choice to the Baden Powell generation, then the revived title arrived just in time to try to recapture that same innocence. Britain was entering the Eighties, a decade that promised pride and prosperity after the fag end and bleak winters of the latter Seventies. The Queen's eldest son had married his future queen in Westminster, Manchester United - the 'red devils' were top of the FA Cup league, and the Falklands War alerted my maturing eyes and mind to the new generation of battlefield technology - Harrier jump jets, Mig Foxbats, infra-red night vision goggles. This was the flavour of the new Eagle, a mission statement of pop stars (Suggs! Easton! Stevens!), celebrity athletes (Coe! Thompson! Dando!), and the various comic guises of Lenny Henry. It was, to a fault, cheerily British, and I lapped it up as I did Noel Edmonds' Late Late Breakfast Show.

The early revival was a bit of a misfire, though. Photostrips - the style usually adopted by girls' Romance comics, was a prevalent style, with drawn strips the poorer sibling, and this was the model for some time, with only Dare in colour (and drawn effectively in the Frank Hampson style by Gerry Emberton) but rubbing shoulders with darker and more intriguing illustrated fare - Doomlord, The London Mad Max-style Tower King, and the grand guignol of Jose Ortiz's artwork in The House of Daemon. Years later I'd see why these stories appealed - while the straightforward adventure of Tower King was by Alan Hebden, a then-2000AD roster writer, the more tongue-in-cheek and visceral Doomlord and Daemon came from the minds of John Wagner and Alan Grant, creators of 2000AD's titanic Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. Small surprise then that some twenty or so years later the illustrated Doomlord would see an unauthorised fan reprint, as would Wagner's other serial from Eagle's final years and mingling with ill-fated horror comic Scream, The Thirteenth Floor. All of which would be beyond me by those days, as I'd long since abandoned the earnest but ultimately juvenile Eagle and properly discovered Wagner and Grant's superior stomping ground (along with would-be Dare revivalist Pat Mills) in 2000AD. By 1989 I'd abandoned 2000AD, for a few years at least, and the Eagle had crash-landed.

So far as I can tell the revamped Eagle isn't fondly recalled to this day, though the aforementioned strips do get the odd mention on the forums. I've always felt that the title suffered from an identity crisis - too young and establishment to be 2000AD, and not as polished to even equal sometime 'AD rival (and the true home of Strontium Dog) Starlord. And yet, it's where it all began, and perhaps its time will come again.

Putting the Fan Film into Fantasy Films

Not quite in the wake of Judge Minty, here's an earlier stab at the 2000AD-based fan trailer; a mock trailer this time, and in French. I'm sure its writer would approve nonetheless given his work in French press.

Voici Pat Mills' Slaine the Horned God, based on the book of the same name by Mills and Bisley, and reproducing the latter's work with admirable devotion!



I didn't think it too many, etc.

Reissue, Repackage - The Meknificent Seven

And now, for a change, something I actually DID throw out. Well okay, I replaced it, and the story goes a little something like this:

Here is the earliest edition of the collected strips of 2000AD's original series of ABC Warriors, bringing together the escapades of this rag-tag™ unit of war robots on Mars, created and written by Pat Mills and illustrated by a slavering roster of future heavyweights of the UK scene - I'm talking Gibbons, O'Neill, Ezquerra, Brendan McCarthy and of course Mick McMahon, who provided the gorgeous cover illustration for this imprint by early 200AD licencees Titan. Inside are all of the Mars stories written by Mills, plus an introductory strip by Mills and Kevin O'Neill, like the cover, produced exclusively for this collection. Years passed and this imprint was discontinued. I saw it as recently as a couple of years ago in Graphic in Cuba Street - shame I didn't pick it up then.

After Rebellion purchased 2000AD they went into their own reprinting venture, and started things off modestly. The reproductions are pretty good, although suffer from some downscaling due to the original comic's page dimensions not being A4 compatible. This (left) is the cover of their initial run of The Meknificent Seven. The cover is by future ABC art droid Kev Walker in a post-Simon Bisley painterly style. Walker produced vibrant and consistent work during his long tenure on the strip, but the choice of illustration - itself a very post Black Hole era design, is Awl Rong. It's ABC leader Hammerstein, which is fine, but it's a nineties redesign of the robot, doesn't sell the crucial image of the ABCs as a team, and it seems like an afterthought to provide some sort of continuity with the later reprints of the colour strips. I wonder whether the original reprint was a Titan-owned piece, which might explain its absence along with the dedicated introductory strip? Apart from setting the template for future ABC reprints, this is the least-collectable version, and it's the one I replaced as soon as I could (sorry Dave, to whom I gave it to). Moving on…

Here is Rebellion's second stab at the reprint, produced last year. It's a gorgeous cover - not the McMahon commission of course, but it is a reproduction of a contemporary 2000AD cover by the artist in question, and it's just what it should be - all seven Warriors in colour, retro-coloured to fit the Seventies era style. The contents are a step up too - the Titan strips have been included, Pat does a foreword (this aligns the volume with the others in the series published between editions), and as volume two, the aforementioned The Black Hole by Mills and Bisley/SMS is also in black and white, the first recap chapter of that strip is included as a taster. I was deid chuffed when I got this and didn't regret my purchase. The only way it could have been better to my mind would have been reprinting the original gatefold pages from 2000AD in colour, and perhaps included the Steve 'Preacher' Dillon-inked 1985 Annual story Red Planet Blues. As this wasn't written by Mills but by some guy called Alan Moore however, I could understand why Rebellion might have omitted it.

It's now 2010 and Rebellion are keen to have another poke at the US market. Onward to a new edition of The Meknificent Seven! Spine-wise this ties in with the existing collection, although the cover is a radical redesign - a pretty slick composite of a panel of Gibbon's work within, and it looks cool, but not as cool as the Titan original. Inside what do we have? An introduction by Pat, the Titan strip plus single-page strips for the core five Warriors used in their 80s return, the Black Hole teaser is back in its own volume where it belongs and in colour… Red Planet Blues.

I think I know what they might select for the next reprint now.

…

Mongrol smush greedy publishers!!!

Video Affects - Shriekback Nemesis (1985)

A rare example of "I know where I was when I first saw this" applied to music videos, my first encounter with Shriekback's Nemesis took place at the house of my friend Derek, during the holidays near the end of 1985. We had been watching his music videos, particularly those of Sting, whom we both were into at the time, and Derek remembered that he'd videoed (ahh, nostalgia) the previous night's Radio With Pictures. So it was obviously a Monday. Probably the first Monday of the summer holidays, a gloriously languid and sun-drenched day as they all were at the time, the air buzzing with wildlife and the footpath outside his parents' architecturally-designed home almost ticking in the heat. I digress. We fast-forwarded idly through the videos - was ZZ Tops' Legs in among them? Unlikely. How about Neil Young's This Bud's For You? Possibly. But the last clip of the night, the last episode of RWP for the year, was reserved for presenter Karen Hay's favourite video of the year, and it was Nemesis. After a few blasts of Synchronicity II we definitely favoured Shriekback's offering in the end, and must have played it until we could remember the whole thing (although it would take years before I could decipher its bizarre lyrics.)

Nemesis represented a curious and infectious collision of worlds in our heads; though I speak for both me and my friend we were very much alike in interests and obsessions. With shaven-headed singer Barry Andrews purring his way through a melange of odd images, looking for all the world like Robin of Sherwood's latter-day villain Gulnar, the clip promised more - a Bacchanalean feast, weird masks of wood and feathers, black glassy eels and most thrilling of all, the Arch-Deviant himself, Pat Mills' comic creation Nemesis the Warlock as a slow-mo phantom swathed in red mist. Shriekback's lyrics are, it turned out, nonsensical, but contained wonderfully arch vocal triggers that caught our young ears - "In the jungle of the senses/Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper"..."We drink elixirs that we refine/from the juices of the dying"…"Call in the airstrike/with the poison kiss". The music itself is harsher than the band's earlier, dreamlike and more avant garde efforts, with guitars and real drums to the forefront, and Sarah and Wendy Partridge's shrill screamed vocals matching the synthetic strings during the choruses. That it makes no sense either visually or lyrically has opened the song up to various interpretations - is it about the comic strip? Probably not. Is it about mankind's destructive urge? Maybe. Is it about the postulated 'death star'? Some (not me) think so. It doesn't matter though, Nemesis is three minutes and forty-three seconds of sensoral wonder set adrift in the mid-Eighties and in one moment changed my musical tastes from pop to something more askew (ironically, its parent album Oil and Gold is regarded as Shriekback's most commercially succesful). I returned briefly to Sting and the Police, but never let go of Shriekback and still have three of their albums in my permanent collection. And every time I hear Nemesis I return to that day when my mind met something quite recognisable and alien at the same time.