Corrected Edition! This Week In 2000 ad No 2: Prog 1711

This is the second "edition" of this review, and my sincerest thanks go out to Emperor for informing me of my howling mistake that required a serious edit of the first version. In the unlikely event that anyone is curious about why that should be so, the explanation is in the comments section. My apologies to all, and in particular to Mr Tomlinson & Mr Dyer, who certainly didn't begin their Dredd tale after the inciting incident;

1. "Sinister Dexter: Are You Being Severed? Part 3", writer, Dan Abnett, artists, Anthony Williams & Rob Taylor

I've been far more impressed by this latest Sinister Dexter serial than its predecessor. As I discussed a few weeks ago, there's no ethical confusion on show in the pages of "Are You Being Severed" on the matter of the worth of conscienceless killers, and the introduction of the politics of an election in the city of Downlode promises a strip that contains a touch more varied content than just the business of one gang of future criminals shouting and shooting at another.

But although the moral and thematic content of "Sinister Dexter" is looking up, and it is, the story itself was this week so terribly visually tedious, especially for the reader who knows little of these characters and their complicated backstory, that it was hard to want to read through the strip's five pages. And despite the fact that it's so hopelessly redundant to say that comics are a visual medium, and to note that there's often a temptation to avoid saying so because the point really shouldn't ever require repeating, the art of this week's "Sinister Dexter" was shockingly, shockingly, dull. For here we have a five page chapter composed of little but talking heads delivering prosaic plot points one after another, and nothing has been done by writer or artists to make the visuals of this process either enlightening as regards the meaning of the script or entertaining as regards the pleasure of the reader. The script seems to offer nothing that might help make these panels anything other than still and data-heavy. The art is as humdrum and lacking in informing detail as it is deficient in movement, in characters simply doing something more interesting than merely talking or watching others talk.



I would have imagined that if a story had been written which was to be told largely through such unengaging visuals, somebody in the editorial chain-of-command would have suggested a touch of a re-write. Mr Abnett has, after all, an entire future world to place his cast into and yet he gives us, for much of this chapter, two of them sitting on a sofa involved in nothing more eye-catching than eating popcorn while another few cast members are presented on TV. And there's nothing that's signed up in these pages, beyond two panels with flying cars in them, that carries any sense of character or place, or time or atmosphere, that might enliven the process of reading all these pages of chat.

And so, this week's Sinister Dexter isn't a comic so much as an illustrated script for a rather dull radio play. It seems inconceivable that such an able writer as Mr Abnett isn't writing for the medium, that he's not thinking of how to make these conversations at least visually interesting if not emotionally enthralling; a panel description of "bloke sits on settee and chats" isn't either of those things, after all. And Mr Williams and Mr Taylor surely had to have been thinking, really thinking, about how to make their art here more than a flat representation of a few conversations. "Boring" just doesn't belong in the pages of a mainstream comic book, and especially not in one depicting a science-fiction future. Even if the world to come is one of drudgery and deep-framed TV's, it's still notably different to ours, and we need to know what that this difference is so it can mean something to us. What is this future like, and what kind of lives do its inhabitants suffer, and what's so interesting about it that we should even be shown it at all? Most of all, what does feel like to live there? For if we're not being given anything of an emotional resonance to associate with in the script where the characters are concerned, and here we're not, then the world that we're being presented with must in itself be designed to fascinate us, or impress us, or depress us, or in some way create the depth of feeling that the story itself doesn't.


Otherwise, this is just a few pages of a few people having a few chats, and it could be set anywhere and anytime since the invention of cheap and affordable television, or, indeed, given the lack of visual information in this week's chapter, radio.

It's not that this chapter of "Are You Being Severed" needed spaceships crashing into sports stadiums. But some movement and depth and ambiance should surely have been designed into this chapter from the very start, for this is, after all, a comic book, and, yes, comics are a visual medium.


2. "Dandridge: Return Of The Chap, Part 2", writer, Alec Worley, artist, Warren Pleece

It's taken me a while to work out why I found this week's "Return Of The Chap" so difficult to enjoy. Warren Pleece's art is, after all, as charming, clear, and effectively designed as always, and Alec Worley's strip is teeming with interesting ideas; a short list of concepts such as ectomorphic possessors, soul cages and tiny girls stored in bottles and fearful of being eaten doesn't begin to exhaust the contents of this script.

But it's often the grammar rather than the story content of a script that neuters a reader's interest, and that's what's happened here. For my inability to enjoy reading "Danbridge" begins with the very first panel of the story. Try as I might, I simply can't get interested in a static, medium shot of a character I know little about who comes accompanied by three crowded word balloons containing almost 80 words. 80 words! There's simply no way that Mr Pleece can choose a single illustration that can sum up and emphasise the central meaning of all those words, because 80 words can't have a single meaning. All Mr Pleece can do is present a general illustration to stand passively behind those crammed word balloons and story titles. And as a inevitable consequence of that scriptwriting choice, the eye simply skirts across that vital opening panel, recognising the regretable presence of yet another illustrated screenplay in this week's pages rather than that of a really interesting comic book.


Panel two is slightly easier to engage with. It has, at least, two passive characters instead of one, although we're shown Dandridge in unengaging profile and Oliver looking down at his feet. But it does still have 70 words filling it, and by that point, the whole momentum of the tale has already been stymied at the very point it began.

And it can't be said that the rest of Dandridge is designed to compensate for that energy-sapping start. The first two pages close without the slightest note of tension having been created, despite or perhaps because of some rather unproductive confusion concerning a great elongated tongue, which all means that the vital business of page-turning is hardly incentivised, while pages three and four end respectively on a door-knob fizzing a touch and then Dandridge wandering calmly through a wall into what appears to be a pantry.



It's as if Mr Worley is so sure that his audience will be interested in what he's doing that's he's not considered that there might be a necessity to compel the reader's attention. This is, after all, a world with so very many options for the consumer where entertainment is concerned, and yet the script for "Dandridge", along with that of "Sinister Dexter" and "Slaine" too, seems almost complacent, seem to be founded on the assumption that the reader will make the effort to engage with a text which in so many ways isn't making an effort to engage with them.

There's a great deal of note and potential in "Dandridge" that might in other circumstances be admirable, but much of it isn't integrated into the fundamental discipline of producing a compelling story in the context of a weekly adventure comic book. And so, why should the reader really care? After all, as with both of the other strips mentioned above, "Dandridge" isn't an emotionally affecting piece, and in the absence of a moving human dimension, a great deal else of craft and content needed to have been loaded into the work in order to compensate for what's basically missing; heart.

Coming next, on Saturday, the concluding part of the piece comparing All-Star Superman to Superman Earth-One, and then, depending upon the arrival of next week's subscription copy of 2000 ad, either that or a blog about the splendid Catman from Gail Simone's Secret Six.

Have a splendid day! Stick together!

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This Week In 2000 ad No. 1: Prog 1709

Tomorrow, a discussion of the work of Geoff Johns on "Darkest Night", and after that, I think, the long-promised/threatened piece on All-Star Superman, but now, a new feature for most Mondays taking a look at each week's new 2000 ad and each month's Judge Dredd: Megazine, starting with a quick tour around the delights, and some of the complications, on display in prog 1709. Please do be aware that there be spoilers ahead;


1. "Judge Dredd: The Beast In The Bay", writer: Simon Spurrier, artist: Patrick Goddard

Let's put aside the unfortunate truth that the narrator of this six page satire on the West's hypocritical attitude to immigration is sadly something of a derogatory stereotype himself, a cartoon Mexican-esque very-wetback who's too naive and unworldly at the tale's end to realise that he's in a detention centre rather than a kindly hostel. It's a shame it's so, because Mr Spurrier and Mr Goddard are clearly fighting on the side of the angels here, but their humane intent is somewhat blunted in the execution.


That aside, "The Beast In The Bay" is awash with smart ideas and an appropriate measure of political cynicism. In truth, there's probably too much being crammed into a mere 33 panels, which results in neatly-established opportunities for some scornful-minded cruelty being partially squandered. That's particularly true for the scene in which a mutated fish the size of a three-storey building is attacked underwater by all manner of warring Mega City One obsessives while Dredd and his fellow Judges try to keep the beast alive for the purpose of public relations. There's well-armed souvenir hunters, a pro-animal cruelty group, super-obese citizens addicted to sushi, and needing a mountain of it to maintain their own blubber, and Dredd himself, shooting and stabbing at everyone he can in order to protect a big diseased fish that he wanted to do away with in the first place. It's a gag that works well in it's own right, quite seperate from the rest of "The Beast In The Bay", and it neatly underscores one of the major themes of the Judge Dredd stories since the feature's first days, namely that the Judicial state has kept everyone so stupid and passive that their creativity can only express itself in absurd and obsessive behaviour. I'd like to have seen more of that scene, and more made of that point, and less of the conceit of the dense, illegally abroad and wide-eyed narrator whose portrayal jars with the good-hearted intentions of the story as a whole.


2. "Defoe: A Murder Of Angels: Part 10", writer: Pat Mills, artist: Leigf Gallagher

I'll miss "Defoe". I don't know any other strip that stars a lead character who's so politically charged, so fundamentally English in the sense that our history is as much marked by dissidents as courtiers, rebels as men of power, and democrats as aristocrats. "Who cares about the royals' bleeding treasures?" declares Defoe when told the tower containing the crown jewels is under attack by zombies, "There are people in there!" It's not a speech that'll endear him to the blue-bloods around him, but Defoe doesn't care, anymore than he's concerned about spitting contempt at that most dedicated of social climbers, Samuel Pepys. Defoe's on the side of the "common bawds, strumpets, mollies and beggars", and how odd it is, in our times marked by economic dislocation and anxiety that there just aren't more comics books dealing deliberately with the dread business of politics. Where are the right-wing strips, the openly Randian epics, the stories grounded in conciliation or rebellion, the social democratic texts, the anti-Capitalist adventures, the tales that take a stand somewhere on their surface rather than hinting at stances, consciously or not, in the sub-text?

The silence where the politics of the present day might be placed in the comics of 2011 is a disturbing one. It's not that I want polemics, or relevancy, or political correctness. It's simply that reading this week's "Defoe", and indeed the Judge Dredd tale before it, makes it plain that there's so much missing from a great deal of what we're used to consuming.


3. "Sinister Dexter: Are You Being Severed? Part 1", writer: Dan Abnett, artist: Anthony Williams & Rob Taylor

If the previous Sinister Dexter serial seemed to glorify gangsterism while utterly confusing new readers, a confusion of purpose in which not explaining matters clearly left the text as apparently amoral as it was opaque, the first chapter of "Are You Being Severed?" makes a successful start in putting both problems to rest. The tale's prologue clearly establishes the moral tone of the piece; this is a world where terrible things happen to good mannered people, and so the possession of a gun and a habit of pushing people from great heights to their deaths can't in any way be mistaken for a humorous business that's really rather cool. And Mr Abnett's knowing trick of listing the various unsavoury hobbies of each of the story's featured assassins leaves us in no doubt that no-one on show in "Are You Being Severed?" is in any way the tale's protagonist; there are indeed, it seems, no more heroes anymore, and it's good to be shown that.

It remains to be seen whether Mr Abnett and the artistic team of Mr Williams and Mr Taylor can tell us anything of note in "Sinister Dexter" beyond the undeniable fact that guns go bang and that men with those bang-producing machines can be powerful and dangerous creatures. In particular, it'd be fascinating and instructive to see something of how this gangster-state is run. One way to make it explicit that these blokish, wise-cracking killers aren't heroes would be to show the reader more of how their world works for the typical woman and man in and off the street. We'd surely benefit from seeing their routine of suffering, the fear, the casual violence, the capriciousness of a state unbound by law, the mechanics of paying protection and the effect of that on the relations of everyday life. For in truth, "SinisterDexter" needs a great deal more context, even if it's delivered in the broadest and most amusing manner possible.

But then, who's to say that we're not going to see that in the weeks to come?


4. "Slaine: The Exorcist: part 1", writer: Pat Mills, artist: Clint Langley

Oh, dear. I'm afraid that I'm about to show how out of step I am with contemporary taste. Because all I can recall about Clint Langley's painted art is that it was exceptionally green, markedly vague where backgrounds are concerned, and reliant on distracting photographic references. And I can also remember being somewhat baffled by the establishing panel labelled "The City Of Eborakon" which seems to show a big wooden house isolated from the world in a grass-less field.

It's beautiful work, I wouldn't ever deny it, but it's an effort to read, and the information it doesn't convey seems more noteworthy than the technique and surface flash it does.


But sadly Mr Mill's script is no more forthcoming where helping the unfamiliar reader along is concerned. The assumption is that we know who these folks are, and that we're absolutely comfortable with what they're doing and why. Even the introductory blurb on the letters page manages to produce a thoroughly confusing summary of the strip's background and purpose.

In the end, all we're given is what feels to this reader like a showy and shallow six pages in which a beautiful women spits a demon out of her mouth, a Celtic barbarian speaks in stiff platitudes while striking unimpressive manly poses, and an irritating dwarf makes profoundly unamusing jokes.

I know. I am out of step, and these are exceptionally able creators. I suppose one of the things that'll I'll need to pay attention to in the coming weeks is how to engage with a product this distinct from my own taste. I'll be reporting back from the comicbook-reading classroom as my education continues over the coming weeks.


5. "Low Life: Hostile Takeover: part 10", writer: Rob Williams, artist: D'Israeli

When Checkov discussed the famous matter of the gun left in the audience's view in a play's first act, he was adamant that it should be fired by the end of the act that followed. Here, the reappearance of Cross-Dressing Trev, the gender-brutalised killer robot, occurs at the start of what might be labelled act five of "Hostile Takeover", and this reader for one had quite forgot that the big metal lass/lad had been ever been placed in full view at all. And so, the problem with not having seen Trev for so many episodes is that my response was "Oh, look, I'd forgotten Trev existed!", rather than "Hurrah! It's Trev to the rescue!". Croos Dressing Trev was, I suspect, a gun that either needed firing sooner or placing on the shelf later.

But for all of that, Frank's rescue of Dredd is a lovely scene. To see Dirty Frank fighting back succesfully after the previous nine chapters detailing his emasculation had me quietly but emphatically cheering, and his victory cry of "Cross-dressing Trev! He is all woman!" made me realise how fond I've become of the maddest and hairiest of Judges over the past few months.


There should be Dirty Frank action figures, starting, I believe, with the "Low-Life" double-set, starring "Battle-Winning" Frank with a five foot tall Cross Dressing Trev Robot, complete with matching bra and mini-skirt accessories.

Elsewhere, "Hostile Takeover" concluded with considerably more focus and a far greater measure of satisfaction than I would ever have imagined just four episodes before, where the lack of a clearly identified point of view character and an excess of unexplained backstory threatened to derail this reader's enjoyment. And it ought to be said that the absence in the final chapter of the tale's master-antagonist hardly helped dispel the sense that all ten chapters had described a showdown with a character who new readers rarely meet and never have a chance to get to know. And yet, for all of that, "Hostile Takeover" actually finished up being one of the year's most enjoyable and even touching serials. There's so much precise and moving characterisation woven throughout the story from Mr Williams and Mr D'Israelli that, in the end, emotion carries the story even when the plotting doesn't. It's a fact that can be noted in how the


story ends on a subtly affecting note, with the cold and formal beauty of the first chapter's opening panels reprised with Judge Frank now standing as lonely as Aimee appeared to be all those ten chapters before. I may still not know the slightest thing about Aimee, but Frank has won my affections, and if he's upset and lonely, then I'm concerned for him. It's a scene which provides evidence of careful forethought and structuring that I suspect will become more obvious when the story's collected, and, yes, that's a collection I'll happily be investing in.

It's always good to be won over, it's always good to have ill suspicions confounded. More "Low-Life" gentlemen, if you would.


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