Castle Vardulon

This is a perfect example of nostalgia gone mad. If I see current comic book characters referencing popular fiction, I'm as likely to groan as anything else. Yet if I see people in the 40s doing the exact same thing, I'm deeply charmed.

Cover: Is there any way this issue can possibly top the cover? That’s a warbot who’s dropped his gun so that he can better protect an adorable dog! The only way this could be better is if that robot went on a kill-mad frenzy to protect the dog, like Christian Bale and his puppy in Equilibrium. I can't remember, did Christian Bale cry like the robot or not?

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Things have gone very badly for Bill Savage and his Mad Dogs. Their numbers depleted and their home base destroyed, they’ve been forced to look for refuge with the pompous Brigadier General and his remnants of the British Army. This safe haven comes with a price, though, as the Brig forces the Mad Dogs into basic training, in the hopes of turning them into ‘real soldiers’.

Look, I know the point of this part of the strip is to remind everyone how useless the establishment is compared to a reg’lar bloke like Savage, but come on – do you really expect me to believe that the secret resistance in an occupied country goes on ten mile formation marches in matching uniforms?

It seems like you’d get a better storyline if you showed the advantages of the army’s approach as well as Bill’s, so that it might seem like there was a little bit of hope for the British resistance as a whole. Not that Bill Savage and his pal Silk aren’t great and all, it’s just that I’m skeptical about the chances for Britain’s future if they’re the only two people in the country who aren’t morons.

Quickly rankling under the yoke of authority, Savage steals a military vehicle and drives off, looking for trouble. Which he quickly finds, in the form of of a Volgan road crew about to execute their slave laborers.

Savage is having none of that, of course. He flips on the pavement layer and runs over the Volgans, then quickly recruits the would-be victims to his cause. He’s not exactly treated as a conquering hero when he gets back at base, though. The Brig wants him brought up on charges for striking his sergeant and stealing the jeep, but Bill merely laughs at him and leaves, taking Silk and the slave labourers with him. So they’re off to more adventures around the country, killing fake Nazis! Who knows where they’ll go next? Liberate the coal miners of Newcastle? Kill the Volgans occupying the midlands? Visit whatever topical thing happens in Ireland? The possibilities are endless!

Thrill 2 - Flesh

Logically the strip should have ended last week, with Regan escaping to the future and the trans-time base destroyed. There’s one big loose end left to pull, though – just what happened to Old One-Eye?

She died. It was 65 million years ago. And she was already over a hundred years old. Of course she died.

In fact, the majority of this issue acts as a requiem for the old hag, telling the story of how, knowing that her life was coming to an end, she journeyed to the Tyrannosaur’s graveyard join all of her ancestors. Fighting off scavengers and defeating heart attacks through sheer force of will, she makes it to the top of a mountain, her triumph complete.

Amazingly, even though the next three panels depict her having a final heart attack, falling off a cliff to her death, then becoming fossilized in sandstone, that’s not the end of the story!

We pick up the tale in the near future (to publishing date, of course) of 1983, where we reveal the big twist – all the amazing trans-time adventures 65 million years in the past… were taking place in England! Maybe not the most accurate paleontology, but we’re not looking to these stories for their educational value.

We abruptly move to a fancy dinner party, where the head of a museum is entertaining a group of scientists… inside Old One Eye’s ribcage! Wait, just how big is she? Because she never seemed this big:

Over drinks, the scientists discuss the strangest thing about Old One-Eye – inside her skeletal ribcage was the complete skeleton of a man! The lead scientist dismisses this as a carbon-dating error, since humans lived at such completely different times. This, despite another scientist’s persuasive argument that his son used to read 2000AD, which featured a story about men in the future using Time Travel to kill dinosaurs! A, self-referentialism, ever since Don Quixote went to hell and met that unauthorized sequel you’ve been a key source of comedy.

The mystery goes unsolved by any of the scientists, despite their access to futuristic mid-80s technology. Before the episode ends, we’re treated to one more kill, as the lead scientist is so sure of his superiority to dinosaurs that he’s comfortable climbing into the skeleton’s mouth. Unfortunately, in doing so, he knocks away one of the bars that is ‘keep the jaws apart’. Now, I’m not a paleontologist, but I’m pretty sure that when they put fossils (or plaster fossil replicas) together there’s nothing elastic trying to pull the jaws together. If you knocked a rod away, wouldn’t the jaw just fall off?

As opposed to, you know, snapping shut and rearing up triumphantly?

Anyhow, that’s the end of Flesh, making this the first serialized 2000AD story to reach an endpoint. Who’s going to be next? Harlem Heroes, Invasion, MACH 1? Obviously not Judge Dredd, but it’s got to be someone, right?

I’m going to lay money on Harlem Heroes – of the remaining stories it’s the one that’s the least episodic, meaning that now that the finals have started, we’re probably only ten or fifteen issues before things wrap up, and the villain (Ulysses Cord) is revealed in the shocking twist ending.

Tune in next time for the start of a brand new story: SHAKO! Which, if my fuzzy memories of colour 2000AD reprints are to be trusted, is about a killer Polar Bear on the loose in the Arctic circle! I can’t wait!

Thrill 3 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

When we left the Harlem Heroes, Artie Gruber, cyborg assassin, was throwing a ball to Giant, hoping that the booby-trap in it would kill his foe. But Giant has other thoughts on the matter – despite the fact that he didn’t know he was being thrown a bomb, he elects to let the pass go right by him into the hands of Dale Parker, a random player who has never had a line.

Oh, Dale – you never got a line, but you do get a profoundly ironic thought bubble:

Just before exploding:

For the record, ‘What the-‘ is the correct thing to say when someone explodes next to you.

Once again proving that Aeroball has the worst referees in sports, the fact that a metal ball full of helium just exploded with enough force to blast a man to pieces isn’t enough to convince anyone that there’s anything fishy going on. The Heroes agree to continue playing, and decide to use their hatred and frustration to their advantage.

The game turns vicious as the Heroes forget about points and focus entirely on crippling their opposition. Giant calls a time out and tries to talk away his players’ tempers. Hairy, who’d nearly decapitated a Gargoyle with a ‘missed’ shot, points out, rather persuasively, that since the opposing team is made up entirely of robots, it doesn’t matter how badly they’re taken apart.

The episode ends with the Heroes’ fight being broadcast all over the world, much to the pleasure of the still-unidentified Ulysses Cord, who announces that his plan will be a success in any event – if Artie kills the Heroes, he wins, and if they turn into violence-mad killing machines, he also wins! But what can that possibly mean?

Here’s something a little odd – instead of the normal line of text at the bottom of the story, plugging the next installment, there’s another ad for SHAKO!

They’re really pushing this thing, aren’t they? Good for them. Also, he's a polar bear with monstrous strength and giant claws. Somehow I doubt all of his victims 'die real slow'. But I guess we'll have to wait and see. Actually, you know what? That's the new thing I'm tracking - the percentage of Shako's victims that 'die real slow'. Look for that next week!

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE:

Oh, what the hell. Remember that cover? That amazing robot-and-his-dog cover? It’s not a story in this issue. It’s actually just a ‘Supercover’! What’s a ‘supercover’? Good question. It seems that instead of coming up with an interesting cover based on one of the stories inside, they’ve just put a random cover on the thing and justified it with a two hundred word short story in the Nerve Center.

Because reviewing it would probably wind up using more words than the story itself, I’m just going to present it here for your enjoyment. Or enjoyment-ish, because, well, yeah…

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare: Space Hyper-Hero (?/Belardinelli)

Dan Dare, flying the Two’s stolen spacecraft, is in the process of escaping from their centre-of-a-sun hideout along with his light-saber-wielding certainly-not-a-wookie pal, Rok, the space-dog. Once they’re out of the range of the guns, Dan takes a moment to rifle through the onboard computer files. In there they discover a terrifying secret about the Two…

You know, I’m usually pretty snarky about Dan Dare, but this is just a great idea. Between this revelation and the amoeba whose crime was so alien that human words didn’t exist to describe it, I’m really liking the specific sci-fi ideas being presented in these stories, of not the execution.

Oh, and also the living axe. The poor, dearly departed living axe. I love that guy.

They uncover another secret: The Mekon has planted a miniature nuclear bomb in the Two’s chest as part of a clever scheme. How clever? He’s hypnotized the Two so that they’ll screw up a pirate attack on a well-guarded space liner, knowing that they’ll surrender and be brought right into the central chambers of the galactic council, where the bomb will destroy all galactic government!

Wait… what? Is that what they normally do with criminals? Bring them into the galactic council chambers? I can’t remember the last time an arrested bank robber was brought before congress as part of their court case.

Also, do they not have suicide bombers in the future? You’d think with all the high-tech weaponry that everyone has on them that full body scans would be a standard part of every arrest.

Once again, Dan’s going to have to save the world, because the world is far too stupid to save itself.

Also, it seems that next week we’re going to find out why SHAKO is the ‘world’s most wanted monster’. You know, this story is going to have to be pretty great to justify the ads.

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

There’s an intriguing splash half-page this week, introducing us to the newest problem that Probe will be sorting out:

It seems that the British Mining Company have recently purchased this pacific island, and, to quote the narrator, are quickly turning it from a ‘paradise into a hell on earth’! Wow… is John Probe going to be fighting an evil corporation for environmental reasons? That’s great! Sure, the foreman there is a bit of an over-the-top lout, but at least the story is finally covering a contemporary issue, as opposed to just random espionage-themed super-heroics.

Or is it? Right after that opening panel which introduces the people I’d assumed were the villains the story takes a turn. Out of the jungle walks a Japanese soldier, one that still thinks the second world war is going on! Wow. That’s the second really crazy thing to happen this issue. Third if you count the story about the robot with the dog who’s going to die really soon. So this is a story about John Probe fighting a sixty-five-year-old man? Remember, MACH 1 takes place in the late 80s, so at the time of the story WWII has been over for more than forty years.

At least the old man has traps on his side. Probe doesn’t get more than a few feet into the jungle before he’s fired on by remote-controlled tanks, whose 40-year-old shells work just fine, thank you very much. He easily dodges the tanks, but then winds up running headfirst into a barbed-wire noose that snatches him into the air.

The soldier comes out to check on Probe, and then quickly loses to him in a fight. It’s only after seeing Probes hyperpower in action that Tanaka (the last soldier) understands that the war is over, and he quickly commits seppuku to avoid the disgrace of having to surrender.

Probe then walks away, angry that a man had to die all for a few tons of phosphate-enriched soil that the British arms industry needs.

Um, John, if you’re not on the ball with the exploitation of this island for the good of the military-industrial complex, why don’t you do something about it? Have you forgotten that you have superpowers? Because right now it makes you look like someone who’s perfectly fine being an accomplice to the destruction of the environment so long as he gets to bitch about it.

Typed the man working with a computer chock full of toxic chemicals that will seep into the water table for the next hundred years. Then again, I don’t have superpowers.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd (?/Cooper)

First things first – there’s an artist listed this week! Yay! I’m not sure who this ‘John Cooper’ is, but I’m extremely happy he signed his work.

Anyhoo, on to the story.

Judge Dredd is driving through the city on a bright, moonlight night, which Dredd refers to as a ‘mugger’s moon’. Not sure exactly what that’s supposed to mean. Sure, a bright moon would let muggers see their prey more easily, but wouldn’t their prey also be able to see the muggers, and avoid them? More to the point, does it ever really get dark in Mega City 1? Shouldn’t it be one of those future dystopias so lit with artificial sun that shadows can’t exist – therefore making the shadows in men’s hearts all the darker?

Or maybe he’s just referring to Full Moon Mania, and they call it something different in the future.

Proving Dredd’s prediction almost psychically prescient, there is, in fact, a mugging going on just nearby. A hapless citizen is running from a group of thugs when he sees a classic 20th-century automobile approach. The driver doesn’t bother to stop, despite the man’s pleas, and the victim is so desperate in his attempts to escape that he even grabs onto the car’s exhaust pipe, hoping it will drag him to safety. It doesn’t, though, leaving him at the gang’s mercy.

Dredd rolls in on his bike moments later, though, and quickly dispatches all three muggers with a single heat-seeking bullet, which pierces each of their hearts in turn.

I’ve never been exactly clear on how the heat-seeking bullet is supposed to work. Beyond ‘seeking body heat’, that is. How does it know to track the muggers, and not kill the muggee as well? And how does it know to stop after hitting the third guy? Hopefully there will be a technical diagram sometime in the near future that lays all of this out for me.

With the muggee rescued, there’s one bit of business left to take care of – track down the driver who abandoned him in his time of need!

Dredd quickly catches up with the classic auto and pulls it over. The driver protests that fleeing from a crime scene without calling the cops or offering assistance isn’t a crime, so he can’t be charged with anything. This is kind of a surprise to me – isn’t dropping litter on the street a serious crime in Mega-City 1? You’d think not reporting a crime would be equally bad. Either that or watching cartoons while driving.

Dredd agrees that the man can’t be charged with a crime, but points out that his classic car is putting out dangerous levels of pollution. It seems that when the muggee grabbed his exhaust pipe a clean-air regulator broke off, and now the car isn’t street legal! Dredd does the only sensible thing and blows the car up, then drives off with one of his trademark quips-

Early Dredd really was a softie, wasn’t he? I mean, the Dredd I know and love would have blown up the guy’s car then cited him for littering and blocking a road with the wreck.

That ends the comic, with one final ad, this one promising that Shako makes ‘King Kong look like a pet chimp!’ Which actually seems like a weak analogy, given how many stories you hear about pet chimps viciously attacking people.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (20)+3=23!

Final Thoughts

Best Story: FLESH! - I don’t care if the final sting was cheesy, I like the classy wrap-up of FLESH. I’m not saying that I ever empathized with Old One-Eye, but it was certainly satisfying watching her last day on earth.

Worst Story: MACH 1 – Huge disappointment this week, as a comic that looked like it was going to cover something interesting just wound up being pro-arms manufacturers destroying nature. Dan Dare - you're just lucky your lazy plotting was overshadowed by MACH 1's general terribleness.

Oh, wait - am I allowed to pick that totally mislead cover? Because if so, I want to pick that.

Cover: It’s number 2 in our series of supercovers, but I’m not going to complain this time. Oh, sure, it’s doing nothing more than plugging an interesting premise that the comic is going to do absolutely nothing with, but I don’t care. Why? Because I recognized the way those people’s clothes were drawn. Only Brian Bolland draws clothes like that. A quick scouring of the image uncovered this in the bottom-right corner:

I looked over last week’s cover and sure enough, it was also a Bolland. Guess I’m just not familiar enough with his robots and dogs.

So even if the whole concept of the Supercover is a little weak, I’m impressed that the editor of the magazine (Tharg, I suppose) was smart enough to choose the best possible artist to draw them. I’m not going to go too in-depth into Bolland here, though – I’ll save my worshiping of the man’s work until he actually starts drawing actual stories in the comic.

Thrill 1 – Shako!

Tharg’s really excited about this whole Shako thing, it seems. He’s even gone so far as to bump Invasion out of the prestigious Thrill 1 spot for it! So will Shako deserve the prime position? Only time will tell. I mean, I already kind of know, because I read all of Shako in reprints like twenty years ago, but hopefully my memories are fuzzy enough that there can still be a few surprises along the way.

Oh, and I’m also going to be testing out the comic’s promise that ‘All of (shako’s) victims die real slow!’ In order to do so, we’re have to define the terms I’ll be using to judge the claim’s truth. So, first off, obviously ‘his victim’ will be anyone that Shako kills. That’s easy enough - although I won't be counting seals, fish, or other non-human life forms that he might also eat. ‘All’ is self-explanatory. ‘Die real slow’ is a bit trickier, after all, if a polar bear were to stalk someone for two hours and then bite their head off, that wouldn’t count as ‘dying real slow’, would it? Sure, the whole encounter lasted two hours, but the victim wasn’t ‘dying’ until the polar bear actually swiped his head from his shoulders with a single, playful, bat. So I’m going to define someone ‘dying real slow’ if the amount of time between first physical injury caused directly by Shako until death is longer than five minutes. Now that’s not exactly ‘gutshot’ slow dying, but it’s certainly an achingly long amount of time for a polar bear to take.

So, with our terms clearly established, let’s move into the actual story!

It opens with a secret CIA jet having engine trouble while flying over the arctic – the pilots want to bail out, but their boss, one Jake K. Falmuth (nicknamed ‘Foul Mouth’ by his men, apparently, although this being a children’s comic will severely hamper any attempts at making that nickname make sense) insists that they crash land, because they’re carrying an unbelievably precious cargo! And because this isn’t an unbelievably pretentious movie, I guarantee to you that we’re going to discover just what that cargo is!

In an amazing coincidence, the plane crashes right next to where Shako (a larger-than-normal polar bear) is napping. Rudely awoken, Shako saunters over to investigate, and comes across the secret capsule, which had fallen off the wing in the crash. The plane’s pilot spots Shako swallowing the capsule, and tries to shoot him in the head (the capsule being too valuable to risk hitting with a body shot). The shot goes wild, though, and the pilot pays what I’m sure will become the standard price for trying to kill Shako!

The co-pilot tries his luck as well, and it goes just as badly as you’d expect.

That really is a big bear, isn’t it?

Shako then drops the man, giving him the false impression that he’s being let go – is this man going to die real slow? Nope. Shako was just figuring out whether the man would be edible, which he quickly discovers is, in fact, the case.

Back at headquarters, Jake is infuriated by his pilots’ inability to kill a single bear, and invites Eskimo guide Buck Dollar (seriously, that is the character’s name) into the top secret installation to educate everyone about the dangers of hunting polar bears. Buck does offer one important piece of exposition, though – the capsule is both indigestible and too large to pass through Shako’s system, so he’s going to be even surlier than your average polar bear. Jake is unimpressed, and orders some men from the closest ice station to go out there and just kill the thing so they can gut it and retrieve the capsule.

Meanwhile Shako is out hunting seal, which allows the author to drop some educational biology lessons into the story.

The artist made a critical error here – that bear is way too cute to be scary

His hunt is rudely interrupted by some attacking soldiers, who race along the ice in a snow cat, wildly firing at Shako. Shako’s having none of that, though – he quickly lures them to a

thin section of the ice and leaps on it, sending the vehicle into the depths, with the four men trapped inside!

When the news gets back to Jake, he decides he’s had enough. Jake announces that he’s going to fly up and deal with the Shako situation personally. He also drags Buck along, giving the half-Eskimo time to warn Jake that Shako is an expert killer, and they might well be overmatched. Well, if that’s the case, why are you even going?

You know what? This is, by far, the most promising first part of a story I’ve seen yet in 2000AD. Exciting, fast-paced, profoundly violent. Good work, Tharg, this is an excellent replacement for Flesh. I only hope it can keep up this pace until the end – since, like Flesh, this is clearly not meant to be an ongoing story.

While the story itself was wonderful, it proved to be quite an exercise in false advertising. Shako killed six people this week, and all were instant deaths, or near enough to it. Hell, even the people Shako sent through the ice died ‘in seconds’ according to the caption. So just one episode in, and the ‘all’ portion of ‘all his victims die real slow’ has already been blown, since none of his victims this week died even a little slowly, let alone ‘real slow’.

With the first criteria utterly busted, I’m going to adapt the survey in an attempt to discover what percentage of his total victim count will die ‘real slow’. Right now that stands at 0 out of 6, or 0% of his victims.

Come on, Shako! 2000AD’s marketing plausibility is riding on you! Pick up the pace… or rather, take your time will all the murder, would you?

Thrill 2 – Invasion!

After his exile from both London and the ‘official’ English resistance, Bill Savage and his gang find themselves forced to drive aimlessly around the country, looking for trouble where they may find it. Arriving at a garage by the highway for repairs, Bill gets some news from one of his mechanic friends (he was a trucker, remember?) – it seems that everyone’s gone underground since the Volgs took over, leaving him without any help he can count on.

Bill and the gang head into a local diner, the ‘Greasy Spoon’, for a meal while their van is repaired, but wind up cornered by a Volgan patrol who recognize their vehicle from informer reports. Luckily the Volgans don’t have a good description of the entire gang, so they think they’ve arrested everyone by pointing guns at Silk and the road crew from last week, but miss Savage, who’s gone behind the counter to cook some food for everyone.

With the patrol brutally gunned down the Mad Dogs flee the scene immediately before backup can arrive. They don’t even have time to wait for their van’s repairs, which will no doubt lead to trouble down the line. As predicted, Volg backup in the form of motorcycle troopers show up at the garage and gun down the mechanic when he refuses to rat out Savage. They don’t’ quite kill him enough, though – leaving him with an opportunity to phone for some help.

Help which arrives just in time to rescue the Mad Dogs as their van breaks down a few miles away. Things look bad for a moment as the Volg motorcycle squadron closes in, but then the British Bikers (on British Bikes!) zoom in, chains swinging. The Brits make short work of the Volgs, and then the bikers give the Mad Dogs a lift out of Volgan territory – they’re taking this resistance on the road, and while this week didn’t give us a themed location-based encounter, maybe we’ll have a little more luck next time.

Thrill 3 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

We return to the Heroes in mid-bicker, arguing about whether or not they should be vicious in their playing style, while Artie Gruber watches from nearby, cackling at his success. Tempters are quickly cooled by the voice of reason, eell, the synthesizer of reason, anyhow, when Louis flies in. That’s right, I said flies:

It seems that during his long absence from the strip Louis has had all sorts of enhancements made to his brain-jar. Not only can he fly and give motivational speeches, but his advanced sensors have detected a heartbeat coming from one of the supposedly robotic gargoyles! Giant puts it together than the Gargoyle captain was involved in all the ‘accidents’, and tricks Artie into revealing himself by using his real name during a chase for the ball!

Cornered and revealed, Artie has only one play left to him – he pulls out a bomb and announces that if he can’t escape, he’ll resort to suicide bombing the entire team. Apparently he’s forgotten that everyone is wearing jetpacks, and the whole team could have easily flown away in the time it took to make that threat. Unless it’s a really, really powerful hand-held bomb.

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

Another supercover‘story’ this week, which once again seems to be little more than a thinly-sketched premise attached to a fantastic cover. See for yourself-

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare: Space Hyper-Hero (?/Belardinelli)

Desperate to save the galactic council from the Two’s preposterous suicide bomb (wow, two of those this week, huh?), Dan Dare flies right towards space command’s headquarters. This proves quite alarming for the ships guarding HQ, to whom the sight of a heavily-armed alien craft operating under radio silence is more threatening than not. While making quick evasive moves, Dan comes up with a plan to announces his peaceful intentions – he vents plasma in the shape of morse code! In an amazing coincidence one of the men in the defense grid happens to know morse code, and puts together that the DD written in space must refer to Dan Dare! That’s kind of a leap, but what the hell, anything that moves this story along, right?

Dan immediately tries to warn the ground forces about the threat to the council, but Tremayne, the security chief, isn’t having any of it! Because, like all authorities in the world of Dan Dare, he’s an absolute moron who assumes that everyone is lying all the time, even when they have no possible motive for doing so.

Dan has Rok pull his light saber on Tremayne, and the tree climb into an aircraft. They quickly make it to the Council chambers, but find themselves confronted by yet another line of defense, this one the least practical, but most entertaining, yet.

I love the way that one in the middle just says ‘cremate’ over and over again. He really seems to be relishing the idea, doesn’t he?

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

This week Probe is acting as part of the Prime Minister’s security detail, and it’s a lucky thing as well, because Japan’s security forces are woefully inadequate, it seems. The moment the Prime Minister’s plane (a Concorde, naturally) lands in Tokyo a group of protesters rush the tarmac, and it’s only Probe’s quick fists that save them – and his hard head, when he intercepts a dropped slab of concrete intended for the PM!

With the PM safely away, Probe goes to investigate the source of the attacks. His first stop is a meeting with Khan, the oddly-named Japanese agent who was supposed to be in charge of the protective detail. He finds Khan at a dojo, beating up some sumo men for practice. After a quick fight to establish their respective credentials, Probe convinces Khan to team up so that they can destroy the terrorists together!

Khan explains that the terrorists are anti-progress, and have become so sickened by Japan’s ‘smog and poisoned food’ that they want to return to a less industrialized state for the country. For an unclear reason, they believe that killing the Prime Minister of England will help them accomplish this.

Assuming that the next attack will be on the PM’s train tour that afternoon, Khan and Probe make no efforts to warn anyone, increase security, or cancel the trip. Instead, they just climb aboard themselves, assuming they can stop whatever the threat is. This plan doesn’t go too well for the people in the front two cars, who are killed by the terrorists’ poison gas.

The second part of their plan is simple – disconnect the PM’s car so that it will roll backwards down the hill they’re on, somehow causing it to be destroyed. Probe is having none of that, and he uses his hyper-power to span the two cars, holding them together with sheer physical strength.

Of course, this precarious position leaves Probe at the mercy of the terrorists – at least it does until Khan comes bursting through the window-

It must be really difficult to complain about being kicked inthe teeth while being kicked in the teeth. I applaud the effort

Khan makes short work of the terrorists in the car, and Probe manages to toss their leader under the wheels of the train. A little later the train arrives at the station, and the two counter-terrorists congratulate themselves on a job well done. Okay, not well done…

No, Probe, Khan’s right. If you had done your job in the first place none of those people would be dead, and you wouldn’t have had to hold a train together with your body. Even with their various failures the two agree that they are likely the best fighters in the world, and look forward to they day that they can team up once again.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

Never let it be said that Judge Dreddisn’t good to his readers.

See? That’s a man who knows how to say things out loud to avoid forcing us to read a caption. In addition to his wonderful suit and stylish manner of speaking, Max is always ready to offer some juicy information for the low, low price of ten thousand credits a tip.

This week’s info? That classic comics are being sold to kids by a local soda shop owner! That’s right, apparently classic comic books are illegal. Who knew? It seems the comics are super-addictive because of their high quality, and once the kids are hooked, the dealers raise the price.

Gee, I wonder which comic they’re dealing?

Dredd watches the soda shop until the comics are delivered, then follows the bagmen to the distribution warehouse. Dredd runs in, guns blazing, and kills all of the criminals involved in the operation… or does he? We see him shoot three guys, but-

Okay, I’ll believe the the guy he shot on the stairs was just hit in the shoulder, and the man he shot in the back with a riccochet bullet was just wounded, but the third criminal had a heat-seeking bullet plow right through his heart. There’s no way he’s coming out of that alive. So I’m still giving Dredd one kill this week.

Now that the main plot is wrapped up, we can finally get a look at just what comic was being pushed on kids.

Yup, it’s 2000AD. What a shocker, right? Does anyone else find it a little odd that out of all the covers they’ve done for this comic the one reproduced here is the absolutely worst one, number 13? Whose idea was that?

Judge Dredd Kill Count (23)+1=24

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako– It’s a new story, so I can’t really judge how the arc’s going to work, but the combination of great polar bear art and a quick-moving plot has me hooked.

Worst Story: Invasion – In an issue where even Harlem Heroes had some plot movement, this was one hell of a weak installment.

Cover:

Way to drop the ball there, Supercovers. You weren’t a great idea in the first place, but at least the questionable concept was propped up by the brilliant renditions wrought by the greatest comic book artist to have ever lived, Brian Bolland. So what do you go and do? You got someone else to draw the cover.

Oy.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Things sure have changed under the Volgan rule. Now the great country estates, instead of sitting idle waiting for royalty to swing by for a visit, are occupied by sadistic Volgan generals. This episode takes place at Sandringham, which, according to the webternet, is a real place. Now occupied by one ‘General Rostov’, who lives there in a cruel parody of the British gentry, executing prisoners as a form of ‘skeet shooting’.

Bill is naturally having none of that, and after defeating the estate’s security cameras with a simple thrown glob of mud, the Mad Dogs hide inside the grounds with an insidious plan: strip down to their underwear, slather themselves in mud, then pose in the place of a group of marble statues all night, holding their guns.

Wait, hold on a second… You know, I’ve put up with a lot of nonsense from Bill Savage over the past twenty issues, but this is too far. Take a look:

That’s the real statue. Simple enough affair involving naked guys looking into a fountain, right? Now here’s what it looks like the next morning:

Yup, now it’s five guys, all wearing shorts, facing out, and holding rifles, which are not covered in mud. You can’t expect me to believe no one noticed the difference. Also, how on earth did the Mad Dogs manage this? Even if I give them that the Mad Dogs were able to sneak onto the well-guarded grounds, how on earth did they tear down those statues without anyone noticing? And where did the statues go?

The Mad Dogs open fire, killing most of the Volgan guards. Then it’s simply a matter of chasing the general into the manor house, and killing him with a morning star. Well, at least the story had something I can’t complain about. With the general and his surprisingly small protective detail dead, Bill and the Mad Dogs head off – this episode took them to Norfolk, next time they’ll be in the Southwest!

I don’t know what that means! I should really learn more about UK geography!

Scotland’s in the North, right?

Thrill 2 - Shako

Following the format of Flesh pretty closely (not the plot stuff, the ‘nature’ interludes), this episode opens with Shako brutalizing a walrus, but it doesn’t turn into animal snuff, since Shako is distracted by a low-flying plane long enough for the wobbly mammal to slip into the water. And who’s on that plane? Jake and Buck! Now that they’ve spotted Shako they land and commandeer a boat. The plan is to capture the big bear and retrieve that capsule inside, although they’re still being really cagey about just what that capsule contains. Is it microfilm? I hope it’s microfilm.

The plan goes amazingly well – despite the fact that the boat captain is a bit of a drunk, he manages to quickly find Shako and snag him with a chain. The chain just isn’t up to the job, however, with predictable results.

I think that guy’s probably dead, right? Yeah, I’m counting that one. Anyhow, Shako grabs the drunken captain by the leg and dives into the water, then swims to a nearby iceberg – the crew is too afraid to fire, as they might hit their captain.

This leads to another murderous interlude, with Jimbo attempting to placate Shako by offering some of his booze. Proving himself to be quite a lightweight, Shako gets drunk off just a few laps of booze and starts seeing double. Which proves to be quite an unfortunate turn of events for the captain-

Damn it, Jimbo! Didn’t you understand that Shako wanted to make you ‘die real slow’? Why did you have to go and confuse him like that? Because now we’re at the end of a second episode, and no one has died even a little slowly yet! Yup, the ‘die real slow’ count is still stalled at 0 of 8 (0%).

On the upside, when Buck suggests they just quit chasing the bear before anyone else dies, Jake reminds him just how important the capsule inside him is. Why is that an upside? Well, even though Jake is still tight-lipped on the subject, the next-episode ad promises that we’re just a week away from learning the terrible secret of the capsule! Yay!

Thrill 3 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

The threat of Artie’s grenade fizzles quickly, when a aeroball bounced off his head distracts him enough to make him drop the thing. While Giant catches the grenade and hands it over to the police, everyone else is distracted by the rubber peeling off of Artie’s face, revealing the cyborg skull beneath.

The Gargoyles jump to the correct conclusion that Artie killed their captain, and they all tackle him at once. The big ball of metal drops quickly and slams into the stands, although, thankfully, they’re stands that have been vacated, so no one is harmed. The umpire gives the game to the Heroes, and Artie’s body is carted off by the authorities.

So anyhow, in the future they’ve given up on things like criminal investigations, autopsies, or even checking to make sure someone is dead, so Artie’s taken straight to a crematorium. Does he not have any family who might want a proper burial? It’s a moot question, anyhow, as Artie’s not dead, and his cyber-surgeons are able to reactivate his heart, leading to another dynamic piece of Dave Gibbons art.

Oh, David Gibbons, why can’t you draw every story? Because your art is good, and therefore requires time. Right. Sorry.

The news of Artie’s escape has reached the Heroes on their huge luxury-liner, but they’re too focused on their next game to worry about the unstoppable cyborg killing machine who lives only to see them suffer in agony. Their next game? It’s against another themed outfit…

Those swords had better be decorative, because if they’re not, Aeroball officially doesn’t have rules any more.

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare: Space Hyper-Hero (?/Belardinelli)

It seems this is a week of cliffhangers turning out to be significantly less cliffhangy than we’d expected. First the grenade is an utter no-go, and now the Crematorobots prove far less effective than you’d expect a twenty-foot-tall robotic flamethrower monster would be.

It seems that when they designed the killbots they forgot to account for one possibility – that their opponents would be armed with an “it-not-legally-a” lightsaber“(so please don’t sue)”. The robots are chopped to pieces, allowing Dan and Rok to approach the council chambers. They’re greeted by Lo-Han, the head of the galactic governing council.

He has quite a surprise for Dan in store – it seems that he’s every bit as psychically powerful as the Mekon, if not more so. The council have already discovered the Mekon’s plan and mentally reprogrammed the Two – they even describe the Mekon’s entire plan as utterly ridiculous, since the entire Council have transformed themselves into beings of pure energy, which by its nature, cannot be created or destroyed. Making them almost entirely bomb-proof.

Frustrated that he’s just wasted absurd amounts of time and energy on a pointless cause, Dan storms off to the ship that’s waiting to take him back to earth. Just as he arrives the Two blasts their way out of the prison cell and commandeers the ship. Despite Tremayne’s protestations, Dan and Rok rush onto the ship as well, hoping to recapture them. But Dan has once again made a tactical error – the escape was all part of Lo-Han’s plan! He’s sending the revenge-mad Two back to attack the Mekon with a bomb in their chest!

How’s Dan going to get out of this one?

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

Yup, it’s time for another short story. And this one’s so questionable that in addition to presenting it, I actually want to type part of it out for myself.

That’s right. Who cares when an anti-missile missile missiles a missile out of Earth’s orbit? There’s more missiles where that missile comes from, perhaps at the missile dealership, where missiles are always half off! 75% on missile Mondays!

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

When I turned the page after that last short story and saw the splash half-page setting up the MACH 1 story my mouth literally dropped open. I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolic. I was dumbfoiled. See for yourself.

Yup, he’s going after Howard Hughes. But what could bring these two titans into conflict? It seems that four top athletes had recently been invited to visit Howard’s estate – and they haven’t been seen since!

Probe leaps over the wall of the guarded estate, coming face to face with Howard’s niece, who doesn’t believe her uncle is up to any funny business. After dismissing his computer’s suggestion that he murder her, Probe goes on to severely beat her attendant guards until Howard rolls up in a buggy. He invites Probe inside the house, where he reveals all of his secrets. In his attempts to cheat death he’s paid scientists to create a device that will drain the ‘life energy’ from healthy people and give it to him. The treatments have extended his life by a few years, but left the athletes as functionally lobotomized husks.

I’m not really sure what they mean by ‘life energy’, but let’s assume the scientists discovered something revolutionary and just move on from there. When Probe tries to bust the place up he’s conked in the head by a pistol – it doesn’t hurt, but Probe plays dead so he can get a better look at Howard’s evil machinery.

Once Probe is hooked up to the machines Howard discovers that he’s hyperpowered and demands the secret of this limitless energy. Probe refuses the bribes he’s offered and wrecks the energy transfer machine, which Hughes announces is tantamount to a death sentence. Um, can’t you just build a new one?

Then Probe makes a run for it with gunmen hot on his tail. He jumps into the buggy and, despite the niece’s warnings that it’s too dangerous (wait, what is she doing in this story at all?), he uses two other sports cars as ramps and leaps over the wall, narrowly avoiding the electrified gate.

This doesn’t stop the gun-toting henchmen, though, who charge after Probe and, according to the comic, ‘(forget) the precautions against intruders’ and run right into the electrified gate, killing themselves.

How is that even possible – even if the guys could possibly forget that the gate was electrified, which is a stretch, why on earth would they touch it? They live at this facility and see people coming and going all the time, so they know it’s an automatic gate. So why grab the gate instead of running for the controls? That’s like chasing someone out of a building by leaping through a closed window rather than following them through the open door.

Amazingly, that’s the end of the story. Probe escaped, Howard wasn’t brought to justice in any meaningful way, and his niece’s role in the plot is as inexplicable as it was two pages ago when she was introduced.

We’re coming back to this story, right? This isn’t the end, is it?

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

We’re introduced to a new kind of future crime in this week’s Judge Dredd– Hit Men who want to kill Judges just for the hell of it! I’m specifically talking about ‘Gorilla’, a mook with a solar-powered laser cannon and a gang of goons who introduces himself by blasting Judge Carter!

After the bike and Judge have been reduced to a pile of ash the Grand Judge arrives at the crime scene to talk to Dredd. It seems that Gorilla has been killing Judges in alphabetical order! First Abel, then Baker, then Carter, and now Dredd has received a note announce that he’ll be killed at noon, when the sun is at its peak!

Dredd’s having none of that, of course, and after getting a warrant from the Grand Judge he drives for the weather control offices (last seen creating the thunderstorm that took down the Heavy Metal Kids during the robot revolution) with Gorilla’s gang tailing him from a discrete distance.

With the time closing in on noon, they resolve to blast Dredd as soon as he walks out of the offices. But when he does, he’s accompanied by a cloud bank that blots out the sun! It was a weather warrant he got from the Grand Judge! Oh, that crafty Dredd, what won’t you think of?

With the solar cannon (which has no internal batteries, it seems) functionally useless, the Gorilla gang make a run for it with Dredd in hot pursuit. Dredd guns two of them down before they make it more than a few meters, forcing Gorilla to flee into weather control. Taking an elevator to the upper levels, the sniper comes across a scientist holding a monkey-

Poor Gorilla. He didn’t stop to wonder just why the scientist was carrying a monkey. No, it wasn’t a ‘dark room’ at all. It was the passenger chamber of a rocket – a rocket aimed straight at the sun!

Yes, the sun. The monkey was going to presumably be put in stasis for the three year trip to the sun and back. The idea, according to an automated voice, is that if the test subject returns alive, then it will be safe to set up a sun-monitoring space station in solar orbit. Naturally Dredd takes this opportunity to point out the irony inherent in Gorilla’s fate:

It’s weird, I don’t really remember Dredd being this quippy. Is this going to stop at some point, or am I just remembering it wrong?

Judge Dredd Kill Count (23)+2=25

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako– I don’t know what it is about that monstrous polar bear, but I sure am enjoying all his murderin’. Even if it is a little quick for my tastes.

Worst Story: MACH 1 – A frequent resident of the worst story slot, I don’t know what the hell was going on with MACH 1 this week. The story wasn’t resolved in any way, shape, or form, but it didn’t end with a cliffhanger either. I do reserve the right to take this back if next week’s issue picks up where this one left off, though.

Cover:

It’s the fourth supercover, which is, once again, not drawn by God-Among-Artists Brian Bolland. This time I’m actually going to guess what the story is, based solely on the cover. It’s probably about a peaceful alien who comes to earth and then gets misunderstood and hunted because he looks ugly, allowing them to have a ‘message’ in their hundred-word story.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Bill Savage and his Mad Dogs have made their way to Sommerset, which I assume is the same rural area of England featured in ‘Mid-Somer Murders’, that show I used to watch on TVO.

It seems that the Resistance is feeding themselves by herding cattle in and out of caves to keep them hidden while fattened up, and Savage has dropped by to check on the outfit. This raises an interesting question – just how long has this invasion been going on? It doesn’t seem like more than a few months at this point, so are things really so bad, nutritionally speaking, that the resistance has had to resort to the incredibly time, land, and resource-consuming practice of raising cattle?

Or do they just really love their steak, to the extent that they’re willing to risk capture to get it?

I hope that steak was delicious, because Savage isn’t in the pasture for more than a minute before Volg armored cars roll in. They prove no match for Bill and the Mad Dogs, but unfortunately the cattle are all killed in the crossfire.

Desperate for a new food source, Bill grabs a Volg prisoner and sticks a shotgun in his face… turning to cannibalism a little quickly there, aren’t you, Bill? You want to check if they have some leftover rations first, maybe?

Oh, wait, it’s not a Donner party thing. Sorry. Bill interrogates the prisoner and executes him, then announces that they have to stop a nearby train. The cattle herders are confused about how blowing up an equipment train might solve their food crisis, but one train robbery later, they have their answer-

You know the story is so clearly about World War 2 that every now and then I forget that it’s actually set 22 years in the future (the far-off 1999!). Also, why didn’t Savage tell them what they were trying to steal in all the time they were waiting for the train? I’m reminded of that Simpsons joke – “I said there was no time to explain, and I stand by that!”

There’s one last surprise in the story, though-

You’re turning down a hard-earned meal, Bill? But wait, just two pages ago you said-

Maybe I was a little too quick in dismissing that whole cannibalism thing…

Thrill 2 - Shako

We pick up with a pair of hunters, out searching for Shako, hoping to pick up the sweet reward that’s been offered for the Great White… um… bear. Shako’s too clever for them, though, and after edging a block of snow and ice to within a few meters, he lunges at the hunters, making quick work of them.

Over at the nearby base, Jake finally breaks down and explains to Buck just what they’re looking for. The capsule contains a nerfarious virus, one that has horrible effects on bunnies!

Dear lord, if they don’t get it back, the world’s hosentheffer supply could be in jeopardy! It’s possible that this virus affects other animals, of course, but until I find out for sure, I’m going to assume this is a quest to save all the world’s rabbits.

Also, now that I know what it is, Jake’s secrecy makes a whole lot more sense. After all, isn’t building killer viruses unbelievably illegal? It’s not like they’re claiming that this is a virus that the CIA stole from the Russians in order to develop a countermeasure. This is a full-on CIA project, which makes Jake the bad guy in this story, attemping to recover his ‘deadliest weapon’. Somehow, I don’t see him making it to the end of this strip, and that’s not my fuzzy memories talking.

The two men heads out to look for the bear, along with two snowmobile drivers. They quickly stumble upon Shako’s feeding grounds. Hey, Would you look at that? It seems Shako didn’t make quick work of both of the hunters, after all! When Buck arrives on the scene, one of the hunters is still being batted around painfully. You know, unless he survives, we may just have a qualifying death here…

Jake opens fire, but misses his target, giving Shako the chance to dive through the ice and then burst out under the snowmobiles, in a manner that in no way resembles a certain movie about a certain shark-

While everyone scrambles around Shako unleashes some of his trademark violence-

Ouch, right? Next he turns his attention to Buck, who knows a trick that just might save his life. A trick that, depending on if you believe the narrator or Buck, comes either from racial memory or just normal memory.

This leads to the most intense staring contest I’ve ever seen in a comic book, which is not meant as an attempt to damn it with faint praise. Check it out:

Shako grows bored with the lack of stimuli, and lets his attention wander just long enough for Buck to grab his rifle and shoot Shako in the chest. This would be a bit of an anti-climactic ending for the strip, except for the fact that Buck was using a Tranq rifle, and Shako’s just fallen asleep. Falmuth grabs his own (much deadlier) rifle and plans to finish the job, but Buck rushes to intervene.

Um… why? Hopefully we’ll discover next issue.

Okay, weird week for scoring… Shako killed one of the hunters and one of the drivers, both very quickly, but the other hunter’s fate is still unknown. If he dies, then Shako certainly did kill him ‘real slow’, but if he doesn’t, then we’re still at zero. So here’s what we’re going to do- If there’s any reference to that hunter dying next issue, we’re giving it to Shako, but if he’s proven alive, or even naver mentioned again, we’re going to assume that Buck, Jake, and the other driver dragged him to wherever they went and got him some medical aid.

So for now, the count is 0 out of 10 (0%) of Shako’s victims have ‘died real slow’.

Thrill 3 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

The Heroes land in Tokyo to the boos of the surrounding crowd, and a confusing text bubble:

Maybe the exact year hasn’t been forthcoming, but there’s no way this is set in the year 2000. Not just from a technological standpoint, either. I mean, the world they’re living in isn’t set that far from Judge Dredd, and that takes place in 2099. Not that these stories are set in the same world (although ‘Judge Giant’ from much later would suggest that they are, and Giant gives up Aeroball somewhere down the line), but the comic has been relatively consistent about what kind of technology exists at what time, and this isn’t Invasion-level tech.

Also, the trans-atlantic tunnel from issue 6 wasn’t completed until 2040. So there’s that. (Note - I just checked the post about the first issue - this is set in 2050)

Anyhoo, when they get off the jet the team finds Ulysses ‘the secret villain’ Kord waiting for them. Amazingly, this happens just after Giant wonders to himself about the identity of the secret villain who employed Gruber. This is what’s known as ‘foreshadowing’. Awkward, poorly written foreshadowing. Still trying to seem like he’s not evil, Ulysses offers the ream some new gear-

Does this game have a governing body of any kind? Many issues ago I started compiling an Aeroball rulebook, but that seems to have been a fool’s errand.

Ref: Hey, Giant, what’s going on with your gloves there?
Giant: Oh, those are just daggers. We figured that, starting today, we’d wear them on our gloves and use them to stab the other players.
Ref: (strokes his chin) Cool. Just watch it with the sandwich tackles. (slaps Giant on the shoulder)
Giant: (remembers he’s a 70’s blacksploitation stereotype) Right on, brutha.

If you think I’m exaggerating, here’s Giant’s response to the offer-

Then it’s on to the game against foes so dedicated to winning that, like Kamikazi pilots of old, they’re willing to sacrifice their lives for a game. Which is idiotic. It’s a game of Aeroball, people.

Right at the first ball launch, I check out from the ‘sport’ part of the comic strip. Here’s why.

I don’t care what the announcer says. There are no rules in Aeroball, there is no sense in Aeroball, there is no point to Aeroball. From here on out I’m not going to be reviewing the sports parts of this strip at all. If something absolutely nuts happens, I’ll cover it, but from now on, we’re just looking at the drama and mystery. Which there is no more of in this installment. So see you next time.

Okay, one more thing. It seems the Japs even have their own goals, which, instead of a five-sided post, is just a single hole in a flat wall. So yes, there isn’t even a standardized goal design in this frigging game.

And don’t talk about different ballparks having different distances to the rear wall. Find me a baseball field where the run to first base is five times as long as the run from third to home and you’ll have a believable comparison.

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

Here’s the supercover story in full, as usual.

Couple things to note – instead of being from space, he’s from the Lovecraftian concept of ‘Outer Time’. Also, they announce that it was earth’s atmosphere that turned him into a squat mutant, but I don’t know, that suit still seems to fit just fine.

There some actual letters this week, both are pieces of fan mail from people announcing that if anything bad happens to Walter the Wobot, they will never read the comic again. Ah, to care that much about a ficitonal character. I wish I could say I didn’t still know what that was like, but I totally stopped watching CSI Miami when they killed off Rory Cochrane, only returning when they promised they’d be shooting Horatio.

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare: Space Hyper-Hero (?/Belardinelli)

When last we saw Dan and Rok they had stormed the Two’s ship as it took off. This story begins with the Two tearing said ship apart, all in the hopes of keeping Dan from revealing ‘the secret of our hollow world’. Yeah, um, guys? You know Dan already escaped the hollow world, right? And that he was just on Earth, where he presumably told, oh, I don’t know, everyone about it?

The Two’s rampage is stopped abruptly when Dan shows himself, offering peace and a team-up in the hopes that they can kill the Mekon without self-destructing. Although I’m not sure why that’s so important to Dan. Why not just let the council’s plan go ahead? Hopefully we’ll get a reason at some point.

Pretending that Dan has been capatured, the Two contact the Mekon and plot their retun to the land of the hollow sun. The more violent of the Two doesn’t want to go along with the plan, but he’s kept in his place with an ingenious scheme:

There’s nothing that’s not great about that plan. The rest of the plan is a little fuzzier – basically they just land and open fire, ordering the gun-headed Skash to help out.

Not quite sure why the Mekon didn’t just blast them out of the sky. Even if he didn’t think they’d betrayed him, he’s still inviting a guy with a malfunctioning bomb in his chest into the inner sanctum. Can’t imagine how that could go wrong…

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

Probe is back in the wild this week, once again helping British mineral interests suppress the locals. This time it seems that natives are angry because the oil drilling teams have disturbed a natural flame phenomenon, and taken to pinning them to machinery with spears as reciprocation.

Probe drives out to see the locals, who tell him that a local Sheik Firouz had let them know about the crime against the holy fires. Probe is suspicious of the Sheik’s motives, and with his computer’s help, intuits that it’s actually a plan by the nobleman to run the English out of the country so he can resell the oil rights.

During a meeting with the corpulant ruler Probe sees the Sheik order a female slave to be flogged for not peeling a grape. Apparently he didn’t know that’s where all the nutrients were. Huh. John’s not about to put up with anyone mistreating a woman, so he jumps into the fray and murders the captain of the Sheik’s guards with a punch to the neck.

The locals, being a cowardly and superstitious lot, are impressed by Probe’s strength, but Firouz points out that the English are the ones responsible for their inadequate flames. Soon Probe is being buried alive, and it’s only his heretofore unestablished mole-like digging ability that saves him.

Firouz happens to be waiting where Probe comes out, backed up by a couple of cheetahs, who he immediatley sics on the Hyperman. Probe is too fast for them, and in his attempt to slow their prey down Firouz accidentally wings one of the Cheetahs. This turns the animals’ favor against him in the most vicious way possible:

With Firouz dead the natives are quick to accept Probe’s claims that the Sheik was responsible for their ignition difficulties, despite offering no proof to back it up. With their primitive beliefs catered to, the natives are more than happy to allow Probe’s BP friends to continue despoiling their land.

Yeah! Go John Bull!

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

You know, I’m not sure what a ‘murder gang’ is, but I’m with Dredd. They need to die.

Just one of the perps survives the onslaught, and he tries to bargain for a reduced sentence by giving up his boss’ location. Dredd thanks him for the information, and takes a single day off his 40-year stretch. Which seems like an odd play. I mean, outright mocking people who try to co-operated, no matter what’s motivating them, doesn’t seem very conducive to taking down criminal networks.

When Dredd arrives at the run-down hotel it’s surrounded by Judge, who are waiting for his order to enter the building and search for the criminal, Mr. Buzzz. Dredd has a better idea, though. He sets the building on fire, forcing Buzz to jump out a window to avoid being roasted alive.

Well, that’s a little odd… Yes, it seems that there are mutants in Mega-City 1. According to Dredd mutants were banned from Mega-City 1 because they hate humans due to their own deformities. That seems like a thin excuse – are all mutants violently antisocial, or is that just a cover the Judges use for their purges?

We won’t find out, because this isn’t a social commentary episode, it’s an action story. Dredd chases mr. Buzzz into a building, and it quickly befuddled by the utter blackness he finds inside. This doesn’t hamper Buzzz, who gets around by echo location.

Actually, that seems a little odd – not the echo-location, he’s got mighty big ears. No, I’m confused about Dredd – there’s no low-light equipment in that visor of his?

The suspiciously under-equipped Dredd figures out an alternate plan – he fires off a hew high-explosive rounds, brightening the hall while deafening Buzzz with the sound. One punch later and Buzzz is down for the count, ready for Dredd to drag him outside and lead him away in cuffs.

Actually, maybe I was a little wrong about the social commentary thing. I feel a little sorry for the freak, surrounded a the bloodthirsty mob. Kind of hard to feel like Buzzz is the David in this story.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (25)+2=27

Final Thoughts

Best Story: I’m going with Shako again. That strip is just so consistently competent that it’s hard to dislike it.

Worst Story: Harlem Heroes – Even though John Probe, heroic imperialist, may have disgusted me, I’m still more annoyed with the flat-out nonsense being presented as the ‘sport’ Aeroball.

Cover:

Brian Bolland’s done it again. I find this cover especially wonderful, for reasons that won’t be apparent for quite a while. Let’s just say that, in some very key ways, this image is kind of a dry run for one of Bolland’s all-time great covers.

Also, having men grow out of you is not a great kind of plague to have.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Huh? Is it not 1999? Give me just a second here…

Yes, the comic, up until this issue, was set in 1999. Is this a deliberate change, or a mistake? If it’s not just an error, why are they making the change – does it have anything to do with the crazy mistake in last issue, which placed the Harlem Heroes in the years 2000?

Hopefully we’ll discover the answers to these questions together, soon enough.

Anyhow, on to the story. Savage is in Newcastle this week - not bringing coal, I hope! (God, I hate myself sometimes.)

Using the mining equipment at hand, the mad dogs cut the power to a tunnel and then approach wearing head lamps. I’m not sure how this gives them a huge advange – yes, they can see with the headlamps and it blinds the Volgs a little, but doesn’t putting a flashlight on your head in a dark tunnel mostly serve to let people know exactly where your head is, and conversely that your body must be right below? How hard would it be to shoot them full of holes?

Bill Savage and the Geordies bust up the convoy and rescue a mining chief, then escape in a coal truck, keeping the theme going. On the outskirts of town the mining chief reveals the story’s twist – he’s actually a Volgan agent, and the whole prison transport was a trap for Bill! A very poorly-concieved one. If the plan was centered on sacrificing everyone in the transport, why bother with an agent? Why not just use a really big bomb?

In the end, the agent makes the mistake of calling for backup rather than just shooting Bill, giving our hero a chance to decapitate the man with a shovel.

Then Bill hops into one of those steel ore carries and heads out to sea, reminding everyone of the ending of Get Carter.

Thrill 2 - Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

For some reason they’ve moved the inferior Harlem Heroes up into Shako’s slot in the magazine. And since I’ve stopped covering the ‘sport’ section of this story, I’m even more disappointed.

There is one crazy element to the story, though, when 2000AD’s vaguely racist Asian stereotyping rears its ugly head once again. Check out what happens when one of the Bushido Blades fails to prevent a point from being scored-

Yeah, he just killed himself. Over a single missed point. You know, the aztec guys didn’t cut their captain’s head off when they lost. Just saying.

When they get to halftime Ulysesses ‘the villain’ Cord is waiting at the sidelines, suggesting that they amp up the violence, maybe even commit a little suicide the way the Japs do. You know, to get the audience interested.

Once again, I’d like to point out that this sport has no rules or governing body.

Naturally the Heroes are having none of this. Taking special exception to the plan is Louis, who flies in using his hoverjar and announces that his time as a disembodied brain has allowed him to develop amazing psychic powers. He immediately uses them on Cord.

I have no idea what’s happening here, although I’m sure next issue whatever Louis is up to will lead to Cord confessing. I wonder how long the strip can last once that cat is out of the bag?

Thrill 3 – Shako

Buck Dollar has just saved Shako’s life, kind of inexplicably. I mean, I know Jake is the bad guy in this story, but I really can’t see a reason to leave Shako alive in this situation. Sure, he’s an amazingly large bear, but Jake is right – this is the mid 80s, and at this point in history there’s still a lot of ‘bruins’ out there. Also, I’m not sure why the characters keep calling the bear a ‘bruin’. Apparently it’s a synonym for bear, but outside of the hockey team, it’s not one that I’ve ever heard used.

Shako is dragged back to base and placed on an operating table, because apparently it’s easier to lift a 1-ton animal onto a platform than have the surgeons crouch a little. Naturally this plan doesn’t work out, as the surgical team forgets to re-sedate the bear until it’s far too late.

You know, if you’re going to rip off Jaws you could at least be creative about it.

With the rest of the team cowering in fear after one of their member is gutted, Jake comes up with a plan.

Yeah, he’s going to go after the ten-foot-tall bear with a broken bottle. Did no one think to bring a gun, just in case? Jake’s weapon utter fails to cow the Yogi, who bites the chief’s arm off, then saunters away in a surprisingly casual manner.

Shako wanders off into the snowy night, munching away on Jake’s arm. Jake, in the meantime, counts his lucky stars that he had his arm torn off in the best possible location, an operating theatre. Not that it cheers him up all that much-

Okay, two things – A: That’s a profoundly ugly man. Great job, artist. And B: He’s never sworn once, in all his appearances. If you’re writing a children’s comic, don’t base an entire character around a trait that you can’t demonstrate in the story.

When it comes to kills this week, Shako just murdered the one person, tearing him apart with monster bear claws. Yeah, he also tore Jake’s arm off, but since he’s certainly surviving, it can’t count as killing anyone ‘real slow’. Now that’s 0 of 11 kills, for a total ‘real slow’ kill count of 0%.

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare: Space Hyper-Hero (?/Belardinelli)

The fight is on! Dan and the Two open fire on the Mekon, who skitters away on his hoversled like a coward. It’s nice when enemies can team up to battle a common foe, isn’t it?

They corner the Mekon in a pod bay, giving him just enough time to jump into an escape bubble. Dan’s been foiled – the Mekon’s flame gun is too deadly to allow pursuit, but the Two throw caution to the wind and jump into the capsule along with the big-headed monster! Inside they find a mexican stand-off. If the Two kill the Mekon, his dork-sled will explode, destroying the capsule. If the Mekon kills either, or both, of the Two, their fusion bomb detonates!

Meanwhile, back inside the hollow sun, Dan and Chewbacca blast their way back to the Two’s ship and fly away just as the entire base self-destructs.

In a manner totally dissimilar to the Death Star, FYI.

While Dan and Rok head back to Earth in their ship the Mekon and the Two are trapped together in the escape pod. Mekon swears that he’ll kill the Two one day, even if it takes a hundred years to get to a planet. The Two have much more practical concerns, however, just wondering where they’re going to get food for their little trip.

And that’s it for the story, folks. Yup, according to a window at the bottom of the page Dan is taking a break for the immediate future so that a new story can fill in. I wonder what it’ll be? Is it too early for Rogue Trooper? Probably… but maybe Strontium Dog… no, that’s still in Tornado at this point.

I’m almost literally giddy with anticipation!

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

It’s another supercover, folks, written in the same style as the last one. By that I mean wildly sarcastic, as if the writer felt they were too good to be cranking out hundred words preces about broad sci-fi concepts. Take a look-

Spoiler Alert – the story that this cover reminded me so much of is far, far better than this one while being uncannily similar.

You know, given the overall bored tone of these last two stories, somehow I don’t see this whole ‘supercover’ thing lasting much longer.

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

Probe is in a super-sonic jet flying low over the treetops of ‘Dog Forest’, which may or may not be a real place, looking for a secret agent with classified documents about a radar camera! His orders are to extract the agent if possible, or kill him and take the documents if not.

Before he can find the agent he’s spotted by a commie tank which damages his ride, a futuristic hover-jet. Using his hyperpower Probe is able to escape the commies and reach the secret agent. After quickly dispatching the wolves that were about to feast on his target, Probe is disturbed to discover that agent Peel has gone mad with pain, and is convinced that Probe is there to kill him. Which, come to think of it, was not that unreasonable thing to suspect.

Probe backs away and turns his energy towards killing the rest of the approaching commies. First with an avalanche, and then by dropping a tree on the few remaining soldiers, who helpfully form a line no more than five feet wide to assist Probe in their murder.

Now that’s a considerate group of guys.

Having just risked life and limb to save the pain-addled agent, Peel finally agrees to be rescued, and the two G-Men escape in Probe’s plane, which was apparently not as badly damaged as previous stories suggested.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

It’s time for a little social commentary in the pages of Judge Dredd – this week’s story opens with an announcement that in the future, smoking in public is completely illegal. Which is the first future prediction that 2000AD had gotten dead on. I’d say it was a little late – the comic is set nearly a hundred years in the future, and my own town is basically a hair’s breadth away from outlawing public smoking altogether – but the story doesn’t make it clear how old this particular law is.

Proving what a softie he is Dredd lets a couple of teens off with a warning because he’s able to stop them before they actually light their cigarettes. Then he rushes across town after a report comes in about a vicious bank robber!

That’s right – he’s so evil that he actually uses his smoking as a weapon. The bastard! That cigar stub proves to be a valuable clue, though, as it leads Dredd to the man’s Tabacconist, a store so old-fashioned it even has a wooden indian! The robbers show up just a few minutes later, given Dredd a chance to punch one out and blow another away. The leader of the gang flees, and Dredd rides in hot pursuit.

The robber speeds down an alley, ditches his car, and runs into the first building he sees. In an amazingly unlucky coincidence, this turns out to be the city smokatorium! The one place in the Big Meg where it’s legal to light up. Unforunately the place is so full of smoke that it’s customers have to wear oxygen helmets to keep from choking to death. Of course, the robber does have one, so just seconds after heading in he comes stumbling out, eyes stinging, breath ragged, only to find Dredd waiting, rifle in hand. The robber doesn’t surrender, so Dredd blows him away, and follows it up with another classic, if entirely predictable, quip.

Oh, Dredd, you card, you.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (27) + 2 = 29

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako - I know it’s getting tiresome, but man, am I loving that yogi. Is it just because I love Jaws so much? Probably.

Worst Story: Harlem Heroes – I might have given it to Dan Dare, but at least that’s over. Harlem Heroes can’t wind up soon enough at this point. Not that I’m complaining about Dave Gibbons’ art – but if I want to look at that I can always go read Watchmen again. Ah, who am I kidding, that’s how I was going to spend the night in any event.

Cover:

The second Kevin O’Neill feature here in the pages of 2000AD. It’s still just a single page, but it’s an impressive enough one that I’m not going to complain about it. As for the story, I’m at something of a loss. Perhaps a chariots of the gods thing, with ancient astronauts inspiring cave paintings?

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Bill Savage has found his way to the Scottish border, where Volgan missile trucks immolate anyone dares approach the chain-link fence seperating the two countries. I’d imagine these missiles would also make short work of the chain-link fence itself, necessitating constant repairs. Of course, thinking that way might be what’s keeping me from becoming a power-mad dictator.

Speaking of which, since these ‘Volgan’ troops are clearly analogous to the Nazis, where’s the Hitler figure? Who’s in charge of all these troops? Hell, we haven’t even seen Vichy prime minister Creepton in how long? 20 issues?

Amazingly Bill Savage thinks it’s too dangerous to attack the missile launchers, which leads to a fist-fight with one of the local resistance troopers. Seems a little hasty on the northern bloke’s part – doesn’t he know that Bill always comes up with a preposterous plan to deal with the problem? Why, in just a few pages he’ll probably be suggesting they use a fake parade with flame-throwing bagpipes or something.

Okay, I just checked. It’s crazier than I thought. Bill Savage lets the local troopers attack the camp on their own, and they’re immediately slaughtered as Bill and Silk watch from the hills. But Savage has a plan – it seems that the hill they’re camped out on in Hadrian’s wall! So, with the attachment of a couple of ropes to some nearby trees…

Yup. They build makeshift catapults. Startlingly, this works, killing the crew of the nearest missile launcher without damaging the machinery. This allows Silk to grab the controls and blast the rest of the Volgs to pieces with their own weaponry. With another victory under his belt, Savage heads off to free the rest of the country. First he takes a moment to grafitto-tag Hadrian’s wall, though:

I’m not sure what kind of a scoring system Bill’s using here. I mean, the Volgs did destroy like 90% of England’s army and detonated a nuke, didn’t they? And on his side, hasn’t he had twenty-four issues worth of victories at this point, rather than just one?

Of course, there’s always the chance Bill’s just not great at math…

Thrill 2 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

Yup, it was Artie that Ulysses Cord was having hallucinations of. He immediately faints, and Louis explains that he was just testing out a theory. The rest of the team forgets that Cord’s last line in the previous issue was that the apparition was his ‘friend’, so that they can push back the villain reveal to later in the story.

I find it a little odd that the image Louis sent was of Gruber with both his normal face and Gargoyle uniform. Seems like a strange combination.

The game then resumes, but since I’m not covering that any more, I’ll give only the broadest strokes. The heroes trick the Blades into suiciding enough of their plays out of the game that they’ll be completely overmatched. The heroes win, allowing them to move into the finals, and we go yet another issue without Ulysses Cord being revealed as the villain

Thrill 3 – MACH 1

I’m not sure why the order of stories is being juggled so madly – did Probe do really well on a survey or something? Not that I’m bothered by the move – it’s quite a striking opening image this week-

No, they haven’t gone to the set of a Hammer film, that’s the torture chamber of one King Karat, a crazed Arab who lives off the coast of Dubai, where he hoards stolen gold so that he can destabilize the world’s precious metals market! Naturally Probe has been dispatched to murder him.

The plan involves beating up a black market boat captain who works for Karat, and convince him to smuggle John onto the island in a coffin. How does he do this? By threatening to crush his head, which leads the captain to make the following colourful statement:

Also, have they switched artists? Based on these faces it looks like Belardinelli has moved over from Dan Dare to MACH 1, although the continuing lack of credits forces me to depend on my questionable ability to judge artists by their work.

The plan is simple – load Probe into a coffin and ship it to Karat’s island – you see, Karat needs a constant supply of corpses because he moves his gold around the world by pouring molten gold into them and shipping them to customers. I’m going to go ahead and assume that he tells the customs people that he’s moving morbidly obese bodies, because a gold-filled corpse would have to weigh somewhere in the neighbourhood of a ton.

The ruse is quickly discovered and Probe is brought to the torture chamber for execution. Much like all the other characters who have tried this up until now, it goes badly for him. Probe quickly beats up all the guards and throws Karat into the vat of molten gold, so that he can die like he lived. By murdering people with molten gold.

Rather hilariously, Probe refers to this as ‘drowning in molten gold’. Yeah, I know Gold doesn’t have the highest melting point, but that guy was long dead before the gold got to his lungs.

Thrill 4 – Tharg And the Intruder

You know, I was sort of hoping that the loss of Dan Dare would mean that Judge Dredd, or possibly Shako, would have been moved to the center spot. But hey, a Tharg story – that’s no small consolation.

This story concerns one ‘Alife’, a fan of the competing ‘Wonder Comics’ (presumably a stand-in for other lad's mags of the day), who’s broken into the 2000AD building to confront Tharg about the overall terribleness of his magazine. Now, normally Tharg would just vaporize the child, but he’s feeling forgiving today, so instead he elects to take Archie on a tour of the facilities.

Oh, Kevin O’Neill. Is there anything your art can’t improve? After taking Archie through the main museum, Tharg points out a vault that absolutely must not be opened. Naturally the moronic kid (who but a moron would prefer anything else to 2000AD, after all?) opens it immediately and finds himself bitten by… THE LIVING AXE!

Okay, please give me a second to wipe the tears from my eyes. I honestly thought I’d never see him again. This couldn’t make me any happier. Well, I guess I’d be happier if the axe had killed Archie, but other than that, I’m good.

Archie remains unimpressed, so Tharg pulls out the big guns, and escorts the youth into the deepest room of the vault, where the undiluted Future Shocks are stored!

Now that Archie’s mind has been destroyed he’s ready to return home and become a good 2000AD reader. He’s escorted there by Walter, the instantaneously popular sidekick character who’s already escaped Dredd strips to make cameos elsewhere. Tharg then addresses the audience directly, announcing that, starting next issue, we’ll have Future Shocks as a continuing feature!

I’m more than a little excited about this, since Future shocks are a key element of my love of this title, as well as well as where Alan Moore’s work is going to start showing up first, if I recall correctly.

Also, it’s what they should have been doing instead of those damn supercovers all along. Just saying.

Thrill 5 – Shako

Uh oh. Once against we’re opening the story focused on Shako, which serves as a reminder that he’s the only main character a story like this needs. This wouldn’t be so bad, if the first panel didn’t also introduce Shako’s wife and children, as they frolic happily in the ice, learning to hunt seals.

This is like a cop’s partner talking about his retirement. There’s literally no way this can end other than Shako’s mate and cubs being brutally murdered, and Shako swearing animal-revenge on the human killers. Now begins the march towards that inexorable fate for the adorable kids-

Those poor little guys. They’ve got no idea what’s coming. And I’m not talking about global warming, either. I’m talking about bullets.

Wow. It happens two pages later. Seriously. Hunters are out looking for Shako on Falmuth’s orders, and they happen across the happy family, minus Shako, of course. I’m not clipping an image because I found all the shots to mom getting shot in the head and the family of corpses oddly upsetting.

Also unsettling is the fact that I have no memory of this happening in the reprints I read as a child. I know exactly how the story’s going to end, but this middle stuff is oddly new to me. So either I’ve forgotten it completely, I was missing a couple of issues, or they didn’t reprint certain parts of the story. Now I’m going to have to find out which is the case. Somehow…

Shako returns to his homestead to discover his murdered family. Events proceed in a predictable pattern-

I’ll admit it. They’ve got me. I’m totally on the bear’s side at this point. He even kills the other guy real slow! That’s right, it finally happened. After biting that first guy’s head off Shako chases the second one down and tears at him, gradually stripping the man’s clothes off until he’s nearly naked in the arctic. Then Shako gives him a playful swipe across the stomach and buries him in the snow. Shako wanders off, leaving him to freeze to death, so that the meat will still be fresh later.

You go for it, bear.

We finally got a real slow death, which brings the total to 1 out of 13 kills, or roughly 8% of his victims have, in fact, died real slow.

THARG’S NERVE CENTER

Wow, you’d think at least one of these supercovers would have some kind of a twist. Well, at least this one isn’t as sarcastic as the last few.

In addition to the supercover there are a couple of letters – one from a kid announcing his belief that evolution is a lie and humans were brought to earth from another planet. How humans developed on that planet is left unaddressed. The second letter is far more interesting – it’s from a kid whose dad worked on Star Wars, and he wrote to mention how happy he was to see the movie promoted in 2000AD. The IMDB, and the kid’s name have allowed me to determine that, in all likelihood, this child’s father is one Burnell Tucker, who played Del Goren in the movie.

I have no idea who that is.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

There’s a panic in Mega City 1 – the Wreath Killer has struck again! Their nefarious MO: they rob and murder a person, and then leave a wreath at the scene of the crime! Which seems like an odd choice, given that it lets the Judges know that these are related events, and not just among the thousands of random crimes that occur every hour across the big meg.

Stumped for clues, Dredd swings by Justice Central to ask MAC, the justice department’s Macro Analysis Computer, for details of the wreath murders. For some reason he has to go to the computer to do this, rather than just calling it in over the radio. The future is strange in many ways.

MAC reveals a key clue – in an amazing coincidence, every single corpse has been carted away by the same ambulance! Which is incredibly suspicious because, contrary to popular belief, ambulances do not move corpses. That’s done by morgue vehicles. Also there’s the whole ‘same ambulance’ coincidence. Or is it a coincidence at all…?

It’s not, as the next scene lets us know. The medics show up at an apartment and menace the resident, leading to the first panel where I’ve been really impressed with the artwork in a Dredd strip.

See? That’s just great framing and perspective.

Dredd shows up just in time, presumably because the ambulance has some kind of a tracking device in it, it’s never adressed. Dredd is tackled by one, but he manages to throw the killer clear, which sends his murder weapon (a cleaver!) sinking into the head of his partner.

The surviving killer snatches Dredd’s gun off the floor (it fell in the fracas) and points it at the Judge. Dreddisn’t afraid, though, because he knows that lawgivers are programmed to only fire using a single Judge’s handprint*. Anyone else pulling the trigger will quickly have their arm blown apart by a self-destruct mechanism. Which is exactly what happens.

With the killers dead and the victim saved, Dredd closes things out by tossing the final wreath atop the corpses. Startlingly, this action is not accompanied by a pun of some kind. Weird, right?

Judge Dredd Kill Count (29)+2=31

Final Thoughts

Best Story: I’m going with MACH 1 – I know Shako was fun this week, but a man got thrown into a vat of molten gold. What’s not to like?

Worst Story: Harlem Heroes – I’m done with the ridiculous sport, the mystery that’s not, the nonexistent characters… Seriously, has King been given a line in the past month? One that wasn’t just generic sporting cries? This thing can’t be over fast enough.

* Yeah, I know Dredd as well as all the other Judges wear gloves. I’m sure they’ll explain this at some point. I mean, I never read an explanation, but it has to have happened. It just has to.

Cover:

I’m confused – is this a supercover set in the world of Judge Dredd? Because that would be a change. Or maybe it’s a different Mega City? Anyhow I’ve got no clue who the artist is this time around. The buildings look a little Ian Gibson-y, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

It seems that Bill Savage has already given up on visiting actual locations in his cross-country journey, and this week he drops by ‘Novatown’, the brand new city built in the North East. It seems that in the first days of the war the Volgans dropped nerve gas cannisters on the city, killing every single person. Then, for some reason, they proceeded to cart all the corpses away, leaving the city utterly empty.

Which is the state it’s in when Silk and Savage arrive, looking for cover after attacking a Volgan border camp. Searching the streets they spot a living man behind the desk of a luxury hotel! He proves to be the sole survivor of the attack, because he was the only person in the entire city who owned a gas mask. He offers his hospitality to the two Mad Dogs, who greatfully accept the opportunity to take a hot bath for the first time in months.

They don’t reciprocate the favor by warning the crazed old coot that a Volg patrol is out searching for them. As a result, the man gets brutally stabbed by Volgan bayonets. Although Bill is caught off guard, he reinacts a scene from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly to pull his fat from the fire, while looking unusually deranged.

The immediate Volgans delt with, Silk and Savage still have the rest of the patrol left to kill. Luckily the nearly-dead survivor has a tip to offer – there’s an unexploded cannister of nerve gas left in the city! The Mad Dogs scrounge up some gas masks and detonate the WMD, killing all the nearby Volgs. Not exactly even revenge for the death of an entire city, but it least it’s an emotional victory.

It’s less of a victory for the reader, however, seeing Invasion go back to its standard storyline of ‘Savage meets themed character, themed character sacrifices himself to kill some Volgans. I’ve accepted at this point that there’s never going to be an overarching plot to Invasion, but mixing it up a little would be nice.

Thrill 2 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

The final match of the Aeroball world series is about to start, and I couldn’t care less. The Heroes are going to be facing off against the Teutonic Titans, who dress as knights and, preposterously, carry shields.

Far more importantly, the Heroes have finally gotten around to discussing the fact that Cord publicly revealed his complicity in the attempts on their lives. Of course, they don’t have any proof, and Cord is rich, so their options are limited. Louis announces that he’s got a floating-brain scheme to deal with the situation, but he doesn’t announce what it is.

Days later the Heroes return to their home base to discover that all of their equipment has been stolen. Naturally Cord rushes in to offer them a new set of jetpacks and armor, ones that he’s sabotaged to ensure that the Heroes are all killed in the big game. The readers are treated to his interior monologue announcing his evilness, so there’s no doubt, but he’s still vague as to his motives.

Hopefully we’ll get those next issue, when the story wraps up. Okay, it might not wrap up next issue, I guess I’m just getting carried away with fantasy.

Thrill 3 - Shako

Continuing this strip’s bizarre structure of being about a bear, we stick with the yogi’s point of view as he attacks a small human settlement. First is a preposterous sequence where he attacks a cop in a snow buggy, whose calls for help are disregarded by the sheriff on the other end of the radio. Because when you’re living in the arctic, you’d naturally assume that a person screaming bloody murder about a bear attack was a joke.

The bear wandering into camp does make for one nice development, though, as it’s the very location where Falmuth is recuperating – why is this a nice change? Because apparently there’s been a change in editorial policy, and now Jake’s allowed to swear. Kind of…

And, you guessed it, nobody believes Jake about the bear, either. He’s quickly dragged back to bed and sedated, giving Shako more time to wander over to the sheriff’s house, which leads to my new favorite panels in the history of this comic. It seems that the sheriff is taking a shower, and therefore can’t hear a 1-ton bear bursting through the front door, wandering around the house, and finally pushing his way into the bathroom. A bathroom that apparently has a 13-foot ceiling, as you’ll see in a moment.

Yup. He thought the bear was a towel, which led to a hilarious double-take. The proceeding violence is decidedly less hilarious, or maybe just as, depending on one’s feelings about naked people being torn apart by polar bears. Finally Belle, the sheriff’s wife, hears the screams and runs into the bathroom – her excuse for not hearing the bear ransacking their house is left to our imaginations (I’m guessing it’s headphones like in Terminator, but with a hi-fi rather than a Walkman, which had yet to be invented), and Shako quickly kills and devours her as well.

That’s a startling three deaths this week, none of whom died slowly. Which brings Shako’s total killed slowly statistic to 1 out of 16, or 6%.

Thrill 4 – Tharg’s Future Shocks

It’s a little bit of a challenge to review these stories, since they’re just simple setup and punchline affairs with no continuity and very few pretensions. I suppose unless I’m presented with any really fascinating images I’ll just tell you the setup and the twist, and leave it at that.

At least until we get to the ones Alan Moore wrote.

This time we see a bunch of primitive humans fighting one another on the distant ‘Giant Planet of Jalaz’. One tribe has red hair and the other has black, and this seems to be the entire reason for their conflict. The red ones win, and we turn the page to discover…

Yup, it’s a human farm owned by ants, who live in a crude mockery of human society, bet you didn’t see that coming!

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

A train has been taken hostage by the ‘Third World Terror Group’ and there’s only one man who can save the passengers… John Probe! He arrives on scene and gets a rundown of the situtation. It seems that the leader of the terrorists is one Felix Wraffen, a twisted killer who was recently paroled on medical grounds. This seems like a weirdly preposterous right-wing attack on the justice system, or it would, had it not actually happened just recently in England.

The french authorities want Probe to attempt negotiations, but he defers… Action’s more his style! So he drives up alongside the train, shooting at the terrorists until one uses a grenade to blow up his armored car. That’s not stopping Probe, though – he simply tears a piece of burning metal from the wreck and shields himself behind it as he charges the train.

At this point, you may be wondering why all the hostages aren’t dead. That’s an excellent question. The answer? The terrorists are absolutely terrible at their jobs. While Probe is busy setting the train on fire Felix wants to kill everybody in the rear car, but one of the other terrorists protests, claiming that, despite the fact that they’re actively being fired on by the authorities, he can still resume negotiations. Felix loves murder too much to bother trying, so he just shoots the other terrorist and heads back towards the hostages.

Probe, who’s crawling under the train at the time, decides to protect the hostages in the only way he knows how. What’s that? No, he doesn’t just climb up to the doorway and punch Felix when the door is opened. Instead he shoves the back car really hard, tearing the couplings apart and sending it rolling uphill at 11MPH. Which seems like a gross exaggeration of his powers as we’ve come to know them. Hell, just two pages ago it took 80% of his hyperpower to tear a metal door off the wreck. And now he’s got no trouble sending a 50-ton locomotive up a hill with a single shove.

Felix opens the back foor of the train and falls out, giving Probe a chance to disarm him. Then Probe notices the passenger car rolling back towards them. In order to keep the passengers from being hurt by the impact against the rest of the train, Probe elects to stand between the cars, which against seems to suggest his powers are somewhere around ‘Hulk’ level, especially considering that Felix is crushed to a bloody pulp by the same impact.

The hostages are rescued and a young french woman cuddles up against Probe in appreciation (because, lest you forget, this is about Super-Bond), apparently not turned off by the gore that must be covering his clothes.

THARG’S NERVE CENTER

I’m a little impressed – not only is this story in fact set in the world of Judge Dredd’s Mega-City 1 (down to the anti-mutant laws), but it’s actually part one of a two-part Supercover. Not bad, Tharg.

The rest of the nerve center isn’t noteworthy, except for the fact that the reader respons slip (where you tell Tharg what you like about the comic), has 7 entries, but there are only ever six stories in a comic. Am I supposed to put in specific characters?

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

Time for a little satire here in Mega-City 1, as Dredd stumbles across Walter watching ‘You Bet Your Life’, an illegal gameshow where people can either win big money, or die. In a decision owing more to Walter’s popularity as a character than logic or common sense, Dredd brings Walter out on the bike along with him.

Because the justice department doesn’t have better signal tracking equipment than a vending machine robot.

Over at the game show the contestant answers a question incorrectly, which leads to his mother-in-law being shipped off to mutieland. Dredd breaks into the studio and disarms a few guards, while the hosts move on to the next question. The contestant’s wife is offered ten thousand credits or the contents of a mystery box. Naturally she chooses the box, which winds up containing a giant deadly rad-spider.

In this series of panels it’s revealed that the show has a gigantic studio audience. Like sporting event huge.

Dredd bursts into the auditorium just as the final question is being asked, and the hosts drop a guillotine on the contestant while running away. Dredd’s having none of that, though – he shoots the blade in mid-fall, sending the two pieces of metal flying across the room, into the brains of the two hosts.

This wraps up the story with a huge number of questions still unanswered. Where was the money for this game show coming from? Who was watching it? Who on earth would be part of the studio audience?

Well, it’s a fun idea, anyhow.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (29)+2=31

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako – Yup, we’ve now got the answer of what the movie Jaws would be if it had been told from the shark’s point of view. And featured more double-takes. That answer? It would have been awesome.

Worst Story: Harlem Heroes – Do I even have to say it?

Cover:

1

It’s not a Boland cover, but I’ll go ahead and admit it: I’m curious about the Satan horde. Also, I recently discovered that if you click on images here on blogspot you can view a bigger version of the image than the one that appears in the post. Who knew? o anyone who was having trouble reading the supercover story will now be able to get a better look at them.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

It seems like a week can’t go by without those dirty Volgs coming up with another devious invention to impress the brits. This time it’s a super-fast boat! Yeah, I’m not impressed with it, either. But Bill thinks it’s important enough to bother with blowing up, so here we go.

He and Silk head into a random boathouse looking for a craft they can take out onto the water for the attack, and in an amazing coincidence, they just happen to run across the ‘Warbird’, the British boat that broke the water speed record in the 80s!

It seems that Tharg was a little too optimistic about this one. The water speed record was broken by an Aussie in ’78, and the 500kph record hasn’t been topped since.

Accompanying the boat is Robb, the watercarft’s pilot. He’s given up the fight, and Bill and Silk can’t shame him into helping out. That night the Mad Dogs plant limpet mines on the side of the ship, but are instantly found out by the Volgs. They attempt to flee, but the Volgsuperboats are just too fast.

Just then Robb changes his mind about helping out, and races the Warbird into a suicide run against the Volg boats, destroying both of them. The Mad Dogs are so impressed by the sacrifice that they take over a Volgan radio station and broadcast the new water speed record across the nation. Which is a nice message, but it seems like if Bill had come up with a better plan than ‘Rowboat vs Destroyer’ then the old guy wouldn’t have had to sacrifice himself.

Bill Savage – always willing to let someone else take the fall for his mistakes.

Thrill 2 – Harlem Heroes (?/Gibbons)

Remember how the Aeroball world championship was about to start? Yeah, I don’t so much care either. It’s only interesting insofar as Ulysses Cord has booby-trapped their jetpacks.

During the whole first half of the game Cord anxiously awaits and explosion that doesn’t come. He’s puzzled, and when he goes to visit the Heroes in the dugout, he notices that Giant’s pack is smoking. Fearing for his life, he turns tail and runs! Giant is hot on his tail, though – will both of them blow up next week? Somehow I doubt it.

Thrill 3 - Shako

When we last saw Shako he was devouring the sheriff and the sheriff’s wife in a small Alaskan shanty-town. We return to him as he makes short work of the schoolhouse’s food store. Outside a group of CIA agents and hunters scour the village, looking for the killer bear.

What they don’t know is that the bear has a friend in the form of UnkSumak, young Eskimo lad. He takes an instant liking to the bear and ushers him to the safety of the schoolhouse’s book cupboard. Because what trouble could he get into there?

Oh, right, if Unkdoesn’t let the bear out or tell anyone he’ll kill the teacher. Well, don’t worry. I’m sure it won’t be too much trouble getting a new schoolmarm to fly three thousand miles up there. You know, after she finds out the last teacher was eaten by a bear.

As the children run away screaming Unk leads the killer bear under the hospital which, ironically, is the very place that Jake is trying to escape so that he can join the search for the Yogi!

With the schoolmarm dying so rapidly, that brings the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ to 1 out of 17, or roughly 6%

Thrill 4 – Future Shocks

This weeks’s Future shock is a creepy little affair called ‘Food For Thought’. It concerns a group of fishermen out looking for fish, or as they call it ‘brain food’. What’s the twist? They themselves are pulled up by monstrous aliens who eat human brains! Hilarious.

One interesting thing about the aliens-

I recalled those names as the sounds that the bizarre mutants made that time Supreme saw the nuclear-ravaged future (yeah, I’ve read Supreme a lot…). It obviously wasn’t a coincidence, so I looked it up – turns out that ‘Squa-Fon’ and Spa-Tront’ are apparently things that creatures yelled in monster comics from EC.

THARG’S NERVE CENTER

It’s the first Supercover sequel, and it’s something of a doozy, with the humans of Mega-City 1 inviting alien bounty hunter to exterminate the entire race of mutants who attacked them. Is there a twist? Click on it to read and find out!

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

Continuing his habit of being sent to wildly odd locations for strange reasons, Probe heads to South America to look for a missing archaeologist. What does he find there?

Yeah, some random guy from issue 4. Weird coincidence, huh? Krall traps Probe in a chamber with a low-frequency sound generator, but by pushing his hyperpower to its very limits, Probe manages to break through a stone wall. He’s about to go after Krall when something… odd… happens.

Yup, it’s chariots of the gods again. Probe figures that a spaceship must have crashed thousands of years ago, causing the Incas to build a religion around it. Okay, makes sense. But why is it taking off? Probe has a theory about that, too – the low frequency sound flipped the switch from ‘off’ to ‘on’. Makes as much sense as anything, I guess.

Probe can’t fight the giant alien robots, so as the Iranites are slaughtered he leaps off the spaceship and plummets the 90,000 feet back to earth! Landing safely in a mud lake, Probe survives the ordeal and the story ends without anyone commenting on how Probe’s entire worldview has just been shattered by discovering aliens are real. In fact, his British bosses don’t believe him about the aliens at all. I suppose the top of a pyramid disappearing doesn’t count as evidence in Sharpe’s world.

Also, the story ends with a ‘don’t try this at home’ disclaimer. So remember, kids – if you find yourself on an Inca spaceship leaving earth, don’t jump off it.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd

A little more future shock from Judge Dredd this week, as a man named ‘John Nobody’ goes to a place called the ‘Dream Palace’, where people can enjoy fully lucid waking dreams. Interestingly, this issue features the first reference yet to the people of the future being largely idle, working, at most, ten hours per week.

This Nobody likes the dream palace because it allows him to live out fantasies of blowing up buildings and killing huge numbers of people. What’s his motive? He doesn’t like his name. Seriously. That’s his motive. More on that later.

Dredd is called into justice central to hear about a crime spree. All of Nobody’s crimes are coming true. Of course, Dredddoesn’t know who’s behind them, or have the slightest idea where to start looking. In an amazing coincidence Dredd happens to drive by the Dream Center after leaving the Hall of justice, and an employee flags him down. She reports Nobody’s disturbing dreams, and tells Dredd about a new one he just came in for that morning – it involves Nobody bombing the justice day parade… which is happening right now!

Dredd arrives just in time to hop on Nobody’s hovercar, crash it into a float of the statue of justice, which causes the sword from its hand to fall and impale the crook. A happy ending for everyone. Except for Nobody, and all the people he killed.

Now, a little more about the motive. Do they not have name changing in the future? Because he could have just changed his name. This is as stupid as that woman’s motive for hating Spider in Transmetropolitan. She was sick of people on the street recognizing her as an (unwilling) porn star. Hey, lady, you live in a dystopian future where body modification is the norm. Buy a new face.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (29)+1=30

Final Thoughts

Best Story: MACH 1 – Shako was a little silly this week, what with the helpful Eskimo lad stepping up to save the bear. I was more impressed by the Inca spaceship.

Worst Story: Harlem Heroes – Thank god there can’t be more than like three stories left.

Also, this was the first week of 2000AD’s postergraph series – which we’ll take a look at when it’s complete.

Cover:

Yikes. That’s just… unsettling…

Thrill 1 – Invasion!
This week Bill’s traveled to Glasgow (remember how he destroyed the wall blocking Scotland? It seems no one repaired it). All the glaswegians have been walled up in a small section of the city where they fight like animals for the scraps of food the Volgs throw in. I’m sure Bill will have something to say about that.

Ambushing a Volgan care on the way to Glasgow, Bill discovers that an extermination order has been planned for the entire city! There’s only one solution – Bill heads into the ghetto to train the townspeople into a guerilla army in the few hours before the slaughter begins.

You’ll note that this plan hinges almost entirely on the Volgs not just gassing the city the way they did New Town. We’ll see how that works out next time.

Thrill 2 – Harlem Heroes (?/?)

Now it’s time for the big reveal – Giant explains that the whole equipment theft was faked. In a legitimately good plan of Louis’, the Heroes created a weakness for Cord to exploit, rather than wait for him to make one. That way they’d know what to expect – giving them a chance to find the damage to the jet packs and have them repaired before the match.

Isn’t that in Sun Tzu somehwere? If you don’t present your opponent with a weakness they’ll find one on their own?

Okay, it would have been a better scheme on Cord’s part if it didn’t rely on the world’s greatest Aeorball team not having their equipment checked out before the biggest game of their careers. But still, it’s an actual plot where advance thought went into the thing, so I’ll give them a little credit.

Well and truly caught, Cord reveals his motive – he was worried that the heroes were too sportsmanlike in their conduct. If playing by the rules got too popular the game would be too boring to watch! So naturally, he tried to murder the team. Of course.

With the plot over with the Heroes quickly win the championship and decide to quit Aeroball. It’s a little abrupt, but what the hell, I’m happy this is over.

Also, and I don’t know when this happened because I stopped paying attention a while ago, but it seems Dave Gibbons isn’t drawing this any more. Or if he is, he’s doing a really bad job.

Thrill 3 - Shako

After hiding below the hospital until dusk, he decides it’s time for another brutal slaughter. He sneaks up on a nurse – that’s right, the 11-foot, 1-ton bear is now making a regular habit of sneaking up on people. Inside buildings with solid floors. Then he kills a nearby orderly and accidentally pushes an old man out a window. Startlingly no one hears any of this, allowing Shako time to slide into the old electroshock therapy room. Which apparently they have in the hospital.

Even nurse not-Ratched’s (see, it’s different because her name is Hatchett!) quick use of the electro shock panels doesn’t slow him much. In a few short moments he’s gutted both her and the two orderlies. The elderly patient’s fate isn’t addressed, so I’m not counting her.

Still, Shako went absolutely nuts this week, bringing his total number of kills up to 22, with only 1 dying ‘real slow’, or less than 5%.

Thrill 4 – Future Shocks and Thrill 5 – MACH 1

Sadly, my copy of this issue is missing whole bunch of pages, so I can’t adequately cover these stories. The Future Shock involved aliens landing in England, but without the twist ending it’s meaningless, and the Mach 1 story was the start of a new serial about Probe going into space – hopefully by reading next week’s issue I can figure out what I missed.

Far more tragically, I may never find out what was going on with that supercover.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd (Wagner/Gibson)

Dredd is also missing critical pages, but I’ve got to cover the story a little, because it introduces some key information about the world. Also, there’s a cheeky credit nod.

Yup, that’s the writer and artist just below Dredd and Hunt. This episode is mostly about explaing the world of the Judges in a little more detail. We discover that Judges are sent off to the Academy at 5 and graduate at 20 (since Dredd graduated in 79, this makes him 40 years old!). Until they graduate Judges wear white helmets:

And no, the Cadet isn’t talking nonsense, he’s referring to a Futsie (few-t-see), someone suffering from Future Shock, i.e. the crazed fast-paced world of tomorrow has driven them to go nuts with an axe. It’s almost always an axe, see:

Really, though, since they’re living in the future, doesn’t that make it ‘Present Shock’? Guess ‘Pretzie’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I know this issue has been pretty much a wash, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that Dredd gunned the Pretzie down, and award him the kill. If I find out differently, I’d adjust the count later.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (30)+1=31

Final Thoughts

I’m not going to award any titles this week, since I wasn’t able to see enough of the issue. Although I think we can all agree it’s good to be rid of Harlem Heroes. Too bad the ending promised an imminent return…

Cover:

So folks, what’s the twist here – did the spacemen travel to a planet full of giant insects, or did their spacewarp magically shirnk them so that when they returned to earth the mosquitos merely seemed gigantic? I’d suggest that they went to the future where radiation from nuclear war had caused all the insects to become gigantic, but they just did that twist, so it’s not too likely.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Silk and Savage have headed for the hills, with a Volg divison hot on their heels! As ever the Mad Dogs are underequipped, wading through knee-high snow while ski troopers hunt them down, but they’ve got one thing on their side the Volgs don’t – British stubbornness and ingenuity!

One ingenious plan – they know that in all of the Volg’s ski training they never learn how to stop suddenly, which gives Bill the chance to do this-

And this!

The rest of the Volgs finally stop and call in for some snow-cat backup, ready to crush down the wall of the chalet that Savage has taken refuge in. Putting that ingenuity to use once again, Savage notices a few sets of mountain lion tracks leading to the back of the building. He lures the snowcat back to the den, and the Nazis find themselves mauled by good old British Lynxes!

With an appropriately ironic fate dealt to the snow-cat drivers, Silk and Savage head out once more, and finally link up with the Scottish resistance, who live in caves, well out of sight from the Volgan air patrols. Who knows what kind of mischief they’ll get up to with some backup? If this is true to form, the kind of disasterous mischief where a poor plan by the local commander gets almost everyone killed, and Savage has to rush in and save the dregs at the last minute.

You know, it just occurred to me that we only ever got two secret messages for that code wheel. What the hell, Invasion?

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd

It’s time for another callback here at Judge Dredd – we just saw the fallout of the robot rebellion, and now we’re checking in with Whitey, the villain from Dredd’s first case way back in issue 2! When we last saw him he was left on Mega City 1’s ‘Devil Island’, a prison that stands above a massive highway intersection, where all the traffic runs at 200kph! Of course, if that traffic were to ever stop, you could just climb right down since, in an unusual move for a prison, Devil’s Island doesn’t have any walls or guards or sensors or anything like that to stop people from leaving.

So it’s just a matter of Whitey getting the brain who works in the machine shop to build him a machine that can change the weather machine’s programming remotely. Suddenly the Big Meg sees its first snow-storm in decades! All over the city traffic grinds to a halt, leaving Whitey free to jump down onto a suddenly safe roadway. After killing his scientist friend, of course – Whitey can see no possible advantage in having dozens of people escaping at the same time. He thinks he’s got a better chance of getting away if he’s the one and only criminal on the loose.

I’m beginning to see why he was so easy to catch in the first place.

Dredd rushes to the scene of the escape, but his bike is useless in the snow… at least until he finds Whitey’s discarded chains, which he wraps around his tires for traction! Meanwhile Whitey has killed a guy and taken a woman hostage, so he’s not wasting any time with the whole ‘continuing evil’ thing.

On his modified bike Dredd quickly catches up with Whitey, but Whitey proves too fast, managing to shoot Dredd in the arm with the gun he stole from one of the invisible guards while escaping. Apparently prison guard’s guns don’t have ID-locks the way judge’s guns do. I wonder why? Even though he’s a little injured, Dredd manages to defeat Whitey in the saddest way possible.

Yeah, that was a snowball. How dispiriting. Dredd then switches the sunlight back on and takes Whitey back to Devil’s Island. Which means this was an entire Judge Dredd story where he didn’t kill anyone at all.

Sigh. I was expecting something a little bigger from the Return of Whitey.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)

Thrill 3 - Shako

Picking up the death count for the issue is Shako, who quickly slaughters every single person in the mess hall that he wandered into last time. Which just goes to show you – always carry a gun when eating lunch on a Russian spycraft.

Shako doesn’t eat any of the soldiers, though – because he smells something much more delicious on the deck above. It seems that the Russian Spy Ship is disguised as a whaler, and there’s a prime sample of whale flesh on deck at the moment! Shako runs for the whale, in the process knocking a man down a chute into a vat of boiling blubber. Which is an extremely disgusting way to die. Ick.

The KGB rush onto the deck and drug Shako with a dart, but before they they can get him below deck American choppers fly in – it’s Jake’s backup, ready to bring the fight to the Ruskies! They chain the sleeping Shako to one of the helicopters and fly off – but the Russians aren’t going to take that lying down! Their commander radios another neaby whaler, which happens to have a harpoon on the bow…

Now, that wasn’t the helicopter that Jake was on, so we’re not through with him yet – but Shako’s in trouble, since he’s still chained to the chopper as it heads to the bottom of the arctic sea!

Big week for Shako, mauling and melting 11 people! This brings the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ to 2 out of 37, or roughly 5%

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

Things get weird for Dan this week, as his ship is approached by a fleet of heart-shaped spacecraft, all of whom broadcast messages of peace and love. They insist that Dan follow them back to their plane twhere they can be welcomed as honored guests, so long as they don’t bring guns. Dan’s wary, but convinced of the fake romans’ good intentions when he discovers that their planet’s main continent is actually shaped like a valentine heart!

Once they’re down on the planet Dan learns the downside of hiring a group of disreputable criminals for your crew when two troopers attempt to chase after some hot roman tail rather than proceeding to the formal welcoming ceremony. Dan beats them up with a heart-shaped wall plaque, then heads to the dinner.

While everyone else partakes of wine and song, Dan notices the two troublemaking crewman sneaking off with the ladies from earlier. Proving that he’s absolutely determined to keep people from enjoying themselves, Dan heads out after them, only to discover the two men lying dead in an alley… with their hearts torn out!

It seems that the roman’s aren’t heart-obsessed because they’re so in favor of peace and love, but because they’re all vampires, who love devouring the hearts of their human visitors! How will Dan foil them now that his entire crew is drunk and stuffed with food – and let’s not forget that his ‘entire crew’ seems to be like twenty guys. Not really enough to deal with a planet of the vampires, is it? Guess we’ll find out next time!

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

As I’m sure you’ll remember from last prog, John Probe was dispatched to Macon Coutny Georgia in order to find a crashed UFO – he succeeded in his mission, but before he could crack it open to find out what’s inside, he was waylaid by rednecks who, confusingly, think that the UFO is the work of the devil.

Their plan? Use a bulldozer to lift up the UFO and put dynamite underneath it! Wait, if the UFO was in a place easily accessible by BullDozer, how was it so hard to find? Anyhow, Probe proves too strong for the BullDozer, but his show of strength convinces the rednecks that’s he’s some sort of Satanalien!

Despite the fact that he just flipped a bulldozer with his bare hands, the Rednecks decide that they should try to take Probe on in combat. It goes really badly for them. Their leader is gutted with his own chainsaw and the gunmen are knocked over by thrown logs, but Probe can’t stop the last of them from detonating the dynamite that was left lying next to the UFO! That’s right – the dynamite was already wired to detonate, even before they’d gotten it in the place they wanted it. Not the best plan, but hey, they’re redneck.

Much like all of their other decisions, the dynamite proves to have been a bad one – it ‘wakes up’ the UFO, which blasts all the remaining rednecks with a heat ray! Only Probe and Simon survive – Probe dispatches Simon to summon the government’s troop, while he himself explores the inside of the UFO, which now has a suspiciously open door. It proves somewhat disappoing, as all that remains of the crew seems to be some mush left on the floor. Were all the aliens splattered in the impact, did they escape, or is there a third, more terrifying answer?

We’ll discover next time, because a distress signal beeping on the UFO’s dash has attracted reinforcements!

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

You know, I’m a little disappointed by the lack of a twist. Also, I don’t know what a ‘Marrow’ is in the story’s context.

Thrill 6 – Future Shock

It’s the 23rd century, and earth is dangerously overpopulated! We see the story through the eyes of a scumbag desperate to leave the planet and head to the ‘paradise planet’ that the global government has started advertising as a place where the overpopulated masses can take refuge! Tickets are free, but it’s first-come first-serve! So how’s our scumbag going to get one?

By running over people, of course! A friend of his even hired muscle to bully people out of their tickets! When the scumbag gets to the counter he sees someone bribing the ticket officer to get on the flight! The scumbag finally muscles his way onto the flight, which begins the long trip to the paradise planet. Weeks later they’re ready to beam down-

Time for the twist, so get your guesses ready…

It’s not a paradise planet at all! It’s a frozen wasteland, and like Australia before it, the government has decided that only scumbags will be tough enough to tame the wilderness, so they set up a system of going to the planet that assured only scumbags would get the tickets!

Hilarious.

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Dan Dare – I don’t think Dan Dare’s made a single appearance in this section since the death of the living axe, but what can I say? I enjoyed the planet of the vampires.

Worst Story: Future Shock – Yeah, that wasn’t a very good twist, guys. Where was the alien zoo?

Which means I'd better get my predictions in now before I risk seeing any spoilers. I'm not planning on watching the final episode until tonight, but there's always a chance I'll have it spoiled between now and then, so here goes-

I'm pretty sure Keiran's the killer. I know I have a spotty record of predicting these things at best - I mean, I called Piper in Season 1 way earlier, but Harper's Island and the Mentalist had me completely fooled. Although I maintain that Harper's Island cheated pretty severely - although I have no intention of relitigating that here.

Alright, so here's my reasoning-
At the end of Season 1, we were left with a question - who attacked Will and Piper, if Piper was the killer? Audrey obviously knew something, but unless the show was massively cheating, she wasn't the second killer, since she is tiny, and he was absolutely not-

Now, unless the show wants to cheat its audience, the killer has to have been someone who was introduced during the first season. So by height alone, Keiran's basically our only suspect.

But could he have killed everyone in Season 2? Let's check!

Jake: Goes out to boondocks to prep burning down the mayor's subdivision.

Where was Keiran: Supposedly sleeping on the couch in his living room. Of course, Emma didn't notice him getting out of bed with her and leaving the room, so this isn't much of an alibi.

Motel Clerk: Stabbed to death in motel while Emma is lured to find the body.

Where was Keiran: Who knows? He was absent for almost all of the episode.

Emma Attacked in Woods: May not have happened, but probably did.

Where was Keiran: Possibly sleeping in Emma's bedroom, but there were no witnesses. So he was definitely in the area.

Emma Attacked During School Lockdown: May not have happened, but probably did.

Where was Keiran: In the school, which the killer had to be, and notably absent from the library in the scene directly before the attack.

Gang Chased at Empty Fairground: The killer just menaced them here, making no real attempt to hurt anyone.

Where was Keiran: At the empty fairground. He runs up to the gang from the direction the killer was last seen, and claims not to have noticed the killer.

Sleazy Teacher Mutilated: It's not clear how the killer found out about where the sleazy teacher was - maybe phone surveillance?

Where was Keiran: No alibi. Last seen leaving Emma's house in his pickup truck, which has more than enough room in it to conveniently store a body.

Teacher Thrown Down Stairs: This is a legitimately bad-ass stunt that we should all enjoy together.

Yeah, that was just brutal. Although it's not clear how the killer could have possibly gotten Sleazy Teacher's body into and out of the building in broad daylight without being noticed.

Where was Keiran: No alibi. Other than a scene at the beginning where Emma yells at him for trying to save her life, he is not in the episode. Also, Emma is the worst.

Model Home Burned Down: While Emma is on her date with Evil Cousin, the killer sets the house on fire to keep them from discovering the bodies upstairs. Presumably the killer knew this would be a good place to hide bodies because Jake was planning to burn the house down at the behest of the mayor, meaning zero security.

Where was Keiran: See above - it's the same episode. And Emma really is the worst.

Keiran Attacked At Carnival: Yeah, this makes the whole theory not look that great. That being said, there are things called selfie sticks, and it's actually pretty weird that he's looking that far off camera - as if the killer was like four feet up and to the right of where they were aiming the phone. Why, it's almost as if using the selfie stick makes it hard for him to gauge exactly where his eyeline should be!

And this is the point where I've officially gone too far down the rabbit hole. Seriously, selfie sticks? He could just have yet another partner.

Where was Keiran: Doing all that stuff in the above paragraphs. Also, it's a risky play to almost get shot by cops, but Keiran was in a rough situation, with Emma pulling away from him and spending time with Evil Cousin. So he's got motivation, and could easily have pulled the plan off.

Horrible Teen Stabbed At Party: Haley, who hates Emma, is super-confident that the person she's seeing couldn't possibly be the killer. Also, that person suggested she set up the party. Obviously she would be super-psyched if Keiran was cheating on Emma with her, given her feelings about Emma, so her manner is completely explained by the situation.

Where was Keiran: At the party. He seems to call the police (although who knows if he actually did), then gets lost in the crowd as Emma goes to confront Haley. After Haley is stabbed to death, he appears back in the crowd, looking for her.

Noah Stabbed And Kidnapped: The entire episode is devoted to Emma and Audrey's attempt to rescue Noah and Zoe. It doesn't go great.

Where was Keiran: Not in the episode.

Killer Steals Emma's Dream Journal: The killer walks confidently through the house, as if super-familiar with it. There's a questionable moment where he opens the mom's door, but it can be read either as getting the wrong room, or just checking to see if she's asleep. More importantly, the killer is there for the dream journal specifically as part of the 'frame Emma' plan, and therefore already must know it exists.

Where was Keiran: No way to tell. He was home a few minutes later to receive Emma's phone call, but there's no reason to suspect that's a long journey, especially since Evil Cousin was also there.

The killer does tap a photo of Keiran and Emma with his knife-

Which can be read as a threat, or Keiran being kind of proud of how well this is all going.

Mayor Stabbed With Pitchfork: The entire episode is devoted to making it seem like Evil Cousin is the killer. They find evidence that he was in town during the first spate of killings, he goes to the mayor's house and threatens him, Keiran finds Audrey's missing letters to Piper under his mattress. It looks bad for Evil Cousin, and good for Keiran. Which is why this is the episode that tilted me pretty far the other way.

So let's lay out the evidence.

Keiran overhears Evil Cousin talking about his plans to blackmail the mayor (he's talking to his mother), and sees the blackmail documents.

Keiran finds the packet of letters hidden under Evil Cousin's bed. Naturally these must have been planted, only to be 'discovered' for the benefit of Audrey and Emma, who are on facetime while he searches. It's not incredibly likely that the killer - who would need some kind of a workspace to hide his costumes and set up his murdering tools, would have hidden incredibly incriminating letters under his bed, of all places.

The Killer texts the Mayor and lures him to his death, using the threat of revealing the documents that were stolen that afternoon. The Mayor is only able to be lured because of the robbery, so the killer must have known that it happened. At this point, only three people know about the Mayor's secret blackmail file theft. Keiran, Evil Cousin, and Drunk Aunt. Keiran pointedly does not tell Emma and Audrey about it at the car, even though it would go a long way towards proving just how sinister Evil Cousin is, and bolster his case for going to the police.

The biggest clue, however, comes in the Killer's plan. Extreme lengths were gone to in order to frame them for the series of murders. This culminates in having them find the Mayor just moments after his brutal stabbing. The only way the killer could have arranged this is if he knew where everyone was going to be - only Keiran was in a position to have all of this information. Emma and Audrey decide to go to the pig farm after he leaves, but then Emma immediately announce that he'll text Keiran with their plans as she gets into the car. Soon after, the mayor is texted and dispatched out to the pig farm. So either Keiran is the killer - as he's the only person who could have contrived this meeting, or the show is asking us to accept this astronomically unlikely coincidence.

The final part of the plan involves having the police show up and find Emma and Audrey standing over the Mayor's body. Keiran is the one who calls the police. So either the killer got incredibly lucky with independent decisions made by two different people, or Keiran is the killer, and the plan went great.

Where was Keiran: In the vicinity of the Pig Farm - he drives up literally minutes after Audrey and Emma are arrested.

So that's the argument, and the evidence. Even being incredibly critical of my arguments, the only one it's doubtful Keiran could have done is killing Jake - in all of the rest he's the best suspect in the show. Evil Cousin is, of course, second best, since he wouldn't have had any trouble killing Jake, but he couldn't have arranged the conclave at the pig farm in episode eleven.

Am I right or wrong? You can check right now by watching the final episode - I'm going to be doing that tomorrow, after which I'll put up a post-mortem offering my thoughts on the season as a whole, and either gloating or apologies depending on how things shake out.

See you there!

Cover:

I don’t know. He seems pretty confident, but I’m taking the odds on the human, even though they’re 15-1. I like a long shot.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

We pick up the story a few weeks after Savage has hooked up with the Scottish resistance. They’ve been very effective at slaughtering Volgs, so effective that the villains have called in a specialist to deal with the situation. Colonel Volgaska! A man so nasty that he remains suspiciously off-camera!

His first order of business? Torturing the location of Savage out of a group of prisoners! Meanwhile Silk and Savage use a sheep-shipping truck to sneak into town, then sneak over to the barracks and get a look at the opposition. It seems that the Colonel’s room is facing a nearby hilltop, which will allow Silk to snipe the monster as he sleeps!

Before they can put the plan into motion they notice an old cleaning lady headed in to clean the Colonel’s room. Silk warns her to skip work tonight – they don’t want her getting caught in the crossfire! An hour later Silk and Savage are waiting on the hill for the Colonel to show his face. They’re distracted by a an old lady gathering heather, but they quickly turn back to the task at hand, which results in Savage being stabbed in the back! But how?

Now there’s a twist! More importantly, though, we’ve learned a valuable lesson – that there’s more opportunity for gender equality in Volgania than in England. Yes, over the past thirty issues we’ve seen dozens of people involved in the resistance, but other than an Eel Pie lady that Savage moved out of the way of an explosion, there hasn’t been a single woman involved in the British fight for freedom. Compare this to the Volgs, where not only are women allowed in the armed forces, but they’re put in charge of oppression efforts!

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd

The future has come to Mega-City 1, in the form of a computer hotel, or ‘Komputel’! I’m not sure where the K came from, but let’s give them a little license. The inefficient human element has been removed from managing a hotel, and now everyone’s needs will be taken care of by robots and machines! Dredd is prophetically skeptical about the whole thing-

What do you mean ‘one day’, white man? Haven’t the gadgets already gone horribly wrong? Have you forgotten that whole robot rebellion from a few months back? Actually, given that people are so suspicious of robots at the moment that anti-robot KKKs are forming, you’d think people wouldn’t be lining up to spend the night in an all-robot hotel. But line up they do, which immediately leads to mass murder.

Yeah, the hotel doesn’t waste any time at all. Tossing people down empty shafts, drowning people in showers, pumping toxic gas through the vents. One guest manages to escape and runs to Dredd for help – naturally he hung around outside, knowing that if anything was going to go wrong, it would happen on the first night of operation.

He dodges a few death-traps and makes his way to the central processing unit, where a robot explains its evil motivation. It was designed to replace inefficient humans, and it decided to expand its mandate to all humans, not just the ones whose jobs it was stealing.

Dredd settles the situation the only way he knows how, by shooting the robot many, many times. This works, and the few surviving guests stumble out into the night air. Dredd laments that people just aren’t suspicious enough of machines, then goes home to have dinner served to him by a suspiciously subservient vending machine droid.

And ends another issue without killing anyone.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)

Thrill 3 - Shako

With the helicopter dragging Shako down into the frozen, briny depths, the Russian KGB man shakes his head sadly. He does, however, have enough understanding of the situation to realize that the virus was too dangerous to be allowed to fall into anyone’s hands. This would be a melancholy ending for the series, if Shako didn’t manage to tear loose his bonds and swim to the safety of a nearby iceberg.

Jake scours the area in a helicopter, but can’t catch sight of the nefarious yogi, whose fur blends perfectly with the ice and snow around him. When he’s rested enough Shako goes looking for some food, because his meal of blubber was rudely interrupted. He quickly comes across some hunters who are busy slaughtering baby seals. Yeah, really.

I’m a little unsettled to have seen this.

Shako does PETA’s work for them, tearing off one hunter’s head, clawing another to death, and grabbing at the third. Before he can get around to actually attacking the third hunter Shako grabs the man’s gun, accidentally hitting the trigger with his teeth. The gun shoots the hunter in the head, and Shako is scared away from technology for good.

Then Shako turns on the cubs himself, and brutally slaughters a few, devouring their corpses. Oh, that crazy yogi.

With three hunters dead the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ is now 2 out of 40, or exactly 5%

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

With his crew soused to the gills, Dan needs to figure out a way to rally them quickly against the vampire threat. His plan? Slip a little rocket fuel into each man’s glass so that they’ll be disgusted enough with the taste that they’ll assume they’re being poisoned! It works, and they immediately start battling the roman vampires!

It’s a pitched, losing battle, but Dan has a plan for that as well – he has to get their guns which, for some reason, are hanging in a large circular cage above the dining hall. This proves incredibly convenient, allowing Bear to throw Dan up to the guns! Now re-armed, the crew manages to fight their way back to their landing craft.

After shooting down a few of the vampires’ heart-craft, Dan and his crew escape back to their fortress ship, and make the bold pronouncement that ‘those ghouls will never lure anybody else to their planet!’ Um… why not? You killed like fifty of them, and destroyed five of their spaceships. It’s an entire planet of vampires, who no doubt have the resources to build more spaceships.

Kind of a half-assed solution there, Dan. You didn’t even nuke the hell out of their cities. Although I do wonder just what the vampires are eating between visits from unwary human travelers. This doesn’t seem like a particularly well-thought-out alien civilization.

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

The UFOs are coming! Attracted by the fallen ship’s beacon four more ships arrive, and immediately occupy themselves with firing weird rays at the corpses around the crashed ship. They also blast the local sheriff, taking over his mind and making him shoot his dogs, then call the rest of the police, demanding that the cordon off the entire county!

Probe comes across one of these roadblocks immediately, and while he’s able to beat up the cops guarding it quite easily, he holds back when the sheriff arrives, offering to help him get to the bottom of the whole UFO thing. They drive back into town, and the sheriff seems oddly unconcerned when he sees that all of Pine city is being destroyed by the UFO’s heat beams.

Probe figures out what’s going on, but not fast enough to keep him from being throttled by the lead redneck zombie, who lunges out of the back seat, ready to kill! How’s Probe going to survive this? Will it have something to do with Simon, who Probe sent to get help last time around?

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE!

This week we learn how to assemble the postergraph, which will get its own special page next time. For now, here’s the supercover story.

Told you so.

Thrill 6 – Future Shock

It’s a classic story, here at the Future Shock, although the fact that it’s a two-parter means that we won’t know what the twist ending is until next time.

So let’s get on with the setup! A group of romans are watching Pompeii being destroyed! Two of them are suspiciously blasé about the suffering they observe. Why is that? Because they’re time travelers, here in the past to watch history’s greatest tragedies, and wallow in the suffering of the long-dead!

The twisted snuff-porn fanatics return to their spaceships just in time to avoid being roasted alive, then try to decide where they’ll be headed next. London during the Blitz? The time the Volgs invaded England? The English witch-hunts? Is there a reason the company only wants them to go to England?

A consensus is quickly come to – they’ll go to the witch hunts, which will no doubt lead to an ironic demise next issue. Be here to find out! You have a whole issue’s worth of waiting to try and figure out what ironic shape their comeuppance will take!

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako – I really loved the twist of that yogi killing a bunch of hunters for slaughtering the baby seals, then going on to slaughter those seals himself. Property disputes can get nasty up there in the arctic.

Worst Story: Future Shock – I’m not saying you’re not allowed to do a two parter, and in the future I’m sure I’ll be more forgiving, but I wanted a twist ending, damn it!

This season, if nothing else, could be presented as something of a masterclass on how to lose your audience. Emma spent every episode whining and being withdrawn, Audrey spent the whole season actively hurting the police's chances of finding the killer because she didn't want people to get the wrong idea and think she knew about the first spate of killings beforehand. And it only gets worse from there...
Just take a moment to think about how she excuses her belief that Piper wasn't the killer - she announces that when Rachel was killed, she was with Piper, so she was willing to offer the benefit of the doubt. Perfectly acceptable at the time.

Of course, Piper did turn out to be the killer. Which means that Audrey was one of only two living people who knew for a fact that there were two killers. Did she share this information with the police? Nope. Which means she spent a year covering up for a murderer to protect herself - not from prosecution, remember that she did nothing wrong in communicating with Piper - but rather from damage to her reputation in a town she hated.

So the producers saddled themselves with two lead characters that are impossible to be sympathetic with - who was there in the supporting cast to keep things interesting? The sheriff and Emma's Mom at least had compelling bits of the storyline, since I'm interested in seeing Brandon James return and getting to the truth of what happened on the night of the original massacre. Stavo was a giant creep except when he was helping out long-suffering Brooke, the one person it's possible to truly be on the side of.

Even Noah lost huge points with the audience by pursuing a relationship with Zoe even though he had every reason to believe that doing so would put her in a murderer's crosshairs. Eli was so horrible every moment he was onscreen that that even though he was totally innocent and Keiran had ruined his life, I was still incredibly happy to see him get murdered.

Which brings me to Keiran, and possibly the season's biggest flaw - he spent the entire season being a wonderful boyfriend, supporting the frankly horrible Emma through all of her PTSD, and whenever anyone was in danger from the killer he'd forcefully suggest that they go to the police and spill their guts, ruining the killer's plan. He did all this while also being the killer.

I know that the audience is supposed to feel betrayed the same way Emma was, but it just doesn't land, because by this point in the season it's really hard to be on Emma's side. I was on Team Keiran the week before I figured out he was the killer, and I'm still on it now, while he remains the most relatable character on the show, stuck in prison, conversing with the still-alive Brandon James.

Mostly I'm still on his side because of how perfunctory the killer reveal was - they literally use the incredibly tired 'wait, you said something that the killer said' reveal, having the killer make a stupid mistake rather than letting the characters actually figure it out. More importantly, though, the showrunners ruined their chance at a legitimately troubling cliffhanger of an ending: Let Keiran successfully frame Eli, fast-forward a few months making everything seem like it was back to normal, and then reveal Keiran as the killer when he's contacted by Brandon, setting up season three.

It's entirely possible that I'm the only one who would have been completely satisfied with that resolution, but it would be hard to argue that it would have been far more intriguing than what the writers ended up with.

Especially since if Keiran's going to be involved in season three in any meaningful way he'd have to break out of jail, which is an incredibly contrived plot device.

Also, and finally - the show ends with Keiran getting a phone call in prison from Brandon James-

How on earth do you - from a craft standpoint alone - make this anything but a face-to-face meeting? Have Keiran sit down at one of those booths with a transparent wall, he doesn't recognize the person he's looking at, and we don't see the other person at all, then he picks up the phone, talks to him, and only then do we realize Brandon is back.

It's more dramatic and it promises the audience that Brandon's face will finally be revealed next year. How did they not see that?

Cover:

You know, I always knew that Jason X was ripped off from somewhere. And here it is.

Also, it’s nice to see another signed picture, this one by McCarthy and Ewins. I’m not exactly sure who they are, but if memory serves from that time Dredd had to investigate a murderous family who was killing tourists in Atlantis and feeding their corpses to giant manta rays so they could bribe a doctor to keep their mutant son a secret, at least one of them is named ‘Brett’.

You know, when we get to the story whose plot I just spoiled in like two years, it’s going to turn out that these weren’t even the artists on it.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Silk and Savage are trapped in Colonel Rosa’s terrifying torture dungeon! Bill has already been driven so mad by pain from the poison he’s been injected with that he starts gibbering about needing Nessie! Rosa is so entertained by his mad yelling that she decides televising him yelling about Nessie would be a propaganda coup!

But the coup doesn’t end there. No, she thinks it’ll be even funnier if they drive Silk and Savage all the way to Loch Ness so that he can yell for Nessie at the lakeside. Unfortunately for the Volgs, Nessie responds. No, don’t worry, the story didn’t just get really interesting. This is the Nessie he was yelling for:

It seem that she’s Big Nessie McNairn, a famous lady wrestler from before the invasion! And she’s brought other Scottish rebels with her! They quickly gun down the Volgs and capture Rosa. Why not kill her? Because Savage has a plan – he’s going to make the colonel wrestle big Nessie! Which is going to be televised over the entire country, for some reason. Because there’s no one back at the broadcast centre to flip the switch, apparently.

Rosa loses the fight, but again Savage doesn’t killer her, assuming that her Volgan superiors will punish her badly enough for losing. Yes. There’s no way that can go badly.

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd

As predicted by me last issue, Dredd finds the behavior of his solicitous robot increasingly suspicious. Although it’s not because of Dredd’s well-founded anti-robot bias, but rather because Walter has been giving him gifts. But where could the money be coming from? Dredd decides to trail Walter in order to find out.

Dredd tracks Walter to a garage, where it seems that he’s been picking up shifts as a taxi driver so he can afford gifts! Ah, the life of a free robot. Free to perform menial tasks for a paltry wage. In an amazing coincidence another cab is hijacked just a few blocks away, allowing Walter to ChauffeurDredd to the scene of the crime.

With the crooks quickly arrested (and not killed, I might add), Dredd takes Walter back to the cab dispatch to solve the biggest mystery of the story – just how did Walter get the job?

Okay, now I’m a fan of this story.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)

Thrill 3 - Shako

Time for some revenge in the pages of Shako! Not Jake or Shako or anything like that. No, it’s time for some Walrus revenge! An old one-tusked monster who’d fought Shako in the past is looking for some payback, but winds up anticlimactically killed by Shako. The important part of the fight is that in order to get an advantage Shako has to pull the walrus out of the water, revealing both of them to the sea plane overhead!

Back at CIA headquarters Jake is getting told off by his supervisor over the whole ‘opening fire on a Russian ship in international waters’ fiasco. It also doesn’t speak too well of his abilities as a spymaster that he hasn’t been able to kill a single bear. Jake demands one last chance to track the yogi down.

Jake and redshirt climb into a plane and go looking for Shako, along with a few other CIA triggermen. They come across the recently-killed Walrus and Jake devises a plan – since polar bears will come back to a kill to finish the meat, he’s going to saw the walrus open, have redshirt climb inside, and wait to kill the bear when it returns. Buck, who was along for the ride, suspects that Jake just wants redshirt out of the way because he’s next in line for station chief, but doesn’t say anything to stop the plan.

And that’s how, resdhirt winds up getting eaten by Shako. Because they saw him up inside a walrus and don’t bother giving him a bag for its gun, causing all the frozen walrus innards to gum up its works.

It looks like we’re coming towards the end of the story – how can I tell? Because Buck examines Shako’s tracks, and finds that he’s dragging his leg – he was injured during the Walrus fight, and can’t have gotten far!

that brings the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ to 2 out of 41, or roughly 5%

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

It seems that the future isn’t as free from piracy as we’d have assumed. Wait, no one assumed that? Sorry. Although I’m not sure why regular freighters are heading through the lost worlds, which are basically the monster-infested Bermuda triangle of outer space.

Dan’s crew gets to the besieged ship too late to offer any help, but elects to bring the corpses of its dead back to their home planet, Phoenix, for decent burials (sadly, it would later turn out that Phoenician burial practice is to set corpses adrift in space. Okay, not really). When they arrive Dan hears about the plight that the race of traders suffers through at the hands of the pirates. He decides to offer his help by loading up a ship with his bloodthirsty crew, and sending them out as a trojan horse.

As anticipated the pirates promptly attack, and Dan removes the fake panelling from his warship and opens fire. They blast the pirates to pieces, forever saving the phoenicians from the threat of the pirates. Until another group of pricks buy a ship and some guns.

Dan and company head on to the next lost world, proving that they’re not that great about follow-through.

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

You know, minus all the drama about unplanned pregnancy, this is basically the plot of The Asylum’s movie ‘The Terminators’.

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

It’s Macon county Georgia, and the UFO’s have come to raze it to the ground. There’s looting, prayer, people scrambling to survive, and through it all, heatrays. Oh, the heat rays. They’re unstoppable. Or are they?

After Probe causes the police cruiser to crash he kills the redneck zombie, then picks the whole car up and whips it at the closest UFO. This sends the UFO crashing into a building. This profoundly pisses off the remaining UFOs enough that they use magic powers to suck up the entire nearby lake, and use it to drown the city-

And kill the town it does. Probe is able to outrun the tidal wave, but no one else is, and they all wind up extremely dead. Probe reports back to base, where he discovers that the government is planning to cover up the UFO attack, and tell everyone that the city was destroyed by the flood. Wait, what happened to Simon, and his knowledge about the UFO? More importantly, what was going on with those UFOs?

No answers are in the offing. In fact, Sharpe (Probe’s boss – he’s been gone for a while, huh?) announces that they know all about who the UFOs are, and what they want, but it’s too secret to trust Probe with.

Wait, does that mean we’re not going to find out either? There’s no ‘to be continued’ at the end of this story, so maybe not. Which would suck rather profoundly.

Thrill 6 – Future Shock

Hey, remember those time travelers who headed back to the British witch-hunts because they want to see women burn to death? Well, they get bored with the snuff, and decide to play a little prank on the primitives. They radio for their spaceship to pull them up with tractor beams, so they can make everyone think that they’re real witches!

Care to guess the twist that you undoubtedly figured out last time?

Yup, there’s a power failure causing them to fall back to earth and they get burned as witches. Congratulations, everyone who figured this one out. By which I mean everyone who read it.

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako– A man crawled into a dead walrus, then got eaten by a polar bear. What the hell else do you want, people?

Worst Story: Invasion – No, it was just too stupid this week. That was seriously his plan? Keep yelling about Nessie, hoping that the message would be broadcast and then they would drive him out to loch ness? That’s maybe the worst plan I’ve ever come across.

Cover:

Expanding sun? Solar flare? Put your guesses in now! Also, do the non-white featured players indicate that this is London’s near future?

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

It’s a dangerous time to be in the British resistance… all too regularly people are willing to sell out their countrymen for the chance to curry the Volgs’ favor. One such man is Macgregor, who tries to turn in Savage for camping on his property. All the Volgans who show up to capture him are killed though, and when facing down the prospect of an execution, Macgregor begs Savage to sign up with the occupiers. Bill seems oddly convinced by this pitch, and runs off with Mac to deal with the Volgs.

The rest of the Mad Dogs feel betrayed, none of them seeming to understand that Savage always has a plan to escape Nazi clutches and kill everyone who tries to stop him. This time it seems that his plan is to ingratiate himself with Mac, who’s holding a dinner for Volgan officers that very night!

Yes, Mac is so convinced that Bill Savage, the most notorious Volg-hater in the entire country, has crossed over that he lets Bill drive a Volgan armored car right onto his property, where the officers are already having dinner, without leaving any guards outside to protect them. This allows Bill to load his armored car with explosives and send it right through the wall into the dining room, killing Mac and all the assembled officers. Also the frightened domestic staff who were serving the Volgs only under fear of death. Of course, Bill has never worried too much about innocent bystanders.

With all the Volgs dead Bill is free to steal Mac’s Rolls and drive back to pick up his compatriots. Then Bill reveals a little about his background, when he announces that he knows a ‘bloke’ down in Aberdeen who’ll give a good price for cars, no questions asked. Just what was Savage shipping back in his lorry driver days?

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd

This can’t be! How can this episode be opening with Dredd’s death? All we know is that his funeral is a media circus, with everyone reporting generically on the tragedy. It seems that Dredd was shot by a mystery assassin, and is now being afforded the biggest funeral in Mega-City history. Including weird butchering of Shakespeare quotes!

Other people eulogizing include Judge Gibson, who claims to have been one of Dredd’s best friends. Since the idea of Dredd having friends is utterly ridiculous, and we’ve never heard of Gibson before, I surmise that he must be the killer. A surmumption that proves wholly accurate just one page later, when Gibson flashes back to events he wasn’t present for, namely Dredd examining the MO of famed bank robber ‘Mutie the Pig’

Seeing as there’s only three left-handed Judges in the entire justice department who use that particular technique, Dredd is able to narrow the suspect list down to three, of which only one was in town when the robberies occurred… Gibson.

Hold on a second – can there really be this few an amount of left-handed Judges? How many judges are there, anyways? This is a city of hundreds of millions of people. New York city has 10 million people, and they have like 40 thousand cops – so about one in every 250 people is a police officer. Assuming that a crime-infested hell-hole like Mega-City 1 has the same percentage of Judges to the normal population, this should mean that there’s more than a million judges. With one in seven being left-handed, that’s a pool of over a hundred thousand left-handed judges. And only three use that aiming technique?

These are just back of the envelope calculations, of course, and I won’t know for sure until the comic actually provides us with some concrete numbers for Judges in Mega-City 1, but still, it seems like a stretch.

Proving that Gibson is a pretty decent criminal, he was watching Dredd’s investigation from across the street – because it’s plausible that the main computer room of Justice Central has a window – and shoots Dredd while he stands at the computer. Expecting, I guess, that the other judges who rush in to check on Dredd won’t notice the fact that the computer readout shows the names of three possible suspects for the MTP crimes, including himself.

The next day is declared a city-wide day of mourning, and the weather control turns on the snow. Gibson goes out for another robbery, but he’s foiled in mid-crime by Dredd, who’s somehow not dead! Tune in next time for the shocking explanation!

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)

Thrill 3 - Shako

It looks like time’s running out for Shako. He’s injured and there’s a snow-cat bearing donw on him. His one advantage? It’s the middle of a blizzard, so the whole world looks the same colour as he does.

Jake and another redshirt track Shako to his cave, but unbeknownst to them Shako heard them coming, and is lying in wait above the entrance! He leaps down and corners the two men in the back of the cave, making redshirt drop his rifle, then lies down at the entrance, blocking their escape and waiting until he gets hungry.

At this point, you may be asking yourself why Jake doesn’t just shoot the hell out of Shako with his pistol. I mean, he’s only got one arm, yeah, but he can still hold a gun. The answer is… terrible writing! Yup, no explanation for Jake chasing down a killer polar bear completely unarmed is offered by the story.

Jake buys himself a little time by throwing his redshirt to the hungry yogi, then grabbing an icicle with which to stab the bear when it goes to sleep. For some reason he doesn’t go for the fatal neck stab, hoping instead to distract the bear with a haunch stab, giving him enough time to grab the rifle. Here’s how that works out.

With all the key members of the team dead, Buck Dollar comes to a conclusion. It’s time to get serious, and kill Shako. Um, you know, if you’d done that when he was drugged, all those other people you're feeling guilty about would still be alive.

Just a thought.

With Jake and redshirt both being mauled quickly, that brings the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ to 2 out of 43, or roughly 4%

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

After saving the Phoenicians last week, Dan received in return a map to some other interesting‘lost worlds’. On their way to the closest, the jungle-covered ‘green world’, a stowaway makes his presence known. It’s a space monkey! One of the crew tries to kill it (one of the problems of crewing your ship with violent psychopaths), but Bear stops him – killing a monkey is bad luck in space, because monkeys were the first astronauts!

You know, that’s a really good fake superstition. I’ll have to remember it.

After landing on the surface Dan and company start chopping their way through the undergrowth. Why are they bothering with this planet at all? Because the other members of the lost worlds are terrified of the monsters that live there, and Dan thinks that by slaughtering a few, they can build a rep. Doesn’t it seem like killing all those space pirates would have handled that already?

The away team doesn’t get more than a few feet into the jungle before men start mysteriously disappearing. But how? There aren’t any animals around, nothing but closely-spaced trees! I’m guessing you’re seeing this twist coming, right?

Yup, the planet is covered with killer walking trees. Dark young, if you prefer. Dan and his men open fire on the monstrosities as the episode draws to a close – now that’s a cliffhanger!

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

That’s a twist I didn’t see coming. It’s basically the solar focusing mirror from that episode of Futurama!

In addition to the story there’s an interesting letter this week – EarthletCrispin Julian asks what happened to the other robots that helped out with the rebellion. It seems that Howard is now a cab driver, J70/13 is trying to become the first robot judge, and Stewart got a little too into his pleasure circuits, and wound up destroying himself with too much pleasure. Which sounds a little like Futurama as well.

There’s also a weird pitch for prog 35.

Yes, she can. It happened last week. How’d Tharg miss that one?

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

It seems a group of British mountaineers are attempting to climb Everest by the most direct route – but then a few of them are swept away by an avalanche while approaching camp! That’s the tenth avalanche on the trip so far, and the men are getting scared to continue. Their fears are justified when an ice wall in front of them melts, revealing some frozen mountaineers!

Probe is sent in to check on the missing mountaineers, and he finds the oddly warm section of the mountain where all the corpses have been revealed. Following the heat to its source, he finds a giant solar energy collection station just below the summit! Before he can investigate further or make a report Probe finds himself under attack by a guard! The man is quickly incapacitated, but then Probe is drugged with a syringe before he can get any answers!

The episode ends there, suggesting that Probe has wholeheartedly adopted the multipart story thing, which is a great idea. Now if that karate-master would just make another appearance…

Thrill 6 – Future Shock

The future shock opens in medias res, with a group of Ezquerra-drawn spacemen fleeing an alien bat-monster that’s bent on sucking their blood! Rimmer, one of the crewmembers, is bitten, but his friends manage to drag him on board.

Safely away in space, Rimmer finds himself quickly changing into a beast – one that craves blood! He begins to devour his crewmates, who find their stunners and deathrays useless against his magic powers! Soon every member of the crew is dead, save for the cook, so Rimmer heads down the galley to finish his work-

Time to guess the twist, folks. Lock in your answers, then read on.

It seems that while all the other crewmen are too scientifically-minded to know how to stop a vampire, the chef is something of a classicist.

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Future Shock – That was a space vampire, damn it. And I refuse to apologize for loving space vampires. Especially magical, rather than scientific space vampires.

Worst Story: Shako– Explain to me why Jake didn’t have a pistol and I’ll rescind the ranking, Shako. But don’t try to pull this crap again, got me?

Cover:

I’m confused. Do the UFOs think that I-beams are human? This had better be one heck of an explanatory story.

Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Bill Savage has taken a break from his cross-country journeys to hang out in a Scottish cave with some other resistance men. You’d think that him hanging out in one place for a while, generally being awesome all the time would have the Volgs routed from Scotland within a few weeks. It hasn’t happened yet, though, so Bill’s called in some reinforcements. Lumberjacks! Sadly the woodsmen are cantankerous, and their leader picks a fight with the oilmen who make up the rest of the Scots resistance fighters. Rather than just telling them to grow up and fight the nazis, Bill suggests that they have a boxing match the next day, out in a field with totally open sightlines.

Someone tips off the Volgs about the fight, and they roll in to arrest and hang the fighters. Silk runs back to base and informs the rest of the resistance men, who rush to the nearby prison in the hopes of mounting a rescue that wouldn’t be necessary if the two men hadn’t been so weirdly prideful about their opposing careers.

A plan is quickly hatched to make good use of both team’s strengths. First they roll flaming oil barrels at the wall of the fortress, and then use the cover of the black smoke to rush the walls. What do the woodsmen bring to the table?

And that’s why you don’t fasten a wooden pole against the wall of your fortress. Once inside the resistance men are easily able to gun down the Volgs and rescue their prisoners. With the fortress destroyed and the Volgs defeated, Savage is ready to admit that the whole ‘tipping off the Volgs’ thing was his idea. Because somehow he knew that the Volgs would capture his men leading to a team-building exercise in rescue. And not just, you know, execute them.

But I guess that’s why he’s Bill Savage, and I would have been killed in the first ten minutes of the Volgan invasion.

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd

When we last left Judge Dredd, he’s cornered famed bank robber ‘Mutie the Pig’, who turned out to be his good pal Judge Gibson! (Presumably named after the artist on this story, Ian Gibson) So what happens next? Things get stupid. Really, really stupid.

After Dredd recaps last week’s plot (faked death, faked funeral, real arrest), Gibson makes a plea – don’t send him to Titan, they way he did Rico. Instead, he wants to settle this whole ‘murderous bank robber’ thing like they settled disagreements back at the academy. Which, if this picture is to be believed, involved a boxing ting a buzz-saws attached to strings.

Or maybe futuristic deely-boppers. It’s hard to tell.

Dredd somehow agrees, as if this is a personal grudge that needs to be settled, and not just a regular crime. They head to the hall of justice for their duel, which takes place on the shooting range. It’s pretty standard stuff, although we learn that the only way of stopping a heat-seeker is by shooting another heat seeker, so that they’ll collide. Which is actually pretty clever, come to think of it.

The one interesting note about this fight scene is that the whole thing is narrated by the Principal of the school, the eyepatched Judge Griffin, making his first appearance in this issue:

The idea of the guy calmly explaining the strategy involved in a fight to the death gives the scene just the right kind of creepy vibe that it needs, signalling that Dredd is going to, at some point in the future, stop being just an action strip and start having some actual messages.

Also, and this is a minor thing, at the end of the story Dredd paints over judge Gibson’s name on the honor roll from their graduation year. That year’s listing was Dredd, Dredd, Hunt, Wagner, and Gibson. Dredd’s already killed two of those other four guys (in suspiciously similar circumstances, I might add) – will we ever get a look at Wagner and Hunt?

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)+1=39

Thrill 3 - Shako

It’s a few days since Shako ate Jake, and now he’s getting hungry again. So he saunters over to an Eskimo village and starts pawing through the dump, looking for anything edible. In an amazing coincidence this is the exact village that Eskimo tracker Buck Dollar has stopped at in his search for the Yogi. Hearing about the bear’s whereabouts Buck dismisses his well-armed escort, announcing that he’s going to take down Shako‘the Eskimo Way’ – with a single harpoon!

Um… Buck… you remember the capsule in his gullet, right? The one you can’t risk puncturing without destroying the world? Are harpoons really accurate enough that you want to risk it?

It seems so. The harpoon doesn’t kill Shako, though, just horribly injured, giving him a chance to maul Buck before retreating to lick his wounds.

The CIA men come to rescue Buck, but he announces that he’s too far gone, and wants to use himself as bait for Shako. He has the CIA men dig a hole in the garbage pile for him to hide in, so that Shako will have to come at him from the front. Wait, isn’t this the exact scheme that got redshirt killed? How is it going to be different this time? Oh, because Buck’s using a bazooka, which won’t freeze up the way a rifle might.

Wait, Buck’s bringing a Bazooka? Isn’t the entire point of this story that they can’t just recklessly shoot the yogu because he’s got a doomsday device sitting in his stomach? What the hell do you think a bazooka is going to do to it, morons?!?!

Apparently we’ll never find out, because the strip ends one moment after Buck shoots Shako in the chest with a rocket, extremely killing him.

Yeah. That’s it. And adding insult to injury? According to a rhyme at the bottom of the page, next month the Harlem Heroes are going to be back for more Aeroball Action.

God damn it.

With Buck Dollar’s brutal, gradually fatal mauling and suffocation, that brings the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ to 3 out of 44, or roughly 7%. A pretty pathetic figure when compared to the 100% statistic we were promised.

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

After the disaster that was the last issue of Shako just about anything would cheer me up, and Dan Dare does just that. By being a thing. Dan and his landing party are besieged by living trees, and everyone blames it on Haley, who created bad luck by beating up a space monkey. Which, need I remind you, is a major no-no.

This shame leads Hale to volunteer for a suicide rush against the killer trees, hoping that they can make the smaller trees flee by blowing up the largest tree, which is presumably the leader.

The guess proves to be accurate, since the smaller trees happily sacrifice themselves to block the incoming fire and grenades of the spacemen. Haley knows there’s only one way to make up for the bad luck, and sacrifices himself by letting the big tree grab him before pulling the pins on his grenades.

With the king tree blown to ‘matchsticks’, the other trees clear out, giving Dan a chance to call in a rescue craft.

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

Weird story this week, huh? No twists, no weird premises, just a pretty run-of-the-mill sci-fi action tale. And one that didn’t really reflect the contents of the cover that well, either.

Huh.

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

The mystery of the high-tech Solar Station at the top of Everest is revealed: It’s a Tibetan Army instillation, built to melt the Himalayas, thereby flooding all of India!

Wait, is that how flooding works? I’m confused. Wouldn’t they be just as likely to flood themselves? How could they guarantee that the water would only flow one way down a mountain range?

Anyhoo, their scheme is undone because the latest British climber they’ve taken hostage is none other than John Probe, the MACH Man! He quickly frees the other mountain climbers and fights his way through the facility, destroying the solar focusing device, and then he bodysurfs down the side of the mountain!

That’s not the high point of this adventure, though. No, that comes when Probe, near the bottom of the mountain, finds himself surrounded by Tibetan soldiers with only one weapon at hand – the frozen corpse of a dead mountaineer from the 1924 expedition!

Seriously.

With that little bit of corpse-desecration over with, Probe and the other climbers are able to flee the country with no further interruption from Tibet’s armed forces. I’m not exactly sure how that works, but let’s go with it.

Actually, my biggest question in this issue goes to the Tibetan government. You know, you’re the Tibetan government. If you don’t want people stumbling onto your secret solar weaponry research facility at the top of Everest, stop letting people climb it. It’s your mountain, you can just put a sign in front saying ‘no access’.

You deserved to get taken down by a fake cybernetic James Bond.

Thrill 6 – Future Shock

Kind of a weak story this time around. “The Ultimate Warrior” tells the tale of a bizarre ice planet where two warring factions have been fighting for over ten thousand years! 10,529, to be exact. The story mentions that number a couple of times, actually.

One side, ‘Topan’, is led by Ross, a ‘Warrior King’, who dispatches his genetically-engineered Ultimate Warrior Peron to finally win the war once and for all. How’s he going to do it? By using his superpower – a deadly gaze that kills anyone he looks upon!

After killing the entire enemy army single-handedly (or I guess two-eyed-ly, if you want to be niggling about it), and returns home to a hero’s welcome. At which point Ross has him killed, for fear that Peron’s popularity will threaten his own rule.

And that’s the end. There’s no twist to speak of, other than the fact that Ross kills Peron with a mirror (get it? Because his looks killed people! Not sure how the science of that worked…), which is so weak as a twist I didn’t even give you a chance to guess it.

Final Thoughts

Best Story: MACH Man – This has been such a disappointing issue overall that I was tempted to just not award a best story. Then I remembered Probe clubbing people to death with a human icicle, and I relented. Also I’m interested to see the layers they’re adding to Dredd, now that he’s been around for more than half a year.

Worst Story: Shako– What the hell, Shako? You just threw out the premise in that last issue. The entire story had revolved around that frigging virus capsule, and then we never find out what happened to it? Come on! That’s just insulting. Who cares if he died well? What happened to the populations of Russia and Canada?

Cover:

Are the supercovers just not trying any more? This is just the story of a spaceman fighting tentacle monsters. Where’s the fun in that? I mean, other than the obvious. What happened to the giant pigeon-eating robot that crushed London?

Thrill 1 – Inferno (Tully/Belardinelli/Nuttall)

You’re probably noticing that Invasion, for the first time ever, isn’t leading off this issue. It’s weird, but bear with me. Also the comic finally has proper credits in front of the stories! Yaaay! So from now on I’ll be listing the credits for each story in the order given, generally “Writer/Artist/Letterer”.

So what exactly is ‘Inferno’? Good question, since the title isn’t exactly clear. It seems that ‘Inferno’ is, like Aeroball, a dangerous Futuresport, although this one is based less on basketball, and more on the movie Rollerball. The premise is simple enough – actually, no, it’s ridiculously complicated, but please, bear with me.

Each team has two types of players – jetpack guys, and motorcycle guys. The goal of the game is to throw a ball into a ‘cave’, which each team has situated at either end of the field. The twist? You can only score if you land inside a ‘key’ that surrounds the cave. Also in that key is a ‘cave man’, a giant hulking guy with a club who’s allowed to hit anyone that strays inside the key.

I know what you’re thinking – then what are the motorcycles for? Excellent question. In addition to carrying the ball around the field, each biker has a wrist-mounted grappling hook gun that they’re allowed to fire at opposing jet-packers, creating this game’s equivalent of a ‘tackle’.

Oh, and when they score, it’s called a ‘Cave-in’. Because the ball went in the cave.

Yeah, I know.

As ridiculous and stupid as this sport is, you’d think I’d be a little more interested in seeing where it was going. I would, if it wasn’t for a single fact that I’d held back until now – this ‘Inferno’ story is the sequel to ‘Harlem Heroes’. That’s right, we’re introduced to the game when Giant, Slim, and Zack are in the stands, watching the display. It seems that since we last saw the Heroes their sport has fallen on hard times. Yes, despite the fact that it was a hugely popular sport with millions of dedicated fans and ridiculous themed teams, in just a few months Aeroball has completely disappeared as the world’s fandom has turned to more violent and confusing sports, like Inferno.

You know, the way everyone stopped watching Football and the NFL collapsed the year after the WWF was established. Oh, wait. That didn’t happen, did it? But I guess the people of this future world have a thirst for blood that overpowers all other concerns.

So, wait – Ulysses Cord was right about everything? That’s a twist.

On their way out of the game the Heroes are approached by the manager of the ‘Washington Wolves’, offering them the chance to sub in and fly for the team in their next game. The heroes are famous jet-packers after all, and there seems to be a lot of crossover between the two games’ required skill set.

Still, it’s the first issue of a new story, so the Heroes are going to have to be humiliated a little in order for them to have something to build up to. The humiliation that starts their game is entirely their own fault, though, since they didn’t bother to learn the rules of inferno that well.

First Zack is nailed by the launching ball, because he forgot that it could be coming from any one of a dozen ports around the arena, then Giant wanders into his own team’s key, having forgotten that the only way a biker can score is if he rebounds the ball off of one of the opposing team’s flyers, while that flyer is inside the key.

Wait, really? That’s a rule. Man, this game sure is iconoclastically dangerous, folks.

Yup, the Heroes are going to have their work cut out for them if they want to survive the crazy game of Inferno! Yet somehow I think they’ll manage. Who knows, they may even win the world championship in their first season of even trying the game!

Thrill 2 – Invasion (Lowder/Kennedy/Frame)

Now that Bill Savage has been bumped from the front of the mag, he’s really going to have to step things up if he wants to keep his suddenly precarious position. Who knows, in a couple of weeks he could be trailing behind the Mach Man!

Jumping off on his best foot, this issue has Bill Savage (finally) leaving Scotland in order to take on his biggest job yet – sabotaging the newly completed Channel Tunnel. This is a little weird - I know that in the first issue of the comic referred to all of western Europe being conquered by the Volgs, but it's been nearly 40 issues, and this has got to be the first time anyone but the Brits have been mentioned.

Well, setting the sudden escalation in premise aside, Bill has one goal – to further British isolationism by keeping it from being attached to those filthy frogs! And, of course, the Volgans who’d want to use the tunnel to ship goods.

Bill takes an old fishing boat across the channel to meet up with the French resistance in hopes of coordinating their efforts. They have a brilliant plan – kill a Volgan officer, have Frenchie dress up in his uniform, then pretend to capture Savage and Silk just as the first arms convoy goes through the tunnel, knowing the the Volgs will put all three of them in a jeep, with the prisoners not secured in any meaningful way.

The plan goes off without a hitch, despite Frenchy having single frenchest moustache ever that he doesn’t even bother shaving for the operation-

Naturally Frenchy is killed in the fight, he’s a themed character, and they never last, but Silk and Savage also manage to destroy the tunnel in the most preposterous manner possible. They hop into a VTOL jet and fire missiles into the roof, then hit the eject button while flying under the rushing water.

I’m not sure that’s how reality works, but what the hell. The tunnel’s closed once more, and Bill’s triumph is complete!

Except for the fact that all they did was smash a single hole in the roof of the otherwise intact super-tunnel. A hole that, since the Volgs have the ability to perform underwater construction (the chunnel was flown in segments, then welded in the ocean) it shouldn’t be too much of a chore to patch the hole. Is pumping all the water out going to be a bitch? Sure. But how long is it going to take, really?

Bill’s got bigger things to worry about, though. He’s decided to head back to Scotland?

What? Damn.

Thrill 3 – Tharg’s Future Shocks! (Gosnell/O’Neill/Knight)

Yay! Kevin O’Neil’s finally doing a full story! ‘With it’ readers will recognize him as the artist on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And even though that job is two decades into his future, it’s the best thing ever, and retroactively improves everything he’d ever worked on in the past.

Of course, if some of that turns out to be truly awful, I’m probably going to feel very betrayed and start attacking him.

Ah, the fickleness of being a jerk.

This episode deals with a group of miners searching for minerals on the moon in the year 2200. After digging down a few hundred feet, they make a horrible discovery – the moon has a steel layer under all the rock. Bombing around the planet reveals that this steel extends all the way around the moon – it has a machined solid steel core!

Okay, so are you ready for the twist? Because I guarantee you’re not going to see this one coming. Lock those guesses in, and then look for the reveal right now!

Yup. The moon is a pool ball in a game of intergalactic billiards.

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

Well, the story managed to improve on the cover, which wasn’t a challenge, but at least it was an interesting premise, right?

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

Time for more adventures among the lost planets? This time, deep within an asteroid field, they find a giant satellite! Whose similarity to the death star is not legally actionable!

Seriously. Fox can’t sue over that?

After sensors reveal that it’s manned, Dan takes two landing craft on a scouting mission, only to have one of them blown to pieces! Dan’s ship is hit soon after, and the crew has to flee in their spacesuits! This leads to a surprisingly brutal shot of the men getting blasted to pieces in their escape-

Note that, in addition to the brutality, the man getting shot through the chest is named ‘Skinn’, no doubt a reference to DezSkinn, a name that I know to associate with 2000AD, but am not sure how. He was probably the editor or something.

Yes, Wikipedia could help here, but that’s not what this project is about, man. I could also find out who wrote this episode of Dan Dare, but for some reason they put a credit card on every story but this one.

Once Dan is back on his ship they receive a message from a crazed alien in a dark helmet who announces that they’ve fallen victim to the might of the ‘Starslayers’ Empire’! Yikes. He gives them an ultimatum – flee, or be destroyed!

Dan finds a third option, naturally. He decides to pretend to flee, then have all his men paint their spacesuits black and start floating towards the satellite in secrecy. Actually, that’s not a bad plan. We’ll see how it turns out next week!

Thrill 5 – MACH 1 (Hebden/Lozan&Canos/Potter)

There’s an important moral lesson to be learned in the beginning of this week’s Mach 1. A masked man is stealing something from a guarded country estate, but rather than shooting him the guards choose to satisfy their lust for cruelty and sic the dogs on him. The dogs do manage to kill him, but not quickly enough to prevent him from tossing his loot over an electrified fence to a waiting motorcycle.

Luckily Probe is headed towards the house at that exact moment, sets to chasing the motorcyclists up a mountain path. He’s able to kill one of the riders with a branch he grabs from a tree, but the other one escapes on a stashed hang-glider! Probe drives off a cliff and swims after the thief, but can’t make it in time to keep the waiting submarine from the hanglider landed on from getting away!

What was stolen? The information on how to create hyperpowered Mach Men! Wow, they really should have shot that guy, huh?

A few days later Probe is almost killed by a piece of falling stone while walking down the street. He runs up to the roof, but doesn’t catch the person who threw it at him. Why doesn’t he catch the culprit? Because he’s a ridiculous sexist. You see, on the way up the stairs, he bumps into this woman on the way down.

Yup. They gave her a line. Which means she’s the world’s first-ever Mach Woman. And presumably a Russian spy.

His sexism only lasts a little while, when after a quick car chase he sees the same woman try to push a truck over on to him with her bare hands. Finally Probe figures it out, and chases after her into the crowd.

Thrill 6 – Judge Dredd (Wagner/Gibson/Jacob)

Oh, John Wagner – it’s nice finally seeing your name on a thing. Also I’m a little proud of myself for being able to identify Ian Gibson’s art in the last few issues. And what’s he getting to draw this week? Crazy monsters!

They’re called the Troggies, and they live under Mega-City 1, surfacing only to kidnap regular humans! Dredd follows their tracks down into the crumbling remnants of an old subway system, presumably New York’s. Does Boston have a subway?

The second he gets underground Dredd is waylaid by a horde of the Troggies! He puts up a good fight, but there’s simply too many of them, and they manage to capture him! Dredd is brought befor their leader, one ‘Slick Willy’.

He explains their nefarious scheme – the Troggies have placed bombs under the foundations of the city, and tomorrow they’re going to detonate them, causing the entire metropolis to crumble!

Hold on a second – I don’t care how many trogs there are, Mega-City 1 stretches from Georgia to Montreal. It’s tens of thousands of square miles. I don’t doubt that they could do something like drop a sector, but the entire city? Come on.

Of course, we haven’t reached a point where they’ve invented the Sector divisions yet, so I guess everyone’s still a little confused about how big Mega-City 1 is.

Although, what with John Wagner being the co-creator of Dredd, you’d think he… You know what? I’m letting it go. Dredd will fix things next week, and this won’t be an issue. I do hope there’s a more coherent vision of Mega-City 1 in the future.

When ambushed, Dredd only managed to kill one Troggie, but I'm still counting it, as they're technically human, despite their mutations.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)+1=39

Final Thoughts

Ooh, check it out! From the back page, here’s a diagram of Dan Dare’s ‘Space Fort’!

Best Story: Judge Dredd– Don’t care about the bad geography, I’m just really happy there was a mutant with a pompadour who said ‘Daddy-O’. You win, Dredd.

Worst Story: Invasion – Just too stupid. Oh my god was it stupid. Ejecting through water, flooding the Chunnel, the pointlessness of the sabotage. Just too much stupidity.

Cover:

Now this is the kind of Supercover I like. Crazy, inventive, a promising an unexpected story inside. Is it the future? Is it space? Both? Only time will tell!

Thrill 1 – Inferno (Tully/Belardinelli/Nuttall)

When we left the Heroes they were having a hell of a time of it, mostly because they didn’t bother to learn the rules of the sport they signed up for before actually playing it.

They’re quick studies though, and before you know they’ve learned the ins and outs of hitching a ride on the back of a motorcycle to speed into the score zone, and deflecting their foes’ grappling hooks to avoid being captured.

Yes, the game of inferno is very stupid. So stupid that the motorcyclists regularly drive up the walls of the arena and do circuits during the game. So let’s move along.

The Heroes win the game, and become fan-favorites in the process. The story doesn’t waste any time introducing us to the villains of the piece, a pair of corrupt gamblers who like to fix Inferno games:

The immediately plan to bribe/threaten the Wolves Manager into throwing a few games. You know what? As contentious a relationship as I’ve had with the Heroes in the past, I’m ecstatic that they’re not going to jerk us around with an endless, pointless, mystery this time.

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd (Wagner/McMahon/Jacob)

Restating the incredible underestimation in scope that appeared last time, Dredd begins by explaining to the audience that the Troggies have spread explosives throughout the ancient ‘subway tunnels beneath Mega-City 1’. By which we can only assume he means the old New York subway system – but since New York is just a tiny fraction of the size of – you know what? I said I was going to let this go, and I am.

Dredd pulls the second oldest trick in the book to escape from custody – he fakes a fight with another prisoner and then lets himself get punched over near some laser drilling equipment. After slicing two troggies in half he’s off to save the day!

Yes, you’re not seeing things. Apparently the subway cars of old New York are still totally functional (despite having a city built over them) to the point that even the lights on board them work just fine. Dredd uses these lights to blind all the troggies at the destruction ceremony, giving him a chance to keep Willy from pressing the detonator without having to actually kill anyone else.

So the Big Meg (or at least a small fraction of it) is saved, and the Judges are now going to be eternally vigilant of the Troggy threat. Or possibly they’ll just never be mentioned again.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (39)+2=41

Thrill 3 – Invasion (Finley-Day/Pino/Frame)

Savage waits by the shore with the rest of his resistance men for the arrival of the regular arms shipment from Canada, but when it arrives it brings with it a surprise passenger… King Charles’ son, Prince John! It seems the noble snuck aboard in the hopes of seeing Britain again. That seems incredibly selfish and troubling, especially when a Volgan jet arrives and blows the sub out of the water, stranding John in old Blighty, where thousands of Nazis are looking to catch him as the ultimate PR coup!

Suddenly Silk and Savage find themselves with a new mission – getting the young Prince back to the safety of Canada!

Not a lot of story this week – but I assume they’re setting up something huge, so who’s complaining?

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

Screw you, Supercover story. If you want to know why, click on it and read for yourself. But you’re better off not.

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

You’ll notice the odd credits at the top there – despite all other stories getting a full credit sheet, Dan Dare still only has an artist listed. Weird, huh? Is it because these colour spreads were done so far in advance and they didn’t want to alter them when the new policy came in? I guess we’ll see in an issue or two, when it’s been a month since they started actually listing the writers, artists and letterers.

The black-spacesuit attack on the Not Death Star goes really well, allowing Dan and company to quickly overwhelm their opposition and take control of the doom sphere. The garrison leaders has a few threats left to utter with his dying breaths. He explains that the Starslayers have an empire spanning a dozen worlds, each with a native populace ground under their heel.

This kind of stuff is basically catnip to Dan, who announces that their next mission is to take their single ship and overrule twelve entire planets full of heavily armed psychopaths. I understand his crew’s skepticism at the idea, but I’m excited by what this means for the continuing serial aspects of this strip.

Before any hard and fast decision can be made about their plans Dan’s Space Fort is attacked by a set of SS battleships:

That’s right – the doom sphere got off a distress signal before the crew was mercilessly slaughtered. Dan’s oddly pleased with this development – it means that he doesn’t have to spend any more time convincing his men: They’re already at war with the Starslayers!

Thrill 5 – MACH 1 (Hebden/Lozano&Canos/Potter)

Probe picks up just where he left off – chasing down the MACH-WOMAN (or MACH 2, I guess). They run down into a subway platform, and the merciless female tries to delay Probe by pushing a child onto the tracks in front of an upcoming train, certain that his western sentimentality will force him to intervene.

Her amateur profiling proves accurate, and the time it takes him to save the kid and stop the train without hurting anyone gives MACH 2 a chance to set up a trap further down the tunnel. Finding himself at gunpoint, Probe does the natural thing – he grabs a jackhammer and throws it at the crate she’s standing on. This leads to a wrestling match, as he tries to knock the gun (a ‘silenced’ revolver misidentified as a Browning Hi-Power) out of her hand. Probe gets her on the ground and is ready to put her lights out for good, but then he hesitates and winds up thrown aside.

MACH 2 grabs the gun and moves to shoot Probe, but can’t bring herself to do it – despite the computer in her ear telling her to complete the mission, she can’t forget that Probe went easy on her when he had no reason to. This, it seems, is motive enough for her to surrender and volunteer to defect to the west.

Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?

After a quick check of her programming and abilities, Sharpe sends both MACHs back through the iron curtain, on a mission to destroy the east’s MACH plant once and for all!

They head back on the amazingly un-stealthy method of a public train, which leads to them being cornered by an indeterminate country’s secret police:

Okay, that’s just wonderful.

Thrill 6 – Future Shock (Flynn/Ewins&McCarthy/Aldrich)

In the distant future of 2142, all of humanity’s needs will be tended to by helper robots – but now and then the robots go wrong, and need to be repaired! Which keeps the robot repairmen busy. At least it does until someone invents a self-repairing robot!

Knowing that they’ll soon be out of a job, Darryl and Zak, who may or may not be sterotypical gay leathermen, based on their dialogue and choice of outfit for infiltration, which seem more like something catwoman would wear-

Also, note the ‘Map of City’

-decide that their only option is to blow up the factory and kill the inventor! Which seems like a really fast jump to criminality to me, but I guess the future’s morality is alien and awful.

They succeed in shooting the doctor in the head, but then find themselves attacked by the prototype self-repairing robot! What’s the twist? Find out next time – this is a two-parter!

Final Thoughts

Best Story: MACH 1 – It’s rare to see MACH 1 in this position, but I’ve got to say I enjoyed how incredibly fast this story is moving, and the attempts at widening the mythology of the MACHverse are appreciated.

Worst Story: The Supercover Story – Screw that thing. Seriously.

I'll present one of my favorite moments of Grandpa Simpsons nonsense, from the Critic Crossover Episode "A Star is Burns":

I'd never given the line much thought beyond what a perfect example of old-timey gibberish it is. Then, listening to the radio one day, I heard reference to a Hog's Head being a size of barrel used in liquor production. Naturally this meant it was time for some calculations!

I couldn't find an official exact conversion, but it seems that the hog's head is about 60 gallons, While a Rod is a little over 16 feet.

This means that, the way Grandpa likes it, his car uses up 60 gallons of gasoline to travel 640 feet. This works out to 480 gallons of gasoline per mile traveled, or 0.002 MPG.

Does Grandpa drive a cruise ship? Or some kind of rocket?

The Two Hundred Fifty-Ninth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Programme 19 (2-July-77)

Programme 20 (9-July-77)

Programme 21 (16-July-77)

Programme 22 (23-July-77)

Programme 23 (30-July-77)

Programme 24 (6-Aug-77)

Programme 25 (13-August-77)

Programme 26 (20-August-77)

Programme 27 (27-August-77)

Programme 31 (24-September-77)

The Last Episode of Scream Season 2 is Now Live

Programme 32 (1-October-77)

Scream Season 2 Retrospective

Programme 33 (8-October-77)

Programme 34 (15-October-77)

Programme 35 (22-October-77)

Programme 36 (29-October-77)

Programme 37 (5-Novemeber-77)

Simpsons Math!