Nothing truly great in this bunch, but at lot of stories you won't find anywhere else...
Black Siddha by Pat Mills and Simon Davis
(21 episodes / 3 series between Megs 202 and 252)
What was this? A rare fairly straight-up superhero
story. Written by Pat ‘I HATE superheroes’ Mills, which gives it a certain
flavour. Specifically, that our human hero Rohan is both even more reluctant
than most traditional superheroes, but then also even more seduced by the power
of Black Siddha than the same trad heroes.
Importantly, this is all set in the UK (in the suburbs of a
non-specific town/city), and pretty much all the characters are Hindus, one
assumes the 20something leads are 2nd-generation immigrants, which
informs much of the story, setting and characterisations.
Now, here in the 2020s it pretty much just isn’t done to let
two White British creators tell a story about people from a different
community. And to an extent, the story probably does suffer a bit from not
having that perspective on the top level. On the other hand, Pat Mills likely
does more research than just about anyone else in comics before he commits to
writing something, and of course Simon Davis works a lot with models, so
clearly there is a lot of first-person perspective and advice going on behind
the scenes. (Although it is a bit jarring when some of those models are
Bollywood stars.)
All of which leaves you with something rather unique – a
mainstream British comic about British Hindus. And it’s not a biography or a
slice-of-life story or a ‘racism is BAD you guys’ meaningful story. It’s
superheroes. Which means, callow youth torn between fighting bad guys, saving
the day, finding love, negotiating family life and all that jazz. Coupled with
a whole bunch of ‘learning some cool/weird stuff about Hindu mythology’. If you
want British-Indian Spider-Man, this is the comic for you.
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| That IS a pretty natty helmet. Words by Mills; Art by Davis |
Of course, like about 80% of Spider-Man comics, it’s only ‘good’ rather than ‘spectacular’.
Dreddworld relevance? None at all.
Writing: 8/10 Mills knows how to juggle characters
and plot and mythology and stuff. It’s fun, occasionally funny, and generally
interesting. But I would say that overall, he hasn’t conjured a story and cast
of characters who are SO compelling you’re aching to read each episode.
Art: 7/10 Like a lot of 2000AD/Megazine painted artists, the effect is
often most impressive when showing people alongside weird fantasy business. An
awful lot of this story is set in and around suburban streets and
newsagents’. There’s also quite a lot of
gurning and stiff poses, which matches the talking heads of it all. Still, it’s
inherently very good art!
Impact: 5/10 It ran for three series, which isn’t nothing. And it’s decent.
Overall score: 20/30
Has it been reprinted? It has! In the floppies attached to Megs 339 and 346 and 359, and also in Hachette's 2000AD Ultimate Collection volume 151. That's titled Sláine: DragonTamer, so you'd be forgiven if you missed it...
Kenny Who? by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy
(Vol 1 issues 1-3; Megs 228-229)
What was this? This probably shouldn’t count, but as
it appeared in the very first issue of the Meg I’m giving it special treatment.
Anyway, this was the further adventures of Kenny Who? The Cal-Hab stand-in for
Cam Kennedy, and his misadventures in Mega City 1. The character originated in
a much-loved 1985 Judge Dredd story, that was massively prescient of
AI-generative tech. The artist is good, his work is fed into a computer; the
computer reproduces his work to order, and so the artist a) is no longer needed
and b) does not get paid for any of the work produced that follows his style.
Welcome to the 2020s!
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| COULD THIS BE A META-JOKE? Words by Wagner; Art by Kennedy |
Kenny Who is displeased with this turn of events. For two
more stories! He has run-ins with Judge Dredd, jokes are made about his surname
(which includes the ?), and in general it is clear that Dredd is sympathetic to
the man who is more of an unlucky nuisance than anything worth his time and
effort. Cam Kennedy is of course not just Scottish, but a resident or Orkney,
so like super-mega-Scottish. He and (also Scottish-ish) writer John Wagner have
lots of fun exaggerating this exaggeration. To some extent the two Megazine
stories seem to be more about them having fun than them adding any new ideas to
that instant-classic original. And why not. But they are not as good as that
first tale.
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| Judge Dredd is taller than you. A lot taller. Words by Wagner; Art by Kennedy |
Dreddworld relevance? It’s so Dredd-world relevant, these are arguably Judge Dredd stories. But, that first sequel did run under the Kenny Who? banner, so I’m dropping it in on a technicality. Sorry to folks who love Kennedy’s art that it’s not higher up the ranking!
Writing: 7.5/10 (the original is a 10/10, mind)
Art: 8/10 The first sequel is better than the second, for whatever that’s
worth, when it felt like Kennedy had more to prove. His designs for the Who?
family are just wonderful.
Impact: 5/10 These are very fondly remembered by the readers. One suspects
even Judge Dredd would remember Kenny Who?
Overall score: 20.5/30
Has it been reprinted? It has! The whole thing is in the Art of Kenny Who? collection, along with a bunch of other Cam Kennedy Dredds (mostly his more recent, colour efforts). In case you are wondering, the original Kenny Who? tale is in Case Files 10, and his 3rd (and so far final) story is in Case Files 41. But the second story is not in any Case Files. (because it's a Kenny Who? story, not a Judge Dredd one...)
Realm of the Damned by Alec Worley and Pye Parr
(Megs 369-376)
What was this? Like, a Death Metal album brought to
life. That’s more or less the explicit set up. Perhaps more famously, it’s the
comic with the EXTREME swearing, nudity and violence. (Although of course the
violence but doesn’t stick out as much in the context of the Megazine). It
caused quite a stir when it ran, this comic! Prety much entirely because of the
swearing, although the bit where a newly-reborn demon quite visibly pisses
blood onto a minion was a contributing factor.
So anyway, for my taste the extremity is most of the point.
I mean, if the idea is to imagine the emotion at the heart of Death Black Metal (two subgenres I know almost nothing about, so apologies if speaking out of turn), then
the comic has to try to hit those beats. I have to suspect that one bit of
pleasure people get from listening to the music is the transgressive stuff,
which is a lot about Satanism but I think also describing acts of bloody
violence. Swearing, of course, is not new to rock music. So maximum thrill
points to the creators here for managing to hit those levels of offence – if
they hadn’t annoyed at least some readers, I guess the project would’ve counted
as a failure?
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| Are you not Words by Worley; Art by Parr |
Of course I haven’t talked about the actual story – and after the first couple of episodes, that really is the focus. Honestly it’s fine if not amazing. Again, this might be part of the point? I doubt Black Metal exists to try to tell new stories, more to tell the very old ones in a certain way. So here we have a world in which, basically, monsters (vampires, werewolves, mummies etc) have taken over, and humans exist mostly as cattle. That part of the set-up is a bit obscure if I’m honest. Not quite sure such a world would allow for teenagers forming a metal band.
Anyway, said teens manage to re-animate the long-dead corpse
of uber-demon Balaur, who immediately ants to kill and maim humans wantonly,
and generally take charge over all thee other monsters. Who respond by hiring
the last surviving van Helsing (literally) to fight back. There’s a mix of
minor political intrigue and major blood-letting. None of it quite living up to
the frankly astonishing visual ideas in episodes 1 and 2, which focus on that
amazing jaw-bone cage thingy.
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| That is a seriously cool horror artefact. Art by Pye Parr |
Van Helsing, who ends up being our hero, has to make some pretty intense personal sacrifices, and meets some fun characters, but it’s all building up to an inevitable confrontation. Again, it’s baked into the nature of the story, so not a criticism! But honestly, my excitement waned as it went on, and I confess I have not bought any of the sequels stories (which didn’t run in the Megazine).
Dreddworld relevance? None.
Writing: 7.5 / 10 There’s strong commitment to the
whole scene, and plenty of fun nasty ideas.
Art: 9 / 10 Pye Parr is ON FIRE in this series, possibly the first
long-form thing he’d done since quitting as Tharg’s Design-Droid-in-Chief? So
many gnarly character designs, so many glorious gore scenes, and the man can
draw some epic werewolves. (Scary to think that he’d only get better in future.
Check out Petrol Head!)
Impact: 4 / 10 Look, I think overall people didn’t love this one, but it
sure got the letters page jumping for a few months.
Overall score: 20.5 / 30
Has it been reprinted? It has! In a fine hardback
collection from Werewolf Press. There were two sequels, and you can buy thewhole thing in a shockingly cheap collection. There’s also a ‘motion comic’animation of just the first story, I think? Haven’t seen it!
Young Middenface by Alan Grant and various artists
(23 episodes spread across Volume 4.11 – Meg 243)
What was this? The adventures of preteen / teen Middenface McNulty during the time when anti-mutant sentiments got worse and worse, building up to the early stages of the war as seen originally in Portrait of a Mutant. It’s kind of facile to compare this to a sort of action-adventure version of 1930s Germany, with Mutants as a stand-in for Jews (and other persecuted groups), but I’m doing it anyway. (If I knew more about Scottish history (or, really, anything about it at all) there might be more of a parallel to the highland clearances or general English colonial evils.)
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| And there IS room for some poignancy here, too. |
The obvious difference is that the Mutants understand that their heading into a fight vs extermination really very quickly, which means the story soon ends up moving into a phase of guerillas hiding out and getting into skirmishes from afar. As well as the usual in-fighting within the mutant strongholds.
There are some fun new mutants around; I especially enjoy
the mutant who is super-duper handsome, rightly recognised as a rare mutation!
The actual plotlines and storytelling and such is all decent, if never quite
matching the heights of the best eras of Strontium Dog. Middenface as a 2000AD
version of a Beano character is very much my thing, but of course it’s not
quite like that as there’s a narrative to contend with as well, sadly we don’t
get many one-page gag strips about Middenface being cheeky to the norms and
getting slippered at the end.
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| As this cover implies, the series is also a proto-Regened version of a 2000AD story featuring kids, like an angry, more violent Beano. Art by Mark Harrison |
The whole thing builds up to the point of war, and can’t
really go further without eating into ‘Portrait of a Mutant’. There is an
ending to the story of the new characters we meet in the series. I’m slightly
sad that the art duties went from Patrick Goddard (doing good work, but still
early days for him so not quite at Savage / Rogue trooper heights) to John
Ridgway, finally getting to draw a good Scotland-set kids adventure comic, and
Shaun Thomas, who is not a bad artist but is so much more into vibes than
coherence that I kind of lost interest by the end. Ho hum.
Dreddworld relevance? I’m gonna say none, and never mind that technically Middenface has crossed over into Mega City 1 at least once.
Writing: 7.5/10
Art: 7/10 (an average)
Impact: 6/10 This feels like an experiment that worked, and was allowed to
run its natural course. And people liked it, didn’t they? I did!
Overall score: 20.5 / 30
Has it been reprinted? It has! In the 2000AD Ultimate Collection 117: Middenface McNulty
Death Cap by TC Eglington and Boo Cook
(2 series (so far) across Megs 439-475 and counting)
What was this? The one set out in the Cursed Earth,
following the (mostly sad and disgusting) exploits of ex-Texas City Judge Goya,
and her run in with a new semi-sentient version of Grubb’s Disease -the
mushroom menace that turns people into walking mushroom farms. It’s seriously
weird!
Very hard not to think of this as a spiritual sequel to Blunt.
It’s by the same creators, and is also about the horror (but in a fun, gloopy
way) of the interaction between the natural world and the humans who blunder
into it. Where Blunt is pink and green and wet, Death Cap is yellow and brown
and dry.
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| Time for the hero to dig up her old gun... Scenario by Eglington; Art by Cook |
It's also a sad and angry tale of revenge. Our hero, ex-Texas City Judge Goya, sees her family done in by the evil mushroom-infected mutant bad guys, and proceeds to chase them across the Cursed Earth, all while tackling her own experiences with the same mushroom disease. The Western-flavoured revenge stuff is fine, not really doing much new; the evil fungus mutant - who looks oddly like D.R. with his Hollywood beret/monocle - is a bit one-note, but the occasional side-bars into the idea of mushroom/human/habitat symbiosis is genuinely interesting. Series 2 is pursuing this angle more, and has my attention, but it's too early to say how it'll end up.
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| I can't emphasise enough the gross body horror of this series, which takes Ezquerra's original Grubb's disease look and says "Nah mate, too easy on the eye." Art by Cook |
Dreddworld relevance? It’s set in the Cursed Earth, starring Judges (albeit from Texas City not MC1) and everyone’s favourite killer fungus, to boot.
Writing: 7.5/10
Art: 8/10
Impact: 5/10 A second series is running right now, and we may get a trilogy
out of it, or at least continued Bio-horror fun from Eglington and Cook.
Overall score: 20.5/30
Has it been reprinted? It has not – and with both the
floppy and Hachette collections basically done, this is the sort of mid-tier
(but actually pretty decent) story that may slip through the collections
netting. ☹
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