This is what happens when you get top-tier creators doing their job well, even if they're not perhaps quite as inspired as on their very best works.
22. The Bendatti Vendetta by Robbie Morrison and John
M. Burns
(Vol 4 issues 13-18; Megs 209-211 and 234-236)
What was this? I don’t know if the phrase
“Eurothriller” is a) real and b) has specific connotations, but it surely
describes this series above anything else. It’s the one about people who want
revenge, but instead of hunting down their own targets, they join a secret
society who assigns them different targets, making the whole thing less
personal but I guess more efficient? When I type that out it sounds a bit mad
but honestly, when you read it it’s compelling and holds surprising levels of
emotional resonance.
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| Violence that is both brutal and just a bit classy Art by John Burns |
I guess the key is that most of the people who are the targets of the revenge are mobsters or otherwise ‘important’ people who would be difficult for any one person to track down and kill, so having a wider organisation to back you helps with all that.
Anyway, the whole thing is super stylish, involves a fair
bit of foreign travel, and is all beautifully painted by John Burns in a way
that reminds me of European comics. You know, a bit adult, a bit sinister, and
perhaps chiefly the sort of comics art you can imagine casual or even
non-comics fans finding attractive and easy to read.
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| Lots of strong work being done by facial expressions in this series. Words by Morrison; Art by Burns |
Page by page, I don’t exactly fall in love with the characters, and on a personal level I tend to find revenge stories un-engaging. But, certainly based on the evidence of top-tier comics and movies, they can make for really excellent fiction. I think the world and her sister all agree that revenge is never going to satisfy anyone, and only involves sadness and death. So, within that, is where the better storytellers get to explore fatalism, the impossibility of changing your mind, or getting over your grief, or what have you. I’m not sure Morrison and Burns are quite at the very very top tier of revenge fiction, but the basic idea of this story is super interesting, and the panache with which they tackle it is excellent. Very much worth a read.
Dreddworld relevance? None.
Writing: 8/10
Art:10/10
Impact: 5/10 Three well-liked series and a reprint collection is not to be
sniffed at, but this still feels like quite an outlier in Megazine history,
rather than a trend-setter.
Overall score: 24/30
Has it been reprinted? It has! In one nifty collection.
21. Strange & Darke by John Smith and Colin
MacNeil
(Just the one series to date, Megs 319-323)
What was this? A Brit-Cit spin-off from Delvin Waugh,
featuring Det. Insp. Jericho Strange (the one with the head that’s actually a
Sheep skull (or is it a horse or goat maybe?), and his new partner, Becky
Darke, who investigate weird goings on. In the case of this one story, those
weird goings on involve satanists in future Wales enacting a black orgy to
summon a demon.
It came relatively soon after Devlin Waugh’s adventures in Hell, in the stories Vile Bodies and All Hell which featured perhaps the most sexually graphic/horrible art yet printed in the Megazine, which is saying something. This new series dials that UP to show a satanic priest getting black demon spunk on his face. Yet somehow it’s kind of demure? I dunno.
Anyway, this series was a hoot. For a John Smith comic, it
was very straightforward to read and follow, the characters have distinct
personalities but no great pretensions, and the story plays out neatly and
tidily and generally one wanted more. Sadly, it was the last thing Smith
completed for the Meg, and for various reasons, he’s not been back since. Went
out on a real high!
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| Remember to read Strange's dialogue in a Welsh accent! Words by Smith; Art by MacNeil |
Dreddworld relevance? I mean, Devlin Waugh continuity feels VERY different to Dredd continuity, even though they absolutely co-exist. But yes, this is a Dreddworld strip.
Writing: 9/10 I guess not quite peak Smith in terms
of weird horror, but it totally is peak Smith in terms of basic scripting
prowess.
Art: 9/10 Full-on cartoony pen-and-ink MacNeil is not my absolute favourite
of his styles, but this is the peak of that style, and he’s drawing some weird
and amusing things to boot.
Impact: 5/10 Pretty sure everyone wanted more, but sadly it was not to be.
Overall score: 23/30
Has it been reprinted? It has! In a collection alongside the first
series of Storm Warning, and in Hachette 17 Weird Science
20. Surfer by John Wagner and Colin MacNeil
(2 series across Megs 439-454)
What was this? A spiritual return to Chopper, but not
actually featuring the man himself. Instead, Wagner constructs a crime-based
tale centred around the son of one of Chopper’s old friends/rivals on the
skysurfing circuit. It’s a pretty classic Wagner tale of a person you really
like just not having the best time of it, ground down by poverty, the madness
of Mega City 1, and the way small-time crooks just keep preventing someone from
taking an honest job.
With lots of skysurfing.
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| Skysurfing in Mega City 1 is inherently cool! Art by Tom Foster |
As a change, the surfing bit of the story isn’t based around a contest, but a movie of a contest, and then rapidly a heist/crime situation. The excuses to show radical skysurfing moves are plentiful, and it’s always great that Wagner pushes himself to do something different with the basic set up. But there’s no escaping the fact that one misses the comedy inherent to a future sports story with Wagner commentators, and that the emotional ups and downs never quite live up to Chopper’s original escape / competition stories. The framing device of Zayn Perks trying to rescue his Dad from an evil Block-based gangster services the narrative, but doesn't add anything Wagner has not tackled before - and better - in the pages of Judge Dredd.
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| It's not easy, making a made-up technologically impossible sport look difficult Words by Wagner; Art by MacNeil |
Dreddworld relevance? It’s set in Mega City 1, and the Judges are a constant threat.
Writing: 8/10
Art: 8/10 MacNeil is both on excellent from and also maybe a bit uninspired? Or maybe I’m just spoiled by his consistency?
Impact: 7/10 I mean, it got an immediate sequel and a collection. It
remains to be seen if Zayn Perks lingers in readers’ minds, but I think the
story itself will be one people remember.
Overall score: 23/30
Has it been reprinted? It has!
19. Shimura by Robbie Morrison and a bunch of artists
(14 stories of various lengths, spread across Vol 2 issues 37-77, Vol 3 issues 14-35,
and finally bowing out in Megs 224-243. Oh, and the 1996 Mega Special. The
series span off into Inaba/Hondo City Justice, which hit the ranking a
while back)
What was this? The long-running saga of Shimura,
Hondo-City Judge and very-soon-turned outcast. We start off with our hero
training up a rookie Judge, Inaba, who is pointedly the first female Judge in
Hondo City. Shimura himself is presented as one of the few (only?) non-corrupt
Judges. So the series quite quickly becomes about Inaba fighting prejudice (and
corruption) on the inside, with help from Shimura fighting corruption from the
outside. This ‘corruption’ is mostly about Yakuza/organized crime / ancient
family ties, with a bit of techno-futurist computer stuff thrown in. And yes,
if that sounds like a double cliché of how the West perceived Japan in the
1990s, you’d be right. And yet…
…I think it’s a reasonable proposition to say that Shimura
is THE best ‘what’s it like in a non-Mega City 1 Judge system’ comic that the
Meg has yet produced. It’s perhaps not the highest bar, but there IS a bar. And
the reason Morrison and co clear it is because they create a compelling set of
characters, and, over a natural progression of timer and stories, build up
their own world of stories to tell that are almost never stories you’d imagine
reading in the pages of Judge Dredd (except for the couple where Dredd himself
shows up).
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| Art by Frank Quitely |
The art does a lot of the heavy lifting. Frank Quitely made a HUGE splash with his work on the opening, scene-setting series. Then we get the likes of Colin MacNeil turning it all noirish. Then a combo of Duke Mighten, Simon Fraser and Robert McCallum all being stylish and turning up the colour and violence in exciting ways.
Another part of Shimura’s success may be that, alongside Armitage, it was one of the few Dreddworld stories that had SOME backing in canon Judge Dredd comics. Morrison doesn’t refer to any pre-existing Judges (I don’t think?), but is leaning a bit on some ideas, and certainly costumes/customs, as presented in ‘Our Man in Hondo’. Now, THAT story is remembered as being one of the ‘why are we still doing racist voiceovers in 1989?’ classics of John Wagner. But I think also remembered as being a pretty good story with excellent art, and the kind of Japanese stereotyping we get is not so very racist? Maybe?
Morrison is definitely being much more culturally sensitive,
although one does wonder how much time he had actually spent in Japan, vs how
much time he had spent reading a handful of Manga and maybe a few books, and no
doubt watching yakuza movies.
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| Ah, it's about honour, then... Words by Morrison; Art by Mighten |
ANYWAY, you can (kind of) ignore a lot of that. Yes, the
tropes that lean on ‘Japan is super sexist’ and ‘Japan is secretly run by
gangsters’ (and other bits from Frank Miller comics) are pretty heavy handed,
especially at first, but really quite quickly the stories push past this and more
into weird sci-fi future crime / future crime-fighting stuff that is what Judge
Dredd is kind of all about, and Morrison & Co manage to make Shimura all
about, only in a really quite different environment.
Shimura himself, and indeed Inaba, get to be cool and
competent, increasingly so as the series goes on – but also, in the Morrison
style, quite flawed and very much aware of their emotions, which is upending of
some clichés at least.
Dreddworld relevance? It's set in Dredd's time and world. A couple of series at the very end even feature the big man himself, as well as the return of a recurring Dredd villain or two.
Writing: 7/10 It’s not as good as Nikolai Dante or
Shakara, but this averages out as good solid comics.
Art: 9/10 Not every artist who tackled Shimura was a winner, but it has a
really high hit rate.
Impact: 7/10 It’s no small achievement that this series kept going through
3 different iterations of the Meg, AND got its own spin-off, and had a couple
of crossovers with Dredd himself.
Overall score: 23/30
Has it been reprinted? It has! There are three Rebellion collections. The first, covering early Shimura, might be out of print. Hondo City Law and Hondo City Justice reprint some of the early stuff, but mostly cover the later series, along with spin-offs Inaba and Hondo-City Justice, and then there’s a brace of Hachette Mega Collections, 60 and 61.
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