Prog 85

The fateful words "Important news for all readers" appear on the cover of this week's 2000 A.D. and I immediately turn the page to find out what is coming. A merger with Starlord, and a slew of new stories slated for next week have me reinvigorated, and although we will be saying goodbye to several stories this week, I know that what comes next will be some of the most famous stories to appear in 2000 A.D. The future is bright, but before all that I remind myself to stay in the moment and appreciate what I have in front of myself now. It is time to carefully comb through the final panels and words of some of the current stories and put out of my mind what the future holds. The future will come soon enough, let's not rush towards it too fast. As a fifty-year-old man, I can't afford to waste the day ahead of me, let alone jump weeks in advance!  

Prog 85

7th October 1978

Dave Gibbons is back on art for Dan Dare and the strip immediately gains a radiance we have not seen for some time. The murky gloom that has swirled and swallowed the characters recently is lifted to reveal the story underneath, making for a fast-paced, and dare I say it, exciting read. 

Dare is facing the skeleton of Moebius, the last of the Golden Ones, who is communicating to him through the medium of the kid travelling with Dare. As Dare grabs the skeleton it falls to pieces in his hands, leaving Moebius to use the kid as a mouthpiece to fill Dare, and the reader, in on the back story of this mysterious alien vessel. 

The ship was originally sent to explore, seek, find, and learn, the mysteries of the universe. The mission started well enough, but plague arrived onboard the ship, and soon all of the Golden Ones had fallen. Only Moebius remained and in attempting to keep the mission alive he planted his mind into the ship's computer. Now through his thoughts, he continues to control the ship. 

At first, things went well - until the ship began to deteriorate. With no crew, the defects could not be rectified. The ship became an instrument of thoughtless destruction, sweeping up and capturing ships across the universe.  

It was only when Moebius formed a telepathic link with the kid that a solution offered itself. Finally, Moebius could destroy his own ship. 

By turning off the master switch, the ship would be without power. It would have a few seconds of life, and then anything could happen, most probably ending in an explosion that would destroy the ship. 

Being a man of action, Dan Dare doesn't dillydally and pulls the master switch right away. With that, it becomes a race against time, and Dare and his small band make a dash back to the Eagle craft. 

There is little chance of them making it, especially when they encounter the primitive wild men that they first met when they came aboard. They fight their way through, and we have our first casualty as Hitman is struck from behind. He appears OK, but he quietly tells Dare that he is not going to make it. Fighting a rearguard action, he urges Dare to make for the Eagle craft.

Arriving at the craft Dare is in for a shock as he finds all the crew dead - killed by the very same wild men that they are now fighting outside. 

With the airlocks threatening to close at any moment, Dare speeds towards an escape. He makes it outside the alien ship, but seconds later it evaporates in a tremendous explosion, shattering Dare's own Eagle craft. 

The final panels of the story show Dare still alive, unconscious and floating on some space wreckage in his spacesuit. Alone in the infinity of space, the captions ponder if this is the end of Dare, a thought that I, as a reader, share.

We have had our ups and downs over the last few weeks, but this final issue pulls everything together in a pleasing manner that has me holding Dan Dare in high regard. There were still questions left unanswered, which left the door open for a return, and these questions kept me quickly turning pages wanting more. I always hold the artwork of Dave Gibbons in high esteem, and his work here brought a lightness to the strip that had previously been gloomy and heavy. The name Moebius was a curious choice for the alien, and I did wonder as I read it if the name was inspired by the French comic artist with the same name. We'll never know, but I'd like to think so. Dan Dare has delivered a variety of stories since the beginning of 2000 A.D. but never settled into the groove of a particular type. As such, each story felt completely different from the last, as Dan Dare appeared in a series of guises. He always looked the same, but with his character shifting with each story, the stories themselves remained frustratingly inconsistent. We finish on a high here, and my only hope is that if he does return we get a solid run of stories that do justice to this legacy character.  

Rating: 7/10

Best line: "Not going to make it! This is the end of the line, Dare..."   

We have two Future Shocks this week, filling the page count until the arrival of new stories next week. 

The first is a tale titled "Fourth Wall" and is exactly as you may guess. The future holds many advancements, and one of these is the arrival of full-screen wall-sized TVs. We start our story with a small boy who watches TV all day, enthralled by the TV show "Adam Gordon" along with a host of other entertainments. 

The boy tells his dad that he has heard of a Fourth Wall TV, and these are much better and all the more realistic. The Dad then decides to get one for the child's birthday in a week. 

The day arrives and the TV is installed. The boy is overjoyed with the realism of the TV and is soon lost in the world he is watching. However, as he watches he realizes it is too realistic, and as a laser shoots from the screen, destroying his stool, he becomes scared.

He cannot escape this realism as more blasts come from the screen, and the strip ends shortly after with his father checking on him and finding him dead, killed by what is happening on screen.

Nice to see John Cooper's artwork on this strip, and his work was recognisable from the first moment I saw one of the faces. The story itself was a clever play on breaking the fourth wall, but for me, the cleverest part of the story was seeing the flat screens taking up an entire wall. The future is here now, and it is always pleasing to see a writer correctly predict what the future holds. Not my favourite Future Shocks story, yet it still did enough to keep me entertained, and although I probably will never think of it again, I did enjoy my time with it. 

Rating: 6/10

Best line: "Somethings gone wrong. I've got to get out of here, 'phone those engineers! This is no fun anymore... it's getting frightening!" 

Staggering through the Mojave desert, Judge Dredd makes his way through the haze towards Mega-city Two. He's struggling, and in his delirious state, he suffers visions of all the foes he has faced across the Cursed Earth.  He realises that they are merely illusions, and continues onward, only for a very real Mek-trooper to emerge from the desert sand and grab him by the leg.   

With the droid chewing at his leg, all Dredd can do is shoot it at close range. With his leg now useless, Dredd drags himself through the sands while behind him the equally incapacitated droids follow, with their battery power rapidly dwindling. 

Dredd's willpower gets him through, and he delivers the vaccine to the desperate city. Inquiring after Tweak, Dredd learns that he has already arrived with his vaccine, although the citizens of Mega-city Two consider him nothing but a dumb animal. 

Some weeks later, after Dredd has sufficiently recovered, Tweak is reunited with him. Dredd urges Tweak to reveal his true intellect to the people, but he refuses, still hiding behind a cloak of dumbness. 

Dredd understands why he is doing this, and once Tweak reveals that he wants to go home, Dredd immediately arranges for him to be shipped back to his home planet. 

With Tweak shipped home, all that remains is for Dredd to walk directly towards the reader while thinking that a return to Mega-City, and a little peace and quiet, is just what he needs. 

Although this wasn't the exclamation point on the Cursed Earth run I expected, it still did a fine job of wrapping up all the loose ends and delivered a moderately satisfying ending. Seeing the cast of characters from across the Cursed Earth as Dredd hallucinated in the first few panels was a good reminder of all the struggles that Dredd has faced throughout this story. He has certainly faced some tough foes and interested characters. His final arrival at Mega-City Two was heroic, and befitting his character. There was no blazing entry into the city, just a grim steel as Dredd dragged himself to the goal. This said far more about the man than any battle or shootout could, and I felt we all knew the real Dredd as he arrived. The final pages did feel flat, although this was no fault of the writers or artist. It was necessary to see the Tweak storyline through, and this was a logical conclusion to that portion of the story. It was never going to be an exciting few pages, and what we got here was what I expected. The Cursed Earth has been a fantastic string of stories, and I shall perhaps re-read it in future. For now, I have fond memories of the last few months. I leave with the thought in the back of my mind that what comes next will have to have a large scope to match everything we have seen in this story. 

Rating: 6.5/10

Best line: "Tweak, I want the whole world to know how you risked your life to save Mega-city Two! I want them to realise how brave and intelligent you really are!"  

Ant Wars begins with Captain Villa discovering that he isn't the only one in the lair of the Queen ants, Anteater is there too and in a perilous state as the ants pull at his limbs. 

It seems that this may be the end of Anteater, but he earns a reprieve at the last second as the giant ant decides that it has eaten enough and he can wait until later. 

Now both Captain Villa and Anteater are carried deeper into the ant's nest by their captors.  

They are left with two ants guarding them and will devoured later. However, as they sit and await their fate they observe something extraordinary taking place. A column of small ants enters the tunnel and begins to attack the giant ants. Swarming over the two giant ants, they defeat them by sheer weight of numbers, much to the delight of Captain Villa and Anteater. 

The two men run deeper into the tunnels to fight the queens with their newfound army, only to find themselves soon fighting for their lives as more giant ants attack them. They are soon overwhelmed, and Anteater prophetically notes that this will be their last fight. 

This proves correct over the page as Anteater is snatched by one of the ants and killed. Captain Villa struggles alone fighting the remaining giants, and soon he too meets an end. However, as he collapses to the ground, losing blood fast, he is able to deliver one last line exclaiming that the ant wars have been lost.

He does not live to see it, but he is wrong. The tiny ants continue to swarm over the giants, destroying them one by one. The ant wars have been won, not by mankind, but by the tiny ants beneath our feet.

The story is neatly wrapped up on the final few panels as two U.S. Army officers observe the quiet Andes foothills, and congratulate themselves on the efficiency of the nuclear strike, little aware that it wasn't the nuclear weapons that won the war, but rather the ants that even now are busy at their feet. Throwing a can in the jungle they drive off, and as the ants scramble onto the can the two men are talking about retesting the CGS gas that caused all this in the first place. 

A strong ending to a story that has been uneven at best of late, and at worse downright poor. I was almost relieved to see Captain Villa and Anteater beaten by the ants this week. Week after week we see other men succumb, while Villa and Anteater always come out on top. Finally, we saw that they were not supermen and the ants rightfully beat them both. The cleverness of having the tiny ants win was a highlight, of not just this week's issue, but the entire Ant Wars saga. Ant Wars arrived on the pages of 2000 A.D. with great fanfare, yet after a strong start, it quickly faded. The stories became shaded by the same beige form week after week, and we essentially had the same story repeatedly told with different names and locations. This final issue shook us out of this groove and left me with more positive feelings than I otherwise might have. An interesting concept, Ant Wars never quite reached the highs I'd hoped, and I can't help but think that it could have been better. 

Rating: 7/10

Best line: "Those monsters won the Ant Wars!"    

We have another shot of Future Shocks to round out this issue. Aliens have secretly landed on Earth and taken on human form for twenty-four hours. However, one man has seen them, a poacher by the name of  John Pritchard.

Pritchard discreetly follows them, waiting to see what their plans are. First, they go to a nearby inn where they watch the Earthmen, while from a corner Pritchard watches them.

Then it is onto a fishing harbour and the zoo. Pritchard is surprised, he thought they would be spying on military bases and the like. Eventually, he decides that he should report it to the police - even though it will expose him as a trespasser and poacher at the time he saw the alien craft.  

Escorted by the police, they enter the grounds where Pritchard first saw the craft. It isn't there and Pritchard is arrested for poaching by his own evidence that he was there last night. 

Meanwhile, the aliens are onboard the craft, where they are looking through their holiday photos, one observing that Earth is nice, but you wouldn't want to live there. 

A nice enough story, although it never really grabbed me in the way it should. Everything was just "good", with no sense of challenge or danger for either the characters or the reader. After an issue of change and ends, this story brought the comic to a soft close rather than a raw punch in the face. This issue deserved a better ending, and I don't think it was the fault of the story, but rather the order the stories were presented in. If this had arrived mid-comic, I would be far more positive and receptive to it than I am with it bringing the curtain down on a farewell issue to several blockbuster stories. 

Rating: 5/10

Best line: "Looks like I'll have to shop myself to the cops. But then these aliens mean business...reckon the future of the Earth could be at stake!" 

 Prog 85 final ratings:

Overall: 6/10

Best Story: Ant Wars

Best Line: "Behold, the one who still controls the ship though he is long dead! This is the body of Moebius - the last of the golden ones!"   

Best Panel: