Script Robots: Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Alan Grant, Jamie Delano, Alan Davis, Al Ewing, Dan Abnett
Art Robots: INJ Culbard, Carlos Ezquerra, Alan Davis, Colin Wilson, Kevin O'Neill, Mick McMahon, Steve Dillon, John Higgins
Colouring Robots: Chris Blythe, Mark Farmer
Lettering Robots: Annie Parkhouse Simon Bowland, Tom Frame, Steve Potter, Jack Potter, Tony Jacob
Essayist: Tom Shapira
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Review by Paul Dunne
31st January 2023 (Released: 31st January 2023)
The Pitch: The ultimate 2000 AD mix tape has finally arrived! An explosive Judge Dredd adventure, fresh essays by prominent popular culture writers, a graphic novel-length feature presentation, and a vintage Dredd case. In this volume: Judge Dredd hunts untraceable assassins firing Magic Bullets by Al Ewing and Colin Wilson; even robots get the Red Planet Blues from Alan Moore, Steve Dillon, and John Higgins; not even Mega City One's brightest can escape The Vampire Effect; join the front line of the resistance against intergalactic bigots in Gothic masterpiece Nemesis The Warlock! Cover by Becky Cloonan and designer Tom Muller.
It's Elmer and Maybelline I feel sorry for. They're just Overlanders, living their Overland life... Until they entered the travel tube of Termight! There, they were caught up in a chase between the glorious Torquemada and the Alien devil Nemesis! These aliens, coming down here, taking our jobs, making our cities unsafe...
The Best of 2000 AD Volume Two has many delights in store for you neophytes and for those of us who perhaps have forgotten or fallen off the Tharg train in recent years. But the stand-out is Nemesis, created by Pat Mills and the late, lamented Kevin O'Neill. And it's an extraordinary creation. Although John Boorman's Excalibur was still a year away, there's a quasi-Arthurian-pop grounding... but that's the only thing grounded about it. Nemesis is an insane creation for an insane world. In keeping with the anarchist's cookbook of ideas that was (and let's face it, is) 2000AD, it features a fascist environment. Only it's one that the populace has gleefully embraced, along with the face of oppression, Torquemada. It's hard to communicate just how wild Nemesis is to the uninitiated. Imagine if Gaudi was asked to re-brand the Salem witch trials after he's just watched George Miller's entire Mad Max quartet. But it's not all fun and games. At the beating heart of the strip is the encroaching, clawed fist of fascism. Only here, it is celebrated. Torquemada is viewed as the hero by an eager populace, to the point where they gladly string Nemesis up, leaving him for dread. It's not long before they begin suffering horrible fates though, but you know they deserve it. It's this story that cements the mood of Nemesis as a whole. It's a haunted piece of grand guignol, in equal parts blackly comedic and just plain black… Like its lead character, a mix of stag beetle and bipedal horse, the comic is a beast of many parts. The aforementioned Excalibur and Mad Max. The insecticidal, skeletal creep of Alien. Edgar Allan Poe. And, weirdly, the rock opera of Queen and the gothic pomp of Black Sabbath. Mills’ imagination runs riot and fuels O'Neill's stunning artwork. His panels are filled with details and fine-tuning, making the art essential to pour over again and again.
Lest we forget, there are other delights. You get Al Ewing's take on the primo 2000AD boss-man, Judge Dredd, who also makes another appearance in 'The Vampire Effect', written by Alan Grant (another toll 2022 took on us), and penciled by Mick Macmahon, one of THE definitive Dredd artists. As with Nemesis, this story speaks to the horror bent that was always present in the galaxy's greatest comic. For me, though, it's edged out by Cry of The Werewolf, which I hope will appear in a later volume, even though I own it already. Such is the hunger of comics collectors. Owen Michael Johnson, curator and advocate for these volumes pulls off the genius move of treating a collection of one of the world's most popular anthology comics like, well, an anthology and gives us Abnett and Culbard's next chapter in the Brink storyline, bleeding over from the first chapter's inclusion on the Best of Volume One. Alan Moore's influence on this comic is acknowledged in the ABC Warriors story Red Planet Blue, one of his lesser-known stories, which doesn't have quite the impact of Halo Jones from Volume One, but its appearance here is an absolute treat, especially for Moore completists like me. For added value, there is also an essay by comics expert Tom Shapira that precedes Nemesis The Warlock.
The curation and care taken over these volumes make them a must-buy. Johnson's choices show a genuine love for the material and respect for the reader, as well as an element of risk in picking smaller, less heralded stories that will broaden our knowledge. As before, the volume is reasonably priced and geared to the US market, which makes sense. For aesthetes out there, the design by Tom Mueller keeps the look of the volumes consistent, meaning there's a thing or two the big two could learn from the scrappy little sci-fi comic.
The Best of 2000AD Volume 2 is available now from Gosh! 2000AD is published every week and is available at your local comic shop.
