"I've got a devil's haircut in my mind"
2000 AD is a magazine with a strong pedigree in this country. Started sometime in the late eleventh century it's first story was a satirical retelling of the defeat of King Harold by the forces of William the Bastard and ended with Judge Dredd firing an arrow into the former's eye and saying "Prithee get the pointe, creep!" 2000 AD's main role is to be a venue for aspiring British comics creators to showcase ideas and create work, before being snapped up by American companies to produce stuff that isn't shit. After a few years in America whoever owns 2000 AD will put out collections of their juvenilia to try and cash in, presumably to try and embarrass them. To be fair, Garth Ennis's
Judge Dredd stuff isn't that bad, mainly because he's such a monumentally dumb character that all you can do is turn the crazy up to 11, something that Ennis has never had a problem with. But while
Hewligan's Haircut is young, dumb but full of fun, most of the time a creator's 2000 AD work is as cool as your Mam turning up on Cribs to show everyone your baby photos.
Someone has decided that Alan Grant is big enough to make it worth trying to get some money out of his old stuff and so
Mazeworld has been shat out into an uncaring world. Arthur Ranson's art is generally above par for a work like this, but Alan Grant's script is awful balls. Adam Cadman is due to be hung for a crime he did commit, but every time his life in this world hangs by a thread he finds himself transported to the alien Mazeworld and the identity of The Hooded Man, where he comes to be a hero of the rebellion of the oppressed people against their corrupt rulers and Gods.
The page restrictions of 2000 AD means Grant doesn't have the space for things like characterisation so it's all straight by the numbers sword-and-sorcery nonsense. If at any point anything in this surprises you then please turn in your reader's card. But it is worth a glance at for Ranson's often lovely work, this is a man who should be doing more work.
The spine of
Who is Jake Ellis? by Nathan Edmondson and Tonci Zonjic has a '1' as though this the first book in a series but I think it's a self-contained story. Freelance mercenary Jon Moore is constantly advised by Jake Ellis, smarter than him and more invisible, he is able to scope out scenes in an instant and tell Moore what to do in any situation. But Moore was once subjected to a horrific series of medical experiments and his former captors are after him, forcing him to confront the issue of what Jake is, his own superenhanced abilities, a ghost or something else. Zonjic's uncluttered artwork compliments Edmondson's Nu-noir script, often washing pages in a limited pallet of colours and the eponymous Ellis a black and grey ghost. It's published by Image so it's obviously a promotion for 'Who is Jake Ellis?' the movie, but that would be a film worth watching. The story jumps continents like James Bond as Moore closes in on the truth behind his life and can be read in less time than it takes to watch 'The World is Not Enough'.
Supergods is a collection of random thoughts that escaped from the word processor of Grant Morrison when he wasn't concentrating. Jumping topics like a fourteen year old on two cans of Red Bull the book is occasionally a partial history of comics, sometimes a partial history of Mister Grant Morrison and sometimes whatever he was thinking about at the time. On his own personal history Morrison is most interesting, but on discussing culture he is a blunt tool when compared to the non-fiction work of someone like Warren Ellis. What's most annoying is that as he progresses through his own career he's voluble on the 2000AD days but gets progressively briefer on his DC/Vertigo work. He writes about
Flex Mentallo but on
The Invisibles he concentrates on the much-put-about story of the alien abduction that came to inform it's cosmology and
The Filth is pretty much ignored. Perhaps he wants the work that's easy for people to access to stand for itself but it's annoying that he passes talking about them for chapters about the actors who have played Superman or Batman on the small and silver screens.
Red Wing. No. That is all.
If you are within spitting distance of the capital then
Tired of London, Tired of Life should be one of your regular reads. A daily suggestion of somewhere to go, something to see or somewhere to eat and drink, it has been reproduced in
book form suggesting something for every day of the year, though from what I've seen so far the majority of them are not particularly date specific so don't feel you're missing out if you buy a copy next December. But you should buy it now.
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