Prog 37: Examining specimen now… soon we shall exterminate the plague of humans!

First impressions – a giant robot holds a specimen jar with a person in. It’s a functional image by McCarthy and Ewins, but doesn’t really jump out to me – I think both artists still need to find their stride. We also haven’t seen any strip work by the duo.

Inferno continues with the crowd jeering at our three (Harlem) Heroes in the game they’re not familiar with. No standout splash images by Belardinelli in this episode, but plenty of dynamism. The Harlem Heroes secret foe wanted to increase the amount of death in the game to increase viewing figures, by the last two panels of this episode we’ve been introduced to a gambling cartel (well, two people) who going to cause problems. Wonder how long it will be until Artie Gruber comes along?

Judge Dredd is still with the Troggies – strange thing is that any two-parter begun by either Ian Gibson or Mike McMahon seems to end up being finished by the other – we’ve had The Academy of Law, Mutie the Pig and now The Troggies. Dredd uses the ‘pretend to fight with one of the other slaves’ ploy to land next to some laser-drills and frees himself. The next page has great use of black and white, light and shade, with Dredd driving a train through murky tunnels to the meeting of the Troggies in the dark, with the last panel of the page contrasting nicely with blinding lights switched on.

Invasion starts with an arms drop from a Canadian sub, with the Captain inviting Savage and Silk to raise a glass to the King Over the Water (and family, as shown in a photograph). Next panel we get a shot of the son of said family stowed away on the sub – no such thing as long-drawn out foreshadowing in Invasion! This isn’t the quickest bit of foreshadowing though – further down the same page Savage warns that having the Prince on board would make a juice catch for the Volgs while on the conning tower in the same panel a spotter reports an enemy aircraft approaching. The Volgan patrol jet gets hit but crashes into the sub. The Prince escapes, though his presence was recorded in the jet’s black box. The last panel shows the duo has become a trio, with Savage, Silk and Prince John on the run with a much increased Volg force on the hunt.

Supercover Saga – there’s some confusing narration about spiral-necked aliens who (from the cover) look like robots and have metal hands. Like H G Wells attackers from Mars, however, they are susceptable to human diseases. The actual story is the old ‘dream of disaster, wake up, disaster then proceeds to happen’. The description of being trapped in a specimen jar was pretty horrifying, but the rest of the short story doesn’t match or support it. The Nerve Centre also features an advert for Derailleur gears (for cycles) makes a change from adverts for stamps!

Dan Dare launches the attack on the Starslayer Empire, managing to defeat everybody they encounter and make it through to the ‘inner decks’ so that Dare can execute the Commander. They ransack the star-maps and battle fleet recognition charts. Back on the Space Fort, Dare starts planning the rest of the campaign to destroy the Starslayer Empire but factions break out. One side reckons that they were only attacking the gun-satellite in revenge for those spacers who had died. Characters we’ve actually met before think everybody should blindly follow Dare’s orders and take on an entire empire with a single crew of men. They’re feuding is interrupted by the arrival of not one, but two Starslayer cruisers.

John Probe continues the chase after the M.A.C.H.woman, whose name is Tanya Maski. Her compu-puncture was not as effective as Probe, meaning that her computer can be more easily over-ridden and that she risks burning out. The story continues as the two prepare to jump out of a moving train headed into Eastern Europe. I still think she’ll die in Probe’s arms before the story is done.

I thought it was about time that McCarthy and Ewins did some strip work to develop their style, and here they are illustrating a Future-Shock. The robots and future tech aren’t very interesting and the humans are stiffly posed. I know both artists are better than this, so hope it doesn’t take too much longer for them to find their place.