Dan Dare leaves the front page to make way for Dredd’s return to Mega-City One, in possibly the first giant image of Dredd looming over the city, as illustrated by Mike McMahon.
After the Nerve Centre we launch in to Dan Dare, or at least the Snappers do. Technically they launch into some of Dare’s crew, while the Commander looks on. So, they all come up with a plan to assassinate the Slurgg Mother 20 miles deep by turning a blockbuster into a sonic weapon and injecting themselves with a Zeeb boosting-fluid (which sounds rather like Viagra, to be honest: “we inject ourselves with a special boosting fluid that hardens us… enables us to withstand the mighty pressures!” As Dare and Ley (yes, that’s right, a crewman we’ve not heard of before) get their injections, an eruption jogs them. Three panels later we say goodbye to Ley, who we now know was only there to let Dare know that being jogged meant he didn’t get a full dosage and is prone to die from the massive water pressures 20 miles down.
MACH 1 next, with a montage intro very reminiscent of that in the first prog. This episode is co-written by Landau and Preston, who are Nick Landau, co-owner of Titan Books, Forbidden Planet (the one in London, anyway) and Roy Preston. While Kelvin Gosnell was being swamped by the launch of Star Lord, these two were made sub-editors of 2000AD to take up the slack. Other than the montage page, the story continues from the previous week with Probe appearing back in the UK and trying to find out more about his own past. This is to no avail as his memory begins when the hyperpuncture began (though we’ve met a few of his old friends in previous storylines – does this mean we remember more of his past than he does?) We’ve met MACH 1 and MACH 0, this is the prog where we (briefly) meet MACH 2!
Colony Earth! As the four set off on their mission to gain access to the alien mothership, HMS Lion is attacked. Steel allows a desire for revenge for the deaths of the crew put the future of the human race at risk. This isn’t the only thing that risks the entire mission – once Hunter, Vandenberg, Steel and Charlie make it to the mothership Steel gets snagged on a girder and drifts in front of a viewpoint at which an alien is working (looks like he’s playing around on a keyboard, so theoretically he could just be too engrossed in his work to see the human drift past – we’ll find out next prog, in the penultimate episode).
Judge Dredd: Return to Mega-City. This opens with another of those flash-forward panels that I’m not a fan of. This is a great episode – Dredd smiles, Maria and Walter comment on how out-of-sorts this is, all the while Dredd observes crimes occur but does nothing. We find out about mid-way through that Dredd isn’t sworn in yet, but the moment he is he requisitions a rookie’s lawmaster and tracks down the perps he’d walked past earlier. Unless something better comes up in the next few stories, this also has my grailquote for this prog.
Tharg’s Future-Shocks: un-named, but in some places called ‘Tin Can‘. Jose Ferrer’s last Future-Shock and pretty good art on this post-apocalyptic tale. As others have said the third person narration does the art (and story) no favours. As I was reading it (and before reading that other blog post) I was thinking that oil would also be useful in the post-apocalyptic world, though mabye it’s easier for us to easily make that connection in a post-Mad Max 2 The Road Warrior world. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that this story is very close to another comic or sci-fi story, though maybe I’m mixing it up with a different Future-Shock (which very definitely is based, panel-for-panel, on another comic).
To no great surprise, Kalmaan the droid manufacturer is dead and even less of a surprise, the giant garbage robot outside smashes through the front of the droid shop. With art as good as Belardinellis, it would be churlish to complain about these episodes of Inferno. Louis puts forward a contender for quote of the prog for his very modest: “…if I can… concentrate the … colossal power of my… brain…” This week’s cliffhanger has Eegle trying to prove he hasn’t lost his nerve by roaring into the path of the giant garbage robot. p.s. the sleek black beetle-style shell of the robot may look menacing, but aren’t most industrial machines decked out in black and yellow stripes?
Reader’s art for the next two pages, in response to a call for creations that could go up against Dredd. My favourite is Serle the Hundress – though the judges specifically go out on a mutant-hunting raid, which seems uncharacteristic – but in those early days of Dredd, character hadn’t quite been established, so who am I to Judge?
Lastly, Walter gets on Dredd’s nerves and is kidnapped while going late-night shopping for breakfast. He’s kidnapped by Ygor, who is just leaving the Lunar Morque with a dead body, so you can guess where this story is going to go. Now what variant of the name ‘Frankenstein’ will writer Joe Collins come up with? I remember the last panel or two of this story, and have a feeling that with Dredd’s return to MC1, there won’t be any more regular Walter stories. But first we have to get to the end of this story, four or five progs away…
Grailpage: for the first time, I’m going to go with the cover – McMahon’s gigantic Dredd pointing a finger at cowering perps in the city below.
Grailquote: John Wagner, Judge Dredd: “Mega-City 1… 800 million people and every one of them a potential criminal. The most violent, evil city on Earth… but, god help me, I love it.”
Back Prog Hack 