Ian Gibson provides the cover, featuring Slade, Kidd and Cutie (the first half of the cover blurb is provided by Kidd, the latter by Cutie).
In the Nerve Centre, Tharg plugs the 2000AD 1979 annual – does that mean it’s out at this point, or it’s coming out in the near future? I hadn’t been expecting to be reading it (and the Dan Dare annual) for about another seven days…
Sam Slade carries on ploughing through the Verdus robots. The trio manage to escape the experimentation complex and go on the run. There troubles begin when they break into an apartment and find that everything within is robotic – kettle, boots, clock – everything! There are some nice touches – one of which I will probably leave until the grailquote section…
Next is a Tharg and Matchbox competition to win the Land Raider along with the Flight Hunter and Crusader vehicles. The actual competition itself is beyond me to decipher, though the explanation will appear the following week.
Ant Wars has a map of the ants travels through South America. I’d assumed they’d started off somewhere close to Rio, but it appears that they’ve already gone half the way across South America (never mind Brazil), most of which was without being detected. They’ve now headed down to Argentina. The Brazilian authorities want to keep quiet about the ant attack of Rio, but Anteater spots a giant antennae in a news report between episodes of Wacky Races – I think they missed an opportunity to show a return of the Crumpets personally. After escaping the Brazilian government, Villa and Anteater manage to get themselves captured by Argentinian gauchos (cowboys) who blame the duo for killing their cattle. Conrad from Space Spinner 2000 suggested that Ant Wars is a little like Big Trouble in Little China in that the supposed protagonist (Villa/Jack) is actually the sidekick, while the sidekick (Anteater/Wang) is the actual protagonist, having agency, knowledge, skills and pushing the story forward. It’s a nice idea, though for this one episode, Villa actually makes a few heroic decisions – any other episode and the theory holds!
Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth Chapter 20: The God Judge! It starts off as a continuation from the previous episode – a Mafia-dominated mega-city, though quickly turns into a pastiche of 1920s Mafia tropes, Bugsy Malone style (though no splurge guns). Dredd ends up as a catalyst for the League Against Gambling to take over Las Vegas, then continues on his mission. I dimly remember that the city appears again (possibly only to be destroyed) but can’t remember any details – it’ll be a good twenty or thirty years until it happens, whatever it is!
The Cursed Earth Game gets some rules, numbered from 1 to 8. Skim-reading them I can’t imagine it would be worth all the trouble of assembling everything to play, though I’m sure I’ll get around to it one day (not by cutting up the original comics, of course!)
Tharg’s Future-Shock is an un-named story by Jan Garczynski and Carlos Pino and takes place on the interplanetary prison on Titan where a new inmate is to serve twenty years – presumably inspired by Titan in Judge Dredd, but there the similarity ends. The inmate escapes, but shock! He hasn’t really escaped, he’s just hallucinating it because the prison doctors have been injecting him with drugs that make him happy.
In the Doomsday Machine, Dare and crew are in a vast hold containing not just the Space Fortress but also a Biog ship, the USS Enterprise, original Dare’s Anastasia, a Space 1999 craft, Thunderbird 1, the robot from Metropolis, an X-wing and more. Others have done more extensive pop culture eye-spies than me. Dare picks a crewman who almost definitely is wearing a red shirt – if not now, then by the time one page has passed he is. Red with his blood is what I’m saying. Anyway, wild men kill never-appeared-before, not-able-to-appear-again Yossarin before a space prospector called Jebby rescues Dare and Hitman – where was Jebby while Yossarin was still alive? Jebby has survived for many years using his battery lamp to ward off the wild men. Now that Dare’s here the battery is about to pack up, meaning this will be the last time that Jebby can ward off the wild men.
Grailpage: it was tempting to go for Goring and Leach’s vast hold filled with spaceships, but the more compelling image for me is the map of South America with two lost Scottish tourists which opens up Ant Wars.
Grailquote: T.B. Grover, Feeder Truck: “Order understood. Am responding. Do I call you “Sir”?” Slade: “Call me what you like – just run ’em down!” Slade (four panels later, on the following page) : “Here’s your last order, stupid. Smash those robo-cops, and keep smashing them until they smash you!” Feeder Truck: “Order understood, Mr what you like. I am responding.” An obvious joke, but made effective by subtly using it a page after the set up.
Back Prog Hack 