I've started some of 2000ad's comics and I've come to really enjoy what I've read so far. I know Dredd/Death/Anderson are the big ones but are there any specific stories I should read/avoid when it comes to Dredd or is all good? Any recommendations for other 2000ad comics? So far I've read Button Man and currently going through Kingdom.
Button Man I really liked, was short and sweet, and I like how instead of putting Harry in more and more absurd situations for eternity(Like Mack Bolan) over a load of volumes they just ended it somewhat naturally.
As for Kingdom, I know the clever stuff and I have lots of muscles in my head so I'm really enjoying it too.
Where can I find volumes 7 and 8 of Kingdom.
Volume 1, 3 and the last for Nemesis the Warlock are good, the rest swing between OK and kind of garbage depending on your opinion of angry writers in 80s Britian.
Shit. I didn't think the first volume was very strong either.
O'Neil's art carries it
Yeah, the art is great. But then I found out he leaves the book for a while. I like Talbot, but then some other dudes replace him. I'll finish it someday.
After Talbot, John Hicklenton took over and he was really polarising aquired taste in terms of art. The plot also largely connects pretty closely to what was going on in the ABC Warriors strip so unless you're also reading the Black Hole arc it'll make even less sense (and bear in mind that another core component of these stories is the introduction of a Satanic T-Rex from yet another Mills story, so it was already pretty weird). There's good bits, but its definitely self-indulgent on Mills part. The last book of Nemesis and the Deadlock spinoff is a return to form and has some excellent art from Henry Flint, but I can completely understand if nobody gets that far.
I do love that whole era of 90s ABC Warriors, however, so I can't hate it. Kevin Walker was the best ABC artist, my mind cannot be changed on this.
The first decade or so of 2000AD is almost all good. Especially Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Strontium Dog, ABC Warriors, Rogue Trooper, Slaine, Sam Slade Robo-Hunter, Future Shocks, and Time Twisters.
A lot of the 90s is pretentious "punk inspired" strips written by second rate writers and usually drawn by overrated artists. I can't think of anything specifically to avoid, but use your own judgement and stick to anything up to... maybe 1992 and you should be mostly safe.
Ace Trucking Co and Robot Hunter wre both pretty meh of the original set.
Slaine peaks early tho, like after Horned God it devolves into full-on eternal recurrence
last trade of Kingdom has not been ripped, for whatever reason so your just going to have to buy it if you want to read it,
you might also want to read other dan abnett books at 2000ad he's currently doing Lawless which is a judge story as a Space western which is pretty good, and he did a space opera called Insurrection which is very good as well.
You can also just find one of the various torrents with all the progs and specials and just go through each one, had to do that for Dexter Sinister because the majority of the stories aren't included in any of the various volumes or collections.
if i have one complaint about 2000ad/rebellion is that their kinda shit when it. comes to collected edition which seem to come out years later or if they do have continuous trades coming out it only every every 12-18 months
I hear you, I missed out on Deadworld volume 2 and now its stupidly pricey. I would imagine its a problem for them being quite a small company that's basiclaly run as a hobby, the Dredd case files sell well enough to continuosly be kept in print but everything else is much more dicey. From what I understand they're one of the few comics companies that are successfully pivoting to digital, so maybe that will help with the collections issues - sure, the print runs will still be tiny, but at least they'll exist in some form.
wish they would reprint Shakara since those books have been out of print for while now. Rebellion/2000ad is definitely one of the better publishers when it comes to digital but compared to Japan it's still a bit behind but at least it something compared to any american publisher
For what its worth, they were part of the Hachette partwork 2000AD: The Ultimate collection. You can get the Avenger (part one) on ebay for reasonable prices.
https://hachettepartworks.com/en-en/2000-ad-ultimate-collection/shakara-the-avenger/
https://hachettepartworks.com/en-en/2000-ad-ultimate-collection/shakara-vol-2/
Shakara's one of the most popular strips of the last twenty odd years and its complete in two books, so it does get reprinted slightly more often. Leviathan too, actually.
thanks anon i've only been checking 2000ad webstore for physical release
Is Gene The Hacked Man back in a new story??
no he showed up in a 2020 special but that's the only. story not in the collections
is Stickleback good or not?
Haven't read it, but the art reminds me of Perramus by Breccia.
I enjoyed it. I'd also recommend Leviathan by the same creative team, Ampney Crucis Investigates and (to a lesser extent) The Red Seas.
They're all somewhat connected
If you enjoyed the art on Button Man, try out the other major Ranson strip Mazeworld, or his work with Alan Grant on Psi Judge Anderson. Similar kind of wavelength to Kingdom, you might also want to try Dan Abnett's other recent-ish strips Grey Area (about an alien immigration cops) and Brink (about cults and crime on orbital habitats after earth has died)
Also Nikolai Dante, which is possibly the best of 90s 2000AD. Its a long complete story, with a beginning, middle and and end, a long term plot balanced by lots of individual episodes, an interesting setting and loads of cool characters.
>Leviathan by the same creative team, Ampney Crucis Investigates and (to a lesser extent) The Red Seas.
Good to know.
>I enjoyed it. I'd also recommend Leviathan by the same creative team, Ampney Crucis Investigates and (to a lesser extent) The Red Seas.
should I read those in publication order or chronological order?
I'd go with publication order (Leviathan > Red Seas > Ampney Crucis) but really however you want to approach it works. Red Seas is quite a bit longer than the other two, if I recall correctly (or, at least, there's more of it - its a kind of Pirates of the Caribean type alternate history swashbuckler thing). If you enjoy the writing, you might also want to look at Ian Edginton's other major works Brass Sun (about an artificial solar system that is slowly breaking down) and Kingmaker (which appears to be a Tolkien pastiche for all of a couple of pages before swerving quite severely
For more detail, spoiler below that I'm still going to try to be vague about:
Each story is set in connected but apparently seperate universes, but they are at different points in a timeline - Red Seas is 18th century, Stickleback is 19th century, Ampney is interwar 20th century. Some characters appear between them, but its unclear if they are the same people each time or their alternate universe doppelgangers, and there are several recurring motifs implying implications. One story straight up shows the others existing as alternatives at one point
Stickleback and Leviathan are both illustrated by Matt "D'Israeli" Brooker, but Ampney Crucis has Simon Davis on art duties. Where D'Israeli is mostly very clean and does a lot of black and white, Davis has a unique painting style - see pic related. He's probably best known for doing Sinister Dexter, back in the 90s.
thanks for the surgesstions anon
>He's probably best known for doing Sinister Dexter, back in the 90s.
I probably should read that considering Abnett's currently doing a sequel series of sorts in the most recent progs
I've completely lost track of Sin/Dex, but I'd say its worth dipping into the early stuff at least. They're pretty episodic action comedies, for the most part, with one or two longer arcs. From what I recall they get quite repetitive if you read a lot of them on the trot.
Oh yeah, and if you like Judge Death and the gang you can't go wrong with the Deadworld (Dreams of...; Fall of...) serials. Dreams are short one offs about each of the Dark Judges after they killed their world but before they met Dredd, Fall followed it and goes into a lot more detail about how they actually managed it. It manages to be pretty gripping when by all logic we know how it ends.
>From what I recall they get quite repetitive if you read a lot of them on the trot.
that gets to be a problem with a several 2000ad strips unfortunately or. other books they publish like the trigan empire omnibuses
I like Sinister Dexter but like I said here
you gotta literally go through each individual prog if you want to read it all because one later particular volume just collects stories done by a single artist which is moronic because it leaves a lot of critical story gaps.
Would a ship like this actually work?
I don't think so, its so massive that even if you had the materials and engineering that could hold it all together, the fuel cost of trying to get it to move (never mind run all the facilities) would be catastrophically high. [/spoiler]this is a plot point[/spoiler]
On his blog I think he showed the whole step by step process of how he does it, it's much more complicated than I thought. This isn't quite what I was thinking of, but as I can't find it right now it'll have to do
https://2000ad.com/news/2000-ad-covers-uncovered-disraelis-step-by-step-guide-to-the-whole-cover-for-prog-2204/
It's pretty good, D'Israeli has a really neat art style
>Button Man
Thanks for the reminder.
Thank you all for the recs, I didn't imagine the thread would last a day.
There's a rogue trooper game?
from 2003 and they remade it in 2017 or so
Absalom's another one worth reading, if anyone watches this and gets interested. The case Harry is called to at the end of the animation is the first of issue of the series proper.
Pic related chosen mostly so it has no spoilers.
just read Gold tiger which was interesting I guess but it is an unconventional book by 2000ad since it was kickstarted and then they published it