#prog 15

2000AD Prog 15: 4-Jun-1977

alright where the fuck were we

Invasion! #15

oh right this shit

So Savage and the rest of the Brits are getting ready to attack a nuclear research station. A couple of men try to bluff their way in in Volgon, but a guard calls out a command in English and they respond, blowing their cover. Once again, the only competent man is Savage, who steals a truck full of acid and plows it into the research station, somehow blowing it up.

I promised before my big hiatus I was gonna try and be more insightful. So here’s my insight--boring as it is to read, I’ve come around on the basic conceit. The idea of this working-class man’s-man great-man-of-historying himself all over the place with superior intelligence, brawn, and plain dumb luck, consistently besting people who’ve worked their whole lives to become competent military men...you could, hypothetically, make it work.

Waaaay back when I said “social commentary has never been a major selling point for me when it comes to stories”. I phrased it dumbly, but I think what I meant was social commentary can’t be all there is. You need something to sustain it. It can be narratively substantial: interesting characters, engaging storylines. It can be fun to read: witty prose, interesting visual style choices, exciting action scenes. But there’s gotta be something to latch onto besides a deep meaning and a nifty premise. And it just...doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen for Invasion! any time soon.

So for right now, I think, this and my piece on Prog 14 are my last words on Invasion! outside of plot summaries. I don’t want to keep repeating myself.

Flesh #15

The beasts’ war on mankind begins in earnest. Dinosaurs are driving cars! Spiders are knocking on doors! It’s a madhouse!

Reagan’s managed to secure control from...the Controller...but it’s too late. Corporate isn’t sending reinforcements --it’d be unprofitable. And Joe, the only one who realized what a mad, stupid world he lived in, gets eaten by spiders.

To its credit, the comic frames this as a tragedy. Joe didn’t meet the toxic masculine archetype seemingly required to survive in this world, and Carver claims it was his lack of masculinity that dooms him. But Reagan insists that Joe was worth ten Carvers--not that Joe was somehow tougher or more masculine, but had more worth as a person for not being the testosterone nightmare Carver and Reagan are.

It’s time now for the final showdown between Reagan and Ol’ One Eye. After that, it’s over year of issues before we get any more Flesh. I’m gonna miss it.

Harlem Heroes #15

In this brief installment, Zach, the Harlem team babyface, must best one of the Scots in a sudden-death round. Nothing else really happens.

Look, they’re not all gonna be dissertations.

Dan Dare #15

And I mean, that brevity leave more time for Dan Dare, which I know is the thing you all really care about. Dare, O’Malley, and Rok are the only survivors of a crash landing on Mekron’s hidden planet, and surrender in order to gather information.

The big thing to dig into is the sudden infodump about Rok’s culture. His species honors their dead by eating their corpses, and he’s never heard of surrender. While it’s nice that the strip is becoming more willing to extend alienness onto “good” characters, it’s unfortunate that this also makes him a generic Proud Warrior Race Guy. Also, he’s got a laser sword, because clearly someone was hype for Star Wars.

The other big thing is that Mekron doesn’t recognize Dare, because he’s no longer drawn the way he was the last time Mekron was relevant. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the strip is playing tug-of-war with itself, between the bizarro art piece it wants to be and the generic space opera mold old-time Dare fans expect. After all, Mekron and his generic world domination plans are a far cry from the intensely weird baddies we got last story arc. Making that tension an active part of the text is an interesting choice--or at least, it would be if either version of Dare was exciting to me.

M.A.C.H.1 #15

In “Bepal”, John Probe investigates the mysterious maulings of people who turned down the chance to get in on the opium trade. Though the victims claim their assailants were invisible, they were merely yetis, their white skin rendered invisible by the snowfall. Probe sics them on their master.

We’ve forsaken the Probe/brain computer buddy-cop act this week, which saps Probe of anything resembling human interest.

Obviously villainizing the “Bepal”ians for dealing opium, and South Asian people in general, is fucking awful, especially for a British comic.

Yeah.

Judge Dredd #14

Dredd combats Call-Me-Kenneth’s robot army by installing the “Old Law of Robotics” in his processing plant, creating an equal and opposite army of human-worshipers.

The comic continues to rely on Call-Me-Kenneth being a homicidal dictator to justify why robots might want humans to stay in power. Back in 2015, I rolled my eyes at the comic’s hamfisted attempt to weasel out of the implications of its pro-slavery storyline. But now I think I see what the story’s doing, giving us the first taste of the “better the fascism you know” ethos that’ll stifle any real change in the Dredd universe for generations. The comic at its best is about challenging the idea that a firm hand is needed to keep people in line by showing the logical endpoint of such a line of thought--Kenneth is simply another version of that.

On This Day...36 Years Ago!

The great Brian Bolland art droid weighs in with this instant classic,drawing just his second cover for the weekly(Prog15,4Jun'77).