A comics bonanza: Exploring the latest ‘2000 AD’ jump-on issue with 2,450

Despite its legendary status, 2000 AD can prove a wee bit impenetrable to new and/or casual readers. The iconic magazine has been running since February 1977, and has currently published some 2,449 issues. (Beat that, the entirety of comics!) Luckily, and with some regularity, 2000 AD publishes so-called “jump-on” issues, featuring new stories/chapters intended for almost anyone to start their love affair with the magazine.

And as far as 2000 AD jump-ons are concerned, Prog 2,450 is an especially big one if you like weird, relevant, and unwaveringly intense comics action. There’s effectively six new tales launching in the issue, including four that we think are of extra significance:

• Judge Dredd, “And To The Sea Return” Part 1 (Rob Williams and Henry Flint): Here’s a fun fact: Mega-City One is situation near the “toxic Black Atlantic” (to the east). Seems like a solid enough excuse to place everyone’s favorite Judge in a horror story on the big, dark sea. Talk about shivering your timbers!
• Rogue Trooper, “Ghost Patrol” Part 1 (Alex de Campi and Neil Edwards): For the very first time, we look at the origins of Rogue Trooper. All you need to know going in, then, is the the story features Genetic Infantrymen like our titular hero locked in an endless war on Nu Earth as the Norts battle the Southers.
• Brass Sun, “Pavane” Part 1 (Ian Edgington and INJ Culbard): This is the first new Brass Sun story in some eight years. Luckily, this first chapter summarizes the entire series so far. Here’s the gist of it: The story follows Wren, an citizen of The Orrey (a “clockwork solar system”) who is suddenly “charged with finding the elements of the key that would restart the sun.”
• Void Runners, “Book Two” Part 1 (David Hine and Boo Cook): Debuting in the last couple years, the far-future tale takes place after the Ankorites have seized control of The Federation (a conglomeration of planetary systems). It’s up to one Void Runner, Alice Shikari, to free the Federation (a task further complicated by the Ankorites’ use of the vision-inducing Kali’s Dust drug).

With 2,450 out this week, we decided to catch up with all four creative teams. There, we talked a little bit about each story, what you might expect, and why you should happily give up your free time. In the majority of these chats, we also get into the work of 2000 AD, and why this iconic title continues to be so vital to comics’ continued status as a purveyor of exciting and vital stories. Now jump aboard!

Judge Dredd

AIPT: There’s been a few Dredd-starring horror/horror-leaning stories over the years. Why does our terse enforcer friend work so well in that genre/context?

Rob Williams: I think one of the joys of Judge Dredd and the reasons for the strip’s 48-year vitality is Dredd suits any genre of story. It can be horror, like this one, or comedy, action, sci-fi. Dredd’s world and universe is so rich you can tell any kind of tale within it. And the same goes for Dredd himself.

The unique thing he has compared to other major pop culture icons is in one story he’s the good guy, in the next he’s the bad guy. But whatever your opinion of Dredd’s politics, when he’s facing a horrific threat to his city, he’s definitely the guy you want standing in its way.

Henry Flint: Ever since Judge Death, there have been leanings towards horror stories in Dredd’s world. I did one a few years back for the final movie Dredd story. City of the Damned was one of my favorites. I love a good horror story, especially if it’s slightly surreal with weird elements thrown in, Dredd’s world is perfect to introduce weirdness like that.

AIPT: Rob, you just finished (in 2,449) another Dredd story in Tunnels. Does this new story build off that somehow? And what’s it like continuing on this “Dredd streak”?

RW:: No, “Tunnels” (an eight part story we just completed with extraordinary art by Scalped‘s RM Guera) is a totally separate story. That one was a kind of Sam Peckinpah-esque manhunt thriller. “To The Sea Return” is a horror story where a floating enormous ship-prison goes missing off the coast of Mega-City One with 10,000 prisoners onboard. Dredd and Judge Anderson have to investigate. Something has happened to that prison and the people onboard, and it may well be coming to dock with Dredd’s City.

It’s drawn and colored by Henry who, for my money, is one of the best, most innovative storytellers we have in comics. Henry and I, along with Arthur Wyatt, had collaborated on Judge Dredd: A Better World, the graphic novel of which has gone to a second printing for Rebellion. I asked Henry what he wanted to do next and he said “a horror.” So, get ready for the horror. With worms. No one likes worms. Especially ones that eat you.

AIPT: Henry, how has your approach to drawing Dredd changed over the years? Did you change up for this new horror series?

HF: My approach to drawing Dredd has changed so much since I started drawing him way back in ‘93/‘94. My style was way too cartoon-y I was trying to draw within my own set of skills. If I’m honest, I felt like a bit of a hack at times, especially compared to the artists that came before me. I knew what I wanted, but quite often couldn’t achieve it.

Roundabout the time of Rob’s Judge Dredd story Titan, something clicked. Matt Smith kindly gave me more control over the colors, and I allowed the story to wash over me. I enjoyed adding some grit and a sense of desperation which seemed to work for me. Much happier with the results since. It helped that Rob‘s scripts were anything but cartoon-y.

AIPT: What’s a standout moment from the story that you’d like to tantalize folks with right now?

RW: Spoilers! But there’s one scene I don’t want to spoil where Dredd and a couple of companions end up in the most screwed-up boat ride and Henry and I both commented on how messed up it was and how much we loved that scene. Also, there’s a single page in episode nine which might just be the best thing Henry’s ever drawn.

HF: Yeah, there is a standout moment in this story which made me laugh out loud with its absurdity. Grim stuff. I did wonder what was going on in Rob‘s head when he wrote it but I have to say it’s quite brilliant. Of course, I can’t say anything; my gob is firmly zipped up!

Rogue Trooper

AIPT: What was your relationship/interest in the character beforehand? Why does Rogue Trooper feel so bright and vivid among the many stars of 2000 AD?

Alex de Campi: Rogue Trooper was the very first character I wrote for 2000 AD! He’s always been one of my favorites, and I’ve been hoping to write something longer featuring him for a few years — so when Tharg offered me a graphic novel-length series to re-introduce the character ahead of Duncan Jones’ film, I leapt at it.

I think Rogue always feels fresh because there’s so much you can do both action- and character-wise with war stories, especially war stories in space. We’ve really only just scratched the surface of what can be done with Rogue Trooper.

Neil Edwards: Yeah, I loved Rogue Trooper from growing up in the ’80s and his design was amazing! Always loved the aspect of a lone super-soldier running around the battlefield. I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to Rogue’s story!

AIPT: You’re diving into the character’s origins and legacy in a way that hasn’t really been done so far. Is that a scary prospect, and how do you boil down and craft a definitive story considering the character’s giant-sized status?

AdC: Well, to be fair, there have been stories about Rogue’s origins before — I’m just choosing to benignly ignore them. There hasn’t been as much around his legacy, for some reason, and that’s been a lot of fun to dig into.

The project was a scary one to tackle, because of Rogue’s status and because of the complexity of writing the character for new readers while also making it engaging and interesting for longtime readers and making it look effortless. But I love formal challenges like this, and honestly if you don’t feel like you’re up on a terrifying high wire without a net while writing, it’s probably not very good writing.

NE: Initially yes, I did something similar on Spider-Man: Season One, retelling Spidey’s origin for Marvel and initially it was really intimidating. But then you start understanding the character and get a feel for him which gives you confidence in drawing him and his world. Hope I’ve done Rogue justice as he’s one of my all-time favorites!

AIPT: I feel like the Rogue Trooper story/character is more relevant now than it has been in some time. Why do you think that is (unless you disagree, of course)?

NE: Yes, I think it’s prevalent that Southers and Norts see Rogue and the GI as weapons and are no different than a tank on the battlefield, disregarding their personalities and what they go through on Nu Earth, just to win the war.

AdC: We’re living in a very unfair time right now, aren’t we, with the shadow of fascism long on the land. Peoples’ basic human rights are being stripped away, in part due to the lobbying actions of a former children’s writer. Immigrants are being targeted for violence. There’s just so much officially-sanctioned cruelty out there right now, in so many aspects of UK life, it’s exhausting.

And the whole point of catharsis through fiction is that the fictional characters must suffer more than us and come through it—so here we are, at war stories. I wish Rogue were less relevant, honestly, but that would involve locating the greatest fictional MacGuffin of our time: Keir Starmer’s spine.

AIPT: We’re also getting a Rogue Trooper film in the near future. Does that film influence or inform what you do or how you think about telling this specific story?

NE: I certainly wanted to give it a cinematic feel and let some of the character moments breathe, as the story moves incredibly fast!

AdC: I saw an early assemblage of the film (it’s fantastic) and while my story doesn’t spoil the film and vice versa, they can exist in the same universe… and there are a few quiet links between them.

Void Runners

AIPT: For new readers, what should folks know about Void Runners? Can/should they jump in blind with book two?

Boo Cook: I’m sure plot-master Dave will answer this better than me but essentially we have a free-wheeling free thinking bunch of Void Runners lead by Captain Shikari who harvest a space narcotic known as Dust from vast space jellyfish for some nasty controlling despots who use it to control the known universe.

In series one this doesn’t go well for the despots known as the Anchorites and Shikari and their crew mount something of an insurrection and steal away with the remaining quantities of Dust leaving the Anchorites in something of a tight spot… Shikari and co. go rogue and embark on a Ken Kesey-esque mission to liberate planets under the yolk of their evil controllers and that leads us right into series two.

With these facts in mind I’m pretty sure any readers fresh to Void Runners will be able to hop on board without much trouble!

David Hine: I’m always careful to make a series work for new readers, so all the relevant background information will be drip fed at the appropriate points in the plot, without having a massive info-dump on page one.

We’re in a new setting with Series Two, on the Planet Rigel 16, where the Primas are the “superior” race who exploit their workers, the Manjukaks, using a bogus religious tome called “The Book of Truth” to make them believe that the First God Person created them to dedicate their lives to slaving for the Primas. Shikari and her Void Runners arrive with a mission to liberate them through enlightenment.

As Boo mentioned, it’s a sci-fi take on Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus trip across the USA in the early sixties. While Kesey handed out free samples of LSD to turn on America’s youth, Shikari uses a naturally occurring psychedelic called Kali’s Dust as a sacrament to open the minds of the Manjukaks. And if you’re wondering what could possibly go wrong, the answer is, “Just about everything.”

AIPT: What’s a standout moment from the story that you’d like to tantalize folks with right now?

DH: Okay, so the Head Ankorite, who is the big cheese in the Oracle that controls the vast interplanetary Federation, is completely addicted to Kali’s Dust and has a moment of revelation where he realizes that the entire universe only exists in his imagination. I can totally identify with him there. I had the same revelation as I was writing it. It’s like “None of this is real. I made all this shit up in my head.” I think Boo probably feels the same. It’s quite disconcerting.

Anyway, I got over that existential crisis and managed to hold it together for the rest of the series. The absolute best and most enjoyable event has to be the Ceremony of the Purple-Violet Squish, inspired by real events in Haight-Ashbury during the peak of the hippy revolution. It gives Boo the chance to indulge his penchant for drawing naked alien life forms.

BC: I’ll simply say that I was asked to ramp up the psychedelic-ness even more than the already very trippy series one, which I’ve taken great joy in doing! Once the Dust kicks in things go straight up to 11 and from that point on there is much nudity and narcotic splendor.

We live in a pretty grim world right now and I think the time is right for some unabashed flying of the freak flag – it’s really about time humans stopped being horrible to each other and hopefully this will go some small way towards achieving that goal. It’s not all flying elephants and unicorns though – when did a revolutionary psychedelic renaissance ever go right?

AIPT: How has the collaborative or creative process between you two evolved in the couple of years working on Void Runners?

DH: It really has been two years, hasn’t it? That went by in a flash! We gelled creatively at a very early stage on Void Runners. As soon as we started talking about the themes and characters for the first series, it was obvious we had a lot in common in the way our imaginations work. The same things make us laugh and we have similar sources of inspiration. Boo basically gets where I’m coming from in the same way as my other frequent collaborators, Shaky Kane and Mark Stafford.

I think we all occupy a similar space in the Sphere of Unsanity — the mode of existence where you can more-or-less function in the physical world, while your mind is a roiling ocean of confusion. That’s true for most people I guess, only we get to make it the basis for a career.

My scripts for Boo are less detailed than when I work with artists I don’t know so well. I try to leave plenty of space for Boo to add lots of quirky details and there are always some surprises in the art. I hold off from completing a script for as long as possible so I can see what Boo is drawing in the previous episode. There are usually some elements that will push a character or event in a different direction. That keeps things spontaneous and enjoyable.

BC: Dave and I have settled into a nice groove with series two — I know I can expect brilliant, fucked up solid psychedelic mayhem from Dave, and hopefully he knows he can expect the same in return. Sometimes I’ll expand upon something in the script and give it a tweak of my own, so I always make sure I send the pages to Dave so he can spark off from my efforts then I can spark off from those sparks. Basically there’s a lot of sparks. Good sparks.

AIPT: What’s the future of Void Runners look like? It feels like a series which can constantly refresh itself?

BC: There’s never a dull moment drawing Void Runners and it couldn’t be more up my street thematically — so I’m happy to be constantly surprised by what comes next ad infinitum as long as Dave and of course The Mighty One are happy to continue. If recent democratic shenanigans are anything to go by, 50% of people will probably be fine with it returning and 50% of the readership will want to burn it with fire — as long as they inhale the fumes when they do so we might see a change in those figures with any luck…

DH: There are near-infinite possibilities for the concept. The universe is fairly large, and Shikari’s mission is to spread her message to all of it, if she can figure out what her message is. She’s a bit vague on detail but it’s basically, “Do no harm and be nice.” So, yeah, we could go on forever with Void Runners, or we might get bored and knock it on the head. For now though, my cunning plan to end on a cliffhanger means that Tharg has no choice but to give us another series. You lucky people!

Brass Sun

AIPT: What was the impetus to return to Brass Sun after some eight years? Did you feel rusty at all with this world/story or was it easy to get back into?

Ian Edginton: I decided that I’d let the story lie fallow for far too long and that it was time to revisit it. The return of Brass Sun was also the question I was repeatedly asked when I was at signings and conventions. I kept on prevaricating and procrastinating until I finally decided to get out of my own way and get on with it.

The problem had been that the first series of Brass Sun back in 2012 was very positively received, so much so that I started to doubt whether I could repeat it with the next run. It was genuinely a case of performance anxiety! I was worried that it wouldn’t measure up, so I kept on putting it off and putting it off.

Ian Culbard and I eventually went on to do other things and Brass Sun got quietly put to the side.

A year or so ago my teenage daughter read the whole thing (of her own volition I might add!) and was annoyed that there wasn’t any more, I’d just left poor Wren and the others in limbo. I went back and reread it all myself and realized she was right. In fact it made me want to finish telling Wren’s entire story. I owed it to her and my daughter!

Getting back into Wren’s world was easier than I thought it would be. I already knew there was going to be a time jump, Wren’s older now, in her mid-20s and after all the harrowing things she’s gone through has withdrawn from the world.

I wanted to explore the idea of what happens when the “chosen one” fails to complete the task they’re supposed to fulfill. Putting the fate of the entire solar system in the hands of a kid and expecting it all to work out is clearly not going to happen. Wren’s story is about what happens next.

INJ Culbard: I got the script. That’s all the impetus I needed to pick up the journey where we left off. But picking up where we left off proved a little trickier than I anticipated; because a lot has changed, as an artist going back to a work from some time ago. But then so has Wren, she’s changed, so I latched on to that.

It was always going to be weird drawing stuff I did over a decade ago, but she’s become the embodiment of that change for me. It’s handy having a protagonist who ages, almost in real time. Yes, we’ve been away a while, but in the interim there’s all this stuff that’s happened.

AIPT: Has the message or themes of Brass Sun evolved given the dire state of our current timeline/hellscape?

IC: I think the world evolving into such a “hellscape” makes a lot of those themes — that have really been there since the very beginning – increasingly relevant.

IE: Well, it wasn’t done deliberately, but we do have a heavily armed, militarized society who are murdering civilians in what they believe to be is a just cause, so make of that what you will.

AIPT: This story in 2,450 is basically a retelling of the story so far, as a myth almost. What challenges come with basically paring the story down like this to its “essence”? Did you learn anything new about Brass Sun during this process?

IE: I didn’t want the recap to just be big chunk of exposition. I needed to cover what had gone before, to try and bring everyone up to speed but I wanted to do it in an interesting way. Eventually I came up with the idea of a Chaucerian style pilgrimage set in the far future. Wren has become this legendary, iconic figure, so much so that there are pilgrims who visit her old home world of Hind Leg.

The Orrery, the Wheel of Worlds, has clearly changed, but we don’t know how or what Wren did to become so revered. We drop hints and scatter plot threads and then jump back in time to the 20-something Wren. This series and those that follow will show us how she gets from here to there.

IC: Quoting [Andrei] Tarkovsky, “A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.” We come to stories with our own baggage that informs the way we see the story, and for a story a decade or so in the telling, you see the world of it a little differently to how you saw it before. That’s the journey.

Back in the second series, Prog #1,850, we had a page-long shadow theater introduction to the world of Brass Sun, but now it takes the better part of ten pages to bring everyone up to speed. If you’re new to the story, there’s a catch up, and then we drop you in medias res (I grew up loving stories like that — Empire Strikes Back, for example; just dump me in the middle of the story).

AIPT: What’s next for this story, and the rest of Brass Sun — I assume we can expect more chapters down the line in the near future?

IC: This chapter is very much its own story and we have a ways to go. We have more chapters, always with the end goal in our eye-line, and the plan is to keep that future much nearer.

IE: There’s plenty more to come! As we follow Wren’s story, we’ll see lot more of the diverse worlds and species that live on the worlds of the Orrery. We expand on the story and the universe it’s set in.

2000 AD Prog 2,450 is out now!