Adventures in Thrill-Power #4: The ‘2000 AD-verse’ overflows with interdimensional horror, vampire queens, and steampunk wonder!

As we promised during last week’s Action-packed coverage, we’re back with Adventures in Thrill Power #4! Hey, don’t say we never did nothing for ya.

If you somehow missed editions #1, #2, and #3, this bi-monthly (-ish) offering is where we celebrate all things related to 2000 AD. The long-running British comics magazine has basically set the watermark for important indie comics since the late ’70s. (The magazine is also the birthplace of the eternally entertaining, often terrifying Judge Dredd.) In recent years, we’ve tried to lend a spotlight to 2000 AD‘s important work, and Adventures in Thrill-Power should help to open up this work to an increasingly hungry and ravenous comics audience.

And just because we’ve missed a few months doesn’t mean 2000 AD has slowed down at all. This column, then, focuses primarily on Prog 2481, which does include a few new tales but mostly features some ongoing favorites. (So, think of it like a sampler platter, only this plate bites backs.) Ahead of each interview with the creative teams, we’ve offered up a little context to get you (generally) up-to-date and mentally primed before you decided to catch up for yourselves with recent issues. Sure, there’s a lot here, but consider it us basically making up for lost time. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to saying “sorry,” really.

If you’re Stateside, Prog 2481 is out this week (May 20). And we’ll hopefully have Adventures in Thrill Power #5 to you sooner rather than later. Until then time, fellow Adventurers, read comics, punch bullies, and howl at the moon!

Ken Niemand, Nick Percival, Dan Cornwell, and Jack Lynch, “The Oubliette”

If you hadn’t read the image already, “The Oubliette” doesn’t technically begin until Prog 2483. (That’s out June 3 in the U.S.) However, the creative team are gifting us a little preview of sorts of a story so big, it’s being told across 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine. (It also had something of a soft launch/preview with the “Messengers” story from late 2025.) And “The Oubliette” needs all the room it can snag as the story sees Dredd tortured by the immortal prophet Carver as Grant and Rico are forced to keep the peace in Mega-City One. Expect horror, brutality, and stakes galore as Dredd is tested like never before.

AIPT: Messengers was released last year and acted as a prelude for “Oubliette.” As we head into this new event, can you catch readers up on what’s been happening so far to set up the story?

Ken Niemand: Well, this story’s been building for a while. The first reference to the Oubliette was in the Xmas Dredd story in 2023, when Judge Rico was warned that something bad is coming and it’s going to be up to him to fix it, because Dredd will be trapped n the Oubliette. The warning is repeated and elaborated on in the story Messengers, when we learn that the return of something called The Black Tower previously mentioned in the story Shift – will be the cause of a mega-disaster; that Dredd won’t be around to deal with it; and that Giant and Ricpo will go into the Black Tower but only one of them will come back out again.

So each mention of the Oubliette or the Black Tower has drip-fed a little bit more info, and hopefully raised the stakes some more. We know that that the Black Tower is currently in the horror dimension called the Shift, but all we really know about the Oubliette is that it’s very far away, impossible to escape from, and that Dredd is headed there whether he wants to or not.

Nick Percival: The seeds for the Oubliette and The Black Tower were sown quite far back in earlier Dredd and Dredd-related strips. The ones I’ve illustrated (House on Bleaker St., Iron Teeth, The Shift, and Messengers) were all horror-based and established that Dredd is going to be suddenly out of action from Mega-City One for some time just as a sinister new supernatural threat attacks the city in his absence. A lot of this was set up in “The Shift” storyline, where we saw some of the evil powers at play and our first glimpse of the ominous Black Tower where all this evil emanates from.

AIPT: Oubliette and The Black Tower seem to be as much about Dredd being locked up as what happens when he’s gone. How does each side of this story dive into Dredd, and his importance to Mega-City One?

KN: Oubliette, running in the Prog, is all about Dredd. He’s trapped in this nightmare prison place. He doesn’t know where it really is, how he got there, who put him there or why. he has to learn the weird rules of the place, he has to survive, and he has to escape because his city is in danger without him. Even though everyone keeps telling him that escape is impossible.

Dan Cornwell is artist on all the Oubliette episodes, and it’s the best work I’ve ever seen from him.

Dan Cornwell: I think the importance of Dredd in Mega-City One goes without question, but this story effectively takes him and his history out of the equation, effectively, and MC1 struggles in a big way without him. I really don’t want to give too much away, but safe to say (in regards to Dredd in the Oubliette) this won’t be just Dredd stuck in a prison cell. The Oubliette is much, much more than that with so much going on. Terrifying, exciting, claustrophobic yet vast.

KN: Interspersed with the Oubliette episodes is a separate but linked story called The Finders, set back in a Mega-City struck by the disaster of the Black Tower, and about a group of already established characters coming together to find out what happened to Dredd, and then hopefully rescue him. It’ll be running in the Prog, too, as part of Oubliette, and with art by Jake Lynch.

Jake Lynch: Being a nerd, locked away from the world in my tiny studio, has meant I have had the great pleasure of getting to know my fellow droids, and its been the greatest of thrills to see the pages Nick and Dan are producing before they go off to production. Everyone knows what remarkable artists these two are, but I’ve been blown away by what I have seen and can’t wait for everyone else to see that too.

KN: Meanwhile, over in the Megazine, The Black Tower is happening, where we see its arrival in Mega-City, and the subsequent psychic apocalypse unleashed by it. With Dredd out the picture, it’s up to the next generation of Mega-City lawmen to deal with the crisis. Art is by Nick Percival, continuing many of the themes from our previous supernatural Dredd stories together.

NP: The Black Tower has a big focus on Judge Rico and his links to Dredd and what it’s doing to him mentally. The evil influence of the Shift leaking from The Black Tower is affecting him and messing with his head. He goes to some very dark places and horrible things will happen…can’t really spoil much more!

KN: Although it looks like another Dredd story crossing over between the Prog and the Megazine, you should be able to read both separately, although you’ll get more out of it  if you read them together. The mysteries in each one — What’s in the Black Tower? Who created the Oubliette, and why? Why is Dredd there? — may not necessarily have the same answers.

AIPT: What are some of the core challenges as well as novel opportunities that come with an event like this? Is it complicated at all balancing this across two books (that’d be 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine)?

KN: Ha! It’s the only story I’ve ever worked on that I’ve had to create a big spreadsheet to keep track of how the story fitted together, how the mythology would be explained, what artist will be doing what episode, and how the running order would go, in the switch between the Prog and the Megazine portions of the overall story.

We looked at previous mega-disaster stories and crossover events, and what did and didn’t work with them, and planned accordingly. The two stories should compliment each other, but not be utterly dependent on each other. You can read one, without having to read the other. No chopping and changing of artists from week to week. It was Dan for the main Oubliette story,  Jake for The Finders, and Nick for The Black Tower. 

There would be ramifications beyond the actual story. It wasn’t one of those mega-epics that happens in a void, without reference to it anywhere else. Liam Johnson is doing a Judge Anderson series showing what she was doing during the Black Tower crisis, which is something I was particularly keen happen, since she doesn’t feature in the main story and her absence needed to be explained.

NP: The schedule is a bit hectic, and obviously there are a few continuity challenges along the way. As artists, we all have different styles, mine probably more so, since I fully paint the artwork, so we’ve been sending pages back and forth to each other just to keep everyone in the loop and to try and maintain a consistent look to the key supporting characters and so on.

Ultimately, we’re still doing our own thing which is important. I’d established the designs of some key characters in the earlier strips, so it’s cool to see other artists do their take on these. I think it all holds together very well.

JL: I wouldn’t say there has been any real difficulties in coordinating. Ken sent out a complete breakdown of how all the parts fit together right at the beginning. Then, it comes down to little things like, “No, he doesn’t wear that anymore” or “Do I have to draw this character without a helmet now?!” (Sorry, Nick, my bad…)

DC: From an artistic perspective, there’s been a lot of sharing images with Nick and Jake, along with getting approval from Ken. It’s certainly a team effort. There has been design elements that we have to align and get right or the story could miss the mark. But I believe we’ve done just that.

Let’s be clear here: Ken organized this entirely himself, and good god it must have been a headache to get right. But he got it done, and man, he did a stunning job. I don’t envy him; it was a hell of a challenge. This is quite a different kind of Dredd story and will have huge consequences for Dredd and the whole of his world.

KN: This isn’t one of those THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!! lofty promises, but it will change some things. We lose a major Dredd-verse character, and another one gets severely messed up and may never be the same again. The ripples of the Oubliette storyline will continue spreading out in my own stories for a while yet.

AIPT: Anything you’d care to tease or spoil outright from the story? Any characters we should keep an eye on as the story continues?

KN: There’s hopefully what’s going to be a big twist right in the first episode. And a few surprises and easter eggs scattered all though the rest of Oubliette. It’ll be fun to see if anyone can unravel  the clues about the unfolding mystery of who or what’s doing all this to Dredd, and why.

You should also pay attention to the actual full title of the story in the Megazine, and wonder what it could mean…

NP: From my side of things, certainly Judge Rico, Judge Giant, and the mysterious Psi-Judge Inviata. We also do some very cool things with the monstrous creature, Iron Teeth, that will continue way beyond these stories and other things I can’t mention. Everything we’ve set up will have repercussions down the line for Dredd and Mega-City One.

DC: Too many story twists, characters, and events to even start. This will be Dredd, but not as you’ve seen him before.

Mike Carroll and Joe Currie, Silver: Malignant (Part 5)

The TL;DR of Silver is basically “vampires in space.” Book one (Unearthed) launched 2024, and introduced us to to a tale where “guerilla fighters who dig up a centuries-old vampires in order to fight back against a gigantic mechanized army.” Then, book two (Perfidious) furthered the conflict between the alien Sepsis and the fighters and the vampire queen Baroness DeSilva, raising questions about loyalty and the real enemy. Now, we’re at part five of the third book, Malignant, where the conflict has reached nasty new heights (and a nuclear reactor may be involved). The war for mankind’s soul ain’t nearly over, folks.

AIPT: What can you tell us about this new chapter of Silver? What’s the series about and can fans jump in blind on this one at all, or are they better off diving into back issues?

Mike Carroll: Ideally a new reader should be able to jump into a comic book story at any issue and quickly pick up what’s going on, but with only five pages per episode we don’t have enough room to summarize everything that’s gone before… So, yeah, the readers should check out the back-issues! Or, better still, the graphic novel which collects all the episodes published so far.

In the meantime, while the readers are waiting for the delivery of their copy of the graphic novel that they’ve just ordered – plus the 10 other copies they generously bought to give to their friends – here’s the basic idea: Earth has been invaded and the people enslaved by an alien race, the Sepsis. There are resistance cells all over the world, desperate men and women fighting a battle against greatly superior forces…and in England one of those cells has recruited a 500-year-old vampire, Baroness Yelena Honorée DeSilva – code-named “Silver.”

At the end of book 2, Perfidious, the Baroness seemingly died when her actions led to the destruction of a nuclear power station that the Sepsis had been using as a nursery for their cloned warriors. But vampires are rather hard to kill…

Joe Currie: Erm, its Da-Silver actually. How rude.

Because of Mike C.’s outstanding writing skills and fabulous storytelling abilities, the reader can jump into the story anytime, but there’s lots of good stuff in the other two volumes to munch on with your eyes. What’s really cool about Mike’s writings is the storyline can flip on a dime; he has the super skills to throw massive curve ball putting us all in a spin.

AIPT: The thing that sets this “series” apart for me (as evidenced in this debut chapter) is the design of the world and how it doesn’t feel like any other dystopia. Can you talk about some of that world-building and why it matters to a vampire story?

MC: This is a vampire story, true, but it’s also a story about occupation and resistance – and the lengths to which people will go to survive.

The world-building was very strongly shaped by the story I wanted to tell, and because I knew that Joe Currie would be drawing it! Aside from having a very unique style, Joe’s incredibly gifted at creating beautiful pictures out of ugly components. His work is often visceral and otherworldly at the same time – amazing stuff!

JC: The story is set in the late 1960s near Bristol. After the massive invasion from Sepsis, all industries/infrastructure stopped, and humans became the hunted by an overwhelming force. There’s only two things you can do: survive or fight.

MC: We’re three decades into the Sepsis occupation. This means that the humans’ technology stalled at the end of the 1960s, so it’s pretty primitive by our standards. No computers, no cell phones, no sat-nav…the rebels drive battered VW vans around the ruined streets and fight with WWII-era weapons. They are vastly out-classed by the Sepsis, but they keep on fighting.

And while the Sepsis are indeed brutal overlords, far worse in many ways are the human collaborators: the Overseers and Procurators. One thread of the story follows Morrison, an Overseer who crosses paths with the Baroness shortly after she’s unearthed.

So this is a world occupied by an unstoppable, unknowable oppressing force that has obliviously trampled over everything we hold dear – and our one spark of hope for victory is a creature that for half a millennium has considered humans to be food.

AIPT: There’s so much going on in Silver. As you’ve continued writing the series, what’s been your favorite aspect to develop and explore: the growing politics, the supernatural elements, the futuristic and technological aspects, Silver herself and her development?

MC: The political aspect is fascinating to address because we have an oppressed people willingly allying themselves with a creature that in any other circumstances would be their worst nightmare. The resistance fighters have to ask themselves which of the two evils is the lesser – and they don’t all reach the same answer. Some see the Baroness as their only hope, others believe that they’d be trading one brutal master for another.

With the characters, for the most part I’ve kept them quite simple because the situation has crystalized their motives: the rebels know that the Sepsis must be defeated, the collaborators believe that their only hope is to put themselves and their families first. The Baroness is deliberately more complicated because she sees the humans as lesser beings and she has no love or affection for them, but the Sepsis could potentially wipe them all out…if all the people are gone, what will she live on? And she was human, once…there are traces of empathy still in there.

JC: It’s not following a traditional Victorian vampire story of feeling tantalized when seeing an exposed lady’s neck in public, on Sunday. In the park. After church. With the vicar’s family. It’s different and unexpected.

The technology is fun to play with, too. The Sepsis are vastly more technologically advanced than the humans, but history has given us many examples of “primitive” people defeating their high-tech enemies. Your hand-held Hyper-Neutron Axion Cannon isn’t going to be of much use to you if the enemy can get close enough with their sharpened stone to chop off your trigger-finger.

But if we want to boil it all down and turn it into a nourishing soup…I’ve had the most fun writing the fight scenes. I spent many years writing kids’ books and romance novels, so with Silver it’s nice to have the freedom to express my inherently hyper-violent nature. I don’t think a day has passed since 1987 that I haven’t thrown a garbage can through a plate glass window, punched at least one bus, and then beaten up a passer-by or two just for fun, so writing the action scenes is a great release. It’s like Tolstoy probably said: One is only truly free when one is writing a scene in which a 500-year-old vampire is punching an alien baddie’s jawbone out through the back of its neck.

AIPT: Can you tease out anything from the rest of the new story?

JC: Yes: with the rest of the story there’s a lot of blood sploshing about! I have a distant feeling someone is going to get shot in the face.

MC: I have a case of Advanced Spoilerphobia – that’s a real medical condition, no need to look it up – so I don’t like to give away too much, but I can confirm that there will be blood. Oh yes. Much of it will be alien blood…but not all of it.

JC: I know nothing, I just get spoonfuls of script now and then due to the high amount of super cool action which could melt my mind into space goo. They are looking after me – it’s nice and warm in this desert warehouse. I don’t know where I am..

MC: We’ll be delving a little deeper into the Baroness’s past, too – that was a huge amount of fun to write, and I can’t wait to see how Joe depicts her scenes with the character known as The Shepherd.

Oh, and there’s a scene about half-way through that’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever written. That is, the situation is horrible, not the writing (I hope).

JC: I think I saw a sign outside once that said Cappuccino One…help me. I’m hiding behind a large boulder on a fake moon set….

Ian Edgington and D’Israeli, Helium: Red October (Part 6)

Of all the stories in this issue, Helium may be the most packed with history. (Not counting the many, many, many misadventures of Judge Dredd, of course.) After a 10-year break, Ian Edginton and D’Israeli returned in late 2023 with new stories of their steampunk/dieselpunk saga where humanity has moved to floating cities above a gaseous ocean of toxic fumes. In the third series, Red October, Constable Hodge and Sol team up with Professor Bloom travel down to Earth to explore if the world can be made inhabitable once again. Yet even with all those layers and history, Helium is continually a delightful read.

AIPT: If fans want to jump in here, what should they know about Helium going in?

IE: It has been 350 years since the end of The Great War. No one won. Everyone lost. Some 85% of the Earth’s surface now lies beneath the vast, gaseous ocean of the Poison Belt — a toxic, mutated cocktail of biological and chemical weapons designed by both sides to win the war. Instead, it ended it and almost spelt extinction for the human race.

Those that survived and prospered cling to the High Lands — alpine valleys and mountaintop islands safe above the noxious fume. Humanity lives in the clean air now, airships and flyers of all description ply the jet-stream highways, while dirigible cities and air-port towns ride the high air.

All the while, the Poison Belt roils and swirls below. However, rumors have begun to grow, tales of vanishing ships, shadows in the fog and ominous, baleful lights where life should not exist.

Far below in the morbid deep, something is stirring.

D’Israeli: Helium is set in an alternative 1940s, after a devastating war has covered the Earth in a lethal sea of corrosive poison gas called The Fugue. The last remnants of mankind live on the peaks of mountains, which are now islands poking out of The Fugue.

AIPT: Helium perfectly splits the difference between old and new aesthetics. How does that work out — how do you design something both vintage and so novel?

IE: It’s a culture and civilization built out of necessity. The cities and towns that survive above the Poison Belt rely on old and even ancient technology that has had to be repeatedly repaired, renovated, and reproduced. Even though things are effectively new, they reflect the antique aesthetic that they’re originally based on.

D’Israeli: Mostly we start with period-specific details — for example, most of the aircraft in the series are based on World War II-era prototypes (Ian suggested many of those). The community of New Castle at the start of the story was based upon the island fishing communities of the Northern Isles of Scotland, down to the characters having family-specific patterns on their jumpers.

So generally, it’s an extrapolation from something historical — even the dirigible freighters and warships in Helium start with real sea vessels and adapt the designs for the story. While I try to make the designs look plausible, there’s a lot of poetry in there too — for example, the dirigible “ships” have their gas envelopes under the hills, which would be a recipe for capsizing in practice.

AIPT: What do you think is going to ultimately be your favorite defining moment of Red October? Are there any characters, locations or moments you’re looking forward to readers finding out about in particular?

D’Israeli: Without giving any spoilers, there’s a completely new environment in this series that we had a lot of fun designing. The resolution to that situation in episode 11 is my favorite sequence in the series, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the readers make of it. From the point of view of the overall story, there’s a big reveal in episode 12 that’s going to be pretty dramatic.

IE: That’s a tricky choice. Visually this series is stunning, D’Israeli is a magician in turning a few paragraphs of script into the most sumptuous artwork. We have the capitol of the Commonwealth perched high on the mountaintops, so there’s lots of snow and crisp cold blues. Then, under the Poison Belt, we find what’s left of the British Royal Family and their palaces, so everything is done in rich golds, deep reds and purples.

My favorite part of this series though is the relationship between Constable Foundling Hodge and her friend and assistant, the cyborg Solace Grimsby. He has been with her since she was an infant. She trusts him with her life and vice versa. They get drunk together, swear and shout at each other, but they would also each give their lives to save the other. They’re more than father and daughter, and they’re more than friends. They know that they can trust each other completely.

AIPT: Ian, I also love Brass Sun. Do you see these two as connected (even just spiritually, I’d reckon) in any way? Are you hitting at the same interests or ideas?

IE: Possibly. There are similarities in that they’re both exotic worlds, or in the case of Brass Sun, solar systems. They also share a retro-tech kind of vibe. Brass Sun actually does have links to another 2000 AD series of mine called Kingmaker. So you might want to check that out as there’s a new series in production!

Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard, Brink: The Call of The Void (Part 10)

And speaking of books with long histories, Brink is already at book seven. (The sixth book was collected and released back in February.) In the story, mankind has left a destroyed Earth to live in Habitats in deep space. But with tensions high after two decades floating in the great, wide nothing, it’s up to Bridget Kurtis of the Habitat Security Division to keep the peace. This latest storyline features more crime around Sects (i.e., space cults), and as far along as they are with this tale, the creators regularly provide a pretty sturdy jumping on point across each new chapter of Brink. And for even more from the duo of Abnett and Culbard, check out Wild’s End and The New Deadwardians!

AIPT: The premise of Brink is brilliant – for people who might not have read it before, what is your series about?

Dan Abnett: Brink is essentially a police procedural in which our main characters investigate uncanny and disturbing “cult” related crimes taking place on The Brink…which is all that’s left of the human race. It’s set towards the end of this century. The Earth has died due to exploitation and climate collapse (we suppose, we’re not told specifically), and the human race has evacuated.

All of humanity is now living in the claustrophobic confines of The Brink, a series of space stations and “habitats” scattered through the inner solar system.  They’re trapped there because interstellar travel (FTL) is not yet technically possible. It’s a strange and bleak life, made worse by the fact that the whole of humanity seems to be slowly going mad — either because of the trauma of the situation, or becomes something very much weirder is going on. “Cult” (we actually call it “sect”) delusions are springing up, destabilizing society.

Each “book” of the series focuses on a specific case, but a growing meta-story is building in the background. It’s a very methodical series, with a reputation for being slow-burn and “talky” as our lead characters painstakingly pick each mystery apart. It is deliberately very naturalistic. When the action and horror happens, it’s sudden and shocking. It can get quite creepy and disturbing, and very much leans into the paranoia of the situation.

AIPT: Where is our favorite space investigator as we find her in this latest tale? And what does it represent regarding the long-term plans for both the story and character?

DA: With the current story (Book 7, “The Call of the Void”), we find Bridget Kurtis, our principle character, finally closing on some of the deeper mysteries. There is a real sense of progression that she’s finally putting some major pieces together. She’s arrived at Luna Hab, the only Brink Habitat on a planet (the Moon), and it’s very eerie and depressing. The closer she and her allies get to discovering the truth — especially about “The Mercury Event”, which happened in book 1, and which appears to be a cult atrocity that blacked out or destroyed all of the habitats in the Mercury Zone — the more the strange forces in opposition gather to obstruct them.

After seven “cases” (well, six, and one cunning “flashback” story that showed previous events from a contrasting angle), we are now really entering the endgame, moving from individual crimes to the greater mystery. It’s very tense, and may be the most unsettling story yet.

AIPT: I feel like people have really resonated with Bridget — why do you think that is?

DA: I think it’s the fact that she’s smart, and resolute, and absolutely won’t back down, no matter the problems that causes. She is resolute and uncompromising. And she also has, though it’s very deadpan, a wicked sense of humor. Her caustic interactions with character like the straight-laced Bonner, and the wildcard Reggie, and her genuine friendship with Gita, allow her to shine, and also bring the other characters to life.

AIPT: How does Bridget compare with classic 2000 AD characters like Dredd? Are they closer than we might expect?

DA: That’s an interesting question. When Ian and I pitched Brink to 2000 AD, we didn’t think it would be accepted because it’s not really very “2000 AD.” By that, I mean it doesn’t fit the template of the classic and wonderful series like Judge Dredd. It’s much slower-burn, much less reliant on action, and it doesn’t feature a larger than life main character, like Dredd or Rogue Trooper, to drive the drama forward. Indeed, it’s not even named after the main character, which 2000 AD strips usually are.

But Ian and I had worked together on various series (like The New Deadwardians for Vertigo and Wild’s End for Boom) and we had both been working for 2000 AD on other series. Brink was a concept we really liked, and we relished the idea of creating a 2000 AD series together, so we pitched…and were delighted when “Tharg” accepted it. It was probably a gamble and an experiment on Tharg’s part. We were even more delighted when the series became so popular and acclaimed.

I think Kurtis is a very compelling character. The strip may not be named after her, but it’s become hers. In fact, originally, we were planning to have different lead characters in each story, but once we’d done one book with her, she became such a force of nature that we realized she had to be the lead.

She’s very determined, very dogged and intense, and she’s not very good with people…she tends to rub people up the wrong way and act like a difficult outsider. I think it’s her stillness and intensity that makes her such a focus, with very interesting and contrasting characters circling around her. So, by default really, she has become a classic character like Dredd. The “packaging” is different, but in many ways — with their dedication, intensity and indomitable spirits — they are very similar. They’d probably get along. Well, they’d probably work together very well, if they had to.

AIPT: You two have been building quite the story mountain with Brink. What’s the appeal of this series in the grander scheme of 2000 AD?

DA: I’m not sure, but I’m glad it is. I suppose it’s the sheer scale of it. Though it is broken down into digestible “cases,” it has a vast a complex scope, so it has a texture (I suppose) like a complicated novel. Crucial pieces of information are revealed or discovered as we go along — and the significance of some of those things aren’t apparent until much later. Perhaps it’s that. It’s very (pardon the pun) “grounded” in naturalism, with everyday language and an undramatic, “professional” approach.

I think readers really love it when things open out and a discovery is made, and they like seeing the hard work put in getting there. It is also, despite it’s slow-burn nature, very creepy indeed, with a deeply unsettling tone. And, unlike the classic 2000 AD series where the lead is also the name of the strip, there is a feeling that anything can happen, and that no one is safe. No one is. The twists of the story can be very shocking.