Review: 2000AD PROG 1926- JUST BUY IT!!

Writers and authors: Numerous
Publisher: Rebellion
Released: 15th April 2015



2000AD is fast becoming my favourite comic book of the week, and in PROG 1926 this long-time Judge Dredd hater even enjoyed that strip as well.

PROG 1926 begins with ‘Judge Dredd- Enceladus New Life: Part Three, and even though I still despise the power tripping main-man himself, the story being told is a good old-fashioned mystery tale that has really captured my interest, attention, and whatever else I have that is hanging out there in the wind waiting to be captured. The structure of the story is clever, you want to know what happened to cause a space ship to turn into a suicide bomber minus the Allahu Akbar, and the art has a nice grain and grit about it as well.

Second strip this week is ‘Orlok- The Rasputin Caper: Part Three,’ and this is another case of me disliking the main protagonist but enjoying the story. This one features a nice dig at the corporate whore mainstream media of the future deliberately lying to the public. Looks like things in the future are much like things in the present then.

Third strip is the awesome in every conceivable way ‘Slaine- The Brutania Chronicles- Book Two, Part Three.’ The colouring, the art, the layout, and the overall look of this strip is excellent, lovely, beautiful, harsh, ephemeral, otherworldly, but real. This book has to be released in hardcover, and when it is released it will be a must buy for art lovers and comic book fans alike. The story this week is focussed on a cliché-spouting slave to a centralised control system. Hey, with that sort of corporate talent she would do very well today. A promising career on television or politics, or writing for a mainstream newspaper awaits a lady so unquestioning, so blind, so enslaved, so in love with learnt helplessness and a desire to do nothing but passively accept her lot in life. Like I said at the beginning of this paragraph, everything about ‘Slaine’ is awesome in every conceivable way, and just like I said last week, you need to get 2000AD just for this one strip alone.

How do you follow something as brilliant as Slaine? You can’t really, but ‘Grey Area- Just Routine Questions: Part Two,’ is a very good story that is posing a lot of interesting questions itself. The story here is about a planet of new-ager types who are happy to do nothing but be ‘spiritual’ and suck in their vegan guff fumes and think happy thoughts of niceness whilst congratulating each other on their passive inactivity. There’s a lesson to be learnt in this story, of how you cannot isolate yourself from the world, from reality, without it eventually busting down your door and forcing you take some kind of action. A life of ‘peace’ is nice, but is it really time right now in 2015 to hide yourself away in a cabin, to ignore what is going on all around you and hope that the world doesn’t eventually knock upon your door? That’s what is being explored in ‘Grey Area’ and that is why it interests me.

Last strip of this thoroughly entertaining and rewarding week in 2000AD is ‘Strontium Dog- The Stix Fix: Part Three.’ There is a vein of humour running through the strip that I’m enjoying and the story about a compromised prisoner being forced to help out some recognisably horrible centralised control freak types is along for the ride, assisting the humour and giving the narrative an element of seriousness that stops it from dissolving into a frivolous (‘Survival Geeks’) inconsequential joy ride.

The only thing that I didn’t like about 2000AD this week was the rather rough looking front cover. The rest of the book is superb, from the breathtaking Slaine to the clever and funny Strontium Dog to the questioning Grey Area and to the unlikeable protagonists but good stories in Dredd and Orlok. PROG 1926 of 2000AD is a fine comic book, and if you are not yet reading it then you really should be checking it out. 2000AD is a book that is on top form at the moment, and it really shouldn’t be missed. If you like comic books, then you need to get this book, it’s as simple as that.


Rating: 9/10 (Since the spring 2015 new start this book just keeps on getting better and better)

Best story: Slaine (10/10)

Worst story: All five stories in 2000AD at the moment are worthy of praise.