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I've started various threads recently reviewing/raving about/drawing attention to the House of Thargs cheap, news-stand reprint tile 2000 A.D. Extreme Edition. Some have taken off, other haven't.
To stop me from clogging your board up with posts every eight weeks I thought I'd start a potentially long lasting thread to discuss the issues as they are released and to flag up any contents of interest to the average reader.
The latest issue, X23, ties in with the sentient City Block on the rampage in Anderson, Psi and the Giant Stompy Robots versus Dinosaur Sized Alien Sperm in Detonator X with a GIANT ROBOT STOMPY CARNAGE theme.
The cover star is Armoured Gideon which hasn't aged terribly well. It's very 90's in style and tone but for all that is fun. Truly, you'd have to be really terrible to render Giant Robots fighting pan-dimensional entities on the border of reality as anything less than diverting. This isn't entirely bad, and you can see why Tharg commisioned more. Mind you, he commisione three lots of The Clown and Kronos Karnival.
Gideon is an endearingly designed single word vocabulary robot who comes out of no-where to prevent Lovecraftian Horrors from entering our dimension. A photo-journalist tries to prove he exists. And then it ends. It read better in installments as the recaps and jumps between episodes jar the reeader. One of the better new strips of the time, mind.
The thing that might attract people to this issue is the main B-feature. Slaughterbowl (by the obscurants darling John Smith with art from Paul "Who?" Peart) is a generic death sport story from the infamous Summer Offensive. A mild mannered man with a quiet home life and terminally ill wife is sacked from his long term job writing greeting card verses. His life spirals downward and he finds himself arrested for crimes he's sure he didn't commit. His method of getting off Death Row? Entering Slaughter Bowl, the violentest death sport of them all. Heavily armoured dinosaurs ridden by maniacal killers in a battle to the finish.
A tribute to the death sport genre that had gone out of vogue Slaughter Bowl has none of Smiths trademark semantic cleverness but displays his mordant wit and flair for introducing dozens of interesting characters. This isn't aiming for literate greatness or depth of character it's aiming to be the best mindless fun it can be, and by Jove it succeeds. Entertaining, violent, with art that is at once brilliant and bland Slaughterbowl is the sort of thing your inner Beavis (or Butthead, delete as appropriate) will love.
Both strips have downbeat endings, and the two filler tales are predictable but, having Gibbons art, pretty.
£2.99, newsies everywhere.
Anyway, if you want me to stop these posts start a petition and let me know! |
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