Prog 4 - Flesh Bonus!

Here's a really cool 'mock' ad for Flesh. The fantastic fun art is by Kevin O'Neill. Love the nice touches like the registered trademark of Trans-Time Corporation and the ad jingle.
'Flesh is fresh and good to eat...Flesh is lots of juicy meat!'

Prog 4 - Judge Dredd

Mutants break into Mega-City One and Dredd is there to stop them. He looks like he's having a lot of fun killing them too judging by his dialogue in the page above.

Dredd quips as he blows them away that fighting the mutants is 'just the sort of soft job a judge like him needs!'

The mutants are getting massacred by Dredd and retreat back into their territory outside the city.

Dredd is informed by Justice HQ that the mutants, The Brotherhood of Darkness, have kidnapped the Mayors son and he must follow the mutants and rescue him.

Dredd adopts a disguise. He puts on a robe, probably from one of the fallen mutants, and decides to fool his way into the Brotherhood as they trek their way outside the city.
We get our first glimpse of what lies outside Mega City One. It's an atomic wilderness. A radioactive nightmare as a result of the Atomic War.
Dredd gets his insects screwed up. In the first panel, it's a Praying Mantis and in the panel where the Brotherhood are barbqueing...it's a grasshopper, not the mantis he saw. I guess they don't teach that sort of thing at the Academy.

Dredd sees that the Mayors son isn't the only Mega City citizen the mutants have kidnapped and while the Brotherhood are feasting, he makes his move...
After getting rid of the guards he frees the Mayors son.
He's in the process of freeing the other captives when the Brotherhood spot him. He puts the lawmasters lights on full beam, temporarily blinding the mutants and throws a few flares for good measure.

Dredd makes his escape with the rescued slaves back to Mega City One.
This story is important for two reasons. One, it introduces Mutants into Dredd's world and two, the Atomic wasteland, which would later be named the Cursed Earth.

The script was written by Malcolm Shaw. Of the first fifteen Dredd stories commissioned by Mills, Shaw wrote seven of them. Of course Mills probably, heavily rewrote them...like he did with all the early scripts.

Prog 4 - MACH 1

I love the title of this MACH 1 installment, 'In 24 hours a President must die!'

John Probe is on a mission to eliminate the President of Irania, (No prize for guessing what country 'Irania' is based on.)before the President can launch an invasion on their neighbors Turkostan. It's going to be a tough mission. The Presidents palace is heavily guarded.

Rather than waste time, Probe tries the direct approach.
He's arrested and taken to the secret police headquarters and is interrogated by a Colonel Krall.
The Colonels henchmen are surprised that Probe has no weapons. Probe responds that he 'doesn't need fancy gadgets. I'm going to kill the swine with my bare hands!'

Krall says that Probe is full of it and he's going to skin him alive. The interrogation begins... Thanks to MACH 1's hyper-strength, he's able to withstand the torture with a minimum of discomfort. The interrogation is interrupted by an officer that informs Krall that the President is curious about his British prisoner and would like to see him. Krall chains Probe, he wants to make sure that he can't carry out his threat to kill the President.

Probes gamble has paid off...now, he will get face time with the dictator.

President Mudar is just as vicious as his underling Krall. Probe tells him, quite nonchalantly, how he is going to die.
Mudar is interrupted by one of his men. The officer tell Mudar that his invasion force is ready. Mudar has no time to waste on Probe and orders that he be taken back to Colonel Krall for futher interrogation. MACH 1 makes his move. He snaps the chains that bind him and kills Mudar's men.
And true to his word, Probe kills Mudar by a hyper-powered karate chop!
Krall has been watching and decides to take Probe out with one of his hunting guns. A gun so powerful it can stop a charging rhino! Probe races forward in an effort to stop him...but too late. He takes the brunt of the blast!
With his hyper-power depleting, Probe takes a huge risk, he charges forward, crashing both him and a stunned Krall, through a window.
Krall is dead and MACH 1 makes his escape. He steals an armored car, crashes it through the palace gates and makes his way across the border. We end the strip with Sharpe paying Probe a visit in hospital where he's recovering from his wounds.
He has completed his mission. By assassinating Mudar he has stopped Irania from invading Turkostan.

Lots of good stuff in this strip.

We see that Probe is human after all. He barely makes it out alive. And his computer brain has a weakness...it doesn't have any working knowledge of old weaponry. When Probe steals the tank, it can't give him any data on it because it's an old tank, it can only give him data on 'new' vehicles.

The strip ends with a conversation between Sharpe and Probe and we're left with the impression that Sharpe is glad that Probe made it out alive because he's cost the government so much money. It speaks a lot about Sharpes character.

Nice fun script by Mills and decent art by Enio.

Prog 4 - Dan Dare

Seriously!

Can Dan Dare get much worse? The script on just the center spread alone is atrociously bad! Kelvin Gosnell wrote the script for this crap. Thank God he got waaaay better with his adaptation of 'Stainless Steel Rat'.

Check out the dialogue on this page. We have a crew member referring to Dan as DD! Maybe it was hip to refer to people by their initials! I would have smacked him for the lack of respect. Then again, Dare does have his initials in big bold letters on his chest!

And Dare is 'posi-sure' he can land the craft. What the heck is that language. Posi-sure?!?

And poor Neil Armstrong gets forgotten about in the future. Not bloody likely...but there you go. Also, Dare is a 'spacer'...now, I don't know about you but when I was growing up a 'Spacer' was slang for a lunatic or whackjob!

This center spread just reads so weird and on top of the freaky dialogue we get Dare landing on an island of crystal titanium floating on a sea of boiling metal!

Seems like Mr.Gosnell has been smoking the funny stuff!

After safely navigating through the storm, Dan lands the craft on Jupiters surface. The crew put on their space suits and venture outside. The suits have been adapted to survive the rigors of Jupiters high gravity.

'Spacer' Logan picks up readings of a power source nearby. Monday, Dare and crew follow Logan's lead. But the power source is too strong for Logans suit to handle and we get where the cover idea for this prog came from...
Which makes me ask the question...Why are the rest of the party still alive? Surely, they have the same type of spacesuits on!

The crew come face to face with the power source and Dan, more or less, tells Monday to shut his face while he wants to know what the alien is planning on doing with them and what connection it has to with the creature back on the 'Odyssey'. We leave Dan to ponder what's next and switch back to the Odyssey and the Medic Sector. Doctor Ziggy can't figure out what the purpose of the creature is. While she's trying to figure that out...the creature manages to get itself loose from it's glass cage and surprises the good doctor. Again, Dare suffers from bad script writing. Not even Belardinelli's wonderfully bizarre alien creatures can save it.

Hopefully, the next episode will be better.

I live in hope!

Prog 4 - Harlem Heroes

Zack is plummeting to his doom!

Just as he's about to crash into the crowd, Giant and Hairy save him, and the spectators, from certain death!
They carry Zack into the pit where firefighters extinguish the flames from his jet-pack. The Heroes suits are made of fire-proof material and that's why Zack wasn't hurt by the flames.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Bulls have taken total advantage of the situation with Giant and Hairy too busy rescuing Zack, and not being able to call a time-out...the Bulls have scored.

Giant is pissed off. If it wasn't for Zacks cockiness they might have been able to stop the Bulls. He gives Zack the hairdryer treatment.
Giant and Hairy get back into the game. The Bulls are dominating. They're just about to score again when the ball is intercepted by Harlem's Chico. The Bulls are playing tough...to tough. They give away a free throw for a challenge on Chico.
The Umpire interrupts the game and informs Giant that they're short a player and he has thirty seconds to make up the squad. Giant is beside himself. All he has is what's already out in the stadium. There are no more Heroes left! Or so he thinks...
Giant decides to give Zack another chance.

The free throw is taken by Giant. Slim provides a decoy, while Zack Harper grabs the ball and smacks it down to Giant..but the Bulls are onto him quick and there's a pile-up!
In the chaos, Giant manages to score the equaliser by kicking the ball off an opponents face and into the goal. Just in time for the Half-Time interval.

In the pit, Giant receives a call on the holo-phone from Louis Mayer. Mayer tells Giant that he's had a lot of time to think while he's been in hospital and that he believes the road liner crash was no accident. Someone is trying to kill off the Heroes.
The Second Half begins!

Another good installment here. I like that, on top of the challenge to try and win the World Championship with a rag-tag team, Giant and crew have also got to deal with the fact that someone is trying to kill them off. Who and why, we'll find out later.

Nice to see Giant put Zack in his place, but to be honest...he had no choice but to let him rejoin because they'd probably have to forfeit the game if they couldn't field enough players. Giant knew exactly what he was doing to get the best out of Zack.

And it was also good to see another member of the Heroes, Chico, getting some page time!

I'm really looking forward to the next chapter.

Tom Tully is a master at writing sports stories.

Prog 4 - Flesh

I was seven years old when I first saw the above page...and it rocked my world! What a great piece of art by Ramon Sola. Flesh had to be one of the most violent strips I'd ever read as a kid and Sola's scratchy loose artwork just blew me away and his style added to the horror of the strip.

We last left off with Reagan and his rangers making their way to Carver City to get the rookie Joe some medical attention. Joe had suffered from a tyrannosaur bite and it was infected. Reagan thought he had killed the Tyrannosaur but all he did was gouge it's eye out and stun it. Now, the newly named Old One Eye has Reagans scent...and she wants revenge.

There's that crazy word 'Kronj' again!
Reagan decides that only he and Joe should enter the city because it's run by maniac called 'Claw' Carver. Reagan explains to a member of his crew that Carver used to be a trail Boss like him and made so much money from slaughtering dinosaurs that he retired and set up the 'Carver City' trading post.

Leaving the rangers and the herd behind, Reagan approaches the city dome and is greeted by a robot sheriff. The robot tells him that no guns are allowed inside the dome and also tells him the whereabouts of the trading post doctor. No surprise that the crusty old Doc is at the saloon, drinking and gambling. Reagan sobers him up the tough way...
The doctor examines Joe and tells Reagan that he's suffering from an infection from the dinosaur bite and that the only cure is take a special gland from a tyrannosaurs mouth and inject the fluid into Joe. But Reagan has another problem...by bringing the infected ranger into the dome he's risked the whole city catching plague. The doctor tells him that Claw Carver ain't going to like it when he finds out.

But it's too late. Carver already knows...and he's fighting mad! (If you look at the above image, in the right hand corner, you can see that Carver was sitting, playing cards with the Doc, at the table when Reagan entered the saloon.)

Looks like Carver and Reagan have a history. Carver gives Reagan a nice welcome.
Both men go brawling out into the street.
The robot sheriff appears and he's programmed to shoot the men if they don't stop fighting. Just as the sheriff is about to fire, Reagan kicks Carver on top of him and he fires wild, hitting the dome of the city and cracking it.

Outside, Old One Eye and her pack have arrived. She sees the flash of laser fire and the crack in the dome and breaks through. She chews on a human but isn't satisfied, it's not the human she'd been looking for, and then she smells it...the scent of the human she'd been tracking, the human that took her eye.

Carver is nowhere to be seen and Reagan and Old One Eye face off! Great cliffhanger! This episode had everything...robot sheriffs and a bar room brawl interrupted by bloodthirtsy dinosaurs and the first appearance of a great 2000ad villain, 'Claw' Carver!

Carver would get his comeuppance at the end of 'Flesh Book II' and his origin story wasn't told until 30 years later in Prog 1526(2/28/2007) in 'Hand of Glory' written by Pat Mills and drawn by Sola.

Prog 4 - Invasion

I absolutely love this splash page. A really cool cut-away to reveal the insides of the resistance Headquarters and the text box on the bottom right saying that the location can't be revealed for security purposes. It's those neat touches that really involve the reader in the story especially the code stuff.

The brigadier asks Savage what he thinks of the underground fortress. Savage isn't all that impressed he wants to find out with all this weaponry why aren't they killing more 'Dirty Volgans!'

The Brigadier brings Savage into room full of men like him - rough necks! Although, the Brigadiers attiude comes across as a bit insulting.
The Brigadier tells Savage that the volunteer roughnecks are men like him...dockers, mechanics, electricians that have all passed tests that he himself had set up to make soldiers out of them.

Savage has a test of his own. He asks the men assembled to show them his hands.
On inspection he sees marks left from hard work, he knows that these men are who they claim to be...except the man claiming to be a miner! His hands have no marks and looks like he's never done a days hard work in his life.
He's been rumbled. He's no miner...he's a Volgan spy! The spy grabs the Brigadier and threatens to kill him unless they let him leave.
The spy and his hostage enter the elevator and start to ascend to the surface. Savage is having none of it. He grabs the dockers hook and latches himself onto the bottom of the elevator.

The elevator stops and Savage springs his surprise!

Savage has now more than proven how valuable he is to the resistance. So much so, that the Brigadier gives him his own resistance group to lead. The codename for the group is aptly called 'Mad Dog'. Bill also gets a pump action shotgun as a bonus. He won't have to reload so often now!

We then cut to a scene at a Volgan checkpoint on the road to London. The soldiers wave down a civilian van to check out what they're carrying. But this isn't an ordinary 'civilian' van.

It's carrying Savage and his 'Mad Dogs!'
Now that Savage has his team and they're all fully armed...the Volgans are going to be in for a hell of a time.

Let the mayhem continue...

Prog 4 - Cover

A pretty unremarkable cover.
They do get a nice dig in at the Marvelous and Distinguished Competition though 'Better than Super Heroes...Hyper Heroes!'
I have nothing to else to say about the cover, except...thank goodness they get better!