TOP TEN COMICS OF 2003: NUMBER TEN
TOP TEN COMICS OF 2003: NUMBER TEN
Good God it’s February, I’m plugged with cold and flu, just got my computer back online after a long period of disfunction… blah blah excuse excuse etc. Too late to write any huge mega-articles now so slap on ‘The Wizard’ and let’s go day-by-day up the charts blog-style instead. Oh go on, let’s!
Anyway, straight in at number ten it’s 2000AD, trapped at the bottom of the pop chart with all the advantages and disadvantages of any anthology comic. This year (and probably last year and the year before that, I can’t remember) they’ve been adding hot, gamey new characters to a stable full to bursting and dragging new talent kicking and screaming into the fold. The best example of this is Caballistics Inc, which started in the annual ’sci-fi special’ Prog 2003 - technically debuting in 2002, cheating fans - and dragged Dom Reardon from the gehenna of Future Shocks into weekly-series fame, Gordon Rennie providing a taut and multi-layered Stories Of Evil. What else might make a WAY COOL VIDEO GAME in 2005 or so? Well, Lobster Random by new-ish boy Si Spurrier and old hand Carl Critchlow made a good debut… From Grace starring the aforementioned Spurrier and Frazer Irving hit big… Edgington and D’Israeli scored with Leviathan… and I’ve run out of euphemisms for ‘was good’ but there were more where they came from. The hits of the year will be out in TPB soon enough, the misses consigned to the dustbin of history with Dry Run.
The absolute BEST thing, however, was Tharg’s Alien Invasions - one-page future shocks written and drawn by Henry Flint. There’s no room for anything except outright lunacy, and anyone who remembers Funny Folk will know just what to expect. Three cheers for Tharg!
Interestingly, the Dredd vs Death game made little or no impact beyond the occasional house ad and the odd screenshot here and there - there wasn’t the sense of madly hurling all the eggs into a single basket that there was when the Dredd film went down the toilet. “This film will save us all - just as Mutants In Mega-City One on flexidisc did!” howled Tharg as he set the controls of the comic for the ocean’s deepest trench… no sign of that happening twice, thank Stomm. Hopefully 2000AD will be fending off death for another couple of years at least.
(For a second opinion including many things I omitted… go here.)
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