Trollheart

"Robot Wars", Chapter VI

First print date: June 4 1977
Prog appearance: 15
Writer(s): John Wagner
Artist(s): Mike McMahon

While Dredd tries to secure some support for an uprising within the robots' ranks, Call-Me-Kenneth goes personally to deal with the humans. Dredd is less than impressed to find that Walter's “fifth column” consists of precisely three robots, and not even that powerful either. However his mood changes when one of them, Howard, shows him a disc which contains the original Laws of Robotics. If they can get this disc loaded into the main computer, which issues instructions to newly-built robots, they can undo the “brainwashing” that Call-Me-Kenneth has performed on his underlings, and make the robots loyal to humans again. With those robots then, Dredd could indeed raise an army.

But it will not be easy. First they have to get to the computer, which is of course heavily guarded. After a fierce fight, the enemy robots are destroyed and Dredd inserts the disc. Now all the robots that roll off the assembly line are dedicated to serve humans. When those loyal to Call-Me-Kenneth hear this, they turn against them and Dredd stokes the fires of rebellion, telling the new robots that the ones who call humans “fleshy ones” and support the mad carpenter robot are traitors and must be eliminated. A vicious battle ensues, as the robots who have been downtrodden and beaten for so long now turn on their overseers (sound familiar?) and after a time prevail. Call-Me-Kenneth's base and robot factory is under Dredd's control, and all remaining robots are subservient to him.

But as the glow of victory suffuses the place, dire news comes through from Justice Central. As he promised, Call-Me-Kenneth is indeed endeavouring to destroy the humans by his own hand. He has brought a batallion of Heavy Metal Kids to the very steps of the Hall of Justice, where he plans to wipe out every Judge!

QUOTES
J70 Stroke 12: “Corrode Call-Me-Kenneth! Robots were better off when humans were our masters!”
Howard: “Quiet, J70 Stroke 12. If the overseer hears you, you'll end up as spare parts!”

Assembly line robot 1: “Hail Call-Me-Kenneth!”
Assembly line robot 2: “Hail Call-Me-Kenneth!”
Assembly line robot 3: “I am the slave of humans!”
Assembly line robot 4: “I am the slave of humans!”

Dredd: “You and the other wobots --- heck! You've got me at it now! You and the other robots get down on to the factory floor.”

Assembly line robot 1: “What are you saying, fool? Call-Me-Kenneth is our master! The fleshy ones are our slaves!”
Assembly line robot 4: “You lie! Call-Me-Kenneth: that is a robot name! We servie humans --- It is not permitted to call humans fleshy ones!”

Stewart: “You've whipped your last worker, traitor! Into the melting vats with him!”
Overseer: “You can't do this ... do this ... BZZZ!”

Walter: “You must be exhausted after that fighting, master. Walter has made you a nice cup of synth-caff. It's fwesh and stwong!”
Dredd: “In the middle of all this robot carnage all you can think of is making me a hot drink? I oughta have you framed and hung on the wall!”

Call-Me-Kenneth: “Let no Judge be spared! I, Call-Me-Kenneth, will personally squeeze the juice out of the Chief Judge himself!”

Chief (ahem! Grand) Judge: “The situation is grim, Dredd. If the Judges fall, the law dies in Mega-City One!”

Designing the future

Interesting, impressive even, that ten years before CDs even hit the market, Gibson and Wagner here show Dredd using a flat, circular disc which is used to transmit instructions to the main computer. Ahead of their time? Lucky guess?

Fall of a tyrant

Although the vast majority of the droids who fight for Dredd do so because they have been reprogrammed to be faithful to humans, there is already an undercurrent of resentment against the far harsher regime of Call-Me-Kenneth. Together with his brutal overseers (there are always brutal overseers, aren't there, prepared to carry out the wishes of the dictator, not necessarily because they're loyal or they believe in him, but usually because it gives them an excuse to practice the sadism they secretly want to inflict on others), discipline is total in the new world order, and any robot who even slightly displeases their master runs the risk of being beaten or possibly deactivated. Call-Me-Kenneth has already demonstrated his own sadism by ordering a subservient robot to kill itself; he had no need to do that. He could have had one of his overseers kill it. But it added an extra layer of savagery to his already inhman reign.

Now his slaves are revolting (shut up) and seeing a chance to turn on their master they ally themselves to the Judge and Walter, hoping they can free themselves of the tyranny of Call-Me-Kenneth. Of course they know --- must know --- that the defeat of the mad robot leader can only result in their being resubjugated to their original masters, but after suffering under the carpenter bot for this long, you know, maybe humans weren't so bad after all. Better the devil you know...

I AM THE LAW!

It must boil Dredd's blood to see his now-hated enemy on the very steps of the Hall of Justice, attacking and killing his fellow Judges. The very existence of Call-Me-Kenneth, a robot who rises against his human masters and who impels others to follow suit, is a travesty to Dredd, and the hard sympathy he felt for robots before the war broke out has completely disappeared now. He thought it was cruel the way humans treated robots, but they have repaid that cruelty in kind, and now there is no other outcome than the resubjugation of the mechanicals, before they destroy human rule and take over Mega-City One, something Dredd has no intention of allowing to happen.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Although the humans still refer to him as the Grand Judge, this is I think the first time that the proper title for the leader of the Judges is used. And ironically, it's uttered from the hate-spewing mouth of Call-Me-Kenneth. Also, I think this is the first time the headquarters is referred, at least in the captions, to as the Hall of Justice, which again will be the name Wagner will settle upon. Finally, he still does not seem certain as to how to categorise the city: we've had Mega-City One, Mega-City 1 and now Mega-City I. It will eventually come to be known as the first description though.

I'll ask the questions, creep!

But I got no answer. I asked in the previous entry how Walter had got through to Dredd in the cell, and how he intended getting him out, but we're not shown. I guess we have to take it that he shot his way out, but it would have been good to have had this confirmed.

Messages
It's probably nothing, but still... Call-Me_Kenneth is a violent rebel, leading his people into battle against their oppressors, and what was his function? A carpenter? Does this relate back to another famous carpenter who had been expected to do the same thing? Is Call-Me-Kenneth the robot messiah, or does he see himself as such?

Laughing in the face of death
There's still time for a bit of humour as Dredd finds his robot servant's speech impediment affecting the way he himself speaks, calling robots "wobots"...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Chapter VII

First print date: June 11 1977
Prog appearance: 16
Writer(s): John Wagner
Artist(s): Ron Turner

With the very Hall of Justice itself under threat from Call-Me-Kenneth and his Heavy Metal Kids, Dredd makes a desperate dash to the orbiting weather station that controls all of Mega-City One's climate. With Walter and the three original robots who helped him take the base, he breaks in and takes control of the station. His plan is to programme a huge electronic storm that will wipe out all the robots, or at least scramble their circuits sufficiently to disable them. However, there is a failsafe built into the computer: since 2012, no weather pattern may be programmed that could conceivably cause harm to humans, and Dredd has to think again. Channelling the computer's power through Walter's own circuits he is able to bypass the safety protocols and have the computer programme up the storm he wants.

Below, in the Hall of Justice, the Judges are losing the fight as the sky begins to darken. Call-Me-Kenneth has the Chief Judge in his robotic claw, ready to deliver the killing blow with his drill when suddenly lighting arcs down from the sky. Nobody in Mega-City One has seen lightning before, and they wonder what it is, as it seeks out the metal in the area, scrambling the circuits of the Heavy Metal Kids, who begin to turn on one another, the humans forgotten. Call-Me-Kenneth is struck by an out-of-control Heavy Metal Kid and falls.

By the time Dredd returns to the Hall of Justice the battle is over, and the robots all lie at his feet like scrap metal. All but one. There is no sign of the body of the leader of the robot rebellion, and if Call-Me-Kenneth has survived, then the war is not yet over...

QUOTES
Walter: “Wobot twying to destwoy the control room. Destroy it, master!”
Dredd: “Robot destroyed, and I don't need advice from an overgrown vending machine like you, Walter!”

Dredd: “Atmospheric Control creates all the weather for the city, Walter. I'm programming the computer for an electric storm of seven million megavolts!”

Heavy Metal Kids: “Knock down those walls! Squash a judge! Turn him into human sludge!”

Judge: “Look! Look how the very sky grows black! It is an omen --- we are finished!”

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

Where you'll never get bad weather, as climate is completely and automatically controlled by a computer which regulates temperature, rainfall, and all the other things that go to make up weather. Cyclones? Typhoons? Tsunamis? All things of the past: man now has total control of his environment, and never again will he be subject to the vagaries of nature.

The Dichotomy of Dredd

Here I'll be looking at the times when Dredd sacrifices something for the law, those moments when he has to choose between two evils, and chooses the lesser, and the occasions where, in order to fulfil his duty and uphold the law, he will sometimes make a choice we might not have expected him to.

When he programmes up the electrical storm, Dredd does not seem to consider the safety of the loyal robots who have been built at the factory, and who have fought alongside him to secure Call-Me-Kenneth's base. Of course, it is possible that the lightning will only hit those robots who are outside, and none of the loyal ones are. But what of the quartet that came with him to the weather station? Again, they're secure inside the station, but it's unclear as to when Dredd leaves the orbiting platform to return to the ground, though I guess it would be unlikely he would do this during the storm.

Also, he has no problem whatever in risking the life of Walter, his most loyal servant at this point, by running the weather station computer through him, which almost fries the vending robot's circuits. In truth, were Walter to “die”, Dredd would probably consider it a good bargain for the lives of all those in the Hall of Justice. If indeed he gave it any thought at all.

Houston, we have a problem!

What's with the archaic speech when the storm hits? “The very sky turns dark”? “It is an omen!”? The Judges have all been speaking in modern parlance up to now. Why does this one think he's in some sort of Greek tragedy? Weird. And Wagner's such a good writer, it's an odd slip. To be honest, it's more like something I'd expect from yer man who wrote the “Antique car heist” episode.


I'll ask the questions, creep!

What is it about 2012 that created a failsafe in the weather control computer that does not allow it to accept any programme for weather that would harm humans? Was there some big catastrophe in that year? And is it coincidental that this was the Mayan thing, which would have been generally not public knowledge back in the seventies? Did Wagner read up on those prophecies and decide to use them? I know they were used in The X-Files during the last episode, but even then, that was twenty years later. Or was it just a random date he picked?

Famous firsts

When Dredd sees the problem programming the weather control station computer is going to cause him, he snarls “Drokk it!” This is, I believe, the first usage of a term which will become one of the most used in Dredd's universe, leading to phrases such as “What the Drokk?” “Drokk this!” and “Drokkin' thing!” It's an exclamation of anger, and its closest translation would be something like “damn it” or “fuck it”! I don't know its origin, if it has one, but it helps to begin make up the language which will become exclusive to this strip.

Laughing in the face of death

Again we have the Heavy Metal Kids with their hilarious songs.

Return of the nitpicker!

Yes, it's Walter's speech again that has me rolling my eyes. As they enter the control room, Walter says to Judge Dredd, “Wobot twying to close the control room. Destroy it, master!” Here we have no less than three instances of where Walter uses an “r” when he shouldn't be able to. He should be saying “contwol”, “woom” and “destwoy”. While I hate and loathe Walter's lisp --- as well as everything else about him --- if you're going to write that in you need to be consistent, and it's hard to see how Wagner could have missed out three such obvious instances of where the robot fails in his lisp.

Chapter VIII

First print date: June 18 1977
Prog appearance: 17
Writer(s): John Wagner
Artist(s): Ian Gibson

As we head into the final episode of the first Dredd epic, the robot war is over, the robots have been defeated but their leader is still on the loose. Unwilling to submit to the Judges and his human masters, it would seem Call-Me-Kenneth was only wounded in the fight with the Heavy Metal Kids on the steps of the Hall of Justice. Desperate for oil to enable him to carry on his killing spree, blind to the fact that his robot army lies in ruins, or reprogrammed to serve the very “fleshy ones” he hates so much and whose treatment led to his rebelling, the carpenter robot heads for the Mega-City One oil depot. Although he has him in his sights, Dredd cannot fire at the robot for fear of taking the depot, and half of the city, with him.

As the oil tanker he seizes at the depot lifts off, Dredd jumps aboard, watching in horror as the crew are dumped over the side. He attacks Call-Me-Kenneth, but his bullets just bounce off the robot's hard shell. Then he concentrates his fire on the “open wounds”, the areas of Call-Me-Kenneth's plasti-skin which have been damaged and where the circuits are exposed. This hurts and enrages the robot, and he slashes at Dredd, knocking him overboard. As he falls though, Dredd fires back up at the robot, igniting the oil on the tanker. Call-Me-Kenneth begins to burn. A moment later the tanker explodes, taking the rebel robot leader to his electronic grave. Dredd, falling through the air, is saved by a hover patrol.

Later, as the now-loyal robots are put to work rebuilding the shattered city, the three robots who helped Dredd are awarded a special honour: pleasure circuits, while Walter is made the very first ever free robot. True to form though, he would rather serve Judge Dredd, and to the Judge's chagrin, he ends up in his apartment, where Maria is about as pleased to see the robot as is Dredd himself!

QUOTES
Newscaster: “Greetings, law and order fans! You're tuned to another edition of Crime Time. The war with the robots is over, but robot leader Call-Me-Kenneth is still at large!”

Dredd: “I dare not fire. There's enough fuel in that depot to destroy half of Mega-City!”

Grand Judge: “Robots! Those of you with masters to go to --- go there! Those of you whose masters were killed, go to the robo-pound and wait to be claimed. There is much work to do. We have a city to rebuild.”

Grand Judge: “Robot Walter, for services above and beyond the call of duty, I award you your freedom!”

Walter: “Oh Judge Dwedd. Walter is so grwateful he could leak oil. How can Walter ever wepay you, dear master?”
Dredd: “You can start by getting off your knees. You're a free robot now: the first ever.”

Walter: “Walter is tired of fweedom, master. Walter look after you now ---”
Maria: “I want-a him out, Judge!”
Dredd: “And the citizens think we Judges have it easy! I think I'd rather fight another robot war!”

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

Kind of depressing to see that, a hundred years into the future, man is still looking to oil as his fuel of choice. Is it only for the robots? That oil depot is huge, and you would have to think that the vehicles in Mega-City One also utilise it. Surely by now everyone would be zipping along on hydrogen-powered scooters or something? Mind you, this was written in the 1970s..

I AM THE LAW!

It sickens Dredd to see innocents fall to their deaths as Call-Me-Kenneth pilots the oil barge up into the sky, but he is determined their deaths will be avenged. Besides, if the mad robot gets away with such a supply of oil, who knows what carnage he could wreak? Dredd will however not risk the safety of citizens by firing on the robot when he is within the confines of the depot, for fear of igniting the dump's massive stock of the flammable liquid.

Laughing in the face of death

The end scene is both touching and funny, as Dredd, having essentially saved his city, is faced with a domestic set-to between his maid and the robot who now wishes to be his servant, even though it has been granted its freedom.

Those clever little touches

As the oil tanker rises up into the sky, we see it is operated by Texas City Oil. This is the first, but not the last, we will hear of Texas City, otherwise known as Mega-City Three, and it's both appropriate and hilarious that Gibson has depicted the company by using stereotypes associated with the red state: a Dallas Cowboys-style cheerleader wearing a stetson and holding a semi-automatic machine gun!

Fall of a tyrant

Like many dictators whose empire has collapsed, Call-Me-Kenneth, once the most powerful and feared robot in Mega-City One, finds himself hunted, on the run as he tries to secure a supply of oil that will allow him to remain one step ahead of the Judges and continue his reign of terror. With it would seem no logic circuits left, the mad robot cannot see that the end is nigh: his army, his slaves have abandoned him, and he is Public Enemy Number One. It's doubtful though that Mega-City One has made provisions at this point for the incarceration of robots, and anyway, he's a multiple murderer so he can expect nothing but death at the hands of the Judges. Perhaps his logic circuits are firing fine after all, and he realises he has no choice left but to go out in a blaze of glory, hoping his name will be remembered. The only trouble with that is that all the robots who followed him are either scrap metal or reprogrammed, and if anyone remembers him it will be the humans, who will recall when they came close to extinction, and take steps to ensure there is never another Call-Me-Kenneth.

PCRs

As Call-Me-Kenneth dies in the explosion when the tanker goes up, he roars “Top of the world!” The iconic line uttered by Cagney at the end of the classic gangster movie, “White heat”.

It's also hardly coincidental that the award ceremony at the end, when Stewart, Howard and J70Stroke12 are given pleasure circuits, and Walter his freedom, is very reminiscent of the classic “Star Wars” closing scene, the movie having been released only a month before...

Ch-ch-ch-changes

They're at it again! Now it's Grand Judge. Chief Judge, Grand Judge! Pick one! They do eventually...

Return of the nitpicker!

What's this? Last episode it was J70Stroke12, now one of the three heroic robots that helped Dredd in his fight has become J70Stroke13! Has he been upgraded? And this mistake is made twice, in adjoining panels...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Although the title of this journal makes it clear that my main, indeed to some extent only focus is 2000AD and its heroes and villains and stories, if you look carefully at the intro I did mention that I might dip into other publications from time to time, as the mood struck me.

It's struck me.

So my next entry is going to be all about this

with an introduction and then following that, interspersed between Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and any other 2000AD strips I look at, a detailed review, analysis, discussion and general Trollheartery about one of Alan Moore's best (imo) and most well-known graphic novels, which was of course made into a blockbuster movie.

If you haven't read it, you're missing out, so make sure you're here to catch my chapter-by-chapter, page-by-page and panel-by-panel exploration of the one and only Watchmen.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

One of the most important and influential works in the field of comic books and graphic novels of the late 1980s, Watchmen has the distinction of being one of the very first to bring the term "graphic novel" into the mainstream, even though its writer professes to dislike the term. I can see where he's coming from: it's like people who don't want to be accused of reading comics are able to sniff and say “Comic? No no no. This is a graphic novel!” as if that makes a difference. Of course, there is something that distinguishes what we think of as comics from graphic novels. Firstly, and most importantly, they do follow the format of a novel in that there is a complete story within their pages, whereas comics will tend to continue the story or stories in other issues, and the story or stories could run for weeks, months or even longer. Secondly, geenrally they're in a hardback or semi-hardback format and usually all pages are in colour, as opposed to some comic books where maybe only the cover and the middle pages are in colour.

Graphic novels can be written specifically for that format, but often they have been previously published in a series and this series is then collected within the pages of what becomes a graphic novel. This is in fact what happened with Watchmen, along with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and V for Vendetta: intrinsically just a way of appealing I guess to comics collectors and squeezing more money out of them, but it's how I came into contact with Watchmen, through my younger brother.

Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, two men who had made their name working for 2000AD indeed in the seventies, Watchmen imagines an alternative future in which the USA won the Vietnam War very quickly with the aid of superheroes sanctioned by the government. As the novel opens however it is a much different time, and tensions are building between the US and the USSR on a scale not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of the sixties. It is here we begin our tale.

Chapter I: “At midnight, all the agents...”
(A quote from Bob Dylan: At midnight all the agents and superhuman crew go out and round up all those who know more than they do.)

We open on an extract from the journal of one of the principal characters, one who goes only by the name of Rorschach (yeah, like the psychology test) which plays out as cops investigate what appears to be a murder. A guy called Blake has been hurled from the top window of his apartment; the cops can see the door, which was chained up, has been broken, as has the window through which the unfortunate Blake made his last exit. The cops become interested though when they see a photograph of the deceased shaking hands with Vice President Ford, and realise he must have been someone important. They're prepared to let it lie however, alluding to the unwanted interference of “masked avengers” and “vigilantes”, and mentioning the name Rorschach for the first time. They remember that the object of their conversation is wanted for two counts of murder and has gone into hiding somewhere, but fear the worst if he should surface and get involved in this with “his other buddies”.

Once the cops have gone out of sight, a shadowy figure emerges, hunkers down and picks up a “happy face” badge that was on the pavement, near the blood that is all that remains to mark the passing of the man known as Edward Blake. The badge has just about missed being taken down the nearby drain by the pool of blood washing over the sidewalk, and is just on the edge. The figure, wearing a trenchcoat, hat and a mask that makes him look like the inkblot test, notes that the badge is stained with a splash of blood. He then uses a grapple hook to scale the side of the building and enters the room through the broken window from which the previous occupant so fatally exited. He quickly sets about searching the place, methodically, as if he is looking for something specific, something he knows he will find, something that must be there. We note that he is careful, using a straightened clothes hanger to push open the door, as if he expects a booby trap to be set. Having located what he has been looking for, a small push button on the side of one of the walls of the wardrobe, he pushes it and reveals a hidden panel.

Behind the panel is a suit of some sort, a costume as well as weapons, and, looking a little further, an old photograph of what appears to be some friends, all dressed in costumes of some sort, looking very happy. The scene switches to a garage, where two people, one old and one not so old, are reminiscing over old times. Each appear to be the alter-ego of someone or thing called Nite Owl, as the younger advises the older he was the better of the two, but when the younger one, who is named as Danny, leaves and heads back to his own apartment he finds he has an uninvited visitor. It is the man we saw climb into the apartment of the dead man earlier, he with the odd mask on his face. He is sitting eating a can of beans and seems to know Danny, as he addresses him without turning around. We now learn this man is called Rorschach, the same one whose journal was quoted at the beginning and whom the police are hunting for murder.

Now details begin to get filled in a little. Rorschach hands Danny the smiley face badge he picked up off the ground, and tells him it belongs to someone called “The Comedian”. It seems this person's identity was, up to now, a secret, as Rorschach tells him without real interest that it seems Edward Blake was the Comedian. On hearing that the guy is dead --- Danny says “THE Comedian?” so he obviously at least knows of him --- he leads Rorschach down into the basement where they can talk more privately. Rorschach reveals --- to us anyway; it's unclear as to whether or not Danny knows --- that the Comedian had been working for the government for the last ten years or so, helping to effect regime change where the US wanted it effected, and he points out too that Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, wrote a book in which he said some unkind things about the Comedian. Danny does not like the implication that his friend, Hollis Mason, teh original Nite Owl might have been involved in the Comedian's murder, but Rorschach shrugs and says he's not implying anything, just making an observation.

As they talk, it becomes clear that Rorschach and Danny (Nite Owl) were once heroes or vigilantes of some sort, as was the Comedian. They obviously partnered up at some point, as when Danny asks what happened to those days, Rorschach snaps “You quit”. It's pretty clear that he, at any rate, is still continuing on in his own special way as some sort of vigilante, even if not one sanctioned by the government, and the final panel before he leaves Danny in the tunnel depicts a man ashamed of himself, and alone.

Having failed to get any information on Blake's death via his usual sources --- breaking a man's fingers (a man he doesn't even know and certainly doesn't care about) in a local seedy dive he frequents --- Rorschach goes to see Adrian Veidt, a super billionaire technology tycoon and said to the the most intelligent man in the world. Veidt theorises that the killing may have been politically motivated --- as has already been established, the Comedian was working for the government and had surely stacked up a lot of enemies ---- but Rorschach discounts this, saying the US has “Doctor Manhattan” and the Soviets are scared of that. Is this a reference, perhaps, to the atomic bomb? Has that really not been used yet in this world? Rorschach seems to think the “Reds” are terrified of it anyway. Rorschach's own theory is that they have a “mask killer” on their hands. He doesn't say what that is, but we can take a guess.

Given that at least three of the people we've met so far (four, including the late Comedian, five if you assume Veidt was also involved) have spoken of heroic deeds, villains and the old days, I think we can put it together. We've already heard of Nite Owl, and Rorschach appears to be another superhero, perhaps part of an “Avengers” or “X-Men”-style group who defended America against crime in maybe the forties or fifties. Most appear to be retired (or dead) now, but it looks like Rorschach is still operating, if independently and alone. He seems disgusted that his former comrades have all given up, and determined to carry on a personal, solo fight against the tide of crime and corruption, as revealed in scathing prose through the entries in his diary.

He goes to see Doctor Manhattan, whom we find out is a person, if such a thing can be said of a blue giant who stands about forty feet high and has no pupils in his eyes. He is in the company of Laurie Jupiter, who does not shed a tear when she hears of the Comedian's death. She tells Rorschach hotly that he tried to rape her mother, back when Blake and she were both Minutemen. Seems this is the older equivalent of the superhero that Rorschach, Nite Owl and Veidt became; their earlier ancestors, so to speak. Rorschach is not impressed with Jupiter's histrionics; the idea of rape does not seem to impact upon him the way it does us. Doctor Manhattan tells Rorschach that he was informed of the death of the Comedian, as now he is the only agent left working for the government. It's hard to see though, how anyone could even hurt the blue giant, let alone kill him!

The meeting does not go as planned though. When Rorschach shrugs off the idea that Blake raped Laurie's mother --- he does not necessarily deny it, but makes it clear he does not care about the event --- Doctor Manhattan tells him to go. When he refuses, he finds himself teleported out of the building. One of the many powers of the titan we will come to learn about. Laurie, chafing in her role of being the one to keep Doctor Manhattan happy, as she tells Danny when she meets him later for dinner, reminisces about the old days and wonders what happened to them. The final line is perfect: she says “There don't seem to be so many laughs around these days” and Danny replies sombrely “What do you expect? The Comedian is dead.”

QUOTES
Rorschach (from his journal): “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated flith of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicans will look up and shout “Save us!” And I'll look down and whisper “No”.”

Cop 1: “I saw the body and he looked beefy enough to protect himself. For a guy his age he was in terrific shape.”
Cop 2: “What, you mean apart from being dead?”

Hollis: “So there I was in the supermarket buying dogfood for ol' Phantom here. I turn the corner of the aisle and wham! I bump into the Screaming Skull! You remember him?”
Danny: “I think I heard you mention him..”
Hollis: “I put him away a dozen times in the forties. But he reformed and turned to Jesus since then. Married, got two kids. We traded addresses. Nice guy.”

Nite Owl: “That little stain, is that bean juice?”
Rorschach: “That's right. Human bean juice!”
(I can't believe that for years --- literally, years --- I didn't get the double meaning here. I thought Rorschach was just likening bean juice to blood because of its colour and the fact that it's kind of the life fluid of a bean. It took me a long time to realise he was making a double entendre here, referring to “human bean juice” but meaning “human being juice”!)

Rorschach (from his journal): “This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?”

Rorschach (to Veidt): “He (the Comedian) stood up for his country, Veidt. Never let anyone retire him . Never cashed in on his reputation. Never set up a company selling posters and diet books and toy soldiers based on himself. Never became a prostitute.”

Rorschach (from his journal): “Meeting with Veidt left bad taste in mouth. He is shallow, pampered, decadent, betraying even his own liberal affectations. Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further. Why are so few of us left active, healthy and without personality disorders?”
(This is a very telling passage: first, it shows that as we could see, Rorschach has little time for Veidt but it also hints that he has serious problems with homosexuals, and if Veidt is one then he plans to find out. More importantly though, he deplores the fact that so few of his comrades are left without personality disorders. He obviously includes himself as one who does not have a problem, while refusing to recognise that if anyone has a serious personality disorder, it is him. To Rorschach, everyone else is sick and he is the only sane man in the asylum. This speaks volumes to how he sees the world, and how he deals with it, and also explains to a degree why he is such a cold, unfeeling, uncaring person and yet fights for what he believes to be right.)

Rorschach (from his journal): “I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.”

Rorschach: “I'm not here to speculate upon the moral lapses of men who died in their country's service. I came to warn...”
Laurie: “Moral lapses! Rape is a moral lapse? You know he broke her ribs? You know he almost choked her?”

Rorschach (from his journal): “Nobody cares. Nobody but me. Are they right? Is it futile? Soon there will be war. Millions will burn. Millions will perish in sickness and misery. What does one death matter against so many? Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon, I shall not compromise in this. But there are so many deserving of retribution, and there is so little time.”
(This speech totally encapsulates Rorschach's view of the world. No matter the cost, no matter the mitigating factors, he sees evil as an absolute and there is only one way to deal with it. Like his mask, like his name, like his very soul, the world for Rorschach is black and white, and there are no grey areas. This is what he holds on to, what sustains him in the terrible times to come. This is also what will prove to be his undoing, and will impact massively upon the storyline, to the end and beyond.)

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Trollheart

Between the lines
If there was ever a graphic novel which you really have to read over and over again, and that even if you pay close attention you're still not going to see everything there is to see in it, then this is the one. I have read it about six times and I still find new surprises each time I do. It's like an onion with a skin that is endless, revealing more and more as each layer is peeled away. You simply cannot skim through this comic book: well, you can, but you will miss so much. This is one of the reasons, I expect, why making it into a movie, somewhat like it was with “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, seemed almost impossible. Here I'll be pointing out all the little things you might miss if this is your first read through.

From the very first panel we're shown how deep the writing and the art is in this, as Rorschach goes on about the gutters being full of blood, we see a stained pavement with blood all over it, and someone is washing it away, while beside him another man holds a sign that says “The end is nigh”. A moment later, Rorschach speaks of a road leading over a precipice and then the world standing on the brink, as we see the view from a window, down onto the street, and a hand appears at the window, which we will shortly discover is that of a cop, one of a tea investigating what turns out to be a murder.

Another great little touch is when the cops investigating Blake's murder head out for the lift they're asked “What floor” and say the ground floor. As the lift attendant mutters “Ground floor comin' up” we see a panel showing Blake falling headfirst from the window to his death: the ultimate ground floor!

Behind the kid reading “Tales of the Black Freighter” you can just about see a headline on a newspaper, which screams “Vietnam 51st State: official!” So in this reality, the southeast Asian country has in fact been annexed by the USA and added to its states following their quick victory.

Again, as the lead detective suggests “What say we let this one just drop out of sight?” we see the figure of the plummeting Blake.

As the two cops pass the sign bearer one shivers, the other asks what's wrong and the first one surmises he must be getting a cold. Cold war?

A sign on the wall near the building from which Blake has been thrown read “Mmeltdowns!” With the threat of nuclear war in the air, surely tempting fate?

On the wall as the two ex-Nite Owls trade stories is a partial headline of a newspaper which reads “Hero retires, opens own auto business” and outside, as Hollis, the older one, leaves, we see the word Masons going down the side of the building, which immediately tells us the owner is Hollis Mason, without it having to be explained. Also interestingly, someone has graffitied over the front of the shop the question “Who watches the Watchmen?” Also shown is the word “Pale horse”, an obvious reference to Revelations, and with the possible apocalypse on the horizon, chillingly appropriate.

Another clever touch: a sign outside the garage says “We fix 'em” and “Obsolete models a specialty!” Given that the younger (though also retired) Nite Owl has just left the older one who is standing there looking sad, this is particularly telling. The torch has been passed, indeed.

On a postbox another headline seems to shout “Russia protests US advances in Afghanistan”, adding more political tension and telling us a little more about the state of the relations between the two biggest superpowers in the world.

A sticker on a window advises “Stick with Dick in 84”, telling is that Nixon has retained the presidency right up to at least 1984 and is surely in power now until 1988.

As Rorschach writes in his journal he sits on a roof high above the city. His disapproving description of the metropolis below throws into sharp relief his position as he sits in judgement, like some predatory bird, almost in a mockery of the likes of Spiderman and Batman; rather than anxious to protect New York, he is disgusted by it. But he is more disgusted at the crime that run rampant through its streets like idiot children with machetes and guns. Rorschach is almost a superhero by default.

More grafitti: on a shop is scrawled the words “Viet Bronx”...

Interesting little clue as to how technology has progressed here in this alternate Earth. As we see the towering imposing magnificence of Veidt's headquarters, in the distance sailing through the sky is an airship. Seems such things survived, perhaps even thrived, in this world right up to the late eighties.

As Rorschach leaves Veidt, he says “Be seeing you”. A clear tip of Moore's hat to the TV cult series, “The Prisoner”.

In the last panel of this confrontation, as Veidt stands looking out the window of his office, cutting a similar figure to how Nite Owl was left after seeing Rorschach and being somewhat humiliated by him, there is a newspaper open on the desk behind him. Its headline says “Nuclear doomsday clock stands at five to twelve”, say experts, further confirming that the holocaust is hovering ever closer. Another panel mentions “Geneva Talks: US refuse to discuss Doctor Manhattan”. And so we have another mention of the enigmatic figure.

Quite matter-of-factly, and without any warning or preamble, we see Doctor Manhattan put his hand into a computer – as in, he passes through it like a ghost --- and it's clear that this is a being with almost godlike powers. It is not remarked upon; Laurie obviously is aware of his powers and Rorschach has been teleported outside by now.

As Rorschach leaves the Experimental Centre, he walks past the wreckage of a building. It's interesting that we can see a sign in the rubble which shows that it was the “Gunga Diner”, which only a few pages ago was intact. Obviously some ethnic/racial violence going on here. Also, on the wall is scrawled again that question “Who watches the Watchmen?” and on the other side a bill for “Pale Horse” at Madison Square Gardens. We've seen this name on the back of a biker jacket, and it's becoming clear they're some sort of rock band. Extremely telling too is the word “Kristallnacht” daubed on the wall opposite the now-ruin of the “Gunga Diner”. Someone is evidently putting the ideas of that night of terror into practice, fifty years on.

Leaving the restaurant, Laurie remembers with distaste the costume she wore as a superhero: “That stupid little short skirt! And the neckline going down to my navel! God, that was so dreadful!” And Danny, walking slightly behind her and no doubt suddenly envisaging her younger and in that skimpy costume, agrees hoarsely “God, yes, dreadful.”

Tales of the Black Freighter
The genius of this comic is just astounding! Not content with creating an amazing and absorbing storyline, Moore has another sub-comic going, centring around a comic book called “Tales of the Black Freighter”. This proceeds within Watchmen, in tandem with it and will eventually, at the end, dovetail with the main storyline in the most accomplished and incredible piece of storytelling I have seen in a very long time.

Here, we see our very first glimpse of the other comic; as the detectives exit the lift, a kid is reading the comic leaning against the wall. You have to look hard, but that's the title on the cover.

After the storm: Under the hood
Each chapter of the story is followed by some text material that refers to, or adds to the story. In the initial chapters these are extracts from “Under the hood”, the autobiography of the original Nite Owl, Hollis Mason. This helps to fill in the history of the superheroes, gives a flavour of the time before this and also opens a window into why someone would want to pull on a funny suit and go out fighting crime at night.

The opening chapter tells of how Mason, having heard about the emergence of the very first bona fide real-world superhero, Hooded Justice, and wishing to make a difference, joined the police. It was while on his beat that he came across Action Comics and learned of Superman, and shortly afterwards that he would don his own costume and become the first Nite Owl.

The story so far
It's 1985 and Richard Nixon has won yet another term, presumably on the basis of the US winning the war in Vietnam within weeks. This has been achieved through the aid of one of many government sanctioned superheroes, Doctor Manhattan, who is a giant with blue skin. One of the other superheroes --- who are, largely, all by now retired --- has been killed and another who knew him, who goes by the name of Rorschach, is trying to find out who murdered the Comedian. He fears that someone is targeting “masks”, which is to say, superheroes. The world is hovering on the brink of nuclear war, much of it possibly brought about by the distrust the Soviet Union has in America's biggest and most unstoppable weapon, the aforementioned Doctor Manhattan.

The Comedian has a chequered past: he worked for the government abroad, taking down regimes they wished gone, and Adrian Veidt, another ex-superhero, turned media mogul, believes that his killing may have been the result of that. A man makes a lot of enemies in that field. Rorschach is not convinced though. He also visits another old ally, Danny Dreiberg, who was once the superhero known as Nite Owl, but is now also in retirement. In fact, this retirement is enforced, as something called the Keene Act outlawed all but two of the superheroes, the late Comedian and of course Doctor Manhattan, who is still working for the government in the field this time of research and development.

One of the other ex-heroes, Laurie Jupiter, has history with the Comedian, believing he tried to rape her mother back in the forties when they were both Minutemen, the precursors to today's (or rather, yesterday's) superheroes, and Rorschach must wonder if she is involved in the murder in some way? She is far too slight and weak to have been able to throw Blake through the window through which he fell, but perhaps she contracted someone?

An interesting point about these superheroes is that none of them --- with the obvious exception of Doctor Manhattan --- seem to have any actual superpowers. There are no Mister Fantastics, no Spidermen, no Hulks. They all seem to simply trust in (or trusted in) agility, cunning and physical stamina to carry out their duties. There are no laser eyes, sixth senses or flaming bodies here. To all intents and purposes, the superheroes of Watchmen are just really quite ordinary people. On the surface. If they can be compared to anyone, it's probably Batman.

Another very clever thing about this incredible comic book is that each chapter (or originally, issue) ends with a stylised clock against a black background. In chapter/issue one the clock's hands stand at 23:48, or twelve minutes to midnight, and there are exactly twelve chapters, to reflect the original twelve issues that made up Watchmen. What will happen when the clock reaches midnight? It's almost televisual in its immediacy, like the digital clock that would come up at the end of the series “24” and run down to the last second of that particular hour. It really hits home and makes you realise that the whole thing is counting down to some momentous and surely terrible event.

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The Batlord

I'm gonna have to read this entry in a bit, as it's long as ****, but I just wanted to say...

That's the difference between a graphic novel and a trade paperback. A TPB is a collection of issues from an ongoing monthly title, whereas a graphic novel can be a collection, but the issues were still a self-contained story, not part of a larger series (The Dark Knight Returns may have been Batman, but it still had nothing to do with the actual ongoing Batman monthly series).

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Trollheart

Oh okay thanks, that's cool. I did not know that. So Watchmen, as it only ran over a specified number of issues and then stopped, is a true Graphic Novel once collected, whereas, say, Inferno Earth for Spiderman would be a Trade Paperback? Good to know.

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The Batlord

Exactly. How to differentiate between a graphic novel and a mini-series can be trickier though.

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Trollheart

What's the one thing that almost every science-fiction film you've seen, TV show you've watched or book you've read has had in common? With a very few exceptions, it would have to be that Earth and humanity are always the good guys, or at least that things are viewed through their eyes. Nemesis strove to change that. Originally conceived as nothing more than a short set of stories written to tie in with rock music, Nemesis the Warlock received such favourable attention from the readership that Pat Mills decided there was enough interest in it to go ahead with a full series. In the end, it turned out to be one of the star attractions of 2000AD.

Nemesis is an alien, a Warlock who fights for freedom from the tyranny of the Terran Empire (that's us) which is a xenophobic, totalitarian theocracy, founded on the principles of human superiority, prejudice and hatred of all other races. Its own people are ground under the heel of the Grand Master of Termight, Torquemada, who, along with his not-so-secret police keeps them in a constant state of fear, paranoia and unquestioning obedience. Earth has reached out to the stars, and finding non-human races there, has determined to destroy them all. Nemesis is the leader of the resistance, a fire-breathing demon to counter the Earth's religious zealot, and the two will cross swords --- literally --- many times.

Drawn in a strange, metallic, alien, angular style by Kevin O'Neill, everything in Nemesis, from the buildings to the people, is sharp and severe, and this carries through to the dialogue, which is some of the snappiest and cleverest in the magazine, and that's saying a lot! Mills references a lot of pop culture, and has some sharp and witty slants on everything from religion and politics to war and power.

Unlike the other strips I've focussed on up to now, which generally rotate about a single character or a team of two, Nemesis has a cast, which obligates me to talk about them. And so I will.

Nemesis the Warlock: hero/antihero of the series, he is a tall, fire-breathing alien, a demon and the very antithesis of Earth and Torquemada's beliefs and values. He fights against Earth's genocidal attitude towards aliens, becoming the focus for their resistance with his battlecry “Credo!”

Tomas de Torquemada: Like his namesake from the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada is a rabid racist, supremacist and fascist, and he is the ultimate power on Earth. His police enforce his edicts, and as in this dimension Church and State are one, there is literally no limit to his power. He has a fanatical hatred of all aliens, and is on a mission to destroy them all. He calls everyone who is not human, or who fails to live up to his standards of what it means to be a human, impure.

Purity Brown: The only human who is sympathetic to Nemesis and his cause, she becomes his ally and helper.

Candida de Torquemada: Wife of Tomas and mother of his two children. If anything can soften and make the evil tyrant seem human, she is the one thing in his life he cares about more than his holy cause.

Grobbendonk: Nemesis's alien pet, Grobbendonk can speak Gibberish, a fringe world dialect, which gives rise to some mighty hilairous sayings.

Chira: Nemesis's first wife, and mother to his son Thoth

Thoth: Nemesis's only son.

Great Uncle Baal: A scientist who performed controversial and horrible experiments on captured humans, Baal is Nemesis's uncle but has been banished from the kingdom.

The ABC Warriors: Massive armoured fighting robots (who later got their own series and featured in the first Judge Dredd movie) who are allies to Nemesis.

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Trollheart

“Brainblooms”
First print date: June 25 1977
Prog appearance: 18
Writer(s): John Wagner
Artist(s): Mike McMahon
Total episodes: 1

What an absolutely horrible, creepy idea! Talking plants that look like human heads! Urgh! Seems they're also illegal, as Dredd has to sternly point out to his landlady when Maria buys one for his birthday! Giving her a warning, he sets off in search of the source of the crime, whoever is growing the repugnant things. This turns out to be a “harmless old lady” called Mrs. Mahaffy who lives in Tower House. Dredd pays her a visit, and when she crumbles and agrees to come quietly (well, she's a hundred years old: where's she gonna run?) he grants her request that her plants sing her one last song.

That turns out to be a mistake though, and will probably haunt Dredd, as it's contrary to his nature to be accommodating. Getting the brainblooms to sing “their special song”, Mahaffy ensures that the music --- a loud, penetrating hum --- assaults Dredd's ears and brain and threatens to overwhelm him, and he becomes susceptible to her commands. He has been hypnotised by the ugly head-shaped flowers. He returns to Control, reporting he was not able to pin anything on the old lady.

But Mahaffy's control over Dredd is more sinister than just covering her tracks. She knows that once the hypnotism wears off, as it always does, he will remember or guess what happened, or at the very least begin to question why he let her go. In order to prevent this, she has arranged for him to kill himself by riding his Lawmaster into an oncoming truck. The driver, however, seeing the Judge, swerves and Dredd misses him. He does however hit a crash barrier, and the shock of the impact jars him back to reality. Grimly, he radios in a new report, requesting that a riot squad meet him on the roof of Tower House.

As the old woman, realising she has been outfoxed, tries to pull the same trick Dredd has the riot squad spray the plants with foam, which smothers their voices and prevents them from hypnotising anyone else. The threat now nullified, Ma Mahaffy is taken into custody.

QUOTES
Dredd: “Maria, have you lost your sense? Mere possession of a brainbloom carries a severe penalty! Brainblooms grow like flowers but can imitate any known sound --- the result of bio-organic grafting of plant and human!”

Dredd (thinking): “It's not the shopkeepers and the ordinary citizens I'm interested in, it's the evil person who's growing these things.”
(Like cops all through history, at least recent history, Dredd is not interested in the small fish, the users, the clients. He wants the person who is perpetrating this evil upon Mega-City One. Interestingly, this is directly opposite to the view he took on illegal organ transplants some progs back. There, he reasoned that without customers the business would dry up, here he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of supplier. Different methods of dealing with different crimes.)

Mahaffy: “You caught me fair and square, young fellow. I'll come quietly. But first, you wouldn't deny me one last song from my precious pets?”
Dredd (thinking): “It can't do any harm to let her have this last comfort.”
(A rare lapse in discipline and an even rarer show of compassion for Dredd, both of which he will pay for.)

Mahaffy: “You should have remembered that, in the hands of an expert, brainblooms can be made to emit a sound so hypnotic that no human can resist it! Now you're in my power, young man, and you'll do exactly what Ma tells you!”

Dredd: “Yeehaa! Here goes! That truck will squash me to a pulp! It'll take them days just to scrape me off the road!”

The Long Arm of the Law
Age, it would seem, is no barrier to prosecution and incarceration in Mega-City One. Ma Mahaffy is, Dredd tells us, 100 years old, but she's going to get sent to the Cubes like any other lawbreaker, and for a very long time: probably the rest of what remains of her life. She did, after all, try to engineer the murder of a Judge and make it look like suicide. Still, for a woman of such advanced years she's pretty sprightly; perhaps using age-defying drugs, which are surely available in Mega-City One to those who can afford them?


I'll ask the questions, Creep!
How did Ma Mahaffy acquire the brainblooms? She doesn't look the sort to be well in with bio-engineers, particularly those who operate on the wrong side of the law. And what is it that the plants are fed on? Dredd refers to it, saying that the reason they had to be banned was because of their diet, but we're never told what it is. We can guess, but it's never established for sure.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Stuck for that special gift? Want to do something totally different this year? Want to send a message and make sure it's heard? If you don't mind stepping outside the law and risking being sent to the iso-cubes, you can purchase a brainbloom. Shaped like human heads (and kind of looking like devils with their sharp chins and pointed ears) these plants can replicate any known sound, from music to a high-pitched scream and from a jet engine to the sound a tennis ball makes as it travels across the court from racquet to racquet. Exactly how they came into being is uncertain, but Dredd mentions that they are the result of grafting human organs on to living plants. It's a thoroughly horrible idea, but just another example of the wild and wacky diversions available in Mega-City One to those who can afford them.

Laughing in the face of death
It's quite amusing that when we see Mahaffy talking to her plants, they all sing “You'll never walk alone”, the well-known anthem for Liverpool Football Club. Are we being told, in a sly, oblique way, that she is a scouser, the implication (not to be taken seriously of course) that every Liverpudlian is a “scally”, or untrustworthy person? Does Wagner support “The Reds” and is inserting a private joke here? Whatever the truth of it, it's hilarious to see a row of heads sing “When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high”, especially as these plants are basically entirely made of head, and couldn't hold them up high if they tried!

I AM THE LAW!
Dredd must be pretty pissed at Ma Mahaffy, considering she just tried to have him effect his own removal from this Earth. And yet, he approaches her caution and arrest with the same cold, clinical, detached professionalism that he displays when confronting any lawbreaker. There is no question of revenge here: Mahaffy broke the law, and must pay the price. Also, though he tut-tuts that even at age 100 she is still engaging in criminal activity, Dredd has no compunction about sentencing her as the law requires and locking her up, although it's probably likely she will die in custody.

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