Another StarScan(Prog724)beautifully detailing “Killing Time” story with Chris’ artwork really starting to evolve..
This is Chris’ first credited creator series which he developed with off-the-wall genius John Smith.Fantastic,time-travelling yarn which is still running in the pages of 2000ad today
I love this cover(Prog735)Indigo Prime again,this time in Victorian London on the trail of Jack the Ripper!
This cover nearly(!)brings me full-circle with Chris doing the cover(Prog1760,Nov’11)for Indigo Prime ,which he helped create with John Smith way back in 1989
Jack the Ripper revealed!
Chris’ final cover on “Killing Time”(Prog741),there were 3 more parts but that was the last work Chris did in 2000ad for 2 years!(Apart from a one-off Dredd with Garth Ennis entitled “Vidders”(Prog749)
“The Iscariot”! Interior art from “Killing Time” demonstrating the sort of breath-taking splash-page spectacle that Chris would come to be known for
Breath-taking and weird.
The Comics Journal has a superb piece on Indigo Prime, you’ll want to read this:
I figure it’d only be right to abuse my position here for the purposes of announcing my personal favorite superhero issue #1 from this mighty year of myriad relaunches.
I am of course referring to Indigo Prime: Everything and More, from writer John Smith and artist Edmund Bagwell, a 24-page story split into six-page bits over the course of one month’s time with the venerable UK action comics weekly forum 2000 AD, Progs 1750-53. And while I realize that I just covered Judge Dredd Megazine last month, it would be a terrible shame to let petty temporal concerns stand in the way of a twenty-years-later revival of Smith’s Indigo Prime concept, a means for its writer to cannily sew some identity from the patched fabric of freelance thrills-for-hire: the same knitty straightjacket cozied around each and every one of those New 52 and most of the damned corporate remainder.
…
Indigo Prime operatives again appeared in Smith’s 2008 2KAD serial Dead Eyes, plucking out the protagonist for their own present revival in Everything and More. I’ve made this all sound a bit complicated, but Smith has a new mission for the new Indigo Prime – it’s now been visualized as a formal science hero super-team series, not unlike the kind of sci-fi show you’d see on television (naturally, characters profess on-page to having never heard of that aberrational obscurity Doctor Who). Inevitably, this is also to say it mimics the big beats of contemporary action comics, close as they tend to play it to Hollywood simulacra; gone are the crawly textures of Mike Hadley or Chris Weston, replaced by Bagwell’s sparkling clean take on future shock psychedelia, smartly costumed in slightly muted digital color. Rarely a segment goes by without some double-page gape at high technology or grand destruction, accompanied by a potential best-ever apportioning of Smith’s playful, purple narrative captions and non-stop technical speak. It’s a real hundred-ideas-per-minute kind of comic, whisking the reader through a dozen or so characters presented just intriguingly enough in media res to suggest their personal histories, as well as the shared history of Indigo Prime, which the newcomer might be forgiven for thinking is actually detailed in some clump of back-issues, though it’s really all a matter of imagination.
I love this kind of stuff, and Smith does it incredibly well here; one would be tempted to say he’s outdone the likes of Grant Morrison at their own game, if Smith’s outlook weren’t so comparatively sinister. No, Smith is a bit closer to Peter Milligan, currently trying to say something about relaunches himself from his Red Lanterns perch in the middle of the DC explosion. But while that particular book is tethered to the Geoff Johns family of superhero action titles, Indigo Prime looks to the big picture: the implications of high-stakes action storytelling that can’t help but kick off with the detailed destruction of millions of human lives as a means of turning us on to the dangerous life of science heroes. Semi-protagonist Danny Redman — who, remember, has been plucked out of an entirely different comic — spends much of the comic’s space flipping out and committing suicide in reaction to the sights he sees, only to be re-built yet again by his supportive, controlling science team. The story of his evolution to hooting inter-chronological hero — as much as Smith is willing to slow down to observe, at least — is marked by tactical memory blockage and a general willingness on everyone’s part to emphasize the big, big, BIG picture over the petty moralities of basic human survival on the micro scale of, say, humanity going extinct in one timeline, or laying dead in another.
More.
What Chris Weston did next
So, Chris Weston has finished The Twelve but what else does he have lined up? Well here is a clue:
Right; onto other stuff. First stop: a quick trip back to the Nerve Centre, then… who knows?But what could it be? Over to Twitter for the next piece of the jigsaw:
Today I am drawing an Indigo Prime cover. My career has come full circle. I’ll soon be back washing dishes in a BHS restaurant at this rate.Can it get better? Well more CW inside the prog would be nice… If only wishes worked on alien despot editors.
Prog 1753 hits UK stores TODAY, earthlets, and the pulse-pounding thrill-power just doesn’t let up!
On the run and on the prowl for more victims, the notorious mass murderer PJ Maybe returns in the next instalment of ‘Judge Dredd: Day of Chaos’ – but the judges are hot on his heels! John Wagner continues his new mega-story, with glorious art by Henry Flint.
Paranormal detective Ampney Crucis pierces the thin tissue of reality as he accompanies his Russian captors through the broiling dimensional gyre into a nightmarish vision of Britain – but what horrors await them there in ‘The English Assassin’ by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis?
Maggie Roth thought she’d escaped the Whiteraven corporation and its sinister experiments but her past is coming back to haunt her in ‘Angel Zero’ by Kek-W and John Burns.
Indigo Prime have a problem – and only one young man can help. A shame he keeps committing suicide on them… The glorious return of John Smith’s interdimensional explorers and troubleshooters continues with art courtesy of Edmund Bagwell
And undercover Judge Dirty Frank has recovered from the hit-and-run incident moments after landing in Hondo City. But why is he wearing a load of ping pong balls and a big nappy? Low Life: The Deal by Rob Williams and D’Israeli…
Prog 1753 - £2.25 from all good stockists of thrill-power, earthlets. If it were any better, the pages would catch fire…
