Thrill-Power Countdown #20: 2000ad Annual 1989

While the annuals tend to be, by nature, stand-alone efforts, the stories in the 1989 annual require a fair amount of knowledge of what has been happening in the ongoing sagas of the various characters.

Slaine is off on a mystical quest that he's been stuck on for a long while (with some welcome unusual art by Steve Parkhouse); Ace Trucking Co sees Garp the Barp from Parp return to his home dimension after some doppelganger shenanigans (with annual MVP Belardinelli) but comes with a weirdly grim ending, and a Bad Company  by the original BC crew fills in some backstory in the original tale.

The Dredd isn't as dialed in to the vast continuity of the main strip, although it is another comedy musical - Wagner and Grant were very good at this kind of thing, but they did do it a lot. What it does have  is art by John Higgins, who was amazingly shiny at this stage. Higgins is still doing Dredd material today - his Dreadnaughts is really great - and he does some remarkable gore, showing the impact of bullets of fragile human bodies. But this is a trippier Higgins, with some gorgeous neon pastel colour work; while Ewins and McCarthy are also letting their freak fly with Kano and co.

There is a lot of Flesh in the reprint - the hunting dinosaurs kind, not the porn kind - which is always entertaining. But there is a real sense that the best days were in the past, and it's little wonder that so much of this annual is looking back on it with such fondness.