Thrill-Power Countdown #5: 2000ad Annual 1985

There are stories by Alan Moore peppered throughout the early annuals, and most of them are funny, and all of them are clever, and none of them match the melancholic mood of the ABC Warriors tale in this annual.

It's one of the few stories that Moore did with Steve Dillon, and he really should have done more. Dillon was a terrific action artist, but could do moroseness even with the expressionless face of Hammerstein, and the painted colours of John Higgins give the whole story a dreamy vibe that retains the sharpness of reality. In another universe, Steve Dillon could have done a wonderful Watchmen.

And the story is not a silly joke, musing on the red planet blues - robots aren't troubled by it, they say - and on how colonisation of a distant world can sometimes bite back.

The rest of the annual is fairly standard for the time, which is still a level of quality rarely seen in comics - there is some Ezquerra Strontium Dog, but it's reprint.  The Dredd story about smuggling an illegal substance into the city feels like one we've read a dozen times before, although Ian Gibson still draws the hell out of it.

The most interesting thing outside the Moore/Dillon/Higgins (and the only 2000ad annual cover Mike McMahon would do) is a Slaine story that looks slightly to the future of the strip, where the warped one goes all Time Killer, but it's drawn by Belardinelli, and his Elfric is not nearly as sexy as Glenn Fabry's. It's an interesting detour into the roads not taken, although it's not as good as the sad robots on Mars.