Thrill-Power Countdown #1: Judge Dredd Annual 1981

If I was sent into exile on some desert island, and could only take one book with me, there is a very good chance it would be the first Judge Dredd annual. If there was ever a battle royale between actual comics, I would put my money on this book, because the Bolland cover alone would beat the snot out of half the competition, before you even get inside.

This is again Mick McMahon at his absolute finest, capturing the desperation of Mega-City One, the horrors of the nuclear ghosts of Milwaukee, and the silliness of human-sized pinball games.

The stories are all Wagner at his finest - his tale about the man's heart being taken by the state might be the first example where Judge Dredd is actually a terrifying bad guy who can totally ruin some poor geek's life by using the Law against him. (And if you fight back, they will take everything from you, except your screams.) 

The smaller stories still pack a punch - the Walter the Wobot fable is even quite good, with a young Brendan McCarthy doing a Spirit pastiche; while the Shok! story by Kevin O'Neill is genuinely exciting, and so good it was ripped off wholesale for a feature film.

It certainly helps that this is the only annual that doesn't really have any reprint at all - it's all new thrills, all the time. The only thing from an earlier age is the unpublished first episode, spiked because it wasn't far out enough, and infuriating artist Carlos Ezquerra, who had nothing to do with the character for years, before coming back as the ultimate Dredd artist

The filler material is a huge part in fleshing out Dredd's world, looking at both the creation of the character and the fictional world he inhabits, while also comparing different artist's takes on Old Stoney Face. And Ron Smith's frontispiece picture of Mega-City One at night is the most beautiful rendering of the Big Meg I've ever seen.  

This is, without a doubt, the best annual ever produced, setting an astronomically high bar that all the later annuals never quite reached. I've had my copy of this since the 80s and it is beat to hell, with the names of family friends written in big blue marker on the inside pages, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. If all my other comics vanished, I would still be happy with this, the best comic book I've ever owned. 

Thrill-Power Countdown #2: 2000ad Annual 1986

I'm 10 years old when I see this annual appear in the bookstore at the Stafford Mall in Timaru. It's only the second annual I've ever seen in the flesh. It costs $4.95, which is a drokk-tonne of money when the regular prog still costs around 55 cents, but it's worth every cent.

Belardinelli's artwork on the Ace Trucking Co story that opens the annual has never looked more beautiful, with a neon pastel colour scheme that could not be more 1985, and is all the more memorable for it. Ian Gibson's art on the Dredd story also has a strangely vibrant sheen to it (although it is yet another smuggling into Mega-City One story - this time it's coffee).

Strontium Dog has Johnny Alpha being a cold and hard bastard, which he just uses to hide his wonderfully soft heart (and it's drawn by Ezquerra, so it's legit Dog); and Cam Kennedy has been the definitive Rogue Trooper artist for some time, but rarely works in colour on the character, and that bright blue skin really shines on the thick, glossy paper.

The 1986 annual also has the best reprint of any of them, collecting together the Shako storyline form 2000ad's early days, and is just page after page of people dying in gory and inventive ways. My favourite is always going to be poor old Jimbo, the local drunk, who gets the giant polar bear shitfaced, and Shako likes the little guy, but gets so wasted he sees two Jimbos, and one of them has to go!

I'm 10 years old and this book is one of the biggest and most concentrated bursts of pure thrill-power I ever get in my entire life. It might have been 10 times as expensive as the prog, but the pages still fizz with energy when I crack them open again 40 years later, and that's truly priceless.

Thrill-Power Countdown #3: Judge Dredd Annual 1982

It was no surprise that Bolland quickly found success in the United States with his clean lines, but it's also little surprise that Mike McMahon never gained a foothold. Too abstract, too warped, just too weird.

But there is a generation of British comic readers who will follow McMahon wherever he will go - and he does go to some places - because he was once doing stellar work on Dredd every week in the prog, and producing the achingly wonderful artwork for this annual.

The fatties of Mega-City One have never been so beautifully outlandish, and the art on The Vampire Effect is nothing short of brilliant - the villain is a white void that just eats everything, but McMahon's use of shadow and colour makes it a visceral and genuinely scary strip.

There are flaws in this diamond of an annual - it's always nice to get a Mean Machine solo story, but Robin Smith's art looks especially stilted when surrounded by McMahon's efforts, while there is a terrible Walter the Wobot story (to be fair, almost all the Walter The Wobot stories are terrible, even when they occasionally get Bolland on the art).

But this is early 80s 2000ad at its best, and its best is McMahon. He would go on to the stunning abstractions of Slaine and Howler and the occasional Batman, but his annual work is the pinnacle.

Thrill-Power Countdown #4: 2000ad Annual 1988

They don't need to threaten Tharg on the cover - killing the alien editor of 2000ad is my idea of a good time, not a threat - because the 1987 annual is just an absolute monster of a book. Many of the annuals have peaks and troughs of quality, but this one really seems like a complete package of thrills. 

There is Carlos Ezquerra on Strontium Dog, and Kevin O'Neill on Nemesis, and Brendan McCarthy with a more down-to-earth Judge Dredd effort from the mind expanding artist, (although it's yet another annual plot that is more than a little familiar, with glamorous female perps turning out to Wally Squad).

And the 1988 effort is also packed with more O'Neill and Dave Gibbons, with reprints of the Ro-Busters story about Hammerstein's adventures on the front line of the Vogon war.  It's beautiful artwork with a story that actually hits harder now than it did in other times - all that Vogon stuff felt quite dated for a while, but now seems scarily topical.

It doesn't have any of the very best stories in this run of annuals, but the overall book has a pleasant feeling of completeness, or getting everything you could possibly want from mid-1980s 2000ad, and just a little bit more.

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.

Thrill-Power Countdown #6 Judge Dredd Annual 1991

This was another annual I ached to read at the time, but wouldn't get to until years later, and there was one major reason for this - it had the first meeting between Judge Dredd and the Strontium Dog. 

They were always going to clash, because they were the two biggest names in the comic, and they were always going to fight as soon as they met. Even if Johnny Alpha is a legally mandated bounty hunter in the future, that mandate does not extend to the streets of MC-1. And despite being a veteran of a war against genocide and subject to ongoing and endless prejudice, Johnny is a bit more laid back than Dredd. He'll still gun down the scum who deserve it, but he also likes to have a beer and a game of poker with the lads.

So they immediately start pounding the crap out of each other, and it's all drawn by Colin McNeill at his most fuzzy painted phase. Alpha comes out slightly ahead, and Dredd promises they will meet in a rematch - they will soon bust heads in Judgement Day - but one thing is certain. Alpha and his old pal Wulf Sternhammer look supremely cool in sunglasses and dark suits, a few short years before Reservoir Dogs made that look groovy. 

Johnny and Joe have met a few times since, and have come to some kind of arrangement, but will also never be fiends.  That's all in the future, but there is also a strange story in this annual that harks back to the past and it is deeply weird to see a Jonathan Livingston Seagull piss-take in the 90s, even if it is with a dog vulture. 

But there is something of the future on the cover - Jamie Hewlett only did a tiny amount of Dredd, but managed to capture the mania of Mega-City One citizens like few others, and his glorious anarchism will find a mass audience in the future with the Gorillaz. Those cartoon musical misfits are bigger than Dredd in the real world - they just are - but you can bet your butt that if they did clash, Joe Dredd would come out on top. 

Thrill-Power countdown #7: Judge Dredd Annual 1985

What is the best thing about the Judge Dredd 1985 annual? There are a few to choose from.

Is it the way you could go through the Arms Buyers Almanac 2106 and pick out what heavy sci-fi guns and equipment (as rendered by Ian Gibson) you would buy if you had a few spare hundred creds?

Is it the reminder that a nuclear bomb could go off at any moment in Mega-City One and hundreds of thousands of people can die in horrific fire, and it's all part of a short one-off story? 

Is it the reappearance of Judge Giant's first and last air-strike, one of the most action-packed panels in all early Dredd?

Is it more of our man Gibson on Judge Anderson?

Is it the idea that the mutated killer Cursed Earth spiders of an earlier Dredd era just were not big enough, so Dredd now has to face off against GIANT mutated killer Cursed Earth spiders?

Is it the stark red of the cover, one of Carlos Ezquerra finest?

Is it the fatties literally eating an entire vehicle in the finest example of competitive eating?

No, of course not. It's this caption from the fatties story, which as recently noted on the Tearoom of Despair, is truly one of the greats:

Sometimes a great story needs a brilliant artist, or a terrific twist. Sometimes it just needs to point out how fucking stupid human beings can be.

Thrill-Power Countdown #8: Judge Dredd Annual 1983

Mean Machine Angel gets married; there are a couple of punk sci-fi girls by Brett Ewins; Max Normal goes right around the bend; the fleas are so bad that suicide is the only relief possible; Dave Gibbons gets to draw a picture of an alien creature sucking the clothes off an innocent woman; an AI-run hotel kills hundreds of people and because it's a classic reprint, Dredd gets to say 'I TOLD YOU SO'; and Carlos Ezquerra draws most of it.

I don't have much to say about this annual, but holy shit I had a good time reading it.

Thrill-Power Countdown #9: Judge Dredd Annual 1984

There have been literally thousands of individual Judge Dredd stories, they have been breathtakingly exciting, occasionally moving, and frequently absurd. And sometimes - just sometimes - they get a little too silly.

They can be so silly they must never be spoken of again, and are locked away in the darkest, deepest iso-cube. Sometimes it's the story where the Angel Gang get brought back to life in the dumbest possible way - we saw Pa and Junior burn in the fiery lava of Xanadu! - and sometimes it's the story in this annual where Judge Dredd beats up the literal Devil.

The hardcore Dredd fan is not supposed to like these kinds of stories, they disrespect the seriousness of Chaos Day and the Apocalypse War. But I'm as hardcore nerd as it gets, and I freaking love the ridiculous stuff. It's all part of the great buffet of Dredd, just a sweeter taste than usual.

Besides, Carlos Ezquerra draws a bitching Prince of Darkness. And the devil has returned in other stories since then, so he's not totally forgotten.

There's also a great interview with Carlos, and the 1984 annual has two other serious - but still light - Dredd stories by Ezquerra, with a mutant gang on the rampage and a detective story involving time travel from the future. Plus there is some gorgeous black and white art from Jose Casanovas on Max Normal and Mike McMahon doing his 'carved into wood' thing on a text story. 

McMahon also does a timeline of the world of Judge Dredd which must have been a revelation for readers of the time. So things might get silly, but that should keep the nerds who hate the fun a tiny bit happier.