2000 A.D. #2337 // Review
Suzi Nine Millimetre wakes up again. Suzi needs a job to give her black-and-white life purpose. She’s going to head down to the jack market to see what’s available in the first part of a brand-new series in 2000 A.D. #2337. Writer Dan Abnett opens a new cyberpunk serial called “Azimuth” that fluidly graces the page courtesy of artist Tazio Bettin. Also this issue: writer Alec Worley’s Durham Red pursues more than one person in the same body in a story drawn by Ben Willsher. Writer David Hine’s Void Runners are in the thick of a gorgeous battle in deep space with the art of Boo Cook, and Judge Dredd gets a sci-scan and an explosive showdown in the next chapter of writer Mike Carroll’s issue-opening serial.
There’s a lot for sale at the jack market. Dreams. Mouths. She’s not there for anything like that. She’s there to see Papa Legday. He tells her that the twins are hiring. She should pay them a visit, but there WILL be competition, and she knows full well what that means: death. Death is something Suzy can’t live without. The twins think that Suzi can’t die. They refer to her as a “cadavatar.” She tells them they’re wrong. She dies all the time. And it always hurts. They have a job for her anyway...
Abnett’s dialogue and narration are pure poetry. The cyberpunk aesthetic makes it all feel like William Gibson fused with a dizzying array of lyricists and poets. Like the best cyberpunk, Abnett’s writing creates a massive world with a vast culture that seems to spread out of every sentence. It’s one of the more promising new series to emerge in 2000 A.D. in quite some time. Also of note this issue is the darkness that Worley’s pulling to the page with Durham Red. Hers is a quick and brutal hunt that slams percussively into the page with splashes of blood right before the elegance of Abnett’s Azimuth.
Bettin works dazzling detailing around the corners of a gracefully-designed cyberpunk city for Azimuth. Some of the dramatic perspectives he’s bringing to the page feel almost breathtaking. There’s high weirdness around the edges of everything in a clashing mutation of different styles from different cultures. Suzy has a clean, enigmatic beauty about her that should serve the center of the story quite well. Contrasting this (and possibly matching Bettin’s work for some of the best art in the issue) is the deep depth of the color in Boo Cook’s gorgeous space battle on the Void Runners.
Abnett and Bettin’s Azimuth should be a fun series to follow. The density of Abnett’s writing feels that much more electric than anything else in the anthology right now. This is not to say that there isn’t a hell of a lot going on in the issue besides. And some of it is QUITE good, but Azimuth feels like a breath of fresh air next to the rest of it.
