19.8.16

Programme 33 (8-October-77)

Cover:

You know, I always knew that Jason X was ripped off from somewhere. And here it is.

Also, it’s nice to see another signed picture, this one by McCarthy and Ewins. I’m not exactly sure who they are, but if memory serves from that time Dredd had to investigate a murderous family who was killing tourists in Atlantis and feeding their corpses to giant manta rays so they could bribe a doctor to keep their mutant son a secret, at least one of them is named ‘Brett’.

You know, when we get to the story whose plot I just spoiled in like two years, it’s going to turn out that these weren’t even the artists on it.


Thrill 1 – Invasion!

Silk and Savage are trapped in Colonel Rosa’s terrifying torture dungeon! Bill has already been driven so mad by pain from the poison he’s been injected with that he starts gibbering about needing Nessie! Rosa is so entertained by his mad yelling that she decides televising him yelling about Nessie would be a propaganda coup!

But the coup doesn’t end there. No, she thinks it’ll be even funnier if they drive Silk and Savage all the way to Loch Ness so that he can yell for Nessie at the lakeside. Unfortunately for the Volgs, Nessie responds. No, don’t worry, the story didn’t just get really interesting. This is the Nessie he was yelling for:

It seem that she’s Big Nessie McNairn, a famous lady wrestler from before the invasion! And she’s brought other Scottish rebels with her! They quickly gun down the Volgs and capture Rosa. Why not kill her? Because Savage has a plan – he’s going to make the colonel wrestle big Nessie! Which is going to be televised over the entire country, for some reason. Because there’s no one back at the broadcast centre to flip the switch, apparently.

Rosa loses the fight, but again Savage doesn’t killer her, assuming that her Volgan superiors will punish her badly enough for losing. Yes. There’s no way that can go badly.

Thrill 2 – Judge Dredd

As predicted by me last issue, Dredd finds the behavior of his solicitous robot increasingly suspicious. Although it’s not because of Dredd’s well-founded anti-robot bias, but rather because Walter has been giving him gifts. But where could the money be coming from? Dredd decides to trail Walter in order to find out.

Dredd tracks Walter to a garage, where it seems that he’s been picking up shifts as a taxi driver so he can afford gifts! Ah, the life of a free robot. Free to perform menial tasks for a paltry wage. In an amazing coincidence another cab is hijacked just a few blocks away, allowing Walter to Chauffeur Dredd to the scene of the crime.

With the crooks quickly arrested (and not killed, I might add), Dredd takes Walter back to the cab dispatch to solve the biggest mystery of the story – just how did Walter get the job?

Okay, now I’m a fan of this story.

Judge Dredd Kill Count (38)

Thrill 3 - Shako

Time for some revenge in the pages of Shako! Not Jake or Shako or anything like that. No, it’s time for some Walrus revenge! An old one-tusked monster who’d fought Shako in the past is looking for some payback, but winds up anticlimactically killed by Shako. The important part of the fight is that in order to get an advantage Shako has to pull the walrus out of the water, revealing both of them to the sea plane overhead!

Back at CIA headquarters Jake is getting told off by his supervisor over the whole ‘opening fire on a Russian ship in international waters’ fiasco. It also doesn’t speak too well of his abilities as a spymaster that he hasn’t been able to kill a single bear. Jake demands one last chance to track the yogi down.

Jake and redshirt climb into a plane and go looking for Shako, along with a few other CIA triggermen. They come across the recently-killed Walrus and Jake devises a plan – since polar bears will come back to a kill to finish the meat, he’s going to saw the walrus open, have redshirt climb inside, and wait to kill the bear when it returns. Buck, who was along for the ride, suspects that Jake just wants redshirt out of the way because he’s next in line for station chief, but doesn’t say anything to stop the plan.

And that’s how, resdhirt winds up getting eaten by Shako. Because they saw him up inside a walrus and don’t bother giving him a bag for its gun, causing all the frozen walrus innards to gum up its works.

It looks like we’re coming towards the end of the story – how can I tell? Because Buck examines Shako’s tracks, and finds that he’s dragging his leg – he was injured during the Walrus fight, and can’t have gotten far!

that brings the total number Shako’s victims to have died ‘real slow’ to 2 out of 41, or roughly 5%

Thrill 4 – Dan Dare (?/Gibbons)

It seems that the future isn’t as free from piracy as we’d have assumed. Wait, no one assumed that? Sorry. Although I’m not sure why regular freighters are heading through the lost worlds, which are basically the monster-infested Bermuda triangle of outer space.

Dan’s crew gets to the besieged ship too late to offer any help, but elects to bring the corpses of its dead back to their home planet, Phoenix, for decent burials (sadly, it would later turn out that Phoenician burial practice is to set corpses adrift in space. Okay, not really). When they arrive Dan hears about the plight that the race of traders suffers through at the hands of the pirates. He decides to offer his help by loading up a ship with his bloodthirsty crew, and sending them out as a trojan horse.

As anticipated the pirates promptly attack, and Dan removes the fake panelling from his warship and opens fire. They blast the pirates to pieces, forever saving the phoenicians from the threat of the pirates. Until another group of pricks buy a ship and some guns.

Dan and company head on to the next lost world, proving that they’re not that great about follow-through.

THARG’S NERVE CENTRE

You know, minus all the drama about unplanned pregnancy, this is basically the plot of The Asylum’s movie ‘The Terminators’.

Thrill 5 – MACH 1

It’s Macon county Georgia, and the UFO’s have come to raze it to the ground. There’s looting, prayer, people scrambling to survive, and through it all, heatrays. Oh, the heat rays. They’re unstoppable. Or are they?

After Probe causes the police cruiser to crash he kills the redneck zombie, then picks the whole car up and whips it at the closest UFO. This sends the UFO crashing into a building. This profoundly pisses off the remaining UFOs enough that they use magic powers to suck up the entire nearby lake, and use it to drown the city-

And kill the town it does. Probe is able to outrun the tidal wave, but no one else is, and they all wind up extremely dead. Probe reports back to base, where he discovers that the government is planning to cover up the UFO attack, and tell everyone that the city was destroyed by the flood. Wait, what happened to Simon, and his knowledge about the UFO? More importantly, what was going on with those UFOs?

No answers are in the offing. In fact, Sharpe (Probe’s boss – he’s been gone for a while, huh?) announces that they know all about who the UFOs are, and what they want, but it’s too secret to trust Probe with.

Wait, does that mean we’re not going to find out either? There’s no ‘to be continued’ at the end of this story, so maybe not. Which would suck rather profoundly.

Thrill 6 – Future Shock

Hey, remember those time travelers who headed back to the British witch-hunts because they want to see women burn to death? Well, they get bored with the snuff, and decide to play a little prank on the primitives. They radio for their spaceship to pull them up with tractor beams, so they can make everyone think that they’re real witches!

Care to guess the twist that you undoubtedly figured out last time?

Yup, there’s a power failure causing them to fall back to earth and they get burned as witches. Congratulations, everyone who figured this one out. By which I mean everyone who read it.

Final Thoughts

Best Story: Shako – A man crawled into a dead walrus, then got eaten by a polar bear. What the hell else do you want, people?

Worst Story: Invasion – No, it was just too stupid this week. That was seriously his plan? Keep yelling about Nessie, hoping that the message would be broadcast and then they would drive him out to loch ness? That’s maybe the worst plan I’ve ever come across.

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