Digital Delights For 2022 From ‘2000 AD’

After a year’s worth of 2000 AD’s digital-only releases every month of 2021, the company’s now released the list of what’s coming out in 202, including work from Garth Ennis, Gordon Rennie, Tom Tully, Eric Bradbury and more…

The great thing about these digital-only releases in 2021 has been the number of forgotten gems, as well as more recent works. Case in point, in amongst the 12 digital editions of 2021, we had Garth Ennis and Philip Bond’s Time Flies, Alan Grant and Robin Smith’s Bad City Blue, and the first volume of the Tales From The Black Museum amongst others, but the highlights were John Smith’s writing on the strangeness of Revere (with Simon Harrison) and the dino adventure meets serial killer thriller Slaughterbowl (with Paul Peart).

This coming year sees a reduction from 12 to 6 titles, once every other month, and a mix once more of lost works and recent reprints. So, along with the second volumes of both the high energy, high action sports strip from the early days of 2000 AD, The Mean Arena by Tom Tully, Eric Bradbury, and Mike White, and the eclectic and usually excellent Tales From The Black Museum, we have bit of an Ennis rarity, the buddy biker tale of Cursed Earth craziness that was ‘Sleeze ‘N’ Ryder‘.

‘Sleeze ‘N’ Ryder‘ is very much a product of the time, coming in 1993’s Megazine Vol 2.20 – 2.26, with some early artwork from Nick Percival – far from the sort of beautiful grotesquery you’ll see in his work now. It’s another one of Ennis’ comedy strips, it’s goofy and a bit gross, this has two bikers deciding they’re going to bike across the Cursed Earth – just because they think it will be cool. Yeah, they might well be idiots.

As far as the three up to date collections, we’re delving into work from the last couple of years of 2000 AD and the Megazine with James Peaty and Paul Marshal‘s bounty hunter thriller, Skip Tracer: Legion, the ridiculously over the top comedy of Survival Geeks: Crisis Of Infinite Nerds by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby, and Neil Googe, and the latest iteration of the Dark Judges, Dark Justice: Deliverance by David Hine and, with his artwork looking waaay different from the work on ‘Sleeze ‘N’ Rider’, Nick Percival.