Written by John Wagner
Art by Ian Gibson & Jose Ferrer
Cover by Ian Gibson
DC Solicitation: Sam Slade used to be one of the best robo-hunters in the business. But he's getting old, and old means slow - which means dead!
That is, until Sam takes on the biggest case of his life. Verdus was a paradise planet. And while colonists made their long journey there, a self-replicating robot was sent out to prepare the planet. Since the humans arrived, all contact with the colony has been lost.
But the lightspeed journey to Verdus has been sabotaged, and relativistic effects have made Slade a much younger man. Now his trouble's just starting in this classic adventure by John Wagner (Judge Dredd), Ian Gibson (Halo Jones) & José Luis Ferrer (Ant Wars)!
On sale Dec 1 [2004] o 7.375" x 10.1875" o 136 pg, B&W, $14.95 US
This volume reprints:
Verdus, 22 episodes, progs 76-84 and 100-112 (Aug. 1978 to May 1979). Story by "TB Grover" & "Mike Stott" (John Wagner), art by Jose Ferrer (pts 1-2) Ian Gibson (pts 3-22).
Commentary: For its first two years of operation, 2000 AD, like its forefather Action, found hit characters and stories by grabbing popular media templates and adapting them to fit the comic's needs. Judge Dredd was Dirty Harry in the future. MACH One was TV's Six Million Dollar Man. The Harlem Heroes played an aerial version of Rollerball, and so on.
For Robo-Hunter, John Wagner went outside the usual sources of mid-1970s entertainment and took a typical hard-boiled detective, as crafted by writers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, along with the first-person narrative used to such effect in their novels, and threw the source into a goofy science fiction setting. Our hero Sam Slade is a robohunter, a combination of a private detective and a bounty hunter, who specializes in hunting down and occasionally retrieving recalcitrant robots in a bizarre, stylized future metropolis.
Played straight, this might have been a fair idea for a kids' comic. But Wagner immediately realized the comic possibilities in taking another strand from Chandler: the author's Philip Marlowe is typically the only reliable, the only good, the only decent character in his stories, and nobody else can be trusted. Sam Slade, by comparison, is the only sane character in his stories: the only people who aren't certifiable lunatics are Sam and his associates Jim Kidd and Cutie the robometer, and Kidd's a raging-tempered freak. And that's before he gets de-aged to a two year-old body that hasn't been potty-trained.
"Verdus" is inarguably dated in some of its concepts, and all the pieces that make Robo-Hunter such a spectacular strip aren't quite in place: we won't meet Sam's legendary sidekicks Hoagy and Carlos Sanchez Robostogie until Book 2, and Gibson's art is surprisingly loose and rough in these stories. It isn't until "The Beast of Blackheart Manor" (presumably to come in Book 3 in late 2005) that he is totally comfortable in showing a fluid, perfect line for the characters. But Gibson's design and layout skills are just about unparalleled, and even this early, there are some eye-catching and hilarious moments with the ridiculous characters, including a pair of argumentative church droids, one a robotic rabbi with a steel beard.
Indeed, with no disrespect to Gibson, this is a story where the script brings far more to the reader than the art, and the story's a real treat. No protagonist in fiction ever has as a spectacular a mess as Sam Slade to deal with. With amazing, simple ease, Wagner introduces natural, believable plot complications which just defy description. "Verdus" quickly grows from a simple adventure into an almighty catastrophe. There are no simple cases for your old pal Sam Slade. The poor man can't even make his way through some old sewers without being forced into an endless game of Monopoly. It's a joyous, hilarious spectacle and long overdue for this collection.