Wyrd Britain: 2023

Sunday 10 December 2023

Someone at the Top of the Stairs

'Thriller' ran for six series on ITV between 1973 and 1976. The title of the series is pretty self-explanatory but amongst it's 43 episodes there was one with a supernatural aspect, 'Someone at the Top of the Stairs'.

When Chrissie Morton (Donna Mills) and Gillian Pemberton (Judy Crane) rent a room in an old and dilapidated boarding house filled with initially kindly but increasingly odd residents which include a prepubescent peeping tom (Alan Roberto), an underwear stealing Colonel (Peter Cellier) and a mysterious man in the attic (David de Keyser).

Writer Brian Clemens - who has a Wyrd Britain pedigree like no other having written movies ('Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde', 'Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter' 'And Soon the Darkness') and TV shows ('Danger Man', 'The Avengers', 'The Professionals') for the likes of Hammer, ITC and very many others - digs deep into the gothic bag of tricks to confront us with a smorgasbord of occult hi-jinks and it works, it works well, all the way to the big reveal where it unfortunately falls a little flat. Until that point the show develops at a perfect pace and I cant shake the feeling that had this been a movie script the extra half hour would have allowed them to make good on the suspense, fill in some of the plot holes, allow Donna's character to develop completely and to have developed that ending into the one it should have been but it is what it is and what it is is a fun, minor, occult oddity but it could, and maybe should, have been marvellous.

Thursday 7 December 2023

Short Story: The Tomb of Pan

Wyrd Britain presents 'The Tomb of Pan' by Lord Dunsany.

"Seeing," they said, "that old-time Pan is dead, let us now make a tomb for him and a monument, that the dreadful worship of long ago may be remembered and avoided by all."

So said the people of the enlightened lands. And they built a white and mighty tomb of marble. Slowly it rose under the hands of the builders and longer every evening after sunset it gleamed with rays of the departed sun.

And many mourned for Pan while the builders built; many reviled him. Some called the builders to cease and to weep for Pan and others called them to leave no memorial at all of so infamous a god. But the builders built on steadily.

And one day all was finished, and the tomb stood there like a steep sea-cliff. And Pan was carved thereon with humbled head and the feet of angels pressed upon his neck. And when the tomb was finished the sun had already set, but the afterglow was rosy on the huge bulk of Pan.

And presently all the enlightened people came, and saw the tomb and remembered Pan who was dead, and all deplored him and his wicked age. But a few wept apart because of the death of Pan.

But at evening as he stole out of the forest, and slipped like a shadow softly along the hills, Pan saw the tomb and laughed.

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Lord Dunsany
from 'Fifty-One Tales', 1915

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Sunday 3 December 2023

The Chrysalids (radio play)

Wyrd Britain reviews the 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of ' The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham.

'The Chrysalids' was the third of the 'John Wyndham' novels published in the 1950s after 'The Day of the Triffids' and 'The Kraken Wakes'. It's the story of a group of telepathic children living in a post-nuclear Canada in a fundamentalist Christian society that practices an extreme doctrine of genetic purity following the 'Tribulation', a nuclear war that has left much of the world devastated and the remnants subjected to the vicissitudes of the fallout. Eventually forced to flee their home the telepathic teens are introduced to a wider world potentially every bit as extreme as the one they are running from.

This version was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 1981 by Barbara Clegg - later to become the first woman to write a 'Doctor Who' serial, 'Enlightenment' - and stars, amongst others, Stephen Garlick ('The Dark Crystal'), Spencer Banks ('Timeslip' & 'Penda's Fen') and Michael Spice ('The Brain of Morbius' & 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'). It's an obvious labour of love that has been assembled with a real care for the source material. There is an argument to be had over the use of adults voicing the children's parts but that's a quibble with what is otherwise an excellent adaptation.

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Thursday 30 November 2023

The Red Room

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, M.R. James, John Wyndham and others and in this instance H. G. Wells, read by Freddie Jones.

First published in The Idler magazine in 1896, 'The Red Room' is the story of an overconfident man who decides to spend the night in the haunted red room of Lorraine Castle where he fights a losing battle with the candles, the furniture and his own fear.

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Sunday 26 November 2023

After School

This the second episode of the first series of the 1975 ITV series of spooky stories for children, 'Shadows', was written by Ewart Alexander - who wrote an episode for each of the three series - and directed by Audrey Starrett, 'After School' is the story of two Welsh schoolboys Poodle and Seth (Rhys Powys and Lyn Jones) trapped after school in their PE teacher's (Gareth Thomas) office after school who experience a number of ghostly events all relating to the town's coal mining history.

Even though he makes only a short appearance it's fun to see Thomas - seen here a year before heading off to the village of 'Milbury' to look at some stones - giving his original accent free reign and his portrayal of the PE teacher brought back some unwelcome memories of my own Welsh valley school teachers although they would have laughed at his football obsession as they brutalised generations of children on a poorly maintained rugby pitch. The two young lads who carry the majority of the episode are solid enough and make the best of what they have with a script that requires them to continuously over-emote. Written and aired in the long shadow cast by the Aberfan disaster Alexander's script touches on some delicate areas but the 30 minute runtime means any commentary is fleeting and whilst it has some nice touches, such as the 'mine collapse', the film never really amounts to anything more than a curio.

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Friday 24 November 2023

All Hallows

Written by Walter De La Mare and first published in 1926 in 'The Connoisseur and Other Stories', 'All Hallows' tells the story of a traveller's visit to a remote cathedral and his meeting with the verger who tells him of the strange goings on within building.

De La Mare's tale is a masterclass of atmosphere and suggestion. Any and all sense of the uncanny is literally in the telling, both De La Mare's and the Verger's (and indeed in Richard E Grant's sympathetic reading), and in our and the traveller's imaginations as, potentially, nothing actually uncanny happens beyond a tour of the cathedral at dusk in the company of a companion spinning a yarn of disappearance, death and devilry. The story ends on a positive note for the future, but we are left guessing as to the veracity of the Verger's tale of diabolic renovations but captivated by the story he's spun.

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Tuesday 21 November 2023

Who Goes Here? (radio play)

Wyrd Britain reviews the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 'Who Goes Here?' by Bob Shaw.

In the 24th century guilty men join the Space Legion to, quite literally, forget as the offending memory is electronically erased upon induction but when new recruit Warren Peace awakens from the procedure with his entire memory is gone he absolutely needs to find out just how much of a monster he must have been?

From the novel written by Bob Shaw, dramatised for BBC Radio 4 in September 1991 and starring Douglas Hodge as Warren Peace, it's a quick and light-footed adaptation of Shaw's equally quick novel. With it's feet firmly planted in the same territory as 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' this is a fabulously daft story that takes Warren across the galaxy and back again in his quest to find out what it was exactly that he did and who exactly he is.

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Sunday 19 November 2023

Lost Property

'Unnatural Causes' was a seven episode ITV series broadcast in 1986 that featured stories of unusual deaths written by such luminaries as Nigel Kneale, Beryl Bainbridge, Lynda La Plante and in this case 'Sapphire and Steel' creator Peter J Hammond whose, 'Lost Property', is the only episode of the series with a supernatural element.

Anne Forrest (Miranda Richardson) along with her husband John (John Duttine), is living in an old school where she has partially reverted to a fantasy innocence, playing at being a teacher, retreating from ast and her present. John, on the verge of leaving, is a tightly wound ball of frustration unable to understand why his wife is behaving as she is and into this volatile situation appears a young girl, Marian Price (Louise Hellicar), an ex pupil at the school who claims a deep affection for the previous headmistress and for her own schooldesk.

Director Alan Dossor keeps everything tight and claustrophobic meaning the tension in Anne and John's relationship fills the screen and P. J. Hammond's slow moving script gives plenty of room for the two leads to explore their characters. The conclusion manages to be both predicable and surprising and also satisfyingly enigmatic grown out of seeds sewn earlier in the episode but leaving us with plenty of questions relating to the events and the nature of, at least one of, the characters.

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Saturday 18 November 2023

"We Need More Ghosts" - Alan Moore in conversation with Robin Ince

Wyrd Britain presents Alan Moore in conversation with Robin Ince.

"I don't want to be bound together in one belief with a lot of people who worship a sock puppet. That would be mental!"

Today, 18th November 2023, marks the 70th birthday of Northampton's waywardest son (but probably it's truest champion), Alan Moore.

"We need more ghosts, I don't know what all these exorcists are thinking!"

With a several decades long career in comics now behind him Moore has recently released a collection of short stories, 'Illuminations', and is embarking on a series of novels called 'Long London'. Here, in conversation with Robin Ince, he discusses writing, magic, the collaborative process, lost histories, AI and more.

"If everybody else is having their livelihoods threatened by automation, why not politicians?"

I've been a fan since first picking up 2000AD as a young lad and noticing that so many of my favourites were written by the same person and his work has been central to my reading habits ever since. So, happy birthday Mr. Moore, we probably wouldn't be here without you and all stellar work you put into warping our minds so, here's to many birthdays to come and to all the ideas that have yet to bump into each other.

"As humans we need, I think, on a fairly regular basis to transcend those sort of boundaries. Whether it's sort of, uh, you know, by mysticism, by poetry or by reading a lot of books about giant killer crabs".

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Tuesday 14 November 2023

Markheim

Originally appearing alongside - amongst others - F. Marion Crawford's '‘The Upper Berth’ in 1885 in the pages of 'The Broken Shaft: Tales of Mid-Ocean' that year's Unwin's Christmas Annual, Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Markheim' is the story of a murder and of the consequences of such as the titular character comes face to face with, in his reckoning, The Devil who confronts him with his dissolute and degenerating nature and presents him with the opportunity to continue, successfully, along his current path.

The version presented below was made for and aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1971 with Tom Watson as Markheim, Malcolm Hayes as The Stranger and Martin Heller as The Dealer. Adapted from the original by Tom Wright (who returned to the story three years later for a TV adaptation starring Derek Jacobi and Julian Glover and who would later contribute a script to the 'The Omega Factor') it's a rather fine and sensitively performed interpretation although it does omit one telling moment near the end that hints strongly at the true nature and intent of the Stranger.

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Sunday 12 November 2023

Jack Be Nimble

Made in 1980 for the third series of BBC2's 'Leap in the Dark' and written by poet Peter Redgrove 'Jack Be Nimble' is a curious story of witchcraft and female empowerment.

Jackie - played by future 'The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' cast member, Lisa Vanderpump - is the latest in a line of empowered women and is coming into her abilties much to the fear of her family and friends as her growing abilities to predict such diverse things as maths, menstruation and motorbike crashes are increasingly alienating her from all those around her. Fortunately she has Grannie (sympathetically portrayed Audrey Noble) on her side who has a heartbreaking insight into what's going and can guide her to a resolution.

It is in parts a little incoherent and towards the end it trends towards amateurish pretensions, as does some of the acting, but it makes a valiant stab at highlighting the changing times for women and acknowledging the distance still to travel couched in a tale of witchcraft and magic that avoids many of the cliches of the genre and at it's end finds it's way to an open ended conclusion on the nature and use of Jackie's abilities.

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Wednesday 8 November 2023

The Unsettled Dust - The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman

Jeremy Dyson, the off camera 'League of Gentleman' member, has long been known in these pages as a devotee of author and conservationist Robert Aickman being responsible for both a short film, 'The Cicerones', and a radio play, 'Ringing the Changes', based on Aickman's stories.

Aickman was the author of, to use his term, "strange stories", stories that often defy easy categorisation or even easy reading and here Dyson presents a light hearted and engaging exploration of the appeal of the man's literary endeavours, with help from author Ramsey Campbell, TVs Mark Gatiss, Tartarus Press' Ray Russell and others, and makes the case for the man to be given his place among the first rank of writers of the weird and the supernatural.

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Sunday 5 November 2023

Judge Dredd: Superfiend

It's been 10 years since the release of the 'Dredd' movie and with no sequel and no news on the purported Mega City One TV series we're left with just the two official screen adventures of everyone's favourite fascist, future cop, the Stallone movie which looked right but did everything else wrong and the aforementioned Karl Urban movie which got most everything right except sharing a name with that previous pile of crap and releasing in the wake of The Raid, but we do have a couple of unofficial releases that we're going to explore beginning with the the Adi Shankar cartoon series, "Judge Dredd: Superfiend'.

JD:S is a six episode series made in the hyper-frenetic 90s MTV style of animation. I wasn't really watching cartoons then so the only visual reference I have for you would be 'Ren and Stimpy'. The story loosely follows the established Judge Death backstory of Sydney De'Ath, the son of a homicidal dentist who grows up to become a Judge before deciding that as all crime is committed by the living then life itself must be a crime, gets himself all corpsey looking and goes on a rampage but that's pretty much the end of the similarities. Here Deadworld and Dredd's world are one and the same, Rico has only just escaped from Titan and is trying to bond with his daughter, Vienna, and the Angel Gang are selling Stookie in a Cursed Earth disco crater.

The story just about holds up and has some fun moments and dialogue - "Dredd to control. I'm up to my ankles in entrails here, what do you want?" - but the frenetic nature and lack of any sort of depth soon wear away at you but you can entertain yourself by easter egg hunting - my favourite was the brief appearance of Fergee.

If you'd prefer to watch the six episodes separately you can do so here or you can watch them edited into a handy continuous story, without all those pesky credit sequences, in the player below.

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Saturday 4 November 2023

The Diary of Mr Poynter

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, H.G. Wells, John Wyndham and in this instance M. R. James, read by Michael Bryant.

Originally published in James' third collection of stories, 'A Thin Ghost and Others' in 1919, it tells the story of a diary, some curtains and a hairy visitor.

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Friday 3 November 2023

The Devil's Ape

Taken from the 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff 'Spine Chillers' that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories by the likes of Saki, M.R. James, John Wyndham and in this instance Barnard Stacey, read by John Woodvine.

Originally published in 1933 in The Evening Standard it's the story of three chums who upon aquiring a spell book decide it would be a wizard wheeze to use it to transfer the soul of their grumpy neighbour into a lay figure.

With it's satanic undertones this is without doubt the most enjoyably and luridly pulpy of the Spine Chillers episodes I've seen and benefits immensely from a suitably urgent and dynamic reading from Woodvine.

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Thursday 2 November 2023

The Treasure in the Forest

Originally published in the Pall Mall Budget on 23 August 1894, two greedy English treasure hunters kill a Chinese man in order to steal his map but too late learn the meaning of it's enigmatic symbols and the dead man's grin.

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Wednesday 1 November 2023

The Yellow Cat

Far more familiar to book lovers as the owner of the publishing house that bore his name, Michael Joseph was also the author of several collections of stories about cats. 'The Yellow Cat' first published in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine in June 1924 is the story of a stray cat, a gambler and changing fortunes.

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Monday 30 October 2023

The Mezzotint

James' story, taken from his first collection 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', is of an engraving of a manor house, an engraving that changes each time it's viewed.

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Sunday 29 October 2023

The Death of Grass (Radio Drama)

This BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Christopher's 1956 novel 'The Death of Grass' was broadcast in 2009 in five fifteen minute episodes that tells the story of John Custance, his family and their friends as they race across country to reach his brother's remote farm hoping to find refuge from the deadly global blight that has killed all forms of grasses and plunged the world into famine and genocidal chaos.

Narrated by David Mitchell and with a cast including Darrell Brockis as John, Bruce Alexander as the terrifyingly pragmatic Pirrie and Rebecca Egan as Ann Custance, it's a remarkably faithful adaptation keeping to the same time period so the post war callousness and the 1950s sexual politics of the original have not been updated to align with modern sensibilities. The unrelenting bleakness of Christopher's story means this is not necessarily a fun way to spend an hour but it's certainly an engaging one as this tale of selfishness and survival remains a powerful experience that still raises as many questions now as it did almost 70 years ago.

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Wednesday 25 October 2023

Crow Face, Doll Face

Carly Holmes
Honno

I first became aware of Carly Holmes via a story in another Honno book, 'The Wish Dog and Other Stories' and subsequently via her Tartarus Press collection, 'Figurehead' (recently reissued in paperback by Parthian). My impression of her work is of a writer with a delicate and thoughtful touch for whom the strange, the uncanny or the weird is inextricably linked with, or can be found almost incidentally within, the workaday to the extent that it can be easily missed or miscontrued in potentialy devastating ways as is the case in this, her second novel, where she tells a story of madness and magic and most importantly of family with all it's associated turmoils.

When Annie's marriage breaks down and irreparably fractures the fragile unity of her family she takes flight with her two youngest children, the unnaturally beautiful Kitty (Doll Face) and her dark shadow Leila (Crow Face), two children with a seemingly unbreakable and potentially magical bond. We watch as Annie slides ever deeper into her own broken psyche, tormented by her perceived failures, exacerbated by the lingering guilt associated with an earlier bout of postnatal depression that had blighted her relationship with her elder daughter Elsa, obsessed with what she has lost and increasingly spellbound by her two youngest and her belief in their uncanny natures.

Holmes relates the story of Annie with gentle care teasing out her story and keeping it balanced on a razor's edge with the conflicting concerns of sanity and the supernatural held in a deliciously enigmatic consonance as we are slowly allowed to discover how reliable a narrator Annie actually is and we are never entirely certain as to what parts of her story are fact and what is fantasy, what is madness and what is manipulation and what is selfish and what is selfless.

With this book, particularly coming on the heels of the 'Figurehead' paperback, Holmes has placed herself squarely among the first rank of contemporary writers of the weird. I see a kinship in her work with many of the folks we've championed here on Wyrd Britain such as Rosalie Parker, Andrew Michael Hurley, Lucie McKnight Hardy and Alex Older. She is a writer for whom the strange is as mundane as the mundane is strange and 'Crow Face, Doll Face' beautifully encapsulates that fascinating ambiguity with a story of dreams, delusions, fallibility and frailty that lingers in the imagination.

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Tuesday 24 October 2023

The Tower

Marghanita Laski was an English journalist who was science fiction critic for The Observer in the 1960s, biographer of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling and author, most notably, of the timeslip novella, 'The Victorian Chaise Longue' and the terrifying short story, 'The Tower'.

First published in 1955 in Cynthia Asquith's 'Third Ghost Book' it's the story of Caroline, the young wife of the domineering Neville, who decides to strike out on her own for some solo siteseeing at the end of which, with evening closing in, she spots and decides to climb the 420 steps of a tower stood amidst a ruined village.

Laski's story, one of very few short stories that she produced, has long been a staple of anthologies of supernatural fiction and deservedly so. A deceptively simple seeming tale, beautifully written and with a devastating sting at it's end that floored me when I first read it.

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Saturday 21 October 2023

The Great Albert

'Scorpion Tales' was an ITV anthology series shown in 1978 for one series of six episodes, of which one episode, the third, had a superatural theme.

'Great Albert' tells the story of Matthew Ward (Max Harris) who uses a photocopy of an ancient spell book in an attempt to summon Lucifer to help him stop his antique book dealer father, Peter (Kenneth Gilbert), and contemptuously bored mother, Virginia (Lynn Farleigh), from divorcing which, inevitably, leads to unfortunate consequences.

Written by John Peacock who had, a couple of years earlier, scripted Hammer's 'To The Devil a Daughter' and who would later write 'And the Wall Came Tumbling Down' for 'Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense', it's an entertainingly "Hammer" premise that wouldn't have been out of place in that later series but it takes a tad too long to get going and runs out of time and slightly out of steam in its final act but the cast are strong and there's a pleasingly claustrophobic aura that allows us an insight into Virginia's predicament and the toll it takes on Matthew before the story concludes with an intriguing and ambiguous flourish.

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Wednesday 18 October 2023

A History of Horror

Mark Gatiss' wide ranging and fascinating three part 2010 documentary on the history of horror cinema.

The three episodes, "Frankenstein Goes To Hollywood", "Home Counties Horror" and "The American Scream" take us from the 1920's to the 1970s taking in the likes of Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, George Romero, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper and exploring key movies such as the 1931 Dracula and the 1958 one, Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man, Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist.

There is, perhaps, little new information here for horror devotees but as an introduction and an overview to the genre it's hard to beat and Gatiss is always an engaging host.

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Sunday 15 October 2023

The Bells of Astercote

Mair (Siobhan Brooks) and her brother Peter (Ifor Williams) are new to the village of Charlton Underwood, living in the controversial new housing estate on the edge of the old town. Chasing their dog into the nearby wood one day they meet a local man named Goacher Tranter (John Branwell) and the remains of the even older town of Astercote that had been wiped-out during the black death. Hidden in the ruins and guarded by the innocent Goacher is a chalice, the communion cup from the devastated vilage church, which the locals believe protects them from the return of the plague. However, when the chalice goes missing things deteriorate quickly in the town as a sickness takes hold and the already tense relationship between the working class villagers and the middle class new arrivals threatens to boil over.

Director Marilyn Fox has a track record for television of this type being responsible for, amongst other things, 288 episodes of 'Jackanory", along with adaptations of Edith Nesbit's 'Five Children and It' and C.S. Lewis' 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe' and it's immediately apparent that she has a real eye for the uncanny in a story with Astercote's obvious similarity to M.R. James' 'A Warning to the Curious'. Based on the 1970 children's novel by Penelope Lively it's an enjoyable enough story of fear of change and of the other, timeless themes but presented in a manner that feels really quite dated and, like the novel, there's almost no actual supernatural forces at work here beyond belief, superstition and suspicion but they all cast heady spells.

The cast are, mostly, competent if uninspiring with the two leads being too shrill for my ears and too drama school for my liking and there are far too many suspect Somerset accents on display but the various members of the Tranter family are convincingly rustic without degenerating into bumpkins and Janis Winters is an enjoyably no nonsense district nurse, "Mother, you can't have a touch of the black death!"

'The Bells of Astercote' is certainly not on a par with the classics of supernatural television made for young people but it has it's moments and almost certainly deserves the opportunity to reach a wider audience.

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Friday 13 October 2023

Berlin Sounds Decadent - From Cabaret to Krautrock

I'm possibly stretching my own rules for Wyrd Britain to the very edge of breaking point with this one but personally I'm fascinated by the times and the music covered in this BBC radio documentary and in Berlin of the cold war era in particular and thought there was just enough of a relevance to some of the things I feature on here to justify it's inclusion - click here if you disagree. If you were to search through my music collection I would hazard a guess that at least half, if not more, of the music in there was either made in Germany during the 60s, 70s and 80s or was profoundly influenced by it.

The documentary takes David Bowie's relocation to Berlin as it's focus discussing what drew him to the city and from there looks at some of the astonishing music being made in Germany by the likes of Can, Cluster, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Faust and later Einsturzende Neubauten and others but all the time keeping the history in the context of how these musical mavericks influenced musicians in the UK (and beyond) amongst them Brian Eno, John Foxx and Katharine Blake (who all feature here in some form) that would in many ways define music through the end of the 20th century and well into the 21st.

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Wednesday 11 October 2023

Finn: Origins

Pat Mills (writer)
Tony Skinner (writer)
Jim Elston (artist)
Kevin Wicks (artist)
Liam Sharp (artist)
2000AD

Finn is a cab driver by day, and a witch by night, part of a coven dedicated to protecting humanity from the agents of the old 'Great Ones', the ancient intergalactic beings who separated humanity from their beastly nature, and have maintained control ever since.
These arcane and anarchic adventures from Pat Mills, Tony Skinner, Jim Elston, Kevin Wicks, and Liam Sharp are collected for the first time.

Jumping from the pages of Crisis' 'Third World War' the character of Paul, otherwise known as the eco-warrior Finn, got his own relatively short lived series in 2000AD. Going for a much more fantastical storyline than the near future dystopia of 3WW, here, Finn is the hit-witch for a Cornish coven battling the alien 'Newts' and their human agents, 'The Shining Ones', who run the world as opposed to the 'eco-terrorist' character at war with the corporate state.

This version of Finn is magically endowed and his enemies are intergalactic aliens and super-powered yuppies which for me isn't as interesting as the other incarnation but it's certainly good cosmic pulp fun. Whilst Mills and Skinner have had to tone down the pagan politics and disguise it's ecological agenda for this swap to 2000AD it's definitely still there at the root of the story so it's heart remains in the right place and the artists are perfectly suited to this more fantastical and superheroic iteration so I'll definitely be there for a second volume but superheroes aren't particularly my thing so I'd love to get the third 'Third World War' collection first.

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