2000AD : The Ultimate Collection – re-revisited

Review by Luke Williams

4 years ago your scribe wrote an overview of what was then the 120 issue series of 2000AD The Ultimate Collection. By then, the series had been running for 4 years, the article was largely pretty positive, with some reservations, notably production quality and editorial decisions on content.

The Galaxy’s Greatest has had its fair share of classic stories, but whether it could fill 120 volumes without resorting to some of the misfires that it has published in its near 50 year life seemed unlikely.

Nevertheless, by 2023, and the last time we checked in on it, that 120 issues had expanded to 140.

Then it grew to 180

And finally topped out at 200.

Was it worth it? That’s a good question.

The advantage of the extension is that they were able to bring in some of the latter day 2000AD strips, that are classics. This would include the hard sci fi “The Out”, the masterful War of The Worlds extension “Scarlet Traces” and other surprises that had seemingly slipped through the net. When I revisited the Ultimate Collection for ComicScene in 2023, naively thinking that it was at the halfway point, I commented that “Summer Magic” / Luke Kirby and “Button Man” had not been scheduled. Kirby is not one of the best series in 2000AD, but certainly more worthy than some of the other material from the fag end of the run of the collection, more on that later.

Irritatingly, some of these volumes only collect part of a run of stories, like a sampler to the longer series.  “Out” and “Brink”, the sci fi / conspiracy / creeping horror strip from Dan Abnett (now a vital fixture in the Prog) only has part of the story, a criticism I levelled at other collections of strips like “Stickleback”. You begin to ask yourself:

“Instead of spending £2000 over 8 years on a collection approximately half of which I don’t really want to read, why didn’t I just buy the stand-alone collections? “

Firstly, the physical quality control of the volumes could be a bit iffy. Inside covers with the wrong characters, pages occasionally in the wrong order and pages stuck together, just for starters. To Hachette’s credit they were very accommodating and sent me replacement copies for the books with pages that I couldn’t split apart. Sadly, where pages were printed in the wrong order, you were stuck with them. Like the problems in the most recent “Nemesis” and “Slaine” definitive editions (poor reproduction and split double page spreads) – someone needs to check these things before they go out. These days that sort of error is easily avoidable and shows a lack of care, disappointing if you are investing so much in collecting the entire run.

So, content. Highlights for the last part of the run were “Scarlet Traces”, one volume of the ongoing “Kingmaker”,  excellent hardboiled noir horror “Hope”, the underrated “Brass Sun”, raucous swords and sorcery epic “Feral and Foe”, bonkers deep space actioner “Proteus Vex” and the very last “Slaine” strip “Dragon Tamer”,  beautifully drawn by Leonardo Manco, but now annoyingly out of sequence with the rest of the collected strips. Away from their true home of the Mega Collection Tharg threw in space western “Lawless” and Wagner Dredd and “Machine Law” continuing the “Mechanismo” storyline, both excellent works.

Of the mid period material, highlights include “Button Man”, personal favourite “Armoured Gideon”, the trippy and almost impenetrable “Revere”, Eco war story “Finn”, “Middenface” strips from the Meg and the underrated space medical drama “Medivac 318” (M.A.S.H in space without the laughs). Digging back to the early days Tharg collects the strangely overlooked “Harry Twenty on the High Rock” and bizarre old testament riffing classic “Return to Armageddon”.

What about the dregs? Controversially, I’m going to throw “M.A.C.H. 1” in there, only because it hasn’t aged well and it’s weird to have it at the arse end of the collection, but it’s still better than “Mean Arena”.   There were some bizarre choices, did anyone really demand Tornado refugee“The Mind of Wolfie Smith”?  Post “War Machine” Friday Rogue starts poorly under Fleischer and the excellent, but otherwise completely unsuited to the subject matter, Ron Smith on art. Friday improves under script bot Steve White and then jumps the genetically modified shark once someone in the Nerve Centre has the bright idea of mashing the two different versions of the GI together. The ill-judged reboot of “Robohunter” that was “Samantha Slade” makes an appearance, which has the advantage of beautiful Ian Gibson art in the early episodes until he abruptly jumps ship, his last work for the Prog’. But perhaps the most egregious example of barrel scraping is the reprint of the new “Harlem Heroes”, which when it was running in the Prog seemed to go on forever (and ever) like a persistent mouth ulcer. I agreed to pay £33 as part of my subscription for 3 volumes of that dross, its only redeeming feature being the sublime art pairing of Steve Dillon and Kevin Walker.

So, what are we left with? 200 volumes of story which are more accessible than rifling through my progs in the attic, weighing one and a half times a human adult male, taking up over 3m of shelf space which you haven’t got, to get the full effect of the spine art of which you’ve probably already got the stories in other equally convenient, but sans the lovely spine image, formats.  You do of course have the nice editorial bits at the back, with interesting creator interviews, background material etc. These are a nice bonus and have some interesting insights, but they aren’t indispensable. Like the Mega Collection before it, the Ultimate Collection needed to be properly filleted, get rid of the fatty, less tasty bits, the gristle. There is some merit in seeing it as a representation of the Prog’ warts and all, but it’s an expensive way of doing that.

So, Ultimate? As in hopefully the last? Yes, but definitely not a best of. Value for money it is not, if, like me, you are of the completist bent you couldn’t pick up the odd volume here or there, as you’d need all the others too, I envy other Squaxx’s resolve.

In retrospect, and if I were more rational about my 2000AD collecting (I’m still trying to resist that £400 Jock designed Dredd statue), I’d have stuck with the individual collections.

The draw of having a set of hardback volumes of 2000AD and Judge Dredd Megazine stories I already have (in some cases multiple times over) was too strong to resist. And yes, for all my criticism I’d probably do it again, and there are enough Squaxx like me for publishing it to make financial sense to Tharg. Please, don’t be like me, just say no.