While I was reading through some Judge Dredd reprints recently, I happened upon an old Alan Moore story titled Skizz.




The strip tells the tale of an alien translator named Zhcchz who gets stranded on the outskirts of Birmingham when his star-cruiser crashes there. The frightened alien is befriended by teenage schoolgirl Roxy, who – with help from her friends Loz, the biker, and Cornelius, an unemployed pipefitter – has to protect the alien from evil government forces who pursue the creature and his human friends in order to capture and study him for military purposes. The title "Skizz" is how Roxy mispronounces Zhcchz's name, by the way. The strip is clearly riffing on Steven Spielberg's E.T., which had been a colossal box office hit the year before, and Moore even has his human characters make mention of the similarities between what is happening to them and the events of the film.

Skizz completely passed me by at the time – and I was reading 2000AD pretty regularly back in 1983. Perhaps I saw it and it just didn't appeal enough to 10-year-old me to bother reading it? Anyway, it feels very much like it was written for children (which, of course, it was), but that said, it is a fairly realistic alien-lost-on-Earth story and Roxy and Cornelius are both fairly well developed characters. There's also a surprisingly heavy political sub-text aimed squarely at Margaret Thatcher and her then-current Conservative government, specifically regarding the mass unemployment that Britain saw in the early '80s. The Midlands are presented as a brutal and culturally bereft post-industrial cesspool and the officials and government agents are either depicted as utterly weak or completely evil.

Jim Baikie's artwork is very much in the tradition of other British comics of the period and recalls the work of contemporaries like Dave Gibbons, Steve Dillon, and Alan Davis. Baikie gives Skizz himself an interesting design, which is both suitably otherworldly and comfortingly familiar, rendering him simultaneously cute and slightly terrifying.

This isn't top drawer Alan Moore, by any means, but it is a tightly plotted and well drawn little adventure strip. As the story nears its conclusion, I feared the worst for our little lost alien – this is Alan Moore, after all! – but without wanting to give away any spoilers, the ending is unexpectedly upbeat and heart-warming, though Moore also pulls no punches when dealing out death and disaster on his way to the conclusion. Overall, this is an affecting and gripping little comic adventure, and one that will linger in my memory for longer than I might've expected upon starting it.

It’s always interesting (and sometimes frustrating) when different artists work on a multi-part story.

Here’s the start of a Dredd story, illustrated by Bill Ward:






With all due respect to Bill Ward, I am glad Brian Bolland did the next part:

I do wish Dredd would get a hobby, though. I mean, I’m sure most judges don’t sit in their apartments in full uniform - while reading books about the law:

I honestly don’t think he’s reading Dostoevsky’s book. Dredd doesn’t have hobbies, I suspect that that’s the name of a Mega-City One training manual or something.

I can’t prove that, of course. I just don’t see Dredd as someone who reads novels.

A day in the life of Slam_Bradley