#Blogtober 18 - Halloween Bloggery - Scream, Misty, and The Thirteenth Floor!

Hey kids, COMICS!!!  Yeah, going a bit different today, talking about the funny books.  Now Rebellion, the current publishers of 2000 A.D. have been buying up the rights to a few older British titles in recent years, for republication after a long time in limbo.  Two major titles included in there are Misty and Scream.  Misty was an interesting one in that it was intended for girls, but had excellent stories of terror and the supernatural; full points to them for recognising that yes, people other than teenage boys liked horror way back in the seventies!  Scream was another anthology, from the mid-eighties, which had a more general mix of horror themed strips.  Rebellion have been releasing some collected trade editions of quite a few of the strips from these, but the last few years they've gone a step further, and produced some special edition comics for Halloween featuring all new stories!

If you can get to a good comic shop with back issue bins, I do implore you to get the 2017 and 2018 specials, they are great fun!  (Both are available digitally too, but still support your local comic shop!)  They make for great reintroductions to the characters and these strips, especially for how well some of them are modernised.  Rebellion do seem to be using these to test the waters, to see if any of these are worth having a full regular comeback.  Well, given what they've just released as this year's special, they have made a choice for at least one of these stories; The Thirteenth Floor.  This comic, part of Scream back in the day, had a really fun premise; there's a new block of flats, Maxwell Towers, that's automated and controlled by an A.I. called Max.  Max is good to his residents, he genuinely wants the best for them... so when people do somehow threaten them, Max is ready to defend his charges.  He has a secret weapon, a virtual world, his Thirteenth Floor, under his complete control, which he can use to put those he thinks of as the residents' enemies through hell, scare them into line.  The strip ran for a good few years, and it had the right sort of satirical element that made 2000 A.D. back in the day such fun (unsurprising since it had Judge Dredd head honcho John Wagner writing), as those trapped in there are the likes of cruel debt collectors, or bureaucrats threatening to have the residents chucked out. Recently, a trade paperback came out of the first half of the series, and if you like classic comics, I say pick it up, it's got a tonne of imagination and some nice little morality tales.

The last few specials had new Thirteenth Floor strips, which feature Max coming online in an abandoned Maxwell Towers, after many years dormant, and he now has a sidekick in the form of a teenaged boy, Sam Bowers.  This year, the special is a whole 48 pages about the Thirteenth Floor, mostly in one long story, Home Sweet Home, carrying on this plot.  I just picked it up today, and it's a tonne of fun, with it carrying on a simple idea that turned up in the previous specials, and using it to full effect; have one artist do the scenes in the real world, and others in the fantasy realms Max is able to project.  As each one is tailor made to different victims, it works beautifully; there's even one done in a Beano/Vizz style which works an absolute treat.  It also does a good job of balancing the mad monsters in Max's world, with some genuinely effective character based drama and horror too, keeping the original's satirical edge.  If this is Rebellion trying to see if there'd be interest in a full new regular series for the Thirteenth Floor, mission accomplished, because I would buy up more of this in a heartbeat; Max is such a unique character, an A.I. with a personality we can understand and a pretty unusual M.O. that doesn't get old.  So, want some good reading this Halloween?  Go check out The Thirteenth Floor, in this issue, the previous Scream/Misty specials, and the trade.  Oh, and whilst checking out the Scream reprints, also check out The Dracula File from Rebellion too.  It's a great modern (well, 1984) take on Dracula, that's very traditional, but makes him a truly terrifying force to be reckoned with, and giving the story a nice Cold War edge too!