Friday 23 May 2014

Meg 201 - Gold 001 Supplement



This may confuse a few of you... Why am I reviewing Meg 201 again - I've already done it! Well... my Meg 201 wasn't complete - I was missing the Gold 001 re-print supplement that came with it. I finally got round to buying one off eBay, and have just finished reading it - so I can finish my full review at last!

The supplement was a reprint of Fiends Of The Eastern Front - a wonderful early serial by Gerry Finlay-Day and drawn by the legend that is Rey Carlos Ezquerra... There's a good introduction provided by Dan Abnett, writer of many stories for 2000AD, the Meg and many other publications. He fondly recalls... well... not liking it to begin with, actually! But he got into it and has used the story as inspiration for one of his own, also drawn by Rey Carlos.

Anyway, to the comic serial, and it's really rather good. A British Colonel and a German Inspector discover an underground tomb with a skeleton clutching a diary and some mysterious human-like figures drawn on the wall. The Inspector tells the story of Hans Schmitt, a soldier on the Russian Front in the Second World War whose unit encounter some mysterious fighters from Rumania (yes, that really is the spelling!). These fighters are deadly to their Russian enemy, but are never seen in the daylight and like to transport coffins around in their supply truck...

It's an excellent read. I generally like Finlay-Day's stories and with Rey Carlos' art, it's a real winner for me... It's not very 2000AD, no sci-fi elements, but there are some good tensions and a cracking adventure romp.

You can buy the collected story in a trade paperback which also collects later stories that were written. Partly why I wanted this supplement now is because the Meg is about to print a sequel (that's in Meg 245, folks, not the current one!) and I wanted to read the original story beforehand. Of course, I wanted to finally finish the Meg 201 review - so mission accomplished...

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