Bad Company
The thing I remember most about the late Brett Ewins' and Jim McCarthy's art on Bad Company - one of the great 2000AD series - is its sense of rot: baroque soldiers fighting over a decaying planet, details (of scars, rivets, floral growths, bullet sprays) running tumorously rampant over each panel. The visual invention reminded me of Massimo Belardinelli's carnivalesque aliens and fat shapeships; the textural work of Bryan Talbot's sweaty, grimy, thoroughly embodied futures. But there was a frenzy to Ewins' and McCarthy's Bad Company different from either of those - the maddened dance of a planet fighting itself to death.
Bad Company is the last great story of 2000AD's Golden Age, its newsprint paper, square pages, black-and-white first decade. Fittingly, it's a story with a sickly attraction to decadence, the final days of things, a future war gone on so long that every medical boundary has been crossed and the soldiers have all become monsters. It's also a very non-naturalistic story - a commentary on 'future war' stories and their tropes - and Ewins uses a bunch of devices to tinker with the reader's perceptions of the story, constantly drawing attention to the artistic process with blurred or grainy panels and a zoom-in technique involving the same panel in progressive degrees of close-up, freezing a moment in comics time for emphasis. The most memorable example is also the story's biggest spoiler - a three panel zoom into the eye of the character Mad Tommy as he takes a sledgehammer to the comic's premise. It's one of my favourite ever 2000AD cliffhangers, good enough that I refuse to reproduce it.
