Durham Red: The Scarlet Cantos

A god is resurrected. A girl is brought back to the land of the living. But not is all as it seems, and all gets more complicated. It's Durham Red-the hot 2000 AD title (which I read after the classic Asylum).

Durham Red comes from the pages of another 2000 AD classic, Strontium Dog. Abnett is quite the writer for Durham Red, with a big splash in the Warhammer 40k novel and comic world, he's truly worth watching. My only warning is that some of his comic work can be laborious, like the recent Damnation Crusade.

But Durham Red has the artwork of a classic, and the oddly complex plot of an Asimov or Dan Simmons science fiction novel. That's good. We are on a different future world, captured immediately by artist Mark Harrison. The shear detail for the artwork on Durham Red, really for the whole series, is incredible, powerful, and impossible to get bored with. The art is almost the hook itself in the very beginning of The Scarlet Cantos. It has a realism to it, computer aided shots of men and worlds, perhaps the best I've seen 2000 AD ever put out. And I can could on and on-

It's not every day you reanimate your god, the story tells us. A saint is brought back to the world in the future, by a hopeful man. Durham Red,a vampire, is brought back to a world which sees her as a hero and a god. It all sounds to so epic and serious, but once Red is brought back to life there is some colorful storytelling added.

Bringing someone back to life after millennia of sleep is an interesting concept, but using a vampire as the central character, and making her a god in the eyes of an entire race? That's new to me.

These stories are quite original, action packed and bloody, amusing and fun. It's more of an adventure than a hard science fiction story. Space is there. We have an anti-hero. But it's still a comic.

My only complaint is the last story-the only standalone really-is just too "Out There." A future self of Durham Red who wants to kill the original Durham. Why? She hates life. Still, the cool vampire Durham Red is perfect for the writing of Dan Abnett and the artwork of Mark Harrison. Together, this creative team created a classic with one small character from the 2000 AD mythos.