Here’s a weird book, collecting stories published in 1992 and 1993 by a companion magazine to 2000AD, the British anthology home to Judge Dredd. Created by John Smith and Sean Phillips, who also created the series New Statesmen (quite gay-friendly too), Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood is the story of the eponymous character Devlin Waugh, a paranormal investigator for the Vatican—but a future Vatican, set in the Dredd world.
As often with 2000AD series, it’s quite violent, in a way almost no American superhero comic is. It’s not optimistic and moral, and the title character is in no way a “hero”. But he’s extremely interesting. As Smith described him, he’s “Noel Coward as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger”. Or if you prefer, he’s a steroid freak, an occultist with a big gun, and he’s a flaming queen, obsessed with decadent beauty and boys. The wonderful thing is the way the rather grisly story (the first one is that of a submarine jail invaded by vampires, and it goes rather badly for Waugh) is blended with Waugh’s detachement, ennui and very camp humor (or, what if La Cage Aux Folles had been mixed with The Terminator?). Don’t expect any gay sex (or any other kind of sex, for that matter), but Wildian banter aplenty.
Art is by three artists, with Sean Phillips doing most of it. It’s painted, as with a lot of 2000AD series, and looks extremely different from most American comics, in style as well as in ambiance.
All that makes for a very entertaining (and thick!) book. I do look forward to reading the second collection, Red Tide, which has just been published.
You can find those books, published by DC/2000AD, in all comic stores, and they’re available in bookstores. Or you can order them online at Amazon, for example.
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