Bad Company II: The Krool Heart, Ep 7, p6, 2000AD #582

"All gods of all races created light out of darkness..."

This page features my favourite moment ever in a comic, and is, as such one of my most treasured possessions. I've owned this for several years - it was obtained for me by Rufus Dayglo, for which I am very grateful - but I've never put it up on CAF before. In fact, when I first got hold of it, I effectively gave up collecting for a while. After all, I had my holy grail. (Eventually, I got over that and decided that just 'cos you own the grail doesn't mean you've no use for other cups.)

So why has it taken me so long to post this up here? Honestly, I didn't know what to write that would do it justice. How do you explain why your favourite comic page is your favourite page? I'm not sure I even know. That the art by Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy is stunning, macabre, characterful and surreal in equal measures is part of it - but there are many weird, amazing Bad Company pages out there, just as objectively good as this one. That it goes beyond the art - that the marriage of words and pictures is remarkable, that Milligan's prose is as burned into my brain as Ewins / McCarthy's image is another significant factor. That the page features the demise of my favourite companyman, De Racine, has to be important too - for me, this was an unforgettable 2000AD moment, as the narcissistic elite undergoes a sudden heroic turn, saves the day, and receives a grim demise as his reward. Maybe the page is a comment on human existence, depicting as it does life twinned with death, victory twinned with defeat, arrogance twinned with ignorance, religion twinned with grand guignol, and the ridiculous twinned with the profound.

But I think the real reason I love this page so much is because it features a satanic-looking alien monster chopping the head off a super-cool cyborg with a giant pair of scissors! I mean, what more could you possibly ask for? That's 2000AD in a nutshell, folks. That's comics.

And I love comics.