The Complete Bad Company
Publisher: Rebellion
Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim MCarthy
Issue 500 of 2000AD was a real celebration, a glossy paper cover covered in headshots of the comic’s most famous and popular characters by the best British comic artists of the time. It was an interesting issue, which would see the last time Alan Moore and Ian Gibson would collaborate on Halo Jones, but it was also a starting point, for Bad Company.
Bad Company was a science fictional war story, which lasted for twenty issues. Written by Peter Milligan with art by Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy, this story somehow took a step forward, portraying as it did the real craziness of war.
Bad Company tells the story of Danny Franks, who starts as a young naïve soldier fighting on the planet Ararat, a key planet in the fight between humanity and the Krool. Along with other new recruits, he is soon in peril. A notorious band of soldiers, Bad Company, rescues him from being exterminated by the enemy Krool. The Krool are just that, horrendously cruel, and even lose battles because they prefer to torture humans and focus on this rather than defence.
Danny, along with the only few people not obliterated in battle, two of whom are his buddies, gets assimilated into this company commanded by the ubiquitous leader Kano.
Kano leads this group of freaks and misfits who fight the war without any compassion, without any respect for authority and with an understanding of what’s really going on, how the war is already lost, the pointlessness of it. Yet they continue fighting behind enemy lines, with Kano’s only mission being to kill Krool.
The story follows Danny as he goes from recruit to a fully-fledged member of Bad Company. Initially, the company subject him and the FNGs to tests, unbeknownst to them, and when they pass, they join the company and the fighting against the Krool. The hobbies of the Krool include vivisection, mutilation, and torture, and the sounds of human screams are like some sort of melody to them. Their bodies are distorted and grotesque.
The madness of men is well explored, from company member Mad Tommy Churchill, who thinks he is fighting some ancient earth war, to the march across the Golgotha plains, where hallucinogenic gases emanated from the planet instil nightmares and insanity.
Danny keeps a diary, which is interesting, as it gives a strange familiarity to Charlie’s War, where Charlie would write home, the letter or diary forming part of the informative narrative, and we see him changing without his realisation as he questions and wonders who Kano really is, what has caused him to be such a cruel killing machine and eventually how he has become just like Kano, and where one loses humanity and what exactly is humanity in the cruel world of war.
The story feels like it owes a lot to the gritty Vietnam movies of the late seventies and early eighties, as well as giving a huge nod to Darkies Mob from Battle, where a renegade captain fighting in Burma is also diarised about by one of his soldiers. There is an edgy punk element to the characters in Bad Company. They were very stylised, and Kano was immediately iconic.
I remember the story being hugely popular at the time, achieving an interesting following. It was dirtier and more gruesome than Rogue Trooper and The VCs, and the young solider that was Danny Franks obviously hit a chord with the youth of 1986.
There followed a second ‘book’ which sees Danny, Mad Tommy and Mac form a new Bad Company, as they are joined by new strange characters. They pursue a monster who is terrorizing ‘Ghetto’ planets, and also they seek Kano. This all leads to Bad Company confronting the Krool heart. This story at times gets even more twisted than the first, and had a very satisfying end.
Also in this collection there is a selection of single stories from an annual and issue 601 and then another series, Bad Company Kano. This last and final series sees Kano and some of the original members reunite to fight on the Krool home world, while Kano also fights against the past. It is not as strong as the original, I felt at the time and now more so. I wonder if the first two books were sufficient.
But with Bad Company, Peter Milligan penned a great tale. The first twenty episodes are classic mid eighties brilliance that 2000AD seemed to have a flair at producing. The graphic novel is worth having just for this, but then, it is the Complete Bad Company, a few pages at the back of the comic that showed how utterly different this comic could be.
John Wagner, Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra produced a four page pilot for the proposed Judge Dredd Fortnightly. This is in many ways a very similar, yet very different story, with Kano, an ex Judge who had served time on the Titan Penal Colony, leading BAD Company standing for Battalion Assault Deployment, fighting against a more humanoid looking Nurd, with Colonial Troopers on a colony planet of Mega City one. It looks very different, or rather, it looks like classic Ezquerra, which is a long way from the artwork and strangeness of Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy.
Despite the requirement for every six pages to have some sort of conclusion, and be light enough to be enjoyed as individual episodes, the collection overall does not jar or lose pace due to this. It’s classic science fiction with good questions about what is humanity and how one can desensitise in a war zone, what it is to be mad, what it is to be brutalised and brutal.
Ewins’ and McCarthy’s black and white artwork always has just the right feel. The characters’ refined and well-portrayed facial expressions tell much of the story and their depiction of the jungle planet, the Krool, and Bad Company themselves is crucial to Milligan’s story telling. The reactions and moments of madness, the Krool’s bizarre eyes, the warped moments on the Golgotha plains, all rely on the unusual yet in these books delightful penmanship of this team.
Overall I enjoyed this graphic novel a lot, allowing it to take me back somewhat, and just for the first two books, and the pilot, it is well worth reading.
8/10
