Given that 'Me & Joe Priest' might have been, at best, an enjoyable wish-fulfilment fantasy but at least a highly derivative mashup of seventies post-apocalyptic movies without a single bone of originality in its body, I wasn't looking forward quite as much to 'Metalzoic', the #6 to 'Me & Joe Priest's #5 in the 'DC Graphic Novel' series of non-superhero comic books of 1986. I was still intrigued because it's a Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neil title and I know them from other work.

Most notably, Pat Mills created and edited the long-running British sci-fi comic, '2000 AD', which I read through collations of stories in 'Best of 2000 AD Monthly' not a weekly subscription from my newsagent. For that, I'd already got 'The Eagle'. He wrote a number of early 'Judge Dredd' stories but also co-created many strips himself, especially 'Ro-Busters', 'ABC Warriors', 'Sláine' and 'Nemesis the Warlock', most in collaboration with Kevin O'Neill. They later co-created the satirical superhero comic book 'Marshall Law' for Marvel's Epic Comics line.

While I grew up on many of those characters, I hadn't read 'Metalzoic', even though it did get a serialisation in '2000 AD' after being first published in this edition by DC. It looks precisely like a comic about sentient robots drawn by Kevin O'Neill would always look like but he really didn't hold back with the designs. The conceit is that the Humanic Era of civilisation is over, because a barrage of cosmic rays destroyed most life forms and the magnetic field cutting out wiped out pretty much everything else. After the Necromic Era came the Robocene Era, with reproducing robots dominating the landscape, and finally the Metalzoic Era, where they've evolved into an array of animal antecedents. This allowed O'Neill to go hog wild with his robot designs!

In fact, it's easy to suggest that Pat Mills's story, as wild and enjoyable as it is, really can't hold a candle to O'Neill's art. What's more, I think he knew it, because he allowed O'Neill to have an abundance of sections that unfold entirely without dialogue. There are robots having sex, or at least I think that's what they're doing. There are robots fighting battles. What the robots do in some of the other pages, I hesitate to say, but it's all magnetic stuff and I absolutely adore the imagination that he threw at this stuff.

Never mind the lead characters, Armageddon and Amok, who I'll get to soon enough, my focus tended to be on background characters who slip into a scene to attack one or other of the leads and usually come a cropper pretty quickly. There are polarisaurs, huge robot sharks evolved in time from submarines, who use periscopes and fire torpedoes, before breaking through ice to take down their prey. There are loco-constrictors, giant robot snakes evolved from trains which live in rail tunnels and creep out over bridges to surround and crush their targets.

My favourite isn't one species but two, working in symbiosis. Mirrodillos, that name describing mirrored armadillos, are relatively small but bright and shiny critters that roll up to intended victims and dazzle them with wild reflections. Then their partners, helicocks or chicken robots hovering above, fire laser beams down onto those mirrored armadillo shells, wiping out most lifeforms in the immediate vicinity. With that done, the microdillos hoover up body parts and helicocks dive down to join in the feasting.

Of course, those are all animal robots. There are also plant robots in the form of traffids, with the name clearly borrowed from John Wyndham's triffids but skewed to reflect that they prey through traps. In fact, they are traps, one traffid successfully masquerading as a whole human building into which our heroes venture, with a human character they acquired along the way in gleeful tow, only to find that they're now inside the plant and it's secreting acid to digest them before they can leave. Yes, there are still humans around but there aren't very many of them and they're far from dominant in the Metalzoic Era.

But these are transitory species that wander in for us to marvel at and then wander off or die at the hands of the leads. Armageddon is one of the mekaka, an ape robot spiked with circular saws that swings through the vines like Tarzan. He's an arrogant and contrary cuss too, and he wants nothing more than to seek out and destroy Amok, the god-beast. He's the pack leader of a long herd of wheeldebeests or giant mammoth robots that trundle across the landscape on vast caterpillar treads. While Amok is the largest and most dominant robot we see, we quickly realise that Armageddon has to hurry to defeat him because a younger wheeldebeest, Attila by name, plans to take over his herd.

While I've mostly just introduced characters and species there, I've also pretty much outlined the plot. There's the mekaka over here and there are the wheeldebeests over there. We know that by the end of the story, both are going to be in the same place and there's going to be one heck of a battle and only one of these two leads is going to leave it on top.

Now, that's a little unfair to Pat Mills because there are other things going on here and, while I'm not going to spoil them, they do have value. While Armageddon is only seeking Amok, Amok is seeking something else that only becomes clear at the very end of the book. However, it also seems that Mills may have made a noticeable goof. We're told that the Earth's magnetic field cut out in the 24th Century, back in the Necromic Era, but Armageddon has a power-up process that involves invoking Inti, the robot god who lives at the heart of the planet, and he channels what I can only assume is the Earth's magnetic field to "pump iron". Maybe that's not what it is and maybe the magnetic field came back. After all, the Metalzoic is two Eras on.

All I know is that this book is batshit insane in all the best ways and I had a blast with it, even if I'm not convinced there's much of actual substance here. Mills and O'Neill always gravitated to robots and the more chains and saws and spikes they have, the better. Evolving these creatures into imaginative animal forms feels like the most fun they had all year. Who needs a story after that? Just roll with it like a wheeldebeast. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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