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A.B.C. Warriors The Mek Files #1
A.B.C. Warriors The Mek Files 01
ATOMIC BACTERIAL CHEMICAL!
WHETHER THEY ARE POLICING THE LAWLESS FRONTIER ON MARS OR SAVING THE GALAXY FROM ARTIFICIAL BLACK HOLES, THE A.B.C. WARRIORS ALWAYS SUCCEED!Featuring a roster of the deadliest robots ever assembled, including war-weary leader Hammerstein, super-cool assassin Joe Pineapples, master manipulator Blackblood, the hulking Mongrol and his goo-tastic friend The Mess, disciple of Khaos Deadlock and the psychotic battle tank Mek-Quake, the Warriors go where humans fear to tread! Find out who they are and how they became the most formidable fighting
force in the galaxy by reading this fantastic collection containing their earliest adventures.
Written and co-created by 2000 AD mastermind Pat Mills (Marshal Law), the A.B.C. Warriors features art from Britain’s finest talent, including Kevin O’Neill (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) Mick McMahon (Sláine), Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), Carlos Ezquerra (Judge Dredd), Brendan McCarthy (Skin) and Simon Bisley (Lobo).
304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 14, 2014
18 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Pat Mills
848 books229 followersPat Mills, born in 1949 and nicknamed 'the godfather of British comics', is a comics writer and editor who, along with John Wagner, revitalised British boys comics in the 1970s, and has remained a leading light in British comics ever since.
His comics are notable for their violence and anti-authoritarianism. He is best known for creating 2000 AD and playing a major part in the development of Judge Dredd.
His comics are notable for their violence and anti-authoritarianism. He is best known for creating 2000 AD and playing a major part in the development of Judge Dredd.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 14, 2021
I liked the first storyline about Volgan War and Mars, but it went into strange and plainly unfitting places all too soon.
July 26, 2020
The stories in A.B.C. Warriors: The Mek Files 01 (Rebellion, tpb, 308pp) are all written by Pat Mills, with artwork from a superstar cast of artists that includes Kevin O’Neill (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), Brendan McCarthy, Mick McMahon, Carlos Ezquerra, Brett Ewins, and Simon Bisley (the only one I hadn’t heard of before is the mysterious S.M.S.). With a line-up like that you’d expect the book to be much better than it is. Despite the impressive line up of talent, this book is just OK.
The first batch of stories, drawn in a relatively straightforward and readable style, date from 2000AD’s early days – issues 119 to 139, from 1979. Here we see a group of eccentric robots joining Sergeant Hammer-stein for a special mission: Happy Shrapnel, Joe Pineapples, Deadlock (Grand Wizard of the Knights Martial), immense, vengeful Mongrol, reprogrammed Volgan war criminal General Blackblood, and molten monster The Mess. It’s gleefully violent: you wouldn’t give it to a child nowadays without asking a parent first. Once the team are assembled, they are packed off to tame Mars, the devil planet! The premise sets them up for a long run, but after dealing with cyboons, mutants, the red death, robot tyrannosaurs, and big George with five brains (none of which work properly), it wraps up very suddenly with a declaration that “we’ve straightened out this side of Mars now”. I enjoyed all of these stories, but they aren't all that memorable.
The strip returned to 2000AD in 1988, nine years and four hundred issues later, the long gap perhaps explained by the problems that had “plagued the strip from beginning to end” (according to Kevin O’Neill, speaking in a reprint volume from 1983): “Group stories are like breaking rocks for writer and artist alike. Pat Mills broke the biggest rocks and the splinters flew off in all directions.”
The new setting – the future Earth known as Termight – suggests that in the interval the warriors have been involved in the adventures of Nemesis the Warlock. Joined by Ro-Jaws, Hammer-stein’s old friend from the Ro-Busters, and then Terri, a human who thinks of herself as a robot, the team battles foes including The Monad, the quintessence of human evil from the end of the world, who causes havoc after escaping into the time wastes. The art in this half of the book by Simon Bisley and S.M.S. is admirable in many ways – it’s challenging, energetic and expressive – but it’s difficult to tell what is going on, especially when events take place in one tunnel after another, with backgrounds often entirely white or entirely black. It’s trying very hard to be grown up and significant, and though the stories are still being written by Pat Mills, these aren’t half as much fun. I would probably pass on volume 02 if it took the same approach.
But even though the two parts are so different that it’s like reading a book that’s half Curt Swan, half recent Frank Miller, I liked it overall. Its best ideas are brilliant – poor old George staggering across the surface of Mars while his hands and feet argue with his head!
However, I won't be back to read more. I prefer Mills work on Nemesis the Warlock and Slaine much better.
The first batch of stories, drawn in a relatively straightforward and readable style, date from 2000AD’s early days – issues 119 to 139, from 1979. Here we see a group of eccentric robots joining Sergeant Hammer-stein for a special mission: Happy Shrapnel, Joe Pineapples, Deadlock (Grand Wizard of the Knights Martial), immense, vengeful Mongrol, reprogrammed Volgan war criminal General Blackblood, and molten monster The Mess. It’s gleefully violent: you wouldn’t give it to a child nowadays without asking a parent first. Once the team are assembled, they are packed off to tame Mars, the devil planet! The premise sets them up for a long run, but after dealing with cyboons, mutants, the red death, robot tyrannosaurs, and big George with five brains (none of which work properly), it wraps up very suddenly with a declaration that “we’ve straightened out this side of Mars now”. I enjoyed all of these stories, but they aren't all that memorable.
The strip returned to 2000AD in 1988, nine years and four hundred issues later, the long gap perhaps explained by the problems that had “plagued the strip from beginning to end” (according to Kevin O’Neill, speaking in a reprint volume from 1983): “Group stories are like breaking rocks for writer and artist alike. Pat Mills broke the biggest rocks and the splinters flew off in all directions.”
The new setting – the future Earth known as Termight – suggests that in the interval the warriors have been involved in the adventures of Nemesis the Warlock. Joined by Ro-Jaws, Hammer-stein’s old friend from the Ro-Busters, and then Terri, a human who thinks of herself as a robot, the team battles foes including The Monad, the quintessence of human evil from the end of the world, who causes havoc after escaping into the time wastes. The art in this half of the book by Simon Bisley and S.M.S. is admirable in many ways – it’s challenging, energetic and expressive – but it’s difficult to tell what is going on, especially when events take place in one tunnel after another, with backgrounds often entirely white or entirely black. It’s trying very hard to be grown up and significant, and though the stories are still being written by Pat Mills, these aren’t half as much fun. I would probably pass on volume 02 if it took the same approach.
But even though the two parts are so different that it’s like reading a book that’s half Curt Swan, half recent Frank Miller, I liked it overall. Its best ideas are brilliant – poor old George staggering across the surface of Mars while his hands and feet argue with his head!
However, I won't be back to read more. I prefer Mills work on Nemesis the Warlock and Slaine much better.
June 20, 2023
A bumper collection of 2000AD's battling robots, gathering their initial triumphant run and their eventual, much-hyped return after an 8-year gap. Both sequences are defining stories from two very different phases of 2000AD's early years and of Pat Mills' writing for the magazine. The Mars storyline is a compact example of what's great about early 2000AD. The "Black Hole Saga" is a snapshot of a comic struggling to evolve past that early greatness and become something different.
If pushed, I'd reluctantly concede that the first ABC Warriors run isn't *actually* the best 2000AD story of all time. Its structural flaws are, after all, pretty glaring - the set-up takes up half the story and the strip ends with the team's job half done. In a weird way its directionlessness saves it - the ending ruins nothing as there's no overarching plot to rush to a conclusion (and I'm aware Mills went back and filled in the other bits of the Martian mission later).
But I still think these 20-ish episodes are what I'd give to someone who had never read early 2000AD to say "here's what it was". If they can see the greatness in "The Mek-Nificent Seven" then a deep dive into Tharg's vaults is warranted. The strip is an exercise in pure sensation, six page chunks of joyful, violent inventiveness, Mills and his artists starting with the idea of future war between robots and pushing the basic concept further and further each episode. Each new robot is more bizarre or depraved than the last one; each new threat once the squad are despatched to Mars is more pulpy or absurd.
The strip simmers with Mills' political anger - the ABC Warriors terrorise corporations and summarily execute rich criminals the law won't touch - but even that's subordinated to the basic urge to give a reader something exciting on every single page, and "exciting" generally means "violent to the point of mania". The writing is taut, furiously economical, a tabloid writer's approach to narration and dialogue with the central cast collections of wrestler's tics: the eccentric old-timer, the dumb brute, the mystery man, the heel.
Of course it helps that the art is by a murderer's row of early 2000AD talent. Mike McMahon does some of his most glorious work on the strip, the chunky physicality of his art and the power of his action sequences perfectly fitted to the battered but hulking core characters. But there's also wonderful turns from Kevin O'Neill, Brett Ewins, early Brendan McCarthy, Carlos Ezquerra doing dinosaurs, and Dave Gibbons with his unforgettable robot cows.
The strip was deservedly popular but doing a team story in weekly six-page episodes is a big ask, and reading it with adult eyes it feels like having put the team together, Mills ran out quickly of things to do with them. He brought them back years later as supporting characters in his Nemesis The Warlock story, before spinning them out into the second big sequence in this collection, "The Black Hole Saga".
By this point 2000AD was a changing magazine. The thrill-hungry tweens who devoured the initial Warriors run were no longer the target audience - the comic wanted teenage readers who liked guns and robots but also dug heavy metal and hot babes and wanted more sophistication with their violence. Well, a little more sophistication.
So "The Black Hole Saga" has a plot - or a coherent mission, at least. It has interior monologues for half the cast which mostly consist of them telling the reader how much they hate all the other characters. It has all the violence of the original but even more cynicism and sadism. It has lashings of misogyny. It casts Hammerstein as a patriotic, militaristic dupe, when his first action of the previous story is him killing his officer. And in place of regular shots of inventiveness it has immense lore dumps about the backstory of the Nemesis universe. It is, in other words, very much a comic written for a 15-year old boy rather than a 10-year old boy, and a lot worse for it. (I was 15 at the time and thought it was amazing, so it worked.)
The story is, though, a lot better structured than the original run, and while Mills' writing is starting to stiffen up into his more didactic, cranky later style it's not there yet so "The Black Hole Saga" is very readable. But the main reason it excited 2000AD readers so much back in 1988 is the art - split between two newcomers, S.M.S. and Simon Bisley. Both were extremely raw talents - you feel like SMS is learning to draw faces on the job, and Bisley's storytelling is often non-existent. But the strip had the kind of impact the original wave of Image artists would have a couple of years later - Bisley's work especially set the tone for a decade-plus of 2000AD art.
You can see why. There's an extraordinary energy to his stuff, an Akira-via-Kerrang delight in twisted wires, muscle and metal which suits the strip perfectly, and he has little manga-esque touches (hilarious reaction shots, odd goings on at the sides of panels) which are great. But - and this was the curse of his era of 2000AD - he's fundamentally an illustrator more than a comics artist, and all the badass poses in the world don't help when you can't work out what's actually going on. The much less celebrated SMS is just as interesting to me now - his style is more European inspired, and the nicest-looking pages in the saga are his big Moebius style splashes of the city powered by the black hole.
I knew I still loved the first stories here; I was expecting the Black Hole Saga to have aged a little better. With hindsight 2000AD's embarrassing 90s adolescence was a necessary phase, but once you're past the initial shock of the cool with Bisley's work, a lot of his pages are a real sod to read. He improved his sequential art before dropping it completely; his imitators hardly even got that far.
If pushed, I'd reluctantly concede that the first ABC Warriors run isn't *actually* the best 2000AD story of all time. Its structural flaws are, after all, pretty glaring - the set-up takes up half the story and the strip ends with the team's job half done. In a weird way its directionlessness saves it - the ending ruins nothing as there's no overarching plot to rush to a conclusion (and I'm aware Mills went back and filled in the other bits of the Martian mission later).
But I still think these 20-ish episodes are what I'd give to someone who had never read early 2000AD to say "here's what it was". If they can see the greatness in "The Mek-Nificent Seven" then a deep dive into Tharg's vaults is warranted. The strip is an exercise in pure sensation, six page chunks of joyful, violent inventiveness, Mills and his artists starting with the idea of future war between robots and pushing the basic concept further and further each episode. Each new robot is more bizarre or depraved than the last one; each new threat once the squad are despatched to Mars is more pulpy or absurd.
The strip simmers with Mills' political anger - the ABC Warriors terrorise corporations and summarily execute rich criminals the law won't touch - but even that's subordinated to the basic urge to give a reader something exciting on every single page, and "exciting" generally means "violent to the point of mania". The writing is taut, furiously economical, a tabloid writer's approach to narration and dialogue with the central cast collections of wrestler's tics: the eccentric old-timer, the dumb brute, the mystery man, the heel.
Of course it helps that the art is by a murderer's row of early 2000AD talent. Mike McMahon does some of his most glorious work on the strip, the chunky physicality of his art and the power of his action sequences perfectly fitted to the battered but hulking core characters. But there's also wonderful turns from Kevin O'Neill, Brett Ewins, early Brendan McCarthy, Carlos Ezquerra doing dinosaurs, and Dave Gibbons with his unforgettable robot cows.
The strip was deservedly popular but doing a team story in weekly six-page episodes is a big ask, and reading it with adult eyes it feels like having put the team together, Mills ran out quickly of things to do with them. He brought them back years later as supporting characters in his Nemesis The Warlock story, before spinning them out into the second big sequence in this collection, "The Black Hole Saga".
By this point 2000AD was a changing magazine. The thrill-hungry tweens who devoured the initial Warriors run were no longer the target audience - the comic wanted teenage readers who liked guns and robots but also dug heavy metal and hot babes and wanted more sophistication with their violence. Well, a little more sophistication.
So "The Black Hole Saga" has a plot - or a coherent mission, at least. It has interior monologues for half the cast which mostly consist of them telling the reader how much they hate all the other characters. It has all the violence of the original but even more cynicism and sadism. It has lashings of misogyny. It casts Hammerstein as a patriotic, militaristic dupe, when his first action of the previous story is him killing his officer. And in place of regular shots of inventiveness it has immense lore dumps about the backstory of the Nemesis universe. It is, in other words, very much a comic written for a 15-year old boy rather than a 10-year old boy, and a lot worse for it. (I was 15 at the time and thought it was amazing, so it worked.)
The story is, though, a lot better structured than the original run, and while Mills' writing is starting to stiffen up into his more didactic, cranky later style it's not there yet so "The Black Hole Saga" is very readable. But the main reason it excited 2000AD readers so much back in 1988 is the art - split between two newcomers, S.M.S. and Simon Bisley. Both were extremely raw talents - you feel like SMS is learning to draw faces on the job, and Bisley's storytelling is often non-existent. But the strip had the kind of impact the original wave of Image artists would have a couple of years later - Bisley's work especially set the tone for a decade-plus of 2000AD art.
You can see why. There's an extraordinary energy to his stuff, an Akira-via-Kerrang delight in twisted wires, muscle and metal which suits the strip perfectly, and he has little manga-esque touches (hilarious reaction shots, odd goings on at the sides of panels) which are great. But - and this was the curse of his era of 2000AD - he's fundamentally an illustrator more than a comics artist, and all the badass poses in the world don't help when you can't work out what's actually going on. The much less celebrated SMS is just as interesting to me now - his style is more European inspired, and the nicest-looking pages in the saga are his big Moebius style splashes of the city powered by the black hole.
I knew I still loved the first stories here; I was expecting the Black Hole Saga to have aged a little better. With hindsight 2000AD's embarrassing 90s adolescence was a necessary phase, but once you're past the initial shock of the cool with Bisley's work, a lot of his pages are a real sod to read. He improved his sequential art before dropping it completely; his imitators hardly even got that far.
July 13, 2020
VOLGANAYAAA... VOLGANAYAAA...!
In the grim darkness of the future there is only war. Robots vs robots war, to be precise. Fascist Volgans are trying to conquer the, uh, good guys, I guess. Millions of robots, controlled remotely by the human officers, fight the endless fight. Well, not that endless, the Volgans are defeated (or maybe they're just close to being defeated) pretty soon, but no matter. Our protagonist robots will find what to do. Once the dark grimness is established, a mysterious human officer calls upon Hammerstein (one of the good robots and the main protagonist) to make a party of seven for a mysterious task. A solid third of the book is dedicated to that and these are the first ABC Warriors stories from 1979. Out of the whole party I especially like Deadlock, Grand Wizard of the Order of Knights Martial, the tarot-reading knight-mystic robot (yes, you've read that correctly).
Once the party is ready, the quest giver reveals his plan. Since the war is effectively over (I'm still not sure if that's the case, even after rechecking), the robot party will be sent to Mars to get the evil corporations back to heel that war over it, strangling the good people's way of living with their nasty soya bean robo-cows. This is the second third of the book, stories on Mars, and they are all also from 1979. So far the continuity flows well and it's easy to read.
However, the last third is where it gets tricky. It's all a single big story called The Black Hole. While it undeniably looks the best, because half of the art is done by none other than Simon Bisley himself and the other half by an enigmatic artist only known as SMS (checking on Google, it seems that he or she never revealed his real name), whose art at times looks even better in black and white than Bisley's, the result is a mess due to multiple reasons.
The first one is that this story is from 1988. Stuff has happened in nine years, lots of stuff, and even the Mars saga ended pretty abruptly with the robots only winning over one of the corporations. Now the party composition is somewhat different and the old tensions are growing. The team is actually split in two near the end.
The second reason is that this story is set in an entirely different segment of 2000AD universe. In just two pages they briefly establish the Nemesis the Warlock/Torquemada thing with the Termight galactic empire. "And so Nemesis sent the ABC Warriors to repair the damage... through the Time Wastes, a maze of overflow pipes from the black hole no human dared enter for fear of strange creatures lurking within..." It all sounds very much like that at least some of that will be explained in Nemesis the Warlock series, which I've already started reading. Hopefully.
Overall, the book is split in three distinct parts, where there first two read very well but maybe don't look so good and are not so interesting, and the third one, that looks amazing but reads pretty badly. If not for the SMS/Bisley art, I would probably give it only two stars, I do not find the soldier robot adventures particularly captivating.
In the grim darkness of the future there is only war. Robots vs robots war, to be precise. Fascist Volgans are trying to conquer the, uh, good guys, I guess. Millions of robots, controlled remotely by the human officers, fight the endless fight. Well, not that endless, the Volgans are defeated (or maybe they're just close to being defeated) pretty soon, but no matter. Our protagonist robots will find what to do. Once the dark grimness is established, a mysterious human officer calls upon Hammerstein (one of the good robots and the main protagonist) to make a party of seven for a mysterious task. A solid third of the book is dedicated to that and these are the first ABC Warriors stories from 1979. Out of the whole party I especially like Deadlock, Grand Wizard of the Order of Knights Martial, the tarot-reading knight-mystic robot (yes, you've read that correctly).
Once the party is ready, the quest giver reveals his plan. Since the war is effectively over (I'm still not sure if that's the case, even after rechecking), the robot party will be sent to Mars to get the evil corporations back to heel that war over it, strangling the good people's way of living with their nasty soya bean robo-cows. This is the second third of the book, stories on Mars, and they are all also from 1979. So far the continuity flows well and it's easy to read.
However, the last third is where it gets tricky. It's all a single big story called The Black Hole. While it undeniably looks the best, because half of the art is done by none other than Simon Bisley himself and the other half by an enigmatic artist only known as SMS (checking on Google, it seems that he or she never revealed his real name), whose art at times looks even better in black and white than Bisley's, the result is a mess due to multiple reasons.
The first one is that this story is from 1988. Stuff has happened in nine years, lots of stuff, and even the Mars saga ended pretty abruptly with the robots only winning over one of the corporations. Now the party composition is somewhat different and the old tensions are growing. The team is actually split in two near the end.
The second reason is that this story is set in an entirely different segment of 2000AD universe. In just two pages they briefly establish the Nemesis the Warlock/Torquemada thing with the Termight galactic empire. "And so Nemesis sent the ABC Warriors to repair the damage... through the Time Wastes, a maze of overflow pipes from the black hole no human dared enter for fear of strange creatures lurking within..." It all sounds very much like that at least some of that will be explained in Nemesis the Warlock series, which I've already started reading. Hopefully.
Overall, the book is split in three distinct parts, where there first two read very well but maybe don't look so good and are not so interesting, and the third one, that looks amazing but reads pretty badly. If not for the SMS/Bisley art, I would probably give it only two stars, I do not find the soldier robot adventures particularly captivating.
April 19, 2024
Don't Start Here.
Two blocks of stories nearly a decade apart - the first block the original stories that are pretty unenticing to any new readers (or old, tbh.)
Then, after an absence of their own strip for 9 years you're dropped into 'The Black Hole' - there's a change in format, different characters, and you really need to have read the first chunk of Nemesis the Warlock to know what's going on.
BUT the art by Simon Bisley for The Black Hole is fantastic.
Two blocks of stories nearly a decade apart - the first block the original stories that are pretty unenticing to any new readers (or old, tbh.)
Then, after an absence of their own strip for 9 years you're dropped into 'The Black Hole' - there's a change in format, different characters, and you really need to have read the first chunk of Nemesis the Warlock to know what's going on.
BUT the art by Simon Bisley for The Black Hole is fantastic.
February 27, 2025
If it wasn't for the awful "black hole" storyline and terrible artwork, I'd have given this 5 out of 5.
The early ABC Warriors and the mission to Mars forms part of my childhood memories when there was an innocence to comics, and then writers tried too hard and artists became messy and amateurish.
So read the first half and ignore the second is my advise. Spread the word!
The early ABC Warriors and the mission to Mars forms part of my childhood memories when there was an innocence to comics, and then writers tried too hard and artists became messy and amateurish.
So read the first half and ignore the second is my advise. Spread the word!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 30, 2021
Good start bad finish.
It stared out with some great stories, characters, and ideas for the time it was written. However it got less sensible and more cliched as the story went on.
It stared out with some great stories, characters, and ideas for the time it was written. However it got less sensible and more cliched as the story went on.
December 18, 2024
Early 2000AD is early 2000AD
September 30, 2025
When Dave Gibbons is a contender for the worst art in the book, you know it's one of the most visually stunning comics ever
August 16, 2014
Not nearly as good as I remember it being when I was a kid.
July 21, 2015
Brilliant storylines, great artwork, the series rapidly develops into a rich and satisfying story without losing the simple joy of robots battling.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews