Review by Frank Plowright

Rebellion are currently owners of a fair portion of British comics history. Their hardcover and paperback reissues are well curated and welcome, but there remain strips that don’t fit character-based collections, plenty more than were included in the 2024 Treasury. However, the 2025 edition doesn’t match the quality of its predecessor despite featuring Mike McMahon, Major Eazy and three new strips starring once beloved characters.

Robot Archie as reinterpreted by Paul Grist and Simon Williams opens the collection. Grist sets up Archie battling an old opponent, the shape-changing Sludge, but now considered in the light of planetary pollution. It’s a clever idea, but doesn’t sustain an ordinary encounter. Simon Furman and Mike Collins’ revival of Kelly’s Eye is also professional without greatly thrilling, leaving Alex Worley and Anna Morozova’s Black Beth starring in the most entertaining of the new strips. In keeping with so many of the features here, it features a sting in the tail.

There’s some thought to the sequencing of strips, and as before, comedies are mixed with period dramas and fantasy. Ian Rimmer and Mike Western’s ‘New Neighbours’ owes a lot to The Addams Family, but the laugh out loud highlight is Leo Baxendale’s Eagle-Eye Doomsday School, a totally manic spread busy beyond belief.

Art from the late Ian Kennedy feature twice. At eighteen pages the gritty ‘Stryker’ is the longest inclusion, Tom Tully having a no nonsense footballer investigate how another professional was framed for cheating just before his death. ‘Adam Eterno’ sees Kennedy’s art coloured, one of several stories set in the age of chivalry toward the end. The immortal Adam uncovers treachery at Camelot, but it’s relatively ordinary, as is the mystical Flame of the Forest (Donne Avenell and Massimo Belardinelli). Steve Moore and Eric Bradbury supply the best of the medieval thrillers right at the end with Bradbury’s three pages packed with character and detail.

Other than the new strips, the art is generally better than the scripts provided, with many writers lost to time, but John Smith and John Burns buck that trend. Their collaboration is the best combination with the ridiculous Doctor Sin raging against immorality as a blob beast terrorises a rural community. Burns, however, increases the joke by drawing in his realistic style, with Doctor Sin himself a cloaked anachronism amid some great looking pages.

That only leaves ‘Gorilla Island’, a lurid war story about the apes taking over serialised before the Planet of the Apes film, although not before the French novel on which it was based. One can only imagine what artists in the post-2000AD era might have made of the concept, but Frank Langford is technically good with old fashioned pages playing down the sensationalism rather than maximising it.

This is a weaker selection than in 2024, lacking as many star names and the art only rarely overcoming what in the 1960s might have been original ideas, but which now seem very dated.

As before, only the digital version has been released to the wider trade. For a physical copy you’ll have to head for the 2000AD shop.