Review by Frank Plowright
There’s initially no great continuity to Rogue Trooper’s wartime experiences as written by Gerry Finley-Day. You only have to know he’s a genetically engineered soldier who carries the personality chips of his comrades around with him as he searches for the general who sold them all out. With that knowledge readers can pick up this volume without having the first.
The big difference is that Dave Gibbons, responsible for Rogue’s look, drew most of Book One, and his swansong here is a single two-part story, although he’d later return to write the character in The War Machine. Good though it is, it’s apparent that Colin Wilson’s detail-heavy style isn’t suitable for weekly deadlines, so although he draws around half the collection extremely nicely, his work is separated by other artists who aren’t as polished. Mike Dorey and Eric Bradbury are veterans who can tell a story, but don’t seem greatly sympathetic to the material.
Right at the end, though, we have the arrival of Cam Kennedy. The two-parter isn’t his first work on Rogue, which appears in Book Three due to it being chapters of Finley-Day’s first extended story, but it’s evidence that Kennedy’s work on Rogue Trooper remains under-rated.
As for the stories, Finley-Day continues to supply largely formulaic battles. Strip away the futuristic technology and the threat of a sniper or enemy genetic infantrymen could easily have been scripts written for World War II activity. Others are slightly more imaginative, but the lesser artists strip back the wonder. The dialogue continues to be clunky, but it’s noticeable that computer chips Bagman, Gunnar and Helm are given larger roles, and Finley-Day’s gradually expanding the stories beyond two parts. That’s not necessarily a bonus as it leads to contrived cliffhangers to rank alongside Finley-Day’s other disappointing flaw of a threat built up, but which never manifests. There’s another case of malfunctioning technology here.
The imagination is slightly stretched for the best story in which there are concerns about Bagman’s reliability after being shot. Brett Ewins draws the eccentric results well over the first two chapters, but while Bradbury on the third is technically a better artist, there’s a lack of dynamism.
Despite this material being available in several other formats – see Tales of Nu-Earth 01 or The Complete Collection 1 – there is an attraction to these 1980s Titan collections. They’re album sized allowing for larger reproduction of the art, which is on crisp white paper, and they come with original covers, in this case from Kennedy.
