Review by Ian Keogh

The Helltrekkers is a strange publication for 2023, although it’s from the classic John Wagner and Alan Grant writing team in 1984, which is peak period for them. However, even in 1984 it was dated, a throwback to the type of adventure strips that featured regularly in 2000AD’s earliest years, yet from which the comic had moved on. Perhaps the attraction is that other than forming the bulk of Mega-Collection volume Cursed Earth Carnage, it’s not been issued as a graphic novel.

By 1984 Wagner and Grant had built a considerable world around Judge Dredd, and The Helltrekkers is an early example of their realising all the effort they’d put in enabled other stories set there without Dredd featuring. The Cursed Earth had been established as a massive wasteland with the dangers only limited by the writers’ imaginations. To that Wagner and Grant added the Western staple of settlers travelling to an intended better life across hostile terrain, but instead of horses and wagons, the travellers are equipped with state of the art Radwagons. For all the good it does them.

This doesn’t read like a story plotted with anything in mind other than continuing from week to week, created to the template of solving one shock ending over five pages leading up to the next. It’s written professionally enough to include a variety of incompatible personalities guaranteeing internal conflict in addition to the dangers faced, but over most of the strip it’s clear the greatest enjoyment for Wagner and Grant is in contriving inventive methods to kill the cast. Place your bets at the start as to who’ll survive until the end.

The deaths are illustrated in surprisingly grisly fashion by Horacio Lalia, an artist who packs the pages with action and detail. It fulfils the brief of exciting young boys, but there’s no great clarity. Still, that doesn’t excuse the single line biography of the Argentinian whose career spanned sixty years, during which The Helltrekkers was a brief stopover.

As the end approaches, Wagner and Grant supply greater creativity, but it doesn’t rescue this from being anything other than a career footnote.