The Last Warrior 2000

[Suk Harian]

Itis one of the vagaries of an artistic calling that a person's entire career can come to be defined by a few key works, often created in their 20s or 30s, which for whatever reason somehow resonated with their audience. This has certainly been true of Garry Leach, who passed away in March this year. His early work on Marvelman with Alan Moore in 1982 remains the strip he is best remembered for, particularly outside the UK. This is perhaps not entirely surprising however, because few artists can have had such a varied, obscure and at times frustrating career as Garry. When I was compiling my Masters of British Comic Art book a few years ago Garry was the first person I contacted, hoping to get high resolution scans of his artwork. In typical fashion he was the last person to send anything in, fully 18 months later. I had mentioned to him that my principal reason for writing the book was to shine a light on the many great British talents who deserved to be better known, and that he was the person I was primarily thinking of. He simply would not believe me, no matter how much I tried to convince him, and felt I must be joking, which speaks volumes for his self-effacing personality. I wanted him to take his rightful place as one of the greats of British comics, alongside Bellamy, Embleton, Bolland, Burns and McMahon, whether or not he felt he deserved to be there.

The following year was largely spent working for 2000 AD with a pair of solo Judge Dredd strips, another Future Shocks and a M.A.C.H. 1 strip for the 1979 Sci-Fi Special. Even at this early stage, though, he was already finding work outside comics creating adverts, illustrations and posters, something he would pursue throughout his career. In December, his first episode of a new 2000 AD series, The V.C.s, saw print in Prog 141, a space marines series loosely inspired by the Vietnam war which had been designed by Mick McMahon. Garry alternated with Cam Kennedy on the lengthy series, drawing 9 episodes over 8 months. It was to be his longest involvement in a strip as a penciller and firmly established him as a major force in 2000 AD. Garry had been one of the last of the first generation of 2000 AD artists to join the comic, and the last to make an impression on the readership beyond just being an inker. The V.C.s allowed him to finesse his artwork with action-packed storytelling and more focused, controlled inking. It was also notable, however, that Cam Kennedy was drawing twice as many episodes, evidence of just how slow Garry was becoming; this was to be the only regular series he was ever given at the comic. Other British jobs that year included his interpretations of DC characters for Superheroes magazine and the Wonder Woman Annual, alongside a cover for that year's Lion Holiday Special, a last gasp of IPCs traditional weekly comics that 2000 AD was throwing aside.

However, three years after Garry's last Warrior strip, British fans were at last able to enjoy his full art work again when he returned to 2000 AD with one of his finest Judge Dredd strips: "The Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman" in Prog 492, published in late 1986. This was quickly followed by two more classics: "The Comeback" in Prog 513, starring a thinly disguised Michael Jackson; and "Ten Years On", in Prog 520, all of which established Garry as one of the definitive Dredd artists of his era, on par with Brian Bolland at his best. "The 50 Foot Woman" strip in particular was immensely inspirational to the new generation of 2000 AD artists just coming in to the comic as the original creators moved on. I know, I was one of them.

One enjoyable side-line for artists can be the growing number of private commissions for fans, which allows even the slowest creator to really express themselves - Garry was no exception. These commissions typically fell into 3 categories: Marvelman; pretty girls; and classic Marvel and DC Characters, all of which he excelled at. Indeed, some of his commissions were even more polished and accomplished than his best comics work. His ability to mimic vintage Golden Age artists like Dick Sprang and Curt Swan was extraordinary. But Garry increasingly seemed to withdraw from visibility, and while I was putting my Masters of British Comic Art book together, I was often asked about Garry. For some he had become an almost mythical figure, with admirers wondering what he was doing, or even if he was still alive. Visitors to his favorite London comic shops could often see him chatting with friends, but he attended fewer and fewer conventions, and the only mainstream comic work in the last ten years of his life was the aforementioned Miracleman cover and an obscure incentive strip in a crowdfunded graphic novel project, The Liberty Brigade. In fact, in the four decades after Warrior closed down, Garry had only drawn thirteen comics, and few of those were more than 6 pages long. He remained active away from traditional comics, however, particularly through working with his friend and admirer Dave Elliott. Some of his last work appeared in a series of non-fiction graphic novels from Zuiker Press, edited by Elliott with Garry providing inks: Click and Mend (both published 2018) were followed by Imperfect and Colorblind (in 2019), written by young people for their peers.

Denying an enemy access to a particular piece of air, land or sea is a strategy as old as warfare but the term entered the popular military consciousness in the late 1990s and the early 2000s as a shorthand for the modern threat the U.S. faces as precision weapons proliferate to potential adversaries, Bryan Clark with the Center for Budgetary and Strategic Assessments told USNI News on Monday.

Over the last fifteen years, the Department of Defense spent more than $24 billion buying a mix of capabilities to defeat guided missile threats to U.S. and partner naval forces and land installations. Despite DoD's urgency, these investments have not resulted in air and missile defenses with sufficient capacity to counter large salvos of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and other precision-guided munitions (PGMs) that can now be launched by America's enemies.

CSBA's historical analysis of air-to-air combat, detailed in the 2015 report titled Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority by Dr. John Stillion, assessed how advances in sensor, weapons, and communication technologies have changed air combat.

Lots of politicians lose elections, but few get a chance to showa truer self in the act of losing. It was not until the fiveweeks after Election Day that Al Gore was able to prove he wasindeed what he had declared himself to be in his DemocraticConvention speech: his own man.

For the first time since he began his slog for the presidency,Gore wasn't trying to convince people to like him; he was tryingto persuade them he was right. And he wasn't trying to win theirvotes; he was claiming the votes he believed he had already won.So Gore finally lived up to his own billing: the candidate who isnot afraid to choose "the hard right over the easy wrong," thefighter who doesn't shrink in the ring. The hard, joylessendeavor of winning votes had been "like crawling over brokenglass," in the words of an aide. It seemed the least that fateowed him at the end was, if not a blessed victory, then a quick,clean defeat. But in the past five weeks, "the situation, thesignificance, the stakes all brought out the best in him," saysRon Klain, who helped lead the legal effort in Florida. Gorefinally was running the campaign his way.

That meant the flaws and weaknesses of the effort were Gore's aswell. For all his tenacity, Gore also flailed, fearful of closingany option as he gobbled up information and explored all hispossibilities. He indulged his fascination with complexity andwent in many directions at once. In retrospect, he might havebeen better off simply calling for a statewide recount by hand,as some of his strategists recommended in the first days afterthe election; instead, he picked a handful of reliably Democraticcounties in which to make his stand. He might have moved morequickly to the contest phase of the election; instead, he usedvast firepower on the early recounts that preceded Secretary ofState Katherine Harris' certification. What Gore created was "aformless, shapeless thing," concedes an adviser. "You have togive structure to a situation like this."

And consistency as well. But just as it had been difficult topredict during his presidential campaign which Gore you might seeon any given morning, his argument for winning Florida wasprotean. He praised the hardworking Palm Beach canvassers one dayand sued them the next. He wanted to count every vote, butcountenanced his supporters' efforts to get thousands thrown out.He vowed to honor voter intent, a goal that lost some of itsnobility as the nation saw how many kinds of guesswork that wouldtake. So uneven was Gore's footing in the public relations warthat one often quoted adviser made a practice of instantlydeleting the daily talking points the campaign would send him bye-mail.

But it would have been difficult for even the most agilepolitician to wage a war in such unfamiliar territory, especiallyon so many fronts: waging an uphill battle with the legal system,closing the ranks of a Democratic Party whose support for him hadalways been tenuous and quelling the perception that George W.Bush had won the election--one thing Gore's advisers blame on thetelevision networks' erroneous declaration of Bush's win onelection night. Just as difficult, Gore strategist Carter Eskewsays, were "the odds of fighting a system that has a perhapsunderstandable desire for finality and conclusion."

Yet Gore was in fuller command than he had ever been, drawing hiscircle in the dining room of the Naval Observatory tighter aroundhim. By the end, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher andcampaign chairman Bill Daley seemed to weary of the war for whichthey had been drafted. But Gore's family stayed there as italways had, maybe even more, maybe too much. "Up there, Karenna'svote counts the same as Warren Christopher's," an angrystrategist grumbled about Gore's eldest child and most dedicatedwarrior. Though Karenna was teary-eyed at her father's partyafter the concession speech, an attendee recalls her joking"Count me in!" when talk turned to organizing an effort to defeatJeb Bush in the 2002 Florida gubernatorial race. Her father mayhave sounded conciliatory, "but I'm not there yet," she said.

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