5 out of 5

This is one of those ideas that’s so fitting for the floppies that I’m upset I didn’t complain about its non-existence to my non-existent friends and in intended letters I’d never send so that, now that it’s occurred, I could claim credit for the concepts genesis.  Live and learn.  I will now loudly start bemoaning all the things I think should happen, just in case they eventually do.

2000 A.D. is already years ahead of most anthology mags thanks to its mostly unified sci-fi theme and pagecount that allows its weekly entries to sit in a good spot between spacious enough for story-building, but not so much as to encourage padding.  This equates to most issues being fun to read, even if you’re not totally on board with each contained thrill.  “Tharg’s 3rillers” are self-contained tales (in the sense that they don’t use preexisting characters), split into three parts and thus three issues.  They can be hit or miss depending on the creator’s sense of scope, but they’re a good way for the mag to spotlight new talent and to shake-up the format.

Over in the Dredd Meg, they’ve been coming bundled with “mini-trades,” or floppies, which collect scattered odds and ends thrills that either wouldn’t have enough to merit a regular trade, or maybe wouldn’t be worth the cost to produce if so.  For a new-er reader like m’self, it’s a great way to discover randomnness, or get exposure to other writers / artists.

Combine these two concepts – as, after all, the 3rillers have no other home besides 2000 AD – and you get a collection of 4 of such tales as the floppy.

And honestly?  The contents don’t necessarily matter, although they do end up being pretty damn good.  The mag reads like a slightly extended issue of 2000 AD, which I’ve already praised.  All the same: Alec Worley / Michael Downling’s cursed-artifact tale ‘Six Brothers’ is a well-paced spook story; Tom Taylor and Jon Davis-Hunt’s ’15’ a fun application of the “timed” comic – a page per minute of story; and T.C. Eglington and Boo Cook’s ‘Gunheadz’ is a near-genius meta-bit about a comic within a comic (and kudos to the collection’s editor for crediting the cover to the ‘within a comic’ artist).  David Baillie and Inaki Miranda’s ‘The Ghostship Mathematica’ is the only sidestep, suffering from the Too Big Of An Idea problem Baillie’s had on other 2000 AD entries, but it’s still a fun tale overall.  That half of these wouldn’t be recognized as direct sci-fi is part of the fun of the 3rillers (the ability to experiment with the mag’s themes), and it’s cool they stayed true to that in the collection.

Bring on volume 2.