Review by Joe Gordon
The Stainless Steel Rat Deluxe Edition
Written by Kelvin Gosnell, adapted from the books by Harry Harrison, art by Carlos Ezquerra
Publisher: Rebellion
Ah, Slippery Jim diGriz, aka The Stainless Steel Rat, the Galaxy’s Greatest Thief! I will confess up front that I am quite likely highly biased in matter of the rustorezista ŝtalo (Esperanto is the lingua franca of this far future). As a young geek, knee high to a gronk, I first encountered James Bolivar diGriz in these comics adaptations in early 2000AD by Kevin Gosnell and the mighty Carlos Ezquerra. I was only about 11 or 12 and hadn’t come across the books yet – this situation was soon remedied now I was aware of them, and I worked my way through all the existing Stainless Steel Rat novels (the first story appeared back in 1961), and the ones which came later, as well as pretty much anything else by Harry Harrison I could find (away from the Rat I particularly recommend The Technicolor Time Machine – a Hollywood mogul finances a time machine to use for cheap film location shooting! – and Make Room, Make Room, which was filmed as classic dystopian movie Soylent Green).
So yes, I’m afraid I am pretty biased – these comics were my first encounter with this character, and lead me to the books, which I still adore to this day. I went back and re-read some during the first Lockdown in 2020, a form of comfort reading, I suppose, and also because I knew they would make me smile, and by grud we all needed something to make us smile at that point. Actually, I still point readers in my bookshop to the Rat to this day (they also make suitable reading for older YA readers if you’re looking for more reading for your teens who are starting to look outside the YA shelves for more new books). Jim is the greatest crook in the galaxy, in a distant future where most of the world of a galactic union have been largely at peace for centuries, with crime also rare (other than very low level crime, easily and quickly dealt with).
With great skill and intelligence Jim was bored by the sedate lifestyle of these world and set out to become a criminal mastermind, but Jim is a crook with a conscience – he steals from big companies, banks, or nasty people who deserve it, and he has a strict moral code: he will not kill. In fact, in one action-packed scene Jim exits the safety of an armoured vehicle to move an injured enemy soldier who had fallen close to the wheels, to ensure he wasn’t further harmed, risking his own life in the process. He also doesn’t like idiot authority figures and he hates bullies, which also leads him into altruistic adventures (laced with some larceny too, naturally).
The 2000AD adaptations have been out of print for far too long, and this new Deluxe version brings together the three series the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic covered back in the early 1980s (a long ago time, an age which seems mythical now, but it was real), “The Stainless Steel Rat” (Progs 104 to 151 originally), “The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World” (Progs 166 to 177), and “The Stainless Steel Rat For President” (Progs 393 to 404), and yes, sigh, before you ask, I do wish they’d had the chance to adapt some of the other books too (also, why the drokk has nobody adapted the Rat into a TV series yet??).
The first tale, as you’d expect, introduces Jim and his world(s), and does so right out the gate: we see him as paunchy James Bolivar, a businessman, about to be busted by a police robot for the theft of gold bullion. Most would be anxious about such a scenario, but Jim plans for everything and is ready – he takes impish delight in waiting for the robot to say he is being arrest on “the charge” of various counts before triggering the explosive charge dropping the roof onto the police droid – before kicking open a hidden escape panel and skedaddling, ditching his fake paunch and the rest of his businessman disguise as he goes. This isn’t enough though, Jim then works out a plan to re-steal ‘his’ gold from the police evidence collection team, leading to more fun.
Unfortunately, this also leads him into the reason the normally incompetent local planet police stumbled onto his clever operation – he is being hunted by the almost mythical Special Corps, a shadowy agency of the galactic government many don’t even believe exist. They want Jim, but not just to stop his intergalactic crime spree – this is classic “set a thief to catch a thief” storytelling. The head of the Corps is Inskipp, in his youth known as Inskipp the Uncatchable, a thief of such daring he even managed to loot a space liner in mid-flight and escape. Jim’s childhood hero.
While the Corps has all sorts of agents, its own version of Q Branch (headed by Professor Coypu, who becomes more important in later tales, especially “Saves The World”) and gadgets and resources galore, not all agents are suited for every task. Sometimes you need the square peg, the one who doesn’t play by the team rules, the outsider, the one you can drop on an enemy infested world by himself and know he will not only survive but come up with a cunning plan to save the day while he does it. Long, long before Xander Cage would be recruited in the XXX films for similar reasons, we had Slippery Jim, and while working for the Corps gives him access to all sorts of widescreen adventures, he also can’t help but employ some of his old thieving chicanery along the way too (well, a Rat has to plan ahead for his retirement fund eventually, right?).
These tales see him set off on his first Corps mission, when he discovers someone is secretly trying to recreate one of the almost unstoppable space battleships that were outlawed millennia ago (putting a stop to intergalactic warfare and ushering in the centuries of peace in which Jim grew up), which in turn introduces him to Angelina – as clever and slippery as he is, but with a huge difference: she is a psychopath, and enjoys killing for the sake of it. And she’s not happy about Jim butting into her plans…
Spoiler warning… Of course, if you know the books, you know later Angelina doesn’t just become a major character, she becomes Jim’s wife and mother of his two children – James and Bolivar – after the Corps uses advanced psycho surgery to adjust the part of her brain which made her psychopathic, but leaving her other skills intact, making her a perfect partner and foil for Jim. When they are teamed up in the later stories she is no shrinking violet – in fact, sometimes it is Angelina who has to save Jim. And woe betide the foolish men who see her and think she is just a pretty face… There are little shades of the Steed and Mrs Peel relationship to their adventures, which of course just makes them all the more enjoyable.
“Saves the World” sees a time war designed to take out the Corps, the attack launched from the distant past to eliminate this stumbling block to domination plans before it even knows an attack is happening. As his comrades vanish in front of his eyes – including his beloved wife and just born baby boys – Jim reluctantly agrees to a madcap, almost suicidal mission taking him thousands of years into the past to find out who launched the attack and to stop it (this brings him to the attention of the raving megalomanic simply known as He). We get the delights of Jim in 20th century America, 1800s London (during the Napoleonic wars) and the far distant future, before the Earth ends. As with all time travel stories, parts of it will hurt your head if you try to think through the cause and effect too much!
“President”, which was quite a recent novel at the time of the comics adaptation – sees Jim and Angelina begged to help a struggling resistance movement on what looks like a paradise planet, but which is really under the thumb of a geriatric dictator, a planetary banana republic, essentially. Taking on the disguise of Sir Hector Harapo, a local minor nobleman, Jim, Angelina and his now grown up boys James and Bolivar team up with the local resistance to engineer a challenge to the vile President for life. Said president uses every trick, from ballot rigging, voter suppression and straightforward violence and torture to enforce the rule he’s had for decades, but he’s never been up against The Stainless Steel Rat before.
The original novels are all pretty slim books – Harrison is very economical, introducing characters and scenarios quickly and efficiently while cracking along with the storytelling – and here they are, as you might expect, even more pared down to fit into the serialised comics format, so these are fairly fast read. But that doesn’t mean bad! My god, these are still a lot of fun (much like the original books which inspired them), crackling with humour, a real sense of fun (something both comics and prose versions share), wonderfully daft, OTT schemes and plots, lots of action and daring-do, from car chases to space battles, and all of this is brought to visual life by the genius who was Carlos Ezquerra.
Can we just pause for a second there? Dammit, I miss Ezquerra. I’m pretty sure most downthetubes readers do, too. And getting to revisit his early 1980s artwork here, all cleaned up in this sparkling new edition, is an utter delight. Carlos depicts heroes, villains, clever gadgetry, starships and everything in between, and clearly he’s having a lot of fun doing it. And yes, Jim does look a bit like James Coburn. Not to mention Major Eazy (and much later, Cursed Earth Koburn)… Okay, fair enough, we know Carlos liked using that imagery! But you know what? It works here, so I’m happy with it. His Angelina is beautifully depicted, Carlos managing to convey both an immensely attractive woman, but also one with a steel core and a propensity to shoot anyone who gets on her nerves (quite how Jim survives this marriage I am not sure, must be love).
So in summary, as well as the welcome nostalgia rush for both Harry Harrison’s great creation and the golden age of 2000AD, this collection also gives you three cracking adventures featuring crime heists, space battles, fighting oppression, romance, time travel, car and aircraft chases, terrific one-liners and dammit, just a huge amount of fun, all blasting along at a great pace. And all depicted by the pens of Carlos Ezquerra in that magnificent, iconic style of his.
I am a contented reader.
Joe Gordon
• The Stainless Steel Rat Deluxe Edition is published by 2000AD / Rebellion on 18th August 2021 | ISBN: 9781781088999 | Buy it from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)
• The 2000AD exclusive web shop hardback edition is now out of stock
Joe has been a bookseller since the early 1990s, with a special love for comics, graphic novels and science fiction. He has written for The Alien Online, created & edited the Forbidden Planet Blog and chaired numerous events for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He’s more or less house-trained.
Categories: 2000AD, British Comics, British Comics - Collections, Comics, downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News, Features, Reviews