As part of a publicity stunt in 1993 control of 2000AD was handed over to young Turks Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith for a couple of months, leading to the so-called Summer Offensive which begat sub-Thompson drugs bore Really & Truly, gory retread Slaughterbowl and nihilistic actioner Maniac 5. The jewel though was Big Dave, detailing the adventures of the titular yob, Manchester's hardest man. A hilarious and OTT spoof of tabloid attitudes laced with boisterous, aggressive narration taking swipes at everything going, it remains a relevant and funny criticism of British laddishness.
Grant Morrison's late-1980s slice of superhero revisionism is something of a change from the myriad Watchmen/Dark Knight Returns knockoffs of the time. Zenith isn't a dark, brooding figure, he's an idiot. The rough gist, for anyone who's yet to experience the serial, is that Zenith is the world's one known superpowered being but instead of protecting the world he uses this status to become a pop star. It sounds a bit sneering in text, but Zenith's bratty behaviour is actually quite engaging. That said, in the first storyline he's not actually too bad - there's a bit of snark and selfishness from the lad, but he actually spends most of the story doing more or less the right thing, despite protestations. Don't get used to that, though...
Quite what made Rebellion put this thing out in TPB form I don't know, as Mean Team has long been something of a joke among British comic fans in general and older 2000AD readers in particular. Initially it's about a team of hardcase future gladiators in one of those super-violent extreme sport things that infected the industry after Rollerball came out. The 'characters' are straight off the shelf, typified by no-nonsense bastard 'Bad' Jack Keller, whose name really is 'Bad' Jack Keller so we know what a bloody nutter he is. 'Bad' Jack looks like every 2000AD anti-hero ever - bald, scars, perma-snarl.
Midway through the first arc one of the team - psychic Henry Moon - gets blown up and his brain gets put in a panther. Then it gets really silly. The writers realise no-one wants another retread of Death Game 1999 and promptly reset the series by exiling the titular Team to a post-apocalyptic fantasy Earth where they fight all kinds of crap monsters on a half-arsed quest. Then when that collapses in on itself a bunch of spaceships turn up and just execute the main cast in a moment that's so clearly a self-loathing attempt to stop the strip in the most brutal, callous and careless way ever it's actually kind-of audacious.
Sadly there's still a chunk of the undeservedly thick book to go, which is filled by a solo story for Henry Moon, who apparently escaped destruction and heads back to the colonies, so it's basically about a panther sneaking around a space station. Exciting.
So this is an outright bad series; it's largely too long-winded and repetitive to be the hilarious kind of bad (though if you spot this in a store leaf through to the three-quarter mark to see the team getting killed; you will never, ever see a comic's lead characters genuinely killed off in such an offhand manner). It's a mystery as to why Rebellion have released Mean Team but then it's equally mysterious as to why 2000AD ran it for so long in the first place considering they seem to have no idea what the strip's about.
I thought long and hard about actually getting this, considering I've seen it described as an atrocity. But a cheap copy came up, and I thought "How bad can it be?". One question that always springs to mind when you read these things is why exactly writers bother bringing back characters if they're going to totally change them... In this way, this thing's a decade ahead of its' time, foreshadowing the damage Marvel and others would do to their characters around the turn of the 21st Century.
