less than 50 pages
long, but is damn near a perfect comic – economical, moving and exciting.

It featured Chopper literally taking to the
sky to surf the air on his hoverboard, and his quest to prove himself the best
in the world. By the end of the story, the whole world would know his name, and
know that he was the greatest skysurfer on the planet, and that was worth
risking his life and freedom.

And if Dredd was a bully in the first
Chopper story, he was the outright villain in Midnight Surfer, a symbol of a
crushing society that shoots to kill for the perp’s own good.

It’s a prime slice of classic-era 2000ad,
with the usual witty and pointed script by John Wagner, but it’s the
extraordinary art of Cam Kennedy which brings real power andgrace to this
story, finding sublime beauty in a tale of crazy people blasting through the
sky on flying surfboards.

Kennedy is one of the most under-appreciated
action comics artists of the last few decades, at least outside the UK. He
never really broke into the States, even though he dabbled in Batman, Punisher
and Lobo comics, and was the artist on one of the few Star Wars comics that
actually had some weight to it. (Although his apathy towards US comics is clear
in the first Kenny Who? story in Judge Dredd, which is a wickedly pointed
piss-take of American comic industry practices, about a year after Midnight
Surfer.)

He hasn’t done any art for American comics
since 2003, although there has been less Kennedy art in general over the past
few years (apart from a lovely adaption of Robert