Chee chee cheee!
Cleopatra the griblig
Date: 5 April 1986
Script: John Wagner & Alan Grant (as T.B. Grover); Artist: Barry Kitson; Letters: Tom Frame
Plot Summary
While processing Anwar Duglan at a local Justice Department Sector House for posession of vi slugs (illegal violent videos), the perp attempts to plea bargain by ratting on his fellow shipmates on the spaceliner Larvik, where he works as a steward. After naming several crewmembers, he mentions in passing Third Engineman Hud Priestley who had smuggled some kind of animal into the city.
Meanwhile, Priestley arrives at his girlfriend’s apartment to give her not one but two animals – gribligs – which are named Cleopatra and Nelson. The adorable little animals are intelligent and, starving, perform tricks for food. They are being kept in seperate cages to prevent them from reproducing but after the humans go to bed they manage to free themselves and are reunited…
Commentary
So, in case it isn’t clear from the summary, this is basically the Judge Dredd take on Gremlins, which came out in cinemas just over a year before, and the tribbles from classic Star Trek – even the name is smooshing together of the two words. The gribligs go on to breed like wildfire, eat Priestley and his girlfriend and while most are exterminated a handful escape, leaving open the possibility of a sequel.
In fact, we don’t see gribligs in a Dredd strip for years later until Whatever Happened To…? “The Gribligs” in Judge Dredd Megazine 219, 19 years later. Fans of the original Judge Dredd roleplaying game however (and this is how I discovered Judge Dredd) will know that the gribligs appear again in the scenario “A Night in the Death of Sector 255” by Hugh Tynan, which appeared in White Dwarf issue 88 (1987). The scenario is illustrated by another Judge Dredd artist from the era (who also illustrated a lot of Games Workshop products at the time) Brett Ewins. In that scenario, Ewins draws gribligs very differently, looking much more goblin like and much less like the cute little furballs that Barry Kitson draws in this strip.
Barry Kitson is another artist to appear in the mid-80s – in fact this is his first Dredd strip. He doesn’t make a huge contribution to the strip; his most famous contributions are his co-creation of the villain Death Fist (real name Stan Lee, a clear nod to both the famous Marvel comics writer and Bruce Lee the martial artist), and “The Hour of the Wolf”, the third Anderson: Psi Division story (progs 520-531). This established Anderson’s relationship with Orlok the Assassin, a sov agent who precipitated the Apocalypse War, which would become a recurring plot point throughout the 90s. After a few years, Barry Kitson moved on to draw US comics, particularly DC.
Because I’ve opted to randomly select an episode from each year, the samples I end up focusing on can end up being quite unrepresentative. The fact that both this and the previous “Ugly Mug Ball” are somewhat by-the-numbers is somewhat telling however. While plenty of excellent strips appeared during this time, the “Midnight Surfer” (progs 424-429) and “Atlantis” (progs 485-488) both spring to mind, many of the one-shots do tend to feel less inspired – and inevitable outcome of producing a 6-page weekly strip (as well as a newspaper strip) for almost ten years by this point. There is perhaps a notable shift in style during this period; the silly strips stay silly, but we also start seeing a much more serious tone in others, such as “Letter from a Democrat” (prog 460).
Trivia
- To reinforce the links to tribbles, in the second episode it is revealed that the captain of the ship on which Priestley serves is called “James Krik”.