2000AD Thrill-Mail subscribers got a special treat – the first glimpse of Simon Bisley’s art on the new Joe Pineapples story.

Thirty years since his last work on ABC Warriors – The Black Hole in 1988 – Bisley is returning to art duties with a new story written by Pat Mills. Although there’s currently no firm publication date for the special story about everyone’s favourite cross-dressing sharpshooter.

If you want to know more about Joe’s new adventure, Pat and Simon talked a little about the new series on the 2000AD Thrill-Cast last year (if you don’t want to hear them chat about Sláine: The Horned God you can skip ahead to one hour, seven minute mark.)

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Joe Pineapples was one of the first members of the robot commando unit the ABC Warriors, and is an expert marksman, once described as the best sniper in the world. He joined the Warriors after being kicked out of the elite X-Terminators squad for seducing the wife of a (human) superior officer. Joe assassinated the Volgan robot General Blackblood, who was then rebuilt and reprogrammed to work for the ABC Warriors and Blackblood has hated him ever since.

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Originally, Joe only spoke in code, though he has since adopted standard English. Following the original dissolution of the Warriors, he became first a police firearms instructor on Earth and then a police detective on the robot free world of Mekka. He has since rejoined the Warriors and has now spent several centuries more or less continually in service with them (aside from a brief period as an assassin for the Terran government).

ABC Warriors first appeared in prog #19 in 1979. Art for the opening episodes was by Kevin O’Neill, Mike McMahon, Brett Ewins, and Brendan McCarthy, who among them designed the original seven members of the team. Since then they have been illustrated primarily, though not exclusively, by Bryan Talbot, Kevin Walker, Henry Flint, Clint Langley and of course Simon Bisley.

The ABC Warriors are a team of war robots designed to withstand ‘Atomic’, ‘Bacterial’ and ‘Chemical’ warfare. They were built to take part in the long-running Volgan War, which Mills had described in several previous 2000AD strips, including Invasion! and Ro-Busters. Each robot has a distinctive personality – often one programmed by its human creators – but each is more or less able to act with free will.

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