Vengeance comes in many forms and so do alien races. Shakara is one of 2000AD's glorious space epics that relishes reaching into the twisted depths of the unleased imagination to populate a universe full of weird and wonderful creatures, not least the main character himself. This is a strip in the best tradition of galactic warriors such as Strontium Dog, Judge Dredd or Nemesis, with a touch of the berserker rage of Wolverine or The Punisher. He's a loner with vengeance on his mind, taking galactic strides from world to world uttering his battle cry 'Shakara' before annihilating his enemies.

Award-winning writer Robbie Morrison, co-creator of the popular Nicholai Dante, clearly has a passion for those wildly bonkers characters that seemed to populate British comics such as Action and the earlier years of 2000AD. He invests a great deal of fun and mischief in developing a character that's full of mystery so that each episode reveals just a little more of who or what Shakara is. The premise is there from the beginning. An age of terror has seized the whole galaxy after war has ravaged planet after planet, all resulting from the fall of the Shakara, a race of order and repression. But with them defeated, the universe has fallen into chaos only for a lone vigilante, who seems to embody the dead souls of the whole race, determined to rebalance the universal power struggle.

The pleasure of the tales is the wealth of alien races and award-winning artist Henry Flint seems to delight in the challenge to design giant wasps, walking eyeballs, multi-bug-eyed, antennaed mercenaries, along with an equally crazy armoury of spaceships and hardware. And then there is Shakara himself : a kind of walking junkyard skeleton with grasshopper legs and laser-sharp rapiers for hands. His art is intricate and dynamic, and match the bizarrely wild imagination of Morrison, mimicking the unfettered fun of the stories. There's a touch of the eccentric detail of Bellardinelli (Ace Trucking Co) and Kevin O'Neill (Nemesis The Warlock, Marshall Law, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) but also a surreal take on the towering space epics most associated with comics giant, Jack Kirby (The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, New Gods). This is deliriously madcap science-fantasy that brings out those fevered delights of childhood dreams.