2 out of 5

Intentions. What’s the intention of an Annual? What’s the intention of the 2000 AD Annual, which has heretofore been a rather unique entity…?

Subjective stuff, but from my perspective, an annual is a one-shot jumping on point, that teases ongoing or forthcoming storylines, but also can collect some odds and bobs, and serve as an outlet for writers / artists who may not get to frequent the comic’s focus so much. So there’re some new reader vibes there, for sure.

A 2000 AD Annual has always seemed a little different from this, though, keeping with the odds and bobs bit, but as it’s been traditionally packaged as a hardcover, they’ve come across as a bit more niche; almost like a reward for readers as opposed to bait for noobs.

So this new annual – returning after a several years’ pause, even if there have been some assorted specials during that time – seems like a compromise between the above approaches, and that’s where it’s a mixed bag. Because unfortunately, jumping-ons in modern 2000 AD seem to sometimes equate to luring in a more US audience, and while I’m for that, that’s also led to iterations like IDW Dredd, which very much lose the flavor of the character and universe. This is a larger discussion – how to introduce a decades’ long running book to readers without intimidation – that is tainted by protective fandom, but I think even regular issues of the Megazine work really well for this: Dredd (and many regular characters in the -verse) is built on tons of one-shots; you don’t have to change up much.

But the pitch here brings in a US writer – Chris Condon – for the premiere Joe spot, who executes the sin of trying to do Wagner political parody with IDW shamefacedness, the equivalence of I AM THE LAW bellowing without any self-awareness. It’s a Trump / Kamala riff featuring apes, and that’s all well and good besides being very cringey. This is firstly kind of bothersome reading this in 2025, during Trump’s subsequent first initial months in office, but it also underlines the kind of half-hearted snippiness that came to the fore during the election itself besides, again, utterly lacking in the magical blending of over-obvious slapstick and subversive commentary at which Wags (and other classic 2000 AD writers) excel. If this wasn’t a many-happy-returns edition of the annual, or was instead a sci-fi special or whatnot, giving Condon and artist Fernando Blanco their shot would be fine, but given that all the lead pieces in this are followed by text writeups that pitch new readers on the characters, it suggests this is an attempt to woo such readers, which makes longer-time fans such as m’self protest: this ain’t our Joe.

Thankfully, this is followed up by a dense, perfectly balanced Stront tale by Si Spurrier and Hayden Sherman, the latter bringing a fine Quitely line to things and an appealingly poppy color palette, and Spurrier painting the whole picture of Johnny Alpha’s job as a bounty hunter with wit and morality. You kinda know there’re going to be twists in Alpha’s manhunt, but they are excellently paced and executed – visually, narratively – meaning the story is exactly the example requested: a one-shot that gives a new reader a sense of what the character can be about, while also satisfying fans.

Rogue Trooper hits a similar vibe, although its a bit more direct in its execution. Alex Paknadel comes up with a clever way to parallel Rogue’s journey to find a traitor with the journey of another, essentially summarizing Rogue’s backstory at a high level. It rolls out a bit slowly and is talky – the story kind of only gets going halfway through – even if some of that feels true to classic Rogue; in comparison to the high octane flow of the Stront tale, though, things are a bit plodding, if energized by Jake Lynch’s always striking art, and Dylan Teague’s colors.

Note that both Stront and Rogue are backed up by text pieces similar to the Dredd ones, giving a few pages to explain more about the characters for new readers.

In the middle of the special, we get a surprisingly long text story of Lawless from Abnett, with spot illustrations from Winslade. It’s good; we know Dan can write longform, and the Western sci-fi world of Lawless can work without full-on visuals. That said, the story itself doesn’t really highlight what makes / has made the characters especially interesting – it’s just kind of a straightforward showdown. And if I may nitpick the mighty Winslade’s generally excellent work, Abnett does a character-by-character rundown of a gang, and Phil’s illustrations… don’t exactly sync up. It bugged me.

After this there are several reprints, and while a couple “make sense” – Superbean is classic bizarre 2000 AD; the first Rogue Trooper strip gives a sense of history – some are really bizarre choices, with an incredibly underwhelming recent Anderson strip by Maura McHugh and Emma Vieceli hardly selling the character; an acceptable Black Museum that I’d guess was chosen as a middleground between horror and weirdness to be most palatable to newbies; a Mean Machine tale from the cubist period of McMahon, which would be hard for newbies to drop into, and thus just seems like a pull to show the varying art styles in 2000 AD – aka look! We’re an indie book! – and even the Rogue reprint feels a bit odd, given the original tale and text backup run through this info.

All of this is fine, although perhaps you can see how the muddled intentions of the book prevent it from being satisfying beyond that. That said, the reason I’m knocking the rating down one more star is for the final reprint: a set of strips from the Dredd newspaper entries. While it’s awesome to include this stuff – and god bless the condensed hits of Wagner / Grant storytelling and Gibson art – the sudden format change really deserves a bit of explanation to your new readers, but even setting that aside, the strips are printed out of order. Maybe that’s just a digital thing – in which case apologies to those with a print edition and relying on this review to inform their opinions, an audience surely numbering in the millions – but a forum reader confirmed, and I can compare to my print collections to confirm as well: vast chunks of the story are printed out of sequence, making for a very clunky read. A nail in the 2-star coffin, alas.