3 out of 5

Some amazing Dredd entries are balanced out by some acquired-taste additions.

2426 kicks off with a fun one, though: a Dredd tale that leads directly in to a Chimpsky ongoing. That ongoing was… good, but a little cheeky, with more on that in a bit. After that intro, Kenneth Niemand again (as he’s the Chimpsky guy) takes the Joe spot for “Blitzers,” continuing the writer’s understanding of how to balance MC1 brutality with character and story – some forced-into-the-hard-life ex-gangsters coming to terms with their past. Then: Dan Abnett! Dan, who hasn’t written Dredd all that much, does a really brutal oner that comments on the blindness of modern day politics / policies (er, MC1), a sort SinDex-y romp that follows a bad penny around town, and then – after a stopover with Geoffrey D. Wessel, who I have found to have good ideas that he overwrites – Dan takes us up through 2436 with a very fun, very true-to-form three parter that does a dance like its glorifying Joe… only to crash things back down to MC1 reality. Great stuff.

Back to Chimpsky: as drawn by P.J. Holden, and scripted with Niemand’s quirk, this strip is never not entertaining, but the AI-takeover shtick feels like it takes a sort of easy way out to its otherwise excellent escalation. I guess anything would’ve been a solution we’d seen before, but the moderately woo-woo solve Kenneth chose is one that particularly tires me. Still: fun to read, even with / through that conclusion.

Rogue / Nu Earth gets some oners that really just didn’t land for me – Rogue’s world has never felt as tonally rich as Joe’s for these types of sidestories, but I haven’t dived into the RT archives much – until Andi Ewington and Paul Marshall (with spot blue colors on grey tones from Pippa Bowland) do a run called Tides of War, which was very linear – no surprises; Rogue teams up with a sparse crew for a raid on some Norts – but also very solid, and made me curious to poke at Ewington’s other works. Marshall’s art really does or doesn’t work for me, depending on the story, but I think a straight-and-narrow plot, with relatively grounded action, is a great match.

Scarlet Traces also picks back up late in this run, with Ian Edginton exploring the fall-out / aftermath of the invasion – indications that there are still Martians around; the uncomfortable political maneuverings that start to happen. D’Israeli’s art is a bit too digital here for my tastes, but at the same time, the world 100% belongs to this pair; the series feels right at home, even after a long pause. I’ve always been at a bit of a remove with ST, sensing I need to go back and start from the beginning, but “Empire of Blood” is a good jumping on point, letting the history of the strip hang in the background while we focus on some current going-ons. Too early to say yea or nay, but I’m glad to see this here.

Okay! Now on to the divisive stuff.

Silver returns, from Mike Carroll and Joe Currie. I really dig Carroll, and especially his rare non-Dredd work. Silver’s plot of an alien invasion being fended off by human rebels who’ve recruited a frikkin’ vampire is a hoot… from afar. Joe Currie’s art is just make or break, man. I dig the Quitely-adjacent fine-lined style, but his art is also somewhat baffling, with the action never quite clicking, and the feathered pencil style unfortunately not selling the weight of the massive machines being employed in this war. I was iffy on the first series, and this one is a lot better – we’re past the intros; vamp DeSilva is tasked with a kill mission and she starts kicking ass – but it’s still hard to get a read on this. I wasn’t sure if the story actually advanced at all, week to week, though the final scene was a good about-face. Currie’s choreography also got significantly better as the strip went along, but there’s still the weight issue. So I dunno. I hope we get a couple more series for this one to have a chance to really stake its claim.

And then: Ghosted. Guy Adams writing is… not for me. He reads young – like, aiming for punch in his phrasing, that comes across as forced – and his story concepts come across as elevator pitches, perhaps stemming from the “punch” approach, where details are added to be genre-y, or gritty, but don’t feel earned by the story. Ghosted’s story of Benu, living in a digitally-obsessed, class-striated future Congo, and who gets “woken up” to some of the realities in her world thanks to a type of psychic bond with a soldier is probably fine, flirting with social commentary and going for broke on its world building, but I found nothing to really latch on to: our characters are purposefully shallow; the ideas purposefully “sleek” – coming at your fast – and kind of playing into Blade Runner stuff and the like without, again, it really feeling like it’s necessary for the story. And I just can’t with the made-up future slang. At a high level, I appreciate the effort when people do this, but it’s such a careful balance to do it in a way that doesn’t alienate the reader, and / or make sense in the world, and, hammering this home, it unfortunately – to me – reads like another “cool” detail that’s not been fully thought through, and thus was distracting / alienating more than anything else, especially with how often Adams uses it. Artist Megan Huang is also maybe not a great match here, with their Boom!-like open cartoony style very lacking in the kind of scene-setting detail I think would’ve given me a bit more grounding as to what this title was /is about or going for. The forums have been nicer to this one than me, so I may just have a bee in my bonnet about Guy.