3 out of 5

I was really excited for this lineup, but some wayward plotting has allowed most of it to fall into the average pile.

Dredd’s Serial Serial wraps up with part 5 in prog 1954.  Overall, this is a typically solid Wagner Dredd tale – short and sweet with a good sense of history and pacing – with art by my new favorite team of Colin MacNeil and colourist Chris Blythe.  Crazy PJ Maybe guiding Dredd toward catching a “serial serial killer” is a great setup – but almost, like, too great.  We could’ve used more parts for this; I feel like there was a lot of room to explore with this story.  Compression is always preferred over dragging things along, of course, and Wagner’s skill is such that you don’t feel shorted by the brevity, it’s just hard to get too amped up by it for the same reason.

Pat Mills picks up with zombie killer Defoe again.  Having not read the character before, I’m not sure if this is representative of the norm, but I was incredibly excited for Leigh Gallagher art and was not disappointed by the frequent depiction of wonderfully disgusting looking “reeks” with their stretched out hanged necks.  The script, though, is so Mills-y – bouncing around tonally such that it’s hard to get a read if this is going to be a serious tale or darkly humorous.  The focus is also hard to suss out at this point (apparently the mid-point); a particular Reek seems to be getting the troops together for a zombie revolt, but then there’s also some official-type character doing his bit to get Defoe involved as well.  Maybe.  Because there were some scenes I thought were flashbacks that weren’t.  Such is reading Mills sometimes.

Another Brass Sun entry.  Wren has been kidnapped by some clock peeps, tortured for the information stored in her brain while her dutiful traveling companion fights to free them both.  I’ve been down on Brass Sun – and Edginton and Culbard – for wasting interesting world-building with minor plotting maneuvers; I’m still not totally sold on Brass Sun with this arc, but it at least seems like it’s getting to an end game, so the higher stakes are fun to read, and Culbard seems to be putting a bit more work into details than usual.

Halfway into Sinister Dexter.  Like Defoe, I haven’t experienced SinDex before, and as a fan of Abnett’s 2000 AD stuff, I was also really looking forward to this.  The two titular hitmen – Sinister and Dexter – are piecing together a master plan to take down Kingpin-esque ganglord Moses Tanenbaum.  Abnett shows us the police investigation happening after the takedown and then shifts to the moments leading up to it.  After getting settled into the pacing by the third or fourth part, the series starts to pick up, but the approach is a bit disruptive at first, making it hard to get into.  Once you are into it, though, it’s every great action flick rolled into one, with light procedural stuff and great one-liners.  Out of the currently continuing thrills, SinDex is the one I’m now left thirsting for the next entries.

…And Bad Company.  I wasn’t really expecting this to be great, since the original BC is pretty cheesy and Milligan’s only gotten more heavy-handed with age, but it was super cool to see the title return and for Millie’s name to be back in the mag after so long.  Kano and crew are in a retirement home, their Bad Company-ness regulated by meds.  But they get whiff of a notion that the government are keeping them doped up to prevent them from remembering something, and so decide to go off the meds…  Rufus Dayglo and Brendan McCarthy do a great job of emulating the original Ewins (and McCarthy) art, and Pete’s keeping his old-man romanticism tamped down for now, but it’s another thrill that feels a bit wandering (like Defoe) in search of its focus.

Still plenty of time for the non SinDex bits to pick up… and we’re getting ABC Warriors and Survival Geeks in the near future, so even if that don’t happen, there’ll be – as usual – good stuff to read.