4 out of 5

Some entertainingly escalating Dredd with some fun if ultimately unsatisfying thrills in Absalom and Helium; Jaegir remains dark, moody, contemplative and excellent; Outlier falls flat.

We’ve had some excellent Dredd stories in recent past – Block Judge, the painted Dark Judges saga – but they’ve been fairly internal.  While following up on the Dark Judges will touch on that latter story, the series themselves can exist on their own.  But ‘Enceladus: Old Life’ – working off of some long-building Rob Williams’ storylines involving exiled judge Nixon, has that epic sense to it, changing the landscape – very literally, here, to ice – in ways that will probably get name-checked along with Chaos Day and the like.  Henry Flint’s dirty, busy art is excellent for the frost-overrun Mega City One, although because his linework is so active, when the action amps up, the imagery has trouble properly differentiating the tone, so Flint gets maybe a little too stylistic with the action and occasionally it’s hard to tell what’s going on.  That gripe aside, though, it’s really hard to imagine these reanimated baddies done up in a different hand.  And story wise, I dig that Williams has been up front about the Who, and has kept the How churning in the background while focusing us pretty exclusively on trying to figure how the Judges will survive.  I’m not sure how many parts this will be, but I’m down with this tale stretching on for a while.

Absalom: after an awesome start with the curmudgeonly Harry investigating some demon killings, the story feels like it pulls a quick out, explaining the mystery, potentially recruiting another agent under Harry’s purview, and nodding quietly on its way out without saying goodbye.  I actually hadn’t realized the series had concluded until it wasn’t there anymore.  Looking back over it, it definitely has a beginning, middle and end, but it falls prey to the 2000 AD curse of peaking in the penultimate chapters for need of keeping things open enough to continue at a whenever point in the future.  Entertaining through and through, especially with Tiernan Trevallion’s awesomely expressive b&w art.

A more direct offender of this trait is Ian Edginton’s Helium.  D’Israeli helped to establish a great looking world – above the poison cloud, below the poison cloud – with unique characters and contraptions and wonderfully vibrant colors, and though Ian took the story in a slightly different direction than initially thought, our leads’ escape to beneath the poison cloud has been a fun chase/capture/escape series of events.  But the last chapter doesn’t really even conclude…  Whereas with Absalom we can say we at least acknowledged the plotline introduced, Helium is content to duck out royally in the middle of things.  It feels a bit tacked on just to meet publishing needs, which – though I criticize pacing above – that’s the first time that specific sense has occurred to me when reading a 2000 AD tale.  But I sort of place the blame on Edginton, since this type of story structure isn’t uncommon to his tales, which are generally awesome high-level concepts that forever putter about without resolving much.  So maybe Helium will get there.  But the opening chapters – excepting the ending – are at least a great start.

Outlier.  This thrill hasn’t landed for me since its appearance, with the very muscle-man / woman boring art style (Karl Richardson) and a storyline (T.C. Eglington) that quickly drops a mystery/conspiracy element in favor of two guys growling at each other.  There’s an interesting last-minute switch in focus from the good guy to the bad guy, but otherwise, this thrill didn’t do much for me.  It wasn’t unreadable, by any means, just never felt like it properly got going.

Jaegir ends ‘Tartarus’ on an interesting note.  Out of the concluding progs in this collection, definitely the most satisfying, putting us through our paces as Rennie and Coleby continually find new ways to explore the Nords / Souther dynamic, this time tossing Atalia into the frightening politics of the military garrison named in the title.  Fascinating alliances and relationships, and as-always lovely ink-stained art from Coleby, with Len O’Grady’s colours finding endless definition in a limited range of reds and browns.

Rennie also starts up The Alienist in 1944, kicking off a haunted house setup that seems like it’s going to be a ton of fun.