5 out of 5

God bless: I love it when a awesome batch of thrills comes together.

Coming off of the Xmas bumper prog, it was hard to say how the new thrills would hold up.  Part of what makes 2000 AD work so well is its bite-sized weekly format; the bumpers are a lot of fun but the extra content can shift the range so everything feels average.  Even reading these in a batch, the sensation of having only so many pages to read each prog makes it easier to sift through faves and duds, because you are only ever a few pages away from either the start of your preference or the end of something that’s boring you.  But what’s especially interesting about the thrills starting here is that a couple of them feel somewhat directionless… and yet they’re still a lot of fun.

1962 has the only standalone tale: a fun Dredd slice by Michael Carrol that does the stoney-face-as-side-character bit to good effect – a thug bragging about his shooting of Dredd ending with the typically ironic turnabout 2000 AD writers tend to do so well.  Otherwise we see the continuation of The Order, ABC Warriors, Kingdom, and Strontium Dog.  In 1963, the also-Carroll penned and Mark Sexton-drawn (well applied post his Mad Max series) ‘Ghosts’ starts up and carries through the remaining issues.

Ghosts is particularly awesome, first digging up a compelling conspiracy of a secret cabal of judges who judge the Senior Judges, then whipping out some rewarding tie-ins to the Dredd-verse at large.  40 years on and we can still find fascinating new angles from which to see Dredd’s world.  Len O’Grady also offers a fascinating color palette to the mix, a tempered range of Earthly colors that work delightfully with Secton’s cinematic layouts.

Kingdom.  Ah, Kingdom.  More of the same, I suppose, with Gene the Hackman attacking a bigger and badder version of Them, but Abnett and Elson have just nailed the right blend of big and muscley hack and slash, sci-fi, and future think-piece, with Gene’s simplified view of the world sufficient for kicking butt or dropping some notably dumb-but-wise stoicism on our hack-slashy entertained asses.  Elson’s character designs are so on point with Kingdom, giving us such a sense of these characters’ sense of devotion.  Some of his action still hiccups, exact motions unclear or angles fudged, but the overall momentum keeps this series ticking.

ABC Warriors.  Apparently this is a flashback…?  I don’t know my ABC Warriors history, so forgive me.  But I love that Clint Langley, working in mostly black and white, gets to flex his art chops in a way that looks much less digital, letting us appreciate the details in a way his dark computerized offerings sometimes make difficult to do.  And… may I also love the title.  The letters column suggests the tale is nothing new for past readers, which is probably the case, but I’m just glad to experience a Mills strip that’s a bit more consistently tongue-in-cheek with its anti-the-man mentality, Hammerstein relating a time when he and Ro-Jaws joined an Anonymous-like band of robot anarchists against the plotting Howard Quartz.

The Order.  This is the title I was surprised didn’t sink the book, as we are starting incredibly far away from the events related in the first series.  If not for the blurb in the Nerve Centre, I’m not sure I’d have any clue what was going on.  But, smartly, Kek-W adds intrigue to each entry, so even though we’re still sort of in the dark as to how exactly events are linked, there’s enough breadcrumbs to keep reading, and a fascinating enough story developing on its own terms that we can afford to wait for that moment when the shoe finally drops.

Strontium Dog.  Johnny Alpha and his buds dream up a major heist, and execute it with hilariously entertaining gusto.  Pure Wagner and Ezquerra goodness, keeping it simple but evolving.

There’s normally the problem of the thrills passing a plotting midpoint – sometime in the next batch, perhaps – and losing steam, but since most of these titles are already sort of open-ended, I feel like we’re in a good spot for another aces delivery of story in the weeks’ progs to come.