4 out of 5

God, what I love about 2000 AD – and what seems to have held true in its many years, and separates it from any other given anthology mag – is the way it somehow breeds these instant classics.  I’m not saying it happens often, any true enough, I’m partial to certain writers, but even though Grey Area gets off to a sort of bumpy, generic start – tussle-ready police crew ETC’s adventures in ‘The Grey Area,’ a sort of pre-approval holding area for visiting alienkind- you can still sense the immense potential bristling ‘neath its surface.  Writer Dan Abnett packs the short tales with the kind of instantly grabbing world-building details at which he’s particularly skilled: our first contact experience that infected much of the population and thus instigated Grey Area / ETC protocols; the character details of our featured players nudging them beyond their tuff guy / rookie / straight man / etc. templates; initial artist Karl Richardson sketches out the bulky, Gears of War-ish template that makes this future Earth seem so busy and populated and rough, with followup artists Lee Carter and Patrick Goddard able to smooth things out as Dan gets a better sense of the humanity and ironies of his setting.

To that latter point: once the initial runaround is set in place, introducing the Us vs. Them mindset that informs most of the stories, and Dan kicks the lazy ‘rookie writes in her diary’ narration structure, Abnett can work his magic of endlessly inventive alien races that challenge our casts (and our) perceptions; in the same way that the brilliant Kingdom mashes brawly action with subtle smarts, Grey Area has its action cake and muses whilst spitting crumbs, but the fun is in how the title’s intelligence flows organically, as though the aforementioned potential was a surprise to Dan as well.

And knowing how this title has currently evolved, it’s even more awesome to revisit its early stages, which are absolutely no less impressive in retrospect than they are upon first blush.  A great collection.