3 out of 5

Total mixed bag, but if you liked Pat Mills’ Reaper – as dialogue-chewing as ever with computer-tweaked photo art by Clint Langley – then maybe your opinion is a bit more positive than mine.

The main Dredd tale in 357 – 360 is Al Ewing’s The Cop, which is a twisty-turny hunt-one-bad-guy-who’s-hunting-another tale that’s a good slice of crime fiction, given a nice and bloody heavy tone by Ben Willsher, with matching (and pleasing) dark colors from Adam Brown.  I dug this tale because it balanced a feeling of history with being totally self-contained; you believe in the Dredd world, but you can read the story on its own and do just fine.

American Reaper / The Reaper Files drags on.  In Reaper, people can forcefully steal other people’s bodies – inserting their mind into theirs; a crime for which The Reapers are tasked with tracking down the offenders.  As with most thing Mills, we have a somewhat used sci-fi idea that’s punched up to some extreme; this time it’s Mills angry face and a super serious script given the computer art touch by Clint Langley.  As mentioned, if Mills is your bag, perhaps you’ll like this morose and dragging tale of a Reaper tracking down a particularly skeevy body switcher (and his daughter, who’s been all’a mind switched.  And to be fair, Langley does a great job with the photo art.  That style will never be my taste, but he blends the style with the drawn /  computer elements well, and fills up the panels such that there’s actually a sense of motion, as well as an awareness of being a comic book – which is a good thing in that Langley knows not to let the style overwhelm the story.  But it’s still Mills, and it’s still really ham-fisted.

Angelic concludes.  This was a tough one, because it really felt like enjoyment required the history of the character to appreciate.  It’s Rennie, so it’s written well, and has Lee Carter on art, doing an impressive Tony Harris impression but not letting his characters overact like Harris does – but it’s undoubtable that the fate of Angelic matters more when you know the endpoint of this stuff.  Taken on its own terms, the series is absolutely readable and definitely generates my interest in knowing more about the character, though it takes its time filling up its episodes – Rennie probably could’ve squeezed this in to less pages.

Some shorts – Demarco PI, an Anderson tale, some Black Museum tales – fill up the rest of the megs until new series start in 361.  The Black Museum bits are fun reads, but the Demarco and Anderson stories are too inconsequential; the Meg often relies on these 3-4 part stories to pass the time between longer features, and they rarely feel like anything more than footnotes.  Such is the case with these stories.

361 and 362 start the next batch of stories off pretty well.  Wagner and Ezquerra on Dredd, though the tale of Dredd exposing a Radlands urban legend falls into the workman pile of Wagner Dredd stories, Ezquerra’s consistent art matching that tone.  Perhaps the team needs some rest from the phenomenal Block Judge.  Next up is Paul Grist’s Demon Nic.  The first installment of this left me way cold, and didn’t feel right for the Meg.  But the second episode one me over with Grist’s unique and assured style and an entertaining and fast-moving script that has me wondering what’s going to happen with this seemingly heart’s-in-the-right-place titular demon.  It still feels odd for the Meg, but would be moreso in 2000 AD, and I’ve been wanting to sample Grist’s stuff for a while… so why complain.

Leah Moore and John Reppion write the Brit-Cit judge Lillian Storm in Storm Warning.  Tom Foster does a less polished and more bland Bolland thing with his art.  It looks good, though empty.  Our writers set up a visually satisfying Raiders of the Last Ark “find the sacred artifact” hunt; the storytelling is incredibly glitchy (something I noticed in the team’s Black Shuck as well), jumping around questionably, which is where the openness of Foster’s style helps to make it seem like things are kept in check.

Lastly, Dan Abnett and Phil Winslade give us the crowded B&W of Lawless, about a judge assigned to the town of Badrock, which represents every Western small town you’ve seen in any given movie.  Marshall Lawson has to protect a dude, gunshots ensue.  It’s busy, but Lawless is a great character – snarky, smart and violent – and Winslade packs the pages with so much activity you want to take your time reading the few pages provided in each issue.

So no standouts, but nothing outright bad, with a YMMV depending on your Mills tolerance.