3 out of 5

Part of the joy of reading Dan Abnett’s Lawless in its monthly installments in the Megazine has been to see it evolve from something of a TexCit / Cursed Earth riff into its own wild and wooly thing, as jam-packed with character and nuance as Phil Winslade’s edge-to-edge artwork would suggest.  It has rightfully become a fan favorite.

Reading it one go, though, makes it clearer how much of a struggle its been to get the strip to that state.  Welcome to Badrock, the first arc, is something of a shallow mess, forcefully setting up subplots and bouncing around town with Metta Lawson’s no-nonsense attitude while feeling out if this is gong to be isolated hijinks a la SinDex, or something more step-by-step complex.

The second arc, Between a Badrock and a Hard Place, thankfully (considering were we are now) opts for the latter, but Dan still executed some hasty character connections that, again, when read in this compressed state, don’t feel as rewarding or warranted as they did when we had weeks to sit with each strip.

By the third arc, though, all of the pieces are in place: a fantastic train heist variant, with Winslade having tapered some of his earlier sketchiness as he also has gotten a true feel for the strip and world, wrangling an insane amount of terrain and crowd detail onto every single page without misdirecting our eye from our primary cast of Lawson, clerk Pettifer, deputy Kill-a-Man, and gun-for-hire Rondo.  Volume one ends at a particularly thrilling point, Lawson having significantly pissed off the local corporate overlords who will became major adversaries in the next arcs.

Included in the trade is a short foreword from Abnett that explains how this book stemmed from an elseworlds-ish Dredd title he did – which isn’t required reading for Lawless, but appreciated context –  and, more interestingly, some production sketchwork from Winslade which undeniably justifies his large role in the world building.

A thrilling title, but it takes a bit of see-what-works to get there, and that flailing about is much more obvious when the strips are collected.  Still, these are not disposable storylines – they’re incredibly foundational – and are admittedly a lot of fun to read, knowing how well Dan has built on them.