1 out of 5

Okay.  Writing something nigh-incomprehensible and then acronymizing it as ‘mind-melting’ does not, suddenly, make it readable.

Acknowledging that Tyranny Rex maybe started out as more of a funtime badass assassin book with the snarking, dinosaur-tailed titular lead guns a’blazin’ – seeing as how the character is creator-credited to Smith and Steve Dillon, the latter of whom doesn’t appear in these collections – by the time we pick up with her in Deus, she’s renounced her violent ways for something akin to a nunnery.  And maybe those previous appearances laid the groundwork for what’s here, but even so, Smith’s overwrought writing style and forced, failed world-building make actually trying to get in to this story a hassle, thus making my eyes glaze over despite Mark Buckingham, Paul Marshall, and Richard Elson’s pretty fantastic artwork throughout.  (…Ellita Fell’s woefully wandering lettering in the second volume doesn’t help.)

A bad guy attacks the nunnery to get his hands on some ultimate something-or-other called The God Skin; Tyranny is brain-wiped to reclaim her violent self and sent to 2177 New York to find the Deus Ex Machina, which is the only thing that can stop the bad guy.  This is as sensible as any other 2000 AD / sci-fi plot, but Smith stuffs in endless made-up-on-the-spot (or so it felt) references to in-world cultural things that you can’t help but feel lost, sifting through a reality that only makes sense to its creator.  This isn’t an uncommon world-building flub – giving something a wacky name because that automatically makes it futuristic – but it’s so tied to core plot conceits here that you can only follow along conceptually.  At which point: why read?  Add to this Smith’s preferred method of writing in prose snippets that are meant to capture the chaos of the action or of the characters’ thoughts in any given moment and Deus Ex Machina becomes almost purposefully off-putting.

Setting all of this aside, and pretending like reading Tyranny’s first appearances would set you up for this and put you in the right mindset for reading it, I’m not even sure the plot construction makes sense.  The bad guy keeps getting one-upped for a bigger and weirder bad guy, and Rex’s Deus Ex Machina quest takes her to some ethereal realm which is somehow permeated by her pursuers without much explanation.  (Or any.)  This very much feels like a “dig yourself out of a hole” story, where Smith wrote Rex into the nunnery, then had to figure out how to write her out (and very possibly leave things open for more stories, if so desired).  I’m not saying that was the case, but that’s how it reads.  Y’know, if you’re able to get through it.

Also included is a two part similarly “mind-melting” tale about a genius named Stanley Danzig who’s resurrected into a robot body to save the world from, like, the breakdown of reality.  Notable maybe for early Sean Phillips art (which is a strange mix of cartoonishness and photo-real), the story is otherwise nearly as incomprehensible as Tyranny, just without the excessive “future” lingo.  There are references to Nietzsche and situationism, so maybe you get an idea of Smith’s interests…