3 out of 5

The Dredd spot is split between Ian Edginton / D’Israeli’s Babel, a one-off from Ken Niemand, and then the wildly conceptually exciting but… kinda dragging One-Eyed Jacks from Ken and Kieran McKeown. Babel is some solid weirdness from Edginton, making the most of D’Israeli’s design work and wild colors to tell an fittingly-titled tale of miscommunications. Edginton’s BIG ideas work best in small scope like this; the two-parter is a lot of fun. The Niemand one shot is punchy, like the best from the writer, but the next big job from Ken comes with One-Eyed Jacks… doing a time-travel crossover with Wagner’s classic cop John Cooper and Joe. This theoretically is awesome, but McKeown’s overly expressive characters and perhaps slightly off paneling – wonky eye direction – aren’t quite the right fit for the noir tone, making the story feel like something of a misfire, the intermingling timelines coming across as clunky instead of a fluid merging. Perhaps this will read better when it’s completed or collected.

Now we get to a lot of uneven churn.

Storm Warning: John Reppion is back on Lillian Storm – a necromantic Brit Cit judge I want to love, except I generally haven’t been on board with Reppion’s writing style, which tends to underplay story beats in a way I can’t quite vibe with – like it’s not exactly synced with monthly / weekly storytelling? The pitch here, which has Storm straight up going to the afterlife to solve a mystery, is super cool, and admittedly kept me more in tune than some previous tales, but, man, the way it cuts back and forth between timelines is incredibly distracting, and doesn’t seem to properly serve the narrative well – i.e. it does not seem necessary – and another “theoretical” good comes via artist Clint Langley, going less (obviously) digital here and giving an appropriate gothic edge to the strip, but as the story gets more complex as it goes along, Langley seems like less of a fit; pages just start seeming cluttered, along with the writing. I had no idea what was happening after the first couple entries, and wasn’t engaged enough to dig in and figure it out.

Death Metal Planet. David Hine and Nick Percival keep beating the Dead Judge horse. I’m not so enamored with these characters that I need to see them in an ongoing, though I will admit that previous escalations of this tale have had enough promise to remain interesting, regardless of my opinions on the stiff painted art, and Hine’s dialogue being of an old-school “explain it all” style that doesn’t appeal. But this outing, which has a death metal group recruiting the judges to play a concert… It’s an extended (and extended, and extended) joke without a punchline, not helped by Hine’s offhand way of writing about metal which, er, makes him sound kinda out of touch.

Devlin Waugh – Ales Kot continues, with new artist Rob Richardson. People’ve liked Kot on this; I definitely liked the overall tone / direction he’s given / taken the character, but as he’s pushed for more “meaning,” that’s felt… lacking. And that’s a big focus here, as Waugh comes into contact with a doppelganger, and learns more about his past. To me, it just doesn’t have impact. Artist Rob Richardson also seems to be mimicking Dowling’s open, big panels, but I don’t know if that’s “natural” for the artist, and adds to the story’s minimal effect. That said, I still dig a writer taking ownership of a charcter, and I’m sure Richardson will sync up after another story or so.

Lastly: Chopper – or, “Surfer,” the next iteration of Chopperdom. This follows up on Zane Perks, again with Wags writing and Colin MacNeil arting, and it’s just a solid story, with Zane navigating his way through dealings with the underworld to try to do some good, much in the spirit of where Chopper eventually went as well. This is appropriately chosen to close out the Meg, and it’s just a great reminder of what the world is capable of offering – it’s not mind blowing stuff, but it’s a character type and tone that really can’t exactly be replicated elsewhere.

That’s for the main stories, and doesn’t include the text interviews / reviews, which continue to be appreciated and, generally, informative.

Aside from all that, one of the more exciting changes to the Meg, which I think helped make the reading experience much better overall, was essentially including the floppy material in the book itself, starting out with reprints of IDW series (Year One and Mega City Two) and also including some essentially “preview” stuff for Treasury or other reprints (e.g. Leopard of Lime Street). While you could say this is the same as printing it in a separate book, this allows for having the ongoing material – like Surfer – at the end of the entire magazine, and also means you can start to split up the “floppy” stuff into monthly installments instead of an all-in-one collection. The latter was nice, of course, but the serialized presentation can make some of this stuff easier and more fun to digest. To me, this was a wholly positive update to the book which I really enjoyed.