2 out of 5

Totally readable month to month, but as a I lay it all out, I see the stuff I didn’t like outweighed the good. If you factor in the great text pages, though, and how much I like how they’ve flip-flopped some of the extras, it bumps the rating up.

In the Dredd slot: Alec Worley and Ben Willsher do a riff on AI, which fills the pages well with great Dredd characterization and splashy art, then Ian Edginton and artist Kevin West do a two-part Thing-riff on an alien invader. Neither one of these are standouts – the Meg Dredds rarely are – but they’re also incredibly reliable comfort food. They work, although I feel like Edginton’s story could’ve gone one more issue, with its ending feeling abrupt for the level of threat it brought. West I’m not familiar with, but this is some Chris Weston / Winslade awesomeness I’m on board for.

Armitage concludes. I’m not sure if Warren Pleece ever felt right for this strip, which I think needed a more noir-ish artist to bring out the brittleness of our lead, reluctantly brought back into the detectivin’ fold, and to give more teeth to threat of looming deaths Armitage (and a robot tagalong) are trying to prevent. I like Pleece in general, and I can see him working for the story’s talking heads, but the inherent lighter tone of his art could’ve synced with something like Wagner’s Spector, and not a grittier tale like this one. With this mismatch, it’s hard to fully assess Liam Johnson’s script. I definitely like the way Armitage fought against working with the cops the whole while, which felt very true to the character, but it also seemed like we needed maybe one more entry to sell the mystery and its resolution, which wraps up just a bit too quickly and cleanly.

2099 entries from Niemand, with Conor Boyle and Tom Foster handling art duties in separate issues. This strip continues to elude me. 2099-era tales from one of our best modern Dredd writers – aces. The cutesy call-forwards to the future of Dredd are fun, I just can’t really figure out what gap this is filling in the Dreddverse beyond that cutesyness, in which case it feels more like a 6-pager than a Meg entry.

A Black Museum strip from Cavan Scott and Luke Horseman. I really want to like Horseman, but I just don’t think he’s landed on a strip that’s a great match yet, or, alternately, has learned to reign in some of his excesses for more readable pages. I just get lost in his blocky characters and over-expressiveness, and can’t track the narrative, but the black and white is a positive restraint. Scott’s paranormal investigator tale feels like a setup for something that was relegated to a Black Museum instead, rendering the story somewhat aborted – unless I’m (very likely) missing some nods to other Dredd lore.

Pandora Perfect and Department K jump over from the Regeneds, in the newest bid to swap out reprint pages in the Meg. Conceptually I like this, though neither one of these entries does a lot for me. Roger Langridge, Gary Welsh, and colorist John Charles create an appealing vibe with Pandora – here trying to escape her shady punk rock past while also sending her robo buddy off to do some thievin’ – but as I experienced with the previous entries, and maybe with Langridge’s writing in general, there’s a veneer of cleverness that never quite matches to the writing. Like the references and puns sound clever or cutting, but they’re pretty surface level. Visually, though, it works: the physical comedy flows, and it’s just a good strip to look at.

Ned Hartley takes over writing on Department K, with Mike Walters on art. I don’t want to dunk on this too hard, but it’s going to take a few strips for this duo to get up to speed. Hartley comes up with a good concept which has the crew discovering a parallel which is all robot run, and Estabon decides to stay, but after a solid opener (from both creators), the story just drops off, feeling very forced to create tension, and reasons for all the characters to be involved, and as we go in to a parallel-hopping conclusion, Walters’ seems too pressed on time to add much detail or dimension, making the action both very bland, but also hard to follow. This is a strip where it’s just not “sticky” – there’s not enough to brings you from one panel to another. But I think the general tone feels right, and assuming the duo had relatively more time to figure out the first entry – which was good! – versus the others, with some further entries, this could probably shape up.

Harrower Squad: I will fess up that I have no idea what’s going on here. This has somewhat plagued this strip from the start, which, beyond the squad being a “heavy weapons” unit, has struggled – in my mind – with feeling distinct from any other judge crew, and then writer David Baillie jumped way deep into intra-squad double-crosses and politics too quickly, giving us a lot of character interplay to keep straight when no one individually, or as a team, really stands out. Steve Yeowell is classic, but I think does better with generalisms in his art, which functions best when the characters are all canon fodder, or the cast is limited. Otherwise, his style can become pretty bland – there’s not much characterization – and you can see how that doesn’t sync well with my criticisms above.

Dreadnoughts. Carroll chooses to focus more on the corrupt cops in a town than the Judge tasked with laying down the law there, and though it’s a brutal and involving strip, it loses some of its identity with this change. It feels more standalone: the Judge is a faceless terminator, and we’re witnessing smalltown politics unraveling. Carroll’s writing definitely sells the characters, and Higgins the dark and brutal action, it just doesn’t really expand this world very much.