3 out of 5

John Wagner had been back as the steady guiding hand of Judge Dredd for a couple years by this point, but the 90s are still a very uneven era for the character and 2000 AD, and it often feels like larger tales like The Pit don’t necessarily have a clear intention behind them. Wagner would return to this basic setup – zeroing in on Joe cleaning up a specific region – several times, but The Pit essentially setting him up as the desk sergeant, and not on the street, is really promising, and yet John never fully commits to it. The series keeps kind of fading back into tradition, indistinguishable from other Dredd tales, and kind of ends ignominiously with a weaksauce political villain.

Hereafter, the collection is a weird mishmash of relative nostalgia, with the same open-endedness as The Pit – Dead Reckoning sees another go at Judge Death and never quite sells it; Return to Hottie House has the lobotomized cult again is funny, but also feels like it’s missing its own joke sometimes; John Smith’s Judge Child callback seems like it should be a huge twist but misplaces bloody overkill for a more thrilling story. We also get the rather odd The Pack – flying radland sharks? – that’s neither weird or scary enough, and several short bursts of scattershot workmanlike product and genius.

I realize this is all rather negative sounding, but it’s pretty steady work, if lacking in what I might think is decisive editorial direction. Lots of fantastic artists, though – Greg Staples, Ezquerra, Simon Davis, Pete Doherty, Alex Ronald, Henry Flint… spoiled for choice.

Only room for four Meg stories here, but the cutting edge spirit of Dredd feels more present here, even though only one is written by Wags. Perhaps it’s that these live in a vacuum, away from larger narratives, and read a bit more free, and defined.