2 out of 5

Man, we really drew the short straw here on timing – a long, multi-part thrill runs through the progs that’s okay, but ends with the wimpiest of whimpers, and then the Meg entries are rough, rough, rough stuff.

The progs kick off with a Mark Millar two-parter that’s pretty tame for Mark’s writing style – he wouldn’t really develop his edgelord vibes until pairing with Morrison – though shows off his preference for one-liner style toughies. Still, it’s good ol’ standard stoney-face fare. But we’re in much better hands when Wagner and John Burns come in for a cosplay riff in Lonesome Dave, and then a oner which is wonderfully high concept – mind-controlling aliens take over all of MC-1 – narratively compacted and enemies thoroughly dispatched masterfully by Wags and artist Jim Murray in a single prog.

Then… the main show: a multi-part, multi-artist run of connected mini-stories that are loosely about Dredd tracking down the source of some Mega City land shark attacks in the Cursed Earth, but more directly are a hotdog run that follows several primary recruits, with Dredd and DeMarco coaching. Each of the stories on their own are pretty fun, and gave editorial the chance to try out some wild artists (an early Henry Flint is fun to see; Flint didn’t really have clear paneling down at that point – the pages are messy – but you can feel the energy); however, the vague land shark thing is a total bust, which would’ve been fine except towards the end it seems like they’re actually building towards something big with it… only for it to feel like someone told Wags to just end it now, and the conclusion plops onto the page, in a completely conclusionless way. It’s a very dispiriting end to some entertainingly okay progs; thankfully, Wagner gets one last go in this collection (in the prog half) with Greg Staples for ‘Mad City,’ a classic John spotlight on MC-1 oddballs.

Now – yeesh – the Megs, which are mostly split between Robbie Morrison and John Smith. Robbie has always been okay to me; I think he has owned certain corners of the 2000 ADverse well, but his Dredd is always pretty flat to me – just a very standard tough guy cop. Pair that with some clunky art from Cyriel Julien on ‘Web,’ and the interesting idea of a city grown in coral reef falls incredibly flat. Some poorly reprinted, muddy color (or perhaps the original printing was already poor) gets very bad on the interminably boring ‘Fetish’ from John Smith and Siku, which feels like a loooong runaround just to get Devlin Waugh up in there, and for Smith to wax fantastic about some African myths. Siku’s painted, stylized art has not much appealed to me; this is an especially poor outing, in part due to that printing – it’s really, really dark and blurry – and in part because the artist refuses to construct a page like a comic book. It’s Dave McKean, but without the professionalism of directing the reader’s eye.

We do get a slight palette cleanser from Wagner between this, another classically-style tale, focusing on the grey morality of a killer; besides that, another Morrison bit – he pulls a John Smith, roping in a preferred character by pairing Dredd with Judge Inaba in Hondo-Cit – has better, clearer art than ‘Web’ but is still a pretty dry story, and then Gordon Rennie closes things out with Enric Rebollo on ‘Zero Tolerance.’ Rennie is far from the sharp writer he’d become at this point, still finding his voice; like Flint, you can see the sparks there, but he has trouble not just doing the “Dredd’s a tuff badass” thing.

All in all, seeing as how the Megs are pretty much half this collection, and they are primarily a slog… not the best read or reread.