3 out of 5

An amazing descent and ascent in Lawless from Abnett – I should’ve had faith, but I was initially doubting the direction Dan was going! – and a mostly solid set of Storm Warnings butt up against a wandering Blunt entry and an interminable Dark Judges.

But first… a slew of pretty great Dredds, mostly singles to, perhaps, counter the ten part Lawless and DJ.  Wagner gives us a sharp political jab with ‘The Trouble With Harry,’ Henry Flint and Annie Parkhouse masterfully showing us how to jam-pack engaging pages with tons of wordles, and a great, cold color job from Chris Blythe.  Rory McConville and Clint Langley do a classic one-er with superpowered teens; later, (#405 and #406), Rory and Dan Cornwell do a two-parter with an imposing baddie and mutated, bloody violence-enacting, plants.  Alex di Campi and Mack Chater swirl around some tuff guy tropes with the entertaining undercover romp, ‘Riot in Iso-Block 9;’ then di Campi returns with Patrick Goddard for an amusingly grim XMas murder mystery.  Arthur Wyatt and Jake Lynch (in #404 and #409) begin the next phase of their Dredd work with some interesting connections to both a past Dredd character and, more surprisingly to me, their previous Krong tale; and Kenneth Niemand and Nick Dyer send Dredd to The Cursed Earth to rescue an embittered judge in ‘The Crazy.’  Ten full issues of good Dredds is a lot of good will.

…So to keep the scales even, David Hine and Nick Percival give us the Dark Judges tale The Torture Garden, which Hine gives an admittedly interesting quirk to – with Judge Fear finding an appreciation for a particular type of sadistic- or deathly-themed literature by a quick-thinking captive – but Percival’s painted art just sits on drab backgrounds, and the story amounts to ten issues of boring Dark Judge vamping.  There are some twists and turns thrown in there, via wishy-washy alliances amongst the good guys sent in to save the day, but the story, overall, doesn’t gel with the Judges most frightening aspects: that they’re not serial killers, but rather judges who kill in the belief that life is a crime.  So when ‘The Torture Garden’ has them setting up a game that kills the losers and stays execution for the survivors, it feels like a weird stalling / narrative tactic to just fill space.

I’m not even sure what to say about Blunt, from T.C. Eglington and Boo Cook.  I generally like when we explore Mega City-adjacent stuff in the Dreddverse, and alien planet Gentri on which this takes place should offer up a bunch of options for wild visuals, but no characters of interest or storylines that actually grab me have emerged from any of the Blunt entries, and this one especially: there’s a kidnapping, and drugged hallucinations, and big battles, and yet, from issue to issue I never felt much like anything was happening, with Cook’s bubbly art making even the psychedelic freakouts all look rather similar.

Leah Moore and John Reppion start off the first of a couple Storm Warning arcs with Jimmy Broxton on art for ‘Over My Dead Body,’ an interesting body-swapped spirit puzzler that escalates well, despite Broxton incredibly distracting computer-touched ghost effects, which layer translucence on the panel in a way that never makes the images ever really feel part of the story.  Tom Foster steps in to ground things for Green and Pleasant Land, which, in some funny symmetry with the Dredd tale, features some killer, possessed plants.

Lawless.  Dan somehow escalates the Munce war to the Nth degree, then seems to wheedle out of it with a flash forward, then seems to double wheedle out of that with…  Well, saying that would be telling too much, but Abnett and Phil Winslade end up making this in to the best Lawless arc yet, deepening the emotional core of the story and the character development and ties, somehow setting things up for an even more intriguing next arc.  So glad this is continuing.

The usual batch of interviews and promo pieces fill things out, though the Meg has settled in to a sweet spot with these, highlighting interesting new projects and finding outliers with interesting histories for their interviews.