2 out of 5

Either in a rush to end the story before Starlord merged with 2000 AD or due to Hebden realizing he had written himself into a direction of the story that made very little sense, Mind Wars mostly tanks in its latter half, stalling and stalling before giving up with what amounts to our character of interest – the mindly-powered Ardeni – shrugging off everything that’s occurred.

Alan Hebden again brings in some interesting ideas – a junkyard planet under rule of a hypnotizing bird; the potentially fascinating evolution of Ardeni’s powers during a tense escape from Jugla capture – but it keeps butting up against the intrinsic flaw of the story: that it’s really not clear what the Jugla were thinking by giving Ardeni her psychic skills, and why they can’t use that same technology in some more effective way.  Instead, Hebden just keeps us spinning: she got her powers; now Earth wants her to help them; now Jugla wants to destroy her; she’s off on her own mission…

It gets especially puzzling when the Jugla do create another being, but that’s when the story starts to go massively downhill, even tossing in some good ol’ amnesia, because that’s a reliable story trope.

Halfway through, either the printing quality got better or Redondo figured out he shouldn’t be inking himself so blotchily, as the art issues massively clean up, and you can really appreciate more of the detailing.  Hugely distracting from this boon, though, is the lettering from P. Bensberg, which is cluttered almost to the point of being illegible.

The ending lands so immediately it’s almost humorous, and the way it gets rerouted does suggested Hebden maybe had more effective plans for fleshing this out a bit more, but as-is, the interesting bits started in the first half are squandered.