The expected midpoint lull. Sometimes Tharg can avoid this by staggering his stop / starts of thrills, but everything has to wind down at the same time for prog 2000, so these issues have had to put us at the same approximate narrative point in each story, which is either the calm before the storm or the wading before the pool lets out, depending on how into the story you are. Which is where luck of the draw affects things: Are you into the current batch of thrills or not? …And strong starts for titles / writers that don’t often grab me have given way to middles that… aren’t grabbing me.
Dread continues dealing with PJ Maybe in Ladykiller, so named as the madman has been cross-dressing about town. While this doesn’t have the same feeling as a Wagner epic, John has kept the tone of this tale tight, and Ezquerra’s art has seemed especially vibrant, pages and panels packed but instantly readable and directing the eye with perfection. Definitely a highlight, and excitingly promising a temporary conclusion to Maybe stuff. Some fun “guest stars” pop up here.
Scarlet Traces continues, jumping – hastily, I might add – out secret mission to Venus with our two leads… doing something. Letter writers seem pleased this title is back, and I was intrigued by the post-War of the Worlds setup, and D’Israeli’s art is sincerely quite amazing on these thrills, somehow even more inventive than his prior work, without having to rely on over-stylization. But, as my comment above suggests, I’ve had this issue with Ian Edginton’s writing in the past, where it feels like his stories just lurch into their second act, and I completely lose the thread of who’s doing What and Why. It’s a weird feeling because it’s not written poorly at all, and, like, you can sense there’s something cool going on, but whatever linking thread that’s missing makes it hard to get engaged.
Black Shuck, a title I’d previously loathed, had fared better in its second arc by framing it with a historical lens and giving the story a bit more focus, but the ending completely bombs it. This was about Shuck not wanting his children to carry on his legacy, and then the last chapter was about, like… ending the story as quickly as possible. The conclusion hardly felt connected to what came before. It was very odd, but at least allows me to not have to reassess the previous Shuck tale.
This is replaced by an excellent 3riler from Rory McConville and Colin MacNeil concerning a war being fought via “mindbombs”, which can he defused by essentially incepting into the person’s thoughts. Which is an over-simplification of a really cool and uniquely expressed idea, which is perfectly paced and evolved over its three episodes.
This is in turn replaced by a new Jaegir tale, which is only one entry so far so no opinion yet except to say: Yay!
Outlier enters into the treading water territory as Jess and Captain Luthra find a way to work with Caul to combat the suddenly-close Hurde threat. I’m liking the potential here, and the focus on non-alpha males; there’s even a nice story twist that should’ve been obvious but is pulled off well. But there’s been something fairly generic about the Hurde saga (maybe partially to do with Karl Richardson’s 90s-comic style art) that makes it hard to get excited about things. I reserve opinion for the story’s conclusion.
…And an Anderson / Flowers mystery with very Ian Gibson-influenced art from Nick Dyer. Gotta love Anderson, and I like her new recruit Flowers. Writer Beeby is hit or miss with me, and that’s how these read. She takes a bit to put her pieces into place, concerning a political assassination attempt, buy once we’re there, the intrigue starts to ratchet up effectively. Eager to see where it goes.
Hopefully the imminent 2000th prog won’t overshadow these thrills’ endings…
vaguely-offensive 