3 out of 5

Eternal props to editor Matt Smith for continuing to try and push 2000 AD into eyes and hands previously unforseen or held, and not through a janky overhaul, but by employing the right people to write and art the right stories, and then “simply” offering those stories to a wider audience: more trades; US-sized comics; etc.  A Beano-ized version of the mag, featuring strips we know and love in their junior versions – a cadet Dredd, a young Johnny Alpha – and made kid appropriate?  It just might work!  It just… it kinda worked.  But, hey, FCBD is a great place to try this out instead of going all in on a publishing venture, so again: more props.

The thing is, I sense that everyone wasn’t really sure at whom to aim this.  UK Kids’ humor is a bit different from US, true, so the jokes are a bit drier and less meme-ed, and we’re okay with characters drinking and saying ‘damn’ in an all ages book, which is – whatever this means – refreshing, but Neil Googe and Ben Willsher draw their Dredd / Stront (respectively) strips with what looks like comic gusto, and yet Matt Smith and Alec Worley (again, respectively) write them as straight ahead adventure strips.  Even the “factoids” at the bottom of the page seem confused, offering trivia about the old school characters that’s too blah to work as fun world- building.  So if we’re to assume that 2000 AD is enough in the cultural zeitgeist, perhaps, that the chitlins already know the gist and are just happy to get to read new entries of an “adult” character that’s now stamped with parental approval, then I really, really don’t know what to make of the Future Shocks that’s a joke on Trump, and the D.R. and Quinch that’s is 100% completely only sensical if you’ve read the characters before.

It’s a weird set of strips.

It’s a good experiment, one that I’d like to see continue, but it will likely take a few attempts to find a proper tone.