3 out of 5

Highs and Mehs.

A nice mixed bag of mostly one-shot Dredds, but we’re ALL super happy because a lot of this is scripted by current 2000 AD madman Rory McConville.  There’s the utterly bizarre Platinum Wednesday, which unfortunately isn’t as satisfying as its seemingly sentient sale setup would suggest, but it’s still fun and wonderfully Dreddy deadpan; Eglington’s somewhat mean-spirited (though, again, absolutely Dredd-y stone-faced) Collateral Damage with some great Nick Dyer art; Rory on Defrosted, which is a brilliantly winky look at millenials adjusting to post-cryofreeze life in the Meg; Rory again on the two-part Innerspace-y twist Contrabandits, also paired with awesomely (icky) art from Leigh Gallagher; and finally another Krong story kick-off from Wyatt and Lynch, which just makes me wish I liked Wyatt’s sense of pacing better because Krong is such a fun character.

Alan Grant and Paul Davidson’s Anderson stuff continues to drag somewhat pointlessly on with NWO – a hunt in the Meg for the psychic kid from that underground rebel group – and finally wraps up in 390, replaced by a Black Museum tale (a chuckley fake news riff from McConville – god bless this man who is everywhere in the Meg lately – and Neil Googe) and then the start of a Judge Koburn tale by… McConville!  …AND EZQUERRA!  Ah, a fantastic pair.  Obviously I didn’t get much mileage out of this particular Anderson run, but the Koburn replacement is encouraging.

The Nu-Iceland tale HAVN ended in 387, to which I breathed another sigh of relief: Spencer and Flint never really established a set concept to reel me in on that.  It’s replacement: A fantastically fun Devlin Waugh (!) tale by RORY and Michael Dowling.  Dowling’s sort of wide open art is a good match for the tale, which has Devlin traveling to an underwater prison to break out his bro, as it communicates a sense of scope to the setting which might otherwise have been difficult to display.

Another Lawless arc begins in 390.  Most of us are rightfully in love with Abnett’s and Winslade’s streak on this character, though I feel like the Badrock vs. Munce war has maybe been dragging on a bit too long.  However, Abnett may agree, as the scuffle comes to a(-nother) head here and it’s a showcase for Winslade’s detailing and Abnett’s similar attention-to-detail world building.

So all of that is pretty good to better than good, but weighing us back down to three stars are the two other entries: Dredd movie world stuff – which I just can’t get into – following up on the tech guy from the film, post jail release.  I don’t know exactly why I’m not wooed by these thrills, although we do tend to get writers who don’t do much for me (Wyatt and di Campi here) and I guess I just felt like the pared down movie version made sense for the movie but doesn’t effectively fill up a comic like the other 2000 AD worlds.  This version of Dredd – as in the character – (in print) bores me.

…Aaand, sad to say, the Wagner-scripted Dark Judges return of Dominion.  That writer and that topic should sing, but it’s again a pairing that ruins it for me, as I’m simply not sold on Nick Percival’s sequential art.  It’s muddy, and it never feels like there’s any action, dragging the reading down to a freakin’ crawl.  I wish it were otherwise, and I recognize that some readers are loving this, but… I dunno, painted comic art just so rarely works for me.

The text pieces have been really fascinating as of late, especially with the IPC purchase, leading to a lot of interesting retrospectives, and those contained in these issues (along with the usual interviews) are, for the textually-inclined of us, worthwhile additions.