3 out of 5

Yes, I bought these as a pack.  I keep seeing cool 2000 AD trades, or reading that new writers I dig are coming from the 2000 AD stables, so it makes me want to get on the ground floor and see if I can catch gems it sounds like I’ll otherwise be missing.  But as I should’ve suspected from an ongoing anthology – as this is almost the case with all ongoing anthologies – it’s a crapshoot.  It’s possible I just grabbed four so-so issues, but nothing really had me going here except for the established Dredd, and Dredd works because you don’t have to jam in backstory, you can just focus on the meat, or a new element in an established universe.  The flipside of this is something like Eerie or Creepy, which might produce mostly average issues as well, but the stories are all self-contained, so it’s a bit more satisfying.  Since 2000 AD has a habit of serializing stories over 6 or 10 issues, most of it feels too fractured.  Even up to the intro and concluding chapters, which are too isolated to have impact.

That being said, if 2000 AD was part of my local newsrack and only cost a couple bucks… I’d probably pick it up.  But my only options – until I find an easily accessible shop that does carry them – would be to go digital (for which I don’t have an ideal reader), or to buy back issues, or to order a subscription… which is over $100 American bucks a year.  In other words, this would work as something of an impulse buy, but going out of my way to get it is questionable.  Because it was incredibly easy to read, and the production qualities are awesome.  You feel like you’re part of something cool reading 2000 AD; even though the stories I read weren’t amazing, I did like that I was getting exposed to this mix of classic and new – I fully believe the promise that there’s an amazing story around the corner, but, again, it’s the investment in that promise that you have to determine whether or not it’s worth it.

I did choose, methinks, a fairly good set of four issues, as I got the concluding chapters of stories for two progs and the start of new stories for two progs.  Some Dredd tales (all of which I enjoyed, so I’m proceeding with picking up the Dredd Case Files collection), the end of a ‘Slaine’ story – which was a bit confusing for the uninitiated, but cool that I lucked into a Bizley contribution (prog 1848), end of ‘Age of the Wolf III,’ the end of the seemingly over-wrought Ten-Seconders, and then the beginning of ‘Brass Sun,’ ‘Flesh’ – an outdated-reading Dino-hunting tale from 2000 AD creator Pat Mills – the uninteresting ‘Damnation Station’ by recent Marvel transplant Al Ewing, and the start of an ‘Aquila’ tale by Gordon Rennie, who is a draw to me after reading his ‘Dept of Monsterology’ comics for Renegade.  Now more than half of those seemed like I would dig ’em if I’d read the entire serial.  But – 7.99 or whatever per issue, per week?  It’s a tough call.

So my taste of actual 2000 AD issues was pretty much what I expected, offering the same success rate as most anthologies, but with the slightly unsatisfying quirk of having the stories divided into micro-chapters.  Unlike DHP, though, which does that too, it’s weekly, which makes it easier… to spend too much money…  GAH.  Okay, get me a tablet so I can get a digital subscription, ya’ jerks.  NOW.