4 out of 5

Concluding chapters of the past few weeks meh tales, penultimate chapters of the good’uns, two excellent new additions.

Dredd – Dark Justice.  The Dark Judges unleashed on a space cruise ship.  As usual, I have to hand it to Wagner for figuring out how to almost always know how to make the decades old Dredd’s battles exciting.  Here, by following some in-universe logic to get JD and a small crew to the ship, Wagner then spins the gears and isolates the team there with little hope of rescue, and little ammo to spare.  Greg Staples has also, of course, managed to blow away my general dislike of painted art: not only are his action scenes full of awesome (my normal complaint with painted comic art: too static), but his character shots are imbued with just enough un-realism to keep them out of that gross uncanny valley of, say, Alex Ross, where it’s too clear that someone posed for a shot.  I don’t know if it’s just the artist warming to the pacing, Wagner warming to the artist, or perhaps the shift from the more sterile city / ship sequences to some agricultural backgrounds and chaos as the crew moves through different areas of the ship and plot, all / none of the above… who knows.  Either way.  It’s awesome.

Ulysses Sweet concludes – glad this one-gag strip has ended.  Unexciting art, a chuckle-worthy “I’m violent and crazy!” bit repeated with slightly off-pacing.

Orlok concludes.  The ending of this was actually pretty good, pulling some impressive (if “let me explain it to you”-heavy) switcheroos, and Jake Lynch’s moody art really elevated the vibe.  Overall, though, the thrill is unbalanced by having to play its cards too close to get to where it needed to, and it has quite a few extra characters tossed in for its short five parts.

The Order.  Kek-W is sort of stalling, filling us in on the worm invasion, but the just-steampunk-enough world of The Order is still fresh and fun, John Burns art a wonderful ‘classic’ touch that also assists in grounding the tale.  It’s pretty awesome when you have a small troupe of unbalanced old men as part of your main crew and you can individually identify each of them by look and dialogue, despite their designs being somewhat similar at a surface level.  This, in general, speaks to the strength of what these creators have done with a new property, and the blending of sci-fi space-time stuff with the olden understanding of it is a gas.  There’s tons of potential here, and I’m pretty certain it won’t be squandered.

Savage – Grinders.  Pat Mills finally gets to where he’s going, with Bill Savage having to confront his thought-dead brother’s involvement with another resistance.  The slow steps tracing Bill’s history to get to this point turn out to be necessary to show how interestingly nuanced the position of this man is in the world of Savage.  While Mills still leans a bit too heavy on obvious politics for my taste, Grinders has enough different moving pieces to keep Mills distracted from preaching for too long, which actually allows the story to feel meatier.

In progs 1918 and 1919, Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby start Survival Geeks, a strip apparently resurrected from years ago about some dorks dimensional traveling to right wrongs.  It’s all self-aware – they land on a Lovecraft / Steampunk world and roll their eyes – and drawn with wonderful Phillip Bondy exuberance by Neil Googe.  The pages are hilarious, and full of wonderful characterizations.

A 3Riller also starts up in the same progs – Station to Station by Eddie Robson and Darren Douglas.  Eddie has recently been appearing on shorts of this nature, and they’ve been pretty quality; very well-honed short-story writing skills.  Station concerns a Muslim refugee who’s at ground zero of an alien invasion that’s taken over the London Underground.  For some reason, she’s immune to their control, and is attempting to help the military forces set things straight…