3 out of 5

Highlight: the return of Eddie Robson on another Tharg’s Thrillers.  The dude must’ve been storing up a cache of crazy ideas that’s he’s been masterfully distilling down to short format.  In ‘Commercial Break’ – which will conclude with next month’s progs – what starts out as a maybe mind-controlling tale about a TV ad that seems to have mesmerized some local younguns very quickly expands in a completely unique and unexpected direction.

Otherwise we get some shorter tales that feel like waiting games, excepting Wagner / Ezquerra’s Strontium Dog, which is just sort of stable fun.

Waggy does double duty on Dredd, following up on an alien weapon that had a story in the Meg; it’s a pretty standard Law Above All Else Dredd bit, but we get Richard Elson on art whose 2000 AD work I’ve seen is very rich and meaty.  Orlok concludes, and unfortunately the ending does nothing to swing the tale back to the exciting first few progs – it’s just a couple of pages that rattles to its finale as quick as possible, seeming too much like an afterthought.  Slaine continues to not be interesting to me (and I just cannot keep track of who Slaine is fighting or why), though Simon Davis gets the chance to do one prog of all bloody beheadings, chopped up into big three-panel splash pages.  Visual fun; forever not my cup of story tea.  Mark Harrison probably absolutely read my review regarding his art on Grey Area, as the last few entries here are cleaned up significantly – or at least the main characters finally stand out from the muddy backgrounds.  But Dan Abnett’s tale is maddening: he dropped us in an exciting place, an alien Grey Area, but refuses to move the plot forward, delivering these tiny arcs that build to nothing.  This should’ve resolved this chapter of the God Head attack, but instead we get more of the team sequestering resources for the attack.  If these were presented as a long-form story, it would work, but chopped up as such it’s a momentum killer.  To be fair, perhaps I should blame Tharg – maybe Abnett has it all ready to go and our alien editor is shuffling things around for his jumping-on issues.  Harumph.

As I’ve said before – an average batch.  But average 2000 AD is worth the cover price versus yer average Marvel or DC rag.