2 out of 5

Well, this was better than the last Karyn outing I read, also by John Freeman and artist Adrian Salmon, in a similar Sin City-esque b&w negative art style (or attempted style), and I credit that to Freeman’s story.  …Re-confirming that Salmon’s art, at least at this point, undermines most momentum because you can’t tell what the fuck is going on.  So we got vampires, and exorcist judges, and Psi-judge Karyn (who’s lacking in any real notable traits as far as I can tell, making her a contrast to most of the Judges who get their own books) discovering that the vamps have rebuilt New York under Meg-City One, feeding off of criminals and hoping to stay under the radar.  But one vamp, of course, breaks the rules, thus drawing the Judges attentions and, eventually, the wrath of Dredd.  The intro to our story feels a bit slipshod and rushed – Karyn is bit, she guides the strike team to hunt the vamps – but once we’re underground thinks shape up into that boiled down sci-fi that 2000 AD does really well.  Again, though, whenever the action ramps up, Salmon’s black and white stylization just can’t cut it; as long as the panels are talking heads, it looks pretty cool.  Unfortunately, most of the important stuff happens when people are involved in fisticuffs, so with the art an uphill battle to discern, it dilutes the desire to get involved in the story.  Womp womp.

However… I believe this tale was written in 1989.  When we jump ahead to a one-and-done that was made in 1994 (‘Beautiful Evil’), Salmon’s art has sharpened.  The action is cleaner (there’s more details in the panels) and we get a nice gray tone that breaks up the page a bit as Karyn takes to the astral plane to fight something something.  It even ends with a silly one-liner.  Also done in 1994 is the color, two-parter ‘Cabal.’  The color helps a lot, and Salmon’s framing is still an improvement over 1989, but now we can flip the blame to writer Freeman, as there’s an intense amount of hopping around from character to character in this piece – which revolves around the summoning of evil guy Asmodeus – and then the actual battle that consumes the latter half of the two-parter seems entirely like a MacGuffin to just advance the plot of the exorcist judges.  Maybe.  Either way, the story itself feels pretty pointless and without focus.

Lastly, randomly, page-fillingly, a Judge Hershey oner by Alan Grant, Doug Braithwaite and Dave Elliott.  The art is fantastic (really a classic 2000 AD look) and the story is 100% average.  Not in a bad way, it’s just exactly the kind of straight-forward piece on which the mag was built.  Good stuff to cap the book with, though there’s really no reason for it to be here.