Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: Brain Drain
Credits Rory McConville (script) Staz Johnson (art) Chris Blythe (colours) Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: ‘Brain Drain’ is a pretty standard one shot “Dredd” strip. The Judges find themselves on the hunt for the supplier of a new brain enhancing drug EZPZ, which offers up specific knowledge one pill at a time. In an era where preppy rich kids buy ADHD meds from people, the basis for the strip has just the potential for an effective extrapolation into grimdark reality. Yet, writer Rory McConville and artist Staz Johnson’s work lacks the flair or grimdark excess to make a real statement. ‘Brain Drain’ is about as normal a procedural Dredd strip can be. There isn’t anything technically wrong with it, there just isn’t that much to chew on either.
This safe quality is partly due to the perspective in the strip, we’re always with the Judges as they investigate the growing drug use. While that procedural element provides some of the strips best pages as a Judge goes into a dealers mind, depicted by Johson and colorist Chris Blythe as a surrealist journey. The strip treats the Judges as straight forward law enforcement and that doesn’t quite sit right.
There’s no real sense of ‘why’ the drug use is popular or how rampant and corrosive it’s supposed to be. One flunking student cricket batting down a judge leading into a riot sequence turns everything up to 11 too fast before ending as quick as it began. The riot sequence as a whole feels like a missed opportunity to work out what campus protests, and the types it would gather, would be like as the Judges martial their forces on campus. Staz Johnson crowd work is overall solid, and his paneling in that sequence is well done.
The finale and punch line reveal of the suppliers high on their own supply also reads safe. It’s a solid humor spot, but is the one you’d expect and the kind of moment that could’ve added a little twist to proceedings with how the strip had used narration.
The Returners, Irmazhina, Part Six
Credits: Si Spencer (script), Nicolo Assirelli(art), Eva de la Cruz (Colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Kent Falkenberg: Immortality… Gift or curse? It’s that riddle that’s the crux of Si Spencer and Nicolo Assirelli’s conclusion of “The Returners.” And what started off with a few wobbly missteps closes out strong.
‘Irmazhina, Part Six’ hones in on the nature of the strip’s wraith and what this actually means for the 4 unfortunate souls that have been descending deeper and deep within her unholy temple. These people haven’t just returned from death, they’ve been inescapably torn from it. “Till you are dust on the wind, blown into the hair of lovers kissing, stoppering the ears of newborn babies, blinding the eyes of mariners lost at sea, choking in the lungs of soldiers, saints, and sinners alike. And every mote alive and aware for all eternity,” Irmazhina bellows. “Immortal.”
It’s poetic, albeit a little heavy handed, but carries the perfect weight as Assirelli’s art sprawls out across a two-page spread that uses the wraith’s grisly backwards visage to split an image of a skeleton fading into dust with her own dreadlocks coiling out into the darkness like the tentacles of some Lovecraftian horror.
Overall, “Irmazhina, Part Six’ finishes with a surging flourish that makes the whole strip truly feel like a pilot season. Assirelli’s art has had a wonderfully sinister and unsettling quality since day one. It’s fantastic to see that after wondering astray at times, Spencer scripting has finally found a way to keep up to the art’s mesmerizing pace.
Devlin Waugh: Kiss Of Death, Part Three
Credits: Rory McConville (script), Mike Dowling(art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Rowan Grover: McConville delivers a totally unexpected twist in the best possible way in the ending to “Kiss Of Death”. Mercury serves as a perfect POV character in this instance, waking up groggy back to the story at hand with no idea as to what’s going on like us ourselves. Instead of facing down the Fifth of Aac, Mercury and Waugh seem to be fighting for their lives with warrior monks on a floating inverted pyramid. McConville gets Waugh perfectly, who’s taking things very much in stride with a degree of seriousness and comedy to balance. However, it’s the pacing and character work in Mercury that really work for me in this issue. Everything goes so fast, with high concepts very briefly explained to him, that in the end, it’s easy to see why he falls for Waugh who has truly taken him on a momentous date. Like Mercury, our reading hearts are both flustered and aflutter, and McConville nails that with the script and character work.
Continued belowMike Dowling brings his usual aesthetic of soft realism and detailed sci-fi extravagance. From the first page where we fade from black to total chaos, we can see Dowling has a good handle on panel composition, where the fade from black panels start to become slowly more filled with detail before letting loose a full page spread of dynamically angled Waugh vs Monk action. I love the classic action movie shots here too, like Mercury clutching to a fearless Waugh, and the high-tension moment where they jump from the pyramid to a giant flying manta ray, which is perfectly stretched out over four or so panels to give suitable drama to the sequence. The colors work really well here too, shifting from the dark undergrounds of last issue to a triumphant royal blue palette. It’s very grandiose, and looks perfect highlighted by the neon lasers of gunfire and force fields.
McConville and Dowling deliver a perfectly paced short Devlin Waugh story in “Kiss of Death”. It’s a great examination of the character through a different set of eyes, and delivers unexpected but super satisfying twists.
Chopper: Wandering Soul, Part 5
Credits David Baillie (script), Len O’Grady & Brendan McCarthy (art), Ellie De Ville (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Like a Kaiju monster movie, which must have been the inspiration for this finale, ‘Wandering Soul’ part five has a very pendulum swinging sort of feeling. The nukes fired at the end of last chapter, luckily for Oz and the characters, are be almost immediately neutralized by the Kai-Judges. David Baillie the gives us a back and forth as solutions seem to present themselves which fail to whatever extent until the Cleverman Karadji Wally uses his stashed “tech”-didgeridoo to summon Kaiju spirits from the Dreamtime to save the day. In the end it’s not all good as the victory most notably cost his apprentice Kaiya’s life. Baillie avoided much of my worries of Chopper being the white savior but the loss of the Cleverman to be had more an emotional impact in me then it did on Wally. The best part of this finale much be the running commentary being given by the Oz Judge who finally runs out of technobabble as the aboriginal spirits win the day. The final page with Chopper entering the Dreamtime leaves me to wonder if the scene was meant to mean anything deeper, but I suppose any further meaning will come with his next appearance.
The pages delivered by Len O’Grady and Brendan McCarthy have a movie storyboard feeling to them. There is a good feeling of motion to the story visually if the panels are a bit looser then the last few parts. Though a few of the faces are a bit same-y feeling, I did feel the emotional impact in the story, they communicated emotion very well. Also I don’t know if others get this but something an art team can make you imagine the voices and the sound effects and this chapter did that a couple times this week. Though I had a bit of a pendulum swing in how much I enjoyed this story overall it’s a damn solid comic adventure and the ending was thoroughly enjoyable.
Strange Brigade, Part 2
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Tiernen Trevallion (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Tom Shapira: Well, this is it. Not much of a story; just an introduction to a concept that will soon pop up in a video game. It’s done well enough, I suppose. Gordon Rennie and Annie Parkhouse are utter professionals and Tiernen Trevallion is a really good 2000AD style artist who should get some higher profile gigs – not only can he do a decent creature feature he can play up the British stuffiness without overdoing it, it’s a fine line and he walks it with some grace. But in the end of the day there’s just very little meat to what’s going on. The characters are neither deep nor broad – they’re just there to full a line-up of team roster (the smart one, the big one, the tough chick etc.) – and the plot leads to some generic doomsday badguy rising up who must be stopped before he does his badguy stuff.
The writing attempts to cover up the generic nature of the story, and I assume both the plot and the limited space are things Gordon Rennie had been given with rather than chosen, by playing the narration for laughs; the caption boxes engaging directly with the reader and celebrate their own over-the-top nature. It’s a nice enough touch, a dash of personality akin to something like early Terry Pratchett or Tom Holt, but it’s not as funny as it thinks it is and even within two short chapters the joke begins to drag.
Some nice art aside this strip feels like filler.
