Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: Father’s Day
Credits: Rory McConville (script), Ian Richardson (art), Matt Soffe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Christa Harader: We’ve got another classic Dredd one-shot on our hands, except this time there’s not a clear moral winner when the dust clears. McConville prefers to keep us entangled in the complex and often tarnished politics of Mega-City One as Dredd seeks to clear the name his fellow judge and stop a terrorist group from taking out a significant section of the populace. There’s a high body count, some dubious moral choices and a bit of tragedy at play to wrap a solid glimpse into our bleak future. Extra kudos for Dredd’s single-minded perspective on closing ranks and protecting law and order. He’s less expressive this month, and it works.
Richardson favors page-width panels, and they work to this story’s advantage as we get to see a lot of background characters, architecture and world-building flavor. A page full of judges can exhaust the eye, but Richardson puts in good work to keep everything interesting, regimented and tense. Soffe’s color palette is a nice blend of subdued background hues and pops for Erica X’s clothing and hair, and there’s a nice silhouette panel later on with a wash of purple for a mood boost. Parkhouse’s lettering is on point, as usual, with an eye for economy and good balloon placement. A lot of these shorts go big on dialogue, but Parkhouse keeps everything rattling along so we don’t get too hung up on reading.
“Black Museum: Big Marilyn”
Laura Bailey (Script), Brian Corcoran (Art), Ellie De Ville (Letters)
Christopher Egan: The anthology of the Black Museum continues in this month’s story ‘Big Marilyn.’ The curator guides us to the next featured item. The bejeweled boots of pro wrestler, Denver ‘The Diamond Geezer’ Morane are what kick of this dark and unsettling tale. Morane was a psi who used his mental gifts to win his matches, but when his employers discover his secret they do much worse than fire him; they ensure he’ll never walk, let alone fight, again.
Paralyzed and alone, Morane realizes he can use his mind powers to bring whatever he thinks of into existence. When he gets the idea for a wrestling character, Big Marilyn, a woman with the face of a supermodel and the body of Hulk Hogan, he brings her to life and begins to train her to become a star fighter. More or less an empty shell, her thoughts and actions are totally controlled by Morane, with a few setbacks – for example, he can feel her pain. Things seem to be going great for the old fighter and his synthetic champion, but of course for their story to end up in the halls of the Black Museum, things will take a turn for the worse.
Bailey’s story is a decent one, if not a little predictable. Like any quick and twisty sci-fi plots most readers will know where this is going. Overall it is a really enjoyable read that feels like a classic creepy story and has all the trappings of a “Monkey’s Paw” scenario. Corcoran’s art does help tell the story and while there are some fun details throughout, like most stories set within Mega City One. Unfortunately, his work feels mostly incomplete. Although these short stories rely on their quick, black and white panels, this one just comes off as unfinished.
“Black Museum” continues to be a fun, horror-lite anthology that is equal parts spooky and funny. It stands on its own, but can’t quite escape the chains of what inspired it.
Diamond Dogs, Part Six
Credits: James Peaty (script), Warren Pleece (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Rowan Grover: “Diamond Dogs” reaches its finale part six with an action-packed showdown. The framing of this story is super interesting as it gives us on the front end a picture of how Nia ends up after everything but without divulging specifics, just showing her painting with slashes of red paint covering her face like warpaint. In this, Peaty cleverly lets the art do the talking to let readers speculate what might go down. The actual event has some witty back and forth between the two gangs, however, a lot of the action when the Judges intervene happens off-panel and we feel a little let down because of it. Having Nia reunite momentarily after this, but having Jimmy come back to separate them once again, plus the events that follow that I won’t spoil, feels a little like overwhelming misery porn. Also, it seems a little strange that even though Nia’s friends were facing in his direction, they didn’t warn her about Jimmy until he’d already crept up behind her and slashed.
Continued belowPleece does some good work on art here, handling larger scale and quieter scenes equally well. The opening does a lot of suggestions for the reader, as we still open on a run-down graffitied neighborhood, yet contrasting that with Nia painting makes us unsure of what to expect. In the showdown scene, Pleece also does some great work with making each member of the gang feel unique and interesting when placed under close inspection, yet without focalizing them too much so that they steal the spotlight. The sequence at the end of Jimmy attacking Nia is a little underwhelming as the characters’ movements are all fairly stiff, especially considering the dramatic nature of the brawl, but Pleece still paints them with plenty of anguish and pain.
“Diamond Dogs” end pretty well, rushing somewhat to its conclusion but giving us a very human and tragic story of loss. Peaty stumbles a bit when trying to reach the finish line, but both he and Pleece perform well overall to deliver a solid comic.
The Returners: Chandhu Part 6
Credits: Si Spencer (script), Nicolo Assirelli (art), Eva de la Cruz (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: After 4 chapters of near-nothing and a flashback chapter, we finally see some real action come to “The Returners.” Si Spencer attempts to make up for lost time by throwing a ton of action in this one strip and, while it is a more pleasant read than prior chapters, the overcompensation throws the book too far in the other direction. We get a bunch of action, and some vaguely inane bad guy chat, but at least it isn’t just wandering aimlessly anymore.
That said, the central conceit introduced in the past, ‘should the government just abandon these folks?’ is introduced again, without any additional nuance or tact. It just sort of lays there and, while technically we ‘know’ that this will happen next chapter, we also know that there’s almost no way this actually happens next chapter.
Nicolo Assirelli gets a little more to do here due to the increased action sequences, and Eva de la Cruz continues to highlight a real contrast between the placid, muted colors of the characters and their settings and the deep, dark blacks and piercing white eyes that represent the evil incarnation. This story is, likely near the end of its run, starting to feel a little more interesting, but it may very well be a ‘too little, too late’ situation.
Anderson Psi Division: The Dead Run Part Five
Credits Maura McHugh(script) Patrick Goddard(art) Pippa Mather(colors) Annie Parkhouse(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: With the fifth part of the ‘The Dead Run,’ Anderson and Corran’s Hot Dog run comes to an end. By the strips end Judge Shenker declares the run a “success,” an unknowingly ironic statement that seals and perpetuates the systemic disregard that helped to create the Wendigo mess in the first place. While I would have liked a couple of more pages the creative team end the run with the same overall consistency and execution that has been carried through this five part episode of “Anderson Psi Division.”
Patrick Goddard does a good job of creating a sense of scale to the encounter with the Wendigo. Even with the extra pages of the “Megazine” page space is at a premium, through the smart implementation of basic panels Goddard is able to create pages that sell the kaiju like size of the Wendigo and flow with the necessary energy as the Astral forms of Anderson and Corran fly around fighting it. The basic geography and staging employed in this sequence as they fly around isn’t too far off from old “Dragon Ball” whenever Goku would have to fight some large beast. The fight with the Wendigo is efficient, not the most exciting action sequence in the run but it gets the job done.
The fighting isn’t the point, it is a manifestation of the choices MegaCity One has made in their disrespect and neglect for their neighbors, citizens, and land. While that neglect has been running through the strip since the beginning, it is in this moment as other spirits join the fight that everything is tied together. The arrival of this aid is in many ways literal dues ex machina and in the more colloquial sense of the phrase. It isn’t very elegant but is also the kind of storytelling you often find in these strips.
By the end of the strip Judge Shenker is calling the run a success. Sure Cadet Kaeja remains unconscious, others are mentally frazzled, but they did technically all survive. It is an ironic statement that helps to underline how the disregard got so bad. Shenker isn’t the only one to be made to look foolish or called out by the strip, Judge Anderson is also shown to be culpable. In the aftermath angered at what the interloping Witch who set this whole thing in motion has caused to her squad, she declares that “we always care for our own.” Which is the problem, she is part of a system that dehumanizes and disregards those that do not fall into rigid compliance and in doing so the world around them is corrupted by this inhumanity. Anderson is often seen as the lighter side of Dredd, the more compassionate one, and historically that is a fair comparison. But it has its limits and “The Dead Run” helps to show the limit of that comparison.
