Judge Dredd Megazine 421 Featured Columns 

Multiver-City One: Judge Dredd Megazine 421 – End of Watch!

By , , and | June 17th, 2020
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.

Cover by Simon Coleby and Len O'Grady

Judge Dredd: The Fugitive
Credits: Rory McConville (script), Staz Johnson (art), Jim Boswell (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Brian Salvatore: Reading a Dredd story has always been about confronting an outsider’s view of the US justice system, but reading a Dredd story in the past few weeks has been tough, even though nothing has fundamentally changed. “The Fugitive” is an interesting take on the Dredd story because it does three things, simultaneously. It shows the Mega-City One Judges to be largely incompetent, it shows that this is known throughout other cities, and it also shows that they are not always upfront about how, exactly, they are handling their business. The force are depicted as a group that is both cruel and bad at what they do. Again, it’s tough to read this right now.

Staz Johnson does a really nice job at showing Judge Calvin’s frustration through his body language and facial expressions, never showing Calvin anything less than bothered, and usually much closer to pissed off. Rory McConville’s script is nuanced, and does a good job of blurring the line between incompetence and malfeasance in the Mega-City One department. The strip covers a fair amount of emotional ground in a relatively small package, and leaves the reader asking a lot of questions.

The Vigilant: Rapture
Credits: Simon Furman (script), Simon Coleby (art), Len O’Grady (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)

Michael Mazzacane: This set of “Vigilant” specials comes to a close with ‘Rapture.’ This is an interesting strip to think about in the context of the Megazine, it has been a story that was building for quite some time across various strips and specials. That build is something I am not familiar with at all, although there is a feature before this strip that is worth reading for the uninitiated. It is an interesting example of how these one-off strips can build and build, but due to their infrequent publication following the thread appears to be hard. It is also interesting to see how this is a team story which is a rarity.

Overall the creative team makes an engaging and solid strip even if the dramatic build and interpersonal drama is largely lost on me. It starts with an engaging enough en media res like opening and the promise of the Blood Rapture before working its way back. Furman makes good use of the page as a storytelling unit jumping back six hours before the supposed start to the End of Days and using the subsequent pages to count down at about an hour a page. This gives him plenty of freedom to jump around to random moments and slowly build these tiny moments into something bigger. It’s really smart comic writing.

Simon Coleby and Len O’Grady get a lot of mileage out of basic page designs. There isn’t anything eXtreme or fancy about it. Every page is a pretty standard puzzle of squares and rectangles. This helps with readability but they cram every inch of the page with texture and stuff that the pages themselves have this complicated appearance. Coleby’s art and O’Grady’s use of color, in particular the reds, is eye-catching and makes you take your time. Coleby’s use of black ink is fascinating; he has a lot of texture to objects but instead of using hatch marks round circles sort of blot everything. He also makes some good Kirby Crackle in one panel. It all adds some novel texture to character designs that are fairly standard or straight forward, despite their punkish and ramshackle costuming. I don’t know a lot about any of these characters but they make me interested in them.

‘Vigilant: Rapture’ isn’t the most new reader friendly strip. However it does the thing publishers hope for, I’m now curious about hunting down the previous stories and thanks to the feature before the strip I know where to look in the store.

Blunt III, Part Seven
Credits: T.C. Eglington (script), Boo Cook (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

Continued below

Rowan Grover: The latest installment of “Blunt III” shows some slowing down in pacing in favour of some lore building, which seems counter-intuitive to what makes the series so fun. The opening starts off bombastic and looks like it will be leaning way more into the monster/body horror aspect of the series, with the predator creature having absorbed so much of the ship’s crew. It’s especially terrifying having one of the crew try to lean out of the convulsing body mass and warn a nearby man with crutches, with that little added note of dark humor the series always holds onto. However, from there, we’re slowed down by a lot of dialogue from Conrad, which is less interesting. It does have a nice emotional beat when Blunt is trying to reason with him, but still feels a lot slower going than it should be.

Cook has some great frantic energy in this prog as usual, yet his facial work feels a little more rushed than I would like. The swirling body mass of the predator on the first page is visually striking and a great way to catch any unsuspecting scanning readers, especially with the inhuman glows that punctuate it’s features. However, the next few pages feature most of the characters with the same solemn, serious facial expressions, which don’t work as well on other characters as they do for Blunt. There’s hints of a space dogfight in between these slow dialogue sequences, but they are few and far between and feel like more of a tease than anything. The ending pages are pretty solid, especially with the predator exploding and infecting crew members, who are appropriately terrified, but the very last shot just goes back to the same, stony expressions, leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

This installment of “Blunt” is a lot slower and feels unpolished, however the series has built up so much good momentum that I’m still interested to see where it goes, regardless of how this chapter stands quality-wise.

Lawless Boom Town: 07
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Phil Winslade (art), Jim Campbell (letters)

Matthew Blair: While the initial confrontation with the wasteland mutants and monsters is over, there’s still quite a bit of intrigue in Badrock, and in “Lawless Boom Town: 07” we get to start seeing it all play out.

Writer Dan Abnett used the last installment of the story to showcase some very good action, the challenge of “Lawless Boom Town: 07” is to now calm things down a bit and get the reader re engaged in the town politics and intrigue. Abnett signifies this tonal shift with, what else, a cabaret number with dancers, lights, and a kick line. However, after the show is over, Abnett re introduces the tension between the Marshal and the Special Branch judges, a man who is able to transfer his mind to a young boy, and introduces a new player in town in the form of a very imposing and taciturn criminal. It’s not a time for deep character development or action, but it does a good job of reminding the readers of unresolved plot threads while introducing new ones.

While artist Phil Winslade used the last installment of the story to showcase his ability to draw action, “Lawless Boom Town: 07” is a bit more of a challenge since he has to make the seemingly mundane aspects in the town interesting. While the big performance at the beginning helps make the artwork engaging, Winslade’s work shines yet again in showing the characters reacting to the events developing around them. While the story has everyone plotting, scheming, and reacting to the realization that the people around them might not have their best interests at heart, Winslade zooms in on all of their faces and really makes the audience feel what is going on in their head. Plus, he seems to have done his research and is very good at drawing old timey cabaret costumes.

“Lawless Boom Town: 07” is a nice little breather from the heavy and violent action of the last couple of issues. However, just because the bad guys are dead doesn’t mean that there aren’t any problems left to be solved. In fact, it seems like they’re just beginning.


//TAGS | Multiver-City One

Brian Salvatore

Brian Salvatore is an editor, podcaster, reviewer, writer at large, and general task master at Multiversity. When not writing, he can be found playing music, hanging out with his kids, or playing music with his kids. He also has a dog named Lola, a rowboat, and once met Jimmy Carter. Feel free to email him about good beer, the New York Mets, or the best way to make Chicken Parmagiana (add a thin slice of prosciutto under the cheese).

EMAIL | ARTICLES

Matthew Blair

Matthew Blair hails from Portland, Oregon by way of Attleboro, Massachusetts. He loves everything comic related, and will talk about it for hours if asked. He also writes a web comic about a family of super villains which can be found here: https://tapas.io/series/The-Secret-Lives-of-Villains

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Michael Mazzacane

Your Friendly Neighborhood Media & Cultural Studies-Man Twitter

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Rowan Grover

Rowan is from Sydney, Australia! Rowan writes about comics and reads the heck out of them, too. Talk to them on Twitter at @rowan_grover. You might just spur an insightful rant on what they're currently reading, but most likely, you'll just be interrupting a heated and intimate eating session.

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