Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: Don’t Drokk with Bob Part Two
Credits: Ken Niemand (Script), Ian Richardson (Art), Jim Boswell (Colours), Annie Parkhouse (Letters)
Christopher Egan: A manhunt is on for Bob after the brutal display of violence he brought down on two unsuspecting, and crooked, Judges. Both the Justice Department and Mister Linnster are on the lookout as the ‘vagrant’ community Bob was defending tend to his wounds and keep him out of sight. Judge Dredd is becoming more way about hunting Bob the more he learns about his past, but continues his search. Just prior to Dredd coming across the sewer hideout, Linnster and his legion of bodyguards come across Bob and company.
The plot and action come to a head at this point, with bullets and blood spraying in nearly every panel. Niemand fills in just enough of Linnster and Bob’s history to allow us to connect the dots of their history. As the brutality grows and explodes, we get an enjoyable and open-ended finale to Don’t Drokk with Bob. Niemand does a fantastic job with handling a story that is satirical, while treating the characters and ideas seriously. There is plenty of excitement and action in this strip, but it also leaves us, and Dredd, with a lot to mull over.
Ian Richardson’s artwork is beautifully detailed and wonderfully gritty. He gets the look of the city and its constant design features. Crafting a classic Judge Dredd and Lawmaster motorbike, he gives the titular character some great hero moments. Boswell’s colors really bring out the grit and grime of Mega City that Richardson creates the base of with his line work. There is an excellent balance between the nasty sewers and lower levels of the city and the bright colors of Dredd, Linnster and his guys, and even the unhoused people’s outfits. The action sequences are all fantastic and this art team really understands storytelling through their work when dialogue is light.
The finale of ‘Don’t Drokk with Bob’ is satisfying enough and leaves things open for future strips, but it feels a little rushed over all. It’s meant to leave us thinking, and it does, but it would have been nice to get just a bit more of this story.
Devlin Waugh: The Reckoning
Credits: Aleš Kot (script), Mike Dowling (art), Quinton Winter (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: It’s a little surprising that this Devlin Waugh story has a different title than the two previous parts, as it is clearly a continuation of that story, with the same writer, same artist, same cast, and same general plot. Regardless of the title change, this is a fun next chapter in the story of a demon that feels most at home when possessing a dildo.
Aleš Kot’s script continues to have a lot of fun with the bacchanalia that surrounds Devlin. Looking for a value in a bundle, Devlin hires a Spanish soccer team to hang his paintings and also to have an orgy with. Mike Dowling illustrates Devlin grinning ear to ear while chatting with the demon Titivillus, and also while engaged in some gymnastically challenging group sex. Dowling’s Waugh is (pardon the pun) cocksure and enjoying every bit of his life, up to the point where he must betray Titivillus. That is the first point in this story that we’ve seen Devlin not doing exactly what he wants, and it manages to land an emotional punch.
You know, despite the fact that he’s crying over a dildo with a face.
Overall, this story has been a really fun one, and one that hasn’t really dug into just how evil/dangerous Titillus can be. I’m interested to see if he will continue to be a kinder, gentler demon, or if we have not yet seen his full wrath.
Diamond Dogs II: Part 2
Credits: James Peaty(script), Warren Pleese (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Matthew Blair The mission has been given, the stakes are now established, the main character has her motivation. Now all that’s left is to gather the team together to take down the bad guys on one last job.
Continued belowCue the montage music.
“Diamond Dogs II: Part 2” is the part of the story that doesn’t have a whole lot of time for emotional moments, although writer James Peaty does have some time to give the man character Nia Jones the proper motivation to get things rolling. This is a time where the story needs to move at a brisk pace to get all the players in line and in order before the real fun stuff starts. While Peaty does a good job of getting it all done efficiently, there’s really nothing new or novel about any of their motivations or reasons for joining up. There’s potential for something interesting, it’s just not going to be here.
Warren Pleese’s artwork for “Diamond Dogs II: Part 1” continues to be functional and very good at emotional close ups, but like the writing it does feel a bit boring at times. For a futuristic city filled with weird tech and culture, Pleese makes Brit-Cit look pretty similar to a city in our time with familiar looking storefronts and run down modern aesthetics. There are some moments with interesting looking aliens and a bad guy who seems to be properly weird, but we’ll have to save that for a future date.
“Diamond Dogs II: Part 2” isn’t the most exciting or interesting story, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a moment where the creators have to get everyone and everything in place so they can play around with it later, and they do it very well.
The Returners: Amazonia Part 1
Credits Si Spencer (script) Nicolo Assirelli(art) Eva De La Cruz(colours) Jim Campbell (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: “The Returners” are back, with the core creative team of Si Spencer and Nicolo Assirelli. Barrancourt, ex-Judge Minero, and Chavez were previously in Brit-Cit, now they find themselves in the jungles outside Ciudad Barranquilla, with the Law and maybe the Lord on their tale. There is a Predators(2010) disorientating quality to the start, as the trio realize they’ve been mysteriously dropped back in the Jungle. Eva De La Cruz’s is the primary source of that disorientation. Nicolo Assirelli’s paneling leaves her plenty of space to flood panels with shifting shades of green. Shades of green that rarely appear to correspond to any sort of lighting continuity, reinforcing the sense of discontinuity. Note the sudden vibrant shift in the second panel on the first page against the third. Assirelli is primarily focused on the foreground and character work in this opening strip, inking out the shapes of plant life and letting Cruz’ coloring do the rest of the work. It isn’t the prettiest to look at, but it is effective as Cruz lays down a green to yellow-green gradient in the second page that colors most of the background. That gradient shift perfectly leads the eye from background to foreground which supports Assirelli’s overall composition.
Once the trio get on their way things get a little boring. The page construction continues to be solid, though putting a shaft of light through the center of page three is distracting and a bit obvious. The issue becomes the monotony of their boat trip, these kinds of strips don’t have the luxury of that and so it becomes a wasted page. Even as that sense of tedium is contrasted with the action set piece of the episode it all fails to achieve the goal it’s supposed to be signifying.
The action set piece of the strip, a battle with a Jaguar, is a similar story. There is strong choreography and composition by Assirelli, with Cruz using color to create mood rather than spatial continuity. It just reads as haphazard. Si Spencer and the art team do achieve a couple of solid gags.
“The Returners” come back with a less than stellar start. There is clearly craft behind it, and too the creative teams credit it establishes a hint of group dynamics, the strip as an episodic unit fails to fully hook me or give new readers much of a reason to care.
The Dark Judges: Deliverance, Part Nine
Credits: David Hine (script), Nick Percival (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Rowan Grover: As “Deliverance” trudges onwards, it feels more and more like it is grasping the life that its narrative has such a focused disdain for. Out of all the characters presented to me in this book, the least that I was expecting to form a backstory was the relatively flat cult figurehead, Mother Kalula. Building on top of that, the backstory presented here feels so much like a desperate attempt to make this story feel relevant to a modern audience and neglect embracing the grim absurdity that it handled so well in the past. Do I really need to know that Mother Kalula’s death cult sprouted from memes in the 21st century? No, and the way that this is handled goes to extra lengths to alienate the audience that it is so clearly reaching for. This chapter of Deliverance, at least in its narrative form, feels like the most unashamed and unnecessary filler of the series thus far.
At the very least, Percival does a great job on art representing our contemporary era in an ethereal and heightened visual reality. The use of smudged and vibrant coloring around the streamer preaching Kalula’s death cult gives a great sense of the kind of hyper-real feel that a lot of modern streamers utilize. Sure, the character design and look of the streamer might look like an approximation of how Gen Z looks as a collective, but the way that the atmosphere is conveyed with these soft and alluring blues and purples makes it work somehow. Once we start to move to the present/future tense of the story, the colors fade to a much more desaturated palette, showing the timeshift and significant tone change, which is solid. The final reveal is also a little lackluster, though it definitely has the potential to be interesting depending on what direction Hine takes with the character narratively.
“Deliverance” brings its slightest issue yet with this prog, giving us a backstory that almost detracts from the mysterious yet absurd allure of Kalula’s death cult. I can only hope the focus tightens from here until the finish.
