Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Credits: Rory McConville (Script), Staz Johnson (Art), Pippa Bowland (Colours), Annie Parkhouse (Letters)
Christopher Egan: Part 2 drops us right where we left off last time and never stops running. Dredd is still on the scene of Judge Francisco’s disappearance, the abduction has spread to the news networks, the Justice Department is doing everything they can to save the Judge and stop the group responsible.
The chapter is a full tilt chase. Dredd in pursuit, Control giving him as much detail as they can, and Chief Judge Grant tailing his own suspect.
McConville writes a competent story, giving us just enough information to keep things rolling, focusing on conversations rather than larger exposition dumps. It’s a good chapter overall, picking up some of the threads from part 1, while keeping plenty out of sight for future chapters.
Staz Johnson’s work on this is excellent, crafting a lot of characters over just ten pages. It’s all handled wonderfully with a lot of detail. Smaller moments are actually given larger pages and panels to let us fall into them whereas bigger action and more tense scenes are squeezed in to multiple panels, even shrinking them down to their most minimalistic parts in some cases. The artwork is already excellent on its own, but the page and panel design, while nothing new, is used to great effect. The artwork as a whole really brings up the entire chapter.
The colors at play here work perfectly for this story as well. While a fairly wide palette is used, Bowland really works with light and shadow to expand the looks even further. And it changes from panel to panel and scene to scene. The craft works so well. The entire chapter looks great and while tied back to part 1, does have a style all it’d own as the story moves forward.
Action and an awesome art team are what truly keeps this week’s arc moving with only a few new details and a cliffhanger ending to keeping things interesting for what’s to come.
Credits: James Peaty(script), Warren Pleese (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Matthew Blair: “Diamond Dogs II: Part 4” has it all: parties, intrigue, snide gossip, and creepy Frenchmen hitting on English ladies and suffering the consequences.
Yep, it’s a British comic set in a British setting alright.
James Peaty continues to move the plot of the larger story along at a very rapid pace in “Diamond Dogs II: Part 4” and while quick and efficient storytelling is mostly a good thing, in this particular case it’s a bit of a drag. To be clear, Peaty does a very good job of using limited space to move the pieces around and deliver an absolute bombshell of a cliffhanger that will definitely make readers want to see what happens next, but there are moments and certain character actions that take place in this part of the story where the reader could have greatly benefited from a little more explanation and set up.
Warren Pleese’s artwork adds a bit more color and some crazier stuff in “Diamond Dogs II: Part 4”, but it’s still not enough to be really engaging or interesting. The club where this massive meeting of the criminal underworld is taking place is appropriately tripping and weird, but once again the lack of tech or really crazy characters is holding the story back, especially since it doesn’t have a lot of emotional moments for Pleese to shine. Instead of a futuristic town filled with all sorts of insane things to look at, it looks more at home in the modern day, and personally, that’s not something I like to see in my 2000 AD stories.
“Diamond Dogs II: Part 4” has a great ending and moves everything along quickly and efficiently, perhaps too efficiently. The same problems with the setting remain, but it’s still an engaging story to read.
Continued below
Credits: Gordon Rennie (script), Lee Carter (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: One of the joys of the Judge Dredd Megazine is the opportunity to check in with forgotten or under-published pieces of the Dredd lore. “Angelic” is an alternate timeline version of Pa Angel, first introduced back in 2000 AD Prog 140, who was a Dredd adversary. But in “Angelic,” we get a different version of the character who may, or may not, grow into Pa Angel.
Gordon Rennie and Lee Carter are able to establish a setting in the Cursed Earth that feels familiar to anyone who has read or seen a Western story before, but adds in enough alien items and anachronistic items to give it an unique feel. Angel and his son, Linc, aren’t exactly mold-breaking characters, but their ‘Varmint,’ a mute creature that can sniff out caches of valuable items and has become a part of their weird little family. Although they call him ‘Varmint,’ Angel calls him Linc’s ‘big brother.’
Carter’s linework doesn’t shy away from the Varmint’s grotesque appearance or the stereotypical gunslinger appearance of Angel. Carter manages a nice balance of both visual styles, allowing the unusual to stand out against the Old West backdrop, but not stand out too much. It’s a fine line, but it allows the story to feel natural in surprising ways.
Rennie’s script somewhat telegraphs the big drama of this first chapter, but it needed to in order to give Varmint enough pathos to make his disappearance matter. The story is off to a good start, and is instantly digestible to folks who are unfamiliar with Angel and longtime fans alike.
Credits: Si Spencer (script) Nicolo Assirelli(art) Eva De La Cruz(colours) Jim Campbell (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: After a bad trip in the previous strip, maybe it’s a good thing that the third part of “Returners” is a bit more sedate as the gang looks for shelter and out of the creepy jungle. As with the previous strips the third part of ‘Amazonia’ devolves into a travel montage of sorts, but unlike previous entries the creative team work in several different settings that visually develop a sense of progression besides former Judge Minero’s dialog counting down how many clicks until they reach site X.
Spencer for the first time this strip gets to write more laid back humorous dialogue as they traverse the jungle in relative safety. You have Minero making cracks about trusting their mycologist from the previous strip. Continued gags to the phallic symbolism of a law giver. And Piranhas. This dialog and some of the more cartoony expression work by Nicolo Assirelli do a good job of making this group of survivors feel more like a group of friends than tiresome people forced to survive together.
Eva De La Cruz’ coloring does a fair amount of work as they travel through a loggers tunnel. It’s not just the blue-green color correction layer that’s placed over everything, it’s also how they use it and the all-encompassing black to make the moments of pure white just shine like diamonds and subtly guide the reader’s eye. The art in this entry has a sort of dark Disney quality to it, there’s a cartoonish quality to everything but there’s a sinister quality to it.
Everything about this strip is about lulling the reader into thinking this is a chill strip. And it was, until the last panel of the penultimate page and like a dart to the head it drives the reader to the cliffhanger. Ex-Judge Minero has her own plans, and those plans might not mean anything when she’s turned into a pincushion from people off screen. The coloring in that sequence helps to guide everything, our core trio are visually separated and backed by calming colors while Minero and everything else are vibrant red oranges. The cliffhanger might not be the most original, but there is enough technical execution that it works and has me curious as to what will happen next.
Credits: Aleš Kot (script), Mike Dowling (art), Quinton Winter (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: Mike Dowling’s art takes a dark turn in part 3 of ‘The Reckoning.’ Dowling and Quinton Winter bathe the pages in blacks and reds, giving a story that can verge on camp a real foreboding, tense atmosphere. There is more visual space in this one chapter than in any of the Waugh stories of 2021 combined. It isn’t quite negative space, because often times it is the remnants of Waugh’s house or undisclosed areas of hell, but Downling gives an undercurrent of isolation to all of these pages by how they’re laid out. The one exception is the scenes with the soccer team, the poor soccer team that was just trying to have an orgy and now may be cursed to eternal damnation. The soccer team’s scenes are cramped, providing nice contrast, and showing a very different side of hell.
Titivillus continues to be a highlight of these stories, and has the line of the strip (it is about what sort of people care about proper grammar. I won’t spoil the punchline). His fate still manages to be sad, even though we know he’s a demon, and any real pathos is undercut by him being trapped in a dildo. But Aleš Kot’s script makes him surprisingly likable and Dowling somewhat wrings sympathy from a fake penis with eyes that pour light.
The central conflict of this installment is the deal made to Devlin by the devil – he can have either his home, the soccer team, or Titivillus returned to him for one quarter of his soul. The portion of his soul, assumed to have little value by Devlin, will be traded on Hell’s stock market which, truth be told, is a perfect activity for the underworld. Devlin is weighing his options, and wants all three back, as well retention of his soul. Next month appears to be a series of court dates involving the soul, the demon, the homestead, and the soccer team. Let’s hope some semblance of justice pulls through.
