Judge Dredd Megazine 439 Featured Columns 

Multiver-City One: Judge Dredd Megazine 439 – Snow Mercy!

By , , , and | December 15th, 2021
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 Lee Carter

Judge Dredd: Saviour
Credits: Ken Niemand (Script), Steven Austin (Art), Matt Soffee (Colors), Annie Parkhouse (Letters)

Christopher Egan: Ken Niemand gives readers a snowy, Christmas season yarn that calls back to two previous “Judge Dredd” stories with ‘Saviour.’ When a native alien from an Outer Quad planet decides to stowaway on a ship returning to Mega City One, they are immediately gunned down by border patrol guards. A drawing of Judge Dredd leads to questions and Dredd getting dispatched to the alien’s home planet. Upon arrival he realizes there is an entire cult lead by a former preacher teaching an off-shoot of Christianity with Dredd as a modern savior. Dredd lives up to this moniker in a darkly funny satire as he begins to liberate the cult from their oppressors – an illegal mining facility near their village. The strip’s multi-faceted messages regarding religion, colonization, re-appropriation, and exploitation through “liberation” is as relevant as ever and makes the story all the more biting setting it a week before Christmas. It isn’t anything new in terms of satire, but it is competently written.

The script is tight and moves along at a perfect clip giving us every bit of knowledge we need without slowing down the narrative. The entire strip feels like we have to keep pace with Dredd himself as he recounts the tale as we walk along-side him. The writing is clever and, at its core, mean-spirited. The strip “yes and’s” its way to a macabre finale leaving everyone effected by the events in a place they would never have imagined. Even readers familiar with this world and Dredd’s past actions and motivations may find the resolution shocking for even a split second.

The artwork by Steven Austin is excellent and perfectly re-creates this familiar world. Character designs and details are beautifully rendered and we get the briefest look at Mega City One under snow. I wish we could have gotten a winter set story from this team, but as the plot almost immediately jumps to a tropical climate on the distant planet, it is a tease of something that could be used to great effect in a future strip. The colors by Matt Soffee are also perfectly matched to the plot. The drab colors of the city under a dark, winter sky, the piercing light from fluorescents in the Department of Justice, and the bright sunlight over the other planet. Nothing ground-breaking, but every aspect of the art is well executed and the talent is definitely on display.

A perfectly bleak “Judge Dredd” short story just in time for the holidays.

Death Cap, Part 1
Credits: TC Eglington (script), Boo Cook (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

Greg Lincoln: Revenge and westerns go together. Though there is nothing wrong with a good western revenge tale, sometimes you want a bit more. TC Eglinton sets a great western stage, ties it into the Dredd-verse, and gives us a pretty compelling protagonist in Anita/Goya to boot. The history we see sets her up well and endears the Cursed Earth exile to us and leads us to care. As Anita/Goya leaves her town and family, the story kind of telegraphs the tragedy to come. When the fungus festooned gang arrives and kills everyone in the town, including her family, it’s not a surprise. Her race back, too, is no surprise, nor is when she is knocked out cold and thought dead by the gang. It’s a well trod road to vengeance that it’s a little too pat. Sure, we want to see the gang and their preening maniacal leader get theirs, but so much here was window dressing to get the ball rolling.

Boo Cook sells this tale more than the story itself. The art is sold and very much captures the wasteland western atmosphere. Cook’s colors have a lovely, washed out, bleached quality and brings a dry, gritty feel to the story. They also includes a neat mutation on Anita’s horse that you might miss in the story until the fingers that are part of its nose play their necessary role. That consistency and Goya’s tragic history sell the tale in a way that the vengeance set up doesn’t manage. Those details are worth returning for, to see what other surprises Eglington and Cook have in store.

Continued below

Diamond Dogs: Book III, Part 1
Credits: James Peaty (script), Warren Pleece (art), Simon Bowland (letters)

Michael Mazzacane: Just another day fighting for everything you got in Brit-Cit. The latest “Diamond Dogs” opens overlooking the London Stadium, a sign of old glories and good stories that no longer hold any meaning. Only thing that matters is what you can take. Which is exactly what Nia Jones and her crew are up to as they lift some money and merch from two rival gangs.

The strip is a straightforward heist job. That straightforwardness is maybe not the most engaging thing in the world but it’s a plainly efficient heist. Warren Pleece’s art and overall page design are well composed with lots of page width sized horizontal panels that capture both the length of the dock and the size of the get fast boat. He violates the 180-degree rule to make more dynamic comic pages as contrasting lines of action work against each other. Everything is just a bit to clean, there isn’t much drama in the heist.

That will come later I suppose as the Silver Apple gang will likely not take this lightly. Nia Jones also continues to try and buy her way out of the iso cubes by informing the Judge Armitage. Solid comics work but maybe not the best use of the strip as a whole.

Lawless Ballots over Badrock: 01
Credits: Dan Abnett(script), Phil Winslade (art), Jim Campbell (letters)

Matthew Blair: We’re back on the frontier world of Badrock, where the company town of Badrock is gearing up for a mayoral election. While former town Marshall Metta Lawson is a strong candidate, she is facing stiff opposition and wading into shark infested waters that promise to be a lot more complicated than protecting citizens and upholding the law.

The script for “Lawless Ballots over Badrock: 01” comes from long-time scribe Dan Abnett, who helped create this series and knows these characters inside and out. Abnett does a great job of showing how messy and compromising politics can be and while Lawson is a candidate with the best interests of the town at heart, it is very clear that she is becoming overwhelmed by the requirements and rigors of being a public servant. Abnett also does a very good job of showcasing the other electoral factions and all the dirty little secrets they’re hiding from the Judges who are making backdoor deals with company men to organized crime factions looking to gain a foothold in Badrock.

The art for “Lawless Ballots over Badrock: 01” is provided by Phil Winslade, who has done a wonderful job creating a gorgeous story for readers to look at. Winslade forgoes any color in the book and focuses only on pencils and inks, which look incredibly detailed and delicate. It’s absolutely stunning work that really brings the book a feel that can’t be matched anywhere else. With that being said, there is one big problem with the art, namely that the larger panels are so finely detailed and pretty that they look a bit intimidating and a little too rich at times. Still, it shouldn’t detract from the excellent job that Winslade has done on this book and the fact that readers will absolutely enjoy it.

“Lawless Ballots over Badrock: 01” is a look into the dirty and complicated world of small town politics on a galactic scale. It is an expertly written and gorgeously drawn book that comes together into something special for fans of Mega City One and 2000AD in general.

Surfer: 1
Credits: John Wagner (script), Colin MacNeil (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Brian Salvatore: With a name like “Surfer,” it seemed obvious that this new strip was going to tie into Chopper somehow. Well, it turns out that there’s a Chopper biopic being made, and they need a smooth surfing stunt double. In comes Zane, a second generation sky surfer who lost his mom to a bad drop and is in the process of losing his dad to the bottle. Zane is a natural, but he also sees how most surfers wind up. Sure, Chopper is retired, but there’s only one chopper.

John Wagner’s script fills in the uninitiated quite well, and drops enough hints that even those with just a faint understanding of Chopper will pick up on and appreciate the references to the past. But the real star here is Colin MacNeil, whose fluidity is so key in presenting sky surfing. Sure, Wagner’s script does a lot of the work too, describing in detail the physics and techniques that Zane has mastered, but MacNeil’s art makes it look fun, smooth, and dangerous all at the same time.

To really get into Zane’s head, all three of those aspects must be present. Without it looking like fun, no one would ever sky surf. Without it appearing smooth, it wouldn’t have the coolness factor the reader needs. And without it being dangerous, there are no stakes in the story. Wagner and MacNeil give the story both the stakes and the cool that it needs to be effective. While Zane is still a little bit of a bore thus far, the world is established nice and early, allowing the team to fill in the blanks over the next few months.


//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

Greg Lincoln

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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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Christopher Egan

Chris lives in New Jersey with his wife, daughter, two cats, and ever-growing comic book and film collection. He is an occasional guest on various podcasts, writes movie reviews on his own time, and enjoys trying new foods. He can be found on Instagram. if you want to see pictures of all that and more!

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