Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our “2000 AD” weekly review column! Every Wednesday we examine the latest offerings from Tharg and the droids over at Rebellion/2000 AD, the galaxy’s leading producers of Thrill-Power entertainment. Let’s get right to it!
THIS WEEK IN 2000AD
Judge Dredd The Hard Way: Part 3
Credits: Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt (script), Jake Lynch (art), Jim Boswell (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Matthew Blair: The humans had their chance to kill Dred and Maitland and they failed. Now it’s time for the cold perfection of machines and programming to step in. How will our brave heroes stand against Qaganon the Living Meme and a buffed up Sov Sentenoid? Can the Brit Cit Judges arrive in time to help? Will the Judge’s robotic sentinels help turn the tide or become fodder for the villains?
Writers Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt continue to show why they’re the writers for this kind of story in “Judge Dredd The Hard Way: Part 3”. They do throw the main characters a bit of a bone by allowing them to figure out what’s really going on and who they’re after, but any progress they’ve made is quickly snatched away by the assassins who know how to keep the momentum going and keep everyone on their toes. The storytelling is efficient, the action is well paced and quick, and there’s even a bit of room for some classic Judge Dredd humor with the Sov droid spouting standard communist idioms while the Living Meme brings a bit of modern social commentary by using unfounded conspiracy theories to hack machines and rip into the Judges in their hour of need. There’s even a chance for the civilians to react with their usual tired sarcasm as the world implodes around them.
Artist Jake Lynch does a fantastic job in adding to the frenetic and violent action of “Judge Dredd The Hard Way: Part 3” and makes the entire comic an absolute joy to read. There’s a very real sense of high energy and motion in the artwork and the incoming tidal waves of water look massive and almost beautiful if it wasn’t for the fact that they were flooding an underwater building complex and threatening to drown everyone. As for the characters themselves, Wyatt has a keen grasp of what everyone’s uniform should look like and the design for the robots looks equal parts sleek, clinical, and powerful.
“Judge Dredd The Hard Way: Part 3” ratchets up the tension and energy of the story in expert fashion and allows two more assassins to enter the picture, and this time it’s not so clear how Dredd and Maitland are going to be able to escape this.
The Diaboliks: Arrivederci Roma Part Three
Credits: Gordon Rennie (Script), Antonio Fuso (Art), Jim Campbell (Letters)
Christopher Egan: After last week’s reveal of what exactly our anti-heroes were searching for, the entire post-auction event goes awry. Rennie jumps right into shouting and physical action in part 3. He gives us a full enough script. As we learn that the codex is actually in the form of a young girl, Jenny loses all composure, verbally attacking everyone at fault. Between the yelling and emotions running high, on display for everyone to see, there are a few beats of levity, but the chapter as a whole is pretty tense.
Fusso’s illustrations are all visual storytelling. These pages fit into the same tone as the last two chapters with some details fully fleshed out, and others left in shadow or less finished, to allow our minds to to fill in the gaps. Even with that visual language used you could remove most of the text from this and his work would still give us everything we need to know about this part of the story.
The high tension, dread, humor, and action all work this time around. It’s a sharp and angry, but with a good smirk that this horror comedy never becomes darker than necessary.
Scarlet Traces: Storm Front – Part Three
Credits Ian Edginton (script) D’Israeli(art) Simon Bowland(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: The third entry in ‘Storm Front’ begins with another dream sequence, which is slowly becoming a favorite motif for me. It allows D’Israeli to lean into the surrealism of dreams and stretch their cartooned representational style even further via their color rendering. Look at the rendering on that first page, it isn’t quite pointillism but has enough markings and pastels to give it the gloss. But something is still off about it, a feeling that is developed just in time for it all to begin to fade away literally. The transition from Martian to Human body isn’t going as well as was hoped, a bit of self-inflicted mad science. It isn’t all mad though with the development of a human child forces up more uncomfortable questions that the Martians would rather not ask.
This strip of ‘Storm Front’ is weirdly hopeful. It forecloses the romantic delusion of optimism for something more akin to the chaotic hope of the Five Thirty Eight Podcast, ex. just because polling errors happen doesn’t mean they will always go against you. That sort of ethos is expressed as Ahron recounts how his family beat the odds and made it to Earth. It’s a strange but more sincere version of hope that is displayed in this strip Which is also just an odd emotion for “2000 AD” in general.
Those feelings of hope are imposed on pages that D’Israeli just fills with muted but still gaudy color, reds and golds. As far as page design goes they’re effective at building in contrast that brings out the greens and blues on their respective pages. Their color palette however just stands in contrast to the nuanced optimism that Edginton has written. It helps to cut down the romantic sense of inherent hope.
In the end Ahron gets his answers to, they will have their war. Which might be a good thing or it might spell the end of everyone.
Pandora Perfect: Mystery Moon Part Three
Credits: Rodger Langridge (script), Brett Parson (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Caper stories usually feature a double cross, and the ones we get in “Mystery Moon Part 3” are, to quote an old friend of mine, pretty choice. Roger Langridge gives us the one we expect, as Pandora prepares to pick up the purloined Diamond and abscond with it herself, and jumps right to the one we didn’t. It is sad that a rare endangered species dies as part of Spuggs’s backstabbing play, but it’s a clever play that lands Pandora in hot water. It seems the point of the heist was never the Diamond or alp in the face for the rich, it was all about robbing our felonious heroine Pandora. When the big reveal comes, it’s pretty shocking. It makes sense as Bart is a businessman, and a ruthless one at that, and it is nice to be surprised by the twists and turns of a caper story once in a while.
The art, though still cartoonish, takes on a sinister overtones this week. Brett Parson steers away from the brighter palettes of the previous weeks into a more muted, natural tone as things turn serious. As Pandora loses her infinity bag and her trusty felonious companion Gort, the bright color seemingly drains from the page. Bartholomew becomes less the partner as his expressions become more leering and sinister when the threatens to turn in Pandora. The jail and court scenes are dour and dark, and you can feel the resignation in Pandora’s expressions.
The Out: Book Two, Part 3
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Mark Harrison (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: “The Out” has featured a lot of planets over the course of its run thus far, but I believe this is the first time that we’ve had multiple new planets in one strip. Cyd visit three planets, each with an Earth expat on it. Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison create three very, very different settings for the characters, each one reflecting a different experience by the humans. On one planet, we see a couple that moved to the Out with the understanding that their friends would be joining them on a colony of sorts, but a financial crisis has delayed their arrival. That delay is likely permanent, though the Forbes don’t necessarily see it that way, or at least don’t want to believe it to be the case.
Continued belowGillian Forbes keeps repeating just one phrase ‘Lovely to see another human!,’ and it is unclear if she has some sort of illness/degenerative brain disorder to cause her to repeat herself so often, or if, perhaps, she’s, perhaps, an android or some sort of AI designed to keep Gary company. Despite the initially tranquil images and creature comforts of home, this is the saddest of the three stops Cyd makes. Harrison does a great job of slowly pulling back the perspective, so what looks like a lovely home, replete with floral pergola, turns out to be just one postage stamp in an otherwise empty wasteland in the shadow of an industrial structure of some sort.
Stuart, on the other hand, crash landed on his asteroid – lovingly named ‘Stuart’s World’ – and appears to be a converted cannibal, living a monastic life on his floating rock. This is the shortest of the visits, because Stuart is all there is explore here, and Stuart seems relatively simple to understand.
Finally, we get Carmela Hensley, who is not just an expat, but considers herself an ex-human, having fully given herself over to being a Zabmorph, and wanting to completely forget her humanity. She, in many ways, is living the most ‘normal’ existence, despite the body modifications and rejection of her past. Reinvention is a very human trait, but more than that, she’s the only one of the batch that hasn’t found themselves completely isolated from others. The Forbes wanted an enclave but wound up alone and Stuart’s circumstances led to him becoming a fucked up monk. But Carmella, despite her protestations, didn’t want to be alone; she just wanted to be free of her surroundings. I think we can all relate to that.
