Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: Bad Sector, Part 1
Credits: Arthur Wyatt (script), PJ Holden (art), John Charles (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: Judge Dredd has always been a character built on social commentary, and ‘Bad Sector’ continues that, but moves the focus away from crime and into…urban development? It may sound a little silly, but it’s not; this installment does a really nice job establishing one area of MegaCity One and showing just how ravaged by circumstance it is.
Wyatt deals with squatters’ rights, calloused officers, gentrification, crooked cops, police brutality, and public health in just a few short pages, and really establishes Jan-Michael Vincent Block (named, presumably for the late Airwolf star) as a setting worthy of a multi-part story. It doesn’t hurt that PJ Holden, one of the finest artists in the 2000 AD fold, handles this story. His Dredd is perpetually pissed off, but everyone else contains multitudes, and his drawing of the woman infected of Grubb’s Disease was both beautiful and haunting. And his design of JMV Block is outstanding and bold.
The strip also does the classic Dredd take of focusing on others, and how Dredd’s actions affect them, as opposed to trying to learn more about Dredd himself. Wyatt and Holden allow enough time to be spent with Caliban to show that he’s many things, and all of those things will, eventually, come to a head with Dredd.
Blunt III, Part Four
Credits: T.C. Eglington (script), Boo Cook (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Rowan Grover: We’re thrown back into the chaos with this prog of “Blunt III”. Eglington handles the absurd comedy of the situation that Blunt and Ilya are in and juxtaposes it with terror on the first page, giving us a scene of Ilya running to the bridge of the ship almost jokingly, even though it’s out of sheer desperation to get off the planet. There’s also a great sense of tension as Blunt is constantly trying to hide from their rescuers what really happened on Getri-1, putting them at immediate odds with the people seemingly trying to help. Throwing the mutant Splonge back into the mix makes for some fun antics to lighten the mood about halfway through, but don’t seem to add anything to the story at this stage. However, the run-in with the predator mutation is great, and even though the team manages to repel it, there’s only a sense of heightened discourse as the gang has to explain what happened on this planet even further.
Cook does a good job with art here, though his attention to hyper-sketchy detail is a little more restrained than I would like. The focus here is the characters and their immediate surroundings, of which even in panels like the first where they’re tiny and lacking detail, they still feel interesting due to their body language. There are also some great moments later on with Conrad, the rescuers’ droid, depicting lots of overly-complicated technological nonsense that fits here perfectly. It’s just that the backgrounds feel a little lackluster and less busy and packed with life than they’ve been in the past. This makes sense for the rescuing ship, as it represents order over a more chaotic, natural world, but even the shots on Getri-1 that we’re shown feel relatively tame, simply depicting hills and grasslands.
“Blunt III” continues to be an interesting continuation of the story of Blunt and Ilya, but there are some shortcomings here that lessen the quality of how chaotically beautiful the preceding series were.
Zombie Army: Last Rites, Part Three
Credits: Chris Roberson (script), Andrea Mutti (art), Matt Soffe (colours), Simon Bowland (letters)
Michael Mazzacane: The previous entry of “Zombie Army” was a very tense more classical take on zombie action. Andrea Mutti’s art was all about clearly defining the spatial dynamics at play between the mindless horde of zombies and our rag tag group of survivors. While there is a month gap in between strips that is a sort of tension that can be hard to maintain, which is why the third entry takes a step back, catches its breath, and ratchets up the tension in an entirely different way.
Continued belowChris Roberson and Andrea Mutti play with contrast in this strip. The previous strip was all about showing the zombie arm, ending on the cliff hanger that the undead are coming back to unline, again. The dead are only really seen in one panel in the entire strip. Whereas the last strip was all about the mad dash to a defensible position, this one is all about the claustrophobic feeling now that the group has obtained it and the growing precarity they maintain it with. The threat of the dead is unseen but always on everyone from the cast to the readers mind. It is that understated tension that allows the strip to catch its breath while still ratcheting up the tension in a unexpected and satisfying way.
Structurally Chris Roberson’s strip runs like clockwork. By the end of the first page the squad has their task, find the Summoner revivifying the undead, followed quickly by the question of how to dispatch it. The Summoner can only be killed with a shot through the heart and their defensible position stops them from having a clear shot. There is a clear shot on the balcony down the way abit but that would be a suicide mission. Roberson’s script and Andrea Mutti’s figure work play out a very common scenario within zombie fiction without saccharine cliché qualities one would expect from working through a well known scenario.
That well know scenario gives everything a clear structure that allows the strip to end on an upbeat cliffhanger for a change. After seeing the undead come back to unlife anything would be pretty much upbeat, but this one gives them some hope. A hope that I can only assume will be dashed by the third panel of the second page of next months Megazine.
Lawless: Boom Town #4
Credits: Dan Abnett (script) Phil Winslade (art) Jim Campbell (lettering)
Matthew Blair: “Lawless: Boom Town” #4 finds all of the major players in the new colony of Badrock reeling from an attack by a mysterious faction that finally reveals itself in this issue. While all fingers would point towards the alien race that originally occupied this planet, and representing a pretty clear Native American metaphor, it turns out to be something else…and much more sinister.
Writer Dan Abnett continues to showcase his skill as a comic book writer in “Lawless: Boom Town” #4 by juggling multiple storylines in multiple locations with an ever growing cast of characters in a clear an concise manner without making it confusing and hard to follow. While the Judges out in the wilderness begin to recover and regroup from the previous ambush, the corporation that seeks to control the town is making moves behind Marshal Lawson’s back. Meanwhile, a new player is introduced into the mix that doesn’t care much for politics and good relations. They’re looking for blood and slaughter and they threaten everything and everyone.
Along with Abnett’s writing, Winslade’s artwork continues the tradition of maintaining a fine balance between the different needs of the story in “Lawless: Boom Town” #4. Winslade has a rather difficult task with this kind of story. Not only must the artwork maintain the over the top sci fi weirdness that makes the stories set in the Dredd universe special, it must also look like a traditional Western. Not only does Winslade manage to pull that off with nods to the Dredd comics and Western stories, such as juxtaposing high tech lawgivers and Judge uniforms with actual horses and sci fi guns that look like six shooters, he even manages to throw in elements of famous post-apocalyptic stories like Mad Max. The highly detailed and amazing pencils and inks allow each page to be an amazing work of art, complimenting the ever growing story and intrigue.
“Lawless: Boom Town” #4 continues to build its story and rachet up the tension. On top of the corporate intrigue, struggles of imposing law on a lawless land, and establishing relations with not necessarily friendly natives, now there’s yet another player on the planet that threatens to bring nothing but chaos.
