Cover: Joe Currie
Publisher: Rebellion
Judge Dredd
Script: TC Eglington
Art: Paul Marshall
Colours: Quinton Winter
Letters: Annie Parkhouse
Judge Barr walks into a hospital, enters the ICU, and kills a patient: Wilson Ranger, the Epstein of Mega City One. CCTV was cut, so Dredd knows that other judges are involved.
Meanwhile, Sam and Laura kill a corrupt accountant.
Dredd and Barr race to Laura’s home, but Barr makes it there first and is greeted by a mouthful of flies due to Laura’s decomposing mother.
Sam and Laura’s scenes are heartfelt and somehow innocent, despite the crime they’re committing. It’s a believable representation of how desensitised MC1 youths are to violence.
I’m enjoying Flames & White Phosphorus, but I find that the pacing is rather slow because of the dense exposition. Dredd receives clues from Judge Mairn over the headset without doing too much discovery himself, so it almost feels like Dredd is the protagonist of a video game who is just being aimed at the next cutscene.
Brink
Script: Dan Abnett
Art: INJ Culbard
Letters: Simon Bowland
Kurtis interrupts Maslow’s interrogation to ensure that she is treated properly, as a victim and a consultant, then puts Cutwell into internal review.
This is part six of Brink: The Call of the Void, and a great deal of it has been spent in interrogation rooms. I appreciate that the intrigue is supposed to come from the presence of an impostor in the organisation, and Holly Cutwell is sus, but it feels like I’m observing a series of business meetings, which doesn’t entertain me.
Silver
Script: Mike Carroll
Art: Joe Currie
Letters: Simon Bowland
In 1997, Alain’s village was taken over by The Shepherd, who, I suppose, is an official of the Sepsis. The old and infirm are instructed to remain in the village while everyone else is taken to a camp. There, Alain is scanned and rejected and forced to walk away as his neighbours are shot.
For four years, he wanders to Switzerland and back and returns to his village, to elderly skeletons with ventilated skulls, in time to see the Baroness crash land.
Mike Carroll and Joe Currie make a tremendous team, keeping the pace brisk while finding space to insert moments of humanity and inhumanity both. Despite the plain barbarity of the Sepsis, both times that people are shot, we don’t see it. We don’t see the elderly or the camp rejects being shot. I wonder if we’ll fail to see more everyday violence that happens in fascist regimes like the Sepsis.
Future Shocks: Clean Slate
Script: Liam Johnson
Art: Lucas McCoy
Letters: Rob Steen
Steven Jacobs is the first customer of Clean Slate, an establishment which promises to erase your digital footprint. When he gets his wallet out to pay, we see a photo of him with his family. Cute. Why wouldn’t a family man want to repair his digital footprint? However, it becomes clear to the Clean Slate worker that it’s not just embarrassing Facebook posts and drunken club pictures in Steven’s history. She finds an article in a newspaper about an incident involving Steven and a dog, which is never elaborated on, but this is an inflection point, I think.
When Steven returns home, his wife no longer recognises him. He has disappeared from the family photo.
Dissatisfied with the service, Clean Slate greets him again. There was a problem. She plucks one last thread of Steven Jacobs from this reality and -pop- he’s back in Clean Slate. “You’re actually my first customer,” she says, showing that Steven is either caught in a time loop or inserted into a completely new universe. My reading of this story is that Clean Slate found Steven’s incident with a dog and saw that he was irredeemable. The only way to clean up his image was to remove him from reality entirely.
Lucas McCoy shows off his talent for the second time in the prog, and I hope we see his work for years to come. He draws everything so well. Hands, backgrounds, people, everything, rendered with beautifully grimy ink and screentone.
Helium
Script: Ian Edginton
Art: D’Israeli
Letters: Annie Parkhouse
It’s a propulsive second chapter this week, which picks up directly where the last prog left off.
Hodge, Grimsby and Bloom manage to drift away from the ship as another crew member gets blasted by the torus’ flames, but they’re knocked off course, and next week, they’ll be somewhere new, somewhere they’re not meant to be.
By extending the action into part two, it hammers home the stakes of this story. Hodge, Grimsby and Bloom are descending into the unknown, and who knows the dangers they face.
Overall: 7/10
Tony Holdsworth is a comics writer based in Dundee, Scotland, who reviews 2000AD each week.
His comics can be found here: https://tonyholdsworth2.wordpress.com/category/portfolio/
