Cover: INJ Culbard
Publisher: Rebellion
Judge Dredd
Script: Ken Niemand
Art: Dan Cornwell
Colours: Chris Blythe
Letters: Annie Parkhouse
As Dredd and Fargo gun down Murd the Oppressor’s mother, Judge Rico looms over a citizen, gaunt and gloating. Rico and Dredd meet up with Fargo and go over the events of The Oubliette, which is lucky, because I didn’t read the Megazine this whole time, so I couldn’t tell you why Rico looks so dead.
Elsewhere, Judges bombard Necros from space, and Iron Teeth stalks the streets for perps. Who knows where Judge Giant will turn up next.
Overall, I didn’t love The Oubliette, possibly because I was missing vital context from the meg, but I was never particularly excited to read it. Cornwell’s art is stunning and sells the action well, but I never felt much drama from the script. The objective was to rescue Dredd, fine, while Dredd himself made his way up the Oubliette, and oh no! Dredd is foiled by his old ally, the Castellan! But Dredd beats him…then throws himself over the edge to start again? The allies Dredd accumulated on the journey took shelter in his slipstream until they couldn’t; though they survived the antagonists’ tissue paper-strength resistance, they rapidly died versus the Castellan. I’m not clear on what the point of it all was. It feels like it’s supposed to get me hyped for past stories and future stories while neglecting the current one.
Future Shock: A Serial Killer Alphabet
Script: James Lovegrove
Art: Paul Marshall
Colours: Jack Davies
Letters: Rob Steen
The final third of the trilogy from Lovegrove and Marshall stuns with a serial killer’s story. We follow Hoggy’s journey from adolescence to maturity, from the beginning, when he avenges his decapitated stuffed pig by decapitating his parents, right through to his supposed end, when he haunts Blythe lovers in secluded spots.
I want to say up front that I love Jack Davies’ colours. He brings a special sauce and unexpected palette to everything he does, so I hope Tharg gets him in the prog again soon, and repeatedly.
Lovegrove once again pulls us right through the strip with the simple yet effective rhythm, spanning decades and multiple phases of life. Marshall can’t be neglected, though, because his art lays out panels in such a deceptively simple way. The obvious solution for having rhyming couplets on a six-panel page is to have a 2×3 grid, where the beginning and end of each rhyme falls on the same line of panels, but instead he chooses to have a rhyme and a half per tier, so you’re always ripped ever onward, right to the end. At the end, we have a moment-to-moment transition from Hoggy’s POV, which keeps us with the action for multiple panels. It’s a great way to end the strip and the trilogy, but I hope they keep doing these ABCs of BLANK.
The first two stories in the trilogy are about apocalyptic events, the first being an alien invasion and the second being a zombie outbreak, but the third is a serial killer’s ascent to psychopathy, so why stop there? We might as well go for every other genre, ABCs of the Wild West, for example, or a Transylvanian Alphabet. Go wild!
Brink
Script: Dan Abnett
Art: INJ Culbard
Letters: Simon Bowland
On the BRV 1, Chief Vittori sees the gigantic eye and has a heart attack. Kurtis does not see it. Gita turns to the eye and walks forward. Kurtis and Bonner go over the fallout of Call of the Void. In the ward, Vittori speaks in her censored dialect and so does Harry. What a bizarre cliffhanger.
I started Brink volume 7 hating it, but by the end I was willing to give it a chance and give it the context that it deserved, and I was rewarded for it. Of course I still have my issues with it, like how we spend quite a lot of time in offices and meeting rooms, and I still think that Kurtis was very slow to react to the first death on the BRV 1, but with the tiniest crumb of context, my enjoyment grew exponentially. I can only imagine how much I’ll enjoy volume 8 if I commit to doing the reading.
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/
