This month's Meg sorely misses a standout strip like Lawless, but it's not all doom and gloom.
The first Harry Heston story was a decent effort and a lovely gesture from all concerned. This month's reprise is simply outstanding. Hands down the best thing Wyatt has written for Tharg and wonderful art from Lynch. The panel where
Dredd eventually comes face to face with our hero is a joy: the pose, the tension, the quip, everything works.
Sadly, the
Movie Dredd strip is not of the same quality. I've enjoyed previous efforts to combine the two worlds but this one, introducing the popular "Dredd is quite simply a bastard" thead falls flat. Maybe it's just that the setup is overly familiar, or that a crying child always makes me thing of Robbie Morrison's Dredd, but this felt very weak.
The two old lags both pull out the same trick of letting the artist tell large parts of the story without too much interference.
Paul Marshall is given pages of
Anderson with only a couple of speech bubbles to get in the way of the action and handles it with aplomb. Pretty sure Grant has used the central joke in this episode before, only with wrestling, but it's an enjoyable installment and the ending leaves me wanting more.
On the other side of the bench, Wagner gives his man the opportunity to go wild on our initial reintroduction to Death and the lads. I dislike almost everything about Nick Percival's art style, but these opening pages where he gets to go crazy with the discorporated, demonic forms are pretty nice. That's over all too soon and it's back to business as usual as we learn about where they're going to establish their
Dominion and who's going to die horribly. Wagner would have to put in some serious effort to write an actively bad story but there's a sliding scale of how interested I am and this is very close to the bottom.
I really enjoyed that Meg, although I found Havn really confusing. Maybe a reread of the whole thing will make things clearer.
I'll be doing the same (I always do) but I'm not sure how much this will help. Great Flint art in service of a story which seems to be leaping around in hard to understand ways. I don't mean between the real and faerie worlds - that part is clear - but the physical locations in the city of
HAVN itself.
Haven't read a floppy for a while but I remember really enjoying
London Falling at the time so I'll give it a look over the weekend.
