NECRO - beat this NECRO if you can.
Anyway just finished the new edition of Devlin Waugh - Red Tide. Its a very different collection to this one I suspect including stories from a good number of Megazine's in the 200s. Red Tide is joined by Bite Fight, Vile Bodies, All Hell and Innocence and Experience. All the stories are delight and brutal in equal measure, the light and dark shades of our leading man just a breezy joy as he takes up down dark paths, both his own and those of the world's he inhabits.
Red Tide is a tense action thriller in the mode of a zombie movie and when you read it you know the stories aren't going to top it. The you get to All Hell and realise you were wrong as Waugh journeys into hell in quite fantastic style. So that's going to be the best ... until you get to the history lesson and origin story that is Innocence and Experience which is sublime...(actually I didn't enjoy it as much as All Hell but that would have spoiled what I was after.) John Smith just finds ways to keep the stories thrilling and yet astonishing smart and engaging. The character is an absolute joy to read and while his adventures are brutal and horrific he grants them and idefinible quality of pomp.
All this and art of Colin MacNeil, John Burns, Peter Doherty and some pages from Jock's aborted Red Tide which I didn't know about and while the previous package might have been a diappointment this is one of the best 2000ad collections I can remember reading.