Prog 2366 - End of the Road

[JayzusB.Christ]

Dredd – I am fully invested in the story. This is brilliant stuff from the creative team. The cracks in Maitland's plan are starting to emerge.

Me too, I'm delighted to say. It's a cracker of a Dredd. I'm not usually mad about Williams' Dredd but this is a breath of fresh air.  Artwise, it's not my absolute favourite Flint Dredd art - that would be Total War - but he's definitely doing a first class job.

I'm still not completely on board with Dredd's dialogue so I'm kind of glad he's a background character here.  (I like my Dredd articulate if often terse - why do so many writers these days make him omit subject pronouns and auxiliary verbs* every single time? It used to be 'You're never too old to enjoy a good fight', but now it's 'Never too old to enjoy a good fight.')

*Sorry, I'm a grammar nerd.

[broodblik]

I see that Full Tilt Boogie returns next week

[Colin YNWA]

I see that Full Tilt Boogie returns next week

Yeah this is great news.

[broodblik]

I saw on X (previously known as the entity called twitter) that we getting I think a 3riller:

Jet away with Paul Cornell, @illaurastrates, Matt Soffe and Jim Campbell for "The English Astronaut", taking flight 31st January in 2000 AD Prog 2367!

[Colin YNWA]

Cool Beans! Nice art.

[Bad City Blue]

DREDD is based on a fantastic premise, one that goes against what Dredd himself has rammed home to us readers over the years. Hopefully this will run and reach a conclusion, not splinter like recent Niemand ones.

DEVIL'S RAILROAD finished as depressingly as it has been all along, but I found it compelling, a real change from what we normally get. I don't usually like Milligan too much, but this was a cracker, even if I COMPLETELY get who so many disliked it. I'd like to see a follow up.

FERAL AND FOE is, as usual, the best looking strip by a mile, and it looks like we have a big shake up to come which is never a bad thing.

DROID LIFE is one of the worst, with the pun hard to get and far less clever than it thinks it is. Shame, as I usually love it. 

[broodblik]

[norton canes]

Only time for a short post, which is a shame as there's lots to unpack

• Put me in the 'grimly fascinated' camp when it comes to The Devil's Railroad. Constance gets a whole three balloons of dialogue in this concluding chapter (not including 'AAAHHH!' in the first panel) and has no agency throughout. Almost hoping there is a sequel, because this needs some serious repairing.
• Kind of surprised by Feral & Foe's conclusion - first in a 'Well I didn't expect that!' kind of way, then because yes, it does all start to look very Kingmaker. First thought was that overlap should've been picked up while the two strips were being developed but if there's one thing we know it's trust in Tharg, so I presume TMO will ensure the Abnett and Edginton droids don't step on each other's pedal unit extremities.
• 'A Better World' and Thistlebone were excellent. Love the sign-off in the latter - "Cheery bugger, aren't you?"
• Very much looking forward to Full Tilt Boogie and The English Astronaut next prog.

[Proudhuff]

'A Better World' and Thistlebone were excellent.

[IndigoPrime]

The lack of agency for Constance in this episode was something. Maybe that was the point. But I don't want to explore this world further, because everything was so brash and cartoonish. It didn't make me think about the plight of refugees. It just made me annoyed at the writing. I didn't care about what was happening, because everything felt so throwaway.

As for Constance, this all to me felt a hair's breadth from fridging and full-fat male-gaze comics. However, had the script been flipped, it might have worked better. Palamon just... disappears. He's absent from those last two pages. Constance knows he's alive, but just gone. She knows she'll never see him again. The conclusion then all comes from her standpoint. Her life is now awful. She asks whether this sacrifice of her life, agency, health, autonomy, and more, was worth it, even if her daughter will be an Earth citizen. And how her daughter raised in that environment will end up being, worried that she will be a very different person or also repressed (due to the toxic environment of everyone but Constance).

That would still be horrible. But it feels better than "Poor Palamon. He's lost everything. Constance? Shhh. This is about Palamon now! And, hey, at least he's content that his wife is alive and kid is a citizen of Earth!"

[broodblik]

I also feel no need to explore the Railroad further. It reach the end of the track and steam engines were decommissioned paving the way for something better

[staticgirl]

Railroad was horrible. I hope they never bring it back because I might have to give up on 2000AD. The female character is abandoned to marital rape and abuse for the rest of her probably short life  and that's the ending? I was hoping for some focused political rage and an actual look at the migrant issues but what we got was look! Rapey monsters! It made me feel sick and took the shine off the rest of it.

Dredd/Maitland is superb I am glad I read it before the other stories. Feral & Foe is a bit too much like Kingmaker with this twist. I hope something surprising happens. I might go and read the rest of it again because I didn't really take them in as I was too pissed off.

[IndigoPrime]

The female character is abandoned to marital rape and abuse for the rest of her probably short life  and that's the ending? [...] It made me feel sick

And that this was all framed as somehow bittersweet and from the man's perspective, without really acknowledging what you say above. I'm going to have to try and forget this story. Because the more I think about it, the more I dislike it.

(Another route that could have been take: some kind of resolution that has the cartoon baddies ended. The protagonists escape but know they are forever changed. They also find Earth no paradise. They have nothing more there than they'd have had at home. But maybe the child will have more hope. And at least they are free and alive. Many others weren't so lucky, which they spell out.

That would have been grim but with a touch of bittersweet and an acknowledgement that no-one – even the most fortunate – survives these experiences unscathed and many don't survive at all.)

[Hawkmumbler]

I was all for giving Railroad the benefit of the doubt for the majority of it's run. Yes, it was ugly, and meanspirited, and crass, and it knew exactly how repulsive it was trying to be. But that final instalment, as others have pointed out, has tipped it into an almost pornographic obsession with misery and spitefulness.

I'll echo the sentiment, can do without another go around, thanks.

[M.I.K.]

^ Yep. Pretty much that. ^