Ah, that cover. So brilliant. You get comic art legend Mick McMahon to do you a Dredd cover, expecting to see something like the Lawman of the Future astride a Lawmaster, blasting his way through the Big Meg; and he gives you Dredd in the most bizarre pose imaginable, brandishing a long red umbrella. This man is a national treasure.
It's hilarious that the layout droid has made a rather half-hearted attempt, with the sparky font, to convince us it's actually an electric baton of some sort. Nice try!
A rather polarized selection of strips on offer this jumping-on week. The prog cruises along at the very highest levels of thrill-power for the first three, then completely falls off a cliff, only to be saved by an Abnett-shaped crash mat at the very end.
Dredd is glorious, and ably demonstrates why the Williams droid (in conjunction with the Wyatt-bot here, of course) is the ideal choice to introduce viewers to the world of Mega-City One in the upcoming TV series (yes it will). Although having seen upthread that the Red Queen was part of a Megazine story, I'd have liked a slice of backstory.
The wonderful Diaboliks demonstrates why a prog never seems properly complete without a strip by the Rennie droid. And the prog's highlight - a seriously stunning return to the world of Scarlet Traces from the Edginton and D'Israeli team. Reading the first two pages I wondered why the art looked so crude, then of course that breathtaking double-page spread makes it clear, before a genuinely gripping further six pages - utterly fantastic stuff.
And then...
It's a prog of two halves, Clive. Okay to be more accurate a prog of four-sevenths and three-sevenths.
At the risk of courting controversy, can I ask... when was the last time there was a genuinely good Anderson strip? I remember enjoying the one-off from a couple of years ago with Jake Lynch art, the one where the guy pretends to be Judge Death or whatever. But ongoing-wise nothing seems to really work, and this is no exception - it's all a bit by-numbers with some routine debate at the start and a nice attempt at a freaky under-cit gang but the story is just getting in the way and even Lee Carter's art looks a bit drab with a lack of backgrounds and the Anderson on the penultimate page doesn't even look finished (okay maybe there were huge pandemic-related production issues, fair enough) and then there's some hand-waving spells and it's all over for this instalment. Sorry, not really gripped. Though to be fair, I'm trying desperately to come up with even an idea for the Thought Bubble so props to all the droids that are involved in making fully-fledged strips.
Actually, speaking of the Thought Bubble, I wonder if this prog's Future Shock would have stood a chance as a submitted script? It seems like a lot of effort by the Weston droid for a slight payoff.
Anyway, two strips to go... one's a ostensibly light-hearted story about a woman heading into the unknown after a radical change of identity, and the other - yeah you get the drift. The difference is that one's a triumphant piece of work that'll hopefully grace the prog for some time to come while the other looks hopelessly out of place in the current line-up.
Oof - I see there's a 15p price rise next prog. They like to sneak those in after a jumping-on prog, don't they.
