A strange issue, in some regards. I wasn’t taken with the cover (despite loving Winslade's strip art), and the intro page initially made no sense, having so little in it, in terms of strips.
Dredd was fun and I liked the bit with the helmet swap. Googe does tend to draw a very young Dredd, but that works in isolation. Also feels like it’s a set-up to something. Not Niemand’s best, but then even a middling Niemand Dredd beats a lot of other Dredd.
The Alan Grant tribute was great, and then we got Anderson, which honestly isn’t doing much for me. It’s the first time I’ve not been excited by Lee Carter art. (Lots of blank space and drab green here…) And the script is building lore in what should be an interesting way, but it’s all just feeling a bit flat.
Then Lawless. And… well. I mean, it starts before the staples, with the resolution to last month’s battle, which is all kinds of terrifying. Then it ramps up with McClure going full evil. Then there’s the Lawless chase and scrap. And it’s going and going until we hit the very last page of the comic. I wasn’t expecting that, but it’s hard to grumble about anything else when we get so much Lawless. (Unless you don’t like Lawless, in which case I don’t know what to say to you.)
The floppy was… weird. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything so brazenly ad-oriented before. The strip is too new to have value in that form and isn’t really existing as a means to access a current strip in 2000 AD, so I dunno. Any other month, I’d have griped that this was cost-cutting, but given how much strip was in this issue, it looked more like cost-balancing. That said, I very much don’t hope this floppy sets a precedent.
