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« on: 13 January, 2021, 12:08:30 PM »
My partner got me this issue when she got me the Xmas prog - much of it didn't make any sense to me, but I thought my musings (as someone not following the current stories) might be of interest.
I'm going to damn Dredd with faint praise - it was fine. A nice enough little tale, that's ultimately not going to linger long in the memory.
Megatropolis was amazing. Definitely going to pick up the eventual collection of this. Purely as a vehicle for Dave Taylor to do his thang - that gorgeous neo-noir Gotham-meets-Metropolis - it justifies its existence, but the script was great too.
Dreadnoughts - equally, wow. So much to love here. It's such a dense read - halfway through I had to remind myself who had written this, and to see Carroll's name really surprised me. I wasn't always the biggest fan of his Dredds - in fact, his apparent assumption of the 'lead Dredd writer' mantle at the time was one of the reasons I parted ways from the prog - but this is such a step up! Really confident storytelling with loads to unpick, and Higgins brings his A-game to match. The colouring is really sympathetic, too. Another to pick up when collected.
Not a scooby what was happening in The Returners. Lovely art, but the decompression is something else...! You could just about get away with this kind of storytelling in the prog, on a weekly schedule, but when you're working with monthly episodes it's just insane to be offering up 2- and 3-panel pages like this. It's a big part of what (quite rightly) pissed everybody off with American Reaper Sexy Ostriches.
Not a fan of what I read of Deliverance. Hopefully this Whisper chap has had some prior set-up that I missed; he seems to be a walking deus ex machina. 'The only man who can free Death' - er, okay, but why? A fair bit of decompression here, too, and Nick Percival's soft-focus art just makes me feel like my eyesight's going. Based on this (maybe unfairly) I won't be rushing to seek out the Dark Judge stories that I've missed.