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thecommonswings's review
4.0
This is one weird volume - the first third is a bunch of writers and artists who appear to not know how to even begin to approach Dredd or his world (and reassuring evidence that even Kevin O’Neill had an early, dodgy period; the second third is Wagner and Grant, oddly working solo for huge chunks of it, nailing the world far more confidently; the final third feels like they’ve finally worked out how to stretch out and relax in the slightly longer medium allowed by annuals, enjoying the use of colour and test driving plots for future use (Big Bang Theory is almost literally reused as a plot for one of the democracy stories many years later). It’s a fascinating cross section of a comic positively blooming
It’s full of some properly mad stuff though: Mega Miami and the racist robots; a parallel universe story that basically exists for Ezquerra to draw some villains he missed out on first time round (and feels like an early go at the Dredd story in prog 2000); a story that literally rips off Not Now Bernard; John Byrne looking like he’s tracing Steve Dillon; a Halloween story which is just an excuse for Ezquerra to draw lots of wonderful mutations up against Dredd for once, rather than backing Johnny Alpha; and some nice callbacks to early stories for the more careful reader, which in their own way demonstrate the strange continuity that marks part of the appeal of Joe Dredd some forty odd years after some of these were initially published
It’s full of some properly mad stuff though: Mega Miami and the racist robots; a parallel universe story that basically exists for Ezquerra to draw some villains he missed out on first time round (and feels like an early go at the Dredd story in prog 2000); a story that literally rips off Not Now Bernard; John Byrne looking like he’s tracing Steve Dillon; a Halloween story which is just an excuse for Ezquerra to draw lots of wonderful mutations up against Dredd for once, rather than backing Johnny Alpha; and some nice callbacks to early stories for the more careful reader, which in their own way demonstrate the strange continuity that marks part of the appeal of Joe Dredd some forty odd years after some of these were initially published
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