Cover by Simon Coleby

PMcC: Nice and bright. You’re always taking a risk with a flat white background as the image has to be bold and eye-catching enough to warrant the spotlight. It could perhaps have done with the baby being slightly further up the page, as I didn’t realise he was supposed to be sitting on Dirty Frank’s head until Thursday, but I still liked it.

WRL: I really liked this cover - it's a great pic by Coleby and nicely coloured by Blythe. My only quibble with it is that the top of Dirty Frank's head is slightly distracting and, in my opinion, isn’t needed as it adds nothing to the image. The baby with the eye patch and the big gun is intriguing enough to make me want to see what it’s in reference too and at first glance I didn’t even notice Dirty Frank. 

The Sexmek Slasher Script: John Wagner Art: Vince Locke Letters: Annie Parkhouse Colours: Eva De La Cruz

Dredd's innate detective skills at work ...

Synopsis: A crazed Citizen is on the prowl. He's known as the Sexmek Slasher as he has something against the Sexmeks that make up the vast majority of Mega City 1's prostitution rackets. However, as he slashes up his latest victim he's shocked to see that she bleeds and appears to be human - despite having a card slot in her back. Dredd chases the perp and eventually catches him. The victim, Rita Lolita, appeared to have had the slot surgically implanted to make her look like a sexmek, so that she could compete with them. Dredd sentences her to 6 months for obtaining money by deception.

PMcC: This story is so slight it can barely be said to be there at all. I appreciate that these stories have had to be whipped up at short notice, but leaving the artist to make half of it up as he goes along seems like sheer laziness. Even so, there are plenty of artists who I’d be delighted to see turning out three or four pages of Dredd “pursuing enquiries”: Bolland, O’Neill, Jock or even Siku. Now, I’d never heard of Vince Locke – so maybe I’m doing him a disservice – but I shall be scrupulously avoiding his work in future. His helmets are ridiculous (appearing to levitate six inches above the wearer’s scalp), his figures are poorly proportioned stick men and his composition of some panels – most notably in the full page confrontation scene – actively obscures rather than conveys what’s meant to be happening.

Returning to the script, such as it is, Dredd has some terribly clunky dialogue (“And I gotta judge.” Seriously?) while the ending is the MC1 equivalent of “...and it was all a dream.” The basic premise and the punch line of the victim being charged are sound – classic Dredd even – but the execution is shockingly poor. Had anyone other than Wagner written this, I can’t help feeling we’d be knee-deep in the usual “X just doesn’t get Dredd” comments.

WRL: An Origins interlude which I thought was a great Mega-City story, more about the city and its inhabitants than its toughest lawman. I really enjoyed Vince’s art - well everything except the Judges and their technology. The trouble is that if you get the look of the Judges wrong or make the Lawmaster’s look like 50cc "rev and go" mopeds and the rest doesn’t matter.

While I wouldn’t mind seeing Vince’s art on another story, a terror tale or a one off I don’t think I’d be putting him on the future Judge Dredd pile. 

Mother London - Part 4 Script: Ian Edginton Art: D'israeli Letters: Ellie De Ville

Bey gets on the wrong side of the authorities ...

Synopsis: Detective Bey arrives at the conflagration that used to be his house and is prevented from going in to save his wife and children in case he is killed too. Bey begins to suspect that Len Chipps had something to do with the fire as he was the only one with something to gain by destroying Stickleback's documents if he really was in league with Lime. Bey starts attacking Chipps but Chipps manages to talk Bey around - telling him that Stickleback has warped his mind and turned him against his own. Bey backs off and wanders down a side street - wanting some time for himself.

Chipps reports back to Lime that this was the last time he saw Bey - and it does indeed appear that Bey's suspicions were correct and that Lime and Chipps are in on the conspiracy. Lime decides that Bey has become a liability and says that a "black dog" is to be set on the detective..

PMcC: From the ridiculous to the sublime. The plot thickens considerably this week: a man’s life is destroyed (although I don’t recall seeing any bodies), the first layer of the onion is peeled back to reveal the seeming truth behind Stickleback’s accusations and we get a glimpse at the fruit of that mysterious tree.

Mr Edginton does this stuff so well and the theme of unthinking racism could hardly be more prescient; it was an astute poster who noted that, because of the way the strip’s drawn, we are only aware of Bey’s colour through other character’s comments. Which brings us to D’Israeli. His work on this story is so far beyond even the benchmark he set with Leviathan that I really don’t know what more to say about it. The final page of this week’s episode stuns me every time I look at it.

WRL: Ian and Matt [Brooker - aka D'israeli] are a winning team; anything by them has me wanting to read it. If I saw Ian’s name on a script I’d be tempted to commission it without reading it and with Matt’s name attached it’s almost a certainty. Then why, if I like the pairing so much, can’t I write anything about Stickleback? This is one I’m saving not because its hard work and may be better read in one go but I’ve just reading the Leviathan graphic novel in one sitting. I got so much more out of it and enjoyed more than when it appeared in the Prog that as soon as Stickleback started I decided that I was going to read it in one sitting once it was finished.

Usually I do this when I’m struggling with a thrill but for Stickleback I’m doing it because I want to enjoy it in one go and don’t want to have to wait 7 days for the next part.

The Volgan War - Vol 1, Part 4 Script: Pat Mills Art: Clint Langley Letters: Simon Bowland

Mongrol's saviour...

Synopsis: Mongrol hits the ground with a thud and his body is totally written off. He can do nothing but watch as his division is wiped out. Later, he witnesses the zippo killing all the wounded as he has orders not to let any ABCs get into enemy hands. However, before he can destroy what's left of Mongrol, he has to run from returning Kozacs. A week later, Battlecombers arrive on the scene and salvage Mongrol's head. One of them is called Lara and promises to get Mongrol into working condition so that he can escape. Mongrol warns her that it is too dangerous, but she stays anyway, as the Kozacs return...

PMcC: This is very up and down for me. I’m still very taken with Langley’s vision of the Warriors and some of the nice lovely layouts he’s concocting. On the other hand, the wholesale regurgitation of previous stories is a big problem: once was a nice touch, but if it continues it’ll be the equivalent of one of those nerdy discussions about what artist you’d like to see redo a classic strip.

Pat’s characteristic disdain for logic also strikes this week: one minute Zippo’s about to torch Mongrol, the next he’s drawing the Volgan troops away from him. However, the lunacy of The Shadow Warriors showed he can still come up with the goods, so I seriously hope we’re going to get away from the reruns and into some new (or at least revisionist) stuff soon. Could Zippo be the agent of some unseen power, set to watch over the warriors and bring them together?

Oh, and I wasn’t very impressed with Lara Croft thing.

WRL: Artistically I’ve warmed to the ABC Warriors. After the glorious looking opening episode there were a couple of weeks when I thought the artwork was looking too dark and would be lost on the page but the Mongrol section has really ignited my interest again. We're only in January but I reckon we may have seen some of the best images in the Prog that were going to see all year. If I had to pick one thing I didn’t like it’d have to be the photo realistic humans and the reinvention of Lara.

My only gripe with the story is that I start to get depressed when I see anything by Pat Mills that says, Volume One, it just seems that if we get a new Pat Mills story it has to be a multi Volume story and as much as I like some of the details of the Warriors history being fleshed out it feels like we’ve seen a lot of it before and told a lot more succinctly. If you write a history story where you fill in the history we’ve never been told before all well and good but if you’re taking the exact story we’ve seen before but making it three times longer do you get paid less per script because you’re rewriting the same story?

Loving the images not so keen on the padding out of the back-story. 

Part 4 Script: Dan Abnett Art: Richard Elson Letters: Ellie De Ville Colours: Steve Roberts

The Hackman hacks...

Synopsis: The new monsters arrive and Gene tears through them, even though they get to Jack first and kill him. With nothing more than revenge on his mind, Gene continues the fight but it is too much for him. He is mortally wounded by one of the monsters, but before he can be finished off, the attacking monsters are defeated by what appears to be a laser battery. Gene collapses by the lasers as something stirs on a nearby computer - "Widawake protocol initiated - waking the rostered operative..."

PMcC: Quick Pete read this. Quicker than quick. Same as last week. Samer than same.

“Is that it?” was the wondering of that day. Muscles in your head, Abnett. Getting paid for this. Let’s have something happening next week.

I’m still a bit annoyed that I can’t figure out where Jack So Wild comes from. Unless it’s something to do with Jack London and Call of the Wild.

WRL:This shouldn’t work. I’m not a big Dan Abnett fan and not too keen on Richard Elson’s art, it’s always very nice but never sets my thrill circuits on fire. So why am I absolutely loving Kingdom? We may know absolutely nothing about the world or a great deal about Hackman and his clan but so far Kingdom is setting my thrill receptors alight. For me this has been a joy and I’m hoping it doesn’t come to a speedy end.

Baby Talk - Part 1 Script: Rob Williams Art: Simon Coleby Letters: Annie Parkhouse

Frank makes his point succinctly ...

Synopsis: Dirty Frank is investigating a company which has been accelerating the IQ development of babies' IQs but there has been a surge in crimes committed by these hyper intelligent babies and Frank must find out why.

He drops his "son" into the clinic (a baby with an eyepatch) to a Doctor Springstein and asks for the procedure, leaving the baby in overnight for the doctors to work on him in the morning. In the middle of the night, the Doctors go to find Frank's baby but he's already gone missing. Springstein hands over the remaining babies to an eldster called Nowlan - although Springstein appears to be talking to Nowlan as if he is younger than him. The baby is watching all of this with a flipped up eyepatch from the shadows....

PMcC: My introduction to Low Life was last year’s woeful Con Artist. Since then I’ve read the earlier stories, so I recognise that as an aberration rather than the norm. Which meant I wasn’t as surprised as I could’ve been at the quality of this opener. As always Dirty Frank gets some great lines but, for once, he’s upstaged. By a bunch of nefarious toddlers. God knows I’ve never trusted the little blighters, but I’d never accuse them of being Nazis! Some laugh out loud moments in this; I’m just glad I wasn’t reading on public transport.

Coleby’s art still tends towards the confusing, but he definitely seems to have reined in his tendency to draw faces as roadmaps full of unnecessary lines. Which is a good thing. I’m really looking forward to finding out how this continues and what’s under that baby’s eye patch. Which is another.

WRL: Simon Coleby has been a fave of mine and Clockwork Pineapple and School Bully are among my favourite pieces of Coleby art. Since Simon’s refit and return to the pages of the galaxies greatest comic his work just gets better and better. I cant sing his praises enough and while Dirty Frank may not be a favourite character of mine and Low Life isn’t what it once was - Simon’s art makes it a must read. 

PMcC: A Mark Millar Future Shock, illustrated by me, would have been a better start to the week than this Dredd story. Fortunately, the excellence of Stickleback and the very pleasant surprise which was Low Life helped overcome this. The ABCs could still go either way for me, although I’m still enjoying it at the moment and Kingdom really needs to do something interesting before it’s too late.

All things considered, this is still a well above average offering. Except for one thing. I have a real aversion to ketchup on egg, so PYE-01’s invention makes me feel sick. 

Best Story: Low Life

WRL: Artistically Clint’s ABC Warriors has set a new benchmark in the depiction of the Mek-nificent Seven, Simon Coleby’s re-emergence as one of Tharg’s better droids has to be a highlight of the week but for pure enjoyment my vote [and I surprised myself] has to go to... 

Best Story: Kingdom