Will you buy the revamped Megazine? I already buy it - and will carry on doing so. It's a bit too pricey, no more Meg for me Yes, I'll start picking it up again I'll try one issue and see if it's improved. Nope, it's still not for me

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Home ¦ Reviews ¦ 2000AD Extreme Edition 17

Cover by Dylan Teague

10th August 06

Who's behind it?

• The Corps by Garth Ennis, Paul Marshall and Colin MacNeil
• Wynter by Robbie Morrison and Kevin Walker
• Maelstrom by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil

Where did these stories first appear?

The Corps (progs 918-923); Maelstrom (Megazine 2.73-2.80); Wynter (Megazine 2.70)

What should I expect?

On the whole, nothing quite as exciting as promised in Dylan Teague’s excellent cover. However, unlike some previous ensemble EEs, there is a clear theme to all three stories, and it’s not just that they feature Judges at war. It’s all about machismo overdrive and people making tough choices.

What did Alex Frith think about it?

It’s of passing interest that these three stories all first appeared at about the same time – late 1994. In case you need a reminder of what was popular at that time, the main character in one story is a foul-mouthed sociopath called ‘Tarantino’. Ennis is on subtle mode here, folks. Anyway, the Corps and Maelstrom both feature STAR Judges (that’s Judges in Space to you and me), and impossibly both also feature the art of Colin MacNeil, who must have been pretty busy at the time. Presumably the basic concept behind the STAR judges was explained to / hashed out by Ennis and Morrison, who both went away to write similar but different tales about them, rather than one following on from the other.

The basics: Mega City one trains judges from a very young age. Those who are found early on to be hyperviolent psychopaths are exported to appear in stories written by Garth Ennis err sorry I mean sent into deep space to fight wars with enemies of MC1, where a lack of compassion is a definite bonus. STAR teams are lead by women - who have a clearer head in a crisis - and each team comes equipped with a Psi (I guess that’s why there are so few effective Psis actually fighting crime in MC1 itself…). Sinister officials then deploy these teams into combat zones where they are routinely ordered to kill everyone, friend and foe alike, just to keep things tidy. It seems it’s also necessary to have one (male) member who is slightly more psychopathic than the rest, who enjoys killing rather than simply being very good at it.

The Corps tells a week-in-the-life story of one such team, although I guess it can’t be a typical week as most of them end up dead by the end. Maelstrom has a much longer and more convoluted tale to tell, although it too ends up with most of them dying. But there is another link to both stories – to what extent is it acceptable to follow orders, when those orders involve the deaths of thousands, some of them innocent, some of them your friends? A reasonable dramatic hook, to be sure, but one that is massively undercut by the whole principle of the STAR judge teams being that they are basically weapons deployed to wipe people out. If they’re not supposed to have a conscience in the first place, why do they suddenly develop one in these stories? Especially if we’re given to believe that they spend most of the time killing people anyway. Luckily, the main thrust allows for some pretty dramatic art, and for MacNeil to draw those hardman/hardwoman faces that he does so well. Barely a smile in sight. Also, I like his (and series designer Paul Marshall’s) lizardy Kleggs – maybe a mutant strain?

Wynter features scratchier art from Kevin Walker (before he really found his footing) but is a more enjoyable story because it has a similar theme but without the clumsy backstory. Judge Wynter is too keen on violence for MC1, but isn’t hard enough to get sent into space – he only has to go as far as the Antarctic (to reflect on how names are eternally linked to destiny). He, too, is asked to make a tough choice by his superiors, but somehow his emotional conflict is more believable and engaging than his STAR counterparts – not least because he ends up choosing wisely. However this story also suffers from trying to shoehorn in a bit too much exposition along with the soul-searching and the action. Still, the action and drama are strong enough make this story the best of the bunch. Shame it’s only 9 pages long…

The two longer tales both have a perfectly serviceable story, but they’re hampered by being quite difficult to read. The Corps is ultimately straightforward, but Ennis opts to use some fairly intense military-style dialogue, and is light on the old exposition, especially in the action scenes. This does help the whole strip feel appropriately high-octane (not unlike the bizarre ‘Urban Strike!’ series, which is crying out not to be reprinted in an EE), but I found it tricky to work out the whos and whys of it all. It’s also a bit of a shame that the wider politics of the strip, i.e. Mega City 1 vs Sino City 1, was never developed further. Maelstrom has the opposite problem – long speeches and just too much damn story in there. Respect to Morrison for developing so many concepts, but unlike in his Dante strips, it all ends up as a storytelling mess.

I think the problem is that Morrison couldn’t focus on any one character for long enough, as he had so many ideas he wanted to play with. The team leader, the Psi, the pilot, the psychopathic cyborg and the villain all wanted major story arcs, but in the end all got short shrift. If Morrison had written the story a few years later, once he’d mastered his craft a little better, it could have been a true epic. Or even if he’d split the series up into two or three short stories that would have helped.

It’s worth noting that Maelstrom and Wynter are reprinted from the Megazine. As such, the strips feel odd because they don’t have a title when each new chapter starts. Me, I love a well-designed series title, and I think it helps with the scene setting. I believe at the time the Megazine introduced stories in the contents page, or possibly gave each strip a recap page before each new episode. These might have been helpful for Maelstrom…

Good to see the EEs continuing the tradition of reprinting strips that haven’t been reprinted before, but individually these stories aren’t deserving of the honour. To be brutally honest, I found more enjoyment out of dissecting the stories for this review than I did from actually reading them. Top marks for thematic consistency, though.

What did Robert Cornell think about it?

In the Judge Child Saga, Dredd went into space to crank up the weirdness. He encountered freaks, sorcerers and bizarre diseases. Fifteen years later, the freaks, diseases and sorcerers were handily placed in Mega City One. If you went into space, it was for gritty realism.

The Corps is set on the frontier of human exploration, where Mega City One is vying for resources with the other mega cities. The Corps (aka Firestorm 1) are a tough bunch of space judges who do the dirtiest missions and leave the fewest survivors. (Usually none.) They're sent on a dirty tricks assignment to break up Sino City's alliance with the Kleggs, leaving a sector of space open for Mega City One to develop.

The first thing to get out of the way is that The Corps isn't very original. Secondly, if you want subtlety, go somewhere else. This is a testosterone drenched bug hunt (or in this case lizard hunt) with a Ripley type in charge, a telepath to point out the obvious, a couple of guys to get killed and a psycho to go gun-crazy and screw things up.

The colourful and blocky artwork is effective, if not memorable. Except for those Kleggs. In part one they look completely wrong. From part two onwards they look like alligators again. Except for the bushy green eyebrows which severely deplete their fear factor.

I doubt if anyone had The Corps on their Extreme Edition wish list but it does exactly what it's supposed to. Then leaves before things start getting dull.

Maelstrom, on the other hand, is tortuous. The best way to read it is straight through in one go, while taking notes.

What’s going on is this:

The story features another squad of super-tough space judges. In a promising first episode they take out a gang selling Proteus, an illegal mutagen used to alter colonists and make them viable for life on hostile planets. Next stop, the judges bring a deserter back into the service by threatening his alien family. He can form a symbiotic relationship with a ship and is the best pilot in the business. So far so good. It all goes wrong when they head off to Vortice, the scene of a genocidal attack on The Quayaan. These peace-loving aliens were massacred under the cover of a treaty by rogue Earth forces. After a Justice Department cover up, the perpetrators were left to die in the violent storms on the surface. However, they survived by using Proteus (remember, from episode one?) to adapt them for the conditions.

Maelstrom appears to have the things The Corps lacks. It's ambitious, original and has much, much better characters. True, there’s a Ripley type, a gun-happy cyborg, an emotionally unstable psi and a couple of guys who get killed but their motivations go beyond “if it moves, shoot it.” I also enjoyed neat touches such as quoting Judges Fargo’s thoughts on space exploration. The storyline works as an allegory for the fate of the North American Indians.

In fact, there’s only one thing wrong with it: it’s boring.

The narrative is way too flabby for such a tangled storyline, grinding to a halt during flashbacks and featuring page after page of exposition. Two of the episodes (six and seven) acheive nothing other than delaying the big judges vs mutants finish.

The artwork hasn't been done any favours in transition. The blotchy lettering suggests that the scanning process struggled with the high contrast style used by MacNeil. The examples on the official website show it was originally much clearer. The mutated judges are very impressive, including a dinosaur with a face in its chest.

It’s possible that Maelstrom would have flourished under the harsher constraints of the weekly, fewer pages and less time might have reined the story in and allowed it to flow. Or perhaps it would have been just another bug hunt.

Tagged on to make up the pages, Wynter is a punchy one episode mood piece set in Antarctica. It's the most readable of the three stories but also the least interesting.

I've never really bought into the idea that Mega City One has a burgeoning space empire. Haven't they got enough problems? And there's nothing notably “spacey” about the stories. They're only set there to get them away from the restrictions of continuity. In which case, why set them in the Dredd universe at all?

Overall, I'm forced to conclude that this was a wasted slot in Extreme Edition. There are superior "second best" stories in the vault itching for the reprint treatment.