Synopsis and 1st review by David Knight
2nd opinion by Leigh Shepherd

Synopses and reviews contain spoilers for this issue

DK: A real mess of a cover, with a sickly gold-and-white on black design and some patchy artwork. Frazer Irving’s drawing is fine, but the lack of any backgrounds due to the almost pitch darkness inside the warehouse gives the impression of scraps cut out and arranged on a sheet of black card. I can’t honestly see this hooking in the casual browser in WHSmith. It’s as if the cover is actively seeking anonymity among the other magazines on the shelf.

LS: Well it's Frazer Irving, so that's a guarantee of a certain standard. There's a lot of black space that even when deluged with copy still leaves the image looking very stark. Point looks a bit awkward, and the three main images (Point, the girl and the Klegg) seem to be at different angles, almost as if they were each part of a different image.

Son of the Man

Dredd gets to the truth...

Synopsis: Every time Ramon Rockabilly falls asleep he dreams that Judge Dredd is his father. In the dreams Ramon is a boy and Judge Dredd persecutes his son mercilessly, attempting to uncover his hidden guilt over some unknown misdemeanour. Mr Rockabilly’s robot shrink suggests he troubled by something he did in the past and has repressed. The figure of Judge Dredd in the dreams represents Rockabilly’s subconscious desire for punishment. The shrink suggests it might help if Ramon threw himself on Dredd’s mercy and begged for forgiveness.

After many disturbed nights, Ramon falls asleep on the bus. Another dream of Judge Dredd, with Ramon exhibiting castration anxiety, ends with him waking clutching his crotch and shouting. He is hounded from the bus as a pervert, and the judges are called. Judge Dredd responds, and arrests the other passengers for giving false evidence after securicam footage reveals nothing lewd about Ramon’s behaviour.

Dredd has the suspect identified from the footage and pays him a home visit. He bypasses door security to enter Rockabilly’s apartment, where the exhausted Mr Rockabilly is already asleep and dreaming. Startled to wake up to see Dredd in his apartment, Rockabilly dashes for the window and almost leaps from the balcony except that Dredd catches him by his vest. Suddenly, Ramon has a flash of realization that his real abusive father fell to his death when Ramon bit his hand to break his hold on a balcony railing. He had suppressed the memory, but the recent death of his mother had stirred up the guilt again in dreams. Relieved, Ramon confesses to Judge Dredd, and takes his arrest with good grace.

DK: A simple but effective self-contained Dredd story of the sort that makes you think John Wagner can write Judge Dredd in his sleep and still come up with the goods each time. It’s not a new story; it’s actually a refinement of the old ‘spont’ phenomenon, only this time the spontaneous confessor hasn’t quite worked up the courage to approach Dredd before Dredd finds him. The story should also be familiar to anyone who has seen Spellbound (Dir: Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), in which a man’s repressed memories trouble him in a very similar way.

To some, it may read like Wagner remixing his greatest hits: petty officials and authority figures doling out bad advice, the nut-job creating a scene in public, the Kafkaesque plight of an innocent man wrongly accused, Dredd’s gruff demeanour unintentionally sparking off potentially dangerous or criminal behaviour in the citizens. However, this Judge Dredd consistent with 27 years of background and character development: it’s a comfortable pair of slippers.

LS: This months tale reminds me of the kind of Dredd stories that started appearing around the late 400s/early 500 prog mark. They were, depending on your point of view, either trying to push the envelope a little by presenting us with something a little less straight forward, or else they were a sign of a pair of writers throwing ideas around in an attmept to releive boredom or else in desperation for something new. In particular, there are faint trace elemnets of both the Perp Aid (progs 482 to 483) and the Dredd Syndrome (prog 481) one. Added to this is the high concepot of seeing Dredd in a domestic environment, albeit only through Ramons dreams.

While the idea is initially played for laughs, this swiftly descends into much darker territory, with Dredd going from asking his wife where his helmet is to handing out brutal beatings. Possibly there was some move to avoid trivialising domestic violence, but it would have been nice to have wrung a few more laughs out of the idea of Joe as man about the house. Still, there's fun to be had with the bus sequence and the difference between what the passengers tell Dredd and what they actually saw.

Innocence: A Broad - Part 3: Play it Again, Bob

Point takes a hit...

Synopsis: Having found the Boss’s abducted wife, Innocence Barumba, Jack Point crashes through a skylight and attacks her abductors with an assortment of deadly customized simp gimmicks. Jack’s alien raptaur, Cliq, is injured in a fight with a klegg among the kidnap gang, which turns its attention on Jack but is annihilated by a shot fired by Innocence herself. Jack and Innocence take a robocab to meet the boss’s lieutenant ‘Shite’ O’Leary. In exchange for Innocence Barumba’s safe return, O’Leary releases DeMarco and Perkins, but orders his men to shoot them for killing the Boss’s brother. The good guys take cover and Jack summons Dredd’s lawmaster via remote override device he’d installed secretly. Dredd is helpless to resist as his bike veers off course to Sector Thirteen and blasts open the wall of the warehouse where the fire fight is raging. Dredd pursues the gangsters while Jack, DeMarco and Perkins make their exit.

Jack drowns his sorrows at the High Dive, where a notices a candy cane in his cocktail identical to one seen earlier among the exploded guts of the klegg. Bob the barman realises he’s been rumbled and wings Jack with a bullet before fleeing; but he’s apprehended by Perkins. Bob confesses that he plotted revenge on the Boss’s men after their car skidded on black ice and killed his wife. Bob had started injected the bar’s alien dancing girls with jazzalite, an explosive chemical that detonates on contact with male sex fluids, and killed off several hoodlums who enjoyed female alien company. He had orchestrated Innocence Barumba’s kidnap to inject her with the same deadly mutagen in the hope of blowing up the Boss himself. However, Innocence makes out with O’Leary, and the pair explode, and the boss gets away scot free.

DK: How does Si Spurrier get away with so many plot contrivances in a mere three-part storyline? On the available evidence I’d say it was pure barefaced cheek. In Cliq vs. klegg, which could have been a neat battle if we’d actually seen it, we get an echo of Cliq vs. Perkins from part 2. The klegg having been anywhere near the High Dive, thus pointing the finger at Bob, seems highly unlikely, but so what? Jack Point getting near enough to Dredd’s bike to tamper with it – how likely is that? But we don’t care: it’s worth it to see Dredd diverted from his duties to bail out Point and Demarco, and the logic/illogic of it is part of the fun. As for the explosive drug Jazzalitte, I won’t even start! Let’s just say, as the very maguffin the plot hinges on, that too is worth it to have O’Leary blown up unintentionally in place of the Boss.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Jack Point making regular appearances in the Megazine as long as the character and his exploits stay interesting.

LS: OK, I'm feeling a bit dim here, and having some trouble following this, so excuse me while I have a quick reread of the previous installments to make sure I've got this all straight.... OK, that all kind of makes sense. What we have here is a plot straight out of the Bill- take two or more seemingly unconnected crimes and have them all tie up nicely in the end by way of them all being part of the same scam. Tried and tested by the Bill over way too many episodes if you ask me, but it works well enough here as an overall plot, even if its a little convoluted and has the odd plot hole. For instance, if the final explosion revealed that the Mob Goon had been sleeping with the Bosses wife, why didn't the other explosions all detail the fact that a lady alien was a common factor (other than for the sake of plot convenience)?

That said, the only real problem I had following this was the link between Bob and the Klegg . There's a candy cane just about visible when the Klegg is killed, but it's presence doesn't really make much sense or elicit much comment from Point. It appears to be there just for the purpose of making a rather tenuous and almost surreal link between the two, thus allowing Point to 'solve' the case in a barrage of exposition. The fact that Innocence was tied up one moment and killing Kleggs the next doesn't seem to make sense to me either.

All this said, I find myself torn over this strip - the art is great, the character is a really good concept, there are some clever story telling techniques telling the tale in a way only a comic book could and the voice overs are always done with panache - basically all the things people are raving about I mostly agree with. On the opposite side of that, I'm not convinced by the Raptaur sidekick (especially with it being ignored by Dredd), and the use of DeMarco following straight after the Raptaurs seemed like continuity overkill so early into the strip, when it might be more interesting to see it forge its own cast of characters. Then there's the feeling that the sheer weight of clever storytelling techniques are starting to overwhelm the story with exposition, or are distracting from the story unfolding naturally, or are papering over plotholes (a similar problem I have with Lobster Random over in the prog).

Shimura ends the fight...

Shimura’s attacks on Tsunashima’s criminal organisation led Sesoku and Tsunashima to use Inaba as a hostage to draw him out. Shimura arrives blazing, severing Inaba’s chains and disabling Tsunashima’s Yakuza henchmen with laser shuriken. Inaba knocks Tsunashima unconscious with a kick, and Shimura executes Sesoku.

Inaba is waiting at Sakamoto Spaceport to see Mega-City judges Hershey and Dredd leave aboard Justice One. Inaba criticizes Dredd for using shimura as his assassin, but Dredd is unrepentant.

DK: I never understood the point Shimura, and this three-parter hasn’t persuaded me there’s much to it, apart from ‘it’s got martial arts with swords, and it’s set in Japan, so it must be interesting’.

Sesoku is the worst kind of penny dreadful/Republic serial/James Bond villain, who’ll tie his victim to a tree and tell them all his plans and list all the bad things he’s done while they wait for the hero to come to the rescue and punish the guilty. Admittedly, Shimura comes crashing in in fine style, in a scene immaculately drawn by Andy Clarke, but they don’t exactly fight, do they? The execution page was nice and gory and emblematic; but I, for one, am glad this adventure is over.

LS: I can't say I've particularly enjoyed his one. Theres a lot of things in the strip that are starting to move from being Morrison signature themes to Morrison cliches, and the overly wordy criminal sadist is chief amongst them. It really didnt seem to add anything to the strip we hadnt seen before, and the inclusion of Dredd on a particularly uncharacteristic mission (and with his oddly phrased parting comments) didn't help matters. I usually quite like Andy Clarke's work, but here it seemed to have stepped back a couple of years to a more stilted style.

Goons, Goons, Goons...

Muggro gets cornered...

Synopsis: In Sector Thirteen, ‘Angeltown’, a petty crook named Muggro is hauled in by the Boss’s enforcer Gaz for information on the whereabouts of an uptown banker the Boss brought in to be his accountant. She has disappeared after killing Jackie Zalapetti gave away a big clue that she was an undercover judge. A race is on to find the judge before she’s retrieved by Justice Department. Muggro hits Gaz for 10,000 credits to tell him the Wally Squad judge is hiding in a disused aggro dome protected by a gang of street punks. He also advises Gaz that only the east entrance hasn’t been booby trapped.

At 11.50 pm, the street punks’ guard duty ends, and Gaz goes into the aggro dome via the east entrance, and quickly gets into a gun battle with other gang lieutenants who have also come to the aggro dome on Muggro’s advice, hoping to capture the Wally Squad judge to impress their Boss. Each adversary went in by a different entrance, and when the gunfire stops Gaz sees some of the Boss’s best men lying dead. Gaz bursts open the door the judge is hiding behind and knocks her flat. He drags her unconscious from the aggro dome and is shot by Muggro, who set him up earlier. Muggro hauls the woman into his car and drives off to impress the boss himself by delivering the captive to him.

DK: Okay, it’s an ordinary kind of plot: the cunning fox passes himself off as a hapless loser and plays off all his enemies against each other so he can grab the prize for himself. But it’s well written and nicely drawn, and it stands up well in comparison with the rest of this Prog’s stories.

It’s interesting that Muggro appears the more rounded character at the start and Gaz is just a stock villain, whilst by the end Gaz is more developed and Muggro is just a heel. This is one story where I would agree there’s a danger of thinking about it too much. Better just to accept that Muggro came up with a good plan, where plenty might have gone wrong, but nothing did.

LS: Not a bad strip, and if you can accept the fairly unlikely way Muggro's plan works out so perfectly for him, enjoyable enough. The art is alright too, but due to CLiff Robinsons distinctive inking, whenever I see his ink on others work, it just looks like second rate Cliff Robinson, which is a shame for the penciller, whose work is immediately compared to Cliff's.

Killoden - Part 3

Middenface gets a pet...

Synopsis: Mutant rebels control all of Scotland’s major cities; and sixty-nine politicians are held hostage in the Scottish Parliament. Middenface McNulty and Spiderdan find the Parliament’s whisky stash and pass it around, and McNulty puts a dog lead on Sir David Stealer and makes him grovel.

First Minister McWeasle and Sir William Cumberland have taken refuge in an underground bunker, and McWeasle appoints Cumberland to the post of Chief of Kreelers. Cumberland advises a direct assault on the parliament building, on the grounds that it would demonstrate the authorities’ resolve, and that in war everyone is expendable.

The mutant leaders find that their forces are thinly spread, and their men are looting booze and getting drunk. Cumberland launches his air assault, and three helicopters fly in, gunning down the mutant sentries on Arthur’s Seat and firing missiles at the Holyrood Parliament building. Sixty-eight MPs are killed in the attack. Middenface McNulty demands that Sir David Stealer tells him how they’re going to get out.

DK: It’s a funny sort of future world Alan Grant and John Ridgeway have imagined for themselves: one where the security forces fly helicopters, mutant militiamen drive around in flatbed lorries, politicians wear suits and ties, and there’s not a shoulder pad in sight. However, the visuals suit the script’s satirical preoccupation with our present and it’s a pleasant enough read. Middenface McNulty himself is a one man singing, dancing, joking variety act injecting much-needed humour into the grimmest of situations.

LS: I'm enjoying this so long as I don't make comparisons with Portrait of a Mutant too often. There's a lot of fun in here, though perhaps too often the tone is light hearted, when the drama could do with beefing up a little. John Ridgeway's art is a little more rough and scratchy than usual, with quite a few blank looking panels. It's hard to imagine Carlos Ezquera drawing such antiquated looking helicopters in a Strontium Dog tale, and the whole thing looks a lot less futristic than you'd perhaps expect. Overall though, this is filling the space nicely, and a worthy non dredd strip, something the Megazine could do with moving back towards given the number of Dreddcentric strips we've had over the past few months.

WMD - Part 6 - Magic

Wain strikes out...

Synopsis: Inside Anserson’s mind, Psi-judges Wain and Shenker release Anderson from her protective cocoon. Half-life has Gistane in his grip, and attempts to communicate something before disintegrating utterly. The judges return to their own bodies and Anderson emerges from her coma. Wain strikes Gistane, whose methods he detests. The Chief Judge orders the team to enter the scanning room. Psi-judge Wain is revealed to be infected with the Half-Life psi-virus, and is summarily executed to prevent it spreading.

Anderson suspects that the mission ended a little too conveniently, despite the heavy losses, and that the Half-Life virus may not be finally destroyed after all. Meanwhile, Fauster tells Gistane that Wain wasn’t the virus carrier. Fauster had used magic to make everyone think it was Wain, when in fact Gistane was really infected. Fauster silences Gistane and tells him that they will learn Half-Life’s deadly secrets themselves. Gistane is locked in a cell in a Fauster’s laboratory where Fauster conducts experiments in witchcraft.

DK: This has been an interesting story, no doubt laying the foundations for a major storyline to come, so I wish I liked it more than I do. We’ve seen a team of top psi-judges assailed by psychic attacks and all manner of phantasmagoria while fishing around inside Anderson’s head, when it seems it might have been better if they’d left well alone. Whatever happened to encasing her in Boing with a plaque that says “Judge Anderson. A monster dwells within her”?

The army of Death’s march across Anderson’s mindscape in previous Progs gave the story a lot of atmosphere and foreboding, but the ending just made Justice Department’s actions seem illogical. Why risk other psychics for Anderson’s sake and provide the Half-Life psi-virus with a means of exit at all? Still, it hasn’t been a bad strip if you don’t worry too much about making sense of it, and at least it introduced a tasty villain in Fauster.

Miscellaneous Material inc.

• Robin Smith
• Dreddlines
• Fiction - Dead Man Walking
• Metro Dredd
• Charley's War
• Dredd Files
• Heatseekers
  

DK: The second part of the Robin smith interview is less involving even than the first, and deals mostly with the history of The Bogie Man, which is of little interest to most Megazine readers apart from the fact that a new Bogie Man strip, Return To Casablanca, is heading our way in Megazine 227.

David Bishop’s at it again in The Dredd files, slating Alien Seeds but putting Judge Minty right up there with the first appearance of Judge Death. I dare say among its target audience in 1980 Alien Seeds produced a wave of excitement whilst Judge Minty registered barely a flicker, but I could be wrong. There seems to be a lot of text to read in the Megazine these days, which is why I haven’t got round to reading Dead Man Walking (original title, there) by Jonathan Clements; but he tells a cracking good story in his Fist of the North star review.

Charley’s War maybe had a bit more going for it this issue, with a bit of honest revenge, Charley’s comrades acknowledging his heroism, and the Tommies facing the onslaught of a ‘chemical krieg’. It’s curious that the early episodes had a lot more impact for the variety that was in them, with horses, gas, flamethrowers, Aussies, MPs, aeroplanes and tanks. I feel like all the novelty of those episodes has spoilt me for stories of the endless grind of trench warfare.

I enjoyed Metro Dredd. You can’t go wrong with pirates, can you?

LS: The Robin Smith article was very welcome, and hopefully we'll get more interviews of this calibre. Charley's War is still going great guns, with the current Judgement Troopers storyline providing some of the best episodes yet.