A new run on Dredd with art from the always excellent D'Israeli breathes life back into the Progs. Early on in the last Dredd run, I was quick to praise the really effective, gritty art from the Sexton and O'Grady team. Unfortunately, there came a point where the story fell kind of flat for me, and sequences were only bailed out by detailed art that wasn't doing much for the story itself. The new arc is a massive shift in tone from the previous one, and looks like it's going to feature the return of Sensitive Klegg. Though the rest of the Kleggs typically appear ferocious, D'Israeli's colorful, cartoony approach has set a comedic mood for a plot that teeters between absurd and quite serious. The first episode was already a lot of fun, and I trust that the brisk, comedic pace will keep things interesting.
Strontium Dog remains excellent, especially since one of my favorite things is when Ezquerra draws spaceships. Not only do we get spaceships in this issue, but we get spaceships shooting other spaceships. And really, what's better than that? The "Repo Men" arc appears to be nearing its climax, and while it has taken its time unfolding, particularly in the middle, it has still been the star of the last couple of months of Progs.
ABC Warriors and Kingdom continue to be a little obtuse for me, despite several pages in both that were excellent this week. Meanwhile, things have opened up in The Order and the series has once again become familiar to me. Unfortunately, I think it might be too little too late: this leg of the story took far too many issues to return the story to a recognizable, or even consistently enjoyable place. It's a challenge, of course, to start your plot somewhere else and try to work back to the essential elements of an earlier volume, especially when you only have a single digit's worth of pages to do so each week. Still, it's inherent to this format that doing things with an eye towards, say, a normal issue length will make things feel languid. Often, this round of The Order has suffered from exactly that. It seems as if my complaints might be different or at least diluted if this story were released monthly in longer blocks; however, it isn't. My experience of the story is defined by reading it as a weekly smaller installments: it either succeeds or fails as consumed in that manner.
Score: 4/5
2000 AD - Prog 1969 Writers: Various Artists: Various Publisher: Rebellion Price: £2.55 Print / £1.99 Digital Format: Print/Digital Website