2000 AD Prog 2498 Review – Dredd, Deadworld, Brink and Rogue Trooper

This right here is why 2000 AD can be creeping toward Prog 2500 and still feel like the crazy bastard in the corner nobody has figured out how to tame. 2000 AD Prog 2498 does not hand you four strips that look, sound and move the same and call that variety. Hell no. We go from Judge Dredd trapped in a nightmare dungeon, straight into Dave Kendall turning Deadworld into something that looks like it crawled out of a fever at 3 a.m., then Brink slows your heartbeat just long enough to make you nervous before Rogue Trooper comes crashing through the damn wall with guns blazing. Four creative teams. Four completely different visual languages. One weekly comic that somehow holds all this madness together.

Ken Niemand, Dan Cornwell, Chris Blythe and Annie Parkhouse bring Judge Dredd: The Oubliette Part Eighteen into its penultimate chapter with Dredd still stuck inside the Cauldron, and this damn place is attacking more than his body. His memory, judgment and survival instincts are all being screwed with, which is exactly the kind of situation where Dredd gets interesting. You can throw a hundred monsters at this dude, but start screwing with what he believes is real and now you have my attention. Niemand understands that the physical danger is only half the fun here. Cornwell makes the environment feel heavy and hostile with these cavernous spaces, chunky debris and ugly-ass creatures, while Blythe’s colors keep everything sick and oppressive without turning the artwork into visual mud. Parkhouse deserves love too because these pages can get busy, yet the lettering never has you wondering what the hell you’re supposed to read next. You don’t appreciate that enough until somebody gets it wrong.

Then we get to The Fall of Deadworld: Justice Part XII and, mi gente, what the fuck is Dave Kendall eating before he draws these pages? I mean that as a compliment because this shit is beautifully diseased. Kek-W’s finale is already violent, grotesque and apocalyptic, but Kendall makes you feel like you should wash your hands after turning the page. Bodies don’t simply look wounded. They look corrupted. Flesh, machinery, tendrils and supernatural horror start becoming one disgusting organism, and I LOVE when Deadworld gets this nasty. Simon Bowland somehow has to put words over pages that already look like they’re screaming at you and still keeps everything readable. This isn’t polished superhero horror where everybody gets a cute monster pose for the trailer. This is rancid nightmare fuel, fam, and Kendall makes the scale of the apocalypse feel earned instead of somebody just telling us, “Yo, this is really bad.”

Then Brink: The Call of the Void Part 27 comes along and does almost the complete damn opposite. Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard don’t need some creature exploding through a wall every three panels because tension is the monster here. Habitat Security feels clinical, cramped and believable, and Culbard uses those clean lines, controlled spaces and character positioning to make ordinary rooms feel like places where something could go very wrong. The restraint is what makes this work. You start watching expressions. Posture matters. Somebody standing in the wrong place suddenly matters. Bowland’s lettering is especially important because Brink lives in conversations where people are circling danger before anybody actually touches it. The installment keeps tightening that shit until the visual rupture finally comes, and because Abnett and Culbard spent so much time controlling the temperature beforehand, it HITS. You don’t need twenty explosions when you know exactly when to pull the damn trigger. That’s sequencing, baby.

Now Rogue Trooper: Run Amok? Forget restraint. LET’S BOOGIE! Andi Ewington, Nicolo Assirelli, John Charles and Rob Steen get ten pages for a complete Rogue story and waste absolutely none of them. Rogue gets pulled into a Nort pursuit across Nu Earth, and Assirelli draws the chase like these vehicles are trying to punch their way out of the panels. The angles are aggressive, the machinery has weight and the action keeps moving without becoming incomprehensible bullshit. Charles brings in those toxic greens and filthy military tones against Rogue’s unmistakable blue skin, while Steen lets the gunfire and impacts hit without covering half the artwork in giant sound effects. Ewington knows he’s got ten pages, so he gets in, gives Rogue personality, lets the absurdity and ugliness of this endless war breathe, and GETS OUT. That’s how you do a short. It feels like a complete Thrill instead of ten pages of advertising for whatever comes next.

Here’s where this issue really got me: somebody thought about the damn reading experience. Dredd gives us bruising supernatural action. Deadworld takes that horror and throws it headfirst into grotesque abstraction. Brink suddenly cools everything down and makes us pay attention to conversations, rooms and little human movements. Then Rogue Trooper straps us to an engine and sends bullets flying past our heads. That shit matters in an anthology. Give me four stories operating at maximum volume for 32 pages and eventually all I’m hearing is noise. This prog knows when to punch you and when to make you lean closer so the next punch hurts more.

The artwork makes the same argument. Cornwell’s muscular storytelling, Kendall’s diseased painted nightmare, Culbard’s beautifully controlled minimalism and Assirelli’s kinetic war-comic madness should not look like they belong in the same book. GOOD. Why the hell would I want them to? A house identity doesn’t mean everybody has to draw the same damn comic. Each artist is serving the story in front of them. Patrick Goddard, with Peter Doherty on colors, starts the party right on the cover with that hulking robotic menace charging directly at us, and once you’re inside, the visual baton keeps changing hands without anybody fumbling it. Nearly five decades of doing this and 2000 AD still understands something a lot of anthologies never figure out: variety only works when the individual voices are actually allowed to sound different.

Now, am I handing Prog 2498 to somebody who has never read 2000 AD and telling them every single strip is going to be immediately crystal clear? Nah, fam. I’m not bullshitting you. The Fall of Deadworld and Brink are DEEP into ongoing stories. Recap material helps, but there is history underneath these characters and situations that you’re not absorbing through osmosis because you bought one issue. That’s the tradeoff when you’re reading a weekly anthology sitting two progs away from freaking 2500. But there’s another side to that coin. These worlds feel lived in because they ARE lived in. Decisions have weight. Relationships have history. Creative teams aren’t rebooting the damn universe every six months because somebody got nervous. And Run Amok gives anybody wandering in off the street a clean Rogue Trooper beginning, middle and end, so newcomers aren’t completely thrown into the deep end without a rope.

So where do I land on the joint? 2000 AD Prog 2498 is a damn strong weekly package. We get supernatural Judge Dredd, full-on grotesque horror, slow-burn procedural science fiction and balls-to-the-wall Rogue Trooper warfare without the magazine ever feeling like four random PDFs somebody stapled together. More importantly, nobody here feels like they’re killing time until Prog 2500 arrives. The creators are SWINGING. The issue is confident, ugly when it needs to be, quiet when it earns it, gloriously weird and very much alive.

That right there is the 2000 AD sweet spot, Crusaders. Almost 2,500 progs into this lunatic experiment and the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic can still hit you with four completely different punches and make every damn one count.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Judge Dredd: The Oubliette, Part Eighteen
Writer: Ken Niemand
Artist: Dan Cornwell
Colors: Chris Blythe
Letters: Annie Parkhouse

The Fall of Deadworld: Justice, Part XII
Writer: Kek-W
Artist: Dave Kendall
Letters: Simon Bowland

Brink: The Call of the Void, Part 27
Writer: Dan Abnett
Artist: INJ Culbard
Letters: Simon Bowland

Rogue Trooper: Run Amok
Writer: Andi Ewington
Artist: Nicolo Assirelli
Colors: John Charles
Letters: Rob Steen

Cover: Patrick Goddard
Cover Colors: Peter Doherty
Publisher: Rebellion / 2000 AD