Judge Dredd Megazine 381-416
Any way you looked at it, £5.99 was a bargain; every issue was 64 pages and came bundled with a 64-page reprint collection of stories from 2000AD or elsewhere. You could find five ongoing comics inside with a generous helping of articles and reviews. Issue 400 was even thicker with two more comics for £7.99.
Two judges named Dredd inhabited the Megazine during these years: the classic Dredd of 2000AD and the Karl Urban Dredd from the 2012 movie. The second Dredd had a continuity all to himself, freeing up writers and artists from 40-plus years of backlog. This freedom allowed them to expand well beyond the scope of the movie and enrich the character in ways it could not.
Psi Judge Anderson and Judge Death’s Dark Judges also figured prominently with their own respective stories. The depth and mood of their worlds benefited from the Megazine’s longer page count (9 or 10 pages per issue rather than 2000AD‘s limit of 6), and made the most of their real estate. Other favorite characters made comebacks and new ones popped in to keep things fresh.
My favorite ongoing strip continued to be Lawless, a black & white wild-west style tale set on a frontier planet featuring absolutely exquisite art by Phil Winslade. The texture of his linework is mesmerizing. A monthly chapter was just nine pages, but each one of them served notice to every other comic artist in the world that the ceiling of possibility was higher than you thought.
As always, the Megazine had a lot more room than 2000AD for extra features, so it was the place to go for creator interviews and book reviews; Rebellion had recently bought up rights to comics from other British publishers, and was reviving many non-2000AD classics. Every time a collection was released, the Megazine was there to talk about it. As time went on, some of those characters would begin to appear in these pages as well.
