2000AD #2220 Review

Writers: Arthur Wyatt; Mike Carroll; David Ballie; Karl Stock
Artists: Gary CaldwellDavide Tinto; Ben Glendining; Luke Horsman; Anna Morozova; Silvia Califano; Simon Coleby
Colours: Matt Soffe; Pippa Bowland; John Charles; Dylan Teague
Letters: Annie Parkhouse; Simon Bowland; Jim Campbell
Publisher: Rebellion



Prog 2220 is another Regened special, putting aside regular stories for a week and instead focussing on stories ideal for younger readers.

A young Dredd takes on robots and mind-controlled adults in Cadet Dredd: Suboptimal.

An investigation into a missing child leads Dredd towards a long-abandoned shopping mall, where the robots in charge are desperate for new customers.

It’s a fast-moving double-length episode that ticks all the Regened boxes: rather than a grumpy icon of fascist law enforcement, young Dredd succeeds with the help of teamwork and science, outwitting the grown ups along the way. It’s a nice but light satire on consumerism, ideal for the younger reader.

There’s a light-hearted Tyranny-Rex vibe from new character Viva Forever. A smart, stylish and self-aware, tech-savvy anti-hero with something to say about corporatism, this whole new character from writer David Baillie and artist Anna Morozova is a professional crook who targets billionaires and signposts her elaborate crimes through online listicles.

Viva’s first adventure feels like good old fashioned fun. There’s an evil billionaire, a couple of female leads, a twist and double twist. Eyecatching and smart, Viva is a fun addition to the Regened line-up.

In Action Pact: Raydar Recovery, a gang of unwilling but well-armed conscripts battle a mysterious foe. There’s a whole lot going on in this first ever episode: we’re dropped into the middle of a fast moving action sequence that doesn’t let us for most of the story's ten pages, dispatching with characters almost as fast as it introduces them.

There’s almost a little too much action. Every panel has something shooting, exploding, or just fast moving – I’m not as young as I used to be, and have to admit I had difficulty keeping up. There’s a smart idea behind these characters being where they are, but the explanation is squeezed into the last couple of pages.

There’s also a lot going on in Future Shock: Geeno Firenzo’s Big Comeback. In the future, a social media platform allows users to share their feelings, leading to a whole bunch of people feeling exactly what powerful influencers want them to. When the platform shuts down and everyone loses three month of their memories, investigators try to discover what went wrong…

This story is packed with ideas and they fly past at incredible speed. There’s enough here for a multi-part story, but it’s condensed so much that it’s hard to follow. Major plot developments take up a single word balloon, some twists seem irrelevant, and the big reveal is here and gone in around three panels.

Geeno Firenzo’s Big Comeback has lots to say about the power of influencers and the artificial nature of social media. It’s a clever satire that manages to remain distanced enough from the real world that we’re not being smacked in the face with the obvious.  A person able to weaponize social media and leverage that power for political gain, who loses control over the masses when they lose their platform and subsequently spiral into self-destruction? It’s all too absurd to draw direct parallels with the real world.

Mayflies: Previous Cargo might be what Regened has been waiting for. Another extension to the rapidly growing Rogue Trooper-universe, Mayflies introduces a squad of tweenage, genetically modified soldiers, engineered for the unending war for Nu-Earth.

Regened stories often focus on younger characters, showing kids holding their own against dumb adults. The bloodshed is toned down and the morality dialled up. Mayflies makes a point of a character using a sci-fi stun pistol, but it's otherwise gritty and violent, with characters placed in jeopardy from the outset.

Simon Coleby’s art is the perfect fit – perhaps a little more visually downbeat than the rest of the prog, it’s unlikely to pull the attention of the youngest of readers and ensures that this stands alongside his work on the related Jaegir. It’s the sort of story that could easily appear in the pages of regular 2000AD without looking out of place, and the characters could quite easily turn up in other Rogue Trooper-verse stories.

Maybe not the best Regened prog so far, but a couple of pretty great additions to the line-up.