30 days of comics I love #13: Should have done this years ago

Judge Dredd Megazine #465 

By lots of different people

Let's talk about value for money. Comics are a notoriously bad return on investment for small businesses with a magazine rack, they gave you fuck all profit for the amount of retail real estate they consume. It's even worse in paces where the comics cost three times what they do in the US, and has only got worse everywhere as comics got flimsier and flimsier.

But you can still get a lot of bang for your buck with some comic books - manga gives you a solid hit of everything with every publication, and I've never seen one of the new digest titles that DC has been publishing out in the wild, but I dig the idea.

And I still feel like I'm getting my money's worth with every new issue of the Judge Dredd Megazine. It's more than $20 an issue, but it's also more than a hundred pages of comics and features, at a pretty high quality.

Issue number 465 is the most recent I've been able to get - I'm at least six months behind the rest of the world and only get a new issue every few months - but it's got a lot going on.  There's brand new Judge Dredd by Carroll and Williams (a middle chapter, but full of incident); Demarco PI by Bailey and Richardson (I'm still weirdly annoyed by the way they took her fortune away, and justifiably outraged by the way they killed her ape); some retro Mega-City 2099 fun from Niemand and Boyle (where they ruthlessly dispose of Maria the Italian stereotype landlady); some Hugo Pratt war comics from 1960; reprints of Hookajw and American Dredd comics that I never read; new Devlin Wayugh by Kot and Austin (nice try with the dildo, but still lacking in the acerbic wit of the original Smith version); and the prerequisite international judges story by Ballie and the still magnificent Steve Yeowell.

It's also got moving tributes to late art droids Ian Gibson and John Burns (the world is lesser without them), as well as several other features, previews and interviews. There has also been some Johnny Red comics by Garth Ennis recently, and Dan Abnett and Phil Winslade's regular Lawless series is fucking excellent, and feels most like classic 2000ad than anything else in the meg or the prog.

I'll be in a town that sells the Megazine next week, and I'm looking forward to catching up on it (and I hope there is some Lawless), and I don't know what issue it will be, or what it's going to have in it, but I know I'm getting my money's worth.