The reprint material was definitely the weakest part of the early annuals, because they had to resort to pre-2000ad material. But by 1986, there is a wealth of material in the Command Module's archives, and sometimes it outshines the new stuff.
This annual is a little disappointing, and the weakest of 2000ad's golden age. The cover is a weak Robin Smith effort - Smith was a fantastic designer, but his finished work always looked stiff and stilted. There is a Grant Morrison strip, but it's the lamest of all his meta efforts, with a writer's submission to a sci-fi magazine travelling all over the universe and causing all sorts of carnage before ending up rejected by a publisher.
There is some really nice art on a couple of strips - Jose Ortiz's work on a Rogue Trooper story comes with some rare colour that is startling to see on the usual monochromatic artist, and Bryan Talbot turns up to do a Dredd story. Talbot does a great Dredd - his story in the first issue of 2000ad Diceman has the best appearances of the Dark Judges not drawn by Bolland - although the story in this annual of a judge dressing up as a woman to catch a perp is just as problematic as you'd expect (even with a Girl Power! ending).
But Kim Raymond's efforts on a colour Strontium dog story are dire. While I'm more fond of Raymond's gooey Dredd than Wagner and Grant vocally were, it doesn't work at all here
So the highlight is the reprint pages, which get into the full Terra-Meks story from Ro-Busters, and it's just page after page of Dave Gibbons drawing giant robots beating the circuits out of each other, while getting in some blatant social commentary about class warfare. It's top stuff.
2000ad had been around for 10 years at this stage, and while it doesn't hit the target all the time and is starting to flail as its best creators look across the Atlantic, but there is joy in the comic's own past, especially when it's a slick as this.
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