I don't know how Dan Abnett got so fucking good in the past few years. The writer's 2000ad comics were always reliable, occasionally dull and rarely exciting, with the endlessly unfunny Sinister Dexter going on and on and on since the 90s.
But now we're well into the 21st century, and he's doing the arguably best thing in the Megazine with Lawless, and absolutely the best series in 2000ad right now with The Out and Brink.
The Out is all sorts of brilliance, but Brink is something else again, with its slowly unfolding horror of humans in the void getting more and more intense.
Even as the series gleefully pointed out that the deepest of conspiracy theories can sprout from the most mundane of origins, the latest volume still ended with the clear idea that there really is a beast in the darkness, a monster in the abyss. It's not just the void out there, there's something in it, spitting nightmares back at us.
With quite remarkable and vibrant art by INJ Culbard, which helps when the series features a lot of people standing around in small spaces talking to each other, the series is full of menace and threat, and then gets properly apocalyptic when it needs to.
The climax of the latest volume is breathtakingly grim, and still finds some kind of visual poetry in the nihilism of it all. Burning skulls never looked so gorgeous, even as hope burns away with it.
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