The Weekly 2000 AD Prog 2504: Azimuth’s Multiverse Of Madness

Taking a look inside the UK’s greatest sci-fi comic, the Galaxy’s Greatest, fast approaching 50 years of brilliance — it’s the Weekly 2000 AD.

Another week of the wonders of 2000 AD for you now, and, as I keep on telling you, you won’t find a better weekly sci-fi anthology out there. Truly, for nearly 50 years now, it’s been the very best of Brit comics.

We’re keeping going with all five strips here, all of them offering you something different, something good. That includes Judge Dredd: The New Future, the latest bit of Dreddworld politics from Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt and Henry Flint, taking us deep into the intrigue and betrayals behind the bringing down of Judge Maitland’s transformative vision of a truly better world for Mega-City One. Or perhaps something stranger is to your liking? Well, then there’s Ghosted by Guy Adams and Megan Huang, giving us a very different sort of alien invasion tale, complex, questioning, and decidedly good. Or if you prefer something a little more action-oriented, albeit with a healthy dose of mystery wrapped up in it, Alec Worley and Ben Willsher present Durham Red in ‘Hungry City’. Then there’s Dan Abnett and Tazio Bettin‘s Azimuth: How To Train Your Dagon, where we get deeper and deeper into the ways the rogue A.I. has reached into the 2000 AD multiverse. And finally, there’s Herne & Shuck: Storming The Stone, your classic screw-up magician attempting to do the right thing sort of tale, a great mix of horror and comedy from David Barnett and Lee Milmore..

Again, five strips, all different, all really well done — the nearly 50-year-old 2000 AD still outdoes pretty much anything else.

It all begins with a Tazio Bettin cover for Azimuth, with at least one very familiar character appearing in the Azimuth universe …

2000 AD Prog 2504 was out in the UK on 14th October. It’s also out in the USA, via your local comic shop, on 28th October — go and ask them to order it in for you — you certainly won’t regret hopping onboard.

Right then, shall we?

Judge Dredd: The New Future — Part 4 — By Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt, Henry Flint, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Well, you know the drill by now — ‘The New Future’ takes up the tale, pretty much two years on from the events in A Better World, where Accounts Judge Maitland figured out a radical way to solve Mega-City One’s problems. She was allowed to put it into practice in a few Sectors, most notably Sector 304 — and it worked, it really worked. And that scared a few very important people. Most notably, Street Judge boss Hernandez and media mogul Robert Glenn. Glenn, like most of his kind, wants power to feed his ego, and has gone about it by fomenting hate in the citizens, a right-winger’s playbook we’re seeing here, right now, all around us in the non-comics world of 2026. Glenn has Hernandez, potentially in line for Chief Judge, in his pocket — powerful men like Glenn collect ambitious men willing to make deals with the devil after all.

They’re both implicit in Maitland’s downfall and the end of her better world. And Dredd knows this, or at least knows Hernandez had a hand in it. He’s just lacking that essential bit of final proof to nail Hernandez.

Now Dredd’s bringing Chief Judge Logan in on this. Logan has the meet in the secure Tek-Annex he’s already shown Beeny, the one where he’s growing new Judges from the best gene lines, including Hershey, and no doubt Dredd himself. It’s one of those fascinating little sub-plots that Williams and Wyatt have thrown into The New Future, something they’ll no doubt come back to in time, along with the sense of Logan as a Chief Judge with his back up against the wall — as he says himself, ‘just throwing whatever I can at our problems and hoping that any of it sticks.’

Anyhow, Logan’s now in on Dredd’s mission to get Hernandez, giving the order to release Maitland’s files from the SJS, in the hope it will give them that something they need to prove Hernandez’s involvement …

So, there you have it, ‘The New Future’, a tale of Dredd versus Hernandez, with Glenn in the background, and that sub-plot of Logan’s gene Judges in the background, right? Well, no. That would be far too simple. Instead, we now have the little sub-plots introduced at the end of the last episode taking flight …

Okay, so The Church of Grud and Guns might just be colour, but the one in the shipping department of Dynamic Clone Fluids Corp could be something bigger. And, as you’re about to see in this current episode, Wanda Strank’s story is about to become VERY important to ‘The New Future’. She was one of Maitland’s children, those in Sector 304 who believed the dream, and whose life, post-Maitland, has taken a turn. She’s building something in her apartment, and it doesn’t look like anything good. And then, you get that knock on the door.

It’s just a taut, political thriller feel to it all, where there’s not actually been all that much happening. Well, not that much in terms of Dredd doing action things. Instead, we get politics, pieces being moved into place, tension building. And my God, it’s just perfect, it really is.

A huge part of this, of course, is Henry Flint’s artwork. He’s always been great, one of those 2000 AD artists who hasn’t made the move over to the States, and that’s all to the good as far as 2000 AD is concerned. Because Flint, over the many years he’s been at 2000 AD, has just got better and better, his art reaching heights here on Dredd that easily puts him up in the pantheon of the greats who’ve worked on the strip. I’m talking Ezquerra, MacMahon, Bolland, Dillon, and quite a few more. Flint is the only one of those greats regularly working on Dredd right now, and his art is just a perfect thing: every page packed with intensity, dynamic layouts, incredible character work, his line just sublime, his invention something to revel in.

Oh yes, ‘The New Future’ is absolutely everything I hoped it would be, the natural successor to ‘A Better World’. As I’ve said from the start, odds are this will end the year as my best Dredd of 2026. Nothing I’ve read thus far dissuades me from that view one bit.

Ghosted Book Two — Part 5 — By Guy Adams and Megan Huang, letters by Simon Bowland

By now, the pattern is set. We’re alternating episodes in this second Book of Ghosted, an alien invasion tale with a difference. Odd episodes are however many months earlier, a month after first contact had been made, with an alien race who absolutely weren’t friendly. Amerika’s already been wiped out, and the aliens have spread across the globe. The only holdout is the city-state of Kinshasa, their secure dome preventing any incursion, their leaders espousing a mantra of wait and see, explore and investigate, but never give away their position.

We know they’ll be sending out their lesser citizens, tortured and transformed into fighting machines, but that’s sometime in the future. Here, they’re in the earliest stages, sending out exploratory missions to figure out what the aliens are and how to fight back.

Here we get the initial steps of Kinshasa’s decision to weaponise its population, knowing that their isolation will only keep them safe for so long. They’ve already predicted six months to alien victory, and certain elements in government have already put plans in place to use those citizens below a certain social level, enhancing them, programming them, turning the lowest rungs of their city into warriors, all without their consent. This is the state turning on its people in desperate times. As one of the leaders says, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you …’ The most chilling bit comes here, where there’s a cost-benefit analysis done on turning the lowest levels of society into a mutilated and enhanced army to fight an alien threat, the brutality coming in the cold talk of how these people cost the state X, and the transformation process will cost only Y, meaning they’re ‘turning debt into profit and winning the war while we’re at it.’ Tell me you couldn’t see our leaders making this sort of cold statistical analysis right now. Getting rid of the underclass and turning them into the first line of defence against those that threaten us … Chillingly, it’s really not that difficult to imagine, is it?

Ghosted Book One was complex, confusing, seemingly deliberately out to frustrate you, make you question, make you imagine, never easily setting out what was going on. Adams seemed determined to make it as difficult as possible to thread our way through what was going on. Here in Book Two, we’re deep into it now, and as long as you paid attention to Book One, things are playing out a lot easier. It’s that classic thing of a story that isn’t talking down to you, is laying out things early in such a way that you should be drawn in enough to keep reading, intrigued, wanting to know the answers, and here we’re getting a lot of the payoff. We’ve seen the warriors of Kinshasa, pitting their enhanced forms against the aliens; we’ve followed spoiled rich kid Benu as she uncovers that the alien war, thought to be on another planet, is actually right outside the protective dome, and now we’re following the twin threads of Benu and a breakaway offshoot of that warrior clan who believe things could go differently, all alongside the look we get, as here, at the decisions of those in power that have led us to this point.

It’s a fascinating, complex thing. It’s a story that demands your attention, rewards that attention. With the first Book, I was confused yet intrigued. With this second Book, I’m just so glad I paid attention and kept going with it. It’s a slow burn thing, a tale that demands your attention, and one that rewards careful reading.

Durham Red: Hungry City — Part 5 — By Alec Worley and Ben Willsher, letters by Simon Bowland

The bright, neon, in-your-face artwork Ben Willsher’s bringing here really works for this Durham Red, set on the Resort Station of Mondo Carnivallo, Hungry City, where it’s a free-for-all for the crime syndicates and all manner of pleasures are on offer. Case in point: that first page here of Red wandering through the Hench House, looking to give the hat she woke up with, alongside the giant rabbit’s head, and amongst a hell of a lot of blood. It’s a page of decadence amid the bright lights, Red looking effortlessly cool, even as she still has no damn idea what the hell she’s doing here, why she’s here, and whether she’s accidentally caused a major incident by killing the big bunny boss of one of the major crime syndicates along the way.

Anyway, she woke up with a cowboy hat, a cowboy hat belonging to Coltt — ‘Coltt Tootees. An old friend, a mutant, although you wouldn’t know it ’til he takes his pants off … IQ of a marshmallow and twice as sweet.’

So, things are falling into place, with Red connecting the dots, with the death of Bugsy Acciatore (the big bunny head Red woke up with in her lap) maybe being laid at the hands of his son, Donnie, the rather familiar orange, bad-hair sort of idiot son we met last time …

Oh yes, these Durham Red stories by Worley and Willsher just keep getting better and better; self-contained tales they may be, but they’re building upon the mystique and the allure of the character, finally giving us tales that are worthy of her.

Azimuth: How To Train Your Dagon — Part 5 — By Dan Abnett and Tazio Bettin, colours by Matt Soffe, letters by Rob Steen

You want Multiverse of Madness? Well, Abnett and Bettin are happy to oblige here in Azimuth. We’ve already seen plenty of Andi, Cassandra Anderson, Judge Anderson, from another universe, not quite the Judge we know and love in the Dreddverse, accompanying Dexter and Suzi Nine Millimetre on their quest to defeat the rogue AI of downlode, the rogue AI that’s created the world of Azimith.

Well now we get a while trio of multiversal incursions, as shown there on Bettin’s cover. You’ve got Venus Bluegenes from Rogue Trooper, of course. But as for the other two, well, the woman is Ramona Dixie, Dexter from a parallel universe, and the bloke with the ‘Jones’ on his chest armour is a VC, Jack Jones. Oh, the deep dive into 2000 AD history there. Of course, you don’t need to know all that to enjoy the wonders of Azimuth; it’s all set up to allow you to enjoy it without knowing anything other than these three are multiversal refugees from worlds the rogue AI touched. But knowing the history gives you that little bit more, don’t you think?

So here we are, Dexter and alt-universe Andi, meeting alt-universe Venus Bluegenes, Ramona Dixie, and Jack Jones, VC. All of them spat out by the Dagon down in the hypotheseas. And the trio know a hell of a lot more about Aziiuth than either Dexter or Andi …

Oh yes, this city of Azimuth appears to be ancient, full of conflict over the years as Annica spreads her AI tendrils into other worlds, other universes. And the outsiders all end up here, in Azimuth, plenty of them — as we see on a full of delicious teasers to those who’ve previously wound up here — all of them ‘Hronir,’ ‘missing things, imperfect duplicates,’ ‘created out of the hope to find something lost.’

But Dexter, well, it seems Dexter’s something a bit different, an outsider from the original world, the feral AI’s birthplace …

Azimuth continues to impress, full of twists and turns, with the impression that Abnett’s just playing with us here, packing on the mystery and weirdness. But Abnett’s games are fun ones, always keeping me reading, wondering just where he’s going to take it next. It’s sure given new life to the whole Sinister Dexter story. And alongside all that, we have Bettin’s artwork, just a delight to see. Every character given life, perfectly bringing any mad idea Abnett has to the page and selling it to us so well.

Herne & Shuck: Storming The Stone — Part 5 — By David Barnett and Lee Milmore, colours by Quinton Winter, letters by Annie Parkhouse

Well, after plenty of build-up, as we discovered just how connected Herne is to that Tory prat MP, Alex Ramsey-Hall, host to the demon Moloch, we’ve now got to deal with the imminent attack on Herne’s not-so-safe house by Moloch/Ramsey-Hall’s forces of St Michael …

In a wonderful little moment of don’t ask too many questions, it turns out not only is there a basement to the safe house, not only is there a Transit Van down there, but there’s also a secret tunnel allowing our little gang their escape.

Yes, it’s one of those moments of suspension of disbelief, just to push the story forwards. But when it ends with this, a pitch-perfect little gag, you’ll just forgive the cliched way they made their escape …

As is usual by now, plenty to enjoy in this tale of dark magics lightened by the comedy moments laced into it by Barnett, and with Milmore doing his usual sterling work on the art.