Rebellion, the folks behind the British sci-fi comics anthology 2000AD, have been pretty aggressive about marketing their weekly comic digitally, with both an iOS app and direct downloads via their website. This week’s issue of 2000AD, Prog 1850 (issues are called “progs” in their world), is a good jumping-on point for new readers, with four new story arcs launching at once. Richard Bruton observes in his review at the Forbidden Planet blog that three of the “new” stories are the beginnings of new story arcs in existing series, but the Table of Contents includes a bit of backstory and heck, there’s always Wikipedia.
There’s more, though. A few months ago Rebellion started offering 2000AD’s companion monthly, Judge Dredd Megazine, digitally as well, and now they are filling in the backstory with 20 volumes of The Judge Dredd Case Files, available via their iOS app. (You can find them on Kindle as well, at what looks like a slightly lower price of $9.99 per volume.) These 20 volumes (with vol. 21 due out next month) collect every Judge Dredd story from 2000AD and Judge Dredd Megazine, in order of publication. Each volume is priced at £9.99 to $13.99, or whatever that translates to in dollars, pesos, or your own local currency, for over 300 pages of work by creators such as John Wagner, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Dave Gibbons, Mark Millar, Brian Bolland, and Carlos Ezquerra. Check out the preview at Robot 6 for a sample of what’s inside.
A former book editor and newspaper reporter, Brigid Alverson started MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters¹ reading habits and now covers comics and graphic novels for Comic Book Resources , School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Comics World, Robot 6, and MTV Geek. She also edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Brigid was a judge for the 2012 Eisner Awards. Send her an email to wordballoons@gmail.com