Cover Image: Lawless Book Four: Boomtown

Lawless Book Four: Boomtown

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‘Lawless, Book Four: Boomtown’ written by Dan Abnett with art by Phil Winslade is a graphic novel set in a space outpost in the Judge Dredd universe.

Marshal Metta Lawson keeps the law in Badrock, a newly designated Free Town. With newfound opportunity comes a host of settlers, grifters, and schemers. That and corporate shenanigans keep Lawson busy enough, but when a group of settlers is slaughtered, things get rough.

I’ll admit the last issue in this collection is a musical and it threw me off, but it’s got a reason to be here so stick with it. The story and art are pretty good.

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After the grand showdown in the third volume, the little frontier town of Badrock is now free, after a fashion – albeit with SJS observers in place, many of them hoping with various degrees of openness and vehemence for the failure of the project. But even aside from that, Marshal Metta Lawson (or, as the aliens call her, Marsha Metal Awesome) is bridling at the set-up; she was much more at home as a hardscrabble war leader than taking the more formal role at the head of a more formalised settlement with which her own success against the odds has left her saddled. New settlers are arriving, at least the ones who aren't slaughtered on the way – and in true revisionist Western fashion, those are attacks that certain factions would be very happy to ascribe to the natives, despite the facts suggesting otherwise. And in a lovely twist, the alien traders' first overture to the human city is to offer them beads in exchange for something untranslatable... There are details which feel a bit like hitting the reset button, in terms of bringing back familiar antagonists, but then it's hard to criticise the plausibility of that when the news is full of shits who refuse to be flushed. Elsewhere the story does a good job of not going quite where it seemed to be, and the art remains a black and white delight. It even ends with a musical episode, which apparently has been set to music and is available online, something I look forward to hearing.

(Netgalley ARC)

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