I sometimes find Rebellion’s strategies for growing 2000AD’s audience to be more than a little baffling.

For one thing, despite being the publishers for 2000AD, Rebellion were initially – and still are – a video game development company and publisher themselves.

Yet they’ve taken advantage of this on just a handful of occasions, despite having such a rich stable of characters and stories they could adapt into video games.

Even when it comes to their comics, they’ve done a great job with material for younger readers with their Regened special issues of the main 2000AD weekly comic, but the fact that it simply interrupts the normal, adult oriented stories for a week must annoy the hell out of many regular, mature readers who don’t have kids to pass the issue onto.

Not only that, but if you do manage to pique the interest of kids who want to carry on reading the comic, it’s clearly not ideal when it reverts to plainly unsuitable material the following week.

It’d make far more sense for them to spin Regened off as a more regular, separate series entirely.

Which is kind of what we have here with Mega City Max #1, though there’s no indication at present that this is anything other than a one off to test the water.

With Regened aimed at all ages, Mega City Max is ever so slightly more mature in tone and is aimed at the Young Adult age range.

It contains four main stories, featuring characters and/or settings that’ll be familiar to most 2000AD readers, though they’ve been adjusted in some way – for example, several characters appear here as their younger selves, or in the case of Harlem Heroes we’re focusing on a younger, newer Aeroball team.

For the most part, all of the stories are at least worth a read – and deserve a chance to develop too.

First up is the excellent DeMarco PI, which sees the titular detective taking on a case that the Justice Department can’t or won’t touch.

Walter the Wobot features Dredd’s ex-butler droid in a pretty fun, if inessential, little story.

Perhaps the most startling inclusion at first, given how risque the standard version of the strip is, Devlin Waugh dials down the crude content but still manages to serve up a deliciously enjoyable tale.

Lastly, there’s the incredibly busy, hyperactive Harlem Heroes story – which has some awesomely stylised art with fabulous colour work.

Overall, despite me not being the target audience, I thought Mega City Max was great; it’s just a shame that Rebellion have sort of pushed it out with little publicity or faith in the concept.

I hope it does lead to more issues – like Regened, it seems daft to entice readers in without the promise of further, regular issues to keep them coming back for more.