Crossed Badlands ran for exactly 100 issues, reprinted as volumes 4-17 of Avatar's graphic novel series. I don't own them all. After all, their default state is standalone story arcs where almost everyone dies, so there's no need to read them in order. However, this final volume features Smokey (introduced in volume 7), a huge, intelligent Crossed who can lead groups of his psycho crazy fellows, strike deals with survivors and keep them alive and uninfected. (He's still evil, though.) Incidentally, other volumes I was thinking of buying include:

#7 = introduces Smokey and continues the story of Amanda. Reading today's volume made me less interested in this, though.

#14 = Homo Tortor, written by Kieron Gillen, which has a second narrative set 75,000 years in the past, with the "Blood Men".

#16 = I like the sound of these two stories. "Shrink" has a hedonistic bully deliberately infecting himself with the Crossed virus so that his brother can study him. "Anti-Crossed" sounds pretty damn creepy, but that's this franchise for you.

Incidentally, I'd love to know what happened to Avatar. They're famous for their horror comics (including Crossed) and I've read quite a few of their releases... but they shut down abruptly in 2019, leaving ongoing series unfinished. They released a few new things in 2021 and 2022 through their Boundless Comics imprint, but otherwise they're dormant except when reprinting old stuff.

Anyway, the problem with this volume is that Smokey is a dull protagonist. Yeah, he's intelligent. Yeah, he's big and strong. Unfortunately, his plan is doomed (although we'll see it done properly in Crossed +100) and he's not clever enough to do the things that would make it work. He wants to build a Crossed civilisation. Alas, your average Crossed is a psychotic fuck-monkey whose actions are effectively random and who would kill himself for laughs, so Smokey's hope for the future is to breed intelligent ones. He plans to achieve this by selecting clever parents, which in isolation might work... but intelligent Crossed are so rare that this isn't a scalable solution. Ultimately, the admittedly badass Smokey becomes a moping lump who's pinned his hopes to an idiotic plan and ends up getting depressed about reality.

Also, of course, he's still evil. His plan includes breeding uninfected humans for recreational torture, rape and murder. Ultimately, I didn't see the point in following him. We don't expect him to be in danger (and we wouldn't care if he was). It's almost impossible to stop him. So where's the drama?

The uninfected humans he recruits are more engaging. There's a survivalist chap who knows all about disaster shelters and is willing to do shocking things if it improves his chances of staying alive. (Even he turns out to have standards, though. Hang around with Smokey for long and you'll learn where your breaking point is.) There's also a sailor who can obey orders and seems like a nice guy.

This book is boring. You might think that was impossible in Crossed, but it's true. Smokey's guaranteed to fail, everyone's plans will prove useless and the only thing up for discussion is exactly how things fall apart. The most interesting thing about this book was one or two of the pin-ups (the ones that do the impossible and manage to be sexy despite their Crossed mega-grossness). I might buy more of this series, but its trade paperbacks are getting more expensive to hunt down as time goes on...