Douglas Wolk’s series aimed at reviewing every Dredd-related graphic novel at Dredd Reckoning continues, and he’s reached Case Files 8:

Two years after the end of “The Apocalypse War,” its spectre was still looming over Judge Dredd, but Alan Grant and John Wagner had pretty much run out of “post-war” plot kernels. (The anniversary parade at the beginning of “Question of Judgement” is a good gag, with a mushroom cloud and a pile of bodies staged as floats, but that’s about it this time.) It’s clear that the mega-epics were very popular, but that they were also exhausting to pull off.
And it must have been a mighty task to come up with a new angle for an epic: since the premise of the series is the relationship between the protagonist and the city, there are only so many ways to get a long story out of upending that relationship. Pat Mills had already done the “Dredd goes out of the city into a very un-city-like environment” plot (and Wagner and Grant revisited the Cursed Earth for “Helltrekkers,” a 29-part serial that ran from Prog 387 to Prog 415, and has been reprinted a couple of times but never as a book, but let me tell you, you’re not missing anything). Wagner had done the “Dredd moves to a different city” plot and the “Dredd leads the rebellion against the new leadership of the city” plot. They’d done the “Dredd leaves the city and the planet and goes on an outer-space quest” plot. Then they’d done the “city becomes a war-zone, thereby changing all the rules” plot.

So for the first third of this volume, you can see Grant and Wagner casting about for ways to make the feature stay fresh. “Dredd Angel” is the best thing in the volume—it’s very funny most of the time (the gag about “the lost treasures of Liberace” is an excellent conceit, if one likely to be lost on British 14-year-olds in 1984), and Ron Smith plays a couple of scenes for comedy that other artists would have treated as straighter violent chaos.

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“Thirteenth Assessment” is a cute take on the “Dredd and the rookie” formula, and Judge Brisco actually turned up again in 2000 AD just a few weeks ago. (I guess his mom got out of jail sometime around the end of “The Satanist.”) “Sunday Night Fever” (which features Arthur Koestler Block leapers again!) finds Cam Kennedy trying to work some of his Mike McMahon-isms out of his system, but it’s a nice-looking piece as it is. In the prog after this volume ends, Kennedy would draw the first episode of the next great Dredd story. But that will have to wait until the 18th: next week, we take another detour into color, as we arrive at the second volume of The Restricted Files.

More.

Dredd Reckoning, Douglas Wolk’s review blog of all collections Dreddish, reaches Judge Anderson: Psi Files 01:

Anderson was very popular as a supporting character, obviously—of all the supporting characters in Dredd’s stories she was the one who most seemed like a natural to spin off into her own feature. (It may be less that she’s a great character on her own than that she’s a great foil for Dredd: irreverent, inexact, emotional, and totally on the same page as he is.) Still, it’s not clear to me as a reader why it initially seemed like having a second Judge-based series in the weekly was a good idea. It might have been a way of dealing with reader demands for more Dark Judges and more Anderson without having to do another “Dredd fights Judge Death” story—the stakes for the first two were pitched high enough that it couldn’t have been easy to find another angle.

The question Alan Grant (and sometimes John Wagner) faced after that, though, was what kinds of stories it was possible to tell with her that it wasn’t possible to tell in the context of Dredd’s own series. Supernatural stuff, obviously, and squishy psychic phenomena, since those are hard to square up with the Dredd premise of “contemporary American cultural trends taken to outlandish extremes in a sci-fi context.” (But that means they’re also hard to square up with the Mega-City One setting.)

One other answer was that Judge Anderson could simply act as a second channel for Judge Dredd: adding to the backstory and moving characters into position. Anderson’s first full-on serial, “Four Dark Judges,” followed up on “Judge Death Lives,” and established a basis for future Judge Death plots; “The Hour of the Wolf” set up the idea that the Apocalypse War wasn’t so much the conclusive end of a cold war as the instigating event of a very long chain of resentment and revenge.

 More.

Douglas Wolk’s reviews of Judge Dredd graphic novels continues with Case Files 7:

The other extended storyline this time is another seven-parter, “The Graveyard Shift,” which I believe is the longest single Dredd story drawn in its entirety by Ron Smith. (The first chapter might be the initial instance of one of my favorite Dredd clichés: the episode or story that ends with Dredd telling a dispatcher “on my way!”) “The Graveyard Shift” seems like a catchall for a bunch of leftover story ideas—premises not quite big enough for their own story but slightly too big for a Daily Star strip, or variations on routines they’d pulled off before: another Boing gag, another “Block Mania”-type showdown.

But it’s so packed with witty ideas—Dredd’s loathing of paperwork, the left-hand killer, the Carol Monroe Block paragliders, Hershey and Dredd busting down doors for crime swoops to kill some time, “that inconsiderate sniper’s made us late for the theatre!”—that it holds together.

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The best joke of all, here, though, is the quietest—the second leaper, at the end of the story, deciding to turn around and go back to bed: “Perhaps tomorrow…” That he’s perched atop Arthur Koestler Block is a sly touch—Koestler and his wife had committed suicide in March, 1983, and “The Graveyard Shift” ran from September to November of that year.

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Some other well-worn Dredd tropes turn up again this time, too: “Bob & Carol & Ted & Ringo” (and wouldn’t that title make a great T-shirt?) is where Wagner and Grant borrow the dinosaurs-eating-people formula from Pat Mills. It also has one of their least likeable tics—minor characters with comedy Spanish accents—and yet another character, this time David Baloney, who’s obviously a caricature of some public figure. At least Ron Smith clearly enjoys drawing the dinosaurs, and his design for the little keeper robot Granville is wonderful.

Smith’s most… committed work here, though, has to be “Citizen Snork,” a fine example of the “mildly silly idea pushed until the extent to which it’s being pushed becomes hilarious” Dredd formula. It’s also a cute little piece of narrative misdirection: the “Easy Glider” bit in the first couple of pages looks like it’s going to be the central joke until the nose routine completely takes over. And the “Robsmith” gag in the final panel is another one I wish somebody would explicate.

More.

Dredd Reckoning returns with a look at a collection of the Judge Dredd comic strip that ran in the Daily Star:

(Reprints: Judge Dredd weekly strips from the Daily Star, Sep. 5, 1981-Dec. 14, 1985, with some omissions)
A little history, pieced together from the invaluable Barney: The weekly Judge Dredd strip, written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and initially drawn by Ron Smith, launched in the British tabloid newspaper Daily Star on August 29, 1981. (For historical reference, that would’ve been the same cover date as Prog 227, smack in the middle of “Judge Death Lives.” The first, never-reprinted strip is called “Devil’s Island,” which makes me suspect it was a reworking of the story in 2000 AD Prog 2. Anybody got a scan of it I could see?) Smith drew it from the beginning until August 1986, when Ian Gibson took over; the weekly strip ran until the end of 1986. Barney claims that Wagner and Grant wrote it together for its entire run, but the later strips in this volume are just credited to “John Wagner and Ron Smith.”
Judge Dredd was also a daily continuity strip in the Daily Star from the beginning of 1986 until May 1998; that one was initially written by Wagner and Grant and drawn by Smith too, but Gibson took over drawing it in mid-1986 and drew it until September 1987 (and intermittently thereafter). Subsequent Wagner/Grant storylines were drawn by Barry Kitson, Steve Dillon and Mike Collins. Wagner and Grant left the strip in March, 1991, around the time the Megazine must have started demanding a lot more attention; for its final seven years, the Daily Star daily was variously written by Mark Millar, Alan McKenzie, Gordon Rennie and Andy Diggle, and drawn by Collins, Carlos Pino, Smith again, Sean Phillips, Dylan Teague, David Bircham, Charlie Adlard and Andrew Currie.
Various weekly strips and daily continuity sequences have been reprinted in scattered Dredd and 2000 AD specials, as well as a few issues of the Megazine and 2000 AD itself, but none of them are currently in print, and the great bulk of the Daily Star strips have never been reprinted. (I gather from the 2000 AD message board that the publishers would like to see them all collected eventually, but it isn’t likely to happen soon.) The better part of Smith’s weekly strips—but not by any means all—are collected in this 1990 volume, a Fleetway hardcover with U.K. and U.S. prices listed. If you’d like to see what they were like, there’s a pretty good one reprinted here. … These strips do have a lot of charm—the maximum-story-in-minimum-space effect is impressive, and Wagner and Grant pull off a lot of hit-and-run gags (“Kentucky Fried Algae,” various apropos block names, favorite words like “winkling”). For the most part, though, they read like what they basically were: clever weekly ads for the real thing, a hint of a few aspects of what Dredd’s creative team could do, rather than a full-fledged example of it.

conservativeradical:

Douglas Wolk continues his exploration of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files. In this post, he’s joined by Tucker Stone for a review of the fifth volume in the series, which includes the end of Block Mania and the classic Apocalypse War. I went through a pretty hardcore Dredd phase when I started high school (yeah, I know, I’m extremely conventional), but haven’t read the book since. Reading this review reminded me of the things I loved about the series - its total commitment to the absurdity of its premise is downright inspiring.

Since you’re reading a post co-authored by Tucker, check out his post celebrating his fifth anniversary as a blogger. Tucker’s been coming strong, breaking brothers’ backs and keeping shit real for five years. He’s also one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet in the world of online comics journalism/commentary. Congrats dude.

Douglas Wolk’s Dredd Reckoning moves onto Case Files 4, where the John Wagner/Alan Grant team start their legendary run on the story. Although he wasn’t impressed by “The Judge Child” things do improve:

And so Grant and Wagner—with Bolland again—hang a lantern on the problem in “Block War,” a six-pager that beats all of “The Judge Child” as far as I’m concerned. It’s a very simple story, but it makes a great deal of what comes after it snap into focus: we see the Council of Five (at this time Quimby, Ecks, Pepper, McGruder—making her first appearance—and Griffin) discussing Dredd’s role, and questioning his decisions. Dredd, we understand, is a leader in combat situations, but he’s not an administrator; he’s a street judge. And, in counterpoint to their conversation, we see the kind of block war that will eventually scale up into block mania, a year or so later; naming the blocks after Ernest Borgnine and Rita Tushingham gives a sense of just how many blocks there have to be for the naming conventions to get down to that level, too.

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The longer stories, though, are the ones where the Wagner/Grant team start to click. “Otto Sump’s Ugly Clinic” is a dumb idea pushed so far that it becomes kind of sublime—the punch line (“only the rich could afford to be ugly”) is a coup de grâce. (That’s a daring cover, too, for its time: note that Dredd isn’t actually on it.) “The Fink” salvages an idea that got lost in the mayhem of “The Judge Child,” and the artwork is Mike McMahon in top form: the looser and more rickety his line gets, the more fun it is to see his stuff. Also, it’s the story that introduces Resyk, the facility in which dead citizens’ bodies are broken down for useful chemicals. Clearly somebody cracked up over the line “we use everything but the soul.”

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Finally, we get “Unamerican Graffiti,” the unprepossessing two-parter that introduced Marlon “Chopper” Shakespeare. (The conclusion was echoed by “Decade Later” from Brian Wood’s series DMZ, but maybe it’s inevitable for the conclusion of a “graffiti writer is finally caught by the law but gets his revenge after the fact” story.) Chopper turned out to be an unexpectedly durable character—he’s survived at least twice when his writers intended to kill him off—and a great foil for Dredd.

The Angel Gang are lawless psychopaths, the Dark Judges upend the “protecting citizens from crime” argument, P.J. Maybe is a criminal mastermind; they all play against Dredd’s essence one way or another. But the absolute core of Dredd’s character is paternalistic authority: “I am the law.” Chopper recognizes no authority of any kind; he’s somewhere on the anarchistic end of libertarianism. All he wants to do is be free to ride his machine without being hassled by the Man, as The Wild Angels put it. He himself is no physical threat at all to Dredd, or really to anyone else—all he can do is make Dredd lose face, but that’s what makes him dangerous to what Dredd represents.

Dredd Reckoning returns with a look at Judge Dredd Case Files 3:

Still, there’s some enormously entertaining stuff in here. John Wagner was firing wildly at this point: some of the episodes this time are funny or thrilling or both, and expand Dredd’s world considerably, while others are forgettable at best and risible at worst. (See, for instance, the one that starts with a talking cat getting Dredd’s attention while he’s on patrol and ends “Two days later a new law was passed—‘the Dredd Act’—banning forever the use of animals for experimentation.”) Occasionally, he was trying out ideas he’d refine later on: “New Year Is Cancelled” is another instance of Wagner’s “we’ve hidden bombs all over Mega-City, can you find them all in time?” plot that would show up later in “The Big Bang Theory” and “Total War,” and its evil megalomaniac child Albert Sherman is a much less funny rough draft of P.J. Maybe.

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[Ron] Smith’s really the star of this volume, as far as art goes: he nails the design of both Otto Sump and Johnny Teardrop in “Sob Story,” pulls off the sweep of “The Black Atlantic” (the first time Wagner really has some fun with the fascism inherent in Dredd, with its opening “crime blitz” scene of Judges showing up at random citizens’ homes to see what laws they happen to be breaking), and totally sells the scope of the spider invasion in “The Black Plague.” Either Smith specifically told Wagner that he wanted to spend a month or so drawing a zillion giant spiders, or he was a really, really good sport. Every time I see a story like that where an artist has to draw a single creature hundreds of times in every panel, I think of Carl Barks’ story of nearly losing his mind drawing “The Lemming with the Locket.”

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Finally, right near the end of the book, we get its jewel, “Judge Death.” It’s the first multi-part Dredd story that Brian Bolland drew all of (the second and last was “Judge Death Lives,” in fact). And it’s got just about everything that this era of Dredd did well: a hilariously over-the-top concept played straight (“life itself was made illegal”), wild comedy in the context of serious adventure, casual but nonstop world-building (the “highly-strung” Psi-Judges!), excellent character design (aside from Death and Anderson, that DJ with the bugging-out-eyes glasses is fantastic; was he modeled on Buggles-era Trevor Horn, or did he prefigure him?), and a concluding twist that calls back to an earlier episode, and not a likely one: “Palais de Boing.” Who’d have thought that one was going to turn out to be important later?

Douglas Wolk’s Dredd Reckoning blog returns with a review of the Complete Case Files 2 and things are already looking up after last time:

It’s fascinating how abruptly Dredd shifted from the “mostly short stories” format of the first half of vol. 1 to the “extended storylines” format. I don’t know if somebody decided that the “fighting crime in Mega-City One” premise wasn’t working, but just a couple of weeks after he gets back from the moon, he’s sent off to the Cursed Earth for the first half of this volume, and as soon as he gets back the Judge Cal/”The Day the Law Died” storyline kicks off.

“The Cursed Earth” is a strange piece of work. For one thing, it’s Pat Mills’ single longest contribution to Dredd as a writer (although John Wagner pops up in the middle of it for a couple of episodes), and his most sustained piece of worldbuilding in the series—although it probably didn’t add as much to the series overall as the six pages of “The Return of Rico.” (The business with the final U.S. President, Robert L. Booth, being held in suspended animation does turn out to be mighty significant later, though. “Booth” is a nicely pointed last name for an American President, too.) It’s got a whole lot of Action The Way Kids Like It; it’s amazing how Mills is capable of shoehorning images of dinosaurs eating people into pretty much any context, even now. But give him credit: his story about a national park filled with cloned dinosaurs came out a solid 12 years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Even if they’re cloned from, er, “DNA cells.” 

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For all its rickety construction and inconsistency, though, there’s a mischievousness to “The Day the Law Died” that I love. Judge Pepper’s selective credit-taking, Cal’s revenge on Slocum, Judge Schmaltz’s protracted death scene: there’s a lot of stuff here that might fly over the heads of its intended audience, or gets at the ultraviolent tropes of boys’ comics from really weird angles. Not to mention, you know, Caligula. I’m guessing that the Klegg and Fergee have to be jokes about cultural figures that I would’ve known about as an adult in England in 1978; if anybody can explain them, please fill me in. It’s also neat to see the first significant chunk of Dredd artwork by Ron Smith, maybe the most underrated early Dredd artist; it doesn’t yet have the relaxed clarity he’d develop a couple of years later (his fancy layouts get in the way of storytelling), and his characters still look a little too posed, but his character work is already dead-on.

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Next time: the third volume of the Case Files brings us the first appearance of Judge Death, as well as more of Pat Mills’ dinosaurs eating people!

Which is where quality really takes an upswing and everything seems to come together for the first time. Worth remembering that while this is the US-printed volume, the UK Case Files 2 has identical content.

Dredd Reckoning is a new blog dedicated to reviewing all Judge Dredd collected volumes out there, yes 2000AD’s fans are dedicated and ambitious (and a bit mad). Here is the introduction:

Evening, citizen.

This blog is eventually going to feature commentary and/or dialogues about all the Judge Dredd books that are currently in print (and some that are out of print). The plan is to go through all the Dredd-related comics stories that have been collected in book form, in an approximation of chronological order.

“Dredd-related,” for my purposes, means “set in the time of the Mega-Cities.” There are a ton of Dredd spinoffs, some of which have been reprinted in books—Judge Anderson, Judge Death, Chopper, and so on. I’ll be covering those, too. Crossovers with Dredd (Batman/Judge Dredd, Judge Dredd Vs. Aliens, etc.) count, and in fact are often in continuity in the Dreddverse—but other series that have crossed over but aren’t directly associated with the Mega-City setting don’t count. (So: no Harlem Heroes, Flesh, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, etc.)

As for “chronological order”: that’s tricky too, since the latter three-fifths of the catalogue (basically from the beginning of Judge Dredd Megazine) is in severe disarray. What I’ll probably start out doing is running through the 17 volumes of The Complete Case Files that are out so far, adding other volumes at the chronological point at which their first non-Case Files story appears. (So, for instance, the first Judge Anderson collection will probably appear between volumes 8 and 9.) No guarantees, though.

Assuming I manage to keep going with this project, this entry will eventually be updated to include an index.

First up is Judge Dredd Case Files 1:

The question a lot of people have when they’re looking at a series with as many volumes as Judge Dredd is “where do I start?” And the natural assumption is to start at the beginning. In the case of this series, I’d argue that that’s a big mistake, unless you happen to be a bright, angry ten-year-old British boy in 1977.

(For the record, when people ask me where to start with Dredd, I usually say America—the Rebellion edition, with “Fading of the Light” and “Cadet” appended. “America” is a fantastic introduction; it’s also, really, the turning point of the series, the place where it stops being a fantasy about ideological violence without consequences and starts being a pitch-black comedy about the consequences of ideological violence. And “Fading” and “Cadet” have a bunch of great “John Wagner’s playing the long game”/”wow, I really wasn’t expecting this story to go in that direction” moments. Unfortunately, America seems to have gone out of print recently, and although there are storylines I like as much or more—“Tour of Duty,” in particular—they’re not particularly useful as on-ramps.)

It’s strange to see now just how weak the first couple of Judge Dredd stories are, how quickly the series got off the ground in some ways, and how long it took to get interesting in other ways. By the end of this collection, it’s definitely getting there, but it’s not quite there yet.

Then Restricted Files 1:

Part of the reason I picked this peculiar order for the Judge Dredd books—organized by earliest not-duplicated-by-the-Case-Files story in each volume—was to get the worst over with as early as possible. And this collection of Dredd stories that appeared outside 2000 AD proper during its first seven years is the worst of all the Dredd books I’ve read: it has its okay moments, but some of these pieces are just painfully embarrassing to look at. “Completism” means having to say you’re sorry. I’m sorry.

Which is not to say that this volume isn’t interesting for somebody as deeply engaged with this stuff as I am. The thing that makes the bad early stories terrible is the same thing that makes them fascinating, which is that the people assigned to churn them out didn’t yet have any idea of what made “Judge Dredd” work, from the details of its satirical but meticulously consistent world-building to the basic tone and pace of good Dredd stories.

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There we go; it’s all uphill from here! Next week, it’s on to the Case Files vol. 2, with “The Cursed Earth” and “The Day the Law Died.”

These reviews are big beasts giving each story in some massive phonebook-sized collections their moment in the sun. He also doesn’t pull any punches, which makes going in chronological order a little frustrating as Dredd really hit his stride slightly later, but the good news is we know that is just around the corner - the only way is up.