All Crimes Are Paid: JUDGE DREDD

This is part of Discourse 2000, a story-by-story look at the weekly 2000AD comic. Expect spoilers for stories covered!

WHICH THRILL? In the year 2099, due process is a thing of the past. Judge Dredd dispenses instant justice on the streets of the vast Mega-City One.

BIG SIX

2000AD’s sixth regular strip was held over from the launch issue, giving the other five room to introduce themselves and allowing Prog 1 to include a teaser. Some later retellings – helped by the kind glow of hindsight – cast this decision as a display of confidence. It seems likely that some of the struggles Pat Mills had in bringing Judge Dredd to the page played a part too. The only story in the early line-up Mills had developed rather than created, Judge Dredd was an editorial headache. Both the strip’s creators, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, had temporarily walked away from the new comic, Wagner after an apparent IPC promise of greater creator rights had been pulled.

The origin of Judge Dredd is full of stories told and told again. Wagner borrowing a name from an abortive Mills horror strip; Ezquerra’s initial art with its outrageous full-page cityscape; Wagner’s horrified “he looks like a fucking Spanish pirate” on seeing the character design; and so on. It’s the most retold story in 2000AD history, perhaps after the origin of the comic itself. And why not? This is Judge Dredd we’re talking about, the most recognisable British comics character of the last 50 years (if not ever), and more than anything else the reason 2000AD survived.

But Dredd was also the odd story out, the one hardest to square with Mills’ working-class/anti-authoritarian vision for the comic, and full of difficult initial decisions. Most prominently, how much of a bastard was Dredd going to be? The prototype strip has him executing surrendered perps in the street and shooting a fleeing jaywalker in the back. Whether this was too anti-heroic or just too violent, Mills demurred. As published, Dredd is tough but gives at least the illusion of fairness.

Wagner was back as regular writer within a couple of months, but the first year of Dredd is still often scrappy and episodic, with the same abruptness and inconsistency as MACH 1 – initially at least, a much more popular story. It’s also often magnificent, and it’s very little like any later version of Dredd I’ll write about.

Wagner’s earlier strip for Valiant, One Eyed Jack, is cited as a kind of Dredd prototype, and actually fits the Millsian hero template better than Dredd seems to. But aside from being a series about the toughest cop in the world, Dredd and One-Eyed Jack don’t have a lot in common, and the differences are richer than the similarities. The basic difference is that Jack is the most interesting thing in the One-Eyed Jack world, a low-veracity take on contemporary New York. One-Eyed Jack was an entertaining strip but a more faithful crib from Dirty Harry than Dredd is: tales of a rule-bending lone wolf hardman who criminals fear because they know he’ll cross any line that’s put in front of him. Original or not, he’s a strong lead. The action in a One-Eyed Jack story focuses on how Jack will deal with whatever violent situation he finds himself in, not on the situations themselves, and with only three pages to play with each issue, both situations and solutions tend to be rudimentary. 

Early Dredd is occasionally like this too. A strip like “Mugger’s Moon” – by Gerry Finley-Day, not Wagner – is in every particular a 6-page One Eyed Jack story. Judge Dredd chases and guns down some muggers, and blows up the taxi of a cabbie who abandoned one of their victims. Its sole point is that Dredd is tough as nails, violent and ruthless, and he needs to be to deal with the scum he’s up against. But Dredd is the focus, not the city or the situations it throws at him: there’s nothing interesting about mugging.

If all Dredd stories were like this, the strip wouldn’t have topped the popularity charts. It might not have lasted six months. The fact they’re not all like this is down to that difference with One-Eyed Jack: Jack is more interesting than his world, Dredd is the other way around. He’s the epitome of a Judge, the best and most competent cop in his city, but unlike Jack he’s not a rule-bender; he exists in a police state in which all rules come pre-bent. At this stage there’s no tension between what Dredd himself wants and what the Law and his bosses require of him.

In theory this makes the strip less exciting – you’re stripping out one of the main sources of drama in the typical police story. That means Wagner has to find something to replace it with. So the first few years of Dredd find the strip constantly pulling in two subtly different directions. One is to make Dredd more interesting – fleshing out his backstory, giving him a supporting cast. The other is to make his world more interesting. And for a long time, the second gives the bigger payoffs. There is not a lot of variety in Dredd’s response to various situations – even the best 1977 Dredd stories, like the multi-part “Robot Wars”, are generally about getting him in position to arrest the problem, or shoot it. So writing Dredd becomes about finding interesting problems for him to arrest or shoot, and the writers realise quickly that the wilder or even goofier that stuff is, the better the stories get.

Repeatedly in Dredd’s first year, you keep bumping into episodes which feel like Judge Dredd stories will regularly feel in future; stories which read like the creators hitting a target they might not have realised existed until they did. The first story to do this is very early – “Krong”, in Prog 5, where Malcolm Shaw finds weird things to bounce off Dredd (a holodeck-style artificial environment; giant Androids of movie monsters) and knits them together into a rudimentary plot he can let Dredd loose on. It’s not a classic, but it’s immediately a mode Judge Dredd works well in – a ramrod-straight protagonist in a lunatic world.

On the other side of the ledger, it introduces Dredd’s first regular supporting character, his “Italian cleaning lady”, Maria, one of a slew of nagging or domineering older women in early 2000AD. Either some of the creators had mother issues or, more cynically, they knew some readers did. Maria (and, imminently, Walter) are comic relief hedges against a one-note lead character: with hindsight they feel like crutches but they’re an integral part of how the early Dredd works.

Twenty progs later, out the other side of “Robot Wars”, we get another example – Wagner and Ian Gibson’s “You Bet Your Life”, about an illegal game show in which hapless citizens are murdered if they can’t answer the questions. This is a foundational story, because the highly jaundiced view of Mega City One’s citizens which snaps into place here becomes a baseline for years. Dredd is saving the citizens, not just from predatory crims, but from the situations their own desperation and stupidity gets them into.

The story is played mostly for laughs, as of all the Dredd artists Gibson has the most early flair for designing hapless civilians, goofy robots and weirdo perps (though he can also, as his blazing ‘Robot Wars’ episodes show, deliver on the action front). Wagner has zero interest in earning your sympathy for the thick-as-munce citizen Dredd rescues – he’s a fool who’s led his entire family to their doom, and presumably he’s plonked back into his wretched life straight after the story ends. The point is, again, that Mega-City One is a demented environment in which anything might happen. Within six months of 2000AD’s launch, the future city is easily the most interesting thing about the whole comic.

A lot of Dredd’s later history in the comic will be about the slow unwinding of the ideas these early stories set up. We will get more focus on Dredd as a person. We will see wedges between Dredd, the Justice Department he serves, and eventually the Law he embodies. We will also see a broader range of Mega-City One citizens, and learn to view them as people, not just punchlines. The early Dredd tropes turn out over the medium-term to box creators in, and need to be undermined. But nobody in 1977 was thinking about making Dredd work a decade out. and these early ideas are also the things that ensure the strip’s survival and dominance early on. They let Dredd work harder than anything to establish 2000AD as a home for not just action, but dark comedy.

WE ARE DANCING MECHANIK

It’s Wagner himself who first brings to the page the most important implication of the Dredd set-up. It’s clear within a few episodes that Judge Dredd is a narrative inevitability; he’s always going to triumph over the problem, and his triumph is always likely to involve the maximum force of the law. The interest is in creating situations and letting him loose on them. OK, you might say, how does that make him any different from Bill Savage or John Probe, who are also clearly going to win any fight they’re in? What Wagner understood from the start is that Dredd does not need to be heroic: he works as an inevitable force against sympathetic situations as well as evil ones. As a character he is closer to Hook Jaw the shark than to One Eyed Jack.

The ways this works aren’t fully apparent yet, but Wagner gets to the essential ambiguity, the moral slipperiness, of Dredd stories right away with “Robot Wars”, which marks the moment Dredd overtakes MACH 1 in the reader surveys. Most critics of early Dredd rightly call out Robot Wars as a high point and take note of the way the story plays with the reader’s sympathies. Robots are explicitly slaves, treated atrociously by their human masters, and robot leader Call-Me-Kenneth’s call to liberation is hard not to sympathise with. But within a few weeks, C-M-K’s robot revolution takes a darker turn – the robot leader inflicts brutal punishments on his own followers and sets himself up as a dictator, complete with a warm endorsement of Hitler. By the end of the story, the revolution is over, and the handful of robots who helped Dredd get rewarded with a “pleasure circuit”, to the envy of their metal brethren.

What’s going on here? “Robot Wars” invites you to feel sympathy for the put-upon robots, then makes it clear that robot independence, at least under their charismatic war leader, will mean slaughter of the “fleshy ones” but also tyranny for robots, and ends with the status quo essentially restored. Only one robot is actually freed in Robot Wars – Dredd’s lisping servo-robot Walter – and he doesn’t want it: all the others remain slaves. So the story flips from robots as sympathetic, to robots as a terrifying insurgency, to a barbed victory which reminds readers of the initial injustice. The fixed point is Dredd, the essential narrative force, who sees robot trouble coming, is equally hard on Call-Me-Kenneth as messiah and as dictator, and ends the story presumably well aware none of the underlying problems have been solved.

If some of the one-off Dredd stories do solid work getting the setting right, Robot Wars is where Wagner starts to get the tone he’ll use for Dredd – satire and comedy so dark it’s almost nihilistic. Dredd is an unstoppable force, but the justice he represents is seen for the first time to be profoundly unjust – robots really are an oppressed, slave population. At the same time Call-Me-Kenneth’s heel turn towards outright monstrosity leaves the reader firmly on Dredd’s side by the story’s climax. Dredd is a fascist: the threats he fights are worse. This is, naturally, the way real fascists justify themselves too. Wagner doesn’t shy away from acknowledging Dredd’s own monstrosity, but it’s very rarely the focus of the strip at this point, or really for years to come.

Just as important to future Dredd as the story of Robot Wars is the way Wagner tells it. There’s excitement and peril and as much action as Dredd’s early artists can deliver on low-grade paper. Ian Gibson brings the best sequences, with a raw, kinetic style that’s a long way from the sensuous, fluid lines he became famous for later. But even as the tempo of the action rises, the death-dealing robots in Call-Me-Kenneth’s army are continually singing and chanting ridiculous songs. 

What prevents Dredd being just a bootboy fantasy of state violence? In the end, it’s not any narrative content or explicit messaging – it’s this constant absurdity Wagner leavens his Dredd with. Making silliness – and tone in general – your prophylactic against fascists taking your strip seriously is a risky strategy, and over the years some unpleasant people have loved Dredd for its instant, boot- and stick-based, justice. But Wagner’s genius is partly his very fine sense of how far to take things, and how to balance the setting, the protagonist and the tone to make a strip that can fascinate, thrill, and horrify. 

Robot Wars is a good example of why Pat Mills’ instincts were right about a sci-fi comic allowing for stories – and violence – a contemporary paper like Action could never get away with. For the judges to crush an uprising by a real-world minority, however awful their leader, would be unthinkable as a boys’ adventure storyline in 1977. But if one happened in Mega-City One, of course that’s what Judge Dredd is going to do to it. Making the oppressed population robots allows Wagner to do that story, keep Dredd as an action hero, and still leave the story with an ending which goes out of its way to remind us how shabby conditions for the robots still are.

FAMILY AFFAIR

Wagner’s, though, is not the only way to write Dredd, especially not at this early stage. Pat Mills’ “The Return Of Rico” in Prog 30 takes Wagner’s character and finds a completely new tone for him. It’s a story which puts the spotlight on Dredd as a person for the first time, without losing any of his granite toughness. It’s common – and accurate – to point up how much lore Mills adds to Dredd’s background in six extraordinary pages: clone Judges, the prison world of Titan, Rico Dredd himself. And how he finds shade in Dredd’s one-dimensionality – “The Return Of Rico” implies motivation and interiority for the character, a drive to prove himself after his identical clone went bad, without having to spell it out. 

But for me the most important thing the story does is explore a different angle on the idea that Dredd, and his obsessive pursuit of the Law, is an unstoppable force in the narrative. We’ve seen it applied to the villainous, and less often to the sympathetic: here Mills turns that force on Dredd himself, creating a different kind of Dredd story, one in which that narrative inevitability creates immense personal cost for the character. If Dredd can kill his own brother, there’s really nothing he won’t do for the Law; but if there’s nothing he won’t do for the Law, then some of his actions may have terrible consequences for him.

Having seen Pat Mills handle Dredd, let’s step back and ask the question directly – how does this strip fit with the rest of the comic Mills created? Through these posts I’ve been talking about the early tone of 2000AD as ‘Sweeney-Fi’ – a comic centering on hard bastards with a prickly relationship with the authorities they’re theoretically answering to, and strips that give kids the same immediate thrills as the most exciting (or forbidden) adult TV and films, but with a science-fiction twist.

Judge Dredd is in one way the apotheosis of Sweeney-Fi – he’s the coolest, hardest bastard in the comic, and even early on his world is doing the science fiction thing of extrapolating and exploring. But he’s also a break from it – Dredd is authority manifest, and his relationship with the powers that be in Mega-City One is almost always cordial. There are stray moments when it’s suggested Dredd is a man of unorthodox methods, and an odd sequence in “Robot Wars” where he flounces away from the Judges only to return the next episode (the city’s Robot policy is one of his consistent areas of disagreement). But by “The Return Of Rico” it’s explicit – what defines Dredd is his devotion to the Law; we’ve seen what would happen if he lost that.

So Dredd can have the toughness of a Sweeney-Fi hero like John Probe, and the stories can give fun futuristic jolts, but he can never have the attitude of one. Except that’s not quite the end of it – we’re going to continually get temporary status quo shifts which will put Dredd into that rebellious, lone wolf role. He won’t change, but his environment will.

“The Return Of Rico” isn’t just a triumph for Mills – it’s tremendous work from artist Mike McMahon. Compare McMahon’s drawing of Rico’s unmasked face to how Dave Gibbons drew Artie Gruber in Harlem Heroes, another deformed cyborg. Both are glorious, memorable illustrations. But Gruber’s appearances were an invitation to the reader to drink in every clear-lined detail of his grotesque villainy; to enjoy his company, in fact, as a regular menace for the team. Rico is something quite different – a shock of rapid lines outlining a battered, horribly deconstructed face, with the viewer’s attention drawn to the beady fury of his eyes. It’s an image that suggests all of Rico’s punishment and all of his hatred, one meant to make the reader flinch along with Dredd.

McMahon was the youngest of the group of up-and-coming British artists who would define the visual look of 2000AD. And he was the most raw – his early Dredd stories were his first professional work, straight out of art college. He didn’t even have the fanzine background Kevin O’Neill did, and he certainly didn’t have the underground and commercial experience of Gibbons or Brian Bolland. Some of the wonder of McMahon is how we get to see him develop on the page, working out the idiosyncratic angles, perspectives and compositional tricks that make him immediately recognisable, even as his pencilling and inking techniques shift radically. While his contemporaries settled into a mature style quickly, McMahon stayed restless, dropping out of artistic rotation several times only to return months later with a freshly mutated style. In his rare interviews he comes across as his own toughest critic, and probably too humble (unusual in the 2000AD creative line-up!) while his peers and younger artists are in awe of what he could achieve.

McMahon’s greatest work is well ahead of him – his earliest Dredd (the first story to see print, in fact) is done in requested imitation of Carlos Ezquerra, Dredd’s co-creator, who had been tempted away from his creation by the chance to do another co-created strip, Battle’s short-run American Civil War story El Mestizo. McMahon’s art is somehow more Ezquerra than Ezquerra – while the black leather and gold metal uniform is Ezquerra consciously designing a future fascist biker type, it’s McMahon in the earliest Progs who sexes Dredd up, drawing him as lean, young and sensual, with slender limbs and a sneering, full mouth. The only other artist who leant as hard into the Dredd world’s leather, subcultural look is Bill Ward, a veteran of gay fetish illustration who drew an incendiary first episode of biker story “The Mega-City 5000” before being immediately upstaged by Brian Bolland’s Dredd debut in the second.

Bolland’s version of Dredd was heavily inspired by McMahon’s – at this point the strip’s various artists seemed to be in a kind of feedback loop of inspiration. McMahon’s evolution away from the Ezquerra template involved making Dredd more impressionistic, going big on the less functional, more symbolic parts of the design: McMahon’s classic Dredd has the most impractically colossal boots, which work brilliantly as a reminder of his cartoonish, extreme violence and the strip’s commitment to constant action and motion. Bolland took the unreal solidity of McMahon Dredd and gave it gorgeous, deep, almost tangible texture, thanks to a heavy inking and cross-hatching style he’d developed via working on underground comics, in British fanzines, and with Gibbons on Nigeria’s Powerman. A lot of this work had something important in common with 2000AD: the paper quality was atrocious, and Bolland’s style was partly a way of coping with printing that could wipe out nuance.

Bolland’s art looked luxurious, his luridly coloured centre-spreads rival Belardinelli’s Dan Dare ones for wow-factor, and his arrival alongside McMahon and Gibson meant that the most popular strip in the comic had the best, freshest art. Readers went crazy for him. But even with Bolland in place, the world and story of Dredd was still restless. Most of the early Bolland strips are part of Dredd’s second extended story sequence, a sojourn in Luna-City on the moon where Dredd takes up the rotating post of Judge-Marshal. The Luna-City sequence is an epic that isn’t, both in structure – it’s a meandering, episodic set of stories that mostly happen to be set on the moon – and in fan appreciation. While individual parts are fondly regarded, nobody seems to rate the arc as a whole.

EVERYONE’S GONE TO THE MOON

Dredd’s move to Luna-City comes in the context of a number of shake-ups in 2000AD strips towards the end of 1977, in the wake of Pat Mills handing over the editorial position to Kelvin Gosnell and Gosnell’s fannish, enthusiastic young assistant Nick Landau. The new team shifted the comic further away from the Prog 1 ‘Sweeney-Fi’ model and towards something less down-to-earth. Harlem Heroes transitioned to the more violent Inferno; Dan Dare got a redesign and a new, more Star Wars inspired direction; MACH 1 flipped from mission-of-the-week stories to darker internal conflicts. But on the surface Dredd didn’t need a do-over. He was the breakout star of the comic, and a showcase for the up-and-coming set of British artists helping define its look. Why pull him out of Mega-City One and send him up to the moon for several months?

I don’t know if this was John Wagner’s (or editorial’s) intention, but taking Dredd away from the city helped him firm up as a character. We’d seen Dredd in what would end up his most typical role – the face of the judge system; a particularly prominent part of a regime and a machine, but a part nonetheless. What Luna-City and the next two long stories did was put the focus on Dredd as an individual. In Luna-City he’s part of a system he doesn’t initially understand, one it’s quickly established resents his presence. In “The Cursed Earth” he’s thrown into an extreme environment without the city’s resources; and in “The Day The Law Died” he’s up against the city itself in a corrupted state. We’ll dig into those in the 1978 posts, but ultimately we have over a year of stories where Dredd is mostly the centre, and where Dredd knows little more than the readers do about the weird shit he’s facing.

For all the strip’s massive early success – and it is clearly the best thing in 2000AD by the end of 1977 – it’s easy to see why this was a good idea on paper. Wagner and company weren’t running out of ideas, but they’d cycled quickly through the most obvious things to do with a cop character – bent colleagues; a rookie; some tragic backstory. And while the Mega-City setting was starting to show its potential, too many stories just put a vague futuristic gloss on existing crime tropes. There’s the germ of the notion that this setting is a great one for contemporary satire, but beyond the ever-faithful “what if legal thing now is illegal in future?” story type none of the stories are quite hitting it yet. And the writing is still hazy about what makes Mega City One any more distinctive than just “New York in the future”.

So you have a character who works as a narrative inevitability for situations to bounce off; the character is a smash, but the situations aren’t always sparking. One answer is to put him in stories where the situations aren’t just wilder, but where that inevitability can be tested, where Judge Dredd’s status as an avatar of authority might be in question.

Over the next 15 months Wagner and Pat Mills will run through various takes on how to do that, but for Luna-City the idea is pretty simple: Judge Dredd as a future Western. The Moon is frontier territory, and Dredd is the new Sheriff in town, complete with a doubtfully loyal deputy, gunslinger droids and a “Gravity Boot-Hill”. ]

At first sight Western iconography and storytelling is as firmly in Sweeney-Fi territory as the ‘future cop’ set-up – the tough guys kids know from the telly, but with an SF twist. We’ve already seen Pat Mills use Western tropes in Flesh to add weight to his colonial metaphor, and the way early 2000AD latches onto the very Western-esque term “lawman” for Dredd shows how natural a fit he is. But there’s also a difference between Westerns and the other 2000AD source material. The Sweeney and The Six Million Dollar Man are the shows kids watched by choice (or longed to be allowed to watch). Westerns, in 1970s Britain, were what was on when nothing else was: unfashionable imports which filled TV schedules.

Every reader knew what was happening when Dredd faced a quick-draw robot, but this was a situation ripe for exaggeration, piss-taking and subversion in a way the spies, cops and sports stories weren’t. Which suited Wagner’s style very nicely indeed, and the first thing he does is have Walter The Wobot stow away on the Lunar shuttle as a commentator on the action. If you want readers to take the ornery folks of Luna-1 seriously as a threat, you don’t introduce them with Walter saying “they seem a wuff bweed”.

As well as being a chance for Wagner to get Dredd into a situation where he’s a lone lawman, more reliant on his wits than on the system, the Luna-City story is the peak of Walter’s involvement in the strip as Dredd’s main supporting character. He doesn’t disappear after this – he’ll keep popping up, and in 1978 he gets his own strip, where we’ll have a chance to explore whether Judge Dredd actually needs a supporting cast, and whether Walter is it. But in Luna-1 he’s both comic relief and bona fide sidekick. His fanatical devotion to Dredd is a joke, but he also manages to inveigle himself on actual missions, and is at Dredd’s side when he takes down “Mr Moony”, the tycoon who’s been trying to kill the Judge-Marshal since the storyline began.

The set-up of the Luna-City stories points to Dredd getting to play the anti-authority role against a corrupt establishment. But the presence of Walter guarantees that their tone will mainly be satirical, if not outright farcical. There are exceptions – Dredd’s showdown in “The Oxygen Desert” plays its Western tropes largely straight, including Dredd handing in his badge because he’s failed to bring a varmint in. But the glorious, McMahon-drawn Christmas story is much closer to the norm for this phase, from its opening with Walter’s “Please put a penny in Judge Dwedd’s hat” rhyme, to Dredd’s apparent sacrifice for his robot, to the final exchange of gifts. Satirical ideas wander in – five-a-side future sport as a replacement for war; the very Philip K Dick-esque fate of the creeps who pull off a heist in “The Oxygen Board” – but we are mostly reading a relaxed space Western story starring an action-comedy double act, one of whom happens to be the most popular character in the comic.

That summary doesn’t sound much like Judge Dredd, because it isn’t something the strip ever really returned to. At its best that tone made for good comics – there’s something really charming about the Dredd/Walter interactions in small doses, and it’s partly the fact the doses aren’t small that becomes a problem. The double-act model will become a standard part of most John Wagner strips that aren’t Dredd, but for this character it doesn’t quite work.

I want to be careful here, though. We know “action-comedy double act” doesn’t work as a status quo for Judge Dredd because we know what the Judge Dredd strip turns into, and by definition the stuff that lasts 47 years and counting “works”. But it isn’t there yet. The benefit of the Luna-City stories is that they give the writers a chance to define Dredd as a character. The problem is that defining him as a character still involves humanising him by giving him relationships. And even if the point of those relationships is to show how dedicated to his job he is, they can’t help but soften him: Walter may not get away with murder, but he regularly does all sorts of shit which a human would be in the cubes for. This is why what “Rico” did is so impressive and fundamental – it deepens and humanises Dredd by removing the possibility of relationships.

But the “Rico” Dredd is still not the dominant vision of the character. There’s a version of Judge Dredd these early stories are pointing to which the strip ultimately refused – one where Dredd is a much more sympathetic character, a hard bastard with a heart of gold who would prank his robo-servant but only pretend to forget its Christmas present. When exactly the heart-of-gold version of Dredd leaves the strip – or at least recedes fully into the background – is a major question for future posts. For now, I’d argue that’s the character the strip is building up, with 1978 about to give us an unambiguously heroic Dredd.

Before that, though, there’s one of the great Dredd one-shots, “Return To Mega City”, a story that ends the Luna-City story and feels like a tacit admission it didn’t quite work. It’s formatted like a classic Mort Weisinger era DC comic, where Superman is behaving radically out of character and the story is a puzzle about why. In this case, Dredd is back on the streets but doing nothing, strolling past crime and offering only the mildest of admonitions to lawbreakers. What is going on? A Rookie Judge rides up, urgently handing over Dredd’s re-admission papers to the force, and with them signed Dredd grabs the bike and rides down the perps, restored as the inevitable force he is, to the readers’ presumed joy and relief.

It’s a one-joke story which still manages to say everything needed about Dredd’s by-the-book attitude and which establishes that he and his city complete one another. You don’t have to humanise Dredd or find new angles on his character just yet; you can get years of mileage just bouncing the city off him. But the strip has wilder and weirder things to try before it makes that its default.

WHERE TO FIND IT? Dredd is being reprinted in toto in The Complete Case Files, and Vol 1 handily contains all the stories discussed here. It’s permanently in print and widely available.

RECOMMENDED? This stuff sits in a weird zone where it’s a highlight of early 2000AD but not necessarily a highlight of Dredd, and it’s seen as a poor introduction to him. Overall quality is high, though, and it’s well worth reading.

NEXT PROG: Move aside David Attenborough (or get eaten) – a sixteen week nature documentary from Mills, Wagner, Ramon Sola and more. It’s SHAKO.