Out On The Wildy, Windy Moors: JUDGE DREDD – THE CURSED EARTH

This is part of Discourse 2000, a year-by-year, story-by-story blog about 2000AD. Contains spoilers for Judge Dredd – The Cursed Earth.

Which Thrill?: Future lawman Judge Dredd is sent on a mercy mission across a radioactive wasteland to bring a vaccine to a plague-hit city.

PUNK’S NOT DREDD

“The savage route across a blasted continent, teeming with monsters, deadly radiation, and insanely lethal storms…” – Back cover blurb to Damnation Alley (Roger Zelazny, 1969)

Judge Dredd advances a year at a time, unusual for a comic strip, and not made entirely explicit until later. Its New Year is ours. And so, as the strip’s continuity began in 2099, what we’re seeing in 1978 is the dawn of the 22nd Century. Dredd spends New Years Eve on the Moon, dealing with an office worker turned ‘futsie’, future shock victim. People are partying – people will always party – but the new century is not a cause for great optimism. As readers of Judge Dredd were about to learn, humanity didn’t make a brilliant job of the previous one.

“The Cursed Earth”, a 25-part epic which sees Dredd struggling through a radioactive wilderness to save Mega-City Two from a zombie plague, is at once one of the most straightforward and one of the strangest Judge Dredd stories. Straightforward because its throughline – will Dredd deliver the antidote in time? – is extremely simple, and gives Dredd the opportunity to act almost entirely as an action hero, away from his duties in Mega-City One. Strange, because this isn’t a tone readers now expect from Dredd, and because the story is extremely loose and episodic, lead writer Pat Mills enjoying the chance to cut loose and plot a story on the fly, outdoing himself week on week with bizarre threats on this travelogue across a twisted America.

Still, themes emerge – what does being the law mean in a region which doesn’t recognise it? What authorities emerge to take its place, and who do they recognise as fellow humans? These are ideas which will recur every time the strip revisits the Cursed Earth. Which it does, again and again, as the wasteland offers Judge Dredd an irresistible contrast to Mega-City One. There’s an argument that the city is the best character in Dredd, which makes it even weirder that the strip spends so much time in its first few years trying to get him away from it. But the Cursed Earth isn’t like Luna-1, a change of scene which ran out of steam after a few cowboy riffs. The Cursed Earth, far more than any rival city, is the opposite Mega-City One needs. 

As a place, The Cursed Earth can work in so many ways, and it’s startling how many of them turn up in this first look at it. The setting can work as a locus for contemporary political anxiety and allegory, particularly when the strip turns its attention to the territory’s mutant population. It can be a zone of Western-style adventure, stripping characters down to their wits and their essence as a way of raising the stakes. As the city is written as more and more oppressive, the Cursed Earth turns into a place where ideas of freedom and the frontier can be explored. And it can take on weirder roles, providing an otherworld on the city’s doorstep in which strange stories are told, a psychic space like Macbeth’s Blasted Heath where the rules of the strip are bent.

Dredd himself acknowledges that these rules don’t apply. His first action, on learning he has to enter this strange space, is to do the one thing that most goes against everything we know about him as a character: he unilaterally frees a lawbreaker. Dredd’s insistence on taking ‘punk’ biker Spikes Harvey Rotten with him into the Cursed Earth gets two in-story justifications. The first has some credibility: Rotten knows the territory, though it’s hard to imagine the Judges don’t have informants out in the wilderness who could help out. The second is bizarre. Judges are trained from age 5, and after the gun the bike is their main tool – is Spikes really a better rider than all of them? Except the justifications don’t matter next to the powerful symbolism of Dredd’s choice – the Cursed Earth is so outside the realm of the ordinary that he must override the operations of the Law, which is why it’s worth lingering on this initial choice a little longer.

What only a very few readers would have known is the other justification for taking Spikes – because Spikes Harvey Rotten is actually Hell Tanner, protagonist of Damnation Alley, the science fiction novel by Roger Zelazny on which the premise of the Cursed Earth is heavily based. There’s also a 1977 film of the book, but that didn’t get a UK release until 1979. (And it’s terrible, a testament to the visual power of the comics medium). Besides, it’s the novel that shares all the plot points with the 2000AD story. The fact that Hell Tanner is the last and greatest biker in the world. The fact he’s being recruited on the promise of a pardon. The fact that only enclaves of civilisation survive in America, and one of them is menaced by a plague. And, oh yes, the fact that the air route is impossible thanks to swirling storms of rocks and garbage, which periodically dump monsters on your head. 

This final detail, which translates into one of Mike McMahon’s most grotesque and memorable images, is the one that had me rolling my eyes at the cheek of this extensive lifting, which looks like one of the most outrageous “dead cribs” of all. And yet the telling of the adapted elements – from the zombie horror of ‘Red’ succumbing to the virus, to the Old Testament wrath of the leader in the damned, rat-infested town – is so brilliantly done it drives off any disappointment at the swiping. The Damnation Alley source feels like an example of editor Kelvin Gosnell’s long-stated desire to run sci-fi adaptations in 2000AD – we know “The Cursed Earth” is his request, and you can imagine him enthusing to Pat Mills in detail about the premise before Mills took that ball and ran with it. “The Cursed Earth” departs from Zelazny’s material soon enough.

For one thing – which seems small enough but which changes the story dynamic – the Hell Tanner character is not the protagonist, he’s the hero’s guide. Zelazny’s book involves an amoral man realising he does actually have a stake in humanity (while also asking how low humanity has to go for such people to identify with it). Dredd, on the other hand, is at his most moral in “The Cursed Earth”, finding that in the absence of the law he is often forced to fall back on justice.

Not that Dredd talks about justice. In fact this is the story where “I am the Law” becomes Dredd’s catchphrase, a mantra he invokes until the story’s final, totemic cover where the Law is all that’s keeping him going as he crawls through the Mojave desert. “I am the Law” has come to mean mostly a plain statement of total authority: Dredd is the living instrument of the Law of Mega-City One, the incarnate boundary within which correct action for its citizens is possible. But it also goes further: in the Cursed Earth, pushed into improvising by the bizarre situations he encounters, Dredd is most truly the Law itself, the arbiter of who its protection applies to and what it even is. And Dredd’s personal interpretation turns out to be a generous one: out in the wilderness he intercedes on behalf of mutants, aliens and artificial advertising mascots, invoking the Law as he does so.

“The Cursed Earth” is sometimes discussed as an outlier in Dredd history. Technically it is – the first really long Dredd story and the only such with Pat Mills as the lead writer. And it also feels different on the surface because of the straightforward heroism of Dredd’s mission and his drive to achieve it. The constant repetition of “I am the Law” is a reminder that this is not a distinct character or even a very different version of Dredd. Mills as a writer prefers his fascist characters less ambiguous, but here he squares the circle of writing the fascist as protagonist by having this phrase constantly remind us that he is both. Dredd’s total belief that he is the sole source of authority in the Cursed Earth is fused to him having lived his life with that same power in his city. 

Within Mega City One, “the Law” and “the Judges” and “the System” and “the State” all essentially mean the same thing, and Dredd can talk as if being one limb of Leviathan means there are constraints on his choices (though narratively speaking, at this stage of the strip, there really aren’t). As soon as Dredd leaves the city this tissue of justification is dropped, and his recruitment of Spikes Harvey Rotten is the way he acknowledges it. It’s the moment he becomes the Law, in the way he needs to to survive the poisoned territories ahead of him.    

But what about the threat of the Cursed Earth justifies such extraordinary measures? What is the source of its difference? As the story continues, we come to realise that the Cursed Earth is not just a post-Apocalyptic wasteland, it’s the home of something Mega-City One fears perhaps beyond anything else we’ve seen: the past.

THE HISTORY BOOK ON THE SHELF

Pulp science fiction futures are a mix of extrapolation, discontinuity, and tradition. Judge Dredd is no exception. Dredd’s future has hyper-unemployment, out of control crime and brutal policing – magnified versions of the political bugbears of the late 70s and early 80s. It has a radical break from the present – a new city built on top of the forgotten ruins of old New York. And it has robots and moon colonies because it’s a science fiction strip and those things are what science fiction does.

Even that summary may grant too much to planning. Dredd’s future is also built out of narrative sprawl, the constant pressure of a story deadline meaning new elements were glued onto the setting week-on-week, and what was popular stuck around. We talk nowadays about “world building” and early Dredd has a lot of it, but not in the sense it’s often used today, of a clockwork maker revealing the mechanisms behind a wonderful toy. The worlds of episodic strips aren’t built so much as settled – a strong premise is found; it grows piecemeal, idea by idea; and eventually there’s enough of it that some kind of central planning is required. It’s very possible that Pat Mills, John Wagner or both had strong ideas about the backstory of Dredd’s world before the strip began, but for the first year of the strip there wasn’t a need to develop them. “The Cursed Earth” gave Mills the opportunity.

The question he chose to answer wasn’t necessarily the obvious one. Readers knew Dredd’s own story – one of two clone brothers, raised as a Judge since birth – and a logical next step might have been to answer how the Judges themselves began. Instead, Mills answers a different, hidden question in the strip: how did America end?

Separating these two questions is the great gift Pat Mills gives to future writers in “The Cursed Earth”. It means they don’t have to choose between extrapolation and discontinuity, between a future in which American policing just got harsher and harsher and a future in which some cataclysm wiped out civilization and put the Judges in power. They can have both. There was an Atomic War started by the President. The Judges took power after that. But they already existed. It’s a beautiful bit of thinking by Mills, a creation story that opens up narrative possibilities, not closes them off, and it’s all wrapped up in an extremely strange vampire yarn about broken robots draining people’s blood, in which Dredd makes one of the oddest decisions of his life.

But before we look at the specifics of Robert L Booth, we should pick more at why this revelation about Dredd and his world happens here, in the middle of a rollicking wilderness saga. It’s exactly because the Cursed Earth is the otherworld of Dredd and Mega-City, the hidden reverse where the city’s Law can’t reach, and so it’s the natural home of everything the Judges have placed outside the world defined by their rule. That includes their own history.

Fascist regimes have a particular relationship with history. They exalt an imaginary version of it, while burying the real one. Judge Dredd, a comic about a future fascism built over the literal ruins of our present (or increasingly, our recent past), is in a better position than most to explore this. Sometimes it does that explicitly, but it never needs to – a present-day object or habit seen from a future perspective is a natural story hook for a Dredd done-in-one, and right from the beginning the strip exploits that. But those stories, even the ridiculous ones about addictive comics or rockabilly troglodytes, are also telling another story, of a society whose rulers dread its past, who are constantly on guard against manifestations of history piercing the iron coat they’ve wrapped around the present.

As we learn much later, this watchfulness has become reflexive: the Judges control information as much from habit as from actual goals. Even so, the past is not so easily buried – not when it exists on Mega-City One’s doorstep. The resting place of President Booth is not the only reminder of the past the Cursed Earth turns up. Within a few episodes, Dredd’s party is passing Mount Rushmore, engraved with the face of then-President Carter and with a new carving of a mutant leader. Dredd, inevitably, does not leave the monument unscathed. But it’s still one of the more beneficent encounters he has – mostly in the Cursed Earth, history repeats itself not just as farce but as menace.

The most notorious of Dredd’s brushes with a hostile past are the fill-in episodes by John Wagner and Jack Adrian, which separately ask the same question: what has become of the culture of pre-Apocalypse America? By which they naturally mean, its brands. Neither Wagner’s riff on the McDonalds vs Burger King “Burger Wars” nor Jack Adrian’s story of robot mascots run amok is essential to the “Cursed Earth” storyline as a whole, which is just as well as for a long time they were censored. Remarkably, given the savage glee Wagner takes in showing McDonalds as rapacious, murderous, maniacs – redneck ultra-capitalists determined to turn the whole world into a burger joint – it wasn’t the burger story that got the comic in trouble. Instead, an intervention by the owners of the Jolly Green Giant led to a farcical half-page apology (drawn by Brett Ewins after Bolland refused) and gave the two marketing-gone-mad stories a cachet they probably didn’t deserve.

The legalities of “Burger Wars” and the Jolly Green Giant story are better covered alongside the internal chaos of 2000AD in Summer 1978. Both were rush jobs commissioned to give the overworked Mills a chance to catch up. But their presence in the story also shows the different approaches Wagner and Mills took to the post-Apocalyptic hellscape. Wagner’s “Burger Wars” and his gangster judges in Vegas story are extensions of his existing methods on Dredd – satirising elements of present-day America and putting the unbending narrative force of Dredd up against them. For a good few years Wagner’s Cursed Earth is mostly an opportunity to tell the Wild West Dredd stories he enjoyed on the strip’s jaunt to Luna-City – it’s a back country badland full of hicks and weirdos.

Given the massive opening out of possibilities the Cursed Earth allows, though, it’s interesting that Wagner immediately hits on a vein of potential that he briefly explored in Luna-One, the idea of Dredd as a representative of one system confronting a degraded other. The Cursed Earth introduces the notion of Earth’s other Mega-Cities, but Mills ultimately writes Mega-City Two itself as just a plot-device clone of Mega-City One – the destination was never the point. Wagner’s two stories, on the other hand, both find Dredd confronted with places that claim a legal system of their own, perverse though it is. The deranged brand fanatics of the Burger Wars make sure to tell Dredd they operate a “Burger Law”, and Dredd’s Vegas jaunt ends with him winning a car race for the right to be its chief judge and tear down the system. Neither of these stories are among Wagner’s classics – the Burger episodes are full of commentary from Dredd on what a pointless waste of time it is! – but the idea that the ideal opposition to Dredd is a twisted version of The Law is one Wagner would come back to again and again.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREDD

Mills’ “Cursed Earth” is less satirical than Wagner’s. It has its share of human evil – the slavers who Dredd liberates Tweak from, for instance. And it has its share of darkly funny moments too, mostly the pitch-black comedy of retribution Mills loves to mete out on authority figures. But the primary mode of Mills’ “Cursed Earth” is horror, not satire. If the Cursed Earth is where Mega City hides its past, horror is the style most suited to it –  the genre which regularly pits the buried past against the unsuspecting present. And while 2000AD was founded in anticipation of a coming SF cinema boom, horror in the 70s was going through explosive shifts of its own. Its creature-feature staples – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, et al – were being out-frighted by more human depravity, unleashed by demonic or occult forces, psychic abilities, viruses, or simple degeneracy.

The horror cinema boom was even better suited than SF to Mills, Wagner and Finley-Day’s original prescription for reviving British comics: give the kids versions of the stuff they weren’t allowed to see. Of course, horror required more careful handling than thrillers or violent cop shows, and modern horror with its predilection for human-on-human violence would quickly fall foul of IPC’s censors. But Mills was firmly on top of the horror trend – his Moonchild strip for the launch of Misty was heavily inspired by Brian De Palma’s Carrie, for instance. Even if a ‘dead crib’ of The Hills Have Eyes was hardly likely, the vibe of 70s horror could seep into his stories. And so Mills’ Cursed Earth is a gothic landscape that blends ideas and tropes from horror fiction old and new – the town plagued by sky rats is even called Deliverance. It’s full of Old Testament evil, murderous locals, deadly psychic powers, damned towns, undead robot hordes and vampire politicians. And, Mills being Mills, a few Tyrannosaurs too.

It was Nick Landau who encouraged Mills to link the dinosaurs in “The Cursed Earth” to the ones in Flesh, setting up the overarching idea that many of the writer’s stories take place in a shared universe. The bloodline of Old One Eye, nemesis-protagonist of Flesh, is the linking factor between some of 2000AD’s greatest strips. “The Cursed Earth” is where we (and Dredd) meet her offspring Satanus, born as a clone in the 22nd Century before the time-cowboys of Flesh go back to tangle with his Mum. While time travel is always complicated, the dinosaurs of the Old One Eye bloodline are reassuringly similar in every context they show up in: a natural apex predator thrown into conflict with pesky humans.

It’s possible Mills had some regret about killing off Old One Eye at the end of Flesh, as Satanus proves to have very high longevity in 2000AD: like his mother, no mere human can finish him off, even if Judge Dredd gets a rare win. Lesser writers might have focused on Satanus’ backstory – cloned as a theme park attraction, he escapes with bloody consequences – but Mills is more interested in what happens next. In the longest single Cursed Earth segment – an indulgent four parts – The Tyrannosaur is incarnated as a god, fed regular sacrifices by the townsfolk of Repentance, who drug Dredd and Spikes for this dark purpose.

The Satanus story is the delirious peak of Mills’ Dredd-as-horror-comic yarns, steeped in imagery that makes Satanus into a demonic adversary as well as the ultimate example of the past’s grip on the present. He’s initially called simply “the Dark One”; he’s called forth from deep time, his worshippers want to return to the days when the “tyrant lizards” ruled; the climax of the adventure finds him trapped in a church. At heart it’s a more perilous repeat of the flying rats story Mills kicked the saga off with, which you could argue is a sign invention was waning a little. But the gusto with which Mills tackles these episodes – with Mick McMahon showing himself a worthy successor to Ramon Sola in terms of insane Tyrannosaur action – puts the lie to that. Mills returns to the “psychotic David Attenborough” style of narration used on Flesh and Shako, giving third-person voice to Satanus’ bloodlust with a gonzo relish. And it’s a powerful example of Mills’ conception of the Cursed Earth as Dredd’s Otherworld, a zone where the boundaries of sci-fi and horror, of past and present, and finally here the boundaries of the 2000AD strips themselves become weaker. It’s a mythic place, and to survive it Dredd must become something more mythical himself.

As Dredd leaves his city behind, the mythical role Mills chooses for him comes into sharper focus. Early on in his adventure, the character Novar – a mutant gifted psychic powers by the Atomic War – identifies Dredd with the father who abandoned him, a strong and just man. The very next episode, as Spikes tells him not to waste time on villagers who think a vampire is preying on their town, Dredd spells out a credo. He’s duty bound to render aid to anyone in the Cursed Earth who calls on the Law for help. Dredd is like a Western stranger in town, a righteous man: “I am The Law” has gone from a claim of authority to a statement of sheer power to a moral justification for Dredd the Judge to do what Dredd the man knows he should do. And in the next story after that we meet the character who best represents this moral imperative: Tweak.

AIN’T TALKIN BOUT NO ROOTS IN THE LAND

Tweak, a dark-furred alien, is a character who plays a number of bundled, overlapping roles in “The Cursed Earth”. On the surface he’s a way to give Dredd another colourful sidekick as his fellow Judges are killed off, and when he’s called on to rescue Dredd or Spikes it has a dramatic impact an anonymous judge doing the job would not. Visually he’s filling a Walter-shaped space: a little cute, a little comical. As a character he’s not like Walter at all, and he’s an opportunity for Mills to explore what will become a favourite theme of his – the alien who humans entirely misunderstand and mistreat. 

As such he’s also useful to illustrate the difference between Dredd and other men as it’s evolved over the course of the story. When Tweak tells Spikes and Dredd about the gold on his home planet, he understands Spikes is doomed and ends up granting the man his dying wish of being indulged in an impossible fantasy of exploitation, a speedrun of punk outcast to sellout billionaire. Dredd, though, is the one human it’s possible for Tweak to trust. Given Mills’ general approach to authority figures it’s the moment in the story where it’s most unambiguous that this version of Dredd is a heroic one: Dredd has transcended his fellow humans, even to the point of thumping a Mega-City Two judge who mocks the alien.

But this isn’t the end of Tweak’s roles. One key to Tweak is the Brian Bolland cover he appears on, breaking rocks on a Cursed Earth mining gang run by cruel slavers, with the telltale tagline “ALIEN ROOTS”. Alex Haley’s blockbuster Roots miniseries had been a sensation in the US around the time of 2000AD’s launch, with its final episode still the 3rd most watched TV show of all time there. It was rushed to broadcast in the UK in April and May 1977. And it’s fair to say a lot of the iconography and ideas in the Tweak stories – from the slave-catcher gangs hunting runaway aliens, to alien children being spotted by slavers out playing, to Tweak’s doomed escape attempts – are directly inspired by the most famous part of Haley’s work. Tweak is the 2000AD version of the enslaved Kunta Kinte. Kunta’s lifelong refusal to fully renounce his Mandinka heritage becomes Tweak’s determination to never let the humans realise his intelligence and importance.

Mills’ realisation that he could use the metaphor of humans and aliens to talk about race, class and imperialism in a kids’ science fiction comic would catch fire in his 80s work. But in this early incarnation it’s a slightly uneasy fit. While Tweak’s story on the page makes sense, and he has some delightful scenes with the condescending Spikes, it’s also true that doing a Mississippi slave story in Judge Dredd requires Dredd to act as a very direct white saviour figure in a way that feels clumsy given the repeated identification of Tweak’s story with Roots.

What’s also unfortunate, though not Mills’ fault, is the fact that his comic illustration of the coarse stupidity and incuriosity of racism – humans continually assume Tweak is unintelligent because he eats rocks – is being played far less ironically at the same time and in the same comic with Ant Wars’ character of Ant Eater. (Tweak is actually modelled on an ant-eating aardvark, which is such an odd coincidence that if “Cursed Earth” ran six months later I’d have to assume it was meant as a dig). It’s a reminder that 2000AD was not so sure-footed on the topic of race that it could start casually nabbing from stories of the Black American experience and expect to pull it off without issues.

And in the end this is why the Tweak/Roots material lands a little strangely. Roots isn’t just some exciting stories about evil slave-masters and good slaves; it’s a sustained reminder that those slaves are Americans and that the violence of slavery is American heritage. Borrowing from it gets to one of the underlying questions about the “Cursed Earth” story and Dredd as a whole. Roots is a story about American history and an American family, told by and for Americans. But Judge Dredd is absolutely not that. It’s a story set in America, but not one which is about America except inasmuch as US pop culture – its superstars, fashions and game shows – are familiar to British readers and ripe for mickey-taking. The specific social issues of Mega-City-One at the start of the 22nd Century – overcrowded tower blocks and massive unemployment – are 70s British concerns, for instance. 

The Cursed Earth opens up a space in which the strip can confront an exaggerated British idea of America. It’s a story told by and for British people, set in the America of the UK’s imagination, which means it’s a barrage of images and ideas of the USA that a British 10 year old in 1978 might recognise from TV, all tilted and twisted for maximum thrill-power. Cowboys, burgers, Vegas, gangsters, Mount Rushmore, weird Western landscapes, cigar-chomping Generals, atom bombs, with slavery thrown in as part of the mix.

Because most 20th Century pop culture is refracted through the US’s projection of itself, this use of a mediated America isn’t something that affects the readability of Dredd in the way the crasser visits to Asia stick out in MACH 1. (In fact, at least two 2000AD emigres – Alan Moore and Peter Milligan – spent time at the start of their US comics careers on long, twisted tours of the American imaginary: there was a market for a dark outsider view.) The theme park America the Dredd strip creates works well enough, and that’s especially true for the point at which Dredd’s America and the contemporary USA rub up closest: the story of President Booth.

Pat Mills’ idea of a US president who starts a nuclear war and damns the world has remained more useful and relevant than he might have hoped, endlessly adaptable to Presidents since. What’s interesting is that here, at the point of his creation, before Reagan, Bush or Trump, Robert L Booth is “Smooth Booth” (a clear reference to “Tricky Dicky”) before he’s “Bad Bob Booth”. He’s not shown as deranged or devious, and his reasons for starting the Atomic Wars are never explored. The Judges’ takeover is explicitly a coup – in the aftermath of the war Booth is tried for war crimes, sentenced to suspended animation (the state where he’s mistaken as a vampire by local villagers) and at the end of the story there’s a quick “who is the real monster?” conversation with Spikes where Dredd says that anyone who causes the deaths of millions is a true vampire.

In other words, Booth isn’t portrayed as a uniquely bad president at all. All of the later ideas about election-rigging, missile shields, vanity and madness are add-ons which if anything dilute the original point Mills is making, one that’s firmly in line with his lifelong anti-war convictions as expressed in dozens of his other comics. Booth’s crime is what he does, and what he does comes from what he is. Anyone who starts a war – especially a nuclear conflict – is guilty of a war crime. The very concept of a president having that unilateral power is monstrous, and its activation is reason enough for America’s entire political system to be replaced by the Judges (“genetically chosen to be TOUGH – but FAIR”).

Some comics stories, in long-running continuities, become load-bearing, and like “The Death Of Rico” this is one of them. A collection of neat, nasty ironies – the last American president thrown into a story modelled on European folklore; medical robots becoming murderers; and the fate of Booth himself – is a cornerstone of Dredd lore in ways Mills could hardly have foreseen. It meant future writers were gifted the basic conceit of Booth as the catalyst for the Judges’ rise, and were also stuck with the extremely strange details of what happens to him. First, the Judges simply refuse to kill the President, sealing him in suspended animation in the middle of nowhere. Second, Dredd converts his sentence to “life”, working on a farm so he can see how he’s ruined America. It’s an extraordinary choice even within the improvised version of “The Law” Dredd is working in, and later on John Wagner will revisit it as a lapse. But it’s a very Millsian moment – he likes justice best when it’s poetic, which shows why, the creative pyrotechnics of this story aside, his contributions to Dredd since have been minimal.

A STAR IS BORN

The Booth episode is the closest Dredd’s world’s past comes to our present, and Mills uses it to remind us that America as it exists is a terrifying thing. Within the overall story, Booth indirectly leads to Dredd’s final trial, as his robot army who fought the final battle of the Atomic Wars emerge from their burial spots in the Mojave Desert to enact the past’s revenge on the Judges’ present. With Spikes and his fellow Judges dead, and separated from Tweak, Dredd staggers across the desert alone, haunted by all the enemies he’s met on his journey (note that while Ronald McDonald appears here, the Jolly Green Giant does not).

This moment, the story’s climax, is captured in one of the greatest 2000AD covers of all, showing Dredd on his knees, howling his defiance at the Cursed Earth itself. “I AM THE LAW… I AM DREDD… JUDGE DREDD!” It’s by Mick McMahon, one of the two men who’s illustrated the entire 25-part strip. Without McMahon and Brian Bolland, the Cursed Earth would still be a famous and thrilling story, whose contributions to Dredd’s world are well worth talking about. But in 1978, their art, week after week, was what gave the strip its surging, roaring life.

Twenty-five weeks with two artists, with colour pages each week, was an exceptional stint on Dredd. Mills in his memoir gives full credit to Nick Landau for shepherding McMahon and especially Bolland (whose detailed, precisely inked work looks, and was, time-consuming to produce) into delivering it. But the storyline also shows how good the writers and editors were at matching stories to artists – maybe aside from the Vegas section, there’s no part of “The Cursed Earth” where you wish McMahon and Bolland had swapped places. Bolland gets to draw the freaky mutants, the deceptively cute aliens and the weird satirical living brand mascots, all segments where his crisp, realistic style enhances the strangeness he’s being asked to visualise. McMahon’s speciality is the Cursed Earth as a blasted wilderness, full of wild-eyed, wild-haired men, robots and monsters.

Of the two it’s McMahon’s work that dominates, both in page count (he handles around three-quarters of the episodes) and in the iconic images I remember “The Cursed Earth” for. Bolland’s art is, as ever, beautifully smooth, and ironically here he has a facility as a gag cartoonist he didn’t really show on the Walter The Wobot strip. His designs for the Brotherhood of Darkness and the Alien Catcher General are delightfully grotesque, and even better for being as beautifully rendered as the presidential heads on Mount Rushmore. But I feel he’s more at home drawing the people of Mega-City – within a few episodes of Dredd’s return he’s defined the look and tone of the next Dredd story as well as McMahon did this one.

And McMahon, from that first double page spread to the final cover, does an eye-popping, career-defining job on “The Cursed Earth”. The story uses its colour centre-spreads better than anything since Belardinelli’s earliest Dan Dare episodes, delivering a lurid movie poster every week to introduce the story, while on the black and white pages McMahon goes wild. He’s an artist famous for his conscious stylistic changes and redefinitions, and this story – no doubt time pressure played a part here too – finds him at his loosest, with a ragged, energetic line and action-packed compositions. Everything in McMahon’s Cursed Earth is in motion, on the edge, frayed and grizzled looking, pushed to its limits by the hostility of the landscape it happens in. His dinosaurs are worthy inheritors to Ramon Sola’s devil-beasts; his humans have a battered solidity; his faces are often full of fear and desperation. If “The Cursed Earth” succeeds as an action comic or a horror story, it’s McMahon’s art that makes that success.

Behind the scenes, “The Cursed Earth” was ready to end. Its writer and artists were exhausted, the editorial voice that had shaped it was on the move, and 2000AD itself was about to drastically change direction. After a summer in which the comic’s heroes had been dispatched with a brutality IPC bosses reserved for failed titles, that final episode has a triumphant, self-mythologising air. Mills, Landau, McMahon and the rest knew what they’d achieved here. The adventure had been popular enough that an entire Cursed Earth Boardgame had been rustled up and serialised (eating up precious colour story pages) and it wasn’t just nostalgia for his time on the title that made Landau pick it as one of the first Dredd stories to be reprinted in Titan Books’ collected editions.

The Cursed Earth is the best strip 2000AD had yet run. But it’s a turning point for Judge Dredd and the comic itself for reasons well beyond the quality of the story, or the lore it introduced, or even proving that Dredd could work at the half-year-long “mega-epic” length. It’s the series that cemented Dredd’s position as the most popular strip in the comic; more than that, it’s the storyline which proved Dredd could carry the comic on his own if he had to. The strips “The Cursed Earth” ran alongside aren’t all bad, but the gap in quality between even Dan Dare and this is enormous. It didn’t matter. One episode of The Cursed Earth was 9 Earth Pence well spent. Dredd’s crazed shout on Prog 85’s cover isn’t just that of a man about to save Mega City Two. He’s saved his comic too.

HOW TO READ IT: After fresh legal advice determined (correctly as it’s turned out) they could get away with it, Rebellion released The Cursed Earth Uncensored, which collects all 25 parts of the story, and that’s how you should read it. Though if you can only get hold of an earlier edition without the Burger Wars and Green Giant bits, you’re missing the least essential bits of the story.

RECOMMENDED?: Unhesitatingly. As well as establishing a core part of the Dredd universe, it’s early 2000AD at its best – fantastic art and Mills at his most gonzo, going all out for thrills with enough sly jokes and macabre ideas behind them to keep it surprising.

NEXT PROG?: Death Planet! It’s a planetary romance drawn by an Argentine comics legend and it stars 2000AD’s first ever human female lead – what could go wrong?