I was a 2000AD regular up until 1980, by which point I'd turned fifteen and had to make a choice between Sounds music paper or the comic book which was then bringing me regular instalments of Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, both of which were garbage. It wasn't a difficult choice. I hopped back on board a couple of years later. My friend Nick gave me his collection*, of which the earliest issue was, by sheer coincidence, the first prog I hadn't bothered to buy. His collection was patchy with substantial gaps, meaning I could at least tell that it hadn't suddenly returned to greatness immediately after I'd jumped ship, although it seemed to be back on track a couple of years down the line; and one of the strips which had served to remind me why I'd bought the thing in the first place was, of course, Judge Dredd.
Back in the Mean Arena days, Dredd had succumbed to whatever was happening to the other strips - one single episode after another reading very much as though they'd run out of things for him to do; but now that I was back on board I discovered the twenty-five part Apocalypse War, albeit with gaps which I was able to fill when Quality's colourised US reprints started to turn up in the local newsagent.
Thirty or so years later and I don't have any of those old progs. They all went back to the comic shop, one way or another, driven by a need for space and a fear of spending my entire life collecting a weekly comic which would still occasionally reward my dedication with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Age 13½ Months, or Really and Truly, or whatever else had presumably made the cut thanks to a deadline; and yet…
It was either this or back issues of the Quality reprint, and this big fat assemblage of no less than sixty-two consecutive issues seemed like better value. Being a chronological assemblage rather than a greatest hits this means about half of those strips included serve to remind me why I stopped buying, and so we have The Mega-Rackets which ran for what felt like five-hundred or more issues - actually just fifteen - a series of one or two part stories exploring the theme of what organised crime would look like in Mega City One, and mostly it looked like Chicago in the 1940s but with futuristic fins glued to the mobsters' trilbys, and men named Fingers or Lefty zipping through the skies in flying cars bearing a wearying resemblance to the Ford Model 18. To be fair, this sort of tale is fine in weekly instalments, but try reading a whole bunch in one sitting and—Jesus fucking Christ!
Of course, I considered the possibility that it might be just me, and that the somewhat murky reproduction of the original pages wasn't helping; but the contrast is astonishing once you get to the five-part Judge Death Lives wherein the lad responds to the invitation to gaze into the face of fear with:
It's probably one of the greatest single panels of almost any comic book ever, and as such represents the Judge Dredd strip at its very best so far as I'm concerned.
Judge Dredd - which, for what it may be worth, arguably represents the very essence of 2000AD comic in its purest form - is anything but straightforward, regardless of roots sunk deep into the British comics tradition of square-jawed just deserts. He's a cop who dishes out prison sentences for littering, who judges then carries out routine executions. He's been called a fascist, which implies an agenda bearing no relation to the character unless you consider all forms of authority inherently fascist. He's authoritarian for sure, but more like a law of nature and he is as such impartial - pitiless on one hand but above personal bias on the other. He's objectively harsh but fair - extremely unfair in humanist terms, but then life is unfair, as is most of the universe. This is why the strip has lasted four decades and has thus far resisted attempts to adapt it for the big screen, although at least the Stallone version kept some of the humour.
The humour is the element of contrast which sharply defines Dredd as anything but a superhero, and certainly not just Batman with a gun and a crash helmet. It's the traditional gallows humour of the British working class - if anyone remembers them - the sarcasm of English punk rock which informed those very first strips even when aimed at denizens of the junior school. I'd say the strip is Swiftian, even Rabelaisian - which it is - and is therefore probably not to be taken literally, except that feels like a bit of a slippery slope at the end of which I'd take to describing things as iconic, a sure sign of having disappeared up my own arse. Dredd operates more or less entirely on its own terms, which is probably why it feels so flat when the stories are reduced to answering the question, who do we have him fighting this week?
Anyway, I bought this for the Apocalypse War, which I recall as being amazing, and it turns out that I remember correctly. Carlos Ezquerra - the greatest Dredd artist in my view - illustrates the whole thing, maintaining the consistency with heavy, brutal lines which seem carved as much as drawn, and the story is so relentlessly bleak as to approach exhausting - despite the ever-present element of sarcasm and the peculiar intrusion of comic relief from Walter the Wobot and Maria, Dredd's landlady - who seems to follow in the tradition of the women to whom Tony Hancock once paid rent. How this single tale can pull in so many conflicting directions and still work is a marvel, never mind that it works so well - like standing in the blast of a jet engine for twenty-five issues.
*: They had been ruined when his house flooded and he was going to chuck them out. I took them home and dried them out two pages at a time on an oil-filled radiator.
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