Judge Dredd: the Complete Case Files 05 (1982)

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.

Inferno

 

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar & Carlos Ezquerra Inferno (1993)
I was still buying 2000AD regularly when this saga was first published; I re-read some of it a couple of years ago after snapping up those Summer Offensive issues on eBay - mainly for the sake of Big Dave, and yet none of it rings any significant bells; and now I've bought it again as a collected edition—sorry, graphic novel—so as to give it a fair crack of the whip. I say saga but I actually mean a story lasting twenty issues of the galaxy's greatest which therefore probably wouldn't stand up in comparison to, off the top of my head, Beowulf.

Anyway, the main thing I've taken from this, and which I'd forgotten, is that Judge Dredd in its heyday was mostly a comedy, or at least satire, sharing more in common with those ludicrous hard man strips in the early issues of Viz than it did with any caped American fare. In a totalitarian future society where one might be executed by a monosyllabic uniformed nutcase for littering, chuckles were never far away. Dredd himself is therefore horrible, which is the point, his principal virtue being that he's absolutely consistent and ruthlessly honest by his own draconian terms. The weekly strip therefore usually seemed to work better in short, sharp bursts of ultraviolent slapstick, and earlier attempts at lengthy stories spanning multiple issues worked best when they kept this in mind - I still have fairly good memories of the Cursed Earth and Judge Caligula tales, although admittedly it's been a while.

However, fifteen or so years down the line, it was beginning to look a bit thin, at least to me, which was presumably why I stopped buying. Dredd works better as a Ramones album than as some sprawling conceptual Tolkien with firearms cycle exploring the limits of his grim, frowning universe, because that universe isn't really very interesting unless it's funny. Mark Millar's Purgatory develops the background of a prison break in a penal colony on one of Saturn's moons, and Grant Morrison's Inferno brings the escaped violent psychopaths to Mega City One - which they take over because what else would they do? So they act like escaped violent psychopaths - a handful of whom have somehow managed to oust the government of a city of eight-hundred million - Judge Dredd busts heads and saves the day, as usual.

I like Mark Miller but Purgatory is high on primary colours and low on redeeming features even by his standards, and Inferno reads like Grant Morrison was mostly just trying to pay off a phone bill. It would be saved by Carlos Ezquerra's mostly gorgeous artwork, but even that has begun to stray into caricature by this point, with Chief Judge McGruder having sprouted what looks like a loaf of bread where her nose used to be.

It's not bad but it feels somewhat like a strip going through the motions, and the inclusion of Millar's pleasantly ludicrous six-page I Hate Christmas serves mainly to remind us what Judge Dredd should look like.

Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids

 

John Wagner, Alan Grant & Ian Gibson
Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids (1982)
While Verdus seemed like an essential purchase, this collects material which I vaguely remembered reading as a kid, and there it was in the store next to the first volume so it seemed worth a punt. Day of the Droids didn't make quite such an impression on me first time round, and I can see why. It does a job and it has its moments, but it reads somewhat like an attempt to repeat the formula - our man Sam on a one-man mission to put down an entire robot revolution, albeit this time back home on Earth. The sheer absurdity which made Verdus work is still in evidence, but here it feels a little as though Wagner was scrabbling around for things to send up. The cheery stupidity of Hoagy, Sam's assistant, is sufficiently chucklesome, but the robot version of Woody Allen's version of the Mafia feels a bit of a stretch, or at least it did to me and still does. As a whole, Day of the Droids is entertaining as fuck, yet falls some way short of the surrealist riot which was Verdus. I don't quite follow why anyone would have built pinstriped robot hoodlums, and Ian Gibson had apparently reached the point by which he couldn't be arsed to make them look even vaguely mechanical so we may as well be looking at extras from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Also we have Carlos Sanchez Stogie, a robot cigar created because IPC had adopted an anti-smoking policy, so Wagner came up with a robotic alternative to Sam's usual cigar based - it says here - on Carlos Ezquerra. Although Stogie is a lot of fun and it could be argued that Wagner here predicted e-cigarettes, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Ezquerra. I never met the man but I'm sure there was more to him than pronounceeng everytheeng like thees with occasional references to tacos.

I've seen it suggested that Alan Grant's run on Robo-Hunter was where it all went downhill, and yet his Beast of Blackheart Manor - the second strip in the collection - avoids the pitfalls of Droids for all that it's more or less Scooby Doo with robots. Grant actually manages to do something slightly different with Sam Slade and Gibson's art is clean, tight, and more dramatic. It's hard not to wonder whether somebody complained about Day of the Droids' gradual slide into sketchy panels full of wavy lines resembling a sort of amalgamation of Monet and Carl Barks.

Beyond this I have no coherent recollection of later Robo-Hunter strips beyond something headachey drawn by that bloke who drew everyone as massive pairs of eyes surrounded by cross-hatching, so if it was Alan Grant's fault, Blackheart Manor thankfully wasn't necessarily any indication of what was to come.

2000AD Summer Offensive

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and others 2000AD Summer Offensive (1993)
Not a collection, in case anyone was wondering - but eight back issues of the comic nabbed from eBay and dating from a year or so before I gave up on the galaxy's greatest and flogged my entire collection to Skinny Melink in Lewisham. I remember Big Dave being great, and as something which is obviously never going to get a reprint, and the Summer Offensive sounded fun as I applied myself to Wikipedia in an effort to jog my memory of having read the thing.

The idea was to hand the editorial reins over to Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith for a couple of months just to see what would happen - these being three writers who had distinguished themselves with sparky, volatile strips characterised by a reluctance to play it safe, or summink. Maybe someone was hoping to revive that wave of lucrative outrage which had greeted 2000AD when it first appeared in the seventies.

Big Dave is as horrible as I recall it being, and therefore justifies this return visit. It's essentially real world Biffa Bacon from Viz turned up to eleven, working mainly because it really doesn't have any redeeming features whatsoever and constitutes a psychological portrait of the worst aspects of nineties Britain, and because Steve Parkhouse's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best he's ever drawn. Big Dave arguably defies criticism by already being everything bad you could possibly say about it.

Then there's the rest, none of which I was able to remember from the first time I read this stuff back in the nineties, and now I know why. Morrison and Millar's version of Judge Dredd isn't bad but it's no Cursed Earth, and only really feels like Dredd because of Carlos Ezquerra's characteristically exceptional artwork, which I guess at least distracts from a story which might otherwise seem fairly average; and the Indian Judge is named Bhaji and comes fitted with speech patterns very much in the vein of Apu from the Simpsons, so that's a bit of a bore.

Back in April, I wrote a satirical thing called 2000AD After I Stopped Reading which proposed a number of strips which may or may not have featured in the comic since I lost interest, informed mainly by sarcasm and vague memories of the formulaic composition of some of 2000AD's lesser series. Anyway, Mark Millar's Maniac 5 and John Smith's Slaughterbowl read unfortunately as though they were expanded from vague ideas I came up with when taking the piss. Maniac 5 looks amazing, having been drawn by Steve Yeowell, but that's all; and while Slaughterbowl isn't entirely without worth, John Smith has written much better, and it reads as though the other two were egging him on, insisting he make it even more offensive; which I suppose at least conceals its parentage in those earlier future sport strips which were mostly just Roy of the Rovers with jetpacks.

I'd say Really & Truly is as bad or worse than I remember it having been, except I had no memory of ever having read it; so it's as bad or worse than I would have remembered it being had I been able to remember having read it, which wasn't the case. It's like a conversation with a pothead, the word wow in faux psychedelic lettering dragged out over eight agonising instalments, or hits if you prefer, man. Groovy. The plot - and it should be noted that were I to frame the word plot as it applies here between accordingly ironic quotation marks, the necessary degree of irony would demand that said quotation marks be of such scale as to force the rest of my text right off the edge of the screen - is almost identical to that of Everyman and shares similar affectations of nadsat, drugs, and self-consciously quirky characters on a really amaaaaaaazing trip, meaning it's unreadable and a criminal waste of Rian Hughes.

So that was the Summer Offensive - Big Dave, a cover version of Judge Dredd, a couple of participation award winners, and a strip which really, really wanted to be Philip Bond's Wired World from Deadline, which was itself a massive pile of wank: not very zarjaz at all, it has to be said.

Judge Dredd: Crusade

Mark Millar, Carlos Ezquerra & Mick Austin Judge Dredd: Crusade (1995)
Grant Morrison is credited as co-writer of Crusade, but it feels a little like something he may have mumbled in the pub which Mark Millar expanded into a ten part story. A ship returns from deep space apparently with a message from God - which sounds like Morrison's sort of thing - and the rest is a pie fight amongst Judges of various futuristic nationalities as they scramble to the site of the ship's crash landing, each hoping to be first to hear the good news. The Japanese Judge ends up committing hari-kiri, the Irish Judge is already on the sauce when first we meet him, and the Indian guy is called Judge Bhaji; so yeah - my guess would be that this is mostly Mark Millar's doing. I'm ordinarily a fan, although when Millar's writing is bad, it's fucking awful. His version of Dredd mostly reads as though he's taking the piss, but Crusade and Frankenstein Division - the other story here - are mostly saved by gorgeous art. Mick Austin had moved on from drawing people with giant heads and his art was at this point approaching a painterly elegance suggestive of the classic sixties artists who drew for Eagle, TV21 and the like; and the late, great Carlos Ezquerra drew Frankenstein Division, so obviously it's amazing.

It's been a while since I read Judge Dredd, and I was a little taken aback by its singularity of purpose. Judge Dredd is the very opposite of anything which marketing executives would describe as character driven, which is why it works and has proven so enduring. Judge Dredd himself is essentially a massive fucking cunt, but a ruthlessly consistent one so we always know where we stand with him, which is a rare and admirable quality. The strip comprises Dredd punching the rest of the characters over and over, page after page, indiscriminately dishing out desserts both just and unjust whilst shouting, and so it's a lot like listening to a Ramones album in so much as that it's a Ramones album and there's not much joy to be had in arguing with it. At times it approaches Viz levels of absurdity, and the cynicism is of such density as to go into negative figures and come out the other side looking peculiarly sanguine. Considering that it's more or less 1984 with greater emphasis on leather and motorbikes, there's something strangely uplifting about Dredd.

2000AD #2000

2000AD #2000 (2016)
Considering how far back I go with 2000AD, it would have been weird to not buy this two-thousandth issue as I noticed it there on the racks in Barnes & Noble; and it would have felt weird not to write about it, so here I am.

My first issue was #20, cover dated 9th of July, 1977 and costing eight pence from Bradley's newsagent in the square in Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England. This issue cost nine dollars before tax and was purchased here in San Antonio, Texas.

What a long, strange journey it has been.

I bought my first 2000AD on Monday the 4th of July. I was eleven-years old. It clearly made a huge impression on me because on the following Saturday I note in my diary:

Today I bought birthday presents for James and Nicholas in Stratford and got for myself the 2000AD summer special in Stratford.

Then on the Monday:

Not much at school but when I got home I got another 2000AD comic and saw Clapperboard on TV about the film Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

On Thursday the 14th of July, I wrote:

Today I swapped some copies of Topper for some 2000AD comics with Peter Empson. Now I only need four back issues to complete the set.

Curiosity had quickly flared up into obsession leading to what didn't seem so much like a hobby as a whole new way of life, and on the following Monday I wrote:

I hate Nationwide because they said things against 2000AD comic. They're not very nice.

I stayed with the thing more or less on and off until about 1993. There was a large gap around the start of the eighties whilst I discovered punk rock, admittedly three years later than everyone else and coinciding with a run of unusually shite stories such as Meltdown Man and Mean Arena. Then a friend filled in this gap a couple of years later by giving me all of his back issues. They had been soaked, transformed into a column of papier mâché by the pipes bursting in his student accommodation. He was about to chuck the lot, but I took them and spent the next few months drying them out, two issues at a time on the radiator. Once the things were dry enough to read, I realised the comic had picked up somewhat after I'd jumped ship so I started buying it again. I'm not even sure what drove me away in 1993, but it may have been a combination of a girlfriend entering the picture and Armoured Gideon.

I hadn't bought one since, not until right now. I've probably browsed here and there but never saw anything which really grabbed me, and 2000AD was never really a casual read. It was something you collected or you didn't bother; and this situation is strangely akin to my own father reading a copy of Eagle in the year 1999 in some alternate universe where the thing never got cancelled and my dad continue to read comics into adulthood, just like me.

Firstly, it's sort of comforting to see we're still running with the affectation of this being a comic edited by an alien for the benefit of earthlets, and an alien who continues to describe his own work as zarjaz; and it's additionally comforting to detect no trace of irony in this conceit. We have a Judge Dredd strip which requires just twelve pages to team him up with Johnny Alpha, then send them both to the future to defeat a troop of Judge Cal clones. It's fucking stupid and yet characteristically wonderful and a good illustration of what has made this comic great even before we've considered the consistently wonderful art of Carlos Ezquerra. Pat Mills reunites with Kevin O'Neill for a slightly bewildering but nevertheless welcome Nemesis strip. There's linking material from Mike McMahon amongst others, then Rogue Trooper and Anderson, Psi Division - strips which historically had their moments, but never quite became favourites for me, and here fail to change my mind on that score - although it's still nice to see them.

The weird thing at this point was the familiarity of it all, concepts and characters all seemingly dating from my era. They must have come up with something during the last two decades, surely?

There's Sinister Dexter, whatever that may be, then a new strip from Pete Milligan, and they're okay but I'm probably going to stick to catching up with collected editions of the stuff I liked. It's been great to reconnect but I guess it's just not my comic any more, and nor has it been for a while. It did it's job. It raised me and probably changed the face of comics, albeit indirectly. It set me where I am today by some means or other, wherever that is. It's good just to know that it still exists, still works for whoever is reading it, and continues to spread the gospel of causing trouble and ruffling feathers. May it endure for at least another forty years.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat

Harry Harrison The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (1972)
Collecting the first three of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels, two of which I vaguely recall from their comic strip adaptations in 2000AD. Whilst not really one of the mighty Tharg's more memorable offerings, the art of Carlos Ezquerra was impressive as ever, and it clearly did enough to instil curiosity sufficient to inspire my plucking this anthology from the shelf of Half-Price Books thirty or so years later.

The Stainless Steel Rat (1961), The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970), and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972) are, as I expected, ripping futuristic spy-thrillers, unlikely to have one scrabbling for a well-worn copy of Plato's Republic in search of some obscure reference or other, but then that was never really their job.  I'd say Slippery Jim diGriz - the rat of the title - is essentially James Bond in space with a slight counter-cultural twist and a more well developed sense of humour, although being as I haven't actually read anything by Ian Fleming since I was about twelve this may well be bollocks; but hopefully you get the idea.

We have bank robberies, Robin Hood moments, time travel, typically futuristic gadgetry and overpowered security guards revealed to be wearing women's knickers beneath their uniforms - all somehow amounting to a suggestion of diGriz as a young Malcolm McDowell doing comedy turns to camera whilst his long-suffering boss, played by Leo McKern, fumes in silence. It's nothing deep and it's probably dated, but it's also nicely written and a lot of fun. These are the sort of novels you whiz through over the course of a long afternoon, and I suppose my only criticism is that welding three of them together like this somehow misses a point, although it's surely worth noting that I found myself reading all three in quick succession without a trace of boredom.