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.

The Cursed Earth

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Mick McMahon etc. The Cursed Earth (1978)
Being twelve or thirteen at the time, it didn't really occur to me that there might be a problem in Judge Dredd waging war on either Ronald McDonald or the Jolly Green Giant. All my progs went to the local comic shop for something pitiful like a tenner back in the early nineties, and by the time I came to consider revisiting Dredd's trip across the Cursed Earth, the thing had been reprinted following the relaxation of some copyright law or other, so here I am. I have good memories of the Cursed Earth, Dredd's first true saga given that the robot revolution can't have been more than ten issues; and happily it still rocks, so this hasn't been anything like revisiting a once beloved Rupert annual, as sometimes turns out to be the case. Being Dredd, and being aimed at young lads of the age at which I found myself in 1978, there's a lot of narrative shorthand, an explosion on nearly every page, and an astonishing degree of violence, but it works and additionally stands the test of time because McMahon's war torn art is gorgeous, and neither Mills nor Wagner assumed their readership to be fucking idiots. There's not much breathing space as Dredd and Spikes rampage across their post-nuclear wasteland, but just enough to allow for a degree of pathos, even in these primary colours, and to the point that I almost couldn't read the fourth page of Tweak's Story.

I never found Dredd that interesting a character, but this was where the strip really took off for me in revealing a little more of the terrible reality he inhabited. This was the golden age, with Joe as more or less an agent of karma in a brutal but realist world rather than the monotone vessel of fascist slapstick he seems to have become. It always struck me as odd that 2000AD, an English weekly, should run a strip set in a future America in keeping with the prevalent obsession with the romance of the formerly wild west; but with hindsight I see that Judge Dredd offered commentary on America and its seeping cultural infection, complete with jokes, and with a wit that would have been mostly beyond mainstream America itself, this being a far more pragmatic take on truth, justice, and the rest than you would have had from Clark or Bruce back in '78; and it beat Michael Crichton to the genetically engineered dinosaur thing, should anyone be interested, and probably did it better. It really is a masterpiece.

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.

Robo-Hunter: Verdus

John Wagner, Ian Gibson & José Luis Ferrer Robo-Hunter: Verdus (1979)
I just couldn't leave this one in the book store. The pull was too powerful. I grew up reading 2000AD from issue twenty onwards and this was, in my opinion, one of the very best things from those early years before the comic grew up and Judge Dredd took to dropping the occasional reference to Baudelaire. Robo-Hunter was Sam Slade, a man who hunted robots as is probably obvious from the title. Here, in his debut strip, he travels to an entire planet of robots.

Seriously, what more could you fucking ask for?

More or less every single page of this thing was like stepping on a memory sherbert landmine, and best of all is that somehow this comic strip about a man who shoots robots which is very clearly targetted at twelve-year old boys and which makes not one single reference to a Portishead album remains an absolute delight when read in Trump year IV by a fifty-five year old man. Even the jokes are still funny.

I think it works because Robo-Hunter takes itself approximately seriously whilst also being completely fucking stupid, and joyously so. I'd forgotten, for example, how Sam is held prisoner by BO, the unfortunately designated sewer robot, and is required to play Robopoly in order to win his freedom. Robopoly is robot-themed Monopoly complete with tiny robots as playing pieces. BO's pieces cheat, and so Sam bribes the tiny robot coppers inhabiting the board game's jail to knobble his opponent. You simply never had that sort of attention to detail in Blade Runner.

Verdus heaps absurdity on absurdity as it goes on, somehow without ever seeming cynical, culminating in robot religious leaders arguing in the robot parliament, and one of them is a mechanical Rabbi doubtless drawn from the films Woody Allen made when he was funny and arguably less creepy; and it works because Gibson's art has just enough elasticity to stretch to such ludicrous excesses without losing its dramatic footing. He was never quite one of my favourite artists, and I don't even like to think about those later strips which seemed to be mostly just wavy lines approximating women resembling Daisy Duck, but he had the balance just right with this one, keeping those loose lines in check with large areas of black or letratone.

I sort of object to the whole thing about spoilers, because if the matter of whether or not the butler did it is pivotal to your enjoyment of whatever it is you'd rather not have spoiled, then you're probably watching some shit allegedly bingeworthy TV show rather than engaging with genuine culture; but, even though Robo-Hunter is pushing forty, I'll refrain from telling you how it ends in case you don't already know because I'd forgotten the ending - which is actually quite weird and shocking and is probably indicative of why Robo-Hunter could only ever have been born from the pages of 2000AD. I guess I'd forgotten how great this comic used to be when they got it right. Sometimes it really was the galaxy's greatest, and this was one of those times.

I, Claudius

Robert Graves I, Claudius (1934)
One of the most celebrated and most gripping historical novels of all time, it says in a number of places, so here I am once again reading above my weight due to having experienced a feeling of passing foolishness on the occasion of having to admit I'd never read I, Claudius, which would be more forgiveable had I not read greatly in excess of fifty Terrance Dicks novels. Ignoro ab urbe condita Roma, which is possibly to say I ain't know nuffink when it comes to ancient Rome, but Graves' Seven Days in New Crete was decent so Claudius seemed worth a look.

I gather Graves has remained more or less faithful to a common form of Roman narrative, that somewhat having been his field, rendering this as much a reconstruction as a novel due to its major events and characters being historically factual. Claudius did actually write an eight volume autobiography, and although this isn't it, I guess it almost could have been. Our man's discussion of his approach to the recording of history at least reminds me of similar monologues by both Plato and Lucian of Samosata, which I mention mainly because those are the two classical lads I have read. Additionally, Graves exercises a certain degree of wit, at least without quite turning it into Up Pompeii, even casting a few knowing winks in the general direction of us readers, notably when the Sibyl informs young Claudius of the eventually impending Robert Graves' version of his life:

But when he's dumb and no more here,
Nineteen hundred years or near,
Clau - Clau - Claudius shall speak clear.

Cheeky!

To further expose my roots, most of what I know of this story comes from John Wagner having rewritten it as The Day the Law Died in 2000AD comic, so it's a pleasure to return to the source and find it no less enjoyable. That said, gripping might be a bit of an overstatement, although I might find it so were I a little more engaged with Roman history. Certain accounts of military campaigns felt a little dry for my tastes, but the book generally did enough to keep me reading, and the intrigue and conspiracy, particularly once we come to the reign of Caligula, is thoroughly absorbing; and it's thoroughly absorbing in part because its dissection of politics is as valid now as then, then being in this case the times of both Claudius and his modern biographer, in respect to whom, it's difficult to miss certain parallels with Graves' own era:

Caligula was very angry. He sent a platoon of Germans along the benches and one-hundred heads were chopped off. This incident disturbed the conspirators; it was a reminder of the barbarity of the Germans and the marvellous devotion that they paid Caligula. By this time, there can hardly have been a citizen in Rome who did not long for the death of Caligula, or would not willingly have eaten his flesh, as the saying is; but to these Germans he was the most glorious hero the world had ever known.

So yes, jolly good. Quid a stupri fantastic est libri huius etc. etc.

Doctor Who Classics Omnibus

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison & others
Doctor Who Classics Omnibus volume one (2010)
Perhaps inevitably, I was once quite the fan of Doctor Who, right up until its 2005 reinvention which, for me at least, missed all the major points of what had made the series so enjoyable in the first place; and then I found my disappointment somewhat polarised by the repellent fervour with which so many embraced the revival, a fervour which often seems indistinguishable from bullying from where I stand, and bullying offered in support of opinion presented as doctrine, received wisdom reiterated as fact.

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story.

That's just one example; and it might work if accounting for novels like Campaign or The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, but these are usually some way off the radar of those for whom Doctor Who is beyond criticism. I have no idea who first said those words, and I'm amazed they can be restated year after year without anyone actually pausing to ask themselves what is actually meant, whether it might be true, or whether it's just another flavourless lump of hyperbole wheeled out because it sounds vaguely more authoritative than the one about my dad being bigger than your dad. What it appears to mean, so far as I am able to tell, is that being as the Doctor can go anywhere in time and space, the settings may vary a great deal without stretching credibility too thin, additionally allowing for some liberties to be taken with the narrative. You could probably say much the same of Star Trek, not that it would necessarily be any more true as a statement. Stories set in fictional environments or from the viewpoint of a minor character are not necessarily indicative of wild narrative anarchy, and certainly not when every last one boils down to the magic Doctor Who telly man having adventures in his TARDIS whilst occasionally reminding us to be nice to those who are a little bit different. Maybe I'm wrong, and Doctor Who really does allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, in which case I assume I must have missed the equivalents to Finnegans Wake, Rendezvous with Rama, Heart of Aztlán, Lady Chatterley's Lover or all those other Doctor Who stories which didn't frame everything in relation to a time traveller having adventures whilst human companions are captured and find themselves having to ask what's happening, Doctor?

So the wonderful thing about Doctor Who is more likely that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, excepting stories of which any aspect is of greater importance than the main character, which actually leaves quite a lot that Doctor Who can't do without looking ridiculous.

Anyway, that's just one aspect. My point - quite aside from Doctor Who merely being a television serial from which a mighty ocean of merchandising has sprung forth, just as Softly Softly and On the Buses were merely television serials - nothing was ever the better for being taken more seriously than it deserved.

Nostalgia guided the hand that picked this from a pile of cheapies in a branch of Borders just before the retail chain imploded, specifically the nostalgia of having read about half of the strips collected herein when they first appeared in Doctor Who Weekly back in the early 1980s. The Iron Legion, The Star Beast, City of the Damned and others - they were great at the time, just as you might expect from 2000AD regulars like Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, but returning to these now that I'm fat and in my forties, it's difficult to get beyond their being written for a slightly younger audience than at least those early 2000AD strips which have generally stood the test of time. The ideas are nice enough for all the predominance of primary narrative colours, and Dave Gibbons' artwork is beautiful, but it's the kind of shorthand storytelling wherein panels are captioned so as to describe what is quite clearly seen to be happening without any real need for such descriptions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I'm a fully grown man and it no longer works for me, not least because the mere presence of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. does not in itself hold my interest. The thing is, as children's comics go, there are plenty which retain some appeal in later years mainly through having refrained from too much talking down to their readers - Asterix the Gaul, Dan Dare, at least some of what 2000AD published - besides which these strips read sadly like ham-fisted promotional material such as you might find printed on the wrapper of an ice lolly. Neither content, vintage nor the presence of a Doctor Who logo is really enough to justify describing these stories as classic, although I've no doubt there are many people out there prepared to wage dreary online wars in their defence. There may even be one or two reading this review, getting ready to fulminate, having never before taken any interest in either Pamphlets of Destiny or the novels I've written about herein, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about and it must therefore be debated with all due reverence, which I really feel proves my point about things being taken more seriously than they deserve.

Of course, it could be argued that this is also what I have myself done when I could just have said Doctor Who Classics Omnibus is all right if you're about ten, but even then you'd be better off with some Judge Dredd or whatever.