Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: He Sees You When You’re Sleeping
Credits: Rory McConville (script), Agustin Padilla (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: Part Jingle All the Way, part The Conversation, “He Sees You When You’re Sleeping” is, like the best Dredd stories, is full of clear indications that Dredd and the Judges are the undisputed bad guys. Yes, they are trying to stop crime, but they are doing it through entrapment, using children, and exploiting the joy of Christmas.
The Judges have manufactured a new toy and used lots of taxpayer dollars to make it the most popular toy of the Christmas season, rigging the lottery to buy them to target folks that the Judges want to keep under surveillance. The plan works, and by Christmas Day, Dredd is already nabbing a perp. The story is pretty straightforward, and there isn’t really much plot to be had here, though the initial scheme is laid out cleverly throughout the issue. The idea is the key here, and there’s not a ton of dialogue or exposition to further the simple plot. That’s not really a complaint or a criticism of McConville’s script however, as the story doesn’t need to many bells and whistles to work.
Padilla’s art does a good job of shifting between moods; when talking about the Mega0City Max toy, Padilla’s work is smooth and bright, but as the story gets darker, so does the visual style. His Judges are as menacing as the perps, and when the innocence of the kids and the darkness of the ‘adult’ world intersect, the darkness turns to sadness. There’s a lot of nuance to this artwork, and it helps the somewhat slight story and make this a memorable Dredd strip.
Megatropolis, Part Four
Credits: Kenneth Niemand (script), Dave Taylor (art), Jim Campbell(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: “Megatropolis” returns with a strip filled with prognostication, from Radio Psychic Cassandra to Rico and Amy Jara, everyone is starting to have thoughts on this vigilante killer.
“Megatropolis” being a reflexive elseworld “Dredd” adventure is part of its charm. It creates a space for Kenneth Niemand to write layered dialog that works on the level of pun and in-world dramatic statement, such as when Cassandra pronounces that the last thing a vigilante killer felt “dread, when he saw what had come to judge him.” With letter Jim Campbell adding bold for emphasis. That statement gives us our first in-universe utterance of Judge Dread, soon restyled Judge Dredd by the punk youth of Megatropolis, a knowing nod too the strips source material. It also is an evocative statement about the body of the text itself that creates as much tension as it does awe factor. Is Cassandra a sorceress con artist or does she have actual latent psychic ability.
Rico meanwhile judges the co-workers who beat him. Taylor’s art during this sequence is excellent; his staging allows for every panel to have a new lead attacker, without making the image unreadable. There is a level of anonymity to the attackers, but they manage to do a surprising amount of body language that when mixed with the scripting makes the beating an effective moment. Rico’s recollection of his attackers and his judgement of them is disdainful. Especially Jack, someone who could’ve been a good cop, but was “too weak and malleable.” The fascist masculinity of “Dredd” and its titular character comes through in Rico’s judgement of Jack. It will be interesting to see what if any relationship between Dredd and Rico will be in this universe. Rico thinks the city will have to fall farther before he starts gunning down cops, but he’s already judging them.
Dave Taylor’s art in the last strip was solid if a bit muddy due to the coloring. They do a much better job as Dredd’s assault on Filmore Faro. The Egyptian themed club isn’t well lit but the panels are ablaze in gunfire and some natural lighting that make the pages pop. Most importantly it makes the silhouette of Dredd pop as he guns Faro down. Taylor has moved on from treating him like Bruce the Shark to treating him like Jason Vorhees.
Continued below“Megatropolis” continues to be both an engaging exercise in the aesthetic and narrative limits of “Judge Dredd” and standalone narrative on its own merits.
Dreadnoughts: Breaking Ground: Part Four
Credits: Mike Carroll (Writer), John Higgins (Art), Sally Hurst (Colours), Simon Bowland (Letters)
Jacob Cordas: White people love being victims. We need it. You can trace it back to our fetishization of Jesus while ignoring his teachings. Europe loved living in the name of while ignoring the words. In modern-day storytelling, this shows up in a few ways. We are going to focus on its place in “progressive” storytelling.
It’s a simple trick you see everywhere in stories that want to be seen as political: create a protagonist who is a member of Marginalized Group A and make them the representative of the State, create an antagonist within the narrative that is white or non-real (ex. Orcs in Bright) but code them so they are in fact clearly stand-ins for Marginalized Group A, and finally to have that protagonist commit the acts the state constantly commits on Marginalized Group A against the stand-in for that group. Within this framework, you don’t need to actually challenge the biases of the people consuming the story while seemingly resisting the framework those biases were created in. It is a hollow critique masquerading as satire.
And that is exactly what we get in “Dreadnoughts: Breaking Ground: Part Four.” Maybe I spend too much time working in politics but as soon as the phone-mistaken-for-a-gun moment happened, I couldn’t help but sigh. Stephon Clark is not a plot point and deconstructing his final moments like this is almost as bad as what Joker did to the racially motivated murders of Bernhard Goetz. It’s the kind of trite politics that whitewashes history while promoting meaningless rebellions, patting itself on the back for being willing to get in the muck while still wearing a hazmat suit.
If you want to engage politically, feel free. But do so responsibly or you just enable the culture of supremacy you’re trying to critique.
The Returners: Heartswood Part 4
Credits: Si Spencer (script), Nicolo Assirelli (art), Eva de la Cruz (colours), Simon Bowland(letters)
Ryan Pond: As the group clears the spiders away, a new problem arises. How do they escape the house? Time to split up, Scooby-Doo style, and try to find a way out. But maybe everyone isn’t so interested in escaping.
The strength of this story lies in the artwork. Assirelli does a great job of giving the characters expressive face and motions, strong action indicators, and a balanced use of dark shadows. In every panel, the characters faces depict exactly what emotion they are feeling, and give a lot of insight as to what they may be thinking. Action panels make use of black lines around the edge to indicate what is happening to the characters and what direction the action is flowing in. This is a well-balanced effect though, as Asssireelli’s style does make use of dark shadows and outlines.
Eva de la Cruz does a phenomenal job with the colors, and avoids a lot of potential pitfalls by working around the dark blacks instead of trying to combat them. Not everything needs color, but Cruz is able to contrast the deep blacks with some bright colors that truly do breathe life into a potentially dull story. The use of rainbow colors against space and stars makes things really pop and helps the blacks become that much more powerful, and the way singular light sources are used to cast big shadows means that Cruz can work near the light to create some unique negative space against the bold inks.
As the group branches out to try and find a way out of the mansion, some eerie events leave one group reeling from an interaction while the other group deals with some otherworldly problems. The library may have been the way out, but what has the bookshelf revealed?
The Dark Judges: Deliverance, Part Four
Credits: David Hine (script), Nick Percival (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Rowan Grover: “Deliverance” continues to be some of the most free-wheeling, high concept storytelling that I’ve read in a 2000 AD story recently. The real kicker, though, is that it’s having so much fun doing so. Hine employs an almost Monty Python-esque sense of comedic timing in how he paces his story, the most key example being Judge Death finally being freed by Judge Whisper before Judge Death immediately trying to kill everyone afterward for committing the crime of living. By the same token, having the absolutely bonkers deity fly down from the sky in the Wild Kids scene opens up the story to almost infinite potential, that if we can go here then we can go anywhere. But Hine is also clever enough to drop story and plot development hints amidst all of this, like Judge Whisper’s assessment of Mother Kalula to be empty of emotions and wants. It’s entertaining short term storytelling that works well in the macro sense, too.
Percival’s art here comes to a swirling, psychedelic height as we witness Judges Death and Whisper dance around the landscape of Thanatopia with their protean forms becoming more and more stylized and malleable. I love how fluid and inhuman Percival portrays Judge Death as. It lends an ethereal, nightmarish sense to the whole story that elevates the free-wheeling nature of the narrative. Percival is also great at using a muted color palette, especially to highlight certain elements of a story. Mother Kalula feels important because she’s a stark red, in contrast to the muddy, swampy colors all around her. Percival’s design sensibilities are also on display here, as we witness the mind-boggling Wild Kids entity that appears at the end of the story. Definitely worth checking out just for this moment.
“Deliverance” is such a wild riot of a story, I find it hard not to recommend it to anyone not a fan of sci-fi or the bleak, dark humor of the Judge Dredd universe. It continues to surprise me month after month, which is undoubtedly a good thing.
