Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: Risk Assessment
Credits: Mike Carrol(script) Colin MacNeil(art) Chris Blythe (colors) Jim Campbell (letters)
Matthew Blair: Despite Judge Dredd’s reputation for being heavy handed and doling out brutal punishments to lawbreakers, he is still an officer of the law with a sworn duty to protect the citizens of Mega City One, which means he does have moments where he actually helps people. In this case, it’s a surprisingly small and personal story where Dredd stops a group of small-time criminals from knocking over a drugstore. However, it’s also a deep dive into Dredd’s headspace where we get to watch him assess the situation and take everyone out while ensuring the civilians remain safe.
“Judge Dredd: Risk Assessment” is written by Mike Carrol and is a masterclass in decompressed storytelling. Decompression is when the comic uses a lot of pages and space to cover a short period of time, in this case Carrol uses most of the story’s 12 pages to cover just a few seconds. It’s a technique that used to be popular in comics, but lost its appeal a few years ago due to overuse, but here it’s used to great effect to tell a story. It’s fascinating to see the thought process of Dredd in action and it’s actually kind of nice to see Dredd show concern for innocent bystanders. It’s a story that humanizes Dredd while showing just how lethal and capable he can really be.
The artwork of “Judge Dredd: Risk Assessment” is provided byColin MacNeil and it does a great job of enhancing the story and guiding the reader towards what the comic wants them to see. The story is a single moment, frozen in time, and shows Dredd hyperfocused and paying attention to a ton of details, which is shown in a series of extreme closeups that allow the reader to see what Dredd sees. Despite all of that, MacNeil has a great sense of place and geography, which ensures that the plot is never lost and the reader knows exactly where everyone is and what’s going on. It’s a great way to show a slow motion story in a medium made up of static images and lends a ton of weight and pathos to a moment that we would ordinarily not think about.
“Judge Dredd: Risk Assessment” is a small, seemingly insignificant moment in Dredd’s long and storied career. It’s just a simple robbery and amid all the grand moments, city scale threats, and epic bad guys, it would appear that this story is relatively pointless. However, this is a special glimpse into the mind and thought process of Mega City One’s greatest hero and shows just how capable and lethal he can really be.
Spector: Incorruptible Part 7
Credits: John Wagner (script), Dan Cornwell (art), Dylan Teague (colors), Jim Campbell (letters)
Greg Lincoln: Things go from bad to worse as the corrupt cops take it up a notch in their attempts to oust the incorruptible Spector. At the end of last month’s installment, Spector realized that the men that were after him would target friends in high places. In fact, the military grade robot that is employed against our heroes this week was literally dropped off by a clearly marked police vehicle. John Wagner’s writing makes the corrupt cops seem brazen and wantonly destructive in their attack on the DA that Spector is working for. The action in this strip is pretty brutal and goes into the realm of overkill just to get one man, DA Loban. Wagner’s narration is rock solid engaging, but the star here is the art.
Dan Cornwall’s vehicles and buildings may be born of a fifties and sixties sci-fi mentality but that and the offbeat retro future fashions he has crafted make this future his own. For this strip, he created a new piece of military grade robot technology that more of a match for Spector physically then anything he’s encountered before. Cornwall clearly shows us it’s destructive potential with the indiscriminate damage and death it causes getting to and killing the DA. It eve knocks Spector for distance. He delivers solidly good action and keeps a really impressive level of detail in his are while drawing it. There make not be much that happened this month but the art made every hit and shot solidly felt.
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Tales from the Black Museum: The Tooth Will Kill Ya!
Credits: Guy Adams (script), Gary Welsh (art), Jim Campbell (letters)
Chris Egan: This is a fun gross-out spooky tale just in time for Halloween. Much like Tales from the Crypt, The Twilight Zone, or any of the great horror anthologies of their time, “Black Museum” does a commendable job or giving us unlikable protagonists and then doling out punishments on them to meet the crimes, or negative morals they’ve spewed into the world. And this story has plenty of spewing.
Judge Assur, a mid-level Judge trying to make a name for herself, is a violence loving, trigger happy individual who would rather jump right to police brutality, torture, and execution than to fully evaluate and judge the criminals she hunts down. Even for Mega City One, she’s a tough pill to swallow.
Adams crafts a bizarre and icky story that is equally cheeky and creepy in all the right ways. Even with more limited story space than, say, a 22 minute t.v. episode, he is able to deliver on each step of the narrative with a clear and concise set up, build up, establishing the lore and the rules, and then, ultimately, the ghoulish downfall.
It’s a strong little yarn and gives us all the black comedic horror it can in just a few pages. The Black Museum framing device still works, but is used so minimally it almost doesn’t matter all this month. Welsh’s art is true classic black & white “Judge Dredd” and captures not only that original palette, but the entire style as well, from line work to texture and shading. It’s a beautiful little throwback and an enjoyably creepy story.
Lawless: Most Wanted 06
Credits: Dan Abnett (script), Phil Winslade (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Brian Salvatore: In what seemed like a foregone conclusion from jump, Lawson was revealed to be undercover the whole time, and “Lawless” is finally busting forth. Though still mired – in a good way – in the Western soap opera world, this chapter felt like a season’s penultimate episode, with a big bad spilling his guts, the hero coming out from the shadows, and the whole gang joining together to stop disaster.
The chaos of the strip is met by Phil Winslade’s art, which continues to cram as much visual information into every panel as possible. Winslade’s were-creatures looked equally at home here as the lawmen do, which is a testament to his style and the literal wild west that he’s created, visually, in “Lawless.” While this chapter feels a little predictable, it works because Dan Abnett has been threading this needle for a few months now. This feels cathartic instead of well worn. The coming showdown will be an epic one, and with most of the threads untangled at this point, it should be a relatively straightforward one, too.
Dreadnoughts: The March of Progress – Part Seven
Credits: Mike Carroll(script) John Higgins(art) Sally Hurst(colours) Simon Bowland(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: When ‘The March of Progress’ began I described it as a horror strip, how else could you describe the bleak brutality of the Blitz. Their effectiveness by the end of this episode is being reconsidered in the wake of the assassination of a governor and deaths of dozens of Judges. That same creeping sense of horror comes through in the bifurcated nature of ‘The March of Progress’ finale. In the present we have the standoff between Judge Glover nee Miriana Crow and the lawyer Vine who has her son. In the past we see the incident that led to Miriana’s arrest as well as the colonial history of violence that led to that point. Mike Carroll and John Higgins weave together a single character history that shows how someone can go from hating the systemic oppression around them and then joining in a system that just reproduces that same oppression, but this time she’s got the gun. It’s not (just) horror, Mike Carroll and John Higgins have written an American tragedy.
For the fascist it’s fundamentally about the play of power, to be empowered and yet psychically disempowered. The Other must always be thought of as the one with the Power in order to suture together the contradictory impulses of fascism. John Higgins framing underscores this dynamic. In the present, before she goes down to their level, Judge Glover is shown always at a low angle. We are always looking up at her, the vertical rectangular panels enhance the feeling of height she has looking down on everyone else with her gun out. But she doesn’t need a gun to signify her power, she also has gravity, that invisible bit of power, on her side as well.
Continued belowIn contrast to these low angle views that deify her, the flashbacks of her origin story are always a mixture of on the level and fairly tight close ups. Even in her mind she is denied full personhood, a pinup view, she is still vivisected into distinct parts as she unleashes her wrath on the corrupt officers that gun down her partner for no real reason at all. The setting sun washes the present in these purples and reds that contrast nicely with the greens used heavily in the flashback.
With these flashbacks we see how Crow became Glover and with it how someone who experiences and understands white supremacy can become a fascist and enforce that on others and not see the contradiction. At the end of the strip in an ironic yet heartfelt final meeting with her son, he asks her to give these bad guys “hell”. She counters she’ll give them “justice” instead. As if there is a difference between the two words in the eyes of the young Justice Department. It’s not justice the department is after, it’s their ability to control and dominate others. It underlies the inherent fascism of all superhero books, no matter how much they try to dress it up as something else.
Carroll for his part honestly gets in a couple of good bleak moments of humor. There is the previously mentioned comment about gravity, a gag that is underlined with Higgins art. The lawyer Vine using the word “tribe” and then questioning if it was appropriate to use this term when talking about threatening to exterminate a family tree of indigenous people with the boy he is holding hostage is a perfectly punctuated moment of reflexivity. For his part the son feels it’s “fine” just not politically correct to be used when in the context of murder. And then you have the mediation on the nature of justice at the end. “Dreadnoughts” continues to be one of the better Dredd strips being produced in the last couple of years because it returns to the dark commentary that undergirded that first strip with human characters. The creative team aren’t justifying their actions, but they are showing the human core to why they act the way they do.
