Welcome, Earthlets, to Multiver-City One, our monthly look at the “Judge Dredd Megazine!” Let’s get right to it.
Judge Dredd: Escalation
Credits: Mike Carroll (script) Paul Marshall (art) Dylan Teague (colors) Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Matthew Blair: This is a story where Judge Dredd arrives at the house of a Mega City One citizen for reasons that will not be spoiled here, but his visit is confounded by the actions of a very determined–and very well armed–butler droid.
It may seem like a small story, and it certainly is, but this is a story with a lot to say and it says it in classic Mega City One fashion.
“Judge Dredd: Escalation” sounds like a title reserved for a Mega City One epic, but writer Mike Carroll keeps the story small, tight, and very focused. Carroll has a lot to say about the responsibilities of power, abusive law enforcement, and the direction Mega City One is headed and he does a great job of addressing it all in such a short time. You can see how Dredd is able to make a mountain out of a molehill in this story and the escalation in the title comes from years of assumed practices and protocol that Dredd has internalized during the years. What’s interesting is that Carroll writes Dredd in such a way that he kind of agrees with the moral of the story, that Mega City One and the Justice Department are a bit too much and there is a very strong likelihood that it will all implode on itself.
The artwork for “Judge Dredd: Escalation” is provided by Paul Marshall, who has the seemingly boring task of providing a look at the middle class life of Mega City One. The apartment looks pretty boring, although the robot butler has a cool retro futurist look. However, the action is the calling card of this story and Marshall does a great job crafting a desperate fight that builds in intensity until it finally ends with Dredd victorious at the expense of everything else. It’s a fight scene that encapsulates everything fun and wrong with Mega City One at the same time and combines some cool action with interesting ideas that serve the plot and make the story better.
“Judge Dredd: Escalation” is a great Dredd story and proof that sometimes the best stories aren’t always the biggest or the flashiest.
Devlin Waugh: Home Away From Home
Ales Kot (script), P.J. Holden (art), Jack Davis (colors), Simon Bowland (letters)
Greg Lincoln: It’s strange to say this but Ales Kot created a rather touching story about a Vampire and a Demon Possessed Dildo and their many wild adventures. Ales Kot and PJ Holden’s artistic skills meshed beautifully in this story related by the people who knew Devlin as their neighbor. This one shot tale about the adventures of Devlin and his sex toy partner told by his neighbors and friends is both enlightening and heartfelt. The narration creates a completely different impression of the man as he’s making the lives of his neighbors better and having many odd adventures and battles around them.
The art but Holden and Jack Davis really sell the story well. They give the experience of being the interviewer and give snippets of images of Devlin in action. The stylized character designs and less superhero look of the story fits well with the quieter more thoughtful narration. Holden creates a gallery of neighbors that is truly diverse and inclusive and makes you feel a part of the tale too. Davis’s pallet of colors is likewise soft and warm much like the story. By the final panel and the reveal going away gift that Devlin’s friends gave to him it’s hard to imagine readers not feeling a little something, perhaps tears, as it’s clear that the people that lived with Devlin for that period loved him, all in their own way and would deeply miss him.
DeMarco, PI: A Picture Paints – Part Three
Laura Bailey (script), Rob Richardson (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Chris Egan: I love this story’s way of playing with detective tropes while working in the world of the Judges and Mega City One. This world is usually so focused on the Judges’s brand of justice that it feels like all there is. And that is normally just fine, it’s a great continued satire and exploration of the fascist state of that future. So, when we get a private eye type mystery with a criminal underworld element that hasn’t been completely taken down by the Judges, it is fresh.
Continued belowThis arc pulls in just enough of that world, with dead Judges, extreme violence, and weak, and possibly, false evidence. Feels like a fun, yet bleak crime story that we’d get out of Gotham City with someone other than Batman showing off their detective skills. This strip is a great cyberpunk crime thriller and it continues to be a page turner.
Armitage: Bullets For an Old Man – Part One
Credits Liam Johnson (script) Warren Pleece(art) Jim Campbell(letters)
Michael Mazzacane: It’s a classic murder mystery, all we have is a stiff dying of natural cause albeit for the bullet to the head in a safe room. No known enemies or reason for suicide. None of it adds up and yet here it all is. It’s got the new mechanismos detective units unable to compute. Armitage is the only one with the history that could provide any sort of insight into this case. So here we are “Armitage” returns with the curmudgeonly, to put it nicely, consulting detective Judge on a case that has everyone else stumped.
Liam Johnson does a good job of framing Armitage’s new irk in our present moment of techno paranoia around generative machine learning coming to replace the knowledge worker. First the came for the factory man and now they’re coming for one of the oldest knowledge jobs in the world, (consulting) detective. Johnson’s script doesn’t belabor the point too much and neither does Warren Pleece’s art. The cut away to the segregated mechanismos and human office space in the department of justice says it all visually. of Bill’s human partner exhibits a banal kind of narcissism as he complains about Bill’s inability to just database the answer thus keeping him from pilates is tuned to be just the right kind of running gag. These elements mixed with the fatalistic narration by Armitage about the inevitability of time create an interesting tone for this series. It is at once a Agatha Christie like whodunit but with a hardboiled detective and a robotic partner he hates turning it into a buddy cop adventure. It’s surprisingly not that far off from Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century.
Johnson’s scripting does a good job of pacing things out and laying all the groundwork. It’s procedural at heart and so this opening strip is a lot of exhibition and setup. The kind of table setting that in any other genre would be complained about, but here it makes perfect sense. Warren Pleece’s art is functional in the best way. It doesn’t get in the way of being overly stylish, his line work captures body language and character acting well enough. The rendering is maybe a little flat and plain, but everything visually works to just present the facts of the case as it stands.
The game is afoot and it apparently involves some Evil Drokker who fired a gun 51 years ago.
Harrower Squad: Calhab County, Part Five
Credits: David Baillie (script), Steve Yeowell (art), Chris Blythe (colors), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Brian Salvatore: “Retribution Squad” finally lives up to its name in the fifth chapter of ‘Calhab County,’ but aside from Steve Yeowell’s art, there’s still not a lot to cling onto here. Yeowell’s art only has a few moments where it can really let loose but, in those moments, there are some truly amazing panels that emerge. Yeowell has always been adept at conveying action clearly and effectively, and so the sequential storytelling here is well laid out and conveys the story well.
The issue continues to be that David Baillie’s script has moments of interest, but they’re buried in mundanity. Until the scene in which Brontide steals the cybertruck, this felt like any other mid-level Dredd-adjacent story. But once that happened, things got interesting real quickly, which shone a light on just how boilerplate and dull this series has seemed since it started. The last half of this chapter is easily the most interesting, visually and script-wise, of the title thus far, and one hopes that this momentum can keep carrying it through the next few installments.
