Judge Dredd

It's time for another Longbox Graveyard flashback. Last time we looked at the origin of Nick Fury. Today is an appreciation of another comics character of interest to crime fiction fans -- Judge Dredd!

Judge Dredd was new-to-me when Eagle Comics brought his adventures to American shores with Judge Dredd #1 in 1983, but he was already old news in the United Kingdom, having headlined the weekly 2000 A.D. since his debut in 1977. A distinctly-British cocktail of violence, action, farce, science fiction, and social commentary, Judge Dredd was one of my favorite comics of the era, and along with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Watchmen, highlighted a brilliantly creative “British Invasion” of the superhero comics field.

Judge Dredd is still one of the finest, funniest, and most entertaining comic book runs of all time.

Judge Dredd tells the story of an uncompromising lawman who patrols a dystopian future where survivors of atomic war have crowded into massive American “Mega Cities” that sprawl along the entire coastlines of the continent. It is a fast-paced, funny, and uncompromising look at an American culture of celebrity and violence run amok.

Dredd himself is a no-nonsense futuristic lawman, literally empowered to be judge, jury, and executioner. Armed with this Lawgiver pistol and super-macho Lawmaster motorcycle — as well as an infallible and encyclopedic knowledge of Mega-City One’s bizarre laws and regulations — Judge Dredd, as he is fond of reminding us, is the law. A paragon even to the lesser Judges of Mega-City One, Dredd strikes terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere.

I bought this thirty-five issue Eagle Comics reprint run as it came out in the 1980s, and went into them with no knowledge of Dredd and zero expectations about his stories. I loved the world that revealed itself in each issue — the familiar surprises; the stupid, celebrity-obsessed society unearthed layer by layer through stray dialogue or a road sign in the background; and of course the weird and twisted citizens of Mega-City One, fighting off their ennui with extreme cosmetic surgery or propping up their bloated guts with belly wheels. It was a sarcastic, vitriolic take on America by acid-tongued Brits, refreshing and insightful and fun. Judge Dredd seemed something new while simultaneously harkening back to Golden Age crime comics or EC Horror stories — with it’s past-tense captions, thought balloons, and expository dialogue — or (especially) EC’s original run of Mad, with its dense visual humor and a sight gag lurking on every page.

Having no background in the series, I didn’t mind that Eagle’s reprints jumped around in Dredd’s timeline, cherry picking the best stories for American audiences. The timeline all scrambled up — for example, Dredd’s robot servant, Walter, is introduced in issue #2’s “Let The Land Race Begin,” while that character’s earlier origin would not come to our shores for a year, when “The Robot Wars” was reprinted in Eagle’s Judge Dredd: The Early Cases #2. But so what, really? After a misspent life obsessing over comic books, I’ve come to regard continuity as over-rated, and at times a deadly impediment to creativity and the joy a fresh take can bring to entrenched comics properties. There is a history here if you want to tease it out — and the text features accompanying these Eagle reprints do a nice job of filling in the blanks — but for the most part I was happy to go along for the ride with a series that had so much to show me that I would have been frustrated by a sequential storytelling in any case.

Further supporting the “greatest hits” approach of Eagle’s Judge Dredd was another aspect of lost comics craft — the single-issue story. Originally published in Britain’s 2000 A.D. weekly, Judge Dredd had plenty of on one-and-done tales, and these early Eagle issues often feature two or three unconnected stories. Dredd would have its longer runs — and epic, continuing storylines like The Apocalypse War and the Cursed Earth are high points in the series — but the backbone of the book are these shorter stories, made stronger for concentrating on the weird science-fiction concepts of the society of Mega-City One, and only indirectly illuminating our hero, who reveals his core tenants by doing things like threatening a suicidal jumper with arrest for littering the sidewalk, or ticketing a citizen for driving too slow.

For me these comics are inextricably interwoven with the 1980s, and the movies roughly from that era — I think of Judge Dredd and pictures like Robocop, Terminator, The Road Warrior, and The Hidden all-in-one, and as the red shift of memory sets in I’ve expanded that frame to include earlier pictures like Logan’s Run and Death Race 2000, too. Of course Dredd got his own movies, starting with the Slyvester Stallone film of 1995, a profoundly disappointing misfire that nailed the look of the comics, then perversely wasted it all on a story that concentrated on less interesting aspects of the franchise, and almost entirely excised a vital aspect of Judge Dredd: the biting sense of black humor, replaced by Stallone’s action-star muggings and Rob Schneider schtick that still sets my teeth on edge.

(Strangely, Stallone was closer to getting it right in 1993’s Demolition Man, a largely-forgotten future cop science fiction movie that works better for Dredd than did Judge Dredd — at least it got some of the humor and tone, with a politically-incorrect cop from the past running riot through a hermetically uptight society of the future, and an appropriately psychopathic villain in Wesley Snipes who could have walked right out of Mega-City One ... I confess I remember it only because I was on the design team that did the video game adaptation!)

It is that sense of humor that best distinguishes Judge Dredd, and is just so darn hard to get right, in film or in comics. Dredd himself is not funny — he’s the ultimate straight man — but his unrelenting grim and serious approach is itself funny, such as the matter-of-fact way that he tells telepathic Judge Anderson he is without guilt in “The Coming of Judge Death” …

… or how he can without a trace of irony shoot a man through the head, then place him in suspended animation until his wounds can by cured by future medical science and the “perp” revived to serve his sentence in “The Forever Crimes.”

Throughout the series the citizens are bizarre, the culture is fractured, and the bloodshed is extreme (though rarely gory). When criminals attack the Moon’s Luna-1 with Tranq Gas in “The Oxygen Board,” 53,000 citizens are killed, but both we and the judges shrug it off, and the story is more memorable for it’s conclusion — when the bad guys are suffocated by an indifferent lunar oxygen utility for failing to pay their bill — than for its body count.

This casual indifference to life and the ever-present menace of mayhem is key to Judge Dredd’s world — all that matters is being right. Winning the day, or correcting a social dysfunction is of no consequence to Judge Dredd. He seems physically bulletproof in the books, but he’s just as emotionally and intellectually invulnerable, harboring no illusions about the nature of the society he polices. Dredd sticks to the playbook, does his job, and upholds the law. He is the law! It is left to the reader, and the occasional viewpoint character, to question the wisdom and morality of that law, and wonder at the virtue of protecting a society so desperate, arbitrary, and dysfunctional as the one we witness in these stories.

In the meantime, Judge Dredd sleeps like a baby, probably with his helmet on.

(All of the above captured nicely in the definitely-deserves-to-be-seen Dredd 3D, with Karl Urban donning the helmet, and keeping it on throughout the film, as true Judge Dredd must!)

But regardless of his success or failure on film (ok, he's mostly been a failure), I hope you will book time to patrol those future streets with Judge Dredd in this superior comics series, which can be purchased in any number of formats, including the remarkably inexpensive back issues I’ve reviewed here. The second half of this Eagle run dips a bit in quality, but even second-rate Judge Dredd is worth reading. If this will be your first encounter with The Angel Gang, Satanus, Ugly Clinics, and Sob Story, then I envy you the adventures in your future, and if you are returning after decades away from Judge Dredd, then take my word for it that these books are just as good the second time around (and maybe even better).

This article originally appeared at Longbox Graveyard.