Main Menu

Day of Chaos vs Oz - Dredd Epics Ranked - Better! H2H Rd 8

Started by Colin YNWA, 01 April, 2021, 06:57:07 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Colin YNWA

As Tour of Duty reworks The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died so seed 5 Day of Chaos went on to recreate Apocalypse War... well okay, okay in my mind only then... Oz has two letters in its title and two main strands to it tale... okay okay look I've churned these intros out and I doubt any bugger bothers to read them, all you need to do is look at the title and you know what you do after that... so sometime they get ropey - sue me... ahem...

Seed 5 Day of Chaos Progs 1743-1789

Vs

Seed 12 Oz - Progs 545-570

Back to the simple purity of popping the name of the Epic you prefer in a reply to this thread (remember to mark it clearly so I can spot it - bold tags are good) and then say whatever the heck you like to about these two great stories.

We're also back to 3 day votes so this one will close first thing in the morning Sunday 4th of April - Easter - there is no holiday!!!! Winner advance to the Quarter Finals - loser goes into the 16th - 9th playoff vote.

All links go through to AlexF's simply brilliant Dredd Epics Ranked blog. You may need to scroll to find his write up of a particular story - but I'd suggest just reading the whole thing anyway - it's fantastic stuff.

Baffled by what's going on here - well we have a a thread for that - though that might leave you more confused than anything.

Rules for what they are worth.

Not sure about anything just ask and I'll blag it.

broodblik

Day of Chaos - One thing I always hated about the story was the total destruction and it felt like the heart of the strip was ripped out. It was an awesome story but another of those stories focus on the destruction of everything.
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

The Enigmatic Dr X

Lock up your spoons!

Magnetica


abelardsnazz

#4
Dammit, I knew a choice between these two was coming. I don't mind the variety of art on Oz and the two storylines, both seeding things to come. Chopper was the ultimate free spirit in Dredd's oppressive world, and his surf across the Pacific was joyous. And then there's Wagner tearing down most of what he'd built, the steady climb and then the ultimate crash. Because I think Wagner should have gone with his original instinct and not brought the Dark Judges into DoC, Oz pips it for me.

BPP

I hate you.


Day of chaos is masterful. It's my fave of the origins-chaos-duty epics that were the zenith of Wagner's writing on Dredd. and Flint's final page - wow.

Oz is still fantastic and also masterful in how it pulls off a ton of reversing reader expectations - that chopper is a pawn of justice department, that Dredd's arrest is a fake to lure the judda, that chopper looses. That the art changes is part of 2000ad for me - that way we get Dillon's dolphin, McCarthy's birdmen, Simpson's Uluru explosion. I wouldn't want the story without any of those.

So what swings it is Chopper, this should have been his swansong - the midnight surfer (oh man that cam Kennedy art) and Oz. A one-two fuck you to the authority of the judges. Chopper was pure punk rock - almost the essence of what Pat mills try's to channel - and all done so beautifully by Wagner at the expense of his own most famous creation.

I imagine this is the last time I'll be able to rally to its cause but still, Oz wins the day.



If I'd known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.

http://futureshockd.wordpress.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/FutureShockd

Barrington Boots

You're a dark horse, Boots.

maryanddavid


IndigoPrime

It's not my favourite, but I'm going for Oz, if only because I really dislike the end of Day of Chaos. I get what Wagner was trying to do, but in reducing the Meg's population (which was already, if you totted up the numbers, extremely sparse) into something closer to a modern-day Tokyo, the end result robbed the strip of something that it's never quite got back—unless writers basically ignore Chaos (which quite a few of them do).


JayzusB.Christ

I did like Day of Chaos a lot, but agree with IP - Mega City 1 lost one of its defining characteristics; i.e. the massive overcrowding.

I know this is partly nostalgia, but I was really, really invested in Chopper's journey back when Oz came out.  The wait between episodes was almost unbearable.  Also, sporting event aside, a lot of very important threads were established in Oz, and it was the first time Dredd's ageing had been addressed properly.  Also, it was a sort of halfway point for the comic's maturing, being a full-on action romp that was setting the stage for more adult themes of politics and age - pretty much where I was in life back then.  And the 'Chopper for Oz' slogan was so iconic that it spilled out of the comic and ended up on the Berlin Wall. 

So Oz for me.

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Magnetica

Not sure I buy into the school of thought that Day of Chaos stripped away an essential ingredient of the Dredd strip, making it harder to do certain stories from then on. It was definitely intended to shake things up, but as IP says most writers just ignore it. Indeed the talk on this forum for a couple of years after it, was how little impact it was having on subsequent Dredd stories.

For me, any perceived lack of quality in the strip in recent years is due Wagner, understandably, writing less and less of it; I'm not seeing a fundamental barrrier to any particular type of story.


Bolt-01


Dr Feeley Good

Day of Chaos for me even though I loved the Judda storyline...