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Dredd's real-time ageing?

Started by JayzusB.Christ, 10 April, 2021, 03:59:53 PM

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TordelBack

#15
Maybe Dredd died in that stadium, and everything since is a final hallucination as he succumbs to the madness of the disease. Or maybe one day he'll wake up and DeMarco will walk out of the sonic shower and they'll adopt Beeny and all live happily ever as marshals in a Cursed Earth Camp.

Like it or not, Dredd is the golden goose that keeps 2000AD in shiny eggs. Any attempt to kill or replace him with a successor will just result in an accelerated version of the Strontium Dog experience. The promise of real change that made Wagner's hints into such a compelling ongoing story is gone, just as with any corporate superhero property.

Enjoy what we get by all means, but do not dare to hope for an ending.

Richard

Necropolis started out as Wagner's pitch to actually kill off Dredd for real, and even back then, around 1989, the company wouldn't let him do it, because Dredd was already too successful. So that story went as close to killing Dredd as possible and then drew back from it.

After Rico II appeared, someone asked Wagner if he would ever kill Dredd off and replace him with Rico, who would then take Dredd's name, and Wagner not only said never but added that he thought it was a poor idea for a story. (Personally I don't see anything wrong with it, but I have to concede that Wagner would know better than me.)

So we'll always have the original Dredd, and that's fine, but he's 80 now, and stories like Carousel can only buy more time; they can't be a permanent answer. At some point it will need to be addressed. One possible solution is the bio-chip thing we saw in The Judge Child, which is so early in the strip's history that no one could accuse Wagner (or another writer, but preferably Wagner) of making up some deus ex machina at the last minute; it was there all along. But maybe there's a better way. I'm sure that when Dredd is 90, even "its okay, we have rejuvenation surgery in the future" will feel a bit thin. It's already stretching credulity now to be honest.

The Legendary Shark


They could always injure him so badly that he has to be put on ice until he can be healed. But would Justice Dept admit it or organise a stand-in for the duration?

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JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 11 April, 2021, 07:25:30 AM

They could always injure him so badly that he has to be put on ice until he can be healed. But would Justice Dept admit it or organise a stand-in for the duration?

I kind of like that idea.  He can be rejuved a bit then when he's fixed up.  As long as Red Razors isn't involved.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Leigh S

The weird thing is there are SO many technologies established to eep Dredd going it isnt funny

Bio-chips already mentioned

Stookie is illegal, but we did have that Daily Star tory where they were able to manufacture the same effect from Rad Roaches!

Brain transplants for Judges, as shown in Tomb of the Judges....

So giving him a second wind wouldnt be the worst offence, if the alternative is to have him run on foreever - I;d buy that Wagner "death fo Dredd" story off him on the understandning it would be retooled as the "death" of his original body... get some good publicity for the prog, though admittedly a good jumping off point for some.

The Legendary Shark


I seem to recall that the "death" of Superman made the News at Ten.

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Jim_Campbell

I like the idea of giving Dredd himself the top job — Chief Judge. That gives you a similar dynamic the ST: TNG, where the Kirk role is essentially split in two, with Picard doing all the executive stuff and Riker doing all the action stuff, only with Joe and Rico in those roles. It would also be an interesting change for the strip, since politics has always been Joe's one real achilles heel.

(It wouldn't be difficult, somewhere down the line, to imagine a city-threatening storyline where extreme circumstances force Dredd to reconsider and get back onto the streets, necessitating some more drastic and permanent rejuvenation solution, essentially resetting the status quo to where it was thirty years ago.)
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TordelBack

#22
Those are the best suggestions yet, but I don't think Dredd's body is really the whole issue.

Wagner killed the whole city, the entire production line of judges, and the rationale for their existence in DoC, and it didn't so much as nudge the status quo. The only thing that has changed since is the roll-out of Mechanismo,  and that was originally a response to losses during Necropolis, 30 years ago.

After plausible moments of real change for Joe and the City (Apocalypse War, Dead Man/Kraken, Origins, Tour of Duty, especially Day of Chaos) we're left with a feeling of stasis for both the main character and his world. Do we believe Dredd and Beeny are actually going to reform/abolish Justice Dept?  That Joe will really-mean-it-this-time quit and/or be permanently replaced? That something worse than Necropolis or Chaos will fell the city?

I certainly don't. That doesn't mean that the stories can't be enjoyable, but the status quo now seems as invulnerable as the old geezer himself. It was almost certainly pure naivety, but as a reader I really believed change/mortality was possible during those points cited above. Now, I no more believe it than I'd believe it that Wolverine or Superman was really dead this time.

That's why I applaud Niemand's and Carroll's citizen-centric stories. It's at that level that high-stakes adventures can still be had.

Richard

It's more about keeping the status quo going but doing it plausibly, rather than permanently changing something. At the moment the status quo is becoming more implausible with each passing year.

TordelBack

Quote from: Richard on 11 April, 2021, 03:30:07 PM
It's more about keeping the status quo going but doing it plausibly, rather than permanently changing something. At the moment the status quo is becoming more implausible with each passing year.

Well put.

Funt Solo

The modern era of Judge Dredd (the strip, not the character) serves to allow a hydra of creators to work at the coal face (or to enjoy slices of wholesome future cop pie). It would be difficult to rock that boat in a consistent way, and so you need a status quo to reset to after each adventure, unless there is a strong editorial or (combined) creative push to move the fundamentals.

So, after Trifecta, it's business as normal, with a giant city dropped into the ocean for that particular Dredd author to go adventuring in later if they feel like it. But it doesn't push all the other authors to mess with it - and, in fact, they probably want to stay hands off each others' particular toys. Heston belongs to Art. Pin to Williams. Chimpsky to Rennie Niemand. And all of it, to some extent, still belongs to Wagner.

There's a multi-dimensional feel to Dredd over the past decade, with so many authors creating secret, long-running Justice Department cabals, and so many Dredd clones knocking about, that I've lost track of how many of each there are or have been. Rob's Dredd doesn't sound anything like Wagner's, for example - so it's easy to just imagine them as entirely different dimensions.

The Hydra, in the form of a diagram:

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

paddykafka

Revealed! Judge Dredd's Justice Department Sanctioned Anti-Wrinkle Cream! Smooth's out all those bumps and crannies!

https://www.facebook.com/vintagethrillers.org/photos/a.2135382163357216/3175141879381234/



TordelBack

Quote from: Funt Solo on 11 April, 2021, 04:38:30 PM
The Hydra, in the form of a diagram:

So lovely.

What I find interesting is that the final deployment of Mechanismo (by Wagner) has been enthusiastically adopted by all (?) the current writers, so global (if minor) changes are at least still possible. But this might emphasise the point that such innovations may have to come from outside the pool to be universal.

Woolly

Quote from: TordelBack on 11 April, 2021, 07:52:51 PM
What I find interesting is that the final deployment of Mechanismo (by Wagner) has been enthusiastically adopted by all (?) the current writers, so global (if minor) changes are at least still possible. But this might emphasise the point that such innovations may have to come from outside the pool to be universal.

I like to think that editorial learned a lesson from Chaos Day, and decided to give other writers time to take it all onboard and work forward from it before initial publication.

Hopefully the next instalment of TPO will cover this... ;)

JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 11 April, 2021, 02:54:52 PM
I like the idea of giving Dredd himself the top job — Chief Judge. That gives you a similar dynamic the ST: TNG, where the Kirk role is essentially split in two, with Picard doing all the executive stuff and Riker doing all the action stuff, only with Joe and Rico in those roles. It would also be an interesting change for the strip, since politics has always been Joe's one real achilles heel.

(It wouldn't be difficult, somewhere down the line, to imagine a city-threatening storyline where extreme circumstances force Dredd to reconsider and get back onto the streets, necessitating some more drastic and permanent rejuvenation solution, essentially resetting the status quo to where it was thirty years ago.)

That would definitely work for me.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"