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What Defines a Dredd Epic?

Started by Funt Solo, 06 March, 2021, 04:37:41 PM

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Funt Solo

Is it number of episodes? Most people want to include Robot Wars (8), so then you also have to let in Destiny's Angels, which feels less epic.

Robot Wars is 41pp long (actually, it's forty and one half), so perhaps we should go by page count - and Destiny's Angels trumps that at 66pp. Cry of the Werewolf is 48pp and The Graveyard Shift crosses the line at 45pp. We can add in Dredd Angel, Death Aid, then, when the Meg starts up, the page count is often higher per episode, so in comes Midnite's Children (48pp over 5 parts) and America.

Or, does an epic need an epic narrative? A city-wide effect of some kind? Or Dredd teaming up to solve the case?

What makes an epic?
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Batman's Superior Cousin

In my opinion, it's either a really long Dredd story or a series of stories that connect to each other, that impacts upon either Mega-City One (Politically or more than like, threatens the City and its inhabitants on a physically destructive level) and/or Judge Dredd (Mentally, emotionally or spiritually) that would likely have far reaching repercussions in future storyline(s) that other writers would likely expand upon in their own stories about Dredd and/or the City.
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broodblik

#2
Number of episodes do count and as Batman said stories that has a connection with each other. A good example of the connected stories where the Every empire Falls storyline by Mike Carroll. Number of episodes is more difficult because I still feel stories like Destiny's Angel and Cry of the Werewolf can be included in the epic range.  Anything touching 7 episodes or more gets my count in the epic range. Chaos Day and Tour of Duty like stories is for mega-epics, anything above 12 episodes is your megas.

The above I am saying in the context of the weekly manor of the stories. The stories are always written to contain as much as possible in its 6 pages. I have read a DC maxi-series which the prog would have done in 2-3 weekly episodes.
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Colin YNWA

Its funny in my head there's a clear defined list - though for the life of me I can't begin to think what that comes from - maybe its when something was announced as a Mega-Epic in the Nerve Centre. Up to a point it was the stories collected in seperate named volmes by Titan - with The Robot Wars as the accepted (???) precursor so as I've said elsewhere in my head cannon its

QuoteNow I know the actual list of Dredd Epics is just; Robot Wars; The Cursed Earth; The Day the Law Died; Judge Child; Apocalypse War; City of the Damned; Oz; Necropolis; Judgement Day; Purgatory / Inferno; Wilderlands; The Pit; Doomsday; Origins, Tour of Duty and Day of Chaos. The rest are just long Dredd stories.

But there's no rythm and reason for that so the simple anwser is it doesn't matter and we work with what we decide for ourselves I guess. It was stories over 20 part (and The Robot War as the first long form and City of the Damned which was planned to be more than 20 parts, which we all know.... errrr... cos.).

I really admire AlexF (and Broodblik lest we forget) for just placing a proper definition on it and sticking with that... except The Robot Wars, we all makes exception for The Robot Wars!

The Legendary Shark


I don't think length matters (ahem) that much. For evidence I present - The Return of Rico.

Epic in every sense, I think, especially consequentially.

I mean, there have been superduper hyperparted mega epics I struggle to remember at all but TRoR? That one with Morphy? Can't forget those.

Perhaps epic should just mean the cream - especially in such a long, continuous narrative. Or maybe any story, no matter the length, that is a significant* part of the overall narrative is epic.

*wiggle room :)

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JayzusB.Christ

Weird; never really thought about it before.  The dictionary definition*, as a noun at least, seems to insist on length.  Never really thought of, say, Mandroid as a Dredd epic, great as it was; not sure why though - maybe the lack of huge and consequential events.


*As in, I just typed 'epic definition' into Google.
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BPP

1 - it has to be in the prog. Dredd in the Meg can be very decompressed so that would affect page count as a metric

2 - it has to be a concrete event - big or small - not an on-going narrative feature. An epic COULD be the conclusion to an on-going narrative thread but it should be distinctly so rather than just 'here's where that story ends'

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Magnetica

This is the definition I've always had in my mind. The current tourney may well provoke a re-evaluation of this, but for what it's worth, this is now I've always viewed it.

I've always based it on length: to be counted it had to have at least 18 episodes. And they need to be consecutive* not split into "books".

Subject matter doesn't come into it. It doesn't have to be Mega City in peril. It could be Dredd going to the laundry, losing his small and looking for them for 18 weeks.

* short interludes, typically to allow the artist more time are allowed.

The Corinthian

I can remember a time when the list of Dredd epics basically comprised:

The Cursed Earth
The Day the Law Died!
The Judge Child
The Apocalypse War
City of the Damned
Oz
Necropolis

But two things happened to undermine that definition. First, the Megazine came along on a monthly basis, so the idea of an epic as something that ran for months was less workable (no one really thought of Raptaur as an epic when it first ran). Second, epics stopped being one off stories and more a set of related stories unfolding over time. Necropolis - with six months of build up before it actually started - pointed the way towards this. But the Mechanismo saga running over multiple storylines in both 2000AD and the Megazine over two years was a new way of doing things and made epic-aping stories like Judgement Day and Inferno look a bit quaint.

Tjm86

Quote from: The Corinthian on 07 March, 2021, 09:45:59 AM
epics stopped being one off stories and more a set of related stories unfolding over time.

Sorry, have you actually read the Cursed Earth Saga or the Judge child Quest? 


The Mind of Wolfie Smith

yeah, except for the apocalypse war - and mirroring sci fi tv shows of the time - early 'epics' were thoroughly enjoyable as isolated chapters but often curiously unsatisfying when read as a whole, being for the most part collections of 26 short stories linked by a simple thematic undercurrent (eg find a missing boy, cross a stretch of irradiated land).
then, this century, wagner started crafting genuine epics, again mirroring tv tastes, as a huge cast of protagonists played out any number of superior soap approaches, plots and subplots layered and developed over years, complex characters coming and going and CHANGING, epic storylines properly bleeding into each other, actual sophisticated development.
as wagner gradually stepped back, and a slew of new writers came in and developed their own epics and shorter stories, things have become a little frustrating again - the strip often reads as a series of spin off shows, seemingly (but not actually) outside official wagner continuity, each writer's stories and arcs apparently having little to do with every other writer's take. the inevitable consequence of this is a loss of that development, consequence and consistency. The answer would probably be to have an annual writers' room summit of the dredd writers (marvel and dc style) to loosely plot out a year's storylines.

abelardsnazz

Quote from: The Mind of Wolfie Smith on 07 March, 2021, 10:48:27 AM
as wagner gradually stepped back, and a slew of new writers came in and developed their own epics and shorter stories, things have become a little frustrating again - the strip often reads as a series of spin off shows, seemingly (but not actually) outside official wagner continuity, each writer's stories and arcs apparently having little to do with every other writer's take. the inevitable consequence of this is a loss of that development, consequence and consistency. The answer would probably be to have an annual writers' room summit of the dredd writers (marvel and dc style) to loosely plot out a year's storylines.

I agree with this - writers such as Michael Carroll and Rob Williams have had some great ideas in their long-form Dredds, but the consequences of these seem to be lost until these writers come back to the strip.

Another question - could a long-term character's storyline such as PJ Maybe be said to be an epic - I know PJ appeared in Tour of Duty and Day of Chaos, but could all his shorter stories over the years be said to be an epic in their own right?

broodblik

Talking about PJ I would love a complete collection of his misadventures.
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 Corinthian

Quote from: Tjm86 on 07 March, 2021, 10:19:44 AM
Quote from: The Corinthian on 07 March, 2021, 09:45:59 AM
epics stopped being one off stories and more a set of related stories unfolding over time.

Sorry, have you actually read the Cursed Earth Saga or the Judge child Quest?
You've misundertood me. These are both one-off stories in the sense that the narrative starts on page 1 of part 1. There are no foreshadowing stories about the plague in Mega-City Two before Prog 61. There weren't any stories about Judge Feyy or PSI Division's prophecies running through 1979's Progs - we didn't even know there was a PSI Division until 6 weeks earlier.

Now compare to Wilderlands which is obviously pitched as a full on epic but is also the culmination of a storyline that appeared in four separate stories in both 2000AD and the Megazine over two years, and was preceded by a set-up storyline in the Megazine to get us to exactly the point where Wilderlands proper starts.