Dead Man vs Tour of Duty - Dredd Epics Ranked - Better! Quarter Final 2

[I, Cosh]

Tour of Duty.

[sheridan]

I consider Tour of Duty to be a number of different stories bundled together in to an epic sequence.  By the same reasoning (as others have pointed out) The Dead Man is merely one of three prologues to Necropolis (the others being the Letter story and Countdown).

So despite thinking The Dead Man is a more striking story on its own I'm voting for Tour of Duty.

[Colin YNWA]

VOTING CLOSED

Well this was more clear cut than I thought. In part because The Dead Man, absolutely brilliant story that it definately is for many just isn't Epic enough, for some isn't even Dredd. Of course the main reason is

Tour of Duty

Is chuffin' awesome and my favourite of them all - so I might forgive you The Cursed Earth's brutal treatment makes it to the Semi-Finals and The Dead Man enters the vote for 12-5th place. See you tomorrow to find out whether Necropolis joins it...

[WhizzBang]

I think The Cursed Earth may be suffering from the anti-Pat Mills sentiments that are often expressed on this board.

[BPP]

Nah, Pat has many cheerleaders here including myself - the cursed Earth and judge child quest have both been subjected to the same non-Pat critique - they're very episodic rather than one developing story like TAW or necropolis. Mike Carroll's soviets stories got even shorter shrift for the very same issue. People love lots about TCE - from the art to the characters to their own nostalgia - but the structure hasn't aged as well as the big cataclysmic tales.

[Funt Solo]

Also: little bit of credit. It's entirely possible to love Pat's work on established classics (like Nemesis), to still bathe in the glorious waters of treats like The Black Hole, entirely appreciate his work as one of the founding creative forces of the comic and yet still balk at some of his more modern polemicising, or retreading, or aggressive online nature, or obvious hypocrisy around the sharing of ideas.

We can be anti-bits-of-Mills and pro-bits-of-Mills at the same time. Because people are complicated.

[broodblik]

The biggest problem for me with Cursed Earth as I mentioned before it is very fragmented stories. Great art but the story just felt like a lot of small stories weaved together.

[Colin YNWA]

The biggest problem for me with Cursed Earth as I mentioned before it is very fragmented stories. Great art but the story just felt like a lot of small stories weaved together.

See that's its great strength for me, or one of them. Its is a relatively loosely bound series of adventures which give it its scale. Its an exploration of a world we've not seen yet in the strip and the flights into different aspects of it. The fact that its episode mean we know we're only seeing bits of it, that there's much more even in this journey and for many more to come. It leaves gaps for future exploration. That each story is relatively brief is what gives the challenge of the Cursed Earth its scale and wonder. The episodic nature gives the over-arching narrative its sense of pace and desperation. Its other strengths

1. It casts Dredd as hero - which makes sense as he's 'freed' of the system that makes him the evil bastard he is, even while that System defines a lot of what he does here.

2. Is bound in nostaglia - not in the bad sense in they way we are meant to be careful of, whallowing in the past, rather in the positive sense of helping you understand what shapes how you view whats good in the world and that which entertains you. Nostalgia in the way it fires up the energy, imagination and passion we have as kids that the world chips away at as we get older. So for me yeah its a very personal thing. It hit me at the perfect time in a way Judge Child only seemed to try to replicate.

3. Dinosaurs jumping on top of Kill Dozers.