Dredd Reckoning blog by Douglas Wolk

[sauchieboy]

This week: Muzak Killer, Raider, Teddy Choppermitz; by Garth Ennis, Dermot Power and John Burns- from Progs 746-748, 760, 810-814 and 837-839.

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/muzak-killer.html

Douglas Wolk starts this week's blog with an interesting observation concerning the attitude of Dredd's new US publisher to reprint material, before surveying Garth Ennis's determination to turn the weekly Dredd strip into a review of the popular culture of the early Nineties.

Wolk also provides a useful overview of the music world's attempts to honour Old Stoneyface: I had no idea there were two songs bearing the name I Am The Law, and I'd never bothered to find anything recorded by Judge Dread until Wolk gave me a link to click. Remember Megacity Four? So do I, but Megacities Two and Three were news to me. The campaign for Prince Buster and Spizz Energy to feature on the Dredd (2012) OST starts here.

[douglaswolk]

This week: special guest Anne Ishii has some very entertaining things to say about Shimura!

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/shimura.html

[douglaswolk]

This week: Lori Matsumoto and I take on The Taxidermist! Discussed: Jacob Sardini as John Bull, Body Worlds imitating art, and the single best joke to come out of the Wagner/Grant era. Phrase of the week: "flensed sugarplums."

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/taxidermist.html

[TordelBack]

Great stuff as always, Douglas.  The racist angle in old Wagner (& Grant) is always a niggle for me, particularly in the comedy strips, but in addition to the fact that in Dredd's world EVERY race gets reduced to its most unflattering and heightened stereotype I also use my (white male) rationale that it's humour deriving from re-using established tropes in British comics: for example, the 'Aieeee!' Gurkha is straight out of a hundred issues of Victor and Warlord. 

I do know what you mean when you say 'would it be any less funny if...'. but if everywhere we visited in the Dreddverse was populated by fully rounded human beings rendered with close reference to the physical and cultural reality of their 20th/21st C counterparts, well, it wouldn't be Judge Dredd plus we'd need Joe Sacco to write and draw it all.  And folk'd still complain that he favoured one faction over another.

[radiator]

Hmmm, I'm going to agree with Tordel here - in this regard I liken Dredd to The Simpsons - you could easily be offended by a lot of the crude racial or cultural stereotypes present in The Simpsons, but Springfield (much like Mega-City One) is a far crueler takedown of white America than anything else. It's only fair that all nationalities are viewed through the same distorted lens. It's all about context and intent. That's not to say that - by today's standards - there aren't some slightly cringe-worthy moments in Dredd (again, as in certain Simpsons episodes) but nothing with any real malice behind it. Just imho of course.

I'd say the only thing Wagner has written - or co-written - that makes me uncomfortable is the Robo-Hunter strip with all the indistinguishable, camera-wielding, buck-toothed Japanese tourists. That's hard to defend.

[Frank]

Now we've got all that contentious racial stereotyping business out of the way (i), Douglas Wolk's excellent Dredd Reckoning blog moves on to cover Wagner's welcome return to the weekly strip in the still-contested epic Wilderlands.

LINK

He makes some interesting points ("Having easy access to a range of computer hues also meant that Ezquerra all but abandoned the single-color-dominated images that had been such a striking part of his work in the early '90s") and asks some pertinent questions (where did that missing story sequence go?), answers for which our own recent discussion on the topic singularly failed to produce.

Somebody must know the answer.

Perhaps Wolk's best point concerns the format of the story, and the tension this produces between telling a story that's easy to follow (between prog & Meg) and something that's packed with enough action, incident and character to fulfil its epic aspirations. Wolk's concise summary of Dredd's role in the story is particularly telling; he's more or less a bystander as events unfold.
 

(i) Not quite, he still manages a roll of the eyes at the title of Darkie's Mob. Nobody tell him the name of the dog in Dambusters.

[JOE SOAP]

(where did that missing story sequence go?), answers for which our own recent discussion on the topic singularly failed to produce.

Somebody must know the answer.

There's no missing sequence, Dredd was not being attacked, it's just an ellipse between the different weeks and change of artist.

In Prog 911 Dredd has entered the forest after hearing Telfer's Lawgiver go-off.

On the final page, you can see the black metal foot of the Mechanismo as it breaks the twigs on the forest floor coming behind O'Hare, O'Hare hears it, and Dredd (obscured behind trees in the frame) calls out to her. 

In the final frame: O'Hare sees Dredd (out of frame) coming towards her with his pointed Lawgiver, she says: "Dredd--?". O'Hare is alarmed at Dredd's advancement, ready to fire in her direction...

Prog 912 picks up with Dredd's fired round hitting the Mechanismo behind O'Hare. O'Hare is then in the next frame with Dredd.

[Eric Plumrose]

Let's just be honest here . . . nothing's as irritating as being confused as a "fellow" Asian from the other side of the continent.

Anne's annoyance at being confused for someone from Uzbekistan, while understandable, does remind me of something I've been meaning to ask for an absolute age. How do North Americans and Australasians refer to people from, say, South Asia or any of the other UN-designated regions?

[douglaswolk]

On the final page, you can see the black metal foot of the Mechanismo as it breaks the twigs on the forest floor coming behind O'Hare, O'Hare hears it, and Dredd (obscured behind trees in the frame) calls out to her. 

In the final frame: O'Hare sees Dredd (out of frame) coming towards her with his pointed Lawgiver, she says: "Dredd--?". O'Hare is alarmed at Dredd's advancement, ready to fire in her direction...

Hmm. I can't quite get behind that explanation, for two reasons:

1) O'Hare hears Dredd yelling "Hey, O'Hare!"--but Dredd's not actually saying that. It's the Mechanismo imitating Dredd's voice, as we see in Prog 913, after Dredd rips out its voicebox and (presumably, somehow) makes it play back the robot's last words ("Hey, O'Hare!... Who do you think it is--the unknown citizen? I'm stuck in one of those damned plants! I need you!" etc.)

2) There's still the problem with the Tefler/Moynihan timeline. As printed:

*Conehead attacks Mercy.
*Tefler hears Mercy yelling for help, goes into the forest, is surprise-attacked by Beasty with a big rock, fires his gun, and hits a rock.
*Dredd hears the gunshot; so does O'Hare.
*O'Hare hears the Mechanismo breaking a twig, asks who's there, and hears the voice she thinks is Dredd's.
*Dredd fires three hi-ex shots at the robot.
*(The unharmed) Tefler and Moynihan, standing on a rock outside the forest, hear the shots and comment on them.
*Beasty and Conehead ambush Tefler and Moynihan...

[JOE SOAP]

On the final page, you can see the black metal foot of the Mechanismo as it breaks the twigs on the forest floor coming behind O'Hare, O'Hare hears it, and Dredd (obscured behind trees in the frame) calls out to her. 

In the final frame: O'Hare sees Dredd (out of frame) coming towards her with his pointed Lawgiver, she says: "Dredd--?". O'Hare is alarmed at Dredd's advancement, ready to fire in her direction...

Hmm. I can't quite get behind that explanation, for two reasons:

1) O'Hare hears Dredd yelling "Hey, O'Hare!"--but Dredd's not actually saying that. It's the Mechanismo imitating Dredd's voice, as we see in Prog 913, after Dredd rips out its voicebox and (presumably, somehow) makes it play back the robot's last words ("Hey, O'Hare!... Who do you think it is--the unknown citizen? I'm stuck in one of those damned plants! I need you!" etc.)

That still wouldn't be too much of a problem continuity-wise with Dredd's takedown of the Mechanismo but yes, the depiction of the Tefler/Moynihan scenes are problematic, to say the least, not that there's something missing but that there's been an mis-direction in the story.

[Pioneer]

So what was "Mechanismo's dark secret" he refers to a couple of times?

[radiator]

What was also not mentioned in the review - the sudden appearance of the Mechanismo droid on the cover of the prog featuring the episode with the reveal, spoiling the - admittedly fairly obvious - twist.

[JOE SOAP]

You mean this:


(Mind you, the robot appeared on the cover of #911, although not in the story inside...)

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/wilderlands.html

[Frank]

So what was "Mechanismo's dark secret" he refers to a couple of times?

I think, rather than the revelation that Greel was using the mechanised units to stage a coup d'état, Wolk was referring to what I always thought the storyline was building to: some kind of rationalisation of why trial by machine was any less desirable than men who are trained to act like machines.

Other than an overheating processor and the fact that they could be programmed to serve an individual's own agenda, the strip(s) never go much beyond providing Dredd's instinctual hatred of the units as a reason why they are a very bad idea. Human judges go haywire and they were made to serve Cal, The Mutant and The Dark Judges, so it seemed to make no odds to me.

They seem to be serving a useful purpose in the present emergency.

[Frank]

This week: Death Lives (US collection of stories featuring Death, including Dead Reckoning, The True Story, and The Three Amigos- as well as the obvious material)

"The most eyebrow-raising revelation in this recent John Wagner interview is that Wagner hadn't intended to use the Dark Judges in "Day of Chaos"--which means that "Day of Chaos" isn't the "Dark Judges return" story, which means I have even less of an idea of where it's headed, which is awesome. The takeaway other people seem to have gotten from the interview is "all four are going to be reunited"; I don't know if "if I can find a way to make it work..." quite counts as that. But it does mean that Wagner's mulling over post-"Day of Chaos" stories--that's excellent news!"

The way the thanatological threesome were used in recent progs only really makes sense as Wagner teeing up another, longer story in my opinion. Who knows whether Wagner's considering another Dark Judges story as part of his farewell to the weekly strip, or as a series of stand alone- guaranteed bestselling- graphic novels to fund his holidays in retirement?

Greg Staples gets the thumbs up for his art on Reckoning and for the mooted reunion story; Wolk and his anagramatic co-blogger make some good points concerning the merits of the narrative compression 2000ad's format necessitates (and compliment Al Ewing in the same manner as Wagner, Mills and Smith); and an interesting theory is put forward as to why 90's Dredd art didn't always live up to the standards set by Bolland's first stories.