Prog 2279 - Past Crimes

[Magnetica]

The Citadel wraps up. It’s a good conclusion, but I can’t say “it changed everything” as was billed. Or indeed anything much as far as ongoing continuity is concerned.

Hope and Fiends carry on, and I think I will need to just do a little refresher on who is who from the last few weeks. Not a major issue though.

There is a Future Shock from the Thought Bubble winners; the art is nice, but I didn’t really find the story that engaging.

Brink is just brilliant, as always.

[Richard]

The art on that future shock was more than nice, it was brilliant.

The Citadel was a perfectly good story, but I don't know what Tharg was thinking with that tagline. It makes a very entertaining and fun story seem like an anti-climax, which is undeserved.

[IndigoPrime]

Thought experiment with The Citadel: if 2000 AD had somehow accidentally left off the creator credits for these weeks, what would you think? Personally, it didn’t click with me at all. Even taking into consideration the unreliable witness angle, it just felt a bit off to me. It wasn’t bad, but it ended up feeling kind of throwaway and certainly nothing approaching a game-changer nor even really an important story in the history of the character.

Even though Surfer over in the Meg kind of goes over old ground, I’m finding that engaging and interesting. The Citadel just… feel flat. Oh well. (On the plus side, I listened to the Wagner interview for the 45th convention and it seems like he has no intention to hang up his quill. So we’ll likely get more Wagner Dredd in the future.)

[Anthony Garnon]

Agreed that the art on the Future Shock being brilliant. Very John Stokes! (And not just because of the subject matter)

[IndigoPrime]

I’ve read the rest now and Fiends is really great but, man, that cliffhanger. Two weeks? THARG! Brink is also ramping up, as I knew it would. Properly slow burn.

Hope is solid. I enjoyed the two previous tales a lot and especially when collected, and I suspect that’ll be the case here. The Future Shock worked well enough for me and looked superb.

So from me this week, it’s: Fiends > Brink > Hope | Future Shock > Dredd. Nothing bad and at least two I’d buy in collected form.

[broodblik]

Cover by Dan Cornwell:

[broodblik]

Cover and Logo:

[Tjm86]

Thought experiment with The Citadel: if 2000 AD had somehow accidentally left off the creator credits for these weeks, what would you think? Personally, it didn’t click with me at all. Even taking into consideration the unreliable witness angle, it just felt a bit off to me. It wasn’t bad, but it ended up feeling kind of throwaway and certainly nothing approaching a game-changer nor even really an important story in the history of the character.

I'm not so sure, even without reading the final instalment (sorry, out in the sticks here we have to wait for the post to catch up ...).  I'm going to go back to what I'm asking over on the Citadel thread: how are we defining 'game changer'.

I do agree on the question of how the story would have been approached if Wagner's name were not associated.  Then again, this is the point that I am driving towards over there - what does the auth(ority) mean for how we view the story.

[Richard]

Have I just imagined this, or did episode 1 have a terrorist attack on the iso-block? What happened to that?!

[Magnetica]

I'm going to go back to what I'm asking over on the Citadel thread: how are we defining 'game changer'.

I’d say:

Something that fundamentally changes our view of Dredd


Or

A revelation of some awful truth Dredd or the Judges have been hiding for the last 40 years

Or

“Our” Dredd isn’t actually our Dredd.

I think there were hints that The Citadel would reveal something like one of those, but it didn’t.

[Colin YNWA]

Read Dredd quicky after lunch when the Prog landed and before a meeting and since that meeting has ended early I'll comment...

... except I'm not 100% sure there's much to comment on. Having now read the final part I think I need to go back and read it all. We have a few bits confirmed that we (I) strongly suspected that means 'The Citadel', in and of itself, is a dangerous thing to read too much into.

I think rather than change anything this has set up questions and scenarios, introduced characters that over time change things. Its not as if Wagner goes for the quick snap of the fingers to developing Dredd and his world. Personally I see this more as 'Letter from a Democrat' potentially starting something that could have profound ramifications. Let's see how it develops...

...Or not. The hype might have just been that, hype, nothing more, nothing less. A hook to draw folks in and we might well be done and dusted here?

Will also be fun to read this free of that hype, which in some ways has dragged it down as we've been expecting something this really doesn't seem to be and its probably a better story once freed of that expectation.

[IndigoPrime]

From the Wagner interview, it seemed more like this was just an idea he thought up and liked, rather than the trigger for an overarching multi-year shake-up of Dredd’s world.

[Colin YNWA]

From the Wagner interview, it seemed more like this was just an idea he thought up and liked, rather than the trigger for an overarching multi-year shake-up of Dredd’s world.

Yeah I tend to agree now, that's why I choose 'Letter from a Democrat' as I'm not sure that was ever written to become what it became (someone will show me an interview now were JW states he had a 3 year planned mapped out when he wrote it, won't they!) but there's things here that I feel could perculate. I think we could well (though might not) see Chopra again.

It was also a much more open ending when I'd not noticed the tracer hanging from the badge which I didn't at first, wrote a paragraph about that, but thought since I'd read it quickly I'd better check and then spotted it!

[Richard]

I didn't spot it either!

[IndigoPrime]

I noticed that. My take is that the strip is in part Wagner having fun – as he said in his interview – by writing a hard-arse war-time Dredd, vs the more nuanced modern take, with Dredd perhaps made ‘worse’ due to the recall of an unreliable narrator who hates him. The shock value was supposed to be Dredd being a murderer. But in the end, his gut instinct was right and, as Chopra noted, he caused the clone’s death rather than killing him outright. In a broader sense, it doesn’t feel like the story will have any long-term impact.