Justice, good order, and the rigid application of the law

[JohnW]

Look at this. This is Mega-City jurisprudence evolving almost before our eyes.


Judge Dredd Annual 1986


Prog 1387

In 2107 'walking kinda funny' does not yet constitute a crime. By 2019 'walking funny' earns a minor conviction.

Imagine the arguments being presented to the Council of Five during, say, the Volt administration concerning the precise legal definitions separating 'funny' from 'kinda funny'.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Tea was one that always confused me. There was a very short space of time between a couple being hunted down and cubed for possession, and Rico having a cup in Vienna's flat.

[IndigoPrime]

Keep the citizens on their toes. If they're never sure what's illegal, they're always scared – or at least wary.

[JohnW]

Why, IndigoPrime! Your cynicism quite dismays me!

[Funt Solo]

Tea was one that always confused me. There was a very short space of time between a couple being hunted down and cubed for possession, and Rico having a cup in Vienna's flat.

Synthi-tea?

[JayzusB.Christ]

Tea was one that always confused me. There was a very short space of time between a couple being hunted down and cubed for possession, and Rico having a cup in Vienna's flat.

Synthi-tea?

It doesn't seem to be in that case. It's a habit that Vienna picked up in Brit Cit, the Amsterdam of the 22nd century, and Dolman isn't at all happy with Rico's decision to drink it.  But... 'it's legal in the home', even though we clearly saw people doing cube time for drinking tea in the home a few years beforehand.

Also, the death penalty.  Orlok gets the lethal injection; Sabbat gets life (although it plays out slightly different to a normal life sentence). 

There's also the continuity minefield of Alan Grant's Anderson continuity. Is Christianity still illegal?  Did the Judges wipe out a huge percentage of MC1's children or not?  Did nobody think of riot foam during the subtly-named Rodney Ding riots?

[Funt Solo]

I suppose we could hand-wave away the tea and call it changing laws over time. Some get relaxed, some get strengthened. It's always been odd that there's massive unemployment, but most of the characters we meet are employed in some way. Also, capitalism is rife.

Sabbat is a special case, where his head being impaled on the magic earth-spike means that earth won't die, or something. There's a dangling plot thread that nobody wants to touch with a ten foot pole.

Alan Grant's Anderson continuity. Is Christianity still illegal?  Did the Judges wipe out a huge percentage of MC1's children or not?

In Satan, it seems like all the usual suspects (of faith representation) are there on the West Wall. And Corann and Lesley Ryan (as depicted by Maura McHugh) seem to cement the Pied Piper / stolen children bit. Was that Crusade?

[JayzusB.Christ]

.

Sabbat is a special case, where his head being impaled on the magic earth-spike means that earth won't die, or something. There's a dangling plot thread that nobody wants to touch with a ten foot pole.

The way I remember it, which may be wrong, Dredd had already decided the sentence was life, and refused to change it to death when Sabbat's head was impaled.

I started writing a strip a long time ago about Judge Death meeting the Sabbat head, before I realised I can neither write nor draw comics. Not a sad realisation really - it was a huge weight off my mind.

[Woolly]

...Sabbat's head was impaled.

My mind-canon says that Sabbat's cave is now a heavily guarded fortress, with various PSI Div department's trying to tap into his power.

Or something. I'm not great at comics either!

[Funt Solo]

I don't remember it, but The Kinda Dead Man (prog 816) revisits the cave, I think, to find Sabbat in a vegetative state.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Yep, I seem to remember in that story some Judge or other saying there wasn't much left of his mind. But occasionally the dead were expected to rise long after Judgement Day, due to the dregs left of whatever power he was using - another plot thread that was left dangling, most likely forever.

By the way, was Judgement Day ever referred to as World War 4 in the strip? I think I've only seen it described as such on Wikipedia.  I wouldn't have thought it was much of a war, given that none of the nuked cities were capable of any kind of resistance or retaliation.

I do remember Dredd barking something like 'you looking to start World War 5?' at a heavily-armed perp, and I assumed at the time WW4 was the Apocalypse War.

[Richard]

I'm pretty sure that Judgement Day qualifies as a war! Sabbat killed 2 billion people! Remember that those cities were nuked because they were overrun with zombies.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Yeah, fair enough - the whole world at war, even if it was everyone against one man, if you could call Sabbat the Softy a man.  Though technically the Judges killed a sizeable portion of that two billion (with the obvious proviso that they'd soon have been killed anyway).

Not sure how the timeline works out, but sometimes wonder if killing so many people was actually necessary in the end. Not that anyone had any way of knowing how things would work out, but it was a hell of a delaying tactic.

[Funt Solo]

I think the idea was that it was mostly zombies that were being nuked, rather than alive-people. Contact had been lost with those cities. (It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because one third of two billion* zombies situated in South America doesn't seem like that big a threat. They'd have quite a trek to threaten other locales. Anyway - never mind all that - here's another musical number.)


*If it takes two billion zombies a month to dig a tunnel to Hondo City, then how many TADs would it take to dig an escape tunnel to Midgard?

[IndigoPrime]

Yeah, Judgement Day logic falls apart the second you prod it with a stick.