Why was Chaos Day bad for MC1?

[Bolt-01]

Got to disagree. While the speculation here is all very interesting in a 'space-math' kind of way, can you imagine spending a years worth of progs detailing the levels of deprivation and rebuilding you are talking about?

Ultimately Tharg would rather have action packed stories in the prog IMO.

Of course, if someone wants to try their hands at writing a Dredd that does the sort of detail crunching covered here whilst still working as a solid narrative, mail it over to us at Zarjaz and we'll get to business.

[Molch-R]

Did The Phantom Menace teach you all nothing? NOTHING?!?!?!

[radiator]

Reminds me of when Origins was running and people were moaning that it wasn't a dry, detailed list of events chronicling the war and the subsequent building of the Mega Cities rather than what it was - ie a story.

[Link Prime]

Did The Phantom Menace teach you all nothing? NOTHING?!?!?!

Day of Chaos: The Aftermath

It is a time of uncertainty.
The Empire's ambiguous tariff statutes mandate close re-examination of galactic export quotas.
Interim Princess Agoomba has co-chaired a subcommittee to draft amendments to existing trade policies.
Meanwhile, regulatory agencies are being heavily lobbied by a consortium of mercantile interest groups and their suppliers to streamline loading restrictions for class-C cargo vessels.
The shipping unions have remained conspicuously silent.

[Colin YNWA]

But it doesn't have to be handled directly it can be handled obliquely surely. So in the foreground you have the all action romp, the background is the 'space-maths'. The strip has dealt with 'dry' subjects before in a very creative way. As its space-maths you can have some real fun with it...

... all that said maybe I should pay more attention to the man whose been editing a successful and entertaining fanzine working with many creators who've become droids for years, ahead of my own seat of the pants nonsense...

... nah I like my answer better!

[Dark Jimbo]

Got to disagree. While the speculation here is all very interesting in a 'space-math' kind of way, can you imagine spending a years worth of progs detailing the levels of deprivation and rebuilding you are talking about?

Ultimately Tharg would rather have action packed stories in the prog IMO.

The Apocalypse War did go into detail about what had happened in the aftermath, and every last story was also entertaining and action-packed. Bob's Law set out exactly which bits of the city had been destroyed and how the remainder would be re-arranged. Meka-City explained what had happened to all the now-ownerless robots. Law of the Jungle explained what effect the fallout had on Don Uggie and his boys. etc, etc. Pretty much the whole of Case Files 6 does contain a year's worth of stories about rebuilding and deprivation, and it's considered a Golden Age!

Total War was followed by an excellent six months of stories which did the same thing.

[Molch-R]

Flick through any prog from the last year and to be honest you wouldn't think Chaos Day had ever happened.

To be completely fair that's just not true, we filled an entire collection full of stories that dealt with the psychological and physical aftermath of Chaos Day - Day of Chaos: Fallout - and it didn't even include The Streets of Dan Francisco.

[Dark Jimbo]

Yeah, I know there have been plenty of stories set in the aftermath - but in real terms nothing seems to have changed, two years on.

Just an observation, not the entitled whinge it might be coming off as!

[TordelBack]

Interestingly 'Bob's Law' didn't appear for almost two years after the end of 'The Apocalypse War', and while the other stories that Jimbo cites (and many more) did deal very explicitly with the aftermath the very fact that they exist means that new stories in the same vein would be superfluous - we know all too well what post-disaster MC-1 is like, we've been there many times.

As Molcher says, there have been huge numbers of explicitly post-Chaos stories, some of them very significant in charting how things have changed for Justice Dept politically (Mega-City Confidential, for example), and emotionally (e.g. Suicide Watch).

If there is a problem with post-Chaos Dredd it may be that the implications of the massively reduced state of the city and its people just aren't what we might expect them to be: in-story MC-1 most life is block-based, lived in the hab and the pedway, not the sprawling cityscape we see from above.  Once clusters of safe-blocks were established in the immediate aftermath (which we saw happening in The Days After and Wastelands, and alluded to in Mega City Confidential), and the food supply secured, what does it really mean to Joe Meg that Sectors 31-310 no longer exist?  Change the channel Marge, I have to go down the Welf soon. 

Perhaps more significantly, outside of the story I see Wagner in particular turning in scripts that are smaller in scale, and often quite emotionally intense.  You might speculate that for him Chaos was about paring back the glittering SF mega-city to a more near-contemporary scale, where the eternal issues of crime, policing and control can be tackled with a noirish tone.  We think we want to see great political upheavals and drastic changes to how things are, but what we get are stories that suggest that life just goes on.  Maybe that's not what we wanted or expected (I still feel the scale of the death toll was damaging to the richness of the setting, but then I'm not the one who has to write it for 40 years), but maybe it's what the event was intended to do, and we should be looking at this different style of tale as the legacy of Chaos, rather than more stories of rebuilding, reorganising and/or cannibal gangs in the ruins?

[radiator]

I'm still waiting for that 'mutant judges' story that Wagner hinted at.

[Dandontdare]

Flick through any prog from the last year and to be honest you wouldn't think Chaos Day had ever happened.

To be completely fair that's just not true, we filled an entire collection full of stories that dealt with the psychological and physical aftermath of Chaos Day - Day of Chaos: Fallout - and it didn't even include The Streets of Dan Francisco.

Yes, I've always rolled my eyes at all these posts about there being no day of chaos aftermath stories - almost every story has touched on it, some more than others. There have been plenty that take post DoC situation as their central theme. It would be dull indeed if every single story was hand wringing "look at all the bodies" tale.

[ZenArcade]

I gotta disagree re the dry number crunching. This is about believability. Some of the posts are in my opinion right. I read the prog week after week and I got no real sense of a city which has lost 7 out of every 8 of its residents (that is a fairly big knock on any population). Of course we want interesting if not exciting plot driven narratives; but we also want a context here.
Judging by the postings there were a lot of storylines missed in the aftermath of DOC. Now I know that this was because JW caught the writers in the hop with the scale: but that is not the readers fault, more a somewhat serious lack of communication between the creators and the editors. I guess what I'm saying is don't gloss this over by telling us what we should want to read. It was fairly obvious from early on that there is a fairly large percentage of the readership who weren't buying into what was produced post DOC in terms of the aftermath and editors should be alert to this and attempt to cater for it; not talk it away. Respectfully Z

[TordelBack]

It was fairly obvious from early on that there is a fairly large percentage of the readership who weren't buying into what was produced post DOC in terms of the aftermath and editors should be alert to this and attempt to cater for it; not talk it away.

Happily Tharg is a pretty hands-off editor, especially when it comes to folk like Wagner.  If Wagner doesn't want to write this stuff (yet?), would it really be a good idea for Tharg to either force him to do so (could he do that?) or to place major changes in the status quo in the hands of other writers, such that John will have his own writing constrained or changed by it?  I'm fully behind the excellent current crop of other Dredd writers that we are blessed with to write significant and important stories, and they have done so, but essentially the shape of the sandbox itself is Wagner's call, as long as he wants it to be. 

We're entitled to feel disappointed when things don't play out the way we might like them to, but fan-driven editoral interference on that scale seldom works out for the best, IMHO.

[ZenArcade]

Of course JW controls the sand pit as you aptly put it. The issue I have is that he did indeed set out fairly obvious parameters for post DOC Mega City One: 350,000,000 citizens dead; most of the city (bar a few islands of intact City Blocks) trashed and Justice Department personnel cut by 60%. It does not require any major adverse variation on his parameters to write relevant stories dealing with the aftermath.
In relation to fan based editorial pressure and the repercussions steming from said, I can't speak to that as it has not happened in this instance. Z

[TordelBack]

The issue I have is that he did indeed set out fairly obvious parameters for post DOC Mega City One: 350,000,000 citizens dead; most of the city (bar a few islands of intact City Blocks) trashed and Justice Department personnel cut by 60%. It does not require any major adverse variation on his parameters to write relevant stories dealing with the aftermath.

But isn't that what we've had, ever since Mike Carroll's 'Debris'?  Certainly there have been stories, more than a few, which could have taken place in the near-gigapolis MC-1 of 2099 rather than the shattered remnant  of 2136, but we have had multiple stories dealing with life for the survivors and the judges in the ruins, as well as knock-on political shenanigans, attempts to fill the ranks of the Dept, psychological (and psychic) trauma and shady doings in the burial pits... What we haven't had is stories that detail huge changes for the way this new MC-1 is run, operates and survives, which are, I delicately suggest, Wagner's turf.