Ok I read all the Mega Collection I have. Read some Case Files and PSI Files. I got hold of some 2000 AD floppies from 650-ish to 1100-ish with some gaps in between. Just wondering what are the divinitive/peak years of 2000 AD?
I would say the period when Steve McManus was editor, between the merger with Starlord and the 10th anniversary. The Cursed Earth is when Dredd really found its feet, but looking at Barney. the rest of the prog is mostly filled with half-forgotten thrills like Death Planet and Colony Earth.
Quote from: nxylas on 16 April, 2023, 09:26:58 PMThe Cursed Earth is when Dredd really found its feet
Not entirely sure I agree — the story entirely lacks the MC-1 element and is just a procession of environments/threats of the week as obstacles to a goal unrelated to whatever is going on in the current episode (which I would also level as a criticism of the Judge Child saga). Also, "Hero Dredd" receded quite rapidly after Wagner re-took the reigns, to be replaced more often by "Bastard Dredd" thereafter.
The Day the Law Died (aka the Judge Cal(igula) saga) is much more
Dredd as early epics go, featuring the citizen-centred absurdities we associate with the strip, a nascent acknowledgement of the problem of the Judge system's absolute power, and introduced a number of elements of the strip that recur to this day (like Kleggs, and the West Wall).
I would have to agree. On one level it is not much of a coherent storyline. Probably what does set it apart is that it provided an opportunity for Bolland and McMahon to just let rip artistically. There are so many iconic moments in the tale from a visual point of view. The same holds for Judge Child Quest. Also for the Luna-1 stories.
There's much to be said for the first few years of Dredd really not fully finding its feet as the full potential for the strip was explored. Even the first Judge Death story is imperfect, as much as it is lauded. It introduced a character that has often proven difficult to handle effectively.
I would say that the run up to the Apocalypse War was potentially the real point at which it found its feet properly. As Jim says, the moral complexities of Dredd as a character, the Judge system itself and life in Mega City 1 really start to become more effectively explored. I think that is why I've always rated "Alone In a Crowd" so highly. For a one off it showcases so many of these issues in a powerful way. The fact that it was Dillon at the top of his game (to me, anyway) is another bonus.
This will always get wrapped up in all sorts of debate and different option such is the wonderful diversity of 2000ad fandom's views - even if our demographic is a little generic!
Anyway for me if you are looking for older material I'd say the Golden Age is 1980 - 1987, you can stretch that to 1988 maybe.
Then the Rebellion years have been simply magnificent 1999 being a really, really strong single year, possibly my favourite ever. The modern Golden Age (TM) is 2009 - 2012 but you can wonder either side of that quite comfortably and with current thrills like Brink, The Out, Lawless etc you caould also happily argue that we've never had it as good as we do now.
I'm with Colin in that peak 2000ad is the early to mid 80s. We've had some magificent stuff since but there's a lot of stone cold classic tales. during that period. My favourite period, and I suspect this is the same for a lot of readers, is of course the period when I started reading it (88-90) but objectively it's not as good as the years that came before it.
Just discussing Dredd, I also think Judge Cal is where it really starts to take shape as the Dredd we know and love. The Cursed Earth has some very ideas, but it's far from essential imo - as Jim says there's no MC-1 and Superhero Dredd.
That also how I feel with the first golden age being almost the whole of the 80s. The Rebellion years has been mostly strong with so many top-notch thrills. The Rebellion years works for me in these mini-cycles (a new cycle starts when we have a jump-on-prog or xmas prog) and within these cycles you have these ups-and-downs. This years cycle started with a bang
OK, I take people's point about The Cursed Earth, though I personally like that quest format of 1- or 2-part stories within an overarching framework. But reading Case Files 1, which collects the pre-Cursed Earth stories, there's a lot of early installment weirdness in there. For me, despite taking Dredd out of his familiar setting, it's the point at which it starts to feel like the strip we know and love.
Personal favourite era: 1984 - 1986, even if it's solely based on what I have re-read countless times over the years.
Quote from: nxylas on 17 April, 2023, 12:30:32 PMOK, I take people's point about The Cursed Earth, though I personally like that quest format of 1- or 2-part stories within an overarching framework.
Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying it's
bad. It's exciting, fast-paced, and has great art — it's unarguably a high point of those early years of both the comic and Dredd as a strip.
I just don't think it's particularly representative of what the strip would become and, as such, I wouldn't single it out as an
essential Dredd strip.
Shurely the divinitive years started with Psi-Judge Anderson?
I'll get me coat...
---
Prog 178 marks the beginning of a super-strong run of the prog that doesn't really slow down until around prog 700-ish.
In some respects this is a bit like the debate about the best Dr Who actor. There's something to be said about when you were first exposed.
I would agree with comments about where Dredd was pre-Cursed Earth. There wasn't really a clear vision for the character or the world, it grew organically. Just look at the history of the character's development.
There are some clear moments though when the potential is starting to shine through. Even in the earliest days you have bizarre crimes and criminals, Dredd being quite brutal and MC1 quite oppressive. Not just MC1 but even Luna City.
Perhaps the biggest issue was that it was aimed at a juvenile audience. As we entered the 80's and the audience's age profile was rising, so too were the sort of stories being written. This was long before the days of Watchmen and Dark Knight. The legacy of Action comic cast a long shadow over the sort of risks the writers and artists were willing to take, notwithstanding the mis-steps of Burger Wars and Green Giant.
Even so there are plenty of gems there for the discerning.
Quote from: Tjm86 on 17 April, 2023, 07:12:29 PMI would agree with comments about where Dredd was pre-Cursed Earth. There wasn't really a clear vision for the character or the world, it grew organically. Just look at the history of the character's development.
Yeah, the seeds were there from the beginning. But then you also had Dredd handing villains over to the police, and a meeting of "all the judges" which seemed to imply that there were only about a dozen of them.
Quote from: Credo! on 17 April, 2023, 03:41:47 PMProg 178 marks the beginning of a super-strong run of the prog that doesn't really slow down until around prog 700-ish.
Converting that to years gives us the original golden age of about 1980-1990. (As you've seen, other folk tend to squeeze that a bit, but there seems to be a general consensus that the 80s were good and the early 90s were not.)
While there are early outliers (e.g. The Pit), things don't really start to get consistently better until Nikolai Dante and Sinister Dexter shake up the prog in 1997.
Looking over the evidence, though - it's difficult to find any bit of prog-history where you get a five-for-five solid prog - just because of the nature of the format. You're better off picking up trades that provide the highs without the lows.
Quote from: nxylas on 17 April, 2023, 09:33:05 PMBut then you also had Dredd handing villains over to the police, and a meeting of "all the judges" which seemed to imply that there were only about a dozen of them.
That's a fair point and also an example of where the weaknesses lay in the original development. It feels a little at times like ideas around our criminal justice system influenced the way it worked. So Judges were more specialised and there were fewer of them compared to police. Similar to the way our police are more numerous but have fewer powers than judges in terms of sentencing.
That idea pretty much died out within a very short space of time. It is hard to recall many instances of police officers after that first episode and arguably by the time of Robot Wars it was pretty much written out.
When you look at it from a continuity point of view in terms of Origins or Dreadnoughts, what we see of the police in those first few episodes is arguably the last vestiges of a system in its death throes as it were. The police utterly subservient to the judges and actually largely redundant (totally so within the space of a few months of the strip beginning ...)
It's not completely surprising when you consider the ethos of IPC back in those days. Tooth wasn't really expected to last more than a few years, much less the nearly half a century ( :o ) it has to date. It probably explains why it is only now that we've got to a point where we have a far more coherent world than we did back then.
Actually, I need to backtrack on some of this. There is little evidence of the police in the early tales full stop. One seems to appear on a vid-screen in the first tale but is not identified as such and could just as easily be support staff.
Is it possible that you are thinking of Ezquerra's "Bank Raid"? That did end with Dredd handing off a perp to a policeman but since that wasn't used as part of the original run ...
Quote from: Tjm86 on 18 April, 2023, 07:52:35 AMThere is little evidence of the police in the early tales full stop. One seems to appear on a vid-screen in the first tale but is not identified as such and could just as easily be support staff.
Just to confuse the issue some more...
(https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i/jsware2002/Police.jpg)
From the 1982 Annual
Those are auxiliaries.
Two points - I agree that 'best 2000ad/Dredd era' is as subjective as 'best Bond' or 'best Doctor Who' - the one you grew up with is going to have a huge influence. Having said that, there are some eras that just had a better line-up, so I'd say the prog really found its feet in the year or so after the Starlord series joined the roster and this lasted until the period where the brain drain took some of the talent to the states while the new crop were learning the trade (before also heading to the land of big bucks). It just happens that I jumped on the Squaxx train in the middle of that patch, so the four or five years after Prog 308 will always grab me in a way that others won't, no matter how good they may be technically.
The other point about police. My head-canon is that they'd been largely relegated to support roles to the judges, probably some time between the Dreadnought/Judges era that Michael Carroll's stories* are covering and the Atomic Wars of 2070. This was gradually being phased out so that there were clearer lines between judges and Justice Dept auxiliaries who performed many of the same tasks but weren't in any way being called 'police' any more. We were away from Mega-City One for quite a while - six months on the moon, followed by six months (in the prog) journeying through the Cursed Earth, followed by 100+ days of Chief Judge Cal's rule.
Behind the scenes (point 2b), what I think happened was that there was a rotating selection of writers who added various things to the mythos which I think came to an end around the time Dredd got sent to the moon (those were all Wagner stories alone, weren't they?), then Mills took over for the afore-mentioned Cursed Earth trip so that by the time Wagner returned they'd had a lot of time to think about how Dredd and the Mega-City could develop, hence when the city returned to its version of normality after Cal was deposed we quickly got some of the things that are a mainstay to this day (like citiblocks, and names for said blocks).
* as editor / showrunner / author
...and the Mega-City Fats police van is obviously a left-over vehicle that hasn't been repainted yet, like that Waitrose on King's Road that had the sign from the 20th century despite the tiretrack rebranding for all the other shops.
Yeah, I've been skim-reading Case Files 01 again. Wagner seems to have settled in as more or less permanent writer after The Return of Rico, and that's when the strip becomes much more consistent, a lot earlier than I'd remembered. In my memory, it had been the work of diverse hands for pretty much its entire first year.
The whole discussion was a very interesting and informative read. Looks like I have got a lot to catch up on for sure. :)
Looking at Prog numbers, I'd echo Funt Solo's call of 178-700 (maybe stretch to 712 to get Shamballa in) as the first 'definitive' 2000AD era - but be advised that some sections might feel childish by today's comics standards.
Then I'd plump for 1500-1850 for a second slice of 'definitive', that also feels more grown-up.
Not a bad idea to avoid Progs 800-999... (even if that does mean missing out on Judge Dredd: the Pit)
Nope! The Pit was excellent.
Quote from: AlexF on 18 July, 2023, 11:03:27 AMLooking at Prog numbers, I'd echo Funt Solo's call of 178-700 (maybe stretch to 712 to get Shamballa in) as the first 'definitive' 2000AD era - but be advised that some sections might feel childish by today's comics standards.
Then I'd plump for 1500-1850 for a second slice of 'definitive', that also feels more grown-up.
Not a bad idea to avoid Progs 800-999... (even if that does mean missing out on Judge Dredd: the Pit)
I get the reference of that profile picture. I just read that book recently one of the 2000 AD Ultimate Collection.
Quote from: Richard on 19 July, 2023, 01:32:28 AMNope! The Pit was excellent.
The Pit is in the TMC which I have nearly all of. That was one of my faves from that collection.