The Dark Judges - 20 years or life?

[radiator]

Wagner has said that he's happy for someone else to do something with the Dark Judges as he is incapable of writing them as anything other than comedy villains these days.

Personally, I'd like to see what Al Ewing would do with them (once he has a few longer Dredd tales under his belt), though I agree that it would probably be best to use them sparingly and have their arrival be a big twist in the middle of a longer storyline.

[Withnail's liver]

As others have said before me, I see the Dark Judges as one of the various nemeses that Dredd has faced throughout his career. Sovs, Death and co, Total War, Nero Narcos and Frendz, PJ Maybe.  All of these have bubbled away in the background with various lead-in stories and may have been a part of Dredd stories for many years before they make their big play and ultimately fail and are captured (though I'm sure we haven't seen the end of PJ).

I think the reason the Dark Judges still stand out in our minds is because they are such memorable characters and arrived at a time when they would capture our (mostly) young imaginations.  We don't expect to see the Sovs return as they no longer hold any real relevence for the our times.  Poss the same with the Dark Judges?  Were they a product of late 80's paranoia with AIDS? (I remember being terrified of the advert around at the same time) in the same way that the Sovs arguably reflected adult worries over The Bomb? The current ongoing "mutant issue" that MC-1 has been dealing with over the last few years, a mirror to changing attitudes toward immigration?

So, to get to the point (I think there is one here somewhere), I think although they were brilliant characters and have risen "celebrity" status .  I don't think we'll see them again as ideas, attitudes (and us as readers) have arguably moved on...

[Noisybast]

I would say that My Name Is Death started out well, helped enormously by Frazer's stark, none-more-black artwork, but fizzled out halfway through once Wagner started leaning back towards comedy.

I think if Judge Death is ever going to work as a credible threat, he needs to be taken seriously and made a lot more nasty and outright evil. Sure, he may believe what he's doing is all for the greater good, but he's still a ruthless killer who will stop at nothing to wipe out all life on Earth, one soul at a time. Turning him into a cross-dressing old lady with a taste for entering Las Vegas boxing matches and a talking dog sidekick detracts somewhat from that.

That said, I've no problem with other characters around him providing comic relief (Mrs Gunderson, for example). Death himself should remain the straight man, in much the same way as Dredd lets the insanity of the city around him provide his comic relief.

Actually, talking about this has set a few cogs turning in my head. Wonder if it'll amount to any more than a brainfart?

[Mardroid]

Turning him into a cross-dressing old lady with a taste for entering Las Vegas boxing matches and a talking dog sidekick detracts somewhat from that.

Heh, heh. I think I'd like to read that one!

[John Caliber]

The best dramatic outcome for the Dark Judges would have to have been annihilated at the climax of Necropolis; all subsequent stories have felt like excavating the corpse of a once mighty Tiger and swinging its skinny, broken corpse about for schlock value. I was so disappointed that Necropolis climaxed - after a fantastic build up - with the same old 'contained until the next time they escape' ritual.

[brendan1]

Here's a scary thought:

Necropolis finished 20 years ago (Prog 699, Cover date 6th October 1990).

Now, this isn't a nostalgia post about how time flies and how we all feel old.
It does, we do, get over it.

Rather, I was wondering if they would ever come back. I know there's been a little bit of dabbling with the Dark Judges since then but nothing that feels canon, at least to me. As far as I remember, there were the Batman - Dredds and then there was the Death story (in the Megazine?) with him riding a quad-bike and ending with him being pulled into hell.

Is that it? Really?

To put this into perspective, there are comic buying, forum reading, folks who were not born the last time the Dark Judges went on a rampage. Why is this? Does everyone on this board under the age of 25 (or even 30!) know who Fear, Fire and Mortis are? What they do?

Why are they so under-used? Is it because they're one dimensional? Well, 20 years ago so was the Joker or the Penguin or Lex Luthor.

Why has there been no attempt to use them since? If it's a fear of re-doing a "massacre of MC-1" then fair enough, but the world is a big place. Surely they could do something different but still within their goal of killing everything. Maybe (and this if just from the top of my head) going to another country or city and possessing their judges, or creating a disease?

Has Dredd as a story become too "straight"? There's been a real move, I think, from the older style sci-fi - at least by Wagner. No aliens. No dimension jumping Judda. No wacky guns. No monsters. It's all politics and mutant rights; all allegory for the modern world. I love that, and the recent big Dredd stories have been among the best - Tour of Duty was the bees' knees - but I do wonder if the fantastic (as opposed to silly) side of Dredd is being toned down?

Or are we wating for the film and possible sequel?

The Dark Judges are Dredd's iconic villains. But they are not recurring villains. Should they be?

Is 20 years long enough? Should we hear their hiss again? Or is it just the start of a longer sentence?

JD came back in that brilliantly-illustrated Irving masterpiece in about 2001/02

What was that called again?

[Greg M.]

The best dramatic outcome for the Dark Judges would have to have been annihilated at the climax of Necropolis; all subsequent stories have felt like excavating the corpse of a once mighty Tiger and swinging its skinny, broken corpse about for schlock value. I was so disappointed that Necropolis climaxed - after a fantastic build up - with the same old 'contained until the next time they escape' ritual.

The irony there, of course, is that the one time Wagner actually goes out of his way to keep characters active for future use, he might indeed have been better served by eliminating them, or at least eliminating 75% of them.

Since this thread was started, I've been wondering what I would do with the Dark Judges if I was John Wagner and I wanted to use them again. First of all, I thought it might be interesting if the remaining 3 were to get off-world... MC-1 loses contact with a colony, Dredd sent in to investigate, finds almost an entire planet of colonists massacred, a few red herrings and preliminary encounters with demented robots, send the reader off in the wrong direction and then the big reveal. Of course, I then realised that A) that was almost the plot of 'Aliens' and B)we've already seen what happens when they get a planet to themselves - it's called Deadworld. Though having just written this, I now quite like the idea of Mortis and Fear chasing people down the corridors of a huge, crumbling space-craft...

Next, I thought, "Why make them subtler? Go in the opposite direction and threaten every living thing on Earth, or even all life in the universe." But the whole 'I will destroy the world!' vibe really would make them into Marvel/DC supervillains, which then requires Dredd to be a superhero. The problem is that the Dark Judges are such a visually astonishing set of designs (along with Torquemada, they must be the most iconic villains in 2000AD history) that new generations of art-droids deserve a chance to depict them.

[IndigoPrime]

Go in the opposite direction and threaten every living thing on Earth, or even all life in the universe.

You are Russell T Davies and I claim my 5p.

[Greg M.]

Go in the opposite direction and threaten every living thing on Earth, or even all life in the universe.

You are Russell T Davies and I claim my 5p.

Damn it, I was trying to channel that whole Grant Morrison vibe of 'big, mad, over-the-top stories' and I got waylaid in Wales instead... 

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

Thinking about it: (a) they are too good to waste; and (b) the problem is their single mindedness.

If it was me, I'd give them some self doubt. The seeds of it are there with Mrs Gunderson. After all, what have they been thinking about for the last 20 years?

[James Stacey]

What is their current status. Are they all in Justice Dept. except Death ?

[Emperor]

Or, better, create a new nemesis for Dredd, and let us forget Death, leaving him in the archives where he probably belongs now.

Yes I'd like to see someone new and preferably weird. I think the main problem is that they don't have much of a "story engine" - they have one goal and we've seen them try it enough to know there aren't really huge permutations on that theme.

You have two chances to do something different:

1. Have him being set loose, only for it to be revealed that a new big Dredd villain is actually pulling his strings - this way you can "sell" the fact that the new threat must be pretty serious.

2. Pretty much this:

Next, I thought, "Why make them subtler? Go in the opposite direction and threaten every living thing on Earth, or even all life in the universe." But the whole 'I will destroy the world!' vibe really would make them into Marvel/DC supervillains, which then requires Dredd to be a superhero.

Necroverse, the follow-up to Necropolis where Death starts out on alien worlds and tries to kill everything ever, perhaps building up the momentum on those distant worlds. The big problem is that, as Greg M., points out this is the kind of thing a Marvel/DC supervillain would come up with (Thanos has tried this a few times, and it wouldn't be beyond his "cousin" Darkseid). The solution would be to take this in another direction - military sci-fi perhaps with a bit of police procedural. You could work it on a few levels: deploy the space-based troops to counter the larger menace but also work to stop the infiltrators from getting a beachhead on earth (a bit of diplomacy, so all the Mega Cities are working together, and a bit of hunting down clues to reveal sects of Death-worshippers). You could even make it a Dreddworld crossover, with each spin-off doing their own thing to combat the menace.

[Cthulouis]

You could have justice department use them a a weapon of mass destruction. Any aliens start messing with MC1 Interstellar foreign policy, then they'd better be able to cope with a Dark Judge Crystal Egg Thing getting cracked open on their planet.

Another thing that could be interesting is if we continue the Mrs Gunderson style theme, showing that where the Dark Judges set their feet upon this world, their evil lives on forever. What other tainted places have they left scattered around the city? Obviously doing this 20 years after their main walk about could be stretching it a bit, but it could be a possibility in the undercity.   

[Greg M.]

Necroverse, the follow-up to Necropolis where Death starts out on alien worlds and tries to kill everything ever, perhaps building up the momentum on those distant worlds.

The Dark Judges on a cosmic scale... just imagine it. An entire planet terraformed to become an exact replica of the face of Fear, killing all who view it! Mortis-Bombs, composed of his distilled spiritual essence, dropped on alien worlds, decaying the entire population! Judge Fire, emerging from his home in the heart of a sun and utilising solar flares to decimate the enemy fleet! Death himself directing operations from an artificial tomb-planet composed of the skulls of billions upon billions of his victims!

Sorry, went a bit Jim Starlin there..

[Peter Wolf]

Perhaps a Judge Life might be an idea as an adversary of Judge Death being the complete opposite of Judge Death from another warped dimension where all life is sacred.

Just a thought .