The Best of John Wagner's Judge Dredd - Hardback, 304 pages, 15th March 2022
(https://i.imgur.com/a3h3VbX.jpg)
In celebration of the original Mega-City master, this collects the very best of John Wagner's Judge Dredd stories!
He is one of the best-known voices in British comics, respected and revered for revitalising the industry in the 1970s and co-creating the iconic 'Lawman of the future' - Judge Dredd.
In celebration of his forty-five years chronicling the madness and mayhem of Mega-City One, this collection features some of the funniest, most poignant and action-packed tales penned by the great man himself.
I thought this was a heads-up for another one of Colin's polls...
Quote from: Dog Deever on 21 July, 2021, 12:32:03 AM
I thought this was a heads-up for another one of Colin's polls...
Don't tempt him.
on second thoughts, please do...would be a lot of fun.
Predict the contents competition?
Bury My Knee.
Quote from: davidbishop on 21 July, 2021, 05:16:45 PM
Bury My Knee.
If that's not in there it's a misnamed book
Quote from: davidbishop on 21 July, 2021, 05:16:45 PM
Bury My Knee.
Bury My Knee
has to be in there. And although I've got it in at least two other books, "Finger of Suspicion". I'd love to see both in the same volume.
There's a few preview pages up on the webshop entry. "Father Earth" is the only one with a title showing, though I should know all of them, particularly the Dog Deevers story drawn by Gibson ("Full Mental Jacket"?). Great to see one of Carlos Ezquerra's giant Cursed Earth spiders in there too.
Wonder what the repro on 'Father Earth' will be like? Did Rebellion ever get hold of some new scans for this story? Previous editions were not great.
This collection is just of John Wagner's Dredd work because including
Verdus &
Song of the Surfer would have made this book weight a ton, right?
Quote from: James Stacey on 21 July, 2021, 05:18:09 PM
Quote from: davidbishop on 21 July, 2021, 05:16:45 PM
Bury My Knee.
If that's not in there it's a misnamed book
Quote from: Dash Decent on 04 December, 2021, 03:01:02 AM
Bury My Knee has to be in there. And although I've got it in at least two other books, "Finger of Suspicion". I'd love to see both in the same volume.
Same goes with
Little Spuggy's Christmas.
Quote from: Dash Decent on 04 December, 2021, 03:01:02 AM
Quote from: davidbishop on 21 July, 2021, 05:16:45 PM
Bury My Knee.
Bury My Knee has to be in there. And although I've got it in at least two other books, "Finger of Suspicion". I'd love to see both in the same volume.
There's a few preview pages up on the webshop entry. "Father Earth" is the only one with a title showing, though I should know all of them, particularly the Dog Deevers story drawn by Gibson ("Full Mental Jacket"?). Great to see one of Carlos Ezquerra's giant Cursed Earth spiders in there too.
I've banged on about this ad nauseum before, but I still say it's one of the best Dredd stories ever. Similar to, and as good as, Taxi-Driver-era Scorsese.
Contents... not including the bonus section
(https://i.imgur.com/RQt3F4s.jpg)
Kudos to whoever put this together. An impossible task since "The Best of" John Wagner would more or less encompass everything he has ever done.
Nice mix of
- Mega City Zaniness (Sob Story, Full Mental Jacket)
- Mega City Will Grind You Down (The Runner, Finger of Suspicion)
- Detective Dredd (Cal Files)
- Reflective Dredd (In the Bath, Class of '79, Death of a Legend, Bury my Heart)
- Dredd playing cameo to a formidable foe (the trio of PJ stories)
Get Jerry Sing is the only odd one. Bit of a throwaway story but presume the inclusion is because it was the last ever Carlos.
Exactly - the Get Jerry Sing script is also one of the extras.
Very happy to see Bury in there, not to mention the complete story in the extras, a particular favourite!
Quote from: davidbishop on 24 March, 2022, 08:40:53 AM
Very happy to see Bury in there, not to mention the complete story in the extras, a particular favourite!
That and Death of a Legend are probably my two favourite Dredd one-offs.
Quote from: gogilesgo on 24 March, 2022, 06:57:27 AM
Get Jerry Sing is the only odd one. Bit of a throwaway story but presume the inclusion is because it was the last ever Carlos.
Yes, they note that it is the last ever Wagner + Ezquerra Dredd.
It's a good spectrum of stories, but also nice to see a mix of artists including Ron Smith, Brian Bolland, Ian Gibson, Cam Kennedy and of course Carlos Ezquerra. Also Tom Frame and Annie Parkhouse, of course.
Can anyone who has picked this up say what the repro in 'Father Earth' is like? Previous incarnations have not been that great.
I'll have to have a look in the daylight. A quick look under lights shows the blacks looks good and dark, and the text looks reasonably sharp, but some of the pictures look too dark in the dark areas - like they should be lighter and show more detail, but instead we've got big dark patches hiding a bit too much.
Quote from: Max Headroom on 24 March, 2022, 03:13:43 PM
Can anyone who has picked this up say what the repro in 'Father Earth' is like?
Same as in the Case Files, basically.
Oh, I thought that maybe some new scans might have been discovered. If I cast my mind back, I seem to remember that the repro for this story in both the Case Files and Mega Collection left a bit to be desired.
Quote from: Max Headroom on 25 March, 2022, 05:15:13 PM
Oh, I thought that maybe some new scans might have been discovered.
There's no 'discovering' new scans, unfortunately. Unless the original art resurfaces and the owner is prepared to send it in for a repro-quality scan, we're stuck with the film/scans we have. :(
Does anyone have this? How big is the book and how interested are the extras? I've not seen a copy in the wild and am mulling it over, but already have about half the content from the page shown earlier in the Dredd collection and UC.
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 15 May, 2022, 01:39:42 PM
Does anyone have this? How big is the book and how interested are the extras?
It measures up to the exact size of the DeadWorld hardcovers if that's any use. 306 pages and the extras are:
Tarantula from Judge Dredd annual 1985.
Old Pal's Act from Prog 2000.
There's also a script for
Get Jerry Sing which is the last published Dredd story by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.
I can provide a full list of stories if needed.
Cheers
Yeah, I have the Deadworld covers. Thanks. Still mulling.
re: Father Earth.
I haven't ever looked into it, but are all the previous reprints of "Father Earth" (pre-dating Rebellion's collections) as bad as the versions in Case Files etc.? It was collected in the 1989 Annual, Complete Judge Dredd 12, a couple of Titan editions and there's always the original printing in progs 122-125. Is every version of it in reprint and the original printing as bad for loss of detail etc.?
Scanning from the comics isn't ideal, but for a Bolland Dredd that only runs to four episodes (20-ish pages?) I'm surprised that scanning and cleaning up from the progs hasn't been done by now.
I'm not an expert on the process involved but what I do know is someone recently scanned in one of the worst offending pages (the one with the robots sitting around discussing the upcoming mayoral election) directly from a Prog and posted it on Facebook. It looked fine to me. I'd rather have something like that, than what is in the Case Files.
It's an odd one, really. For the Hachette volumes, I'm not surprised some of the repro is ropey. For the most part, it's an exercise in low costs, using whatever is available. I was very surprised at the SMS changes, but elsewhere you can see how some decisions regarding what was included were driven by what was available. (And, again, at least 2000 AD and Dredd didn't suffer to the degree Transformers did.)
But with a new, premium, HC Rebellion volume, it's a pity those pages weren't improved – unless that wasn't possible. (I no longer have eg the Complete Dredd comics to see how it was in those.)
Is it possible that one day as technology improves we will be able to scan direct from the Progs (or in some cases the Titan versions) and achieve good results without being plagued by issues such as moire and the like?
Possibly. AIs already exist that can do superb correction and repair work on old photography, and so a similar application for comics would be feasible, if it doesn't already exist. The issue is in automating the entire process – or botching it in some other way. (Again: the IDW Transformers recolouring disaster. I'm still not sure what happened there, other than it all being outsourced to people who made a mess of it, and then IDW going "whatever".)
That said, moire is a very particular thing, caused by overlapping repeating patterns. Even with extremely high-res scanners, you can end up with clashes. And when you have an original print pattern, scan that and then print it again, you're combining issues. Again, it's presumably something AI would be able to deal with at some point, but right now it seems beyond basically everyone in the comics industry.
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 18 May, 2022, 11:02:29 AM
Possibly. AIs already exist that can do superb correction and repair work on old photography, and so a similar application for comics would be feasible...
It's a slippery slope, I tells ya...
(https://i.imgur.com/8OP045Q.jpg?1)
Quote from: The Amstor Computer on 16 May, 2022, 10:24:00 AM
re: Father Earth.
I haven't ever looked into it, but are all the previous reprints of "Father Earth" (pre-dating Rebellion's collections) as bad as the versions in Case Files etc.? It was collected in the 1989 Annual, Complete Judge Dredd 12, a couple of Titan editions and there's always the original printing in progs 122-125. Is every version of it in reprint and the original printing as bad for loss of detail etc.?
Scanning from the comics isn't ideal, but for a Bolland Dredd that only runs to four episodes (20-ish pages?) I'm surprised that scanning and cleaning up from the progs hasn't been done by now.
I can tell you that the print in the 1989 Annual is crisp and clean - far superior to the print in the Case Files.
Edit: actually, the annual print is cleaner than the original prog - which I think is down to paper quality. The prog is kind of yellow - the annual is white.
Here's the comparison (TTB) of prog, annual and case files. The annual scan is a bit blurry on the RHS as it was in the gutter. You'll notice that the framing is a bit different in the annual - not sure what happened there.
In terms of reproduction, the grey shading effect that Bolland has used for some of the droids just gets turned into mostly black mush by the time it's in the case file. Btw - the case file image is taken straight from the pdf version, the other two I scanned in myself.
(https://i.imgur.com/QaXzCRS.png)
Looks like the annual version has been reconfigured in-house, a job that was done by art assistants unkindly known as 'bodgers'. This was done to cut a page from an old story, or resize for a slightly different format.
ISTR doing it for a story or two in one of the Special Editions. One of the creators got in touch afterwards to express their unhappiness in having their work chopped about; I apologized and made sure that didn't happen again.
The resizing might explain why there are no good materials for this story. The original films may have been chopped about to create the resized annual reprint, nobody realising there was not another extant version of the original available. But that's pure speculation.
Thanks for the examples, Funt. Looks like both prog and annual reprint would be good sources, either for full page replacements or panel-by-panel (although there's a good bit of loss of detail around things like Dredd's badge in the CF reprint, you could improve the look of the page a lot with a panel replacement for the robots).
As David says, annual, yearbook etc. reprints were often edited by art staff to fit the new page dimensions, and it's a pity as they are often the best source for scans for reprint - better quality stock, more robust and longer-lasting vs the more ephemeral weekly comics etc. We reprinted "Dash Decent" in full in our Kevin O'Neill collection and when it came to finding source scans there was a fantastic reprint of it in one of the '90s yearbooks (really crisp, and it looked like it was taken from either original art or good film copies) but because of the change in format it had been edited - and in this case, not particularly well - to extend the page vertically. We ended up using it, but I rebuilt the strip page-by-page to "un-edit" it back to match the original in the prog, and used scanned elements from the prog pages where the editing for the yearbook had removed captions, shifted elements, removed letratone... It was a huge task, but I think it gave us the best version of the strip available. We did the same for the opening half-dozen pages of "Captain Condor", using a later reprint and "un-editing" it to match the original printing, so I clearly never learned my lesson :)
It would certainly be possible to "un-edit" the annual version of "Father Earth" (again, looks like it's been edited to extend vertically based on the addition of the black areas above the panels) but it would likely be a fair investment in time for Rebellion's repro droids. The original prog looks decent though, and would probably be a quicker and easier fix for the poor pages, so hopefully it will be taken on for future reprints.
This story also appeared in the 'Judge Death' volume published by Titan in 1983 - possibly this could be used as a future source for reprint.
As someone who dislikes the Father Earth story, this whole discussion seems quite ironic!
Quote from: Max Headroom on 19 May, 2022, 08:48:02 PM
This story also appeared in the 'Judge Death' volume published by Titan in 1983 - possibly this could be used as a future source for reprint.
If it was, then it would likely be the best source. Titan's albums were typically very well reproduced, on good stock, and they will have aged better than the original progs, and it's unlikely that there was any editing done. Curious enough about it now to see if I can track down a copy...
The Titan Judge Death volume is the best reprint I've seen to date. IIRC Titan had access to some of the best sources back in the day. Wasn't this about the time the truth about IPC's treatment of original art and the disappearance of much of Bolland's artwork came to light?
Got my copy of this yesterday and overall I'm delighted with it. Yes, the repro of Father Earth is very dark in places but that's a minor concern given the missing original pages.
A decent sized book, with a good heft and impressive paper quality - Finger of Suspicion and Old Pal's Act look and feel particularly excellent.
First time in forever that I've re-read In The Bath...great fun.
Eagerly awaiting mine. I ordered a boatload of 2000 AD books recently, after noticing my subs 50% off was about to run out. (Curses, Rebellion: you got me again!) So far, one book arrived and about ten are in limbo. But I'm looking forward to that Wagner book and its Ezquerra sibling.