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The new edition of City of Dredd has a pretty lengthy section on the Undercity, with details of all the stories that it's featured in.

I hate 'decompressed' comics.

I liked Ex Machina a lot but there are never more than four panels a page and very sparse dialogue. The whole thing could have been done in five volumes, not ten.

This didn't really register with me I read the first trade of Ex Machina, but I just got another one out of the library the other day, and now all the two- and three-panel pages are bugging the hell out of me.  The art isn't even particularly detailed, certainly not enough so to require half a page to show two people talking.

Rico's fall in the rad-pit accident in Brothers of the Blood is another retelling.

Yeah, I love that one.  It has the all-too-believable feel of Dredd just casting around for a reason. Maybe it was the fall, the radiation, the helplessness, the sudden perspective on his life that the experience gave him...  or maybe there was something about that fall that we (and Joe) just don't know, or maybe it had nothing whatsoever to do with anything that followed.  It's so open it's perfect.

Yep.  I love also the way that Wagner so casually slid in the fact that Rico II isn't just another Fargo clone but actually a Dredd clone.  Yet another layer of open-ended uncertainty: Kraken and the first Rico were both cloned direct from Fargo, so is it Joe himself who's actually some kind of anomaly in the bloodline?  And given Dolman's situation and the fact that even Fargo couldn't follow his own rules, it makes you wonder how much of the Joe Dredd we know today is a direct result of seeing Rico go bad and the constant pressure to prove to himself and everyone else that he wasn't going the same way.

Uh and one more thing I wonder, can i ask, what is PSU Division? I mean what is their jobs?

Public Surveillance Unit, the judges who watch the cameras and track information on the citizens.  Although not so much at the moment, since their headquarters were inside the Statue of Judgement when it got blown up.

Ooh, might have to go at this one once I'm done with my Megazine story comp entry.  Already got a potential idea...

There are 305 Sectors, and according to City of Dredd (plug, plug), Sector House 301 (the Pit) had a complement of roughly 300 judges.  There's also reference to Sector House 28 where the judges were subjected to brainwashing ending up with 70 judges executed and 150 incurable, suggesting it probably had similar numbers.

Assuming 250-300 judges per sector house, that gives you a figure of 75,000 - 90,000 judges plus however many are stationed in smaller facilities, around the walls and at the Academy of Law and the Grand Hall.  So I'd take a guess at roughly 100,000 judges in total, or one for every 4000 cits.  (By way of comparison, some Googling suggests that US cities on average have one police officer for every 500-1000 people, so given Mega-City overpopulation, that number sounds fairly plausible.)

To be fair, my overall impression of Ennis Dredd is probably best summed up as "largely inoffensively mediocre with occasional really jarring bits".  It's not that it's hugely awful, more that he failed to bring anything particularly great to the table to balance up the aspects that really grated on me.  In general, I'd say his ideas work fine as Dredd-world stories in the broad strokes (which is why it's fairly easy to reconcile his run as being in-continuity, if you just squint past the finer details and remember events in summarised form); it was clumsy characterisation and heavy handed failure to get the tone right that let him down.

Not being John Wagner is certainly not a crime, but it is a hurdle, because he's defined the tone of the stories and Dredd's character for so long that failing to mimic those aspects well enough is going to make any Dredd story feel distinctly "off".  I think we've seen several Dredd writers in the past decade or so who've been able to put their own spin on Dredd without the writing jarring with Wagner's portrayal, but Ennis, at least at the time, really didn't have the skills to pull it off.

If Ennis was motivated by a sense of personal grievance against a fictional character, why don't you assume Wagner was too when he killed him the first time?

I have no problem with Silver being killed.  I have no problem with him suffering any horrible fate you care to imagine, whether it was deserved or not.  My issue is that Ennis made up a whole new personality for Silver and wrote Dredd completely out of character just to be able to set up the story he wanted to tell, which is bad writing.

Silver was just making a good faith attempt to protect morale in a difficult situation, and certainly didn't do anything to merit being dug up from an off-screen presumed death just so he could be retconned into a snivelling coward.

Silver got exactly he deserved:

If we're handing out karmic punishments to judges for being fascists and perverting the course of democracy, Silver's going to have to get in line.  He was a hardliner who believed in doing whatever it took to maintain the system, but there was nothing in his previous characterisation or the Necropolis story to justify the traits Ennis decided to graft onto him to make him look bad, and nothing in Dredd's previously respectful relationship with him to explain the swing into open contempt.  It definitely reads like Ennis was letting his personal dislike of the character dictate his portrayal of everybody concerned.  And the fact he had to go to the effort of bringing Silver back from the dead to do it just makes it seem all the more egregious.

It's always hard to know exactly when the Megazine stories are set in relation to the prog Dredds, especially with stories that take place over a matter of days being told in monthly instalments.  Plus I'm not sure how far outside of Mega-City 1 this has really had an impact yet, aside from a few cases of the chaos bug escaping through the airports.  An Anderson story would certainly make sense, although I still hold out hope she's going to make an appearance in the main Dredd tale.  And Koburn's view of events could be an interesting side story; maybe that could also explain where Rico's been all this time.  Is he still assigned to the mutant townships out in the cursed earth?  He's been pretty conspicuous by his absence so far.

Then Dredd's daft macho [spoiler] revenge on the undead Silver[/spoiler] was just completely lacking in the depth and complexity needed to finish the deep and complex relationship between Dredd and Silver.

It strikes me that Ennis was trying to recreate [spoiler]Dredd's execution of Kraken[/spoiler] with that Silver story. And by "recreate" I mean copy.

The whole thing felt to me like a very fanboyish response of punishing a character for actions that were only unreasonable from the point of view of a reader who's aware that it's a comic strip with a designated lead.  We might know that replacing the main character with a substitute isn't going to fly, but within the world of the story Silver was just making a good faith attempt to protect morale in a difficult situation, and certainly didn't do anything to merit being dug up from an off-screen presumed death just so he could be retconned into a snivelling coward.

I didn't know Barney had that. Thanks!

To quote a certain catchphrase, they are here.  (Click the covers down the side for the others, though it's only complete up to 17 at the moment.)

I've often wished for a guide to what the Case Files cover, too. Am I missing one? It would be best if it included a list of stories in each book, and dates when they were published. They do trade on nostalgia, after all, and it would be of value for people to be able to think: "Oh, that's when I was 14 and we lived in..." etc.

BARNEY has detailed listings of what's in all the case files, but I think a more general overview would be ideal ground for a Dredd primer anyway; it should at least do a mini-recap of major "historical events" like the Apocalypse War et al and link to the appropriate book to read about them.  (Also, the primer should enlighten people to the existence of BARNEY.  It's quite sad how many times a week I consult that to look things up.)

Just a pity the official site Wiki still isn't up.  I was half hoping we'd see it finally appear after this week's downtime.

Glad the FCBD comic did its job!  I came late to 2000 AD as well and have really been enjoying getting caught up.

There are jumping on progs every so often, where things are scheduled so that all five different stories are starting with a new part one at the same time.  There haven't been any for a while though: the last few were progs 1700, 1740 and 1750 (we're up to 1782 this week).  I started reading with 1740 personally, and if you're willing to go back a way, that's a particularly good place to start because it's the very beginning of the "Day of Chaos" storyline that's going on in Judge Dredd at the moment.

(On the other hand, plenty of people have started reading by just jumping in with the current issue and reading till it all starts to make sense, so that's a perfectly good approach too.  There's usually at least one story that's only just starting and easier than the others to get your teeth into.)

Dredd builds a lot on old continuity, so it's definitely good to read the case files.  Once the strip settles into its groove after the first couple of case file collections it gets very good very quickly and stays that way for a long time.  (Things did go through a bit of a rough patch in the 90s, which is the era being collected in the very latest case files at the moment.  But then it recovered and got awesome again.)  If you want a quick catch-up on the major background to the current stories, it's worth reading Origins (which retells a lot of the Judge Dredd world's early history, making it a good intro to the strip) and then Tour of Duty - The Backlash and Tour of Duty - Mega-City Justice.

The Megazine contains new material, though it also comes with a free 'floppy' of collected reprints.  In the current Megs you get a Judge Dredd story and three others, one or two of which are side stories also set in the Judge Dredd universe.  Plus there are a few magazine-type text articles: interviews with comic creators, reviews of sci-fi films, etc.  It's less "essential" than the prog and the Dredd stories tend to be more continuity-light, but it's great if you're hungry to read even more Dredd than you're getting from the progs.

I went into The Complete Indigo Prime uncertain how much I'd like it after being a bit lukewarm on the recent series in the prog, and absolutely fell in love with it.  Amazing stuff.