What's the general consensus on Judge Anderson?

[Judge Brian]

What's the general consensus on Judge Anderson, both Character & Strip? Do you think Alan Grant his handling her well?

To this American reader Anderson is as much of the world of Mega-City 1 as Dredd is. She (& Judge Death) first appeared in Eagle's Judge Dredd #1 & returned in issue #3. She was the Star of 2000Ad Monthly here in America & befriended Batman in Judgement on Gotham. She seems like an integral part of the life of Judge Dredd.

Except she isn't.

She's a fairly minor player in Dredd's history if you look at all the Progs & the Meg. Her stories don't seem to effect life in MC1 in the Dredd strip the way his do her stories. The story Crusade should have at least as much impact as Robot Wars had, but 15 million children leaving MC1 doesn't seem to matter when it happens in Anderson's strip.

[PsychoGoatee]

Well, continuity is one thing. Pointing out Anderson stories aren't effecting Dredd isn't really a criticism on the Anderson stories.

Pretty much, continuity even within Dredd itself has at times been imperfect, not every story seems reflected in future stories etc. So while maybe I don't expect anything earthshattering in Anderson, overall I do often find it to be a very solid title. I've especially enjoyed the recent stuff with Boo Cook on art etc. And back in the day various ones with Arthur Ranson etc. Even if they're just their own thing, taken for what they are I'd say they're good.

The whole "important" stories thing and the continuity topic is always a thing people have different views on. I'm more in the camp that what matters is if it's good. But it is true it'd be nice to feel like there's some change over the years and that changes stick.

But that said, I would like to see Anderson featured as a part more in the main Dredd series as well. She is in the upcoming Wagner/Staples Judge Death story Dark Justice, so that's very cool.

[Simon Beigh]

One of the things I like about 2000 AD is that it establishes a 'universe', like Mega City One, and then has different strips with different characters from that 'universe'. So rather than it all being about Dredd, we get to see other characters and other places. BTW, this is why I like the Megazine so much. Judge Anderson is one of my favourite such characters.

I am reading some of her early adventures, and they are quite well intertwined with the stuff happening in Dredd. Most of all, though, she is tangled up with Judge Death. Jay D is often portrayed as Dredd's nemesis, but the connection he has to the 22nd Century Earth is strongest through Anderson.

In my current Meg re-read, I am enjoying the Grant/Ranson stories where Anderson is in a coma and battling her nemesis in different realms of reality. Because of her PSI abilities, there are many different paths Grant can take the character down - and it's this diversity that makes it compelling.

She also is quite human - in stark contrast to Dredd. Because of her PSI abilities, she feels much more. In one of the episodes I am reading in Case Files 1 she is very shook up by the death of a colleague, something Dredd wouldn't bat an eyelid at. She is irreverent, has a classic exclamation (Grud on a Greenie!) and is drawn differently by every artist who draws her (again, unlike Dredd). My favourites are Roach and Ewins.

So - yeah- I like a bit of Anderson! And think she adds a different dimension to the classic alpha-male storylines set in the Mega City One context.

[Frank]

John Wagner doesn't read other writers' Dredd or Dredd world stories, and that includes Alan Grant. I think that's one of the reasons Grant took Sandra tripping across the galaxy for so long - so he could involve her in large scale and important stories without having to explain why Dredd wasn't involved, and vice versa. The tone Grant (and Arthur Ranson in particular) established for the strip was so radically different from Dredd that their seeming to take place in a different world never seems like a problem to me, though.

The story where the thing calling itself Satan showed up is a great example - same thing happened in the Dredd strip a few years previously, and Dredd just cubed him like any other perp in a story which was full of laughs and knockabout fun. The equivalent Anderson tale was not full of laughs.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

Far too many artists draw her really really differently. Is she 20? Is she 50? She's blonde anyway. To some she'll always be the primary excuse for pin-up tittage and bizarre hard nippling - which is always jarring given how maudlin most of her stories are.

A slew of brilliant artists has kept me watching although recently she's become quite one-note and less and less relevant in the Dreddworld with every story, no matter how universe shattering, not seeming to affect anything beyond Caz's increasingly buggered psyche... poor woman.

Doesn't matter, unzip those leathers and lets see some CLEAAVAGE YEEAHHHH. WOOP WOOOP.

[radiator]

Personally, I love Anderson's early appearances in Judge Dredd and the first 10ish years of her solo series are essential stuff if you're a Dredd fan. I think she peaked around the early nineties with the Jesus Syndrome/Childhoods End/Satan arc. Her story arc seemed to reach a natural conclusion after the Wonderwall/Crusade storyline, and it sounds harsh, but since then IMO she's been treading water and going through the motions. IMO the only worthwhile things she's appeared in post-2000 have been My Name is Death and the Dredd Doomsday epic.

[radiator]

...and the Dredd movie, of course!

[Link Prime]

I'd agree with most of the above.
'Satan' was certainly the last time I enjoyed reading an Anderson story.
Sadly, probably the last time I enjoyed reading an Alan Grant story too.

The relevance she had to Dredd's world ended around the same time, and will never be recaptured IMO.
Movie Anderson is of course a different story- if the sequel goes ahead she'll surely be an integral character.

[Frank]

I defer to the peerless Douglas Wolk in everything but his fondness for Steve Sampson's art:

"Anderson was very popular as a supporting character, obviously--of all the supporting characters in Dredd's stories she was the one who most seemed like a natural to spin off into her own feature. (It may be less that she's a great character on her own than that she's a great foil for Dredd: irreverent, inexact, emotional, and totally on the same page as he is.) Still, it's not clear to me as a reader why it initially seemed like having a second Judge-based series in the weekly was a good idea. It might have been a way of dealing with reader demands for more Dark Judges and more Anderson without having to do another "Dredd fights Judge Death" story--the stakes for the first two were pitched high enough that it couldn't have been easy to find another angle.


The question Alan Grant (and sometimes John Wagner) faced after that, though, was what kinds of stories it was possible to tell with her that it wasn't possible to tell in the context of Dredd's own series. Supernatural stuff, obviously, and squishy psychic phenomena, since those are hard to square up with the Dredd premise of "contemporary American cultural trends taken to outlandish extremes in a sci-fi context." (But that means they're also hard to square up with the Mega-City One setting.)


One other answer was that Judge Anderson could simply act as a second channel for Judge Dredd: adding to the backstory and moving characters into position. Anderson's first full-on serial, "Four Dark Judges," followed up on "Judge Death Lives," and established a basis for future Judge Death plots; "The Hour of the Wolf" set up the idea that the Apocalypse War wasn't so much the conclusive end of a cold war as the instigating event of a very long chain of resentment and revenge.


After Wagner's departure from the Judge Anderson feature, though, Grant's writing takes a significant dip. It's hard to make Anderson the focal point for satire like Dredd, so the stories don't tend to be particularly funny (the demon ram in "Triad" seems to have wandered over from a Dredd story, and seems far out of place). Anderson's not an action hero most of the time, either, and "very serious police procedurals about a psychic future cop" isn't a particularly exciting hook. And the flashes of sexiness don't quite fit either: Cass's shower scene in "Engram" just comes off as pandering


It's interesting how drastically different those early stories are from the material in this volume--the feature went very quickly from being "supernatural-themed Dredd-world stories with a less charismatic protagonist who can resolve any short plot by willing the problem to be fixed" to the more meditative, dreamy/trippy tone of the color stories collected here. I normally tend to like Grant's "I've been reading some interesting books lately--let me tell you about them!" tendencies, but the idea that Chariots of the Gods? was right on the money, and that now the aliens in question are coming back to kill us all, gives us those tendencies at their worst.


Grant apparently lost some enthusiasm for writing the series after "Crusade". I rarely love the particular ways that Grant engages with enormous issues of philosophy and religion and human experience here--but I do very much like that he decided that this series about a nebulously psychic, distinctly callipygian future cop was going to be his vehicle to engage with those issues, damn it all, and I totally love the way that he makes these stories vehicles for artists to engage with them.


"Crusade" is a shining example of something Grant does terrifically well: figure out what artists can draw beautifully and build a script around that. The art saves "Wonderwall" from collapsing under the weight of the series' tics: the Children Good! Child Abusers Bad! gavel-pounding , the forced wordplay, the rundown of what Grant had been reading lately, the straw-man role of Judge Goon, and the general doing-of-the-obvious: if I never see Alice in Wonderland used as an image of the fragility of childhood innocence again, it'll be too soon".


http://dreddreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/judge-anderson-psi-files-volume-01.html

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/judge-anderson-psi-files-volume-02.html

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/judge-anderson-psi-files-volume-03_20.html

[shaolin_monkey]

Steve Dillon's Anderson in City of the Damned is probably my favourite rendition, thought I can't quite put my finger on why. Despite the flowing locks I think maybe she looked a little less 'sexy' than other portrayals, and I think that helped make her case as a hardcore Judge, albeit an emotionally troubled one. 

[Link Prime]

Steve Dillon's Anderson in City of the Damned is probably my favourite rendition, thought I can't quite put my finger on why. Despite the flowing locks I think maybe she looked a little less 'sexy' than other portrayals, and I think that helped make her case as a hardcore Judge, albeit an emotionally troubled one.

You're a man of enhanced taste.

[Greg M.]

'Satan' was certainly the last time I enjoyed reading an Anderson story.

I would have to agree too - 'Satan' wasn't perfect, but it had some great art, and some memorable moments (Judge Dredd's admission that Anderson is his friend, for instance.) Though clearly Anderson is a perfectly strong character in her own right, I feel that keeping her and Joe so separate means we miss out on a lot of opportunities for her to play a major and quite unique role. She's his oldest friend, she's a bit liberal, she's not a clone and she's never been his boss - he hasn't got anyone else like her in his life. If Dredd now wants to reform the whole system, who better to help? Throw Judge Beeny into the mix and you'd have a lot of possibilities.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

I think this recent Talbot cover is very close to perfect -



Also Ranson... I miss his Anderson most of all I think. She always seemed very human.





and yet... the top google image search is always this fanart...

[A.Cow]

Unfortunately an over-reliance on Anderson's psi abilities limits the strip badly.

We end up with too many stories of fantasy-world war in someone's head ("if you die in here you die in real life too" -- yawn) or clumsy attempts at epoch-threatening epics.

[The Adventurer]

Conceptually I love Anderson. But I honestly don't think I've ever read an Anderson story that's really blown me away.

I hate to say it, but I think its time someone not Alan Grant got a whack at her. I'm actually really hoping she has a large role in John Wagner's upcoming Dark Justice story. And was quite unhappy when she didn't warrant even a cameo in Trifecta. With all the memory blocks and rogue Psis running around, you'd think she would have been the perfect ace in the hole/secret weapon.