Some questions about the Judge Dredd universe

[JOE SOAP]

Then there are the lesser charted years - after Origins - which afford the chance to fuck more with the design. -

The Cop

[Frank]

How many different variations of the classic suit has Dredd used over the years? I mean regular attire during street patrolling, not space suits and any other special suits.

Only one that I can think of*, and only for a laugh at the expense of costume changes for comic characters.


* A Whole New Dredd, by Al Ewing and David Roach

[Steve Green]

Do capes count?

[Steve Green]

The jimp story was The Edgar Case, progs 1589-95. There's a line something like "the regalia had changed some over the years, but it would do."

Cheers Richard

[Frank]

Do capes count?

What goes on in Luna-1 stays in Luna-1.

[JOE SOAP]

Do capes count?

Yes

[Dash Decent]

Grant Morrison once had a huge statue that had previously been shown facing onto the Atlantic ocean topple over and destroy the city's West wall (Inferno, prog 850).

It was just a really, really, really tall statue and it was so big that when it fell over in the east it was horizontally long enough to reach the west and smash the wall.

The drawings might make it look like it couldn't possibly be that big but that's just a case of the artist not getting GM's visionary storytelling.  It might look like it was facing the wrong way too but that's just a case of previous artists not laying the groundwork for GM's visionary story telling.

Alternatively it was a replica put up to attract tourists, or it was established as a back up base for the PSU, whose charter only allows them to hide out in Judge-shaped buildings.

Or something.

[JayzusB.Christ]

I liked Inferno at the time, and thought it was a welcome relief from the Millar and Ennis stuff that had been dogging the prog for years.

Rereading it though, it really doesn't hold up, but at least Dredd sounds like Dredd in it. (Morrison's always been good at dialogue, whereas Ennis hadn't quite got there yet.)

[Frank]

Dredd sounds like Dredd in it. Morrison's always been good at dialogue

That's a good point, but the tone of the strip wasn't Dredd.

Morrison's big on surfing the zeitgeist, and - as far as pop culture was concerned - 1993 was the cheesey parting shot of the eighties action hero*, before they aged out and opened a restaurant, like footballers whose knees had gone.

In pop music, it's easy to draw parallels between Morrison's over inflated retread of tyred (sic) Dredd epic tropes and the camp self-parody of Meatloaf and the Pet Shop Boys, or the retro pastiche of The Spin Doctors and 4 Non Blondes (shudder).

End of the road meets Middle of the Road, but the last flowering of Carlos Ezquerra's beautiful hand coloured art made Inferno heaven to look at:




* Although what I find most interesting about that list is how middle of the road it is - the top ten is mostly middle brow dramas for middle aged consumers. The only corporate schlock in the top ten is the dinosaur franchise, with the cartoony Stallones and Schwarzenegger pushed out to the margins

[Smith]

Actually,IIRC,one Wagners story right after Inferno has the Statue of Justice intact.So it could have been a different statue?Or Wagner just ignored Inferno.

[Greg M.]

Wagner doesn't ignore Inferno - he references it in 'Giant', and rebuilds the Statue in Prog 954.

[Sandman1]

As to reasons why Dredd, as a character has never really caught on in the US? My own theory is that Dredd, unlike the vast majority of comic characters, has had at least half(?) of his stories written by one guy - John Wagner. And Wagner's writing style, with its eccentricities and oddball sense of humour, is a bit of an acquired taste. I think a lot of people come to Dredd on the assumption that it's much heavier and more dour than it is.

I think it's hard for most "foreign" comic characters to crack the US.

Or maybe Dredd needs to be involved in a really great project in order to bump up the interest for the character, like his own version of The Dark Knight Trilogy.

They do wear them as raincloaks. Dredd wore the cloak in The Connection - both before and after he went outside city walls.

So he has used it in the big city. That's nice to know.     

[JayzusB.Christ]

Dredd sounds like Dredd in it. Morrison's always been good at dialogue

That's a good point, but the tone of the strip wasn't Dredd.

True. Wagner's epics were becoming infused with a kind of brooding introspection, which worked wonderfully and made possible the seamless flow from Oz through Necropolis to the culmination of the democracy storyline.   Inferno just ignored everything except the look of the characters (Grice, for example, was a fiercely pro-Judge political player in Wagner's hands, while Millar and Morrison simply disregarded all his traits and made him an anarchistic psychopathic.)

I still way prefer Inferno to Judgement Day all the same.

[Smith]

Well,It was still better then the Crusade.Thou,thats not saying much.

[Richard]

I loved Inferno when I first read it, but I hadn't read many Dredd stories at the time. Since then it's lost most of its appeal for me, because the script is pretty ropey. But Ezquerra did his best ever art on that story, and it's just beautiful to look at. Now when I see it I just try to ignore the speech balloons and concentrate in the art. There's no other story where I've been tempted to do that.