Some questions about the Judge Dredd universe

[JOE SOAP]

I'm looking for a story that hits Dredd where it really hurts, something that drives him to the brink of a total breakdown. Which story or stories matches that description?

Same answer as before: all the stories leading up to Necropolis during Chief Judge Silver's term.

Where can I read about Silver's period of governing, especially during the events that inflicts Dredd with doubts?

Judge Dredd Case Files 9-15.

http://www.2000ad.org/?zone=reprint&page=gnprofiles&choice=casefiles9

http://forums.2000adonline.com/index.php?topic=43912.210



Or you can go for the more recent Titan storyline which is a different type of brutalisation of Dredd but it's not quite what you're looking for so read the other suggestion.

https://www.amazon.com/Judge-Dredd-Titan-Rob-Williams/dp/1781084416

[JayzusB.Christ]

I'm looking for a story that hits Dredd where it really hurts, something that drives him to the brink of a total breakdown. Which story or stories matches that description?

It's really hard to know where to look if it exists a jungle out there. And really, I don't have time to read all the stories.

Well, I defended you a few posts ago about your second point here, which I totally understand.

But as for your question, I'm sorry, but jovus drokk, just read the bloody thread! Unless I'm much mistaken, Frank has explained to you in detail that this all happens in the lead-up to Necropolis.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Frank and a lot of other boarders, I mean.

[Sandman1]

Same answer as before: all the stories leading up to Necropolis during Chief Judge Silver's term.

Sure, but those events gave me the impression that it was all about his irresolution concerning the system, not something that hit him on a personal note. But I guess his sense of duty is like a lifelong passion for him.   

[Greg M.]

Sure, but those events gave me the impression that it was all about his irresolution concerning the system, not something that hit him on a personal note. But I guess his sense of duty is like a lifelong passion for him.

But that's entirely the point - Judge Dredd only challenges the system when something hits him personally. His ideology is, as I think Frank and others have said further up the thread, only ever shaken when he becomes sympathetic to an individual. Once that's happened, he's prone to making sweeping changes purely on the basis of those sympathies.

[TordelBack]

I'm looking for a story that hits Dredd where it really hurts, something that drives him to the brink of a total breakdown. Which story or stories matches that description?

Already cited above, but 'Error of Judgement' (Prog 388;  Casefiles 7, I think) is the story that fits this brief, and one of the most important stories for understanding Dredd's character, although it may not look like much on the surface: Dredd intervenes on behalf of a child* to fund medical treatment, with tragic consequences. In a similar vein is 'Letter to Judge Dredd', also referenced above.

More recent (and more flashy) incidents that put Dredd at the end of his rope are 'Titan' (Progs 1862-9; eponymous Rebellion TPB), and indeed 'Chaos Day'  (Progs 1787-8; collected in Day of Chaos: Endgame TPB).  You can't actually break Judge Dredd, but these stories give it one hell of a try.

*Interestingly Becky's injuries are a result of a chem pit, left over from the Apocalypse War. More guilt over past failures?

[JOE SOAP]

Sure, but those events gave me the impression that it was all about his irresolution concerning the system, not something that hit him on a personal note.

No, it's both: his concerns about the corruption in his own/Fargo's Bloodline, and the System, coalesce in the lead up to and including Necropolis. It's all personal for Dredd.

There's nothing better than reading the actual stories - Judge Dredd Case Files 9-15 - and it's better than forming abstract impressions second-hand.

[Frank]

I'm looking for a story that hits Dredd where it really hurts, something that drives him to the brink of a total breakdown. Which story or stories matches that description?

Same answer as before: all the stories leading up to Necropolis during Chief Judge Silver's term.

Judge Dredd Case Files 9-15.

Like the magic eightball, JOE SOAP is never wrong.

If six books is out of your price range, you could just buy Case Files 14 (plus The Dead Man standalone), which would fulfil your brief of showing Dredd at his lowest moment, but you'd miss out on the brilliant way all those different strands of story are pulled together and how Dredd decides to carry on, which really does take six books (and as many years) to resolve.

Don't take the word of internet nobodies, here's what Dredd scholar Douglas Wolk has to say about Necropolis itself. If you can spare the time, there's no better way to learn about the history of Judge Dredd than reading through Wolk's blog. It's a peerless study of John Wagner's development as a writer (SPOILERS, obviously):

"Necropolis" was the culmination of every major "Judge Dredd" plotline John Wagner had written over the past few years; it reads as if it had been intended to actually complete his run (more on that shortly). This volume--"Necropolis" and its lead-ins--is I think, the strongest so far in our trawl through the Dredd bibliography: smarter, bolder and more consistent than anything that led up to it, even the "Apocalypse War" sequence.

Back in the entry on Case Files 8, I was talking about how each of the Dredd epics somehow addresses the relationship between Dredd and the city. "Necropolis" is, effectively, the story of the city without Dredd: he appears only briefly before its final act, and everything up until then is the consequence of his leaving to be replaced by a version of himself who's technically better but not as attuned to the place and its history.

The city without Dredd (or, at least, without the promise of Dredd's return) is lost, almost immediately. Dredd's allegiance is to the law; Kraken's is to playing the part of a Judge. ("Like a Judge" is the key phrase in the way he keeps telling himself to act.)

You can also read "Necropolis" as a twisted variation on The Odyssey, with Kraken as its tormented Telemachus and Mega-City One as both Ithaca and Penelope. The slaughter of the possessed Judges is rather like Odysseus laying waste to the suitors--and by then Giant Jr. has revealed himself as a truer Telemachus than Kraken, the legitimate inheritor of both his actual father's legacy and Dredd's.

But the crucial moment of the story, for me, happens very early on, in chapter 3, as Kraken is reading Dredd's own copy of his "Comportment" and sees his handwritten annotation: "What about the big lie?" Wagner never directly follows up on that within this volume, but it echoes.

The big lie is the one behind the system itself: the claim that the Judges are entitled to power indefinitely, by whatever means necessary. Dredd knows it's a lie, and has always believed it anyway. The city loses him when he stops believing it for a little while, and it turns out that without the lie, the city is doomed.

Or maybe he's the one that's doomed. I have to wonder if Wagner thought he might kill Dredd off at some point --to be replaced by Kraken, or in some other way. By midway through "Necropolis," though, it's clear that Kraken's getting the chop--his failure is absolute--and, in fact, we see him with his missing hand in chapter 12, although it's not clear that that's what's happening from the way the image is framed.

I gather from Thrill-Power Overload and a few other sources that Wagner had been wanting to step away from the ongoing grind of Dredd for a while, although it turned out not to be that easy. It was another year after "Necropolis" before he officially handed the baton off to Garth Ennis with "The Devil You Know". In any case, Wagner seems to be thematically wrapping up his own run on Dredd in "Necropolis," bringing back a lot of the ideas and characters he'd created for one more appearance.

The "Tale of the Dead Man" sequence that opens this volume reintroduces a handful of inside-the-Judge-system concepts from earlier in the series: besides the Judda/"Bloodline" subplot and the democrats from the "Revolution" sequence, it touches on Dredd's "Comportment" (first mentioned way back in "The Making of a Judge"), and recalls Judge Minty (from Prog 147) and Judge Morphy from "A Question of Judgement."

Wagner's underscoring the idea that Judges have to be utterly loyal to each other and to the cause: the flash of insubordination that damns Kraken--"your time is over, old man"--contrasts with Dredd telling Morphy "you're not ready for the boneyard yet, sir." This story is absolutely crawling with daddy issues: Kraken's rejection of Dredd is a son's rejection of his father--but his actual father figure is Odell (who's willing to die for him), as Dredd's is Morphy (who does die in front of him).

One other note on "Tale of the Dead Man": the bit about how Dredd gets to keep his Lawmaster bike "as a special privilege" is covering up for the slip-up in "The Dead Man" where Dredd finds the ruins of his bike. (It's usually "the Long Walk," not "the Long Ride"!) Will Simpson's art on the first part of the sequence is, as usual, a little too delicate for Dredd; aside from one Megazine story, he didn't draw Dredd again until "The Chief Judge's Man" more than a decade later. As for Jeff Anderson's episodes... well, they don't look jarringly different from Simpson's.

And then Carlos Ezquerra shows up to start kicking ass for the rest of the book. "By Lethal Injection," the first of his long sequence here, is as perfectly arranged a piece of work as Wagner and Ezquerra have ever done.

The second page (above) is a great example of what they were up to, one fantastically well-executed image and storytelling shortcut after another: Odell framed in Kraken's doorway as a watercolored silhouette without black lines (echoed in the next chapter when Kraken wakes up), the shadow of Odell's cane, Kraken pulling on his boots and adjusting his belt for what he believes will be the last time, the little splotch of blue and red that sets off Odell's head where no background's really necessary (and the way the light makes the side of his head open up the border of the page), the yellow-lit sequence of Kraken and Odell walking toward the deputy principal's office (with their earlier conversation continuing over it to get there faster), the refrain of Kraken thinking of Odell's oldness (the same charge he'd leveled against Dredd)... it's entirely a talking-heads sequence, but Ezquerra makes it so foreboding and suspenseful that it's as thrilling as the chaos of "Necropolis" proper.

"By Lethal Injection" is also a master class in Wagner's strengths of narrative compression and shock-after-shock--there's some twist in the story on nearly every page, some of them whoa moments, especially Kraken grabbing the syringe.

And the punch line of the story, the revelation of the badge--the same image that provided cliffhangers in "The Shooting Match" and "The Dead Man"--is accompanied by dialogue that cuts off in mid-sentence for an additional aaah what's gonna happen next effect. It's clear what Kraken's about to say, but just think how much less dramatic it would be if he actually said it on panel.

Points to Ezquerra, too, for the way he draws Kraken as having a younger version not just of Dredd's face but of his body. And I absolutely love the way he uses color in "Necropolis": massive blurts of purples and greens and reds, the red of Dredd's helmet the only consistent tone, everything else shifting from one register to another like a bruise.

(Anderson's face is pale blue for most of the story, because why not.) I sometimes get frustrated by Ezquerra's airbrushed-looking computer coloring of recent years; the thick, juicy colors here are so much more blunt and satisfying.

"Necropolis" itself is an intense, frantically paced story, but it's also the most strangely structured of any of Wagner's Dredd epics this side of "The Judge Child Quest."

The way the back cover of this volume describes the plot is that "The Big Meg is under siege from the Dark Judges, Dredd has been exiled to the harsh wastelands of the Cursed Earth, and time is running out for the citizens he once swore to protect. With the body count rising and hope running out, will the Judges be able to turn back the tide of death?"

That's a straightforward way of describing what happens--but it's not actually what we see on the page. The first act of the story is actually about the decline and fall of Kraken: it's a psychological thriller in which the protagonist is gradually losing his mind, and Anderson and Agee are brought in as near-primary players. (We don't actually see Dredd at all for the first 11 chapters of the story.)

It's a little odd that this story brings in Kit Agee only to corrupt and dispatch her. Notably, though, she serves exactly the same function as Judge Corey did in Alan Grant's early Judge Anderson stories, and also seems to have picked up Anderson's habit of referring to the Chief Judge as "CJ." Corey was off the board at that point, having killed herself in "Leviathan's Farewell" about a year earlier; anybody happen to know if Agee was originally supposed to be Corey and got rewritten/redrawn sometime during the process of constructing "Necropolis"?

Act two starts in chapter 12 with the big symbolic splash (of the city overtaken by a smear of festering greenness), with two red splashes on it: one of the inset panels is about the escapees from the gates of the city, one about the death of Silver.

That's the meat of the story as it would ordinarily be described--but immediately after the Dark Judges show up (and we get that weird image of Kraken turning away from them and pumping his right, Lawgiver-less fist at us), Wagner elides over the effects of what they've been up to as hearsay. We don't even get a representative scene of the conflict, as we did with the "Dan Tanna Junction" sequence in "The Apocalypse War."

And the ambiguity of what's happened to Silver leaves the gaps that Wagner subsequently started filling in with "Theatre of Death" (and that Garth Ennis filled in some more with "Return of the King").

After that opening scene, we finally get back to Dredd (for the first time in four months), in a Cursed Earth setting that Wagner and Ezquerra are once again playing as a fairly straight Wild West scenario, then to McGruder--the redesign with the goatee is pretty brilliant--and the Benedict Arnold Citi-Def group. (How many British readers would even know who Benedict Arnold was?)

But once it's been established that Dredd and McGruder have teamed up, the story of them getting back to the city isn't where the action is, so after the scene-shift provided by the Dark Judges' morning newscast (Wagner can't resist parodying the tone of public service announcements, not that anyone would want him to resist it), we move on to the lengthy sequence with the cadets. (Led, of course, by young Giant, who's got some father issues of his own.)

The cadets give us another image of the city without Dredd-as-the-Law, and another image of children without parent figures; they also give Wagner an opportunity to show us a bunch of high-energy scenes while two of the story's protagonists are in a rowboat and two others are comatose.

The plot mechanics require that McGruder and Dredd meet up with Anderson and compare notes--but, of course, the setup of the story makes it very difficult for them to get to the same place, and the mobile judges are in a trip-through-the-underworld situation rather than one that permits much suspense or action. When they finally hit the Big Smelly, the full-page splash panel Ezquerra draws feels like a sigh of exhaustion rather than a revelation.

And, again, a big scene that would've taken a while to show is elided over: Anderson wakes up, and there's Dredd, who's met up with the cadets and somehow convinced them that he's not under the Dark Judges' influence, despite the way he looks now.

The third act is a short one, just the final seven chapters: Dredd and his little crew retake Control (and jeez, Giant's pretty cold-blooded about killing Judges), they get rid of the Sisters by killing Kit, they reinstate McGruder, they dispense with the Dark Judges, and at last we get that jaw-dropping confrontation between Dredd and Kraken, who once again faces death without flinching.

"Necropolis" has to have required even more careful timing than "The Apocalypse War": this time, Ezquerra drew 31 consecutive episodes in full color, all of which were published on time. (Remember, "The Apocalypse War" missed a week, and shifted to black-and-white only, near its end.)

And just before "Necropolis" ended, the Megazine launched, with Wagner and Ezquerra's "Al's Baby" in its first batch of issues. I'm guessing that at least some of "Al's Baby" had been drawn earlier (as I understand, it had been prepared for Toxic!, then rejected by Pat Mills, and the introductory page of the first episode was clearly grafted on after the fact--although Toxic! didn't launch until half a year after "Necropolis" ended). Still, that is one hell of a lot of work for a single artist.

So it's not entirely surprising that Ezquerra only drew a handful of covers over the course of "Necropolis," although one of them is among his best (that terrifying shot of Kraken preparing to "execute" himself). Ezquerra has all but disappeared from 2000 AD's covers over the second half of its run to date: believe it or not, he's only drawn six Dredd covers for the weekly since the end of "Necropolis," plus a couple more for the Megazine.

Maybe it's that his sensibility isn't quite in line with what post-1990 comic book covers are supposed to look like, but that's a shame: Ezquerra has more raw power than nearly any other contemporary cartoonist I can think of.

http://dreddreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/complete-case-files-14.html

[terryworld]

ok "sandman" i've got a question for you.
WHY do you want to know all this? i might be wrong, but the impression i get is that you have some kind of idea for creating your own thing based off judge dredd. after 21 pages, we are CLEARLY past the "hey guys, can you recommend a good JD book?" stage.
you are asking SPECIFIC questions about SPECIFIC things. what is it? video game? spec script? fan fic?

a few boarders seemed a bit p.o'd with me for saying "just read the bloody books", and mentioned that it cost money to buy them. you have said something along the lines of not having time to read them.

well sorry if it puts a few noses out of joint, but i suggest the best way to get a feel for dredd is to actually invest a bit of time and money into the books. spend some cash. take some time. it's not like we're talking about DC rebirth or marvel secret wars here, these are some of the best damn comic books of the last 40 years.

if peeps are wondering why i'm being so narky about this, it's because i like my dredd intellectual property coming from rebellion, and that's where i put my galactic groats.

[JayzusB.Christ]

ok "sandman" i've got a question for you.
WHY do you want to know all this? i might be wrong, but the impression i get is that you have some kind of idea for creating your own thing based off judge dredd. after 21 pages, we are CLEARLY past the "hey guys, can you recommend a good JD book?" stage.
you are asking SPECIFIC questions about SPECIFIC things. what is it? video game? spec script? fan fic?

a few boarders seemed a bit p.o'd with me for saying "just read the bloody books", and mentioned that it cost money to buy them.

That was me, but I certainly wasn't pissed off with anyone. As for what sandman is doing with this information, he's already said it. 

https://forums.2000adonline.com/index.php?topic=43912.msg936955#msg936955

[terryworld]

"I'm contemplating over a concept in an action role-playing game set in the Dredd universe."

I'll wait for Rebellion's version of that thanks.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Fair enough.

[JayzusB.Christ]

...though I will add that as long as he's not making money out of it, then I say more power to him. Judge Minty wasn't a Rebellion product, and nor was the Horned God fan-made mock-trailer, and both were excellent.

[Frank]

a few boarders seemed a bit p.o'd with me ... well sorry if it puts a few noses out of joint, but ... if peeps are wondering why i'm being so narky about this ...

I speak for everyone here when I say Terryworld sounds like a lovely place; soft, fluffy, and straight from the tumble dryer.

It would be a shame if the luxuriant plumpness and violet petal scent of this downy paradise was ruined by carelessly trailing our belt in the bathroom puddle of baseless accusations.

Dressing gowns; not dressing downs.

[Frank]

... those events gave me the impression that it was all about his irresolution concerning the system, not something that hit him on a personal note. But I guess his sense of duty is like a lifelong passion for him

... it's both: his concerns about the corruption in his own/Fargo's Bloodline, and the System, coalesce in the lead up to and including Necropolis. It's all personal for Dredd

His ideology is ... shaken when he becomes sympathetic to an individual

It's easy to believe in the big lie when it applies to an undifferentiated crowd. It's more difficult to deceive yourself when you see how that lie applies to an individual*.

Outwardly, Dredd projects belief in the lie at the centre of the system he embodies. Reading between the lines, he's afraid to take a day off or go to sleep, because that's when his dead dad and brother force him to confront the truth he's spent his life running from.

Dredd's only purpose - what he was literally born (cloned) to do - is enforce the law in MC1. The reason Necropolis and Tale Of The The Dead Man are so catastrophic for Dredd is that they strip him of his only reason to exist.


* Hopefully TordelBack won't mind if I cite the example he shared of a family member who opposes immigration because they are all spongeing layabouts ... but won't hear a bad word said about the only immigrant she knows personally, who she thinks of as an individual.