Heavy Metal Dredd

[WhizzBang]

My local record shop here in Malmö, Sweden has a copy of 'Heavy Metal Dredd' in its window for 75 SEK (that is £6.75 in real money). Now, I am not worried about the price as this is obviously not much but I don't want t add another piece of clutter to small flat if I can avoid it so is this worth reading?

I do not know what it is and the cover along with the phrase 'heavy metal' put me off, but John Wagner's name is on the cover so it may be a fun a read. Has anyone got this and can say what it is like? If all the stories are already collected in Case Files then I can ignore it.

[JayzusB.Christ]

Hmmm. Hard to say - don't expect any depth or complexity; they're just ultraviolent, dark-humoured short pieces of brain-candy, if that's your thing.  They do have the attraction of having Bisley on art duties, though they're far from his best strips.  Some of them, in fact, are probably his worst.  That said, I bought a collection of them a long time ago, and liked it.  I've since list it, though, and don't miss it THAT much.

[Colin YNWA]

If you do a Google Search for Heavy Metal Dredd and look at the images you get most the pages from the first story and they give you a very good impression of what these are.

Its been a while since I read them. In my head they represent John Wagner doing Miller and Morrison's misunderstanding of his own Dredd if that makes sense. All the hard ultra-violence, Wagner gets better dark humour in there, but there's little of the nuiance.

[Funt Solo]

A man once wrote:

These one-offs start out with some obvious link to rock music (the first is Dredd as a song, the second riffs on Pinball Wizard, the third references Ozzy Ozbourne) but then that either gets forgotten altogether or just obscure enough that you might not notice.

[WhizzBang]

Thanks for the replies, I think I will ive it a miss.

[james newell]

Heavy Metal Dredd is great fun, most of the strips have been reprinted, but poorly, if it's an older edition GN edition slightly larger than a4 then it might be worth adding to your collection.

[IndigoPrime]

I think it's a bloody awful collection. It's the kind of thing people think Dredd is (mindless bloody violence) rather than having humour, nuance and good writing. (HMD has a few exceptions, but it's *at best* amusing, inconsequential and entirely forgettable.)

[JayzusB.Christ]

There were also some interesting ones with art by John Hicklenton and / or scripts by John Smith.  I suspect they're not included in that collection, but my god, there were some horrific scenes in those ones.  Those two Johns were made for each other.

[rogue69]

The "Heavy Metal" name was due to them being printed first in the international music mag Rock Power.
In the book Simon Bisley states that "it was Steve McManus who gave me the call to arms; Heavy Metal Dredd, no limits,  separate and aggressive Dredd world that gets the point across". It was not meant to be seen as part of the regular Dredd universe, when it was featured in the Megazine they fielded a year's worth of complaints which became known as "the violence debate"

[IndigoPrime]

I remember trudging through the strips in the Mega Collection. They were bad enough as standalones. Read one after another, they're like being repeatedly punched by mediocre lowest common denominator storytelling.

[Rogue Judge]

I'm a pretty easy fan to please...I enjoy most things Dredd to some extent. With that said, I did not enjoy the majority of Heavy Metal Dredd.

[Richard]

Most of it is shit. There are a couple of good ones.