Judge Death: Death Lives!

(Reprints Judge Dredd stories from 2000 AD Progs 149-151, 224-228, 700-701, 901-902, and 1000-1006, and from Judge Dredd Megazine #3.02-3.07)

We've got another special guest this week. David Wolkin is not, in fact, me, although we are frequently mistaken for each other in print for understandable reasons. He's the Executive Director of the Jewish learning organization Limmud NY, proprietor of Wolkin's House of Chicken and Waffles (and Comics), and a Twitter personality. I had the pleasure of talking with David about Judge Death: Death Lives!, the first themed collection published as part of the current U.S. Simon & Schuster Dredd reprint series. 

DAVID: Approaching this book with the eyes of a relative novice from the Dreddian perspective has been an interesting exercise for me. I'll say upfront that I happen to be a fan of the critically and commercially disastrous 1995 film for two reasons:

1. The idea of a post-futuristic version of "Cop and a Half" with Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider in the title roles appeals to me. 

2. I am biologically compelled to watch and enjoy any movie starring Armand Assante. To prove this statement, I will share that on a recent vacation to Hawaii, I was preparing to go to the beach, but was delayed by 2 hours once I saw that Assante's "The Odyssey" was playing on Syfy. 

I am not kidding about either of these things even a little bit.

I feel that it's always essential to share my background (or lack thereof) when it comes to cultural commentary so that potential readers can have an honest understanding of where I'm coming from. I may lack the capacity to fully appreciate these stories in their broader context, and I may be more qualified to talk about the incredibly handsome Armand Assante than I am the exploits of one Joseph Dredd. BUT: we reside in a culture in which people excel at taking everything out of context, so none of you have the right to judge (Dredd) me. I'd hold that pun in the last sentence against me, though. 

As someone who has sort of fallen in love with British comics though reading collections of Charley's War, I want to address a larger question of form before I get into the meat of this.  I'm at a point in my comics reading career where I definitely don't care for the mainstream superhero stuff like I used to. I can spend 4 bucks, buy 22 pages of story, and proceed to read a comic in which it seems like next to nothing happens. But then I can read five pages of a Dredd story (or any 2000 AD prog, for that matter) and be utterly satisfied, no matter when it was created. There's something about this limitation that has trained the creators to truly pack everything they can into a story. Guess I'm a compression guy now. 

But let's get to the nonsense, son. 

I loved just about every part of this collection. I'm inclined to wonder if my lack of context affected my enjoyment in anyway, because it's interesting to learn what a big deal these characters are in Dredd mythology (or are they?). I read in that interview you sent me that the last time these Dark Judges appeared, it was in a story with Batman. So I'd say that the first strike against this collection is that Batman never showed up. Nor was there anything remotely resembling Armand Assante. Strike two. 

NEVERTHELESS:

I dig Judges Death Fear, Fire, and Mortis. Like, I dig them, the way maybe Lenny Bruce used to ask his audience to dig things (I don't know what this means). But I was struck by the fact that they were simultaneously terrifying and just totally ridiculous, and even moreso by the way they evolved into caricatures of themselves over time, even though they started out as caricatures in the first place. I don't even know what to say about "The Three Amigos," but I know I loved it. Like, I think I need a tutor to explain Clinton Box to me. And I read grown up books!

On a deeper note, I'm somewhat struck by the metaphysical implications of these characters, and my mind kept being drawn back to the Rabbi Neal Gillman's groundbreaking theological work in "The Death of Death". If I remember correctly, that's a book about the broader eschatological claims implied by Biblical texts that suggest a time in which everyone will come back to life. 

That would be the perfect time for the Dark Judges to show up, come to think of it. 

What you got, Douglas?

DOUGLAS: Man, just wait until you see "Judgement Day," whose premise is that an evil magician brings everyone back to life... as zombies.

One thing that's interesting to me about the material collected in here is the tension between what the readers want--their favorite characters, over and over again--and what John Wagner's interested in giving them. I suspect that, given the chance, most mainstream comics publishers would bring back the Dark Judges every few months, like the Joker. Leaving them offstage for 13 years means that their return a couple of weeks ago really did have dramatic impact.

The most eyebrow-raising revelation in this recent John Wagner interview is that Wagner hadn't intended to use the Dark Judges in "Day of Chaos"--which means that "Day of Chaos" isn't the "Dark Judges return" story, which means I have even less of an idea of where it's headed, which is awesome. The takeaway other people seem to have gotten from the interview is "all four are going to be reunited"; I don't know if "if I can find a way to make it work..." quite counts as that. But it does mean that Wagner's mulling over post-"Day of Chaos" stories--that's excellent news!

Still, Wagner mentions another conflict that gets near the heart of both what's wonderful about his writing and what sometimes undermines it: that his impulse is always to go for black comedy. Even the first Judge Death story has undiluted moments of comedy in it; its plot-resolving MacGuffin calls back to "Palais de Boing," which is as silly an episode as Dredd has ever seen. What gives the Dark Judges their impact is that they're absolutely terrifying, both in conception and in design (that sheep skull!)--I dig them too. But they're so serious that Wagner often can't resist sticking banana peels in front of them, especially Death. When they turn up in the middle of "Necropolis," it's a freezing thrill; when they turn up in Batman/Judge Dredd: Die Laughing, it's a "here ya go! just the way you like it!" moment. David Brothers and I talked about The Life and Death of... here last year, and noted the way Death eventually becomes a burlesque of himself when Wagner can't raise the stakes of his appearances any longer.

Consider the publishing context of the post-Brian Bolland stories here. "The Three Amigos" is straight-up fan-service: Death and Mean Machine Angel were two of the Dredd nemeses that readers loved best, and their team-up was intended to lead off the first issue of the relaunched Judge Dredd Megazine in 1995, to tie in with the movie. (It ran so late in production that a couple of short fill-in episodes appeared in the first issue instead, and "The Three Amigos" began with the second issue.) Wagner had killed off the entire Angel Gang at the end of their initial appearance in "The Judge Child," then resurrected Mean Machine a bit later. The whole gang appeared in the movie, though, so Pa and Junior were brought back in this one (with some more explanation in Prog 958's "Awakening of Angels," published the same week as the fifth episode); Wagner later admitted that that was "a step too far." For the most part, in Judge Dredd stories, dead means dead (or at least "kinda dead").

"Dead Reckoning" (after which this blog wasn't deliberately named...) began in 2000 AD #1000, a year later. You can imagine Wagner realizing that he needs to write a big story for the big round number, scraping to work up a Judge Death plot he hadn't done already: maybe if Dredd went to his world... but wait, isn't everyone on it already dead? Well, if he goes to the past of that world... And then he figures out that he can put Death in a little-old-lady dress and wig, and that's amusing enough to get things in motion. Meanwhile, like "The Three Amigos" before it, it had to put Judge Death back in exactly the same box at the end, just to keep the continuity straight for the long, long, long-delayed Die Laughing. Since Wagner habitually leaves major characters in a significantly different place at the end of long stories, both of these seem more like treadmill exercises than they would otherwise. Very nice Greg Staples art on "Dead Reckoning," though. I see how the offer of some more might tempt Wagner to get the band back together.

"Theatre of Death" is really an epilogue to "Necropolis," and Ron Smith drawing it is one more callback to the first act of the series that "Necropolis" ended. It's a little curtain call after that grand finale, leaving open the question of whether the fall of Chief Judge Silver really happened that way at all (Garth Ennis later argued that it didn't). And "Judge Death: The True Story" revisits the territory of old age, infirmity and mortality that Wagner had been poking at since "Alzheimer's Block," and that was particularly a focus of his around this time (see also "Bury My Knee at Wounded Heart" and "Return of the Taxidermist")--that "oh well, they were just old people, NBD" conclusion is brutal.

And as for narrative compression: hell yes. That first Judge Death story is fifteen pages long, and more happens in it than in three issues of any mainstream book published right now except maybe Casanova. Even now, 2000 AD stories tend to be very densely packed, maybe because decompression was never an option for its format. It takes a lot of work to significantly advance a plot in a four-to-six-page episode of a story, especially if its art has room to be more than simply functional, but Wagner (and Pat Mills and Robbie Morrison and Al Ewing and John Smith and others) still pull it off week after week, bless them.

So here's a question for you: what do you think of the look of these stories? How does this stuff compare to American mainstream comics for you, visually?

DAVID: The art, Douglas? You're asking me about the art?

You know how there are those people who read comics and when you talk to them about the art, they say, "I'm not really much of an art guy, I'm really more of a story guy" but what they really mean is, "I lack the intellectual chops to say anything about art but I am ashamed" and you start to ask yourself how such a preference is even possible because you never met a music fan who said "I don't really pay attention to the guitar, I'm more of a bass guy" and that analogy, while imperfect, at the very least illustrates the fundamental ridiculousness of such a preference and I don't know if there should be a question mark at the end of this sentence because I'm like Gabriel Garcia Marquez writing The Autumn of the Patriarch? 

Are you editing this?

By and large, I enjoyed the art on this quite a bit. Brian Bolland's first couple of stories are just so clean and perfect to me, and as much as I enjoy the others, they doesn't compare quite as much in my mind. In that interview you referenced, I was struck by Wagner's mention of the fact that they haven't changed the Dark Judges' costumes since Bolland's original design. Everything he does is always so memorable for me. Greg Staples and Trevor Hairsine particularly reminded me of John McCrea and Carlos Ezquerra, but then again, those are guys who have worked plenty of Dredd stories too.

One thing I noticed: the relative colorful cartoonishness of the art seemed to line up with with the increasing silliness of the stories themselves. Anyways, I really enjoyed Greg Staples in particular... and as for your question about mainstream American stuff, it's hard for me to draw a comparison. Even in these ridiculous stories, I see a precision and care for the art that seems absent in the American books that I've since given up on reading. Which is not to suggest that all American books are bad, which they are not, but to say that the level of quality that I feel like I can get in most of the Dredd stuff I enjoy is that standard, while I have to pick out gems when I'm reading the American books these days. 

I also noticed that that most of the pages are pretty crowded. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed that quite a bit. 

Anyways, did you know that Armand Assante, Sr. is quite the artist?

DOUGLAS: See, I learn something every time I do one of these dialogues with somebody!

I'm with you on the gloriousness of Bolland's stuff. I still have difficulty understanding the fact that he's drawn more pages of Camelot 3000 than of Judge Dredd. 

One of the factors that affect "precision and care," to put it bluntly, is page rates. I don't have a clear sense of 2000 AD's and the Megazine's have risen and fallen over the years, but I've seen very different sorts of work by the same artists. I also gather that a lot of Vol. 3 of the Megazine was produced on an incredibly tight austerity budget--hence the reprints of "Necropolis" and Preacher et al. eventually taking over the better part of each issue. Also, there was a period where the publisher required both magazines to print everything that had been commissioned and completed, good, bad, indifferent or redundant. (One of the few welcome consequences of that policy, as I discovered this week, is the appearance in the Judge Dredd Yearbook 1995 of the two episodes of "Son of Mean Machine" that Chris Halls painted before abandoning the project. And I have no idea how Shaky Kane ended up drawing the Star Scan below, but I'm not complaining.)

I wonder if the "let's get the story that's attached to the promotional push right" effect might have worked to the advantage of the stories in the back half of this volume--"The True Story" appeared around #900, when there were effectively three relaunch issues in five weeks; "The Three Amigos" coincided with the movie; "Dead Reckoning" began in #1000, another big relaunch issue. (It had been preceded by "The Pit," which I'll be covering in a couple of weeks, but the short version is that it reads as if precision and care eventually took a back seat to getting the damn thing out the door before the presses had to roll.)

You're also right that the goofier stories tend to go more to the artists who lean toward comedy, although I don't think Trevor Hairsine had quite found his feet with the funny stuff yet at the time he drew "The Three Amigos." Still, nice job on designing Clinton Box. They do take silliness seriously in British comics.

Thanks again to David! Next week: Blind Justice, collecting John Wagner and John Burns' 1993-1997 collaborations.  

Wilderlands

(Reprints Judge Dredd stories from 2000 AD Progs 891-894 and 904-918, and from Judge Dredd Megazine #2.57-2.67)

"Wilderlands" was an unusually ambitious story, halfway done in by its reach exceeding its grasp, and kneecapped by a still-mysterious internal continuity disaster. In 1994, with the Judge Dredd movie a year away, John Wagner returned to writing the strip in 2000 AD on a regular basis, and was convinced to come up with a second crossover between the Prog and the Megazine. This one had a lot of formal restrictions imposed on it from the outset, though. It had to be smaller in scale, so it wouldn't repeat the eschatological scope of "Necropolis" and "Judgement Day"--but it also had to be big enough that it would Change Everything Forever OMG. It also had to make sense to readers who were only following 2000 AD, or only following the Megazine, without repeating itself too much for those who were reading both.

So the story's schedule played a peculiar hopscotch game. After a two-part reunion of the Wagner/Carlos Ezquerra team, "Time Machine" (which has still never been reprinted), the introductory "Conspiracy of Silence" sequence ran in 2000 AD in June: a primer on the Mechanismo plot and the Dredd/McGruder conflict that Wagner had been building in the Megazine for a year or so. Its final chapter leads directly into "Prologue," in the Megazine, which came out the same week. (Artist Peter Doherty doesn't seem to have noticed that McGruder had shaved off her goatee a while back--and after Mark Harrison drew her in "Conspiracy of Silence" with a can of "Whisk-Away," too!) While "Prologue" and "The Tenth Planet" were running in the biweekly Megazine, 2000 AD was marking time with some episodes written by Dan Abnett and Chris Standley, as well as the final Wagner/Ron Smith collaboration in Prog 899, the Dredd/Rogue Trooper team-up that occupied all of Prog 900, and the evergreen "Judge Death: The True Story" (which we'll be getting to next week).

The "Tenth Planet" sequence is the high point of this book: prime Wagner/Ezquerra, fast, dark and twisty, with a lot of spectacular imagery and a sensory-overload "land sharks inside the cage" sequence. It also includes one of my favorite Dredd character moments, in which he pulls off the neat trick of simultaneously demanding Castillo's respect, refusing it, attacking her and letting her know he's looking out for her: 

And how awesome is it that even though Dredd is officially off the force, he's still going everywhere in not only his helmet but his complete uniform, just no badge?

Ezquerra's new toy shows up partway through "The Tenth Planet": the digital coloring tools that were probably intended to save him time but ended up dating his artwork here badly. I'm sure the particular Photoshop filters he used for the surface of Hestia and various backgrounds would be easy for someone who was using that program in '94 to name. (There are some backgrounds and city shots that are clearly assembled by software rather than drawn by hand, too, and they're a little jarring.) Having easy access to a range of computer hues also meant that Ezquerra all but abandoned the single-color-dominated images that had been such a striking part of his work in the early '90s.

The ending of "The Tenth Planet" segues directly into "Wilderlands" proper, which began in 2000 AD the same week and galumphed along in both titles simultaneously, this time with Ezquerra drawing the 2000 AD sections and Trevor Hairsine drawing the Megazine sections. I can see what Wagner seems to have had in mind: a very densely packed story whose plot threads would include Dredd trying to keep the Hestia expedition alive in hostile territory while they're picked off one by one (à la "Helltrekkers") and while both the convicts and other Judges are conspiring against him, McGruder being convinced that she was wrong about Dredd, the dark secret of Mechanismo being revealed, Castillo redeeming herself from her earlier failure of nerve with the aid of Phoenix the kindly willowy native Hestian, and ultimately a massive shift in the balance of power within Justice Department. This would all have a grand, open pace that would allow for readers of just one series or just the other or both to follow it, and--oh, right: "very densely packed" and "grand, open pace" don't fit so well together.

That trips up "Wilderlands" pretty badly: a lot of stuff is clearly supposed to happen, and not a lot happens. The device of having the weekly episodes focus on Dredd's experience and the Megazine episodes narrated by Castillo kinda-sorta works, until Castillo takes off on her mission--for which Wagner ticks off a few plot beats and otherwise has to pad two nine-page episodes with "huh, guess we're walking across a desert here" moments. The Megazine sequence's slackness is partly down to the fact that it's so bumpy visually. Hairsine was a very new artist at that point--he'd never drawn color comics before, and was still working out the kinks in his storytelling. (There's a figure in his first chapter of "Wilderlands" that's pretty blatantly swiped from something by Neal Adams; can anyone identify its source?)

David Bishop's history of the Megazine suggests that one point of reference for "Wilderlands" was "Darkie's Mob" (file under: really regrettable titles), a grim, violent WWII strip that Wagner had written for Battle in 1976-77, about a mysterious tough guy leading a squadron in the Burmese jungle. That was another super-densely packed series, though (it was reprinted about ten years ago in the Megazine), with much more plot than the pace of "Wilderlands" could handle. Dredd's "leadership" in this story pretty much consists of beating the robot, sending out a search party, shooting Hine through the heart (after "disconnecting the grip sensors"--oh, is that all you have to do to modify a Lawgiver so it won't pull a Kraken on you?) and then being surprised when he dies, and not eating much of the hallucinogenic food. One smart and relatively subtle point of the "Wilderlands" sequence where everyone hallucinates, though: their visions are the Mirror of Erised. It's clear that what each of them is seeing is what that person most longs to see at that moment... and what Dredd sees is McGruder's picked-over corpse.

Then there's that continuity disaster. I don't know if this was addressed at the time, but it's fairly obvious that there's at least part of an episode of "Wilderlands" that never got published. Chapter 13--which appeared in Prog 912, the only episode in 2000 AD drawn by Mick Austin rather than Carlos Ezquerra--picks up from a cliffhanger we never actually see, in which Dredd is being attacked by a robot. (Mind you, the robot appeared on the cover of #911, although not in the story inside...) Right before the end of chapter 11, Beasty bashes Tefler's head in, just as Tefler fires his gun, which Dredd and O'Hare both hear. When we get back to that scene in chapter 13, Dredd fires at the robot, which Tefler hears... right before Tefler and Moynihan are ambushed by Beasty and Conehead. (Conehead then shoots Tefler with his own Lawgiver, which also doesn't explode.) 

Austin mentioned in a recent Megazine interview that he had been frustrated by being 2000 AD's go-to guy for last-minute artwork, and both that episode and his half of "The Candidates" do look pretty rushed. Maybe Austin got sent the wrong draft of a script; maybe Ezquerra fell behind schedule more quickly than expected and the only completed episode on hand at deadline time was that one. Anyone happen to know what happened? Actually, Ezquerra's artwork on the second half of "The Candidates" and "Voting Day" looks very rushed too, as if he didn't have time to ink it in more than a cursory way.

By the end of the book, McGruder has turned her opinion of Dredd and Mechanismo around in a matter of a few panels, Castillo has been successful in her assignment rather than actually overcoming anything in particular, Justice Department isn't too different in any way other than the previously unseen Hadrian Volt replacing McGruder, and Mechanismo's dark secret remains opaque (as I think it still does). Even the Wilderlands collection cuts off abruptly: there was an epilogue in the Megazine, "Farewell to the Chief," that didn't get reprinted in the collection. It's not great, but it does give Castillo's arc a bit more closure.

Next week: special guest David Wolkin and I make a timely visit to Dark Judges territory for Death Lives!

Crusade

(Reprints Judge Dredd stories from 2000 AD Progs 868-871, 928-937)

As Greil Marcus asked of Bob Dylan's Self Portrait: What is this shit?

By way of explanation, here's Mark Millar, interviewed in this month's Judge Dredd Megazine: "I only got into 2000 AD after I began working on it... I didn't realize how good 2000 AD was until much later on--and I hate to say this but I think I wrote some of the worst 2000 AD stories ever."

I'm not unreservedly down on Millar--I adore his Superman Adventures run, and his Ultimates and Authority have a crazy, barbed energy that's sometimes a lot of fun. But he's right: most of his 2000 AD material is just awful, stupid, condescending stuff, and his Dredd stories in particular totally miss what makes the series work when it works. Still, he's a big name now, in the post-Wanted/Kick-Ass world, and so is his former writing partner Grant Morrison, who had already published the excellent "Zenith" and "Dare" and Animal Man and Doom Patrol and the first few issues of The Invisibles by the time the Morrison/Millar-co-written "Crusade" appeared in 1995. That might explain the recent appearance of this slim, disastrously weak album with a handsome Brian Bolland cover (depicting the big-bad from "Crusade," who's set up for fifty pages or so before he's dispatched in a third-of-a-page fight with Dredd).

The ostensible premise of "Crusade" is that the Judges of Many Nations go to Antarctica to find a guy who claims he's seen God; they meet up, chat a bit, and decide to head off in separate directions, then spend the rest of the story trying to kill each other. As dumb as that is on its face, it's got other infelicities interrupting every few pages. Like the badass, crossbow-brandishing Vatican City judge, whose appearance suggests that everyone involved has forgotten about Devlin Waugh. Or the sinners bowing to a statue of "Ciccioliana" (sic) in the middle of the Vatican. Or the Indian judges being named "Sharma" and "Bhaji." Or the Pan-African judge being named "Daktari." Or the Japanese judge reprising the "ninja slices his enemy into pieces before he realizes what's happening" riff from Frank Miller's Daredevil in a grosser way, and then committing ritual suicide accompanied by a column of Japanese calligraphy. Or the dialogue's many lesser variations on "no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" (e.g. "Your priority should be staying alive, American!"). Or Dredd fulfilling a request to bring back someone who's discovered vital information by decapitating him and bringing back his head. And so on. All of this is made that much duller by Mick Austin's artwork, which is consistently ugly and garish--Austin gets a couple of stark, looming vistas across in the first few pages, but once the story degenerates into a gorefest, he starts phoning it in.

The short feature that follows the main attraction is the Millar-written "Frankenstein Division," which ran earlier--in the first four issues cover-dated 1994--and even manages to waste the talents of Carlos Ezquerra. Good on Millar for figuring that there would be repercussions from "The Apocalypse War" ten years later; too bad he appears not to have actually read it. So the Sovs have sewn together pieces of a bunch of their judges who Dredd personally killed in the war into a gigantic monster with a synthetic brain, which is supposed to be "the future of law enforcement." But where would they have gotten the corpses? Yeltsin and Andropov of East-Meg Two--and Millar must have tried really hard to make up those names--wouldn't have had access to the bodies of the Sov judges Dredd killed during the invasion of Mega-City One; they also wouldn't have had access to any of the bodies he left behind in East-Meg One, because the entire city was nuked.

A friend of mine recently pointed out a tic in bad Millar: his habit of repeating a word or phrase in dialogue. "Nothing will stop it. Nothing can stop it. There'll be hell to pay." "Nothing can stop me. And there'll be hell to pay... hell on earth!" "I beat you! I beat you good!" "My head--f-feel's [sic] like it's on fire! What's happening to my head?" "The place is on fire, drokk it!" Also, Millar quoting the Monks' "Nice Legs, Shame About the Face" in a scene about picking body parts to assemble into a monster constitutes justifiable grounds for throwing this book across the room.

Fortunately, it's pretty much all uphill from here in the Dreddverse bibliography: I can only think of a couple more volumes I'm not actively looking forward to reading or re-reading. Next week: Wilderlands, collecting the ambitious if ungainly crossover for which John Wagner returned to 2000 AD. 

Mega-City Masters 02

(Reprints Judge Dredd stories from 2000 AD Progs 513, 613, 740, 800-803, 855, 859-866, 895-896, 954, 1482, 1613-1616, 1640-1648)

The current American Dredd reprint program from Simon & Schuster has had one angle I don't think earlier ones have tried: the Mega-City Masters series, reprinting Dredd stories from the entire history of 2000 AD, focusing on significant artists (the first and third volumes, which we'll be getting to in, I think, June and August respectively) and writers (this one)--there's not yet any sign of a fourth, or of the double digits of volumes suggested by the title. The writers represented here include almost all of the ones who've spent significant amounts of time with Dredd--with the prominent exceptions of Gordon Rennie and Robbie Morrison--and some of those who haven't. Curiously, this book doesn't include any Megazine episodes either, unlike the other two MCM volumes; that might have made it easier to find some not-overexposed material that showed off various writers to best effect. "Monkey on My Back," anyone?

An all-writers showcase--especially for a series that's most strongly identified with two or three particular writers--is an odd idea, but potentially interesting. It's undermined by some peculiar choices, though. I don't know that "That Sweet Stuff" is the strongest choice among Alan Grant's solo Dredds, or that these two Garth Ennis stories really needed another go-'round (not that I mind seeing "The Marshal" again). Dan Abnett's published all of four Dredd stories, and "Rad Blood" isn't a particularly good one: it's mostly notable as one of the last few prog appearances by Ron Smith.

(Smith was all but entirely absent from Dredd in 2000 AD after 1986 or so. I always wondered why that was, but his interview in the Megazine a few years ago suggested that he and John Wagner didn't get along at all. During the early-'90s Wagner interregnum, Smith reappeared, drawing the Daily Star Dredd strip on and off from late 1991 to mid-1998. He also drew 14 Dredd episodes in 2000 AD in 1993 and 1994, but once Wagner returned in the summer of '94, they did only one episode together before Smith vanished from the prog for good.)

I'm also enough of a sucker for the Ian Edginton/D'Israeli team that seeing Edginton and Dave Taylor's "High Spirits"--very attractively drawn in Taylor's airy post-Moebius mode, but the kind of handwaving supernatural horror that seems completely off for Judge Dredd--just makes me want to see the trio of one-offs involving H.G. Wells that Edginton and D'Israeli wrote and drew in 2004, 2006 and 2007 instead. Pat Mills hasn't written too many Dredd stories since "The Cursed Earth" that don't involve Satanus, and "Birthday Boy" is a real head-scratcher--a supernatural story that's built on one improbably convenient coincidence after another. (Vince Locke's artwork is also a little wobbly and unruly to fit in with the ordinary look of the series, although it's more appropriate for a horror sequence than a straight-up action piece.) And "Statue of Judgement" is a lesser dartboard-throw choice for a Wagner-written episode, although it's certainly not terrible.

My not-entirely-defensible prejudices, I suspect, are coloring my impressions of this collection. I have a problematic tendency to think any Dredd writer who isn't named John Wagner is Doing It Wrong, I know, and the flip side of that is to think that any other writer is Doing It Right to the extent that they're doing something Wagneresque. This is a tendency of which I suspect I should divest myself as quickly as possible, especially given that a) "Day of Chaos" is reading more and more like the thematic climax of the past couple of decades of Dredd in the same way that "Necropolis" was the climax of the first 14 years, and b) Wagner noted on Facebook a few days ago that he had finished writing "Day of Chaos" and was "really looking forward to seeing what other writers do with what I've left them." (Uh-oh.)

Nonetheless, my favorite of the previously uncollected stories here has to be Al Ewing and Karl Richardson's "Rehab," an exceptionally clever five-parter that's totally built on the Wagner template in some ways (and not at all in other ways). The opening scene of its second episode, with the World Politeness Championship, could just about be a lost sequence from "Return of the Taxidermist"; the newscasters' heavy-breathing enthusiasm, the quick Otto Sump ad and the singalongs are all familiar gambits from the Wagner playbook.

But what makes the whole thing work as a story is that it's not just one idea stretched out to a multiple of six pages. There are a bunch of concepts here, large and small, that are much more Ewing-ish, and those are the ones that drive "Rehab": "Rage Hard" and his belief in violence for its own sake, the indignant deep-undercover Judge, the verbose and over-philosophical scientist, and most of all an idea of what Dredd's (and Mega-City One's) opposite number would be. I particularly like that Ewing takes the funniest idea in the whole story--the alternate universe's mild-mannered peacekeeper "Judge Joe" and the communitarian culture that produced him--and makes it a tragic axis for the plot to swing around. (And, on reflection, most of the plot strains are related: pretty much everything in the story concerns self-repression and politesse vs. rudeness.)

On the bummer side, there's "Book of the Dead," one of the three lengthy storylines on which Grant Morrison and Mark Millar collaborated (the others are "Crusade," which we'll be getting to next week, and "Purgatory"/"Inferno," which they supposedly wrote separately); it was actually reprinted in a volume of its own by Hamlyn some years ago. This one bears Millar's touch much more than Morrison's, I suspect. It's the storyline in which Dredd goes to Egypt, and--deep sigh--discovers that their judicial culture is based on the Egypt of several thousand years earlier. (Because coming up with a satirical riff on the Egypt of 1993, or at least what "ancient Egypt" meant to the culture of 1993, would have required actual thought and maybe even research!)

"Book of the Dead" doesn't look as weak as it reads, mostly because Dermot Power has a solid design sense and gave it that lush painted look that was in vogue in 2000 AD then. (When was the last painted strip in the prog that wasn't by John Burns? And what was the last painted episode of Dredd? Can it really be, as Barney suggests, "PF" from #1476?) But there's almost nothing in it that's not painfully stupid or an easy gross-out--the toilet paper/mummy gag is some kind of nadir, and resolving the plot with an extended fight scene is a real letdown. Also, the bit about "your genetic material is the purest, derived from the ancient Judda themselves": argh. Even without the later clarification of "Origins"--Eustace Fargo became Chief Judge in 2031, meaning that the Judda as an organization can't be more than, say, 85 years old at the very outside--that's a pretty boneheaded misreading of "Oz."

Millar's attitude toward Dredd's satirical elements always seemed to be "it's a bit of a laugh, really," missing the point that the series' best jokes took their silliness seriously. Hence, for instance, "Judge Tyrannosaur," which features some of the most dumbed-down dialogue I've seen outside of Spidey Super Stories. ("Nobody can hide from the law, creep"--next word balloon--"not even in the Cursed Earth!") It's another pretty Ron Smith color job, but it's also a little embarrassing to see the artist of "Bob & Carol & Ted & Ringo" being dragged back to that territory. Smith can't have missed the resemblance, and in fact he draws "Mike Crichton, Jurassic expert" to look exactly like Irrawaddy Skinner from the earlier story. There's a dinosaur in the room, and it's not the older gentleman drawing the story.

Next week: wading further into the Morrison/Millar era with Crusade!

The Taxidermist

(Reprints Judge Dredd stories from 2000 AD #507-510, #1070 and #1087-1089, and The Taxidermist from Judge Dredd Megazine #2.37-2.46)

Our guest this week is Lori Matsumoto, who is one of those people who Makes Things Happen. She's a comics writer (watch for an announcement of a big project coming soon!), photographer, blogger and cheese-eater, and just launched Mark Waid's forum. She and I discussed the collection of the 1987-1998 stories involving Olympian Jacob Sardini, The Taxidermist.

LORI: I guess this is Week 2 of Japanese American women writing about cultural stereotyping-palooza in Judge Dredd. "Forgivable but confusing" is an excellent way to describe it. As I read The Taxidermist, I kept having some version of this thought process:

•    Whoa, this is racist!

•    Then again, Gibson portrays every ethnicity in a grotesquely stereotypical way.

•    But... but... the way he depicts the Nepalese is really troubling.

•    Look at his Germans. You thought they were hilarious!

•    Yes but argh.

Occasionally my musings on race were superseded by sugarplum visions of Body Worlds. Flensed sugarplums. Douglas, have you been to Body Worlds? 

I went expecting to be repelled, you know, being surrounded by taxidermied humans and everything, but I was more disturbed by the poses they were in than anything else. If stuff like this and this exists in the world, are we so far off from this? 

Also I found this photo. I don't know what to say about it.

Wait wait wait, I just found this.

Dude. It's only a matter of time before human taxidermy becomes a reality show, and then an Olympic sport.

DOUGLAS: Well, yeah, and that's really the hidden theme of The Taxidermist, that bodies are becoming completely separated from the idea of "dignity." I wouldn't have guessed that would be the basis of a laugh riot, but this is one of the funniest books in the entire Dredd-verse. (I actually haven't been to Body Worlds; I think it would just make me really sad to see it in person. Apparently John Wagner was ahead of the curve in figuring out where the bodies used in it might have come from.)

What Sardini does to bodies is, by our standards, as undignified as anything could imaginably be, but the central joke of his story is that he's the one character in the whole thing to whom dignity is everything--an old-fashioned craftsman who's frustrated by the decline in the quality of handiwork and by the dumb things that kids get up to. ("That was his trouble - girls, and those stupid friends of his at the Stutter Club. Why couldn't they speak normally, Sardini would like to know? And why did they dress like fools?")

I imagine that mortality and the idea of what happens to the body after death were on Wagner's mind a lot during this period, for whatever reason: I just realized that the same issue as the final episode of "Return of the Taxidermist" included "Bury My Knee at Wounded Heart," one of his best-loved Dredd one-offs, which is entirely about that. More and more, I suspect that the gag in "The Executioner" about where Mega-City citizens go where they die--to the conveyor belts at Resyk--might be the single best joke to come out of the Wagner/Grant collaboration; it certainly never loses its punch, no matter how many times anyone goes back to it.

I promise I'm going to get back to the race stuff in a bit (especially after last week, I don't want to lose sight of it), but first I want to natter a bit about how ingeniously constructed The Taxidermist as a whole is, and specifically about "Return of the Taxidermist." It's a story constructed on a very familiar template--master of a craft comes back for one last challenge/athlete comes back for one last big game--and it takes the utterly insane idea of human taxidermy as an Olympic sport and plays that absolutely straight, thinking through what exactly that competition would be like and what kind of melodrama would arise around Sardini's final big effort. ("He always said no one ever had hands like Sardini. Hands born to stuff their fellow man.")

That's one kind of comedy. Another kind comes from figuring out what kinds of activities make the least sense as competitions, and framing them as competitions. (I get the sense that most of "Laser Gaze" Bolton's appearances were written after Wagner saw how hilarious Ian Gibson made the first one turn out; she actually came back for a second sequence a few years later, and there was a bit in Judge Dredd about competitive staring just a few months back.) Still another kind is a gag Wagner's returned to again and again, because it basically always works in his hands: channeling the fatuous diction of TV sportscasts and their announcers. ("Robbert--all that remains is for me to say goodbye, and good luck." "Thanks, Grace. We're going to need it. We're a real crap team.") And there are lots of (relatively) understated gags, as in the first "Taxidermist" story--my favorite is when we find out how it is that Fraulein Körperstopfer's hairstyle keeps changing from episode to episode.

The core of the story, though, is actually a straightforward drama: can the mastery that's come to Jacob with age compensate for his physical decline? Can he come to terms with the new technology he loathes? Can he learn the kind of "showmanship" that may be incompatible with what he thinks of as his quiet craft? And can he atone for the cowardice that (as we've seen before) is his failing?

(One other little detail that I really like is the fakeout in the plot: everything we hear about Guru Mahama early on makes him out to be so saintly that there's no way not to suspect that he's actually going to turn out to be some kind of corrupt horror. But he actually is that saintly--until Sardini becomes complicit in ruining his dignity.)

Also: points to Ian Gibson, who's rarely gotten to do color work, and even more rarely gotten to do color work that looks this rich and wittily rendered. (The lines of Fraulein Körperstopfer's dress! The vectors of Sardini's moustache!) Compare this to his dashed-off "Q. Twerk" gigs, or that piece in the back of the second Judge Anderson Psi Files collection--it's hard to believe they're by the same artist. I particularly love his redesign of Sardini, with those spindly little ankles, looking like he just stepped out of a Pixar movie.

"Revenge of the Taxidermist" pales in comparison, I think--not as funny or smart or anywhere near as attractively executed--although I do love Wagner's habit of actually getting rid of beloved recurring characters sometimes. Killing off the featured character halfway through the second part of a three-part story is a hilariously audacious move, too, and it's only fitting that Sardini's murder is avenged through the total loss of his dignity as he understands it--as opposed to how his heir understands it--and the complete perversion of his explicitly expressed desires concerning what should happen to his body after he dies. (And, of course, the moment that he finally shows a little backbone, it immediately gets him killed.) He got off surprisingly easily in the original "Taxidermist" story, but pretty much everybody in Dredd's world gets betrayed in the end.

LORI: I didn't realize you were going to do such an in-depth analysis. And here I'm all, it reminded me of Body Worlds, you guys!

Anyway, I have further shallow observations.

I appreciated the inclusion of synchronized swimming as a competitive sport alongside taxidermy, Everest-climbing, and sex. It's a cheap joke, as is the subsequent massacre of the synchronized swimmers, but I am a fan of cheap jokes.

Speaking of cheap jokes: I didn't realize Sardini's wife was dead and stuffed in all three stories until I got to the third one. Her banal poses were amusing until I started to give them greater thought, and then they were kind of disturbing. So I refrained from giving them greater thought. I guess that sums up my experience of reading The Taxidermist: amusing on the surface, less so past that.

I did enjoy a lot of Wagner's concepts; I especially liked the way he messed with ideas of legacy. Life in Mega-City is cheap, but one's corpse might be memorialized in an elaborate tableau of The Birth of Hitler. Guru Mahama lives on in his generals' idea of what his legacy should be. (Until he doesn't.) Sardini's legacy before his death is more significant than it is after it.

I'm out of time so I'll leave the race/class dissection to you, the privileged white guy. I was writing a paragraph about it, but then I started likening The Taxidermist to Downton Abbey, and then that devolved into a rant about why I don't like Downton Abbey but am tempted to watch the third season anyway because I like Shirley MacLaine. So yeah.

DOUGLAS: Fair enough. But yes okay I do have to talk about the race stuff, because it really is a problem for me as a reader. My attitude toward it as the privileged white guy is a totally entitled and selfish one: "how dare anything interfere with my enjoyment of this thing I want to enjoy?" "Return of the Taxidermist" is a story I'd really like to enjoy without reservations, but then I run into Major Koosh--a villain with a cat-whisker moustache and a design straight out of the Yellow Peril playbook--or the Gurkha yelling "Aieeeeee" as he prepares for his massacre, or the enormous bald helper saying "I watchee you--on vid vid! You great man!," and it's like discovering a bug in my soup.

I mean: yes, Wagner and Gibson mock absolutely everybody in this story (it's an Olympics story, so there's a lot of options available for mocking), and arguably the only character who ultimately escapes the business end of their jokes altogether is Guru Mahama himself. And mocking every ethnicity including one's own is for sure a step up from singling one or two out to mock. (It took me a little while to realize that the pose and outfit Sardini's adopted on the cover that was repurposed for the collection are very close to a famous image of John Bull, below.)

Nonetheless, it's a pretty solid guideline that it's not okay to make fun of people who are lower on the socioeconomic mountain than you are, or to recapitulate particular kinds of caricatures that have a history of being tied to oppression. Which is to say that I also think Wagner and Gibson's German jokes are pretty funny in this context. But the difference between the European caricatures and the Nepali caricatures here is that the Europeans are depicted as eccentric jerks, and the Nepalis are mostly depicted as, one way or another, subhuman.

Even so, the part of me that wants to not be maddened by the ugly stereotypes in here came up with a test: are they necessary for something else this story is trying to do that's rewarding in its own way? And the answer is no, totally not. Give the bald helper a line of dialogue even as bland as "I saw you on vid--very impressive!" and the scene would probably be funnier. Major Koosh could be caricatured in any number of ways that don't look like the cover of Detective Comics #1, with zero effect on the plot. And as for the synchronized swimmers... well, I'd rather see more of what the housework competitors were up to, anyway.

***

Thank you, Lori! Next week, I'll sidle into one of the odder recent American attempts to provide a survey of Dredd's history, Mega-City Masters 2.