The Complete Case Files 02

(Reprints: Judge Dredd stories from 2000 AD Prog 61-70, 73-76, 79-115)

It's fascinating how abruptly Dredd shifted from the "mostly short stories" format of the first half of vol. 1 to the "extended storylines" format. I don't know if somebody decided that the "fighting crime in Mega-City One" premise wasn't working, but just a couple of weeks after he gets back from the moon, he's sent off to the Cursed Earth for the first half of this volume, and as soon as he gets back the Judge Cal/"The Day the Law Died" storyline kicks off.

"The Cursed Earth" is a strange piece of work. For one thing, it's Pat Mills' single longest contribution to Dredd as a writer (although John Wagner pops up in the middle of it for a couple of episodes), and his most sustained piece of worldbuilding in the series--although it probably didn't add as much to the series overall as the six pages of "The Return of Rico." (The business with the final U.S. President, Robert L. Booth, being held in suspended animation does turn out to be mighty significant later, though. "Booth" is a nicely pointed last name for an American President, too.) It's got a whole lot of Action The Way Kids Like It; it's amazing how Mills is capable of shoehorning images of dinosaurs eating people into pretty much any context, even now. But give him credit: his story about a national park filled with cloned dinosaurs came out a solid 12 years before Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Even if they're cloned from, er, "DNA cells." 

We've gotten some requests for more pictures, so here you go, sport:

Mills' Dredd never really feels like Wagner's, though. In some ways, more power to him--nearly every other writer's Dredd feels like a watered-down imitation of Wagner's, and Mills definitely has his own voice. (Even Garth Ennis, Mark Millar and Grant Morrison, when they wrote Dredd, often seemed to be doing Wagner lite, and they're not writers you can ordinarily accuse of not having strong voices.) But a tiny thing that illustrates the difference is that Mills' Dredd exclaims "By Stomm!" all the time. Wagner's Dredd is more likely to say "Stomm!"--a curse, but not an oath sworn in the name of some sort of greater entity.

This is also the volume where "the complete case files" suddenly turn incomplete--the stories from progs 71, 72, 77 and 78, in which Dredd first encounters a war between McDonald's and Burger King partisans and then meets a bunch of mutated corporate mascots, are unreprintable, thanks to legal problems. Thank goodness we have the Internet. Honestly, they're not the best parts of the story, although it's pretty hilarious to see Brian Bolland's super-serious Mr. Peanut and Michelin Man. 

(And speaking of completeness: it'd have been nice to see the final few Walter the Wobot strips in this volume.)

The first big problem with "The Cursed Earth," though, is that it's built on a premise that falls apart if you think about it for eight seconds. Dredd, who has just come back from the moon, is assigned to transport a Blatant Plot Device--excuse me, the vaccine for the "2T(FRU)T" virus, whose name seems to have been devised in an "oh the hell with it, the kids won't care" moment--across the country. They can't send it by air, because all the airports are held by the "plague men." So of course they can't fly to, you know, five miles outside Mega-City Two's borders, or even get a head start on the distance by flying to Texas City, or any of that. They have to go overland all the way. This makes no sense.

Neither does their route, really. Somebody seems to have figured out that you wouldn't see Mount Rushmore the moment you crossed the Appalachians, and added an explanatory caption to Brian Bolland's hilarious image of the augmented Rushmore to the effect that it had been "moved to just outside Mega-City One"--talk about public works projects! Likewise, in "The Day the Law Died," it's explained that the Big Smelly is "the old Ohio River... it got so foul and polluted they had to concrete it over." Which would be a pretty funny idea if, say, Cincinnati were anywhere near close enough to New York to be part of Mega-City One. (And the joke would've worked just fine in the '70s if it were the East River!)

That brings up the big lost opportunity in "The Cursed Earth." Judge Dredd, as I tend to tell people I'm trying to describe it to, is (among other things) a smart, vicious satire of American culture by British people. So the "road trip across the country" format should yield lots of opportunities for satirizing bits of America that the feature can't get to when it's got a (mega-)urban setting. There's a hint of that in some chapters--the moment we get out of the Meg, we're instantly in a town called Deliverance, McMahon's image for "General Blood 'n' Nuts" is fantastic, and Wagner's lost "Burger Wars" sequence gets at Americans' ridiculous obsession with brand identities a little bit. But those possibilities mostly get lost: the Tweak sequence is as hamhanded a commentary on the U.S.'s legacy of slavery as anyone could devise, and at some point Mills seems to have decided "screw it, I haven't written about dinosaurs eating people in weeks." (To be fair: this stuff was written for eleven-year-old British boys, not aging American aesthetes.)

The figure that really fixes "The Cursed Earth" as a 1978 story is Dredd's guide, Spikes Harvey Rotten, the requisite slightly-behind-the-times punk rock caricature, with a name that nicely evokes both Lee Harvey Oswald and Johnny Rotten. Just for perspective's sake, note that the Sex Pistols played their final show (in Mega-City Two or thereabouts) three months before Spikes first showed up. And in case anybody missed the joke the first few times, four weeks into the story, Spikes gets himself a hand-grenade earring: "D'you think I look cute... like one of dem twentieth century punk rockers?" OKAY YES WE GET IT. See also "Punks Rule," at the end of the volume, in which punk fashion is again a sign of genuine sinister intent.

More grousing: Brian Bolland's amazing, of course, and Mike McMahon's stuff has its own rugged charm--though I like his later stuff much better than the early stuff--but having them alternate chapters in "The Cursed Earth" produces serious stylistic whiplash. That said, I also really like the look of the chapters Bolland and Dave Gibbons collaborated on; as I recall, they'd collaborated in some capacity before 2000 AD, and I wish they'd gotten to work together on Dredd more.

"The Cursed Earth" feels like it was largely structured ahead of time: "let's spend six months sending Dredd across the country, now let's see, what can he meet each week?" When Wagner takes over full-time again for "The Day the Law Died," though, the strip gets a much more seat-of-the-pants vibe, as if each episode were constructed leading up to a cliffhanger with no particular thought as to what was going to happen next. The opening premise there--"Dredd gets back home, but Caligula has taken over the city, frames him for murder and sends him into exile"--sets it up for more of a so-what-happens-next? thing. (Incidentally, he's "Judge Caligula" in the next-issue box at the end of "The Cursed Earth," and "Judge Cal" thereafter; wonder what happened there?)

So there are some bumpy transitions between episodes--the second one ends with Cal revealing to Judge Quincy that he's captured Dredd and has him in a crate, the third begins with a splash-page image of Dredd fighting Dredd ("It's a fight I can't win! How can I kill myself?"--yes, that's just the kind of Silver Age-ism Brendan McCarthy has to have loved drawing), then cuts to the manhunt for Dredd, and eventually gets around to showing us that Cal's got a Dredd robot, without actually explaining that that was the one in the crate. The pacing of the overall story seems strange, too: the "Dredd gets sentenced to Titan" thread has promise (I gather that Wagner went back to that well shortly before "Wilderlands," 15 years or so later), and gives Bolland a chance to recapitulate McMahon's indelible image of Rico's altered face, but Wagner doubles back from that possibility very quickly. And Cal announcing that he's sentencing the entire city to death seems like the climax of his madness, but it happens midway through the story and gets dispensed with fairly quickly.

For all its rickety construction and inconsistency, though, there's a mischievousness to "The Day the Law Died" that I love. Judge Pepper's selective credit-taking, Cal's revenge on Slocum, Judge Schmaltz's protracted death scene: there's a lot of stuff here that might fly over the heads of its intended audience, or gets at the ultraviolent tropes of boys' comics from really weird angles. Not to mention, you know, Caligula. I'm guessing that the Klegg and Fergee have to be jokes about cultural figures that I would've known about as an adult in England in 1978; if anybody can explain them, please fill me in. It's also neat to see the first significant chunk of Dredd artwork by Ron Smith, maybe the most underrated early Dredd artist; it doesn't yet have the relaxed clarity he'd develop a couple of years later (his fancy layouts get in the way of storytelling), and his characters still look a little too posed, but his character work is already dead-on.

Finally, after Cal is dispatched and the personality-less Judge Griffin is installed as Chief Judge, things return to non-epic "normalcy." After three extended storylines, though, the final six episodes this time--the one-off, Bolland-drawn "Punks Rule," the two-part "The Exo-Men" and the three-part "The DNA Man"--seem almost truncated. "The Exo-Men," in particular, reads like a leftover from the pre-Luna era, and its routine about a gullible, bleeding-heart "Citizens' Committee for Compassion for Criminals" being taken advantage of by hardened bad guys is about as subtle as a latter-day Steve Ditko comic. Also, Brett Ewins' artwork really doesn't work for Dredd--he plays it as a comedy, which it sort of is, but it's the kind of comedy that depends on underselling the joke.

Next time: the third volume of the Case Files brings us the first appearance of Judge Death, as well as more of Pat Mills' dinosaurs eating people!