(Reprints: Judge Dredd
stories from 2000 AD Prog
571-618)
The easy way of thinking about the split-up of the John
Wagner/Alan Grant writing team in the wake of "Oz" is that Wagner
kept Judge Dredd and Grant got most of
their other gigs. But that's not quite true--besides the fact that they
continued to work on occasional projects together, the actual distribution of
Dredd stories over the next couple of years was more like joint custody, and as
with any such situation, it was sometimes awkward at first.
A few of the earlier episodes reprinted in this volume are
leftovers from the Wagner/Grant era ("Simp About the House" and
"The Sage" are both drawn by not-terribly-speedy artists and seem to
have been in the works for a good long while). But Grant actually continued
writing Judge Dredd episodes by himself
on a fairly regular basis: seven in this volume (by Barney's
count), fourteen in the next. One of them, this time, is "The
Brainstem Man," which set up the Judge Anderson serial "Helios"
that began six months later. It reads as very Grantian, in the sense that it
seems to have been inspired by something he'd been reading lately--the cerebrum/limbic
system/brainstem bit.
Grant and Chris Weston's "Worms" is cute enough, although having the two
writers' separate "murderous teenage unreliable narrator" stories in
consecutive issues doesn't do Grant any favors. His other stories here are
mostly light, wacky comedy of a kind that was at odds with the direction in
which Wagner was driving the series. "The Power of the Gods," in
particular, seems like the kind of premise-warping story that would have been
more at home in an annual, and the central joke of "That Sweet Stuff"--the
illegal drug of the future is sugar!!--was
one that this series had already worn out. "Spok's Mock Chocs" is the
really weird one of the bunch, on the strength of its loopy artwork: Barney
credits Brendan McCarthy and (in his sole appearance as a Dredd artist) Jamie Hewlett, but the printed version names
"R-MC2, Hewlett, Whitaker" (Steve Whitaker, I'd guess)--and credits
the script to one "G. Grant." Huh.
As for Wagner's stuff: "Hitman" went out with a
Wagner/Grant credit on it, but since Grant disavows participation in anything
involving Chopper after the climax of "Oz," I'm guessing it's a
Wagner solo. "Hitman" seems to have come together pretty quickly,
judging from the fact that it was drawn by Jim Baikie, who'd also drawn the final
couple of episodes of "Oz." Unfortunately, Baikie's work here looks
considerably hastier than usual--its raw, dashed-off quality doesn't work for
Dredd. The script also seems a bit off, tonally. The idea (derided by Grant in
that interview I linked to last week) that Dredd let Chopper go out of respect
comes up, but seeing a reflective, self-doubting Dredd, for the first time
since "A Case for Treatment," in a scene where we can actually see
his eyes (!!), somehow doesn't quite work. (Neither does Dredd telling Hershey
"Get lost, huh? I want to sleep." That's not the way he addresses the
colleagues he values.)
Within a few weeks of the split, though, Wagner's scripts
are starting to fall into his natural voice again. "Full Mental
Jacket" has some odd tonal fluctuation between its "nutty juves"
comedy and its tragic domestic-melodrama turns, but the extended dog theme
(including the Oliver Goldsmith quote near the beginning) works pretty well.
(Though could it have been some sort of swipe at Strontium Dog?) It also seems to have run into deadline
problems--it wasn't often that a serial this short switched artists partway
through. The final two installments are drawn by the peculiar team of Brendan
McCarthy and Steve Parkhouse, who draws at least a few panels in his "Bojeffries
Saga" style, notably this one:
I complained
about "A Case for Treatment" a few weeks ago, but this
sequence from it does provide the springboard for "Bloodline."
That two-parter is one of the crucial building blocks for the next few years'
worth of Dredd stories, but it's also a bit of a mess. It's confusing enough
that its narration switches between two different characters and doesn't
entirely stick to its third-person vs. second-person scheme, but it's even more
confusing that the characters in question are physically almost identical (and
so are a couple of the other characters in the story, always a problem with
multi-Judge storylines), and Will Simpson simply doesn't do enough to
distinguish Dredd and Kraken in long shots. Of course it's the point that they're hard to tell apart, but it'd have been
useful to have some visual cues here--this is where American comics'
"multiple POV, multiple colored captions" technique of recent years
might have come in handy.
Where Simpson shines, though, is the "Curse of the
Spider-Woman"/"Return of the Spider-Woman" sequence. The obvious
way to have tackled those stories would have been high-contrast grotesquerie,
the sort of thing Ron Smith did in "The Black Plague." Instead,
Simpson paints them in loose, light-toned watercolors, to echo the character's
diminishing connection to her human life, and it makes them poignant where they
could have been gruesome.
He's not the only artist to come into his own in this
period: Liam Sharp, who had floundered in his earlier Dredd work, finally
clicks with the two P.J. Maybe sequences in this volume. (Or perhaps they click
with him: light farce with nasty undertones suits his style.) It was more than
a year from Maybe's introduction in "Bug" to his return in "P.J.
Maybe, Age 13," but this time Wagner has more of a sense of who he is and what his world is--the
whole "Emphatically Yess" business is a dumb joke that somehow stays
funny. I can't imagine that anyone thought Maybe would still be a significant
character twenty years later, but he's actually kind of brilliant as an archrival
for Dredd: if your protagonist is a defender of the law and a gifted
investigator, it makes sense that his opposite number would be a character who
a) is neutral-evil, alignment-wise (has anybody made a Judge Dredd alignment
chart, by the way? If not, I may have to) and b) has a particular gift for
avoiding suspicion.
Alan Davis's artwork on "Bat Mugger" is really
nice-looking--and the story calls back to "Citizen Snork," of all
things!--but it was his only Dredd episode, and the final work he'd draw for 2000
AD. There's a bit of backstory there: Davis
had been drawing Batman in Detective Comics and Batman and the Outsiders for a few years, and at that point he was supposed
to draw the first Batman/Judge Dredd
team-up. (It was clearly in the works for a long time, since it appeared 3 1/2 years later.) He notes
in his interview in Modern Masters
that "Bat Mugger" was a warmup for the project, but that he ended up
dropping out "after months of contract wrangles."
The surprising art discovery here, though, is Colin MacNeil,
who'd drawn the Chopper story "Soul On Fire" a few months before he
took his first crack at Dredd with "Our Man in Hondo." "Our
Man" has a clever premise--what appears to be a "Dredd teams up with
the local law" plot actually ends up being about Dredd trying to cover up
Justice Dept. malfeasance--but it's a frustrating story, thanks to Wagner's
embarrassing fake-Asianisms. (The way that, as with the Stan Lee stuff, he even
confuses Chinese and Japanese stereotypes is a clue to how tin-eared his script
is. I know I sound like a broken record on this, but I'm going to keep
complaining about Wagner's comedy foreign accents until he quits using them.
"Strange Customs" is another offender on that front, too...) Still,
MacNeil is a very solid if unflashy storyteller, and his design for Judge
Inspector Sadu is pretty sharp; it turned out to have some staying power, too.
John Ridgway always seemed more suited to ground-level noir
than to Dreddish futurism for me--that might have been one of the reasons why
the Dead Man fake-out worked so
well--but three of his relatively few Dredd stories proper appear in this
volume, including two that couldn't have been much more different. The
protagonist of "Alzheimer's Block" is named after Agatha Christie's
Jane Marple (and drawn to resemble Joan Hickson, who played that role on a BBC
series that ran from 1984 to 1992), and it's a barbed variation on the
"elderly spinster detective" archetype--that final-page twist is
Wagner at his cruelest and funniest.
"Twister," on the other hand, is a lot more fun in
theory than in execution. You can pretty much imagine where the idea came from:
when it was clear that 2000 AD was about
to get a bunch more color pages and that Dredd could go all-color, somebody
must have remembered the way The Wizard of Oz transitions from black-and-white to color, noted
that some people had to have thought "Oz" was about L. Frank Baum's
creations rather than Australia, and proposed a Dredd story structured the same
way. (At first, the way the color sections worked meant that Dredd stories
would begin on the centerspread and continue after an intervening five-pager of some kind; getting the
color/black-and-white balance right every issue seems to have been tricky, and
required the occasional reprint from Dredd's Daily Star strip.) But it expends so much effort setting up its
formal structure that it never gets around to actually being funny or
suspenseful, and the "it was all a dream--or was it?" gambit flops.
The only other extended storyline here is my favorite in
this shaky, transitional year: "Crazy Barry, Little Mo." In some
ways, it's one of Wagner's first solo Dredd stories to hint at his mature
voice--as odd a thing as that is to say about someone who'd already been
writing comics for well over 15 years at that point. But the crisp dialogue
here, the offhanded worldbuilding, the rapidly shifting point of view, the
mixture of police-procedural suspense, twisted comedy, violent action scenes
and total weirdness, and the way Wagner's tone is shifting away from kids'
entertainment (with a few Easter eggs for their parents) and toward the
assumption that he's writing for an audience of his peers: they add up to
something that wouldn't seem too far out of place if it appeared in next week's
prog. Also, Kurten's origin is of course the same as Batman's. Whether or not
that had anything to do with Grant's other gig--or with the Batman/Dredd project--is a fine question.
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