Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Batman/Judge Dredd Collection


(Reprints: Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgement on Gotham, Vendetta in Gotham, The Ultimate Riddle and Die Laughing, as well as Lobo/Judge Dredd: Psycho Bikers Vs. the Mutants from Hell)

I'm going to keep it extra-short this week, since a) we're going to be going long from here on out (only six books left to go, and they're all doozies), and b) Brenna Zedan and I discussed most of this one's contents at some length early this year. So just a few points:

*This came out a couple of weeks ago; it's the complete collection of the Dredd/DC Universe material: all four of the Batman crossovers (including the previously uncollected Vendetta in Gotham, which is among other things an excuse to use that lovely Mike Mignola piece on the cover), plus the 1995 Lobo/Judge Dredd team-up Psycho Bikers Vs. the Mutants from Hell. The Lobo story is... uh... I'm not really sure why it happened, or how it happened, other than that Alan Grant was writing a lot of Lobo comics in the mid-'90s. Dredd and Lobo appear together in all of six panels, perhaps because they don't really make sense in the same story. This is, for all practical purposes, a pretext for Lobo to fight Mean Machine Angel, who's just at the outer rim of the Dreddverse's level of acceptable lunacy (and was prominently featured in the Judge Dredd movie that came out in '95).

*Man, Carl Critchlow's painted artwork in The Ultimate Riddle looks different from his pen-and-ink-and-color work in "Trifecta" this week in 2000 AD. I think I like the latter much better, though.


*I'm trying to imagine who else in the DCU would make for an interesting intersection with Dredd, and coming up blank. It's worth noting, though, that Dredd analogues have turned up in Marvel comics a couple of times, notably Justice Peace in Thor #371 (back in 1986, above) and Boss Cage in Dark Avengers recently (below--although he's kind of a Dredd/Iron Man/Luke Cage/Thor/Captain America mash-up). And then there was Judge Elmer Dwedd in the 1997 Howard the Duck Holiday Special...


Next week: Rachel Edidin joins me to discuss another volume with Critchlow's work in it, the collection of Mandroid

6 comments:

  1. 6? Mandroid, Origins, Tour of Duty Backlash, Tour of Duty Megacity Justice, Megacity Undercover 2: Living the Lowlife and Insurrection ?????

    That takes us to 14th Jan..... 14th Fab Day of Chaos 1 is out which I hope you'll be back for?

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  2. You are correct, sir! And Judge Anderson: The Psi Files 03 is apparently out Jan. 17 in the U.K., although books generally show up in the States a couple months late.

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  3. Douglas I hope that you will be able to keep this blog going even though you are almost through the backlog of trades. It is thanks to your (and your guest's) excellent insight that my bank balance is several hundred pounds lighter after shelling out since the summer on vols 1-15 of the Case Files; the PSI Files 1&2 and most, if not all, of the Judge Dredd books with the exception of Total War and The Hunting Party which seem to be out of print at the moment or are going for silly money. Keep up the good work.

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  4. You're very kind! And, with this week's addition of "The Garth Ennis Collection," I actually have seven more to go...

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  5. Douglas, you could also try and review the otherwise unreprinted stories in the bagged Megazine "graphic novels". If you have them it's not much work and will keep the blog live for a while.

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  6. Ah, but that's assuming that the objective is to keep new material coming every week as long as possible! I think I'm going to draw the line at squarebound reprint collections... as much as I'm enjoying this, I suspect I'm going to enjoy having time to do other projects too. Thank you, though!

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