Earth, 2099. The eastern seaboard of what was once the United States of America is dominated by a colossal conurbation known as Mega-City One, stretching from Nova Scotia to Florida. Eight hundred million people live in a society that is heavily automated and served by robots. With over 92% unemployment due to automation, people survive by following fads, watching TV and picking fights with their neighbours. With most of the rest of the world reduced to post-nuclear ash, aside from a few other distant mega-cities, this creates a special kind of pressure cooker in the city where crime and stress is rife.
In charge of law and order are the Judges, custodians of the law who can investigate crimes and deliver sentences - even death sentences for serious crimes - on the spot. The system would be in danger of corruption, but one Judge and his utterly implacable loyalty to the law stands as an example to everyone else: Judge Joseph Dredd. Dredd has to tackle not just a full-scale robot uprising in the city and a six-month secondment to the Luna-1 colony on the Moon, but an even more annoying situation: his inadvertent acquisition of a servitor robot called Walter.
Judge Dredd is possibly the single most famous British comic character of all time. Debuting in weekly anthology comic 2000AD with its second issue in March 1977, Dredd has appeared in every single issue since then (as of today, that's 2,471 issues and counting), as well as the monthly Judge Dredd Megazine since 1990. A stoic dispenser of law and order and the owner of the most famous chin in comics, Dredd has been a firm fan favourite in the UK, thanks to his satirical world and cynical outlook. Video games, audio dramas and two movies (one okay, one excellent) have furthered the character's appeal.
If you want to catch up on the extensive Dredd mythos, publishers Rebellion have provided a handy way of doing so. The Complete Case Files aims to collect together every single story featuring the lawman since his inception. I say "handy," rather than "inexpensive" because this is certainly a long-term and pricy endeavour, and one that's ongoing for some time to come. As of last week, The Complete Case Files had reached Volume 49, featuring stories published in 2010.
For total newcomers, this is probably not the place to start. Dredd is best-known for his expansive, massive mega-epic sagas expanding over dozens of issues. Stories like The Cursed Earth, The Day the Law Died, The Apocalypse War, Democracy, The Dead Man, Necropolis and Judgement Day combine action, character development, themes, satire and worldbuilding to superb effect. The problem is that none of those stories are here: The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died are both in the second volume, The Apocalypse War is in the fifth, and the rest are some way off.
Volume 01 is instead basically Judge Dredd: The Prototype, or Early Instalment Weirdness: Dredd Edition. The creative team are really working on the fly here, experimenting from story to story with tone, how much serialisation they should be dealing with and how to handle Dredd's character, what there is of it. The tone is definitely whackier and funnier (though still jet-black in its composition) than it can be later on, with Dredd's stoic demeanour often being undercut by extreme social awkwardness, a feature of his character that is downplayed in later years. The worldbuilding is also basically being done ad-hoc: the first story even calls the setting "New York," with NYC only being incorporated into the much vaster and far crazier technourban hellscape of Mega-City One in the next instalment. Early issues also suggest that Judges are relatively rare law enforcers dealing with high-level crimes (or whatever crimes they happen to personally bump into) and there's a "proper" police force working below them, an idea which is dispensed with pretty quickly, whilst Mega-City Three is frequently mentioned before it is replaced by Texas City towards the end of this first volume.
The average quality of the stories is also not that great. You can tell the writers are aiming the stories firmly at 1970s teenage kids who've graduated from The Dandy and The Beano to something more adult, with lots of violence and explosions solving problems, although some stories do have Dredd using his brain more to outsmart his opponents. The majority of the stories in this volume are one-off adventures of the week (and these are much shorter issues than the US norm) with limited or no continuing elements, which makes the flow of reading it feel choppy. There's an awful lot of filler here.
There are a few stories that stand out, though. Robot Wars is the first multi-part, long-running Dredd epic and, though low-key compared to the really big hitters, it does show the advantages of longer-form storytelling. There's more character and world development, and we get our first memorable entry to Dredd's formidable rogue's gallery, with the renegade robot Call-Me-Kenneth. Unfortunately this story also lands Dredd with his lisp-inflicted comic sidekick, Walter the Wobot, who is Code Jar-Jar in terms of annoyance levels. His appearances become more sporadic over time, but he is very present in this volume, which can be trying. The volume even collects a series of one-page adventures starring Walter that 2000AD ran for a while, which is both laudable from a completionist point of view and intensely irritating from literally any other (fortunately, readers can simply ignore those stories).
Another early highlight is The Academy of Law, which sees Dredd gain a protege in the form of trainee Judge Giant. This story is the first to delve into the worldbuilding of the Justice Department, the gruelling twenty-year training every cadet must undergo, and how Dredd is very much not a typical Judge. Oddly, Giant doesn't show up again in this collection, but does later become a recurring character.
The most accomplished single story in the collection is The Return of Rico, in which Dredd's clone-brother Rico Dredd returns to Mega-City One for revenge after twenty years in maximum security prison on Titan. We get a lot of backstory to the Judges, the city and Dredd himself (who has mostly been an enigma to this point), and find out what happens when Judges go bad and how they are dealt with. It's the most personal character development Dredd gets in the whole collection, and the only story to really engage Dredd's actual humanity (though only briefly).
The collection rounds off with the loose Luna-1 arc, where Dredd is appointed Judge-Marshal to the moon colony for six months. The moon is a lawless frontier, which Dredd is keen to clean up. This arc leans heavily on the "the moon as the Wild West" metaphor which is...odd, but a choice they commit to and keep up. Like most of the collection it's variable, but in the First Luna Olympics we get additional worldbuilding by discovering that there are "Sov-Cities" in Eurasia which are effectively in a new Cold War with the American Mega-Cities (something that becomes hugely important later on). At the end of the arc Dredd returns to Mega-City One and fortunately the stage is set for the significantly stronger Volume 02, which gives us both The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died epics.
It has to be said that as an introduction to Judge Dredd, this collection can be pretty rough. Even going into it knowing it's a collection of fifty-year-old action comic strips aimed (predominantly) at teenage boys, with characterisation, worldbuilding and any kind of thematic development happening almost by accident, it can be underwhelming. This collection is Dredd at his most superficial and least interesting as a character, and the satirical take on Mega-City One as a horrible place to live which is effectively governed by fascist cops is not really explored at all, instead being played completely straight.
If you want a proper introduction to Dredd, The Essential Dredd collection is a better (and considerably shorter) place to start. If you've already sampled those and want to take a completionist approach and are going into this with your eyes open, there is some fun to be had with these stories. Robot Wars is interesting and The Return of Rico is the closest the collection comes to an actual classic, but you do have to accept a lot of filler (and a few straight-up terrible) stories to get there.
Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 01 (***) is widely available now, with is more than can be said for some of the later collections. An intriguing historical artifact which does set the scene and lay the foundations for the much better stories that follow.
The Complete Case Files Volume 01 contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 02 to Prog 61 of the comic 2000AD, published from March 1977 to April 1978 (no Judge Dredd story was published in the first issue). The stories are set in the years 2099 and 2100. The writers in this collection are John Wagner, Pat Mills, Robert Flynn, Kelvin Gosnell, Charles Harring, Malcolm Shaw and Joe Collins. The artists in this collection are Carlos Ezquerra, Mick McMahon, Ian Gibson, Brian Bolland, John Cooper and Massimo Belardinelli.
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