Mega-City One, 2102. A Psi-Judge has made a dire prediction. Mega-City One will be annihilated in the coming decades if the "Judge Child" is not found and returned to the city. Judge Dredd has located the child, but he has been whisked off into deep space by hostile forces, resulting in the Justice Department having to fund Dredd on a long, expensive trek across settled space in search of the child...with the fate of Mega-City One and perhaps Earth itself hanging in the balance.
The fourth instalment in Judge Dredd's Complete Case Files turns the comic into something a little unexpected: a full-blown space opera. Having traversed the Cursed Earth, saved Mega-City One from an insane tyrant and brought law and order to the Moon, Dredd is now representing humanity and Earth on the interstellar stage as he goes in search of the titular Judge Child. At 26 issues, spanning a full half of a year (and half this collection), the story is a proud epic to follow up on the Cursed Earth and Day the Law Died sagas, but again it's somewhat episodic, an excuse for the writers to come up with increasingly crazy characters, planets and aliens for Dredd to come up against with the search as a framing device.
It's still a reasonably good story and a somewhat iconic one, introducing the Angel Gang and Judge Hershey, who will go on to be a key player in future stories spanning decades (including a sequel in this very volume, where a serial killer starts trying to pick off the survivors of the mission). The ending is interesting but a bit under-explored, and it has to be said that the sudden shift back into standalone adventures and short arcs is a bit jarring, especially when some of these can be best described as "bonkers whimsical." A story about an evolution virus escaping in Charles Darwin Block and "devolving" the inhabitants into angry monkeys is vaguely entertaining, if a bit obvious. A recurring storyline across multiple stories sees Mega-City One gripped by yet another craze, this time for plastic surgery to make people incredibly ugly, which of course makes the creator of the first "Ugly Clinic" insanely wealthy and ripe for criminal exploitation.
The second major story arc, though considerably shorter, is Pirates of the Black Atlantic, in which a pirate group based in the Black Atlantic off Mega-City One's coast causes absolute havoc, even going as far as getting their hands on a nuclear missile, forcing Judge Dredd to storm the vessel. The story itself is slight, despite the devastation inflicted, but more importantly is the ending, in which it turns out that another faction was manipulating the pirates, and Dredd exposing them only delays their plans, not halts them. But that's a story for Volume 05 to pick up on.
The remaining stories have Dredd teaming up with an alien reporter, dealing with pop stars and stopping a graffiti craze in Mega-City One, resulting in the first appearance of Chopper, the Midnight Surfer, a key Dredd character who will recur many times in future stories.
The volume is interesting in being basically made up of a huge epic, several short arcs and a whole bunch of standalones, mixing the approach of previous volumes, where Volumes 01 and 03 were standalones and Volume 02 contained two massive sagas, an approach also favoured in Volume 05. I would say that the Judge Child story, though well-conceived with some great characters, feels a bit slight. The massive build-up to a limp ending is a classic case of storytelling bait-and-switch (albeit one with some further pay-offs down the road), and the story really only ends up being memorable for the secondary characters it introduces. The standalones are a mixed bag, but there's a lot of interesting worldbuilding going on and some good laughs (Walter the Wobot also continues to be a low-key presence, which I am thankful for), as well as a few more, briefly thoughtful moments. The collection ends up being interesting, but it is really the calm before the absolute storm that is Volume 05.
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