Mega-City One, 2103. Mega-City One's criminal rackets are being hit hard, by both internal divisions and by the coordinated efforts of the city's Justice Department. But as Judge Dredd's campaign against organised crime pays dividends, the city is rocked by the arrival of three Dark Judges from a parallel dimension. Their mission is to rescue their brother Judge Death from where he was imprisoned. As the city struggles in the aftermath of that conflict, a mysterious malaise spreads from city block to city block, triggering insane violence that manifests as Block Wars. As the city descends into utter chaos, Dredd and his allies discover that events are being orchestrated by their old enemies in East-Meg One...who have a devastating plan to conquer Mega-City One once and for all. The world will never be the same again.
The first four Judge Dredd collections did a fine job collecting the opening four years of Dredd's strips from the 2000AD comic. These collections show how the character was initially created and then evolved, with the world expanding and gaining more detail, with more factions, characters and enemies being invented.
A key part of the evolution was the move away from one-off strips to longer and more involving narratives, such as The Cursed Earth, The Day the Law Died and The Judge Child. These longer stories allowed for more character and thematic development, allowing the writers - mostly John Wagner and Alan Grant - to start lacing in more and more biting satire on modern life by exaggerating it to insane degrees. These long epics became more popular with readers, despite the risk of devoting a quarter or even half a full year of the comic to a single story, risking newcomers feeling lost if they joined halfway through.
Volume 05 of The Complete Case Files is notable for just dropping the idea of stand-alones altogether and running several massive, and quite influential, storylines one after other, including the combined saga of Block Mania followed by The Apocalypse War, forming one of the comic's biggest-ever single arcs and arguably its most devastating.
Backing up, things kick off with The Mega-Rackets, Judge Dredd's war on organised crime. Organised crime in Mega-City One is very good at keeping its head down and putting so many layers of deniability between the crime lords and their minions on the street that neutralising their activities is almost impossible. This arc sees Dredd taking on the rackets only to be constantly stymied by their lawyers and own cleverness. It's only when the rackets end up fighting one another and a newly-arrived crime gang - from another planet! - that Dredd gets the opening he needs to take them on. This is mostly an excuse to explore several different types of crime in the city we haven't seen before and also see that there is a functioning judiciary and law, with the right to lawyers and appeals. It's a reasonably solid story arc and could have been a highlight of the volume if this was any other volume. Instead, it has to settle for being the lowest-key storyline here.
Judge Death Lives is the shortest of the major arcs here but it's very punchy. As related in Volume 03, the evil Judge Death arrived from another dimension where being alive is itself a crime. Dredd and Psi-Judge Anderson were able to stop Death, but only by imprisoning him in Anderson's mind. Anderson herself was then imprisoned in stasis to stop Death's escape, an imperfect solution but the only one to hand. Inevitably, this stopgap runs out as Death is rescued by his three brother Judges from his home dimension: Mortis, Fear and Fire. They unleash chaos on Mega-City One until Dredd and a recovering Anderson team up to bring them down, ejecting them from our reality and then following them to their home dimension to destroy them there. Unusually, the whole story has the same artist from start to finish, the S-tier Brian Bolland (a few years ahead of his Batman run on The Killing Joke here), which gives it a tremendous visual consistency and quality, and arguably Dredd's single-minded pursuit of justice is taken up a notch here when he casually invades another universe to stop his enemies. To cap it off, the story features what is quite possibly The Single Greatest Comic Book Panel in Human History. The result is a story that is not subtle (Dredd rarely is) but moves with tremendous purpose.
After a couple of brief, disposable interlude stories (Diary of a Mad Citizen and The Hotdog Run), we move into Block Mania. Block Wars, caused by the citizens of two neighbouring blocks having enough of their neighbours and going to war against one another, have been previously established in earlier volumes, but here the scale quickly starts going out of control with dozens of blocks across the northern sector going to war almost simultaneously. Dredd's investigation is made difficult because the sheer scope of the crisis, and the response needed to quell it, is almost beyond belief. It's only when he gets a tip that a single person has caused the crisis, allowing him to potentially eliminate it at the source, that the problem becomes manageable.
The bait-and-switch here remains extremely impressive: the miscreant is caught and we discover that the situation can be brought under control...until it becomes clear that East-Meg One has manipulated events to completely distract Mega-City One so it can launch a massive, full-scale nuclear attack. Block Mania doesn't even really end, it just upgrades into The Apocalypse War, in which Earth is wracked by the largest-scaled nuclear war in its history (dwarfing even the Third World War that created the Cursed Earth and forced the people of the world into the mega-cities in the first place). The scale here goes completely berserk as the two cities trade counter-blows of land-based, sub-launched and even space-launched missiles whilst their laser interceptor screens try to intercept the incoming ordinance.
It's chaos on a monumental scale until the bad guys gain an advantage and decide to try to capture the remaining parts of Mega-City One by ground invasion, which ends up being a significant mistake, giving Dredd time to both martial a resistance movement and then plot to take the fight back to the Sov-Block homeland. The writers really sell the size of the war, bringing back almost every character of note in the comic's five-year history. Dredd's assembly of a Judge suicide squad consisting of almost all the Judges of note we've met so far is a key moment, establishing the likes of Hershey and Anderson as ongoing major players. Even Walter the Wobot and Dredd's landlady Maria have key roles to play.
It's a massive - and quite spectacularly violent - story unfolding on a scale that's pretty bananas. It's even funnier that the motivation for the story was allegedly John Wagner getting annoyed by subsequent writer and artists pushing the boundaries of Mega-City One to a ridiculous size, extending all the way down to Florida when his original map had it ending short of Georgia. The story is basically an excuse to reduce the size of the city to more manageable dimensions.
Themes in the story are more implied than explored: with the invaders showing little mercy, Dredd is not inclined to expend much back in their direction, though even he briefly pauses over one key decision and tells his subordinates to stand down so he can do the deed himself (something that has colossal ramifications that continue to reverberate in the story today, almost forty-five years later). There's also the startling decision by Mega-City Two and Texas City not to come to their ally's aid, even when the immediate threat to their cities is lifted, even more shocking when Mega-City Two was saved from complete annihilation by Dredd himself in the Cursed Earth arc. This will come up again, though not as forcefully as some might wish.
This isn't subtle storytelling - there's probably more nuclear explosions in this collection than almost any other comic book ever published - but it does the job of completely changing the worldbuilding of the setting, and making Dredd arguably the most important person on the planet (making his subsequent return to being a street judge teetering on the edge of implausibility). It'll arguably be eight years until the comic tries to do anything on this scale again, for good and ill.
The Complete Case Files Volume 05 (****½) is easily the biggest, more impressive and most epic collection of stories to date, though again these tales lack a certain subtlety compared to more recent comics. But the collection features several essential storylines that will determine the future of the character and franchise for decades to come.
The volume contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 208 to Prog 270 of the comic 2000AD, published from April 1981 to June 1982. The stories are set in the years 2103 and 2104. The writers in this collection are John Wagner and Alan Grant. The artists in this collection are Brian Bolland, John Cooper, Steve Dillon, Carlos Ezquerra, Ian Gibson, Mick McMahon, Barry Mitchell, Ron Smith and Colin Wilson.
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