Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 05

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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Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 04

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.

The Complete Case Files Volume 04 (***½) contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 155 to Prog 207 of the comic 2000AD, published from March 1980 to April 1981. The stories are set in the years 2102 and 2103. The writers in this collection are John Wagner, Alan Grant and Kelvin Gosnell. The artists in this collection are Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, Mick McMahon, Ian Gibson, Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins.

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Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 03

Mega-City One, 2101. The city is recovering from the rule of the insane tyrant Cal and, as usual, it's up to the firm and unyielding vigilance of Judge Dredd to make sure stability is maintained. But with his niece Vienna being targeted by criminals, crime rising in the city hab blocks, and a vast invading army of flesh-eating spiders headed towards the city, Dredd has his hands full. And that's before the sinister Judge Death arrives from another dimension...

The previous two volumes in the Complete Case Files series presented two different sides to the Judge Dredd mythos. Volume 01 was mostly stand-alone stories with little linking material. Volume 02 is divided into two huge arcs, The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died, with only a few standalone stories. Volume 03 is, once again, mostly stand-alone stories, although these are now usually mini-arcs of 2-4 issues apiece, with the occasional one-off strip.

This approach, coupled with a greater interest in worldbuilding and continuity (things that were more optional in the first volume) means that the omnibus covers a lot of ground. Several Judge Dredd core concepts are explored here, such as city fads that the population of Mega-City One latches onto to avoid going totally insane, with "boinging" (jumping around the city in indestructible plastic bubbles) the first to be investigated. We also learn more about Mega-City One's TV stations and what kind of shows are popular, and we get several arcs in which the city is under threat from a vast horde out of the Cursed Earth, being, er, druid-led hippies and killer insane spiders respectively. In another story, Dredd joins forces with a talking cat (genetic engineering, natch), fights horror-themed robots running amuck (Dredd vs. the Hunchback of Notre Dame is an underrated face-off) and has to take part in an international incident as Mega-City One has to evict Sov-Block warships from the Black Atlantic off the coast. Smaller-scale stories see Dredd having to deal with the introduction of the most amazing-tasting chocolate in the history of the city, and dealing with a super-genius child whose parents did not set appropriate boundaries (this story gets a sequel a mind-boggling thirty years later).

But the volume saves the most memorable story for almost last. Dredd's most iconic, famous foe is Judge Death, a semi-incorporeal being from another dimension who killed his homeworld's population, ensuring justice by making life itself a crime. Dredd has to join forces with Psi-Judge Anderson, arguably the second-most-iconic judge in the whole franchise apart from Dredd, to take down the enemy. This is a foe so formidable that it's hard to see how Dredd can plausibly win, and to their credit the writers realise that as well, and come up with a novel solution that doesn't resolve the situation permanently, but puts it on hold for another time (in this case, Volume 05).

Those looking for another long-running, epic arc may be disappointed not to find one here, but this collection of shorter arcs is head-and-shoulders better than Volume 01. The stories are funnier, the satire is sharper and the world is feeling more consistent. This is still far from Dredd at its best, but we're certainly well on our way to getting there, and it's satisfying to finally meet Dredd's most formidable adversary, and one who will continue to plague him for decades to come.

The Complete Case Files Volume 03 (***½) contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 116 to Prog 154 of the comic 2000AD, published from June 1979 to March 1980. The stories are set in the years 2101 and 2102. The writers in this collection are John Wagner and Pat Mills. The artists in this collection are Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Mick McMahon, Brendan McCarthy, Ian Gibson, Garry Leach, Ron Smith, John Cooper and Barry Mitchell.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 02

Earth, 2100. Mega-City Two, the vast super-conurbation stretching down the west coast of North America, has fallen victim to a malevolent plague. Mega-City One has developed an antidote, but the airspace over the mega cities is contested, so the only way to deliver the plague is overland, through the radioactive, burned-out wasteland separating the two: the Cursed Earth. Obviously only one man is capable of undertaking this epic journey: Judge Dredd. But whilst Dredd is away, there are those back in Mega-City One taking advantage of his absence...

The first volume of The Complete Case Files introduced the insane techno-hellscape of crime-ridden Mega-City One and its enforcers of law and order, the Judges. It's probably fair to say that volume is not the best introduction to the world of Judge Dredd, featuring as it does overwhelmingly violent action stories designed to appeal to teenage boys in the late 1970s. Subtlety, in-depth worldbuilding and strong thematic development were not high on the agenda, and the franchise showed little of the satirical bite and intelligence that would characterise it at its best. Still, it showed some promise, especially when it delved into Dredd's backstory or moved away from crime-of-the-week capers towards longer narratives, like the Robot Wars arc.

By contrast, Volume 02 is just two massive narratives, with a few one-off stories between, and is immediately much better for it. Much of the first half of the volume is taken up by The Cursed Earth, which runs from Prog #65 to #85, and is the first critically-acclaimed Dredd epic. Heavily inspired by Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, it sees Dredd taking a road trip from Mega-City One on the Eastern Seaboard to Mega-City Two on the west coast, bringing urgently-needed vaccines to the sister-city.

Despite being classified as a single saga, the story is really a themed collection of episodes, linked by the device of the journey. Early on Dredd has to deal with mad mutants living in the Appalachians (where Mount Rushmore has been moved for unclear reasons), robotic vampires serving the last President of the United States, Mississippi plantationers using enslaved aliens, a cloned dinosaur theme park in the Rockies where the dinos have escaped and run amuck (did Michael Crichton read 2000AD?), and shenanigans in Las Vegas where the local Judges have gone rogue and become their own Mafia-like gang.

There's definitely a lot more dark satire here than in the first volume, and in fact the volume has to legally omit the most problematic storyline, in which it's revealed the pre-nuclear-war rivalry between local McDonalds and Burger King franchises has escalated into full-scale actual warfare. One infamous scene has a guy dressed as Ronald McDonald executing an employee for spilling a milkshake. Another episode, also omitted, has a mad scientist who looks like Colonel Sanders creating evil creatures based on corporate mascots, including the Green Giant and the Michelin Man. Rebellion did somehow negotiate the rights to use these elements in The Cursed Earth Uncensored edition from a few years ago (now out of print), but The Complete Case Files sadly has to make do without. The episodic nature of the story does mean you don't really notice their absence.

The story is solid, and some of the satire is quite biting, with alien slave Tweak and his story of enslavement in what is effectively the American South (if one reduced to a post-apocalyptic waste) being quite on-the-nose for the late 1970s. We also get a nice amount of worldbuilding by meeting President Booth, the leader of the United States when the third and last world war broke out, and explanations for how Dredd's world evolved out of ours.

If the story has a problem, it can be a little repetitive, goes on a little too long and the defaulting to using explosive ultraviolence to solve every problem can get predictable. Still, the sheer unhinged lunacy of some aspects of the story, like Judge Dredd facing off against a killer mutant tyrannosaurus, is quite entertaining.

The story rolls almost immediately into The Day The Law Died, which ran from Prog 89 to 108. After some odd cases back in Mega-City One hinting that not everything has been running smoothly in Dredd's absence, the city is taken over in a coup by Deputy Chief Judge Cal. Cal initially appears competent, but quickly goes totally insane, enforces the death penalty for the most ludicrous infractions, has alien mercenaries enforce his rule, and appoints his pet goldfish to second-in-command of the city. He neutralises Dredd early on, forcing Dredd to go underground and form a resistance to try to retake the city.

Cal is - fairly blatantly - based on the Roman Emperor Caligula, which may seem random until you remember that the BBC mini-series I, Claudius had been absolutely huge on British TV just two years earlier, with John Hurt on superb form as the deranged Caligula.

The story is again a bit overlong, and suffers a bit from the infamously fractious people of Mega-City One, who normally make the citizens of Springfield, Pawnee and Star's Hollow look quiet and orderly in comparison, going along with Cal's crazy stunts far too meekly. I get the impression the writers agreed and we get a late-story retcon trying to explain how everyone has been put under Cal's spell, but as an idea it's a bit weaksauce.

Instead, the story is mostly an excuse for action and for the development of a larger cast of secondary characters, including the introduction of Judge Griffin, as well as some crazy setpieces and comedic ideas, like Judge Fish, or Judge Schmaltz living up to his name to Dredd's extreme frustration.

By the end of Volume 02 (***½), we're still not up to speed with Dredd at his best, but we're getting closer. The few cases-of-the-week are unremarkable, but the two extended sagas are both solid stories with some great worldbuilding and side-characters. Both stories are probably a bit too padded, and the suspension of disbelief required to accept that Cal would get away with half the things he does before someone shoots him is quite strong, but we're seeing the comic start the development of its satirical bite and darker undertones that will become a much bigger part of its appeal later on.

The Complete Case Files Volume 02 contains almost every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 61 to Prog 115 of the comic 2000AD, published from April 1978 to June 1979. Progs 71-72 and 77-78 are skipped because of legal issues (these stories riff hard on MacDonalds, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, with scant respect for trademarks). The stories are set in the years 2100 and 2101. The writers in this collection are John Wagner, Pat Mills and Chris Lowder. The artists in this collection are Dave Gibbons, Mike McMahon, Brian Bolland, Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, Garry Leach and Ron Smith.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 01

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. Judge Dredd is intriguing as an early example of a proto-cyberpunk setting, though the stories themselves are almost anti-cyberpunk in style (being from the POV of the effective fascist enforcers of the law), but at this stage they're not doing much with this idea.

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.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.