Tell me about a good reading order for Judge Dredd

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Tell me about a good reading order for Judge Dredd

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The original Dredd thredd's gone to archives, so I just wanted to say here what an unexpected pleasure the 'Served Cold' volume of the Mega Collection was. I hadn't really kept track of Al Ewing's stories, but there are some really good ones here - and Dredd's response to a villain who he first encountered 40-odd years earlier in Paris, who has him at gunpoint and says "I've been watching you for decades. What could you possibly do that would surprise me now?" is one of the best "no, gently caress you" comebacks the strip's ever done.

The downside with the Mega Collection is that short of someone doing a spreadsheet, the chronology is utterly hosed up...

# ¿ Jun 23, 2018 23:03

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 08:03

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Because I apparently have little better to do, I've made a spreadsheet listing the Mega Collection stories in chronological order. So you start with 'Krong' in volume 86, and finish with 'From The Ashes' in volume 83.

Note that these are just the "mainline" stories - Dredd (both in 2000AD and Megazine), Anderson, Chopper, Judge Death, The Dead Man. It's not every single obscure side character's story in the entire Mega Collection because I didn't say that I have nothing better to do.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2018 21:39

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Considering it's been running for 40 years, Dredd's had a surprisingly small number of writers (on the main strip in 2000AD, anyway). Wagner and Grant used to use various pseudonyms so that it didn't look like two people were writing most of each issue - eg, John Howard and TB Grover. Apart from the dark times in the 90s, Wagner has written the majority of the strip for four decades.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2018 07:56

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Disproportionation posted:

Ennis' stuff is mostly serviceable from what I've read, but Millar/Morrison is...not, like, Purgatory/Inferno is probably the worst mainline Dredd story I've read.

There were several 90s Dredd stories in 2000AD that boiled down to "remember this thing from your childhood? Here's a parody of it with ultraviolence and Dredd acting as even more of a Nazi bastard than usual as he shoots thinly-veiled analogues of familiar characters, tee hee tee hee!" (Star Trek, Mr Benn, The Magic Roundabout, etc.) They were all even worse than Inferno, which at least had an actual story, however bad.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 21:08

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

^burtle posted:

Isn't Ennis's big event just a rehashed Apocalypse War anyway.

Not really; more a mash-up of AW, Necropolis and Young Death, with elements of The Judge Child (Murd) and crossing over with another strip (Strontium Dog) for no reason other than it can. The villain is just a poo poo version of Sidney D'eath with an even more ridiculous name, and the story kills off a ton of the supporting cast to little effect. It moves at a good clip and it gives Dredd and Johnny Alpha some decent "aren't we badass" moments, but there's nothing original in it at all.

The same's true of Ennis's other big event, Helter Skelter, which basically exists to bring back a load of dead villains so Dredd can kill them again. Between the two of them it feels like Ennis wanted to play with Wagner and Grant's toys, but couldn't think of anything better to do with them than bash them together like a three-year-old with his Hot Wheels. His smaller stories are much better, when he's actually using his own ideas rather than recycling Wagner's.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 00:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

Sabbat the Necromagus is actually Walter the Softie from the Beano, which joke is worth the price of admission.

Ha! I did notice that the bully he killed and zombified was wearing a red and black striped jumper, but never made the connection...

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 06:55

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Disproportionation posted:

I didn't have anything better to do over the bank holiday so I made a modified version of this with spinoffs included, if you don't mind.

No, that's great!

# ¿ Aug 28, 2018 23:33

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

Liking Funko Pops. Forty years, creep!

Funko Pops make me feel depressingly old, because I'll go into a comic/nerd shop and see shelf upon shelf of these pointless, ugly, expensive, blank-faced things and just stare at them for a moment, going "...Why?"

# ¿ Sep 8, 2018 00:01

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jedit posted:

It's just been announced that Dredd co-creator Carlos Ezquerra has passed away aged 70. I'm not able to imagine a world without him in it.

I know. He's unique in mainstream comics because his style is dirty, yet always perfectly clear in its storytelling. And more than anyone else, Ezquerra created the look of Dredd's world; he designed the uniform (which even now is just a bulked-up tweak of his original), the bike and the gun, and without his wild background designs for giant buildings Mega-City One would have merely been a dystopian near-future New York; Pat Mills moved the setting forward by a century after seeing them.

Then there's everything else he drew as well, not least Strontium Dog. drat, he'll be missed.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2018 16:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Ron Smith was one of the underrated classic Dredd artists: nobody drew large-scale chaos and collateral damage like him. He also drew the citizens of MC1 at their grotesque finest. RIP. :smith:

That's Brett Ewins, Steve Dillon, Carlos Ezquerra and now Ron Smith gone...

# ¿ Mar 15, 2019 15:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

When Wagner came back from his 90s hiatus, he all but ignored everything the new guard had done if he didn't like it. Bad guys blew up the Statue of Judgement? Nope!

And he's still the Dredd writer even after all these years. If he changes something in the strip, it matters. poo poo, he's just started the death clock for Hershey after having her quit as Chief Judge, and she's been a mainstay since The Judge Child in 1980!

# ¿ Mar 16, 2019 00:24

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Dredd has become fractionally more liberal and tolerant in his old age (when Wagner's writing him, at least). Problem is, any time he actually tries to do something to improve the system and make it a little more about justice than merely law, it has horrible unforeseen consequences. Small wonder he's always so pissed off.

About the only thing he's done along those lines without hideous blowback has been getting Beeny promoted to the Council of Five, she managing to be both his best prot�g�e and a reformer in a way that he never can and never will, but there's plenty of time for things to fall apart.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 15:47

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Heavy Metal posted:

Another part of that is in the 80s John Wagner and Alan Grant were co-writing, Alan Grant brought a bit more of that full on fascist aspect of Dredd. They had disagreements on stuff around the Oz storyline in 88, then that late 80s stuff into Necropolis is all Wagner. I prefer Wagner's take, a bit more nuanced and a bit of pathos to ol' stony-face. Though him being both the good guy or bad guy relative to the story is always a good aspect.

The first story after Oz, 'Hitman', is credited to Wagner and Grant, but IIRC it's Wagner going solo. He doesn't waste any time setting out his stall, because it's the first time I can remember that Dredd is portrayed as vulnerable in a very human way (he spends two-thirds of the story hospitalised and weak after major trauma, expressing doubt in both himself and the whole system, and is clearly depressed)... yet despite this, he never for one moment is anything but himself. It's a small, understated, but actually quite important story as far as Dredd's character development goes, because it gets to develop.

# ¿ May 2, 2019 12:34

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Re-reading the collected Day Of Chaos for no particular reason, certainly nothing to do with current events.

Mega-City One may be a fascistic dystopia, but at least it made its disease testing kits free to all...

# ¿ Mar 14, 2020 17:59

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Judgement Day was the first time a storyline ran in both the prog and the Meg simultaneously, and it wasn't overly well received because readers had to buy both, in the right order, or have missing or scrambled episodes. Later crossovers like Wilderlands and Doomsday split their story arcs so that Dredd's would appear in the main prog, and other characters' in the Meg.

# ¿ May 22, 2020 08:25

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

sephiRoth IRA posted:

Now THAT is an effort post. Thanks!

I've been really enjoying Brian Bollands work- currently starting at case files 2 again- in the early stuff its just so much better than the other artists'.

You can see a lot of 2000AD artists doing their development in public, especially with Dredd; Bolland's very early strips already had his incredible linework in place, but he wasn't quite there with his dynamism and character poses, and there's one closeup of Dredd (can't remember the story) where it looks as if his helmet's somehow smaller than his head because the perspective's off. (In fairness, Dredd's helmet is really hard to draw consistently, and every single artist gives it a different shape and proportions.) But by the time he got to Judge Death Lives his art was basically flawless, and the final part of Block Mania was his definitive Dredd - it's an absolutely amazing piece of work, easily on a par with anything he did later, like Killing Joke.

And then he never drew another Dredd story again, because that level of artwork required so much time and effort for relatively meagre pay that he went off to work for the Americans instead. :smith:

(And he was seriously hosed off with the endless reprinting and licensing of his work without a single penny coming back to him, culminating in his page for the Thargshead Revisited prog 500 anniversary spoof... that wasn't printed because it was so critical of the comic's management and practices. Similarly, Mike McMahon's original Thargshead page, attacking other 2000AD artists who he considered to be ripping off his artwork *coughBrettEwins* got replaced by a less overt but equally sarcastic version.)

A good book about the development of 2000AD (and Dredd) is Pat Mills' Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! Mills was the co-creator and first editor of 2000AD, and played a massive if understated role in Dredd's early development. He's also a man who is utterly unsparing in his criticism of anyone he considered to be working against the comic (ie, almost all IPC's management) or lacking in talent (including some of the later editors).

# ¿ Aug 3, 2021 12:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Phenotype posted:

e: oh, it WAS Apocalypse War, I finally got to a few of the pages I was remembering. Did this get redone? I don't remember it all being in color!

Apocalypse War originally had the opening spread of each episode in colour, the rest in B&W. At a certain point even Ezquerra couldn't keep up with the workload, so there was a one-week break with a reprint of a really old story, and when AW came back it was all B&W. Any full-colour version was probably done for the Eagle Comics US reprints.

Weirdly, the Mega Collection hardback from a few years ago was all B&W even on the episodes that had colour, and in some cases you can tell they used colour plates and stripped out the CMY separations to reduce it to lineart only. It's a bizarre choice, because if you have colour available and it was there originally, why not use it in your supposed definitive edition?

# ¿ Nov 7, 2021 11:17

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Stallone Dredd actually had his own (short-lived) comic in 1995, Lawman Of The Future. IIRC it went back to the 1977 one-shot approach of "wacky future crimes dealt with by humourless by-the-book supercop" (Wagner himself contributed), but drastically toned down the violence. Which was a sign of changing times; LOTF was aimed at 11-year-olds yet had everything santised, whereas 2000AD started out aimed at kids of 8-10 who really wanted to see the violence of Death Race or Rollerball or Dirty Harry but in those pre-VHS days had zero chance of getting into a cinema to do so - and instead got to see it on paper.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2021 00:49

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The two Dredd movies between them are like that Star Trek episode where the transporter split Kirk into two incomplete personalities: you need both halves to make the whole original. 1995 got the look right, while 2012 got the feel. (2012's "Jo'burg to the max" future was the hardest thing for me to adjust to, even though it's probably more 'realistic' than the 1970s-born image of MC1 being massive futuristic skyscrapers covering the entire Eastern Seaboard. Weirdly, one thing 1995 got right in hindsight was downsizing the city; 100 million people crammed into NYC works better in terms of horrible overpopulation than 800 million stretching all the way from Canada to Florida as far inland as the Great Lakes. I worked out that's the same population density as, er, Barbados.)

# ¿ Dec 18, 2021 00:06

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

A post in another thread just reminded me that it's canonical (written by Wagner, drawn by Ezquerra) that Dredd killed the actual, real, genuine Count Dracula.

Which made me wonder how long before he links to the St Elsewhere kid-with-a-snowglobe Expanded Universe.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2022 00:18

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Alhazred posted:

Dredd is also a prequel to Nemesis the Warlock.

Early Dredd was explicitly in the same timeline as Ro-Busters following 2000AD's merger with Starlord, which meant it was also in the same universe as ABC Warriors, Nemesis, Invasion and Flesh (all Pat Mills joints). Later on this got quietly retconned away as Mills' Volgan War (expanded on in later ABCs and Savage) became impossible to reconcile with the Dreddverse WW3, despite Hammerstein turning up in a Dredd story after his lookalike appeared in the Stallone movie.

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jan 31, 2022

# ¿ Jan 31, 2022 18:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Heavy Metal posted:

Oh yeah, I'm definitely cool with them being loose with stuff like that. Can't have Dredd ending in five years or so. It would be wild if they did still incorporate that 2150 thing in Dredd somehow though.

There have been pre-cog hints dropped in a few stories about a nuclear conflict between MC1 and Brit-Cit in the not-so-far future, which might be it.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2022 23:27

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Payndz posted:

There have been pre-cog hints dropped in a few stories about a nuclear conflict between MC1 and Brit-Cit in the not-so-far future, which might be it.

Quoting myself is probably very bad form, but I found one of the references (I misremembered some details), from Al Ewing's 'The Americans' all the way back in 2009. The "time traveller" is almost certainly Johnny Alpha...

Fake edit: there's meant to be an image, but for some reason it's not appearing, dammit.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2022 15:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

General 2000AD rather than specifically Dredd (although it applies), but I picked up the first two volumes of Rogue Trooper from the 2000AD Ultimate Collection and it reminded me how great Colin Wilson's art is. His near-future hardware is on a par with the likes of Syd Mead, Shirow or Moebius, and there's a kinetic brutality to his action sequences that not many other 2000AD artists match. He did some fantastic work on Dredd too - I think 'Diary of a Mad Citizen' was in the first prog I ever bought, which made for a great introduction to the crazy violence of MC1.

One funny thing though; there's a frame in 'Diary' that's a straight swipe from a late 60s Blueberry story by Moebius (Wilson was a huge fan whose art style is heavily influenced by him), and Wilson later became Moebius's prot�g� and ended up drawing... Blueberry!

Edit to add image:

Look at all the grungy sci-fi detail in the exterior shot. Wilson's MC1 looks decayed, a century of stuff being patched on top of other, broken stuff. (It's cyberpunk before the term even existed; this story was published a full year before Blade Runner was released in the UK.) The atmosphere is a world apart from Ezquerra's Gaudi-esque starscrapers or McMahon's vaguely penis-shaped mass-produced city blocks. And check out the careful positioning of the "UURRGH!" to cover the bloody, explosive exit wound - you can bet Wilson drew it in detail.

"I'm coming to get you just as soon as I've had breakfast!" has to be a Wagner line (TB Grover is a Wagner/Grant pseudonym) - it's a perfect bit of understated black comedy showing just how pathetic Kweeg really is.

Oh yeah, here's the swipe. I think Wilson's a great artist, but oof...

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Mar 7, 2022

# ¿ Mar 6, 2022 16:45

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Heavy Metal posted:

Very cool! I was looking into Blueberry recently too, intending to read some of that.

I was looking for Blueberry volumes on UK eBay and they were all stupid prices, then I had a brainwave and ordered a used copy from Amazon France for about a quarter as much, even with postage.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2022 21:42

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 08:03

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Alan Grant (Dredd, Anderson, Strontium Dog, Robo-Hunter, Ace Trucking, plus a load of DC stuff including Batman) just died. :smith:

# ¿ Jul 21, 2022 12:20

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Tell me about a good reading order for Judge Dredd