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Everyone has a favourite Dredd mega-epic, right? I thought I did until I stopped to think about it and decided it was impossible to choose between the best of them. Partly it's impossible to separate out which stories are good on their own merits, and which are only good because I read them over and over in my youth. But it IS possible to say that some stories hold up better than other, surely? I thought I’d have a go at putting numbers to each epic, as I undertook a re-read. I didn't re-read of ALL Dredd, mind. 

 

Dredd Case Files: most contain one epic, some even have two.

That would be insane, wouldn’t it?

Although some have tried...

Drokk! (ongoing, reviews each Case Files collection, likely to finish just before the series reaches Total War I imagine)

Dredd Reckoning (reviews all collected editions of Dredd stories and spin-offs stories up to Tour of Duty).

 

Anyway, I narrowed my ranking down to the biggest, epicest storylines, defined purely by a combination of episode count and page count, with a minimum of either 10 episodes or 60 pages (This to allow for epics that ran in the Megazine, which tend to have fewer episodes but bigger page counts). Partly this reflects those stories that have been collected into single volumes, but also I did it to pick up a few surprises – stories that don’t seem ‘epic’ but happen to be quite long.

There's one exception to this rule – Dredd's very first 'epic', which most fans seem to agree was the 9-episode Robot War storyline from very early in the Prog's history, although it was only 46 pages in total.

In the end I'm left with 53 stories, from Robot War all the way to End of Days. This is perhaps twice as many as the much-loved 25+ episode Mega Epics (or Mega Progs, if you’re Jeff Lester).

I’ve given each epic a score for writing and art, and have reflected on a story’s legacy – how much has it impacted Dredd stories that came after. After putting all the numbers through a grinder, I've come up with an order, objectively, of how good these stories are. You know, not based on my personal biases at ALL.

And with that, I'll get into it, covering 2 or 3 or 4 epics each time, from worst to best. 

Words by John Wagner; Art by Carlos Ezquerra.
(And yes, this IS from the first ever Dredd strip, albeit not published until the 1981 Dredd Annual)