Epics 9-7: Short but oh so sweet

Oh man, these stories are all just so good you guys. We kick off with a return to Wagner's favourite philsophical well, putting the power of life and death into the hands of a robot...

Epic 9: Machine Law Progs 2024-2029 and 2115-2122
Written by John Wagner; Art by John McCrea and Colin McNeil
(14 epsiodes, 86 pages in total; epic number 48 in sequence)

Robots riding motorcycles - a successful recipe for 2000AD
Art by Luke Preece

The Basics: Mechanismo is back! Dredd assesses a new, improved robot Judge, Harvey, and then has to watch as robot judges are first accepted onto the force, and then even onto the Council of Five.

Analysis: Another split epic, and sort of a cheat as neither sequence in this two-part tale is quite long enough to meet my criteria. But, you know, it’s John Wagner, it’s a continuation of the Mechanismo epic, and in the collected edition it really does work as a single story, with a break in between to make it easier to accept that Harvey can even begin to work as a Council of Five judge.

Backing up a bit, this is basically the inevitable riposte to the original Mechanismo. In that story, Dredd’s mistrust of robots is proven correct – too many of them go haywire, prove impossible to turn off, or at the very least prove corruptible. Here, John Wagner asks, what if, just what if, robots could be programmed so well they could actually do a better job of judging than the Judges? The most fascinating part of it is how the citizens come to like and trust these robots more, precisely because they show not quite a soft touch, but more a holistic understanding of why people commit crimes, apportioning blame to unfair systems or straight up poverty and social inequality.

Where there is societal change, there's a league of angry white men to complain about it...
Art by Colin McNeil

This idea is of course not new in the real world of 2020, but it does feel as if UK society is on the brink of reconsidering police work, not to mention other areas of welfare and social work, to try to join it all up a bit more. And it’s when Judge Dredd stories attempt to reflect on but SF-ify the real world that it works best of all.

Harvey, the first part of the story, is altogether charming, a neat twist on the oft-seen story of ‘Dredd takes a rookie and watches them work’. The twist being that Harvey is a robot, and as such basically can’t fail, but can show Dredd up in various ways without being a dick about it. Artist John McCrea has a really interesting style when it comes to the robots, too, that add to the charm and keep the tone light – appropriate for what is, in essence, a mismatched buddy cop action comedy story.

Ooh, the idea of programming a robot to be able to disobey certain orders! Meaty topic that.
Art by John McCrea

Machine Law, the second part of the overall epic, is darker, heavier and more plotty. These are strengths for Colin MacNeil, and I must say that he really does seem to find an extra bit of magic to pull out for John Wagner scripts, his art here zinging in ways it hadn’t quite on a couple of previous (non-Wagner) epics. As a thriller, Machine Law pulls off that joyous trick of setting up an impossible situation, only to have the main character find a solution that works in story, and is really hard to see coming from the reader’s point of view. Plus there’s the added bonus of some major Mega City One changes happening, as the baton is passed from outgoing Chief Judge Hershey and on to incoming Chief Judge Logan.

Logan - trying to be as sutbborn as his role model, Joe Dredd
Art by Colin McNeil

Story: 9/10 Watching John Wagner scratching an itch is just all kinds of delightful. Will he ever get the bottom of the 'can robots be better than people' question? Maybe in Spector?
Art: 9-10/10 I guess I can see some people not digging McCrea's loose style here, but I think it works so well with the theme of friendly robots. MacNeil, of course, knows how to deliver terrorist-based thrills like few others.
Legacy: robot judges are here to stay! Until they’re not, I guess…
...if you've been following Judge Dredd in 2024.

Some writers have taken to them more than others, notably Kenneth Niemand. Perhaps it’ll be he who delivers an epic length tale to show what happens when this latest iteration of Mechnismo Judges become too powerful?

Wagner himself has already given us Guatemala, which explicitly examines a city in which robots did indeed seize control, with some ramifications on Mega City One and ex-Chief Judge Hershey in particular. I thought about tacking it on to this epic but it’s more of a follow-up rather than a direct continuation.

Overall score: 18.6
Want to read it? There's a nifty collection.

 

Next up, one of the worst Dredd stories redone RIGHT... 

Epic 8: Titan / Enceladus Progs 1862-1869, 1924-1928, 1940-1947
Written by Rob Williams, Art by Henry Flint
(21 episodes, 130 pages in total. This is epic 41 in sequence by my count)

Another ‘split’ epic, in which no single sequence ran for long enough continuously to qualify, but as a whole I think this definitely counts as EPIC. For sure it was split up partly to allow Henry Flint time to draw the whole thing by himself, but it’s also baked into the story that there’s a time delay between each of the three arcs. Even in the 22^nd Century, it takes time to travel to Saturn’s moons and back.

The Basics: Something is afoot on the Justice penal colony on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Dredd and a team of marines go in to investigate, fearing the worst – an uprising by the inmates, and an invasion by those inmates against Mega City 1. Those fears are indeed realised, but with several twists.

This is one of those stories that opens in the middle, with the reprisal already underway.
Art by Henry Flint

Prologues: This epic is sort of a crossover. There’s not much build-up to speak of in the pages of Judge Dredd, except for a couple of episodes that introduce SJS Judge Gerhard, who believes he has a case to bring against Judge Dredd (‘Innocent’, ‘Skulls’ and a post-Titan pre-Enceladus tale ‘Fit’). Specifically, Gerhard blames Dredd’s actions during the Apocalypse War for bringing about a number of disasters upon the city, culminating in the Day of Chaos. To be honest, this plot point goes basically nowhere. It’s already clear that Gerhard is a good guy, and there’s just the merest frisson of concern that Gerhard might betray Dredd during the course of the Titan story.

The real prologue is basically the entire run of another series, Low Life. Because Titan isn’t really Dredd’s story, it’s the story of Aimee Nixon. Spoiler warning for that series!!

[Nixon is a Wally Squad Judge who ended up turning into a crime lord by the final series of Low Life, before being captured and imprisoned by Dirty Frank, the other star of Low Life.] 

You’ll get a lot more out of Titan if you’ve read ALL of Low Life. You could leave out of few bits here and there (for instance, you could completely skip over the Trifecta parts) but Nixon’s long, slow character arc is all about her gradual disillusionment with the Justice system and how she feels treated, and what the point of it all is. Concerns she voices explicitly in Titan, that I can imagine seem pretty weird if you don’t know who she is.

 

Nixon - used to be a goodie, not so much any more. But is she justified?
Art by Henry Flint

Analysis: I have to start by complimenting Henry Flint yet again. Three arcs of the same story, but all with their own colour palate and visual themes that he nails hard. But even more than this Flint provides some super memorable character moments. Dredd wracked with pain but still fighting; Judge Sam going from awestruck to enraged. Hershey showing increasing signs of frustration and impatience, and that one panel where she glares at Dredd with the hardest of all hard stares.

This sort of thing is, I think, the essence of what Rob Williams is trying to get at. He’s exploring character, seeing what he can do to push the main players into corners to watch what will be unleashed when he does. As such, it’s both tremendously exciting and also a little bit clinical. There’s a lot of this epic that feels like it should be an action film – I mean, you’ve got a team of marines flying into a prison colony to put down an uprising, and then an alien invasion of Mega City 1 (sort of). But it doesn’t play out like an action film. A big part of that is, all through this epic Rob Williams is being a writer, using a bag of tricks, and to a certain extent, showing off. Especially the way he starts telling the story at one point, then jumps back in time, then jumps forward again, and back again. Not to mention switching points of view between the main players.

Dredd is just one of the main characters in this story, far from the only one.
Art by Henry Flint

You could argue that it builds tension better, but if I’m honest I found the jumping around in time and in focus rather tiresome. Had Williams just started at the beginning and worked through I think it’d have been just as dramatic. He could’ve either mixed up the time but kept us with Dredd, or switched from telling Dredd’s version of the story to Nixon’s, but he ends up doing both at once, and it requires effort on the part of the reader to keep up.

Those criticisms said, the actual plot and drama of the story is compelling stuff! It’s Inferno reconfigured and done right. It’s a gritty, realistic take on a supernatural story, combining prison breaks, heists and weird energy-alien ghost story shenanigans. And it’s BIG. It’s about Justice Dept not being able to cope even with its own internal matters – i.e. the Titan Penal colony. It’s about Aimee Nixon’s personal story of owing everything to Justice Dept, but being so thoroughly anti-authoritarian that she can’t bear it. It’s about her version of humanity picking a fight with Dredd’s version, and losing.

My memory of this epic as it ran is that people liked it for the first half then got annoyed with the alien angle and especially the magical horse that turned up in Enceladus: New Life. For me, those things kind of come out of nowhere (no matter how much Williams tried to seed an ‘it’s cold/snowing’ theme), but on each re-read they elevate the whole story to make it more beautiful, not least because Flint is doing such superlative work. Dredd on a horse in the snow may not quite make thematic sense, but it sure is a glorious page, and by the end of Enceladus, it actually does feel right. It’s evil Aimee, channelling some sort of devil in the form of the alien ice of Enceladus, vs noble Dredd, aided by the angelic pair of the horse and Dirty Frank.

Is this Aimee Nixon turned into an ice monster, or an ice monster that thinks it's Aimee Nixon?
And can Frank defeat her/it with the power of friendship..?
Art by Henry Flint

For me, it’s exceptional ideas tempered by execution more experimental then enthralling. But you know, I love the experimental stuff.

Story: 8-10/10 (I think the writing gets better as the story goes on, and it stops being quite so jumpy in its structure)
Art: 10/10
Legacy: There’s Get Sin, an epilogue-ish story in which Dredd and Gerhard lead a team into Sov territory to murder a bunch of Sov Judge prisoners, explicitly as revenge for the Sovs murdering Judge-prisoners on Enceladus. But the lasting legacy has been in character relationships. During the course of the epic, Dredd shows a serious lack of respect to Chief Judge Hershey, pushing their relationship to breaking point. On the other side, he also gains new confidants – Accounts Judge Maitland, Architect Judge Sam, Wally Squad Judge Frank, and SJS Judge Gerhard, a team that Williams will come back to in a big way for The Small House.

Meanwhile, this epic is basically the end of Low Life, a strip Williams originated and ran for a number of years up to this point, with Aimee Nixon as its main protagonist. Dirty Frank, who took centre stage off Nixon through force of personality, lives on as an occasional supporting character in the world of Dredd (and, later, Hershey).

 

Overall score: 18.8
Want to read it? Well, there's a collection with the three-part epic and one bridging story. But you might wanna invest in some Low Life while you're at it to get the full backstory.

Next up, a personal tragedy that explores life, the state, and hope, all that good stuff...

Epic 7: Mandroid Progs 1453-1464
Written by John Wagner; Art by Kevin Walker
(12 episodes, 72 pages; this one's epic 33 in sequence)

The Basics: Ex -Space Trooper Nate Slaughterhouse is sent home injured, with an 80% robot body. Back in Mega City 1, he turns vigilante. While investigating the disappearance of his wife and murder of his son, Dredd must prove that the Mandroid has become a dangerous criminal.

So many stories you could tell with an 'ultimate fighting machine' character. Wagner chooses a tragedy.
Art by Kevin Walker

Analysis: A very different kind of epic from any that have gone before, and a refreshing welcome for that. Mandroid is, in essence, a self-contained action movie. One of the clever ones, that presents a very clear 'good guy vs bad guy, with lots of violence' narrative, but acknowledges that the good guy isn't all that good, because he uses a heck of a lot of violence.

Dredd is almost a bystander in this story, but as such he gets to be, somewhat unusually, a moral compass for the reader. He sympathises with Slaughterhouse, and goes well beyond the normal course of his duties to help him out. But he's also wise to the idea that Slaughterhouse might just snap and start killing people, which he's not prepared to tolerate.

Oh my Grud that use of shadow is just EPIC.
Art by Kev Walker

Every now and then, the set up of a Judge Dredd story reveals basic information about Mega City 1, how it works, and why the Justice system was set up. It's abundantly clear here that there simply aren't enough Judges to police the city, meaning that in Blocks (or indeed entire Sectors) that lack Judges, crime of all kinds, but especially the organized kind, takes over. And properly organized crime has the time and space to hide its activities just well enough to avoid prosecution.

All this crime is overt enough and horrible enough that victims welcome the heavy hand that Justice dept can wield. Frustratingly, this scenario doesn't quite tally with the vast number of Dredd stories in which Justice Dept appears to have unlimited resources to track even the most tenuous of suspects, but that's the nature of the beast!

As far as Mandroid goes, what this adds up to is an exceptionally moving first half, married to a satisfying but somehow underwhelming second half. It all plays out in the only way it could, with everyone left dead, defeated and miserable.

 

Friends don't use the brainwashed bodies of dead lovers as bargaining chips on friends.
Art by Kev Walker

Story: 9/10
Art: 10/10 This is where Walker really struts his stuff on Dredd, although remarkably, I think he had an even better story in him. We get to meet a new family, and watch them struggle with all sorts of emotions. We get to see Dredd as his gruff self, but also his softer side. And of course we get giant man-robot explodey fun times.
Legacy: A direct sequel would follow, picking up the further adventures of Nate Slaughterhouse, but otherwise nothing.

Overall score: 18.9 out of 20.
Want to read it? There's a collection, which includes the sequel.

Next time: all hell breaks loose, again and again and AGAIN.