BOOK REVIEW –JUDGE DREDD – THE COMPLETE CASE FILES
VOLUME 1 2000 AD 1977 onwards.
The first in a collection of the complete Judge Dredd series of comic book adventures from the pages of 2000 AD, featuring the formidable cop’s earliest adventures in the anarchic future, where the police are Judge, jury & executioner in one and the same person.
Dredd has no origin story. We see him on duty in a typical crime-stopping day from the outset (strangely his debut story is saved for the end of the collection, though it needn’t be).
Most of the stories are frustratingly untitled, but self-contained. Longer work, and titles, is added later, first with the robot wars story arc in which Dredd mistrusts robots despite their asimovian laws preventing them from harming humans. When a robot proves Dredd right and rampages, starting a war in which many robots turn on their masters, Dredd leads the defence of Mega-City 1, and ultimately has to accept the aid of other robots, such as Walter The Wobot, who would become his sidekick in many adventures from that point on (even getting his own spin off series, which is covered in the book too).
In a famous moment in an early story, Dredd is captured by crooks and unmasked, but the picture of his face is seen as so ugly that the hostage takers are horrified and freeze in their tracks, giving Dredd time to escape and take them down. The readers don’t see Dredd’s face at all, as the picture was censored, and Dredd would never be seen removing his helmet again in nay of the comics. (The film version, starring Sylvester Stallone) offended comic fans for having Dredd unmasked throughout.
In a later story arc, Dredd goes to govern the law on The Moon, at Luna city 1, a wild frontier town where judges have a low life expectancy. Dredd soon puts matters right, and even deals with a killer lunar buggy called Elvis that collects toys and takes the Judge hostage for one of its killer sprees.
In one of the best stories, a serial killer uses solar energy to burn people to death, and pursued by Dredd, he hides in a rocket ship, unaware that it is to be fired into the heart of the Sun as part of an experiment, making his fate one Hell of an act of poetic justice.
Many of the great stories and characters were not created
for some time as yet, Judge Anderson Torquemada, Judge Death, etc, were yet to
arise. What is presented is drawn brilliantly and hugely entertaining.
Arthur Chappell
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