Review: ‘Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files’ Volume 45 – The Best Way To Do Dredd?

Okay then, I previewed this a week back, showing you just some of the delights to be found inside, but I found myself coming back to it and wanted to write some more about just why I think this is the BEST way to read Judge Dredd.

There’s a couple of ways to read Dredd in collection form – collections of stories or these Case Files, where they’re reprinted absolutely every Dredd, in order.

 

Sure, you can go out and grab all the big name collections of all the bona-fide Dredd epics – things like ‘The Apocalypse War’, ‘America’, ‘Judgement Day’, ‘Trifecta’, ‘The Small House’, ‘Titan’, ‘Day of Chaos’, and the forthcoming ‘A Better World’ (and feel free to add your own here – there are plenty and they’re all quite superb). These BIG Dredds that get their own collections are genuine epic things, the sprawling, world-changing tales and damn fine reading all. In fact, if you built your Dredd reading on just those, you’d get a bloody fine library of some of the best of Dredd.

But the thing with Dredd, the thing that’s kept it fresh and vibrant for coming up on half a century now, is that the epic tales, those BIG tales, don’t tell the whole story. And that’s the true greatness of Dredd. It’s a cumulative thing, all the stories, all those one-, two-, three-parters along the way have built the legend every bit as much as the epic sagas. Those interstitial stories in between the big tales have built the world, often showing us less about Dredd and more about the world around him. And that’s where you get the whole Dredd experience, the full Dredd experience, and, I’d say, the true Dredd experience.

And it’s not necessarily the one-offs that you miss out on with the epic collections – sometimes it’s longer tales or storylines that have run for several individual stories that don’t necessarily have the epic tag but are every bit as vital and important in the grand scheme of things.

Here that means John Wagner threading both the ongoing attempt by Dredd to get the Council of Five to repeal the Mutant Laws banning muties from Mega-City One and the ongoing saga of the wonderfully psychotic serial killer PJ Maybe. Those are every bit as wonderful as the likes of ‘America’ et al, but sometimes they just don’t get their due as they’re more difficult to collect in one volume – but it’s those tales, the ones concentrating on the city itself, look more at life in the big Meg and what it means to live under Justice Department rule that have really built a legend from the ground up.

Of course this isn’t to say every single Dredd ever has been fabulous – you don’t go this many years without having a few clunkers, and there’s definitely a few in this volume. But the excellent far, far outweighs the run-of-the-mill and the duds on show here.

And to show you just what I mean, let’s take a little look see at a couple of the finest…

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Let’s start off with my favourite thing in here – the exemplar of why the one-off Dredd can be some of the very best – ‘The Spirit of Christmas‘ by Wagner and Colin MacNeil, a simple done-in-one, albeit at 11 pages a tad longer than a usual. Still, it’s Wagner and MacNeil, so the more the merrier.

It really is just the perfect thing, Dredd having to suffer Christmas, getting the annual family thing out the way and then hitting the streets for another night. Christmas or no Christmas, old man Law won’t take a break – more’s the pity if you happen to be a gang of perps on the prowl this night.

Still, there’s something about Christmas and how the end of the year gets in your bones, starts you remembering, reflecting, going over things you might want to change. And quite brilliantly here, that’s just what Dredd finds himself doing.

So, against the backdrop of a snowy MC-1, against the everyday busting heads, we have an old man’s reminiscences preying on his mind. And that may well have been that – hell, it would have been enough to give us a classic bit of Dredd. But no, this is Wagner and there’s no shortcuts for such a great writer.

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Instead, after that perfectly melancholic few pages, we get Dredd resolved, pushed by his own guilt over the recent mutant question into a chat with Hershey and a monumental decision. It’s an end you don’t see coming and it’s one that sets up many, many tales to come. But Wagner just adds it in here, a moment of brilliance amongst a perfect Dredd. It’s this sort of thing that makes me love these Case Files collections so much, this sort of one-off that’s so well done yet may well be missed off in the big epic collections.

Another one-off that’s hugely enjoyable, deliberately picked to illustrate the point that, although John Wagner was still writing the lion’s share of Dredd, there were others getting their Dredd-time as well, and doing a fine job of it… you know, like this…

Tribal by Robbie Morrison and Tan Eng Huat is one of those classic Dredds with the utterly ridiculous set-up, laughable in its way yet also presciently satirical in the manner of so much Dredd.

Here it’s Bear Grylls and his like, a modern-day adventurer who makes his name going native in cultures around the world. He thinks it’s edgy, but, as the Judges point out, his ratings come from millions of viewers tuning in ‘to watch him suffer a catalogue of indignities’.

This time he’s embedded himself in a Mega-City One gang and the fun is watching him going native with all the po-faced, self-important and egotistic stupidity you can see our reality TV rapidly moving towards.

And for the final great non-Wagner Dredd to show you, The Listener by Gordon Rennie and Boo Cook, with Rennie mercilessly skewering the collectors and fan boys in a Judge Spotters and Role-Playing Club thing.

Because of course there aren’t any 2000 AD fans like this who tend to run fan sites and pop up online to gatekeep ‘their’ comic that they don’t actually seem to like all that much any time after about 1980. Oh no, absolutely not.

Sure, it might be Rennie aiming for the low-hanging fruit, but it’s funny and it’s very on the nose. And Cook’s art is always a real treat to behold.

Now, although I do love highlighting these one off Dredds doesn’t mean that I’m not going to absolutely love the bigger Dredds when they come along. And here, although Mandroid and Satanus III are both just epic in their different ways, the highlight of the longer strips has to be the Wagner-penned PJ Maybe arc running through three tales here – ‘The Gingerbread Man’ (with Henry Flint), ‘What I Did For Chrissmas’ (with Simon Fraser), and ‘Emphatically Yours’ (another with the great Colin MacNeil).

PJ Maybe’s one of the finest of Dredd villains, a comic relief genius serial killer with many faces and identities over the years. One of the reasons his tales are so damn good is there aren’t that many of them, they’re often years apart, and it’s quite obvious Wagner’s having enormous fun writing the little psychopath serial killer as a perpetual thorn in Dredd’s side. The way he can seamlessly thread so much into his stories, just like here – working in both the monumentally important repealing of the Mutie Laws and the perfectly played out procedural as Dredd follows the latest crimes of the maniacal Maybe. No-one writes Dredd this wonderfully well.

So yes, this trio of Maybe tales are absolute Dredd perfection, the whole over-the-top ridiculousness mixed with some of that wonderfully intricate Wagner storytelling as we see serial killer PJ back in MC-1 and killing and manipulating his way into impossibly high office in ‘The Gingerbread Man’, all under Dredd’s nose – so close at times that it just makes Dredd look bad.

Improbably as it may seem, managing to not only grab the Mayor’s job but be rather good at it – again, right under Dredd’ nose. In fact, he’s so good that it’s pissing all the right people off to the point where he’s on the unusual (for him) on the end of assassination attempts in What I Did For Chrissmas.

And then finally, ‘Emphatically Evil’, the life and crimes of PJ Maybe, brings it all together, a multi-part PJ tale against the backdrop of public unrest at the Mutant issue going before the council of five again, after it came to the crunch back in ‘The Spirit Of Christmas’.

What always holds true amongst these Case Files volumes is that it showcases some of the finest of Dredds, the ones you’d miss if you just stuck to the big epic standalone volumes.

They also seem to serve as a timely reminder, seeing as he’s just not doing that much more Dredd these days, of just how incredibly good – yet also criminally underrated outside of Brit comics – John Wagner is.

So, despite this volume actually having a few duds amongst the diamonds, I still hold true to that first statement, that this really is the best way to experience the whole of Dredd.

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Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volume 45

Writers – John Wagner, Alan Grant, Robbie Morrison, Pat Mills, Gordon Rennie.

Artists – Simon Coleby, Carl Critchlow, Colin MacNeil, David Roach, Mike Collins, Cliff Robinson, Ian Gibson, John Hicklenton, Henry Flint, Tan Eng Huat, Boo Cook, Simon Fraser, Paul Marshall, Smudge

Letters – Annie Parkhouse and Simon Bowland

Originally serialised in 2000 AD Progs #1555-#1576 and Judge Dredd Megazine #257-#268

Oh, and let’s not forget that Wagner’s also written some great Dredd gags as well…