Preview: ‘Judge Dredd: A Better World’ — The Collection Of THE 2024 Dredd Tale

by Richard Bruton

Judge Dredd: A Better World brings together the tale of Judge Maitland’s quest for change — an incredible, incendiary thing.

Yes, I previewed this already way, way back in 2024 when A Better World was announced. But now it’s here, published, and it’s still absolutely one of the best things you’ll read this or any other year.

Inside, you start with Carry The Nine, a sublime bit of Dreddworld storytelling where Chief Accounts Judge Maitland is forced to run the numbers to make the Mega-City One budget balance in the wake of the latest huge destructive calamity to hit the City.

So, she runs the numbers. That’s what she does, she makes models, plays with the data, runs the scenarios. And then there’s this…

Yes, Accounts Judge Maitland just figured out how to fix Mega-City One. She’s worked out how to wipe out crime. It’s there in her projections, there in the numbers.

And one thing Maitland’s learned to trust is the numbers. Sadly, those numbers will lead her to her greatest moment and her finale here in the world of Judge Dredd.

After that brilliant intro of Carry The Nine, where Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt laid out the seeds of this defund the law idea, they then left things to percolate for a time, coming back to it nearly a year later, as they head off into The Hard Way. Here, Maitland’s dogged push to destroy The Red Queen’s Euro crime empire results in her and Dredd trapped in Atlantis, the halfway station between MC-1 and Brit-Cit. The Red Queen’s right hand man, Major Domo, assembles a hit squad of the weird and wonderful of the finest assassins, all out to wipe out Maitland.

Once that bit of very fine, over-the-top action is done, we’re back to Maitland’s plan to revolutionize the law in MC-1 in The Pitch, just a single six-pager where she gets to put her idea of the future of the city to the Council of Five. Another particularly brilliant moment in the history of Dredd.

All of that takes us a long, long time. Remember, Dredd time matches real time, so a year in Dredd strips is a year in real life. It’s taken Williams and Wyatt (and Maitland) the best part of two years to get from the first idea of revolutionary change to getting things accepted.

One sector, that’s what she’s got. Just one to experiment with. A chance to prove her idea is workable. And again, we then had to wait another year to see the results of her work in A Better World, the single best Dredd tale there’s been in many, many years. And I don’t throw that praise around willy-nilly either, we’re in a rich vein of Dredd for the past decade, with so many highlights you could pick from. Well, A Better World eclipses all of that.

A Better World has Maitland running her plan, prioritizing education and social care over street Judges brutally enforcing the law. It opens so simply, with Maitland — almost unbelieving — acknowledging that it’s working…

And from that high point, it all goes wrong.

The idea of things being able to change if only the powers that be and those with the ear of the people would accept it just too much to accept. Although most of the Council of Five are reluctantly behind her, helped so much by Dredd’s backing of Maitland, a bad actor and an all too powerful media mogul will conspire to bring Maitland’s dream crashing down around her. And when it does, you’ll be just as crushed as I was.

Make no mistake, this is absolutely incredible work, with Williams and Wyatt crafting a story that revolutionises the world of Dredd. And it’s all matched by the artistic talents on display here. Boo Cook, Jake Lynch, and Henry Flint create page after page of brilliance, an artistic journey full of invention and beauty. Three very different artists, all of them giving us perfect Dredd.

Genuinely a modern Judge Dredd classic, A Better World is an incredibly powerful thing, a prescient look at what could be, if only we’d look beyond the current ideas, if only we’d look to what could be a better world. It is a spectacularly well done thing and one you just can’t miss out on.