Kids’ stuff, and I love it
It’s great fun reading the old Judge Dredd stories; these (and the rest of 2000AD) were the theatre in which my tastes and understanding of comics were formed, so it always feels like going home. Reading back through this material makes it easy to understand why I have so little time for mainstream comics now, particularly if it’s contrasted with the late 70s and early 80s Marvel and D.C. superhero monthlies from which I graduated to 2000AD. Dredd was so much grittier, so much more real seeming, despite being far less consistent and far more overtly satirical. My re-reading (which is at an early stage) is thanks to the spawn’s growing collection of The Complete Case Files volumes, of which I have just read the second; this includes ‘The Cursed Earth’ and ‘The Day The Law Died’, two legendary early storylines, and arguably the narratives in which Judge Dredd achieved its mature form.
I haven’t read Dredd for many years, and I don’t know what it’s like now, but certainly by the time I stopped reading 2000AD, many stories had begun to be written in a way which flowed smoothly between the weekly episodes (I recently flicked through the library’s copy of Sláine: The Horned God, and it read as though it had been written as a graphic novel). These early Judge Dredd stories are rigidly defined by the rhythm of the weekly episode, and each begins with a brief re-cap of the previous instalment; this was before any pretensions to artistic value had been allowed to seep out from the fevered imaginations of the 2000AD staffers, of course… The strip at this stage was squarely aimed at children, but I’m pretty sure it would still hold plenty of appeal for me, even without the nostalgia factor. The art is mainly handled by Mike McMahon, whose messy, dynamic approach provided the defining look of many iconic characters, but there are episodes from Brian Bolland,whose highly finished style is the definitive Dredd for me, Ron Smith, another legendary artist with clean, polished lines and very retro design tendencies, and Brett Ewins (kind of bad). Other artists were involved collaboratively, including major figures like Dave Gibbonsand Brendan McCarthy. Scripts largely came from the pens of Pat Mills and John Wagner,under a variety of pseudonyms. With talents like these involved, a crudely episodic, mass-market children’s strip is always going to be worth reading. I had a lot of fun with this, and I look forward to gradually catching up with Dredd’s activities; who knows, I may end up reading 2000AD again!