Dredd to control request back-up…
We’ve got a nest of Sino-Cit Judges right here in Mega-City!
Judge Dredd
Date: 25 September 1993
Script: Mark Millar; Artist: Paul Marshall; Letters: Tom Frame
Summary
Judge Dredd finds himself under attack; first by Sino-Cit Judges, then Sov Judges and then finally zombie judges. It turns out that he is part of an experiment. Chief Judge McGruder and SJS Judge Stone explain that he has been given an experimental drug to heighten aggression. The people he attacked and killed are ordinary citizens who had been brought in for minor offenses, who they unleashed the drugged up Dredd onto as part of the experiment. McGruder explains that Psi Division predicts a major crisis to happen in approximately 18 months and that they need judges to “toughen up”.
Commentary
I’m struggling to write this installment, mainly because this is not only my least favourite period of Judge Dredd but this particular episode is possibly the worst of a bad bunch.
Mark Millar will presumably be known to the vast majority of people reading this and you will no doubt already have made your mind up about him. By any measure, he’s an incredibly successful writer. One of the things I find interesting about him however is that, despite having had so many of his works adapted for the screen, such as Wanted, Kick-Ass, Kingsman and, after a fashion, Captain America: Civil War, one of the first things those adaptations tend to do is make all the characters more likeable, punch up the motivations and generally make them less cruel. As a repository of great ideas, he’s rightly highly regarded. But you have to get past the extreme sadism first.
This story is a case in point. Dredd casually kills half a dozen basically innocent people on an extremely flimsy context and basically no-one, least of all Dredd, seems to care. One of the problems is, like Ennis, Millar seemed to have the caricature version of Dredd who shoots people for jaywalking and looking funny, and wasn’t particularly interested in exploring any other idea despite this being an increasing concern of John Wagner in the years running up to it. Unlike Ennis, his strips tended to lack any vestige of humanity at all.
It is, to be fair, a very 90s take. We are in the post-Watchmen period, which easily lasted until the mid-2000s, in which a whole army of British and American comic writers seemed to be determined to “deconstruct” any character they could get their hands on. What it tended to result in is a lot of sameiness: Millar’s Dredd is virtually identical in outlook to his version of Captain America in The Ultimates. It certainly became quickly clear to me during this period that edginess was generally a byword for saminess.
This is Mark Millar very early in his career; his only previous notable work was the Trident Comics’ Saviour and reviving Robo-Hunter, another John Wagner creation, in 2000AD.
He was the main Dredd writer in 2000AD from progs 829 to 880, although his work would continue to appear intermittently up to prog 1030 in 1997. During this period he co-wrote two stories with Grant Morrison. “War Games” in fact immediately follows “Inferno” (progs 842-853), which Millar wrote a seperate series leading into it, Purgatory (progs 834-841).
2000AD was really struggling at this point with a bit of a talent drain. There has always been a sense that British writers and artists would do their apprenticeships in 2000AD before moving onto bigger things in the US, but during this period 2000AD stalwarts were also to be found working at Deadline (created by Dredd artists Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon), Crisis (2000AD‘s “political” sister title) and Revolver (2000AD’s more “trippy” sister title heavily influenced by Deadline). There was of course the recently launched Judge Dredd Megazine, where John Wagner was focusing his Dredd energies. And finally, there was creator owned anthology comic Toxic!, set up by Wagner, Alan Grant, Pat Mills and artists Mike McMahon and Kevin O’Neill – a very explicit attempt to take on 2000AD on their own terms.
As a result, 2000AD was busy trying out new writers and artists, many of whom were frankly a little green. Some would go on to much greater things; a lot came and went. It would take the best part of a decade – and the cancellation of all of the aforementioned rival titles (except the Megazine) before the title began to recover.
Finally, this episode foreshadows a major upcoming crisis; one which, for whatever reason, never actually took place. It’s possible that this talk of a “crisis” starting “in the eastern blocks” within eighteen months is meant to refer to “Crusade” (progs 928-937), a strip Millar co-wrote with Morrison, but it doesn’t really fit. What’s most likely is that there was half an idea for another “mega epic” written by Millar to appear in a couple of years time, but it never really came to anything and he simply moved on. But, given that the only thing the judges seemed to do to prepare for it was give their top judge a bunch of psychosis-inducing experimental drugs, it’s probably for the best it never happened. An epic storyline would appear in 12 months time, but it would have nothing to do with Mark Millar and instead draw of plot threads which had been unravelling over at the Judge Dredd Megazine.