Monthly Archives: August 2024

Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (Complete Top 10)

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The Thinker or Le Penseur sculpture by Auguste Rodin (1904) in the Musee Rodin in Paris – photographed by CrisNYCa for Wikipedia “The Thinker” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

I think therefore I am – and I have compiled my Top 10 Philosophy & Science Books.

That first sentence is of course one of the most famous and popular quotations of philosophy – from the French philosopher and mathematician Descartes.(Note to self – compile top 10 quotations of philosophy). On a related noted, my feature image is one of the most famous and popular (as well as imitated and reproduced) sculptures – The Thinker or Le Penseur by Auguste Rodin, a suitably philosophical statue. (Note to self- compile top 10 sculptures).

To be honest, most of these books are perhaps more philosophical than philosophy as such, at least in the formal academic sense. And to be blunt, I use the term philosophy here as something of a general catch-all for non-fiction that is not otherwise mythology or history, albeit usually at least philosophical in contemplating ideas and theories.

On the other hand, my favorite science books tend to cleave closer to science as such, particularly for my favorite science – biology. Even if I do tend to agree with the quotation that the only real science is physics while the rest is stamp collecting. That said, while I tend to be dismissive of the ‘soft’ sciences as opposed to the ‘hard’, I often consider the former among my philosophical or philosophy books.

 

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(10) STONE AGE HERBALIST –

ESSAYS IN DISSIDENT ANTHROPOLOGY:

BERSERKERS, CANNIBALS & SHAMANS / SKULL CULTS & CORPSE BRIDES

(2022-2023)

 

“Good anthropology should frighten and disturb”.

Well, I don’t know about frighten and disturb – but certainly titillate!

I mean – don’t the titles alone pique your curiosity? Berserkers, cannibals, and shamans? Skull cults and corpse brides? The latter conjures images of some fantasy world of necromancy – indeed, I often imagine the Herbalist writing such a world, until of course you realise he is writing about our world, just the strange dark fantasy corners of it.

And that really is the heart of that dissident anthropology tagline, albeit it is a catchy tagline (along with that of his pen name) – writing about the dark fantasy corners of our world, which all too often are swept under modern anthropology’s rug of propriety. There was a time, at least it seems to me, when anthropologists positively delighted in shining a light on those dark fantasy corners of the world or crooked timbers of humanity. I can imagine a straight line from the Herbalist back to anthropologists like Sir James George Frazer, fossicking for sympathetic magic and sacrificial kings. Or back to Herodotus for that matter.

The other aspect of his dissident anthropology is when he turns up findings that throw a spanner in the works of modern anthropology – or turns a critical eye to those sacred cows enshrined within it, particularly those that project contemporary political or social fashions to the past (or beyond the West).

Full disclosure – Stone Age Herbalist is a mutual on the X formerly known as Twitter (under @Paracelsus1092), because he was nice enough to follow me back when I started following his account as it posted about exactly the sort of thing you find in these essays. Indeed, I think the only reason I have anyone following or reading my account is from him boosting or sharing the occasional post of mine.

And I meant what I said that his account is essentially the same sort of thing you find in these books. Many of the essays originated as posts or threads on his timeline – and as a drafting board for the essays he writes on his Substack, from which these books are predominantly compiled.

And of course he also earns my usual wildcard tenth place for the best entry from the current or previous year – in this case his second book of essays in 2023, although hopefully we’ll see a third…

The only thing I can’t quite get a fix on is his formal academic discipline, given that subtitle of essays in dissident anthropology (and that mostly seems to me as his subject matter), yet his Amazon author description is that “Stone Age Herbalist is an archaeologist and writer”. Of course the writer part is obvious, but I tend to think that he is truly cross-disciplinary between archaeology and anthropology. Or perhaps some academic Schrodinger’s cat in a quantum state between them – or an academic Renaissance man, a credit to his range and versatility as writer.

As for the contents of the books, I’ll just quote from their Amazon blurbs because they’re fun.

“How many children are ritually sacrificed in Uganda each year? Why does China have such a long history of cannibalism? Do modern soldiers still go berserk like the Vikings of old? In this essay collection, Stone Age Herbalist ranges across a number of uncomfortable topics, from Mongolian eco-fascists to contemporary child witchcraft murders in Britain, the philosophy of Aztec violence and the biological impacts of famines on populations…you will discover the prehistory of whaling, seafaring, the horror of deep time, indigenous warfare, the genius of shamanism, English melancholy, the mysteries of palaeolithic Australia and much more.”

“Stone Age Herbalist returns with over twenty new essays, covering everything from prehistoric skull cults in Anatolia to contemporary corpse brides in China…dogs which defy Darwinism, 21st century concentration camps for witches, murder victims mummified and sold as precious artefacts, forgotten genocides and modern child sacrifice. Alongside the darkness there is also wonder, the origins of metallurgy, Dionysian rewilding, lost tribes and times when farmers abandoned agriculture for hunting and much more.”

See what I mean about imagining the Herbalist writing fantasy? The “horror of deep time” just conjures up eldritch visions of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

(9) JAMES C SCOTT –

AGAINST THE GRAIN: A DEEP HISTORY OF THE EARLIEST STATES (2017)

 

It’s all about the grain! Or against it!

Zac Snyder’s Rebel Moon was right! Except his mistake was setting his epic about grain in the far future of space opera, where he should have set it in the deep past of prehistoric, well, grain opera – which is how Scott, anarchist political scientist and anthropologist, sees the first human states, essentially brutal granaries. Grain literally makes states.

It always seems a little odd how our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopted (grain) agriculture. Sure – not so odd looking back from our modern perspective of industrialized and mechanized agricultural abundance but much more odd looking forward as it were from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, seemingly much healthier and with richer diets for far less effort than their agricultural descendants.

It reminds me of that meme of a wolf asking itself what’s the worst that could happen from getting food at the human campfire, only to end up 10,000 years later as some ridiculous domesticated dog photo.

How could our own hunter-gather ancestors let themselves be hoodwinked into becoming peasants – stunted and malnourished, overworked and overtaxed, perpetually on the edge of famine and disease as well as serfdom or slavery by states or ‘nobility’?

I had always attributed it to something of a combination of the frog in a pot, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and Malthusian trap. Sure, agriculture has benefits for consistency and reliability of food over time, particularly in storage, leading to population growth and the accumulation of resources – but once you realize you’re hard pressed to keep those benefits ahead of being wiped out by the pressures of more mouths to feed, it’s too late to do anything else except more agriculture. And except of course for reaping the one benefit of higher populations against less populous neighbours – superiority in war, even when agricultural populations were typically inferior as individual warriors.

However, Against the Grain suggests that the trap was a little less Malthusian and a little more Orwellian – that while they barely hovered above collapse and the defection of their subjects, states achieved their power through grain agriculture and weren’t about to let it go without a struggle, in turn using that grain agriculture as an instrument to keep ratcheting up their power, including by forced or slave labor.

This theme is evident in the chapter titles, perhaps none more so than for the first chapter – The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and…Us. Obviously that last word of the title conveys how agriculture above all domesticated humans. To paraphrase Orwell, all humans were effectively domesticated, but some humans were more domesticated than others – because they were domesticated BY others.

As a quick note, I was particularly intrigued by the domestication of fire as the first world-shaping human technology – and one that humans used that way even as hunter-gatherers.

The theme of domestication of humans continues in the second chapter, Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex, to which is added agriculture as the perfect environment for disease in the third chapter, Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm.

The chapter titles continue in a similar vein – Agro-Ecology of the Early State, Population Control: Bondage and War, Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly – although my favorite remains the final chapter title, The Golden Age of the Barbarians. Scott posits this age – when the majority of the world’s population had never seen a tax collector or at least the majority of the world’s territory was one of “barbarian zones” (tracts of land where states found it either impossible or prohibitively difficult to extend their rule) – persisted up until 400 or so years ago.

“Not only did this place a great many people out of the reach of the state, but it also made them significant military threats to the state’s power” – not least because on an individual level, barbarians tended to be better warriors than the subjects of agricultural states, even as they also tended to have a symbiotic relationship with those states.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

Instead of my usual feature image of the book’s cover, I couldn’t resist this clip from the opening sequence of the Inside Job animated TV series, which seems to me a nod to the Stoned Ape theory

 

 

(8) TERENCE MCKENNA –

FOOD OF THE GODS: THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINAL TREE OF KNOWLEDGE – A RADICAL HISTORY OF PLANTS, DRUGS & HUMAN EVOLUTION (1992)

 

“I think it’s time to discuss your, uh, philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour.” – William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch.

Stoned Ape theory, anyone?

Terence McKenna may be a trip and a hoot, perhaps the trippiest and, ah, hootiest, entry in this top ten, although there are a few rival claimants.

But seriously, my philosophical taste leans towards aphorism, the memorable or striking phrase (and idea) – quip and koan, each (and both) of which might be regarded as synonymous with trip and hoot. After, a good koan resembles both a hoot and a trip, the latter ideally the purpose of the koan leading to enlightenment.

Terence McKenna certainly had the gift for memorable or striking phrase and idea, lodging deep in your psyche even if you don’t accept or agree with them, but even more so was one of the leading ‘philosophers’ of the literal drug trip.

And perhaps never more so than in this book, arguably his magnum opus – nothing less than the radical history of humanity and drugs, and even more so the prehistory of humanity and drugs. Enter the Stoned Ape theory, which in a nutshell puts a spin on Genesis where God made man – but in which God was a mushroom.

No, seriously, McKenna proposed that the cognitive transformation from our hominid ancestors to our present human species mainly involved the addition of psychoactive mushrooms (growing in dung!) to our diet, based on the alleged effects of such mushrooms on cognitive capacity.

The intellectual or observational gems don’t stop there – one thing that has always stuck in my head ever since reading it in the book is how much the European empires originated as or were drug plantation empires, particularly if you count sugar as a drug – as McKenna persuasively argues we should.

It gets trippier from there, as indeed did McKenna in general – “an American ethnobotanist and mystic who…spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism and the theoretical origins of human consciousness…one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism and the intellectual voice of rave culture”.

Not to mention machine elves.

This of course saw him come under criticism from those who didn’t see him as the fun he was.

Judy Corman wrote “surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties.”

While Peter Conrad wrote “I suffered hallucinatory agonies of my own while reading his shrilly ecstatic prose”. You fool, Conrad – that shrilly ecstatic prose is the best part!

I prefer the views of Tom Hodgkinson and Mark Jacobson. The former stated that to write McKenna off “as a crazy hippie is a rather lazy approach to a man not only full of fascinating ideas but also blessed with a sense of humor and self-parody”, while the latter wrote “it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-great-mother-river-saga of brotherly bonding,” adding “put simply, Terence is a hoot!”

‘Nuff said. McKenna is a hoot – and a trip!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(7) ROBERT ANTON WILSON –

PROMETHEUS RISING (1983)

 

Rivalling Terence McKenna as the most trippy entry in my top ten – indeed, Robert Anton Wilson might well be summed up by his own fictional creation “Operation Mindf**k” in the Illuminatus Trilogy.

To quote his bio from Wikipedia, “Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic…not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything”.

He was also recognized within Discordianism – that Western zen – “as an Episkopos, pope and saint”, something which permeates both his philosophical and fictional writings, the latter of course including the Illuminatus Trilogy which went a long way towards earning him this entry (as well as earning its own place in my Top 10 SF Books).

Not to mention he was an editor for Playboy magazine, something which earns my respect and indeed reverence alone – which only increases from the book he wrote while editor, Ishtar Rising or at it was originally titled, The Book of the Breast, apparently originating from a bet that he could write a whole book on, well, breasts. In fairness, it’s a little deeper than just a book about breasts – and almost earned this spot.

Although it was a close call with Ishtar Rising or Book of the Breast, I ultimately had to go with his Prometheus Rising for this entry. I’m a fan of icebergs – as in the meme representing ever deeper and wilder layers to something – and this book might well be styled as an iceberg of the human mind or consciousness, taking the reader on a progressively deeper and wilder trip through Timothy Leary’s “eight-circuit model of consciousness”.

Indeed, the whole of Wilson’s writings might be regarded as one iceberg or another, or perhaps one big iceberg – a hoot as you go tripping through ever deeper levels.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(6) ERIC HOFFER –

THE TRUE BELIEVER: THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF MASS MOVEMENTS (1951)

 

First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.

That’s paraphrasing Scarface of course. While it’s close, it’s not quite what American social philosopher Eric Hoffer proposed for his tripartite classification for the development of mass movements – first you get the “men of words or fault-finding intellectuals”, then you get the fanatics, and then you get the “practical men of action”. (Still not sure when you get the women though).

Those categories are not mutually exclusive – they may overlap in the same person or persons – but when the “practical men of action” take over leadership from the fanatics, it marks the end of the movement’s “dynamic phase” (with the movement more establishing itself as a social institution) and “steering the mass movement away from the fanatic’s self-destructiveness”.

And “in the absence of a practical man of action, the mass movement often withers and dies with the fanatic (Nazism died as a viable mass movement with Hitler’s death).”

The book is exactly what it says on tin – thoughts on the nature of mass movements that “arise to challenge the status quo”, including their success or failure, and rise or fall.

One of the book’s interesting (and famous) propositions is that mass movements are interchangeable, whether radical or reactionary – and whether religious, political or something else – they are similar in terms of the psychology of their adherents. The movements attract the same sort of people, some of whom flip from one to another – such as St Paul as religious hitman turned evangelist, or fanatical opponent of Christianity turned fanatical proponent of Christianity.

Hoffer’s prose style was characteristically aphoristic – pithy aphorisms or turns of phrase that stick in the mind and resonate afterwards. Perhaps the most famous is “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil”.

They’re not all bad either – Hoffer “gives examples of how the same forces that give rise to true believer mass movements can be channelled in more positive ways”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(5) JOHN GRAY –

STRAW DOGS: THOUGHTS ON HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS (2002)

 

“I’ve got a Nietzsche trigger finger!”

No, seriously – this brag (by another entry in this top ten) might well sum up the philosophical pessimism and thoroughgoing misanthropy of John Gray.

That or how I learned to stop worrying and love that humanity sucks.

Indeed, one might quip that Gray out-Nietzsches Nietzsche. For Gray, Nietzsche was a pansy who didn’t go far enough in proclaiming God as dead, since he substituted his own myth of the superman for God. (He literally writes that in this book. Well, except the pansy bit).

And yes, Gray’s oeuvre might be summed up as humans suck – a philosophy of posthumanism or anti-humanism.

Hence the subtitle of this book, which encapsulates the book’s thesis that humans have yet to reconcile themselves with evolutionary theory that they’re just another type of dumb animal.

What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think? That’s my quip but it might as well be Gray’s. Indeed for Gray, that thinking part is overblown – “Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life.”

One might well wonder what was the point of writing the book then, if all this thinking business is just an illusion – but I do love me some grumpy philosophical pessimism, which this book has in spades.

“Gray attacks humanism as a worldview in conflict with the view of humanity as part of the evolution of life on the planet…a secular version of the Christian view of humans as differentiated from the natural world. Gray blames humanism, and its central view of humanity, for much of the destruction of the natural world, and sees technology as just a tool by which humans will continue destroying the planet and each other”.

My favorite philosophy is aphoristic, which this book also has in spades, meandering between pithy quips and “short essays on different topics”.

Straw Dogs was praised by none other than English author J.G. Ballard, himself of a somewhat pessimistic philosophical bent and “who wrote that the book “challenges most of our assumptions about what it means to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions”.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(4) CAMILLE PAGLIA:

SEXUAL PERSONAE: ART & DECADENCE FROM NEFERTITI TO EMILY DICKINSON (1990)

 

Men are from Apollo and women are from Dionysus – or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Pag!

Camille Paglia that is – neo-Dionysian and prose-poet provocateur par excellence.

Her mythic milkshake of Frazer and Freud brings all the boys – and girls – to the yard!

She out-Nietzsches Nietzsche with uberman AND uberwoman, even if the latter is a bit of a bitch-goddess, to borrow from William James. Mind you, her uberman is also a creature of extremes – “there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper”.

But no one speaks better about herself – and most things really – than the consummate prose-stylist who is Camille Paglia.

“That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness….”

Or of her book that is her magnum opus and my top ten entry accordingly, Sexual Personae – a book rejected by at least seven different publishers as too hot to handle before it was published by Yale University Press – “it was intended to please no one and offend everyone”. In other words, my kind of book.

“In the book, Paglia argues that human nature has an inherently Dionysian or chthonic aspect, especially in regard to sexuality…Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky, and Dionysus with disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.”

Or in other words, Apollo is boring but practical and Dionysus is damn good fun or hot slice of crazy.

“The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them”. Mmm…palpate. Hail to the p0rnocracy!

Apart from her Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, Paglia also celebrates the Christian-pagan dichotomy – with the latter flourishing in art, eroticism and popular culture.

She believes that the “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics” and that sex and nature are “brutal pagan forces.”

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(3) BOB BLACK –

THE ABOLITION OF WORK (1985)

 

Anarchism as political zen.

Or how I learned to stop working and love the slack.

 

I’m joking and serious – a personal mantra or zen koan I picked up from this very writer (in this very book), somewhat like the other (para)phrase I picked up from him, I make my own rules and break them anyway. (“I’m a law unto myself but break it anyway!”)

I sometimes note that I have a soft spot for anarchism. Bob Black is the reason why.

Which I guess would mean it is more accurate for me to note I have a soft spot for an anarchist (albeit there are one or two others) because Bob Black is an anarchist like no other – an idiosyncratic ideology indeed.

So of course most other anarchists hate him – and he hates them right back. He evokes something of the spirit of Camille Paglia as my preceding entry in that way, except with anarchists in his case as opposed to feminists in hers. Although mind you Black wrote an essay – including in this book as per its full title, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays – skewering feminism as much as he skewered anarchism elsewhere. There’s not much he won’t skewer – it’s one barbed shish kebab after another for Bob.

Black also shares Paglia’s virtuosity as a prose-poet provocateur par excellence and aficionado of aphorism – an enduring influence on my own aphoristic quest for quips and koans. As the man himself said – “If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality”

Bob Black is why I see anarchism as a form of political zen. Unworkable in practice, except perhaps for rare masters and remote monasteries which achieve enlightenment, but good for questioning the basic assumptions by which we live and maybe – just maybe – learning to live better, or at least clearer.

And the most basic assumption Black sets out to despise and destroy – his bête noire, his idée fixe, and his raison d’être all rolled up into one magnum opus – is work.

“No one should ever work”.

Finally a political manifesto I can get behind! And certainly one that seared itself deep in my psyche when I read it – although it helped that I read it in the depths of the most bullsh*t job I had, and that it spoke to me in a way that no one else did.

Even my brainwashed co-workers, who looked at me baffled when I said I was bored – “Don’t you have anything to do?” “Yes, I have lots of things to do” I would retort, “they’re all boring – that’s why I’m bored”.

But I digress. Back to Black – “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”

As an anarcho-primitivist, Black is playing the long game. Taking a leaf from Marshall Sahlins and not unlike that other anarchist in my top ten, James C. Scott, Black sees the Industrial Revolution as just the tip of the work iceberg that goes all the way down to the Neolithic Revolution.

And when I say Black is playing the long game, I mean literally – “That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution”.

By the way, that directly leads into that koan I’ve taken for my own – “You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.”

And if nothing else, you have to love how he puts the Groucho into Marx, out-manifesting the manifesto – “Workers of the world. . . relax!”

Viva la revolution!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

(2) DESMOND MORRIS –

THE HUMAN ANIMAL: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE HUMAN SPECIES (1994)

 

“You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals”

The book of the BBC TV series also written (and presented) by Desmond Morris – English zoologist (and surrealist painter!) – that is the New Testament to the Old Testament in my first-place entry, also the book of a BBC TV series written by its presenter.

I know, I know – it’s my running gag to call my god-tier top place entries, usually my top two or top three entries, my Old Testament and New Testament of the subject of the top ten. However, in this case the gag comes closest being true as books to live by and that shape my worldview – we are but animals, apes to be precise.

As such, this book (and the TV series) replays the grand theme of Morris’ magnum opus with its evocative title, The Naked Ape – as can be seen in that book’s subtitle, A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal.

As Morris stated, “I’ve sometimes been accused of degrading mankind, of insulting human dignity, of making man beastly. This surprised me because I like animals, and I feel proud to call myself one. I’ve never looked down upon them, so to call human beings animals is not, to me, degrading. It’s simply being honest: putting us in our place as part of the scheme of nature on the planet Earth.”

I wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, these days, it’s not uncommon to see the reverse – people elevating animals or the natural world over humans, disparaging the latter or even regarding placing humans among animals as degrading to animals. I wouldn’t go quite that far but I for one welcome animals as our brothers and sisters.

Morris “covers a fascinating variety of subjects – our hunting instincts have been channelled into an extraordinary range of sporting activities; how the modern world can trace its roots back to an early primate picking up a stone that resembles a face…how territorial fights erupt when the tribal systems within our overcrowded cities break down”.

There are six chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the series.

1 – The Language of the Body

“A world tour of cultural body language differences” but which demonstrates biological similarities that are virtually universal, not just with other humans but chimpanzees.

2 – The Hunting Ape

Morris adds another epithet to ape in describing humanity, albeit not quite as iconic as the naked ape.

“Morris traces back our ancestry from arboreal gatherers to bipedal hunters” – and how we are still hunters at heart.

3 – The Human Zoo

Homesick for the savannah – “the evolutionary and psychological implications of modern city living, a kind of natural environment to which our genes have not yet time to adapt”.

4 – The Biology of Love

“So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”

Needless to say, the most controversial episode of the TV series, albeit not quite so much in the book. Let’s just say they go in for an extreme close-up of the female orgasm.

5 – The Immortal Genes

The natural sequel to the previous chapter – children!

“Looking for reasons why we devote more time than any other species to raising our offspring”. Spoiler – we’re born too soon, even with heads (and brains) so big they push the limits of childbearing hips.

6 – Beyond Survival

Evocative of the playfulness of Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work in my previous entry, we are indeed more homo ludens than homo sapiens.

It’s amusing to think that when you boil them down, “things like art, music, literature and philosophy” are ultimately play.

“What we do become once have our basic needs for food, warmth and shelter, as well as various concepts like creativity, artistic progression and symbolic thinking to demonstrate how aesthetic decisions are being made every day by people across the world”.

Ultimately, we are what we are through our “insatiable playfulness”.

As Morris concludes, “of all the millions of species that have ever lived, we the human animal, are by far the most extraordinary. We’re the magic combination, the threshold leaper, the risk-taker, the venerable child for all occasions.”

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT HUMANITY-TIER?)

 

 

(1) DAVID ATTENBOROUGH –

LIFE ON EARTH (1979)

 

What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl?

Or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think?

 

That’s from me rather than Sir David Attenborough, “British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer…best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth”.

And this is the book of the first of the Life collection, that with Desmond Morris’ The Human Animal are my Old Testament and New Testament of, well, life on earth and the human animal. In particular, Life on Earth was my Book of Genesis, the unfolding story of evolution that thrilled me far more than its Biblical counterpart of creation from episode to episode when I watched it (and chapter to chapter when I read it) as a child. Indeed, so much so that when I see the account of creation in the Book of Genesis, I reconstruct it as Life on Earth – and hear it in Attenborough’s voice.

In short, Attenborough is nothing short of a hero of mine – you might call me an…Atten-bro. Yes – I groaned too.

But seriously, I have been an avid fan of his Life collection, which I have consistently both watched as TV series and read as books – although I will always hold Life on Earth in my heart as my favorite.

“Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making, and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series established many of the hallmarks of the BBC’s natural history output. By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of scientists, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes.”

Of course, the quality of film-making is not as evident in the book, given that it is a book rather than a TV series – although it is still a gloriously beautiful book, with photographs drawn from the series or its production. The globe-trotting that was such a delight in the TV series – cutting from one continent to another – is still evident to a degree in the juxtaposition of subjects. Just don’t be surprised if you also see it pop up in my Top 10 TV list.

 

There are thirteen chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the series – with subjects reasonably self-evident from the titles.

1 – The Infinite Variety

This is where it all began – from single cell organisms to sponges, jellyfish and coral.

Although it is odd to think that although this was a single chapter or episode, it’s over half the timespan involved in the evolution of life. In other words, if the evolution of life was compressed into a single year, it’s not until July that we move past this first chapter.

2 – Building Bodies

Aquatic invertebrates, culminating in crustaceans on land leading to…

3 – The First Forests

Terrestrial vegetation and invertebrates.

An intriguing aspect is this was when sexual reproduction began to involve actual bodily contact (rather than letting water do the work) – and the evolution of courtship rituals for the male to avoid being eaten by the female. Sometimes. Hmm – I wonder how my ex-wife is these days…

4 – The Swarming Hordes

Following on from the previous chapter – insects and the flowers they pollinate, one of my favorite episodes or chapters

5 – Conquest of the Waters

Behold the backbone!

Go, fish!

6 – Invasion of the Land

Yeah – this is when we get to the fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl part. In other words, amphibians.

7 – Victors of the Dry Land

The former rulers of the earth – reptiles!

8 – Lords of the Air

The former and present rulers of the air – birds! And a few odd ones that can’t fly

 

9 – The Rise of the Mammals

10 – Theme & Variations

11 – Hunter & Hunted

Yeah – it’s mammals all the way down from here

Again, odd to think of five chapters of thirteen – more than a third – devoted to mammals, tiny part of all life on earth in species or span. But what can I say – I’m a fan of my fellow mammals so I’m not complaining about the mammal-heavy focus.

 

12 – Life in the Trees

Primates! The best of mammals!

13 – The Compulsive Communicators

And here we are, at the apes that couldn’t climb and had to think part.

The original hardback book had a cover image of a Panamanian red-eyed tree frog, photographed by Attenborough himself and which “became an instantly recognizable emblem of the series”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT LIFE TIER?)

 

 

PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE: TOP 10 BOOKS

(TIER LIST)

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(1) SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH – LIFE ON EARTH

(2) DESMOND MORRIS – THE HUMAN ANIMAL

 

If Life on Earth is my Old Testament of my books of philosophy and science, then The Human Animal is my New Testament

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(3) BOB BLACK – THE ABOLITION OF WORK

(4) CAMILLE PAGLIA – SEXUAL PERSONAE

(5) JOHN GRAY – STRAW DOGS

(6) ERIC HOFFER – THE TRUE BELIEVER

(7) ROBERT ANTON WILSON – PROMETHEUS RISING

(8) TERRENCE MCKENNA – FOOD OF THE GODS

(9) JAMES C. SCOTT – AGAINST THE GRAIN

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

(10) STONE AGE HERBALIST –

BERSERKERS, CANNIBALS & SHAMANS / SKULL-CULTS & CORPSE BRIDES

Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (1) Sir David Attenborough – Life on Earth

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(1) DAVID ATTENBOROUGH –

LIFE ON EARTH (1979)

 

What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl?

Or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think?

 

That’s from me rather than Sir David Attenborough, “British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer…best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth”.

And this is the book of the first of the Life collection, that with Desmond Morris’ The Human Animal are my Old Testament and New Testament of, well, life on earth and the human animal. In particular, Life on Earth was my Book of Genesis, the unfolding story of evolution that thrilled me far more than its Biblical counterpart of creation from episode to episode when I watched it (and chapter to chapter when I read it) as a child. Indeed, so much so that when I see the account of creation in the Book of Genesis, I reconstruct it as Life on Earth – and hear it in Attenborough’s voice.

In short, Attenborough is nothing short of a hero of mine – you might call me an…Atten-bro. Yes – I groaned too.

But seriously, I have been an avid fan of his Life collection, which I have consistently both watched as TV series and read as books – although I will always hold Life on Earth in my heart as my favorite.

“Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making, and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series established many of the hallmarks of the BBC’s natural history output. By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of scientists, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes.”

Of course, the quality of film-making is not as evident in the book, given that it is a book rather than a TV series – although it is still a gloriously beautiful book, with photographs drawn from the series or its production. The globe-trotting that was such a delight in the TV series – cutting from one continent to another – is still evident to a degree in the juxtaposition of subjects. Just don’t be surprised if you also see it pop up in my Top 10 TV list.

 

There are thirteen chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the series – with subjects reasonably self-evident from the titles.

1 – The Infinite Variety

This is where it all began – from single cell organisms to sponges, jellyfish and coral.

Although it is odd to think that although this was a single chapter or episode, it’s over half the timespan involved in the evolution of life. In other words, if the evolution of life was compressed into a single year, it’s not until July that we move past this first chapter.

2 – Building Bodies

Aquatic invertebrates, culminating in crustaceans on land leading to…

3 – The First Forests

Terrestrial vegetation and invertebrates.

An intriguing aspect is this was when sexual reproduction began to involve actual bodily contact (rather than letting water do the work) – and the evolution of courtship rituals for the male to avoid being eaten by the female. Sometimes. Hmm – I wonder how my ex-wife is these days…

4 – The Swarming Hordes

Following on from the previous chapter – insects and the flowers they pollinate, one of my favorite episodes or chapters

5 – Conquest of the Waters

Behold the backbone!

Go, fish!

6 – Invasion of the Land

Yeah – this is when we get to the fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl part. In other words, amphibians.

7 – Victors of the Dry Land

The former rulers of the earth – reptiles!

8 – Lords of the Air

The former and present rulers of the air – birds! And a few odd ones that can’t fly

 

9 – The Rise of the Mammals

10 – Theme & Variations

11 – Hunter & Hunted

Yeah – it’s mammals all the way down from here

Again, odd to think of five chapters of thirteen – more than a third – devoted to mammals, tiny part of all life on earth in species or span. But what can I say – I’m a fan of my fellow mammals so I’m not complaining about the mammal-heavy focus.

 

12 – Life in the Trees

Primates! The best of mammals!

13 – The Compulsive Communicators

And here we are, at the apes that couldn’t climb and had to think part.

The original hardback book had a cover image of a Panamanian red-eyed tree frog, photographed by Attenborough himself and which “became an instantly recognizable emblem of the series”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT LIFE TIER?)

Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (2) Desmond Morris – The Human Animal

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(2) DESMOND MORRIS –

THE HUMAN ANIMAL: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE HUMAN SPECIES (1994)

 

“You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals”

The book of the BBC TV series also written (and presented) by Desmond Morris – English zoologist (and surrealist painter!) – that is the New Testament to the Old Testament in my first-place entry, also the book of a BBC TV series written by its presenter.

I know, I know – it’s my running gag to call my god-tier top place entries, usually my top two or top three entries, my Old Testament and New Testament of the subject of the top ten. However, in this case the gag comes closest being true as books to live by and that shape my worldview – we are but animals, apes to be precise.

As such, this book (and the TV series) replays the grand theme of Morris’ magnum opus with its evocative title, The Naked Ape – as can be seen in that book’s subtitle, A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal.

As Morris stated, “I’ve sometimes been accused of degrading mankind, of insulting human dignity, of making man beastly. This surprised me because I like animals, and I feel proud to call myself one. I’ve never looked down upon them, so to call human beings animals is not, to me, degrading. It’s simply being honest: putting us in our place as part of the scheme of nature on the planet Earth.”

I wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, these days, it’s not uncommon to see the reverse – people elevating animals or the natural world over humans, disparaging the latter or even regarding placing humans among animals as degrading to animals. I wouldn’t go quite that far but I for one welcome animals as our brothers and sisters.

Morris “covers a fascinating variety of subjects – our hunting instincts have been channelled into an extraordinary range of sporting activities; how the modern world can trace its roots back to an early primate picking up a stone that resembles a face…how territorial fights erupt when the tribal systems within our overcrowded cities break down”.

There are six chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the series.

1 – The Language of the Body

“A world tour of cultural body language differences” but which demonstrates biological similarities that are virtually universal, not just with other humans but chimpanzees.

2 – The Hunting Ape

Morris adds another epithet to ape in describing humanity, albeit not quite as iconic as the naked ape.

“Morris traces back our ancestry from arboreal gatherers to bipedal hunters” – and how we are still hunters at heart.

3 – The Human Zoo

Homesick for the savannah – “the evolutionary and psychological implications of modern city living, a kind of natural environment to which our genes have not yet time to adapt”.

4 – The Biology of Love

“So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”

Needless to say, the most controversial episode of the TV series, albeit not quite so much in the book. Let’s just say they go in for an extreme close-up of the female orgasm.

5 – The Immortal Genes

The natural sequel to the previous chapter – children!

“Looking for reasons why we devote more time than any other species to raising our offspring”. Spoiler – we’re born too soon, even with heads (and brains) so big they push the limits of childbearing hips.

6 – Beyond Survival

Evocative of the playfulness of Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work in my previous entry, we are indeed more homo ludens than homo sapiens.

It’s amusing to think that when you boil them down, “things like art, music, literature and philosophy” are ultimately play.

“What we do become once have our basic needs for food, warmth and shelter, as well as various concepts like creativity, artistic progression and symbolic thinking to demonstrate how aesthetic decisions are being made every day by people across the world”.

Ultimately, we are what we are through our “insatiable playfulness”.

As Morris concludes, “of all the millions of species that have ever lived, we the human animal, are by far the most extraordinary. We’re the magic combination, the threshold leaper, the risk-taker, the venerable child for all occasions.”

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT HUMANITY-TIER?)

Top Tens – Philosophy & Science: Top 10 Books (3) Bob Black – The Abolition of Work

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(3) BOB BLACK –

THE ABOLITION OF WORK (1985)

 

Anarchism as political zen.

Or how I learned to stop working and love the slack.

 

I’m joking and serious – a personal mantra or zen koan I picked up from this very writer (in this very book), somewhat like the other (para)phrase I picked up from him, I make my own rules and break them anyway. (“I’m a law unto myself but break it anyway!”)

I sometimes note that I have a soft spot for anarchism. Bob Black is the reason why.

Which I guess would mean it is more accurate for me to note I have a soft spot for an anarchist (albeit there are one or two others) because Bob Black is an anarchist like no other – an idiosyncratic ideology indeed.

So of course most other anarchists hate him – and he hates them right back. He evokes something of the spirit of Camille Paglia as my preceding entry in that way, except with anarchists in his case as opposed to feminists in hers. Although mind you Black wrote an essay – including in this book as per its full title, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays – skewering feminism as much as he skewered anarchism elsewhere. There’s not much he won’t skewer – it’s one barbed shish kebab after another for Bob.

Black also shares Paglia’s virtuosity as a prose-poet provocateur par excellence and aficionado of aphorism – an enduring influence on my own aphoristic quest for quips and koans. As the man himself said – “If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality”

Bob Black is why I see anarchism as a form of political zen. Unworkable in practice, except perhaps for rare masters and remote monasteries which achieve enlightenment, but good for questioning the basic assumptions by which we live and maybe – just maybe – learning to live better, or at least clearer.

And the most basic assumption Black sets out to despise and destroy – his bête noire, his idée fixe, and his raison d’être all rolled up into one magnum opus – is work.

“No one should ever work”.

Finally a political manifesto I can get behind! And certainly one that seared itself deep in my psyche when I read it – although it helped that I read it in the depths of the most bullsh*t job I had, and that it spoke to me in a way that no one else did.

Even my brainwashed co-workers, who looked at me baffled when I said I was bored – “Don’t you have anything to do?” “Yes, I have lots of things to do” I would retort, “they’re all boring – that’s why I’m bored”.

But I digress. Back to Black – “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.”

As an anarcho-primitivist, Black is playing the long game. Taking a leaf from Marshall Sahlins and not unlike that other anarchist in my top ten, James C. Scott, Black sees the Industrial Revolution as just the tip of the work iceberg that goes all the way down to the Neolithic Revolution.

And when I say Black is playing the long game, I mean literally – “That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution”.

By the way, that directly leads into that koan I’ve taken for my own – “You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.”

And if nothing else, you have to love how he puts the Groucho into Marx, out-manifesting the manifesto – “Workers of the world. . . relax!”

Viva la revolution!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Mega-City Law: Judge Dredd Case Files 19

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JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19

Mega-City One 2115

(1993: progs 830-855 / Megazine 2.27-2.43)

 

Our next stop is Case Files 19 but just make sure to remain near the Mega-City Law bus – we won’t be staying here long.

 

That’s right – we’re perhaps at the darkest part of the Dark Age of Dredd, when Garth Ennis passed the torch as main writer to Grant Morrison and Mark Millar. As I said previously for the Dark Age of Dredd, this was often seen as a low point for Judge Dredd and the 2000 AD comic in general.

 

Don’t get me wrong – I like Morrison and Millar as writers, indeed as two of my favorite writers of comics…just not for Judge Dredd here. For whatever reason, they just weren’t the best fit for the character or 2000 AD comic at this time (although both had written some of their best work for 2000 AD), particularly as a writing team duo.

 

Although don’t get me wrong about that either – I do like some of their Judge Dredd episodes or storylines even at this time. There’s just slim pickings from those collected in this Case Files volume.

 

The standout for me was easily the episode War Games – not least for its introduction of the Sino-Cit Judges – although sadly subsequent episodes did nothing with its premise, either the pending crisis predicted by Psi-Division (in eighteen months, maybe less) or the “aggro-drug” they experiment on with Dredd to prepare for that crisis.

 

Ironically, the Megazine episodes collected in this volume offer up the runner-up for standout episode with Revenge of the Egghead – ironically, that is, because for me the (monthly) Judge Dredd Megazine is generally secondary to the (weekly) regular 2000 AD issues, but because we’re dealing with the Dark Age of Dredd here, the Megazine episodes often stepped up to take their place.

 

Anyway, there were some other episodes or arcs of interest collected in this volume – the Muzak Killer returns, as does another recurring antagonists penned by Garth Ennis, Johnni Kiss.

 

The episodes in Case Files 19 did feature an epic storyline – epic that is, in length as it consisted of 12 episodes, albeit towards the shorter end of Judge Dredd epics. Not so epic in terms of story quality – I am of course talking about Inferno, which I’ll mostly be passing over with a couple of panels or so. Among other things, it set in place something of a trend for the space penal colony of Titan, reserved for Judges who break the law, to become almost as bad a revolving-door prison for escapees as Arkham Asylum in Batman. Well, perhaps not quite that bad but still annoying – and at least a recurring problem in general for Mega-City One.

 

There was also the return of the Mechanismo robot judge storyline in the Megazine. Heh – more like Meh-chanismo, amirite?

 

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

ENTER JONNI KISS (prog 830)

 

Judge Dredd vs John Wick. Well not really (and not quite yet) but similar in the whole legendary assassin thing.

Okay, okay – I have to admit Case Files 19 opens with a bang and badass assassin Jonni Kiss looks cool when introduced, although everyone looks cool when they’re in art by Greg Staples.

And okay – he proves to be more dangerous than other antagonists for Judge Dredd. That is, when we return to him after his introduction here – two years later or so in the Goodnight Kiss arc compiled in Case Files 23.

But we’ve been here before – the badass or cool hitman or assassin pitted against Judge Dredd, often doing surprisingly well or even seeming to take Dredd out but then doing the Bond villain thing of gloating over him rather than just shooting him already.

Drokk – we’ve even done the exact same foreshadowing in an introductory episode a few years before returning in a longer story arc to kick Dredd’s ass but drop the ball just before touchdown. Remember Wu Wang – or as I like to call her, Lady Deathfist, out to avenge martial artist Stan Lee? Yeah – they did the same thing for her.

Let’s face it – Dredd has faced and will continue to face a long line of badass or skilled assassins, agents, bounty hunters, hitmen or just someone with a grudge against him, all with a bullet (or something) with his name on it, arguably going all the way back to his own clone-brother Rico. Grud – there’s probably enough for their own top ten – Top 10 People Out to Get Dredd or even just Top 10 Judge Dredd Assassins & Hitmen. As Dredd himself says when he hears someone is out to get him or has a grudge, they’ll just have to get in line to take their shot.

Indeed, the Megazine episodes compiled in this same volume include a parody of that same character type of the badass cool assassin out to get Dredd – Slick Dickens, amusingly written as a character of that type written by a Mega-City One citizen, which of course sees him repeatedly jailed by Dredd (although you suspect Dredd’s secretly a fan),

In fairness, Jonni Kiss does better and is better at it than most, as evidenced by his trophy wall of Judge badges.

And he is introduced with a literal bang – assassinating no less than East Meg Two’s Supreme Judge Traktorfaktori. Sigh – I liked him and he seemed a decent sort when introduced into the Glasnost storyline. And yes – Judge Dredd continues its 90s trend of names for foreign Judges seemingly straight out of Asterix. It gets worse in this episode – as we hear of two rival contenders for succession, Riboflavin and Markimarkov, although at least it gives us the great line from Dredd “one Sov’s as bad as another.”

Of course, it helped that Trakforfaktori seemed to be well past it and that Kiss had a little help from some Gila-Munja mutant offshoots, although he double-crosses them, I wouldn’t put it past the Sovs that he had a little inside help as well, given the lax security we see here – possibly one of those rival contenders or even just anyone from the Diktatorat because that’s just how they roll.

But in fairness, Kiss does seem to be the best at what he does – taking out the Supreme Judge as well as the Gila-Munja out for revenge. And those were just test runs to prove his worth for his real target – who is of course Dredd. Although weirdly Kiss seems to go in for a good old-fashioned fax for receiving his instructions, even though those instructions are literally just the one word “DREDD”, setting up his subsequent appearance…

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

THE GREAT BRAIN ROBBERY (progs 835-836)

The Judge Who Lives Downstairs (prog 831)

The Chieftain (prog 832-834)

 

Judge Dredd’s memories are so bad they literally make your head explode!

Why? “Because they’re all bad, meathead”

No, seriously – that’s the plot twist of the two-episode storyline, The Great Brain Robbery, and I am here for it, even if it does not make sense or seems impossible in biology or physics.

I mean, this story is a hoot, both in its premise and plot twist.

Yes, the premise involves yet another new crime driven by technology – memory theft (or thought theft as it is called in the episodes), courtesy of the neuron extractor. Although I don’t recall it featured anywhere else other than these two episodes, which might reflect how flawed its premise is as a crime when you look at it too closely.

We’re introduced to it through a Mega-City ‘tap’ gang, literally mugging one of MC-1’s many down-and-out citizens of his memories. In fairness, they seem a cut above the usual street gang.

For one thing, they carry it out in broad daylight on a crowded street. Sure, they seem to be relying on that common tendency to look the other way, even in our contemporary cities, let alone the dystopian giant mega-city city of the future – particularly where the victim is someone socially invisible like a homeless beggar. That’s further explained by the narration in the second episode – which notes that half of the Judge force has been wiped out by Necropolis and Judgement Day, so “the creeps are making the most of it”.

For another, this memory-mugging gang has more resources than your average street gang. Apparently that’s because memory theft has a high-end market, with rich citizens paying big to live vicariously through the stolen memories. That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. The lives of the overwhelming majority of Mega-City One’s citizens – at least 90% – are defined by their dystopian quality of grinding welfare dependency and drudgery.

Why would Mega-City One’s richest citizens – who can afford to actually live top-end experiences – want to buy memories of lower-end experiences? Sure there may be some thrill of ‘slumming’ it in someone’s crappy memories. More probably, there may be the thrill of experiencing some violent crime that is the other definitive feature of life in Mega-City One, although one anticipates that the market would be more for memories of perpetrators rather than victims, as the equivalent of playing some video game like Grand Theft Auto. However, the narrative makes it clear that the neuron extractor only extracts a few memories and that it’s a matter of potluck which ones you get.

More to the point, the subject of the stolen memories actually referred to in the storyline are mostly banal – “best memory my supplier ever sold me was one of picking up this measly account’s clerk med bills”. Sheesh! That guy can buy all my crappy memories. Although I do like the drug analogy.

Anyway, at least the main antagonist of the storyline – Vito Colletta – has the right idea for a target with memories that promise to be exciting. That’s right – it’s Judge Dredd. After all, we read the comic for excitement.

The memory thieves get their opportunity from Dredd doing his usual thing – going in solo into a city sector gone wild. Chief Judge McGruder initially tells him “you’re going to need serious backup” and the withering look he gives her is priceless. (She immediately retracts her statement – “Uh–no offence, Joe…!”).

 

 

Anyway, that gives the memory thieves the chance to do a drive-by shooting with the neuron extractor. They only get a “handful” of memories but that’s apparently worth “at least 5 mil”. Although I’m a little worried – does this mean that Dredd has lost those memories? Going by that homeless victim we see in the story, it does. On the bright side, Dredd does end up apprehending the rich receivers behind the memory thieves and they have some device to play the memories, so he could have used it to restore the stolen memories.

That of course brings me to that plot twist. Vito Colletta tries on Dredd’s memories for size – after not only reneging on paying anything for them, let alone 5 million, but also having his henchman literally throw them off the building. No honor among memory thieves, I guess.

Anyway, as I said, Vito tries on Dredd’s memories for size – “Judge Dredd’s memories! The action of Necropolis–crossing the Cursed Earth in a killdozer. Soon I’ll have the memories of a hero!” – and they blow his mind. Literally – as in his head explodes. And just before Dredd raids them too, hence his line to the rest of the memory receivers, to which he adds “Guess that creep wasn’t tough enough to handle ’em!”

And yes I skipped two stories

 

  • The Judge Who Lives Downstairs (prog 831) – A fun little episode of Dredd doing the rounds in his home block, Randy Yates Block, which the episode notes is “the safest place to live in Mega-City One”. No surprise there.
  • The Chieftain (progs 832-834) – an ex-Brit Cit ranger from Cal Hab (Caledonian Habitation Zone) on a roaring rampage of revenge in Mega-City One. He even has a weaponized bagpipe droid that kills with sonic waves – the Psycho-Piper, a “tight focus sonic disruptor on a robot chassis”. Dear Grud. Still – probably sounds better than regular bagpipes.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

MUZAK KILLER – LIVE! (progs 837-839)

 

Video killed the radio star – the Muzak Killer’s back and this time he’s live! And again in that glorious Dermot Power art!

Yes – it’s Marty Zpok, back from when we last saw him a couple of years back in Case Files 16. I mean, there’s only been a global zombie apocalypse in the meantime but not much seems to have changed for Zpok and the 22nd century ‘muzak’ he hates.

Well, except of course, he’s doing time in the cubes from his run as the Muzak Killer, when he targeted a thinly veiled version of the 1990s English music producers Stock Aitken Waterman and their expatriate Australian artists from the long-running (and highly popular) soap opera Neighbours, foremost among them Kylie Minogue.

Apart from time in the cubes, that has also seen him as the butt of the running gag in these episodes – being called “sad”, as in pathetic or a loser. It starts slowly and subtly with the abuse of his fellow inmates – as they beat him up in the shower, leaving him with a gap-toothed grin from a missing tooth like Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman for the rest of the story – but escalating to pretty much everyone, including Dredd, calling him out as sad or pathetic.

As “sad” as he is, his luck changes as we find out the Muzak Killer has his own fans. Not many of them to be sure, but quality counts over quantity for fans that are willing and able to break him out of prison in an aerial raid, led by his biggest fan called – what else? – Indiana Saddoe, presumably yet another play on the recurring gag of Zpok being sad. The raid doesn’t exactly go without a hitch. Unluckily, Judge Dredd happens to be in the vicinity and a well-aimed hi-ex shot takes out the “stratorover”, although Zpok and Saddoe survive the crash to escape to Saddoe’s apartment.

And from there they plot – well, mostly Zpok plots and Saddoe just goes along with it like the saddo he is – to hijack a ‘vid’ broadcasting station and broadcast Zpok’s war on muzak live. Needless to say, it does not go well for them, although it ends in a surprisingly lucky turn of events for Zpok. Lucky lucky lucky!

 

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

MUZAK KILLER – LIVE 1 (prog 837)

 

I’ve already covered most of the first episode in my introduction to this arc but the first episode concludes with Saddoe and Zpok holed up at Saddoe’s apartment.

Interestingly, Saddoe is such a fan that he’s even purchased a copy of Zpok’s original Muzak Killer outfit from the first story for Zpok to wear in this one. (Of course, Zpok was wearing his original outfit when apprehended by Dredd). Nothing is said – we just see Zpok wearing it as opposed to his iso-cube regulation clothing so Saddoe must have bought it for him in advance.

 

Sadly, Zpok is less impressed with Saddoe’s music collection, even though it’s “the hippest alterni-music vibes in the Meg). For Zpok, all new music is muzak – “Exactly, Indy. Lesson one – music is only cool when it’s old.”

 

Although he contradicts himself with the very next words out of his mouth – “Down to business, Indy. How’s the music scene doing? Who’s big? Must be some pretty good bands about, since I wiped out the bad ones!”

 

O well – I suppose we shouldn’t look for consistency in the mind of a deranged killer. I suppose he could be talking about covers bands…

 

Anyway, that prompts Saddoe to reply that “lots of new muzak stars popped up and took over from the dead ones”.

 

Zpok is incredulous – “Eh? They didn’t even notice me?”

 

Well yes, they did – but not in any good way. Saddoe produces all of the “press clippings” from the so-called Ramsay bop or Zpok’s first murder spree (weird to think that there’s still paper press clippings or no digital scans in the twenty-second century). And upon reading them Zpok is barraged with descriptions of how pathetically sad he is…which makes him angry.

 

To appease him, Saddoe sees if there is any news of Zpok’s escape on the vid news and sure enough there is. Even better, Zpok rebounds with a newfound sense of purpose upon seeing the latest ‘vid’ entertainment show, Word Up, featuring live muzak. Now he’s a man with a plan – “Heh heh heh…Indy, my boy? You and I are going to be vid stars”.

 

I just love the look on Indy’s face, which says it all really…uh oh. 

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

MUZAK KILLER – LIVE 2 (prog 838)

 

“Oh my drokking Grud!”

I mean, haven’t we all wanted to take a monster chainsaw to that one annoying ponce mouthing off about us? You know the one. And this was before social media – now you could cut through whole swathes of online critics.

Joking aside, I can’t help but feel that writer Garth Ennis or artist Dermot Power are using the Muzak Killer to work through some issues here. That journalist – David O’Steven – has an awfully distinctive appearance. I suspect there’s some inner joke in his name or appearance that I just can’t get through the dust of all these years later.

Anyway, David O’Steven was the journalist whose gutter press writing about the Muzak Killer’s last appearance enraged Zpok on reading it – “Marty Zpok’s slaughter of muzak stars proves just how sad some people are. The love of a good woman might help – but he’s so sad he’s probably never had a girlfriend, the sad jerk”. So there you have it – Judge Dredd did i-n-c-e-l-s first by decades.

And as luck would have it, prompted by Zpok’s escape, he’s writing – or dictating – more of the same when Zpok decides to pay him a visit with Saddoe in toe. Well, you can guess how that goes, particularly with that chainsaw. Mind you, you’ve got to love O’Steven’s last words – “I’ll print an apologaaaagh!”. Sorry Dave, I’m afraid you can’t do that.

Meanwhile, Dredd is hot on Zpok’s trail, although it’s hard to miss. As Dredd observes – “I’m in O’Steven’s hab, Control – he’s all over the place.” Let’s say the visual image of the panel matches that.

However, as we know, Zpok has bigger plans than petty personal revenge – or perhaps rather bigger plans that overlap his petty personal revenge against the world of muzak. And those plans involve hijacking the popular vid broadcast Word Up.

A quick tangent – we see the host of Word Up interviewing “aging star Conrad Conn”. Now there’s a blast from the past – Conrad Conn featured all the way back in The Day the Law Died (as collected in Case Files 2), as Mega-City One’s most popular vid star conscripted by Chief Judge Cal to star as Cal in the Chief Judge’s video ode to himself. That’s what I love about Ennis writing Dredd – you can tell he was a real fanboy for the classic early episodes.

Anyway, that’s what Zpok and Saddoe do – hijack the vid broadcast. Saddoe takes over the control room, with a randomizer to block the Judges from jamming the broadcast (and to keep the control room robots and staff broadcasting at gunpoint). And Zpok’s our host, after throttling the actual host Gerry Hindu and shooting female co-host Kati Mukkrake.

And you know – I think he may have missed his calling as a vid broadcast host, because he’s quite entertaining. Perhaps he and Mega-City One’s muzak industry might have been happier if he’d gone that route as a host of a music vid broadcast, a metaphorical Muzak Killer as it were with snide snarky criticism of muzak stars he doesn’t like. Sadly now he’s the literal Muzak Killer – and as he announces to his live audience, he’s just getting started with the show’s guests…

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

MUZAK KILLER – LIVE 3 (prog 839)

 

“And now…the end is near…And so I face…the final curtain”

Well it’s time to wrap up this show – and by this show, I mean the vid broadcast Word Up hijacked by Marty Zpok a.k.a. the Muzak Killer. He must have known how this would end but he planned to go out with a bang – you might say he did it his way. Indeed, he does more than say it – he sings it, which I found quite surprising since I hadn’t picked him for a Sinatra fan. I mean, I know he liked old music – it’s his moniker after all – but I thought he preferred the different genre of classic or alternative ‘rock’.

And as I said, he goes out with a bang – indeed, several of them. He killed the two broadcast hosts last episode and now he gets started on the guests. Mairaid McSlaphead – I’m pretty sure she was a parody of Sinead O’Connor. Demanda – another of the broadcast’s hosts. Clarence from the Crazy Sked Moaners – not sure of the reference, but ironically he kills himself trying to carve the word ‘real’ into his forehead with a las cutter. Not sure we can chalk that one up to Zpok’s tally, although arguably Zpok egged him on – and you have to admit Zpok quipping “that’s not how you spell real” is funny. In fairness, it wouldn’t be easy getting the letters right on your own forehead.

Zpok gets another good gag in when he asks Anni O’Boge, sister of Syreen O’Boge whom he killed in the ‘Ramsay Bop Massacre’, about her sister “two years ago”. She starts to answer him but belatedly recognizes him – “Hang on a mo’…ain’t you the bloke who…?”. “Yep” says Zpok as he shoots her.

Quick side bar – Anni would presumably be a parody of Danni Minogue, sister of Kylie Minogue parodied by Styreen. And I hadn’t noticed before now that the ‘Ramsay Bop Massacre’ would also be a reference to Ramsay Street, setting of the Australian soap opera Neighbours, beloved in England and from which Kylie and her fellow ‘muzak’ pop stars originated.

Anyway, that’s the last shot Zpok gets in – as Judge Dredd has answered the call by Justice Control to attend the studio, shot Saddoe, and had the hostage studio staff shut down the broadcast (bypassing Saddoe’s jammer).

Which brings us to Zpok singing My Way with its apt lyrics – and Dredd brings down the curtain with a gunshot to the head. “Sad, creep.”

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

MUZAK KILLER – LIVE 3 (prog 839)

 

But wait – there’s more. I can’t resist this epilogue (“six weeks later”) of how Marty Zpok learned to stop worrying and love the muzak.

 

Of course it helps that Dredd’s headshot effectively lobotomized him.

 

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

There’s two episodes after Muzak Killer, which represented Garth Ennis handing over the reins of primary writing duties to the duo of Grant Morrison and Mark Millar:

  • Tough Justice (prog 840), penned by Mark Millar, in which juves exchange the equivalent of campfire horror stories about Judge Dredd embodying the titular tough justice to scare one of them straight (sadly too late as Dredd catches them trying to dispose of a blaster)
  • Down Among the Dead Men (prog 841) also penned by Milar – in which grave-robbing seems to make a 22nd century revival, except snatching corpses from Resyk for medical students. Except…isn’t most medicine done by robots?

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO (progs 842 – 853)

 

I should be excited.

Firstly, Inferno is a Judge Dredd epic, albeit of twelve episodes rather than the usual ‘full’ epic length – the first epic after Judgement Day and yet another existential threat to Mega-City One (as well as potentially to other mega-cities), made more dire by how much Justice Department was weakened by Judgement Day.

Secondly, it’s Grant Morrison’s debut as primary writer for Judge Dredd, taking over (in tandem with Mark Millar) from Garth Ennis.

I should be excited but I’m not. That’s because Inferno is distinctly underwhelming. I’m not entirely sure why – it hits all the right beats for a Dredd epic, but yet feels strangely by the numbers, like Morrison was phoning it in. As indeed it felt for his and Millar’s run as the primary writers on Judge Dredd and 2000 AD – as much as I enjoy both writers for their work elsewhere (indeed Morrison’s earlier story Zenith for 2000 AD remains my second favorite comic of all time, second only to Judge Dredd), ranking them both in my Top 10 Comics, they just didn’t seem to be the right fit here. I’m not the only one that regards their run as where the Dark Age of Dredd was at its darkest, although it still has its highlights – but Inferno isn’t one of them.

It’s essentially a jailbreak – from the penal colony of Titan back to Mega-City One. How anyone pulls this off is beyond me, but Inferno started the trend for Titan as some sort of revolving door prison IN SPACE, rivalled only by Arkham Asylum in Batman for ease of escape or riot (or both). Even worse, the jailbreak effectively happened off-panel before the epic, in the prequel Purgatory by Mark Millar featured separately in the Megazine.

By his own admission, Morrison wrote Dredd simply as “just a big bastard with a gun”, but despite some tantalizing glimpses to the contrary, Morrison also wrote the antagonist – ex-Judge Grice returned from his exile and imprisonment for his conspiracy against the referendum and Judge Dredd back in The Devil You Know / Twilight’s Last Gleaming – equally as one dimensional “bastard with a gun”. Except, you know, not just a gun but also armed with an apocalyptic virus. I’ll give him ram-raiding the Hall of Justice with a spaceship for style though.

I tend to agree with the observations of the Dredd Reckoning blog about Inferno:

“Instead, there’s so much horribly clumsy writing here. Morrison asks us to believe that Grice’s small team of disgraced, hobbled ex-Judges could drive all the current Judges out of the city (off-panel); that the Grand Hall of Justice is built directly on top of iso-cubes; that Dredd would unblinkingly slaughter a building’s worth of prisoners rather than allow them to potentially be freed (although “it was only a parking offence!” strikes me as a very Morrisonian joke…that the Titan escapees would be packed on board a “pre-programmed robot ship” (cough) so Dredd could blow it up; that the Statue of Judgement is perched adjacent to the Cursed Earth, i.e. on the western border of Mega-City One (hint: it’s directly adjacent to the Statue of Liberty, which is on the eastern edge of North America); that the Judges would have an oh-well attitude to germ warfare decimating the population of MC1 (“fewer citizens means less crime”–er, that’s Judge Death’s position); that, after killing a bad guy in a career-record gruesome way, Dredd would go for a James Bond-style one-liner; that hand-to-hand combat between Dredd and Grice could settle the entire problem…”

I also tend to agree with the observation that Wagner’s Day of Chaos not only was an effective sequel to the Apocalypse War, but was “also in some ways, a vastly improved variation on a lot of the plot devices of Inferno…It involves psychic premonitions of doom, germ warfare, turncoat Judges, the Statue of Judgment and Hall of Justice attacked)”

Still, it did have some classic Ezquerra art, so I’ll essentially go from one art highlight to the next while being as economic with the epic’s storyline as possible.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 1-2 – Inferno / Titan Fall! (progs 842-843)

 

“Death from the skies!”

Sigh – Psi-Division being useless as usual without Anderson.

Okay – I have to admit that’s a badass introduction to Inferno in the final panel of the first episode.

And you have to give it to the epic that it hits the ground running – literally ram-raiding the Hall of Justice FROM SPACE!

And it’s badass introductions all round this episode – not least for Judge Dredd himself, as he takes out the Bazooka Brothers, a dubious duo using their titular weapon of choice to destroy shops or something.

But before Dredd, we’re introduced to Psi-Judge Janus – literally on her 19th birthday. Although that just shows how useless Psi-Division is that this raw Psi-Judge, presumably fresh out from graduating as a cadet, is their replacement for Psi-Judge Anderson (on mission off-world). I mean, she’s, like, likable enough – that’s a play on her Valley Girl verbal mannerisms by the way – but she’s no Judge Anderson.

Sadly, Psi-Division is even more useless than that as they also have to rely on a secondment from another mega-city – which sees the first introduction of an Indian mega-city, Delhi-Cit (sometimes written as Nu Delhi), and an Indian Judge, Psi-Judge Bhaji.

It’s his precognitive dream quoted in that panel – “death from the skies”. Bhaji is only marginally more useful than Psi-Division. I mean, at least he had some precognitive alert to the impending disaster about to strike Mega-City One – although apparently “every single Judge in Psi-Division had the same dream” but it’s not exactly helpful advice in terms of warning or preventative action, is it? It’s even less helpful timing as it’s literally just before it happens. That’s barely precognitive. It’s like Lisa Simpson tells a fortune teller in one episode – wow, you can see into the…present. That dream is barely better than looking out the window.

Or screen in this case, as Mega-City One detects fifteen incoming spaceships as the second episode opens – after the reader has been introduced to the epic’s antagonist, ex-Judge Grice and his fellow escapees from Titan, “carrying a deadly germ weapon, the meat virus”.

Which seems to have a nearly instantaneous effect in the dispersion area as they use their ships to ram raid the Hall of Justice and other buildings. We see a Judge Noonan succumb to it as she reports back from Mick Travis Block – named for a fictional film character. “Rapid…toxic…effects!”

We also see Grice swooping in with a jetpack – “This is your wake-up call, Mega-City One!”

I guess that space prison time on Titan left a little to be desired for rehabilitation.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 3-4 Descent into the Maelstrom! / Kill or Cure! (progs 844-845)

 

“No! It was only a parking offence! My Grud! It was only a parking offence…!”

Classic Morrison gag, although not up there with his best one-liners – for that, you have to go to Zenith.

Anyway, Grice and his renegade ex-Judges overwhelm Justice Department with their spaceship ram-raids – and above all the “meat virus”, apparently a weaponized virus they were developing on Titan. McGruder tells the other senior Judges in the Hall of Justice bunker that they have about an hour before showing symptoms – masks are useless as it spreads through the skin.

Still not sure how Grice’s few ex-Judges and spaceships are able to achieve the spread – of ex-Judges, ram raids or the meat virus – to overwhelm the entire Justice Department throughout Mega-City One but there you have it. There’s also Citi-Def but the writers forgot them for the other recent crises of Necropolis and Judgement Day as well.

There’s a grisly scene replaying that brutal torn apart by horses thing you see as a trope in pre-modern torture or execution. You know the one – where you have four horses pulling in opposite directions on a rope or chain to each of a person’s limbs. Except here of course they use Lawmasters – begging the question of how they bypassed the security protocols of the Lawmaster computers. You know, being ex-Judges convicted and sent to Titan.

Anyway, Grice and his renegade Judges ram-raid the Hall of Justice itself, as well as pumping the gas with the meat virus through the vents. McGruder orders a strategic evacuation – but says they can’t “afford to let Grice free the prisoners in the iso-cubes”. Um – why? As in why would he free them? And why can’t they afford to let him free the prisoners – would they really be reliable allies for Grice, or allies at all? Although it does give us that parking offence gag, as Dredd orders the cubes to be flooded. Since when did the Hall of Justice have iso-cubes? And follow-up question – why are they rigged to be flooded? Fortunately, the flooded cubes do serve a more useful – and less callous – purpose later in the epic.

We get to see Judge Hershey pull a big damn heroes moment similar to McGruder gunning down zombies in Judgement Day, but for the renegade judges threatening to gun down the evacuees, Dredd and McGruder among them. She also has a H-wagon, begging the question of where every other H-wagon in the city is and what they are doing.

As they fly away in the H-wagon – apparently part of a general and implausible retreat by all Justice Department outside the city, something which has never occurred in any crisis before or since – McGruder explains the meat virus. An alien virus (from actual dead aliens on Titan), Justice Department were developing it as a weapon. Secondary stage symptoms are sores appearing on the skin a couple of days after infection – more seriously, they all have two weeks to live as that’s when the terminal tertiary stage symptoms or complete tissue breakdown appears unless the antidote is administered before then. (And it has to be before the tertiary stage).

You’d think Justice Department might have had some antidote in Mega-City One in case something went wrong on Titan…but no. You’d be wrong. Of course, Grice and his renegade ex-Judges have the antidote. So that probably explains why McGruder heads off on a Lawmaster, presumably to make amends for her lapse of judgement – perhaps offering herself up to Grice in return for the antidote – and Dredd pursues her.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 5-6 – Long Live the Chief Judge! / Judges with Grudges (progs 846-847)

 

“Long live the new Chief Judge! Long live the Lord of Misrule!”

That’s ex-Judge Grice’s declaration of usurpation, as he usurps the position of Chief Judge in MC-1.

Of course, Dredd is having none of it – “When are you gonna get sick of the sound of your own voice, Grice? ‘Cause I’m already sick of it.”

Before we get there, episode 5 opens with the narration – “Forced out of Mega-City One by Grice and his renegades, the Judges have established a makeshift encampment in the Cursed Earth”.

By makeshift encampment, it means H-wagon parking lot – and by Cursed Earth, it means literally parking their H-wagons right outside the walls of Mega-City One.

The whole scenario is implausible, but perhaps above all that this entire epic makes it seem that the entirety of Mega-City One consists of not much more than a short stretch of the West Wall. Hence, Grice’s ridiculously small force of ex-Judges straight outta Titan in a ridiculously small flotilla of ridiculously small spaceships was able to eject all the Judges from Mega-City One – an Atlantic seaboard super-conurbation of 400 million from New Hampshire to North Carolina – and apparently to the one encampment as H-wagon parking lot outside the West Wall.

It gets worse. Dredd saves a citizen about to be randomly killed by two of Grice’s renegade Judges – and by randomly, it means because the citizen’s ‘eyes are too close together”. Really? Surely Grice’s renegade Judges have some motivation beyond terrorizing random citizens for no reason? Or at least something better to do? Like some sort of plan or orders from Grice?

After saving the citizen, Dredd directs the citizen to report to the cubes “when this is over” for doing nothing more than pleading with the renegade Judges “what do you want?” and offering them “everything I’ve got” – “I’m giving you six months for attempted bribery”. Really? They weren’t actual Judges but renegade ex-Judges and hence criminals – something Dredd is at pains to point out when the epic plays this scene again almost beat for beat a few episodes later, albeit more true to Dredd’s character dealing with the citizen he saves in that scene. Dredd wouldn’t charge a citizen being robbed by other citizens for trying to offer the robbers what they want because of their actual or threatened violence (although he might charge a citizen for flaunting wealth as enticement) – that’s essentially the nature of robbery. Of course, this is an example of how Morrison misfired with the character in this epic, essentially parodying Dredd as embodiment of the Law consistent with his catchphrase, except Dredd isn’t enforcing the Law so much as some deliberately obtuse distortion of it. And even if Dredd was obtuse enough to effectively charge victims of a crime as a party to it, it makes no sense or strategic timing for him to do so here.

Meanwhile, McGruder is being beaten up by Grice as he taunts her – “What did you think you were doing coming here, McGruder?”

Um, he has a point – what was her plan? Presumably it was offering herself up to Grice – but you’d think she planned to do so in exchange for something. You know, perhaps Grice handing over the antidote to the Judges? Or the citizens?

Anyway, Grice offers an exchange – her life for her loyalty to him, which we also saw him offer to that Judge he had dismembered by Lawmasters. Um, what was Grice’s plan here if she accepted? Which she should have – or more precisely feigned it to buy time to get the antidote or plot against Grice, hence my query what was Grice’s plan here if she accepted. Hence the query of what her plan actually was offering herself up to Grice – and what Grice’s plan was if she accepted his offer.

Fortunately for him, she neither has a plan nor accepts his offer, so instead he decides to use her for a much more dramatic and demoralizing display in the style of the Mongol conquests – which, come to think of it, his violent takeover of MC-1 resembles. Or perhaps more in the style of defenestration – except for throwing her out a high storey window, he just launches her on her Lawmaster off the Wall in full view of the aghast onlooking Judges.

Hence his declaration of usurpation. That might have been more interesting as some sort of declaration of anarchy – Lord of Misrule – or some sort of inversion in the style of a Department of Injustice, but Morrison doesn’t do much with it.

McGruder is a tough old bird – she survived injuries in the Apocalypse War, she survived her Long Walk in the Cursed Earth, and she survives this, albeit barely and with critical injuries.

And Dredd picks this moment to somehow materialize on top of the Wall for a dramatic showdown with Grice. Um – what was Dredd’s plan here, exactly? Yes, yes, it’s literally a baseball bat as we see a couple of episodes later. But what was his plan?! I’m so confused!

Anyway, it works out as well as you’d expect for him, given the showdown is only halfway through the epic. Which is to say, not too well, as Grice and his fellow renegade Judges easily best the sickened Dredd. Dredd is saved by a literal deus ex machina – well, literal ex machina anyway – in the form of Walter the Wobot, who also materializes out of nowhere, and out of a prolonged absence since his regular appearances as Dredd’s comic sidekick (which also seems misplaced here). Walter manages to get him out of the City (through some strange shafts or tunnels in or through the Wall) to the Cursed Earth – where it’s a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire as a horde of cannibal mutants attack them…

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 7-8 – Death Dance! / Trial by Fire (progs 848-849)

 

“I got my plan right here!”

Okay, okay – I admit it. I can’t help but like this panel – the best of the epic – even if it doesn’t make sense.

I mean, his plan is a baseball bat?! Usually Dredd has better plans than that.

Also where did he get the bat? He literally just woke up in a makeshift hospital bed in the Justice Department encampment (where they didn’t take his helmet off).

I’m not done with the bat as his plan. Yes, yes – I know it’s Dredd announcing that he’s still in the fight (“who’s with me?”) but a literal fight? That is, a one on one, hand to hand – or rather bat to bat – smackdown with Grice? You know, the same plan as before, that saw him end up in the hospital bed, except with…a bat? You know you have a gun, don’t you, Dredd? Which if you had simply used last time you confronted him – shot first and spoke later – it would now be over. Instead, you did the whole  “I’m taking you in” routine which made no sense – as Grice even said and he had a point. And you only ended up in a hospital bed by grace of deus ex machina in the form of Walter – and Psi-Judge Janus tracking you before the mutants ate you.

Oh yeah – that’s how episode 7 opened. Dredd is about to be eaten by cannibal mutants after Walter helped him out of the city – but Psi-Judge Janus leads a team of Judges to find him and gun down the mutants. “Judge Janus picked up your psi-profile and led us to you”. Hence the hospital bed.

In the meantime, we do have some entertaining internal villain monologues from Grice, who in his usurped position of Chief Judge appears to have become completely deranged, combining the capricious psychopathy of Chief Judge Cal with the omnicidal mania of Judge Death. No, seriously – he muses happily to himself of the death of the entire population of Mega-City One – “Everyone has to die. No one is innocent” – before taking it on world tour. “And then Grice will stretch out his hand to touch and corrupt each of the great mega-cities in turn”.

I mean, replacing the eagle head with a skull on the Chief Judge uniform is something of a dead giveaway (heh).

Surprisingly, there’s only one sane man among his renegade ex-Judges trying to take him out before he kills everyone – “Grice has gone loco! He just wants to kill everythin’ now. Figger he reckons he’s Judge Death or sumthin'”. Unfortunately, he only has one flaky co-conspirator who betrays him to Grice, so Grice has him “executed” (along with the co-conspirator). By chainsaw.

I guess Dredd’s bat is looking better now…

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 9-10 – Here Comes the Judge! / Girl Trouble! (progs 850-851)

 

You know I love a good panel of Dredd’s catchphrase – “I am the Law!”

Also roll credits as Grice replies – “Welcome to the Inferno, Dredd. Burn in hell!”

That’s at the end of these two episodes. Before we get there, we left episode 7 with Dredd heading off, a man with a plan with a bat in his hand, to beat up Grice.

In fairness, this time the epic does Dredd right as he saves a female elderly citizen from two renegade Judges. They were extorting fines from her under pain of execution, but as she pleads with them that she has not money, they switch to killing her as penalty “for flaunting poverty”. Although you’d think the renegade Judges, having the run of the city, could pick more lucrative targets. You know – banks, corporations, wealthier city blocks. But no – I guess street mugging it is.

At least this time there’s no nonsense from Dredd about charging the citizen. Instead he tells her – “On your way, citizen. Anyone you meet, tell ’em Judge Dredd is back!”.

Meanwhile, Grice has been busy setting his own charges – explosive charges on the Statue of Judgement. And yes – he detonates them, bringing the Statue down on top of a large section of the West Wall and tearing it down, conveniently right in front of the exiled Judges encamped outside the Wall. This becomes their cue, spurred on by exhortations from Psi-Judge Janus and Judge Hershey, to charge in and take back the city. Although – couldn’t they have just gone in with Dredd through the underground access he used? Or just flown in on the H-wagons which Hershey exhorts to get “rolling” into the city.

Somehow Bundy, the extremely butch chief henchperson of Grice, manages to find and get the jump on Dredd. Finally he uses his gun to just shoot her, as he should have done with Grice those few episodes back, albeit after the cavalry arrives in the form of Hershey and other Judges. RIP Bundy.

And that brings us to Dredd hunting out Grice for another showdown as the latter is getting started on burning down the Hall of Justice with a flamethrower, declaring there is no law – hence Dredd’s signature catchphrase. Although once again you could have just shot him, Dredd, rather than announce your presence. You’re even shown pointing your gun right at him (with Grice busy flamethrowing in another direction). It’s easy – you just did it with Bundy.

Anyway, there goes the element of surprise again as Grice turns his flamethrower on Dredd.

 

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 11 – White Heat! (prog 852)

 

I’ve come to that time in my Mega-City Law recap when I play my Dredd drinking game – matching up the Case Files volume cover art with the comic panel art.

And what glorious art! By Brian Bolland of course – you can see his signature peeping out from under the 2000 AD title logo, meaning that it wasn’t the comic panel art but the comic issue cover art, Bolland’s specialty by that time.

Unfortunately – and unforgivably! – Case Files 19 does not include this cover, seemingly breaking the rule for Case Files volume covers including art from the episodes compiled in them, and usually compiling the Dredd cover art (where issues featured it as opposed to cover art for other storylines as 2000 AD is an anthology comic), typically at the end of the volume.

Worse, it was the cover for the wrong episode, symbolising what a mess this epic was. As you can see from the cover (if you zoom in), it was the cover of prog 848 – which was the seventh episode of the Inferno epic (titled Death Dance).

 

 

The cover art would actually appear to correspond to prog 852 or the epic’s 11th (and second last) episode – particularly this scene evoking the titular inferno as Dredd confronts Grice (again) while the latter is burning down the Hall of Justice with a flamethrower.

My assumption is that Bolland was given the description or draft art for this episode by inadvertence or mistake for the cover art of the earlier episode which featured nothing like this scene.

This scene also shows us how Dredd gets out of this one. He shoots the floor – for which Grice mocks him in this panel – into the flooded iso-cube cell hallway conveniently right below him, allow him to escape by swimming (and extinguishing the fire while he’s at it).

Dredd retrieves his Lawmaster and has another showdown with Grice outside the Hall of Justice. He finally just shoots at Grice, but then seems reluctant to get another shot in to finish Grice off, allowing Grice to go hand to hand with Dredd – seemingly poised to strike the final blow to Dredd…

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

INFERNO 12 – Mortal Kombat! (prog 853)

 

Grice comes to a grisly end at the wheels of Dredd’s Lawmaster – and so too does Inferno with that Bond one-liner “What’s the matter, Grice? Feeling run down?”

If there’s a running theme (heh) to Inferno, it’s that protagonist Dredd and antagonist Grice spend too much time monologuing at each other rather than just finishing the other off or just shooting him. At least Dredd breaks the habit enough here to have his Lawmaster finish Grice off first before shooting off his one-liner.

And that pretty much wraps up Inferno, but for the usual epilogue bits. As the episode itself narrates, “Grice’s coup is collapsing” – and the coup finishes collapsing with the Judges led by Hershey regaining the city and either killing or capturing Grice’s renegade ex-Judges from Titan. And I suppose also whatever Judges defected to him in the city itself, presumably for the antidote – Grice mentions them but we never see any. What we do see is the last of them – Grice’s renegades – loaded onto a robot-crewed spaceship to be shipped right back to Titan.

Oh – and Hershey casually mentions that they won’t be able to produce enough of the antidote for all the citizens, so there’s going to be a death toll. How many? Who knows, other than Hershey quipping resyk will be working overtime and Dredd quipping back fewer citizens means less crime. It’s lazy writing. Just like we never see when or how the Judges captured the antidote from the renegade Judges – it would have been nice to feature a panel to show this, perhaps even some surrendering renegades offering it up for amnesty.

Speaking of amnesty, you didn’t think they were really shipping the renegade Judges back to Titan, did you? Where presumably they’d just escape all over again, maybe next week? Not on Dredd’s watch! Yeah…Dredd’s not doing that Batman putting the Joker back in Arkham Asylum and the whole revolving door prison thing. Instead he pushes the button and pulls a gotcha on the Titan escapees.

 

 

Nice if somewhat predictable twist but did he really have to waste the ship and robots for it, not to mention the elaborate ploy? And so Inferno ends with a bang – although really epic itself was a story not with a bang but a whimper.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

WAR GAMES (prog 854)

 

“Judge Dredd! For crimes against justice — you are sentenced to death!”

Finally – a bright shining light in the darkness that is Case Files 19 with my favorite episode, at least among the regular 2000 AD episodes and apart from the Megazine.

Unfortunately, it does have its problems and I’ll get to those, but they do not so much arise from the episode itself as the failure to do anything with it subsequently (and its timing as the very next episode after Inferno).

But what’s not to love about that very first panel, with our very first look at the Chinese or Sino-Cit Judges, rendered in superb art by Paul Marshall? Of course, that would be Sino-Cit 2 as Sino-Cit 1 was overrun by zombies in Judgement Day and nuked.

I mean, just look at them! Those uniforms come very close to knocking off those of the Sov Judges and Mega-City One Judges from their pedestal as my favorite. But for the fact that we don’t see them again for many episodes (as I have difficulty recalling their reappearance in the regular episodes) and then only after changing their uniforms, they might well be my favorite Judge uniforms.

I believe that they toned down the uniforms – which is frankly outrageous. If anything, they should have toned them up! But they’re perfect as they are. I note that there appears to be two regular Judge uniforms and one in a more senior or commanding position, although both uniform designs are in the red and yellow designs of the present Chinese flag.

As for the regular Judges, there’s the helmets styled in the traditional conical Asian design. The dragons as shoulder pad similar to the eagle for Mega-City One Judges. The Chinese characters which I presume to be their name, similar to the badges for Mega-City One Judges. The only issue I have is the shuriken belt buckles – which are a bit too much and also a potential source of injury.

The senior or commanding Judge has a similar coloring and design – but with some big boss shoulder pads going on and a dragon helmet. He also has skulls on his collar and badge, suggestive of perhaps a similar role to the SJS in Mega-City One, as well as a giant Chinese character on his chest.

And we’re still just in the very first panel – but I haven’t finished admiring it. You just have to love that grin on the Sino-Cit Judge on the right.

Of course, it’s the Sino-Cit Judges that are in trouble here. It’s that old adage – Dredd’s not locked in there with them, they’re locked in there with him…

 

 

“Not just Sino-Cit Judges, imperialist pig!”

Sino-Cit Judges and Sov Judges and stomm – oh my!

Yes, yes – just bask in that glory of Paul Marshall’s art in these panels from this episode, particularly as we have so few episodes like it in Case Files 19.

Despite being strapped into what appears to be an electric chair for his execution by the Sino-Cit Judges, with a leap Dredd is free! And suddenly armed with two Lawgivers to take them out instead, allowing us to get a look at the back of those Sino-Cit Judge uniforms and see they’re even cooler with the yin-yang symbols on the back.

But no sooner has Dredd escaped from the Sino-Cit Judges, calling for backup from Control (“We’ve got a nest of Sino-Cit Judges right here in Mega-City!”) then he is ambushed by a nest of Sov Judges, prompting an expletive of “stomm” from Dredd.

Or dare I say it, the stomm-bomb! So little used compared to the much more popular f-word substitute drokk. I believe stomm is the s-word equivalent. You often get a good drokk in Judge Dredd but you rarely get a good stomm. Mind you, we also get a good drokk coming up…

 

 

“You failed, Dredd! Welcome to hell!”

Sino-Cit Judges and Sov Judges and drokking hell – oh my!

Out of the frying pan, into the hellfire. The Grand Hall of Justice in flames and Dredd overwhelmed by SJS zombies.

 Just what the hell is going on?!

 

 

And it was all a dream!

Well, by dream I mean experimental psychotropic drug hallucination.

If anything, that’s even darker in some ways than the literal hellscape we saw in Dredd’s drug-fuelled nightmare vision – and as much as I love this episode, that’s where my problems with it start.

Not so much with the darkness of it – that Justice Department is prepared to resort to some extremely callous calculus from grim desperation. The callousness is obvious with the pile of poor chumps that Dredd has brutally killed in his literal drug psychosis and whom McGruder even calls “guinea pigs” – “Perps…we picked them up this afternoon — most of them minor offences but we needed some guinea pigs”.

Good Grud! Picked them up this afternoon? Minor offences?! You may have needed guinea pigs but you need them that badly and that quickly? You couldn’t have, say, used more serious offenders? You know, death row inmates – or the equivalent, as Mega-City One doesn’t have the death penalty…mostly.

Also…did they arm these chumps with, ah, spatulas or fly swatters? And I’m sure one of them just had a skateboard?  Against Dredd with a daystick and Lawgiver?!

Of course, they probably didn’t want anyone – or anything – more dangerous against Dredd, as they doped him to the eyeballs with their experimental “new aggro drug”. That’s the other part of their callous calculus here – the risk to their own Judge, let alone a Judge of the stature of Dredd, from an untested drug affecting their sensory awareness and perception, let alone doing so in some sort of extreme combat simulation to the death. What if it had incapacitated him, of itself or in combat? Not to mention they went all MK-Ultra with it – doing it without his consent or even knowledge.

It prompts to mind the official use of methylamphetamine in World War Two, originally for its perceived performance enhancement but ultimately banned for its negative effects – presumably including a deterioration of that performance (and one anticipates quite a bit of friendly fire).

But my problem is bigger than that. There’s the timing of it – literally the next episode after Inferno. What about Dredd recovering from his injuries, let alone McGruder?

However, the biggest problem is that they do exactly nothing with it – neither with its premise nor with the drug, both of which are never seen again. The premise is essentially one of grim desperation – “according to Psi-Division, there’s a crisis coming on. At our current depleted strength, we’re not strong enough to deal with it”. That crisis is further stated – or rather predicted – to be 18 months away or less, originating in the eastern blocks. “Somethin’ bad is headed this way”.

Spoiler alert – it isn’t and didn’t. While it is on brand for Psi Division to be useless as usual, that’s probably on the writers. No doubt the writing team – including Mark Millar who wrote the episode – intended and planned for something big and bad to hit Mega-City One, but they must have quietly dropped that story idea, whatever it was.

As for that drug tested on Dredd, no doubt it would have come in useful for Mega-City One’s Judges once they ironed out the kinks, not least in one of the crises that did come to Mega-City One, but again they must have quietly dropped it as story idea.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

JUDGE TYRANNOSAUR (prog 855)

 

“Stomping citizens is illegal, meat-mouth! You’re toast!”

You may be cool but will you ever be Judge Dredd taking out a T-rex with a flamethrower cool?

And that’s pretty much the point of this episode (which wraps up the regular 2000 AD episodes in this volume) but I’m always a fun of Jurassic Dredd – whenever dinosaurs pop up in the comic. Although by dinosaurs, let’s face it – it’s almost always tyrannosaurs. Or is that T-rexes?

There is another point of the episode – yet another episode showing Mega-City One’s citizens to be lovable idiots, although the lovable part may be an acquired taste. They’re certainly idiots – which is where the Judge Tyrannosaur of the episode title comes into play.

You guessed it – by contrived but fortuitous happenstance, a tyrannosaur that has wandered a long way from its Cursed Earth home to Mega-City One just happens to eat the right person, a perp holding Mega-City One’s “favorite granny” or oldest citizen hostage for ransom. This happens at the West Wall – the art suggests at one of the gaps still in the wall, so it may have been even more fortuitous that the tyrannosaur slipped through the gap at just the right time.

Although mind you, I’d have expected the oldest citizen to be older than 130 years in twenty-second century Mega-City One. I seem to recall body transplants in one episode.

Anyway, naturally Mega-City One’s lovable idiot citizens in the crowd hail the tyrannosaur as hero – with one oddball “Jurassic expert”, transparently named Dr Michael Crichton, lobbying for it to be made a Judge. How and why the tyrannosaur was taken inside (or further inside) the city, let alone restrained in chains, is not clear. Nor is why the Judges at the hostage situation either did it or let the citizens do it.

However, Judge Dredd is not having anything to do with this mother-drokking dinosaur in his mother-drokking city – “This nonsense has gone far enough!”

And just as well too, since that fortuitously coincides with the tyrannosaur escaping from its bounds just as the citizens were about to give it a giant Judge’s badge. It doesn’t seem to eat anyone but does stomp on the unfortunate Dr Crichton, despite him keeping still – as he tells the panicked citizens, the tyrannosaur responds to sudden movement (another nod to Jurassic Park). Hence the rebuke by Dredd to the dinosaur, before he fries it and finishes it off with a high explosive round.

As he tells the citizens, they don’t need heroes, dinosaurs or otherwise – “You citizens don’t need heroes – you already got us! Appreciate it!”

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

THE HOTTIE HOUSE SIEGE (Meg 2.31)

The Jigsaw Murders (Meg 2.27 – 2.29)

Ladonna Fever (Meg 2.30)

 

“They practice progressive lobotomy…They have bits of their brains systematically burnt out to bring them closer to Grud. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.”

Normally I feature just one notable or standout story from the Megazine episodes in a Case Files volume, but there’s a four from this volume – one as my favorite episode in the volume, even above War Games in the regular 2000 AD episodes, and three for storylines that were to continue or recur in later regular episodes.

Of course, that might say something for the Dark Age of Dredd in the regular episodes at this time – allowing for the episodes in the Megazine, which I think were written by Judge Dredd’s best writer, John Wagner, to shine.

Although not so much in the first two storylines in the Meg – the Jigsaw Murders in the three Megazine episodes 2.27-2.29 and Ladonna Fever in Megazine 2.30.

The former is a ho-hum story about a deranged serial killer targeting a replacement arm for surgery to replaced his own amputated one but I’ll admit the latter is fun – an obvious parody of Madonna and her performances at the time. Naturally they breach Mega-City One’s public decency laws but Dredd hadn’t anticipated the city-wide riots in response to her arrest. They pull a fast one releasing her before serving her thirty year sentence – by releasing her after serving it, via some sort of “time stretcher”. Now she’d unappealingly old to the Mega-City crowds. Even better, her management contracts expired after three years – so her contracts no longer protects her records and assets are confiscated by the city. Hmm – I’m not sure it would work that way, as only Ladonna went through the time-stretcher. Interestingly, she apparently was a model citizen before her transformation into a pop star (essentially through total body plastic surgery). American actress and Madonna associate Sarah Bernhard is name-dropped for the block citi-def in which Ladonna served with exemplary record – during Necropolis or the Big Nec, which is somewhat surprising as Citi-Def resistance was omitted from the epic itself.

The Hottie House siege – an obvious satire of the Branch Davidian cult and its leader David Koresh, famously besieged by federal law enforcement at Waco in Texas – proved such a popular storyline that it was to recur in subsequent episodes. Mega-City One’s Branch Moronians – led here by David Wacovitz – were just the black comedy gift that kept on giving. A nice comic touch is the one or two members who lag behind other cult members in lobotomy and are therefore smarter. Not much smarter, of course, but enough to constantly trigger their leader David Wacovitz – although he implicitly relies on them for his plan of taking the hot dog outlet or Hottie House hostage to have any coherence or indeed purpose. Although even with those members lifting up the bell curve, the whole thing is doomed and Dredd takes out the cult single-handed.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

SLICK DICKENS: DRESSED TO KILL (Meg 2.34-2.35)

The Al Capone Story (Meg 2.32)

Bagging the Bagwan (Meg 2.33)

 

Judge Dredd does literary criticism!

“Thought you killed me in your last one, Kaput?…I’m giving you another five years for this pile of garbage!”

The most amusing thing about this all is that Dredd obviously read the book to pick plot points, pixie dust and all .

That book being the latest Slick Dickens book – Slick Dickens: Dressed to Kill – by Truman Kaput, an obvious play on Truman Capote. We last saw Kaput and his literary creation, sartorial hitman extraordinaire Slick Dickens, all the way back in episode 505 in Case Files Volume 10 – when Kaput found himself doing cube time for practising the crimes in his Slick Dickens book for realism. Dredd obviously read that book too (as he sentenced Kaput for practising other crimes in the book) – he’s a fan!

When he was introduced, Kaput had his literary creation kill Dredd – hence Dredd’s dry observation “Thought you killed me in your last one, Kaput?”

In these two Megazine episode, Kaput’s written a sequel – in his characteristic overblown style – in which Slick is back to finish the job, which has his fictional Dredd spooked. Well, his more fictional Dredd – as opposed to our fictional Dredd, who is less than impressed. Hence the five years Dredd adds to Kaput’s sentence – personally, I think Dredd just wants him to write another sequel and gave him the time to do it.

The preceding two Megazine episodes were also interesting but do not reflect a recurring character like Slick Dickens.

The first episode, The Al Capone Story (Megazine 2.32) features its titular protagonist growing up as a disappointment to his thuggish family – placid, good-natured and intelligence. That’s in marked contrast to Herman Schwartz, born on the same day to the next door neighbors of the Capones, and a constant terror in his delinquent behaviour, although the two boys become best friends. Capone’s father pre-empts the twist in the tale, bemoaning whether there was a mix-up at the block hospital – although Al Capone ultimately lives up to his name, imprisoned for tax fraud (albeit doing better than Schwartz, killed in a shootout with Judge Dredd on his way to arresting Capone).

People name-dropped for blocks include the mob bodyguard and successor to Capone, Frank Nitti (for the birthplace block of the two boys), gangster Joe Bananas (from Joseph Bonanno – for the block the families move to), and white collar criminal financier Michael Milken (for the block in which Capone settles down). I don’t know – it seems unlikely Justice Department would approve naming blocks for notorious twentieth century criminal figures.

The second episode, Bagging the Bagwan (Megazine 2.33) features Dredd having to protect a Dalai Lama-like figure – except less a figure of resistance and more a figure of annoying pacifist obsequiousness (his religion is named kowtowism) – from assassins hoping to claim the fifty million credit put on the Bagwan’s head by the Organization of Extremist City States. Sadly, as far as I know that organization is never featured again and we are not told anything about which cities are members of it – although they’re probably the usual suspects of villainous mega-cities in Judge Dredd.

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

REVENGE OF THE EGGHEAD (Meg 2.36)

 

“Of course, why didn’t I think of it before! I’ll tranquillise the whole block!”

And believe me – this block needs tranquillising.

Ironically named after Kenneth Clark (albeit with misspelt surname Clarke), British art historian and TV presenter of Civilization, there’s not much civilization in this block, populated with the dregs of Mega-City One. As one of its own residents proudly proclaims, “this is a low IQ block”.

Which makes it all the more strange that Egward Shelduk, university nerd with a penchant for chemistry, lives there – but the answer is quickly revealed that it’s a Department of Housing mistake. Although to say he lives in the block is an overstatement – survives might be more accurate. And barely at that – even then it looks like he won’t last much longer.

By the way, this is it – my favorite single episode in Case Files 19. Yes – even more than War Games, because unlike War Games it actually goes somewhere, in self-contained fashion to boot. Also yes – I’m just as surprised as you are that it was not one of the regular 2000 AD episodes, usually the source of my favorite episodes, but one of the Megazine episodes. But perhaps not too surprised – this was the Dark Age of Dredd in the regular episodes after all.

My favorite Judge Dredd episodes often resemble the finest Greek tragedies. Yes – I stand by that comparison, with the common element being that the best Judge Dredd black comedy and the best Greek tragedy boil down to their tragic hero falling through no flaw or fault of their own but from being screwed over by fate. Indeed, often the tragic hero fights against their fate, only to bring it about or make it worse – the tougher they fight, the harder they fall.

Which is exactly what we see with Egward here – he tries to do everything right to peacefully avoid the relentless and violent bullying by his neighbors, only for none of it to work. We see the conga humiliation line pile-up in messages – his girlfriend leaves him a Dear John letter by video message as she can no longer see someone living in “that block” and his house loan application is turned down because his block is classified as “high risk”.

Worst of all, the Department of Housing pulls a good news bad news joke on him. The good news is that they have identified their mistake – he apparently was meant to be housed at Swingle Singers Swinging Singles – and are “rectifying their mistake immediately”. The bad news is that by immediately – or their “urgent priority” list – they mean the year after next.

The worse news is that Egward isn’t going to make it to the day after next the way he’s going, let alone the year after next. So again he does the right thing – he calls in Justice Department on his assailants. Of course, Justice Department shows up in the form of Dredd. Egward pleads with Dredd – “I don’t want any trouble – if you could just have a word with them.” Unfortunately for Egward, Dredd doesn’t do just having words with perps. Dredd arrests the family of bullies and now the whole block is out for Egward – “No judge to protect ya now, egghead!”

And that’s when Egward gets his bright idea – to tranquillise the whole block. “It’s so simple! I can make it up myself from common chemicals you’d find in any highly advanced laboratory!”. Sadly, nothing in Mega-City One is ever simple…

 

 

“Control! Med-wagons to Kenneth Clarke! We have a mass gassing!”

You sure do, Judge Dredd, you sure do. And how!

But also – and how? Well, we know the how. Block egghead Egward Selduk tranquillised the whole block. You know, to avoid being killed by the other occupants, which seems reasonable to me.

Not so much to Justice Department, who are alerted to the block being tranquillised when the crime in and around Kenneth Clarke drops to zero – “Normally we’d expect a crime every three minutes!”

Judge Dredd is called in to investigate and with the protection of his helmet respirator uncovers that everyone in Kenneth Clarke is out cold. Well, except Egward who protected himself with nose filters.

But that’s getting ahead of our story. Dredd disables the tranquilliser gas feed and the block residents awaken, in an even more violent mood than usual and ready to rumble. Or riot in this case – such that Dredd has to call in reinforcements who deploy my favorite Justice Department feature, riot foam.

And right then with the riot quelled Dredd’s off to deal with the perpetrator…

 

 

“You put the whole block to sleep, creep!”

“But that’s impossible! The – the tranquilliser wasn’t strong enough!”

“Not on its own, maybe — but combined with the tranquilliser WE pump into the block system –”

Ah yes – Mega-City One Justice Department tranquillizing its own citizens again. And yet again another citizen who discovers it – by mishap in this case – paying the price. Which for poor Egward Selduk is twenty years in the cubes.

And I for one will not stand for this – justice for Egward!

For one thing, it sounds like Justice Department should have been upping the dose. As Judge Dredd tells Egward, Justice Department’s tranquillizer was “just enough to keep them under control”. I’m not so sure about that, given that whole “crime every three minutes” thing.

For another, Egward had little choice to avoid being killed by other block residents – having tried everything else, including calling in Judge Dredd, none of which worked. He then chose a non-violent means of protecting himself – which would have worked but for Justice Department doing it first, outside his knowledge and obviously not as effectively.

And one last thing – Egward is exactly the sort of person Justice Department should be looking to enlist as a civilian auxiliary. Drokk – Justice Department in general and Judge Dredd in particularly cut deals to conscript peepers to use their spying for the city. Why not the same here? On his own and without any of the experience or resources of Justice Department, Egward tranquillised a whole block, peacefully putting it to sleep to protect himself and dropping its crime rate down to zero. Sure, the block rioted when they woke up, but you could argue that’s on Dredd for disabling the tranquillizer gas without calling in any Tek Division support or other Judges to deal with the citizens as they roused beforehand. So why not cut Egward a deal to conscript him as an auxiliary for Tek Division rather than encubement?

Although you do have to love Dredd’s wry observation at how he was able to identify Egward as the perpetrator – “No one else in the block is smart enough!”

 

 

JUDGE DREDD CASE FILES 19:

MECHANISMO – BODY COUNT (Meg 2.37 – Meg 2.43)

 

And we wrap up Case Files 19 with the ongoing Mechanismo storyline in the Megazine episodes. For me, it was more like Meh-chanismo (heh) but it had too big an impact for me to ignore in my Mega-City Law – and one that would continue for many more episodes yet. It makes quite the Megazine episode tally for Case Files 19. Normally I just feature the best Megazine episode, Revenge of the Egghead in this case (heh), but Case Files 19 had three recurring storylines which had to be featured – Slick Dickens: Dressed to Kill, Hottie House Siege, but the most important of all was Mechanismo: Body Count.

I’ll be quick about it, however, because none of the Mechanismo storyline really grabbed me – except for the climactic and fateful decision by Dredd here.

Judge Stitch – the Tek-Division Judge who masterminded the Mechanismo robot Judge project – is continuing with his insane pet project searching the sewers for his little lost robot which malfunctioned with lethal consequences, Mechanismo Number Five, having escaped psychiatric treatment to do so.

Meanwhile, Chief Judge McGruder is continuing with her pet project to fill the city’s depleted Judge ranks with robot Judges, rolling out the Mark Two models a year after the failure of the original Mark One models, not least Number Five – while Dredd continues to oppose robot Judges.

And Number Five is still out there continuing its pet project of law enforcement with ever more extreme prejudice. It’s pretty much executions all round for Number Five

McGruder conceives the perfect operational trial for the Mark Two models – search and destroy for the rogue Number Five. Dredd opposes this as well but realizes that he has only one option to prevent the Mark Two models becoming fully operational – find Number Five first.

And he does just that, tracking it through the illegal salvage crew that found and reactivated it, but unfortunately it manages to evade him into the sewers – where he, one of the Mark Two units, and Judge Stitch all converge on it. Dredd has already disabled it with a well-aimed shot and disables it further with another, but the Mark Two that destroys it despite Dredd’s order to “hold your fire!”

And that’s when Dredd does the darker side of his catchphrase by taking the law into his own hands – shooting and destroying the Mark Two unit. Dredd compounds this by exploiting the extremely impressionable state of the onlooking Judge Stitch (in his psychiatric breakdown) to effectively implant that the two robot Judges had destroyed each other.

As Dredd muses to himself – “A deception, but necessary under the circumstances. Enough to make McGruder pull back from commissioning the Mark 2s — for a while at least. Long enough to figure out how to deal with McGruder…”

And yes – you know that Dredd is just kicking the can down the road but it’s going to have some big consequences when it catches up to him, or he to it. I forget how that metaphor works. Sometimes you catch the can and sometimes the can catches you, but it’s going to have some big consequences in either case.

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires (Special Mentions – Complete)

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Apotheosis of Empire by Hermann Wislicenus – fresco in the German Imperial palace of Goslar in 1880 (public domain image)

 

But wait – there’s more Roman Empires!

That’s right – we haven’t come close to the bottom of our Roman Empire iceberg, as we follow the iceberg all the way down through wilder and more esoteric claimants to the succession of the Roman Empire.

As my usual rule, I have twenty special mentions for each top ten – and to my surprise, I was able to compile twenty special mentions for my Top 10 Roman Empires, as there was no shortage of claimants for succession to the Roman Empire. That is, there’s no shortage of polities or states claiming succession from the Roman Empire as a whole or from one of its western or eastern halves.

I might even have squeezed out some more – or at least a couple more, with the short-lived state of Dalmatia held by the surviving former emperor Julius Nepos until 480 AD, or the Despotate of the Morea holding out in revolt against the Ottomans until 1460.

“The continuation, succession, and revival of the Roman Empire is a running theme of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. It reflects the lasting memories of power and prestige associated with the Roman Empire. Several polities have claimed immediate continuity with the Roman Empire, using its name or a variation thereof as their own exclusive or non-exclusive self-description. As centuries went by and more political ruptures occurred, the idea of institutional continuity became increasingly debatable”.

As the above quote indicates, the claimants to the succession of the Roman Empire reflected in my special mentions become increasingly tenuous, to the point of metaphor at best and delusions of grandeur at worst.

However, there are some exceptions to the general rule – my first god-tier special mention is very much an exception to the other claimants to succession from the Roman Empire albeit still involving a line of succession with the empire, while my second god-tier special mention does involve a line of succession from the empire but in a unique sense.

My next top-tier three special mentions are for “the most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the Roman Empire”.

My high-tier special mentions may not be as “enduring and significant” but at least could made their claims from a position of having control or possession of either Rome or Constantinople – or close enough for the purposes of the ranking.

And the balance of special mentions is where things get wild – as tends to be the case in my special mentions where I have some fun with the subject category and splash out with some wilder entries – hence their consistent wild-tier ratings.

 

 

The Roman Republic and its provinces on the eve of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC – by TheDastanMR for Wikipedia “Roman Republic” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

(1) ROMAN REPUBLIC (509 BC – 27 BC)

 

Some might argue for this as the real Roman Empire or true Pax Romana – the Roman Republic as imperial republic, a recurring political model with surprising frequency in Western history.

Certainly, when many people think of the Romans, they are thinking of the Romans of the Republic rather than the Romans of the Empire.

As I said for the eastern Roman Empire, there seem to be two recurring arguments among Roman history enthusiasts – whether one ranks the Roman Republic over the Roman Empire, and whether one ranks the Byzantine Empire over the Roman Empire.

While the Roman Republic predates the formal institutions of empire founded by Augustus, it essentially laid almost all the foundations for the subsequent empire, not least in its Mediterranean supremacy and imperial core territory. And perhaps even more so in the values or virtues, martial or otherwise, fostered by the Republic in its citizens and institutions – such that it might be (and has been) argued that the further one gets into its history, the more the Empire is running on fumes from the Republic.

The Republic also saw some of the most definitive events and figures of Roman history – not least Julius Caesar, who lent his name to the title of emperor and is perhaps the figure most identified with the Empire, although it was his heir Augustus who actually founded the empire in the wake of Caesar’s assassination. Like a good car salesman, Augustus just slapped the formal institutions of empire on the pretense of authority of the Republic or Senate, and said this baby can fit a millennium and a half in it.

Obviously, it is the one exception to my special mentions as successors to the Roman Empire – but not from the line of succession itself, except that for the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire claimed succession from it rather than the other way around.

And while we’re on the subject of line of succession, I can’t give special mention to the Roman Republic without a shout-out to the Republic’s legendary predecessor, the Roman Kingdom.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

(2) ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH / VATICAN CITY

 

The most enduring successor of the Roman Empire, indeed the one which can “actually trace its origin to the Roman era” and endures to the present day – inheriting the capitol, the pontifex and the imperial language of Latin, as well as many of the trappings and much of the mystique of the western empire.

It’s a successor in a somewhat unique sense. It was not a direct political successor or successor in terms of the military institutions of empire – as it lacked the latter other than those it could enlist from leaders or states owing it allegiance – but instead, dare I say it, a spiritual successor.

I gave it away with that reference to leaders or states owing it allegiance – it was the surviving institution from the western empire most retaining allegiance, or cultural and moral authority or legitimacy, reinforced by its effective monopoly status as ‘international’ institution transcending tribes or kingdoms, reflected in the catholic part of its name, connoting universality

Indeed, it had started to eclipse the empire in moral authority even prior to the fall of the western empire, best demonstrated by Pope Leo I as imperial envoy to Attila the Hun to persuade him to turn back after his invasion Italy and not sack Rome, armed with little else other than moral authority – which by some miracle worked, with Attila withdrawing from Italy, never to return to the empire (and dying shortly afterwards, possibly from papal mojo).

For much of its history, the Church was somewhat broader than the present Roman Catholic Church, including as the Orthodox Church in the eastern empire – but ironically the Orthodox Church remained in the shadow of the eastern imperial government, while the Roman Catholic Church emerged as the shadow empire because of the very absence of any political state to rival it in reach after the fall of the western empire

Of course, the Church was able to convert (heh) its moral authority to claims for political succession of the Roman Empire, becoming effectively the ’empire-maker’ (or more precisely emperor-crowner) – not for itself, except in so far as it was able to secure control of Rome and other Italian territory as the Papal States, but for my next special mention.

On the subject of the Papal States, they too have endured to the present day, albeit very much in residual or substituted form as the state of Vatican City in its enclave within Rome, the smallest nation in the world.

The continuation of the empire in the Church tends to be one of bases for the argument that “the empire never ended” – albeit usually in a trippy way, as in the works of SF writer P.K. Dick.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – WHAT ELSE?)

 

 

Map of the Carolingian in 814 AD – Wikipedia “Holy Roman Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 

(3) HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE (800 / 962-1806)

 

It may be most remembered today by Voltaire’s famous quip – neither holy nor Roman nor an empire – but it remains the most enduring and significant claimant to the continuation or succession of the western Roman empire, hence ranking in my top tier of special mentions.

Of course, that claim does feel somewhat like Pope Leo III pulling a fast one on the eastern Roman Empire, opportunistically using a woman on the eastern imperial throne – the horror! – to effectively claim Empress Irene as a nullity and crown Charlemagne as Roman emperor, in Rome no less, over three centuries after the last western Roman emperor. Charlemagne’s realm henceforth was styled simply as the Roman Empire – the holy part of its title came a few centuries later or so.

In fairness, the claim to Roman emperor or empire had some force to it under Charlemagne. After all, he had achieved the largest unified polity in western Europe since the Roman Empire, including a substantial part of the former territory of the western Roman empire, effectively including Rome itself – although his father Pepin had donated that to the papacy in what would become the Papal States. Possession of one of the two Romes – the original first Rome or the ‘second Rome’ of Constantinople – is my foremost criteria for ranking special mentions above my wild tier of claimants to succession from the Roman Empire.

Historians tend to identify the empire of Charlemagne as the Frankish or Carolingian Empire, as distinct from the Holy Roman Empire proper. Charlemagne’s empire was divided between his sons. From that division, Germany emerged as a separate realm from the Frankish Empire, largely originating from the eastern Frankish empire, and it was from Germany that the Holy Roman Empire truly arose, with Otto I as the first Holy Roman Emperor in 962, even if that cuts down the so-called thousand year Reich (from Charlemagne’s coronation in 800) to a mere 844 years.

Again, the claim to Roman empire had some force to it under Otto and his successors, even if it oscillated between that idea as reflected in its title as Roman Empire and the reality as reflected in its title as Empire or Kingdom of the Germans. The actual term Holy Roman Empire began to be used only during the reign of Friedrich or Frederick Barbarossa two centuries and two dynasties later, under whom the claim also had some teeth to it (as well as transforming him into a legendary figure) and continued to do so until his grandson Friedrich II, who attempted to run an Italian-German empire from Sicily.

From there however the empire and its claim to succession from Rome devolved into the sorry state reflected by Voltaire’s quip – or that of Marx, that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce – until Napoleon Bonaparte did away with the whole dog’s breakfast of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Hence 1806 is occasionally proposed as a date for the fall of the Roman Empire, albeit often with tongue in cheek.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

Map of Ottoman Empire in 1683 by Chamboz for Wikipedia “Ottoman Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

 

(4) OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1453-1922)

 

“Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople

Been a long time gone, Constantinople”

 

The first of the two most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the eastern Roman Empire – and the one which had the force of right of conquest to it, something the Byzantines themselves might have recognized as part of their own imperial doctrine, as well as substantially overlapping with the territory of the eastern Roman empire at its height under Justinian the Great.

It also had my foremost criteria for a top-tier or at least high-tier claimant to succession from the Roman Empire – possession of one of the two Romes, Rome or Constantinople, once Constantinople fell to Ottoman conquest in 1453.

“After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II declared himself Roman Emperor: Kayser-i Rum, literally “Caesar of the Romans”, the standard title for earlier Byzantine Emperors in Arab, Persian and Turkish lands… Mehmed’s claim rested principally with the idea that Constantinople was the rightful seat of the Roman Empire, as it had been for more than a millennium”.

Indeed, Mehmed apparently took a swing at the first and original Rome itself, emulating Justinian the Great and “reuniting the Empire in a way it hadn’t been for nearly eight centuries” – starting a campaign in Italy with the invasion of Otranto in 1480 but which was cut short by his death in 1481. His successors didn’t follow up on that but instead ” repeatedly (albeit never successfully) attempted to conquer the capital of the rival contenders to the Imperial Roman title” with their sieges of Vienna. Those rival contenders of course being the Habsburgs as claimants for the Holy Roman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire also had the “additional though questionable claim of legitimacy” from past alliances between the Ottoman dynasty and the Byzantines through marriage.

Hence one of the dates proposed on occasion (albeit also often tongue in cheek) for the fall of the Roman Empire is 1922, the end of the Ottoman Empire.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(5) RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1472-1917)

 

The second of the two most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the eastern Roman Empire – and the one which managed to pull it off without conquest or even any of the same territory of the former empire (except for the most far flung parts at its greatest extent in the Crimea and the Caucasus).

Indeed, it didn’t even have my foremost criteria for top-tier or high-tier claimant to succession from the Roman Empire by having either Rome or Constantinople, instead breezily styling Moscow as the third Rome – a lesson in audacity for any claimant as heir to the Roman Empire. Just style your capital as the fourth Rome. What next? London? Tokyo? Canberra, seat of the Tsar of all the Australias?

In fairness, the Russian Empire did set its sights on Constantinople in its foreign policy – and more to the point, did have a tenuous claim to dynastic succession from the eastern Roman Empire. “Ivan III of Russia in 1472 married Sophia (Zoé) Palaiologina, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI” and styled himself Tsar, adapted from Caesar. It also claimed a more abstract succession as the new Orthodox empire, champion of that religious denomination elsewhere.

So now we can add another date to those proposed for the fall of the Roman Empire – 1917, when the last ‘Roman’ emperor fell to the ultimate plebeian revolt in the Russian Revolution.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

Map of the Kingdom of Odoacer in the year 476 following the usurpation of Emperor Romulus Augustus and Odoacer’s declaration as “Rex Italiae” by Shuaaa2 for Wikipedia “Odoacer” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

(6) KINGDOM OF ITALY (476-493 AD)

 

The immediate successor to the western Roman Empire in Italy and neighboring territory in the Balkans, commencing as it did with its Germanic ruler Odoacer deposing the last western Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD, the date traditionally seen as marking the end of the western Roman Empire.

It therefore ranks as a high tier claimant to the succession of the Roman Empire, not only for its immediate continuity with the western Roman empire but also for my foremost criteria of possession of Rome, as well as the actual imperial capital at the time, Ravenna.

Odoacer did not purport to have any imperial authority beyond his kingdom and indeed expressly represented himself as the client of the eastern Roman emperor Zeno, ruling his kingdom on behalf of the eastern empire under the title of duke of Italy (dux Italiae) bestowed on him by Zeno. To that end he sent back to Zeno the imperial regalia of Romulus Augustulus.

And really it seemed like business as usual for the Romans in Italy. Odoacer simply abandoned the pretense of the succession of puppet emperors to German leaders. Romulus Augustulus was himself a child emperor, little more than a frightened figurehead for his father, possibly much relieved at avoiding the hot seat of the western imperial throne – and apart from deposing him, Odoacer left him to peaceful retirement.

Odoacer also left the Roman Church alone, despite being of the Arian Christian faith pronounced to be heresy by the Church. In addition, he ruled with the loyal support of the Roman Senate in Ravenna – in part probably because the Senate no longer had to contend with their own emperor.

Indeed, while the former empire west of Italy went its own way, Roman Italy itself doesn’t seem too distinct for the next couple of centuries or so from internal strife within the former empire – except instead of Roman generals contending with each other, it was barbarian German warlords contending with each other, or with Roman generals from the eastern empire after its resurgence under Justinian.

Odoacer’s reign of almost seventeen years was relatively peaceful when compared to other periods of Roman internal strife in Italy – until it wasn’t, which brings me to my next special mention entry…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

(7) OSTROGOTHIC KINGDOM (493 – 553 AD)

 

The immediate successor to Odoacer’s Kingdom of Italy in my previous special mention – the Ostrogoths led by Theodoric the Great took over the kingdom after killing and replacing Odoacer. The kingdom itself carried on much the same as before, including in territory – it’s the same picture as one might observe of maps of the two kingdoms.

That understates the brilliant ploy of the eastern Roman Emperor Zeno that lay behind it – a classic illustration of winning without fighting by having others do your fighting for you. In this case, having the Ostrogoths fight Odoacer.

The Ostrogoths had settled within the eastern empire in the usual manner of German allies or foederati – except that they retained more independence than the Romans preferred. If anything, the eastern empire was at some risk of becoming an Ostrogothic colony – with large numbers of Goths entering service in the Roman army, as well as comprising “a significant political and military power in the court of Constantinople”.

“The thought occurred to Zeno and his advisors to direct Theodoric against another troublesome neighbour of the Empire – the Italian kingdom of Odoacer”

That suited everyone at the time, except of course Odoacer – who despite being Zeno’s nominal viceroy in Italy, was menacing eastern Roman territory (among other things), although not any more once Theodoric was done with him.

Theodoric the Great assumed a similar position to Odoacer, nominally a subject of the eastern Roman emperor and ruling from Ravenna as their viceroy in Italy. “In reality, he acted as an independent ruler, although unlike Odoacer, he meticulously preserved the outward forms of his subordinate position”. An Ostrogothic Augustus, one might say – similarly appeasing the eastern roman empire as Augustus did the Senate by keeping up appearances of their rule. Speaking of the Senate, they continued to function mostly as before, as did the Roman administration, law, church and elite.

I have a soft spot for the Ostrogothic Kingdom ever since their starring role in L. Sprague de Camp’s SF novella, Lest Darkness Fall, in which the time travelling protagonist finds himself stranded there and seeks to stave off the pending Dark Ages.

We are accustomed to thinking of the Dark Ages kicking in with the fall of the western Roman Empire, but that is arguably premature of us, at least in Italy – with Roman Italy carrying on much as before until the destruction of the Ostrogothic Kingdom by the Byzantines in the Gothic Wars, which truly turned Italy into the Dark Age wasteland we see in our mind’s eye.

The Gothic Wars came about for Theodoric’s successors, when the Ostrogothic Kingdom’s relations with the eastern empire – always somewhat strained, even under Theodoric – finally ruptured into war and the eastern empire under Justinian the Great sought to reclaim the western half of the empire, a war fought for about two decades and that led to my next special mention entry…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

Exarchate of Italy 600 AD – map by Shuaaa2 for Wikipedia “Exarchate of Ravenna” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

 

 

(8) EXARCHATE OF RAVENNA (584 – 751 AD)

 

Yes – this special mention entry is literally the Roman empire rather than some separate entity, as it’s the province of the eastern Roman Empire after their reconquest of Italy. However, the exarchate of Ravenna (also called the exarchate of Italy) seems sufficiently distinct – as well as tenuous, albeit enduring for two centuries – for its own special mention, as well as a segue between my previous special mention and the next one. Also in fairness, it does meet my foremost criteria for high-tier special mention by actually having Rome in it.

The exarchate of Ravenna emerged from the Gothic War, a slogging match for almost two decades from 535 and 554 between the eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogothic Kingdom, in which the Romans found themselves the victors of a proverbial Pyrrhic victory in Italy.

Sure – they defeated the Ostrogothic Kingdom and recaptured Italy after fighting off yet more invasions by the Franks and Alemanni, but an Italy devastated and depopulated by war, and worse, with the eastern Roman Empire so exhausted that they found themselves incapable of resisting an invasion by the Lombards, yet another German invader.

So the exarchate of Ravenna, founded in 584 AD, was tenuous from its very inception – presiding over territory snaking across central Italy to Rome itself and mostly clinging to the coastal cities and southern parts of Italy, as the Lombards were ensconced in the hinterland of the peninsula. (The eastern Roman imperial territory in the Italian islands – Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica – was separately governed).

And it was also tenuous in presiding over increasingly fractious and fragmented territories, nominally subject to the exarch in Ravenna as the representative of the emperor in Constantinople, but in reality asserting their own sovereignty even before being swallowed up by the ever-encroaching Lombards (until the Lombards in turn were swallowed up by the Franks in the Carolingian Empire, the origin of the Holy Roman Empire).

The exarchate crumbled away, with the last exarch in Ravenna killed by the Lombards in 751. As for Rome itself, it had been administered as the Duchy of Rome within the Exarchate, but the Duchy was increasingly supplanted by the papacy, culminating with the papal states under the patronage of the Carolingian or Holy Roman Empires.

However, the eastern Roman empire retained territory in southern Italy that was reorganized as the Catapanate of Italy, which endured in dwindling form until conquered by the Normans in 1071, finally extinguishing five centuries of the eastern Roman empire in Italy.

So there’s yet two more tongue-in-cheek dates for the fall of the Roman Empire – 751 and 1071. And the Exarchate of Ravenna did lead in a way to my next special mention entry.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

The Republic of Venice with its Domini de Terraferma and Stato da Mar – its main territories in Italy and overseas by Ariel196 for Wikipedia “Venice” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

(9) VENETIAN REPUBLIC (697 – 1797 AD)

 

Venice may have laid its claim as an assassin using the Fourth Crusade as its weapon, but it did lay claim to be “lord of a fourth part and a half of the whole Empire of Romania” – or three eighths of the eastern Roman Empire – after Constantinople fell to the Crusade in 1204 AD, extending to a significant part of the occupation of Constantinople itself and hence my primary criterion for high-tier ranking.

Venice had a weird love-hate symbiotic-parasitic relationship with the eastern Roman Empire – evolving from an imperial province and vassal in the empire’s reconquest of Italy, to ally and close associate of the empire effectively as its navy and trading house, and ultimately to rival and perfidious adversary in the Fourth Crusade.

In some ways, that symbiosis involved Venice as almost the inversion of Constantinople – the heart of a mercantile empire which waxed and rose, sucking from the blood of the latter as it waned and fell. Although ironically, Venice found its fortune to be little more symbiotic with Constantinople than it would have liked after all – declining as it faced the Ottoman Empire more directly once the Ottomans captured Constantinople, and not coincidentally, the decline of Mediterranean trade relative to the Atlantic, although it endured until 1797 when it finally fell in the face to the French under Napoleon.

Venice was also somewhat antagonistic to Rome – even as it resembled the latter’s classical republic, down to it also being an imperial republic, albeit more in the classical Greek model of a maritime colonial empire with a focus on its naval power and trade. Of course, the world had moved on from when a single city state could dominate first the Italian peninsula and then the whole Mediterranean like the Romans did – although Venice did punch remarkably above its weight, going toe-to-toe with the Ottoman Empire for four centuries or so of Ottoman-Venetian wars.

Venice is reputed to have been settled by refugees from the Huns and Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire seeking the safety of its islands. It was founded as the Duchy of Venetia within the eastern Roman Empire’s Exarchate of Ravenna – its leader’s title of Doge originating from the Latin for dux (or duke) as an imperial provincial title. It became increasingly independent as the Exarchate of Ravenna crumbled, until effectively achieving de facto independence because of an agreement between the Holy Roman Empire and the eastern Roman Empire.

Venice remained nominally subservient to the eastern Roman Empire but abandoned even that over the next century. However, it remained closely associated with Constantinople, by way of trade and as an ally – essentially gaining exclusive privileges in the former in exchange for the use of its navy in the latter, firstly against the Normans in Italy and then against the Turks. Significantly, Venice acknowledged its homage to the empire against the Normans, but not subsequently against the Turks – reflecting the decline of the eastern Roman empire and the rise of Venice.

The rise of Venice (and its role as creditor to the empire) ultimately saw it become the empire’s rival and adversary, which bore bitter fruit when Venice played that instrumental role pulling the strings of the Fourth Crusade to divert it to capture Constantinople instead, leading to my next special mention entry…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

The Latin Empire and eastern Roman successor states after the Fourth Crusade by LatinEmpire for Wikipedia “Empire of Nicaea” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

(10) LATIN EMPIRE (1204 – 1261 AD)

 

Probably the most ignominious of my high tier successors to the Roman Empire – the state established by the Fourth Crusaders after conquering Constantinople in 1204 – but it did occupy Constantinople after all, hence qualifying for my foremost criterion for high-tier ranking, the occupation of either that city or Rome itself. Also hence why 1204 is yet another date proposed for the fall of the Roman Empire.

It was certainly one of the more precarious. Nominally, according to the treaty or treaties among the Crusaders to partition the eastern Roman Empire among themselves, it was awarded direct control of a quarter of the former empire, with its vassals receiving a further three eighths – and the balance of three eighths going to Venice.

In reality, the Latin Empire was just another Crusader state – or more precisely Crusader states – in which the Crusaders never controlled most of the former empire, as three successor states of the empire arose to challenge it, with the most substantial, the Empire of Nicaea, recapturing Constantinople and reviving the former empire in 1261.

The Latin Empire consisted of not much than Constantinople itself, with only the neighboring territory on either side – although it had various vassal states through most of Greece and the Greek islands. Its vassal states actually did better and endured longer than the Latin Empire itself, which fell when Constantinople was recaptured – although the Latin imperial line persisted in exile for a century or so afterwards.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

Map of First Bulgarian Empire (in German!) under Simeon I in 927 AD (public domain image)

 

(11) BULGARIAN EMPIRE (913-927 AD)

 

The Bulgarian Empire – one of my two high-tier special mention entries that stopped well short of occupying Constantinople but came close enough to earn high tier ranking, wiping the Byzantines out of most of their Balkan territory.

That’s the First Bulgarian Empire and those dates are not the dates of that empire itself, which endured for about three and a half centuries, but the dates of its imperial claim (and height of its power) under its ruler Simeon the Great, when he took a swing at crowning himself emperor, conquering Constantinople and creating a joint Bulgarian-Roman state.

Well, one out of three ain’t bad, as Simeon was crowned “Emperor and Autocrat of all Bulgarians and Romans” by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the imperial regent – particularly when it set the trend for rulers styling themselves with the title of a Roman emperor, down to the usage of the Bulgarian word tsar standing in for Caesar.

As for the other two, what Simeon got was the bitter Byzantine-Bulgarian War from 913 to 927, with Simeon’s imperial claim ending with his death in 927, although the Byzantines had managed to backpedal it to basileus, effectively a sub-emperor position as “Emperor of the Bulgarians” – which continued to Simeon’s successor and was bolstered by dynastic marriage.

So how did that work out for you, First Bulgarian Empire? Not too well – once Emperor Basil II, henceforth known as the Bulgar Slayer, switched it around completely to conquer the Bulgarian Empire, creating that joint Bulgarian-Roman state after all.

The Bulgars didn’t go anywhere but ultimately struck back (after regaining independence) with the Second Bulgarian Empire from 1185 to 1396 – which strutted around calling its capital as the successor to both Rome and Constantinople, pre-empting Russia’s Third Rome.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

Map of the Sultanate of Rum by Swordrist – Wikipedia “Sultanate of Rum” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 

(12) SULTANATE OF RUM (1077-1308 AD)

 

Sadly that’s not a sultanate of the liquor in the style of Wallace Stevens’ poem The Emperor of Ice Cream – the Rum in this case is the Turkish word synonymous with the eastern Roman Empire and its peoples.

Its claim for the eastern Roman Empire was, like the Ottomans after them, one of conquest, albeit stopping well short of Constantinople itself or the complete defeat of the empire – but close enough for high-tier ranking, the second of two such special mention entries after the Bulgarian Empire. Their conquest was of the empire in most of the Anatolian peninsula, after the empire’s (in)famous defeat by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

The Sultanate was a breakaway state that seceded from the Great Seljuk Empire in 1077, ironically only six years after Manzikert. They succeeded in secession – reaching the height of their power in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, but weakened by the Crusades, succumbed to the Mongols in 1243 and finally leaving behind many smaller states, one of which emerged as the Ottoman dynasty, which truly fulfilled the Sultanate’s dream of claiming itself to be the successor to the Romans.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

 

 

(13) SERBIAN EMPIRE (1346-1371 AD)

 

Okay, this empire and its claim to the Roman Empire came down to the man who made both, the Serbian emperor (Stefan) Dusan the Mighty. He was succeeded by his son Usok the Weak, but you can guess how well it all went after that by comparing their two epithets.

Dusan proclaimed himself Emperor – once again Tsar from Caesar – not only of the Serbs but of the Greeks or Romans as well, a title signifying a claim to the succession of the Byzantine Empire, then in the last century or so of its existence.

In fairness, he did put his money where his mouth was, having “expanded his state to cover half of the Balkans, more territory than either the Byzantine Empire or the Second Bulgarian Empire in that time” – including substantial territory conquered from the former in Greece.

Like the Bulgarian Empire or the Sultanate of Rum, it did not achieve my foremost high-tier ranking criterion of occupying Constantinople, but came close enough in the conquests for its claim to rank in high tier. And also like them, at least it staked its claim while the empire was still alive, albeit in its last century or so of life – ranking it above my wild-tier special mention entries who staked their claim to the empire’s corpse in the West…

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

Coat of Arms of Charles I of Spain – reproduced by Heralder for Wikipedia “Succession of the Roman Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

 

(14) SPAIN?

 

Hola, Caesar! Or is that ole, Caesar!

Here we are, starting my wild tier successors to Rome, those states that tenuously staked their claims more to the myth or metaphor of Rome in nationalist terms rather than any continuity with the Empire. We’re at the bottom of the Roman succession iceberg here, people.

Of these wild and tenuous claims, I was surprised to find Spain has the most depth to theirs, arguably making it the least wild and tenuous of these wild tier claims (or higher up the iceberg). Don’t worry – we’ll get increasingly wild and tenuous as we go.

If nothing else, at least Spain gave us the term Latin as a substantial label for ethnicity – as well as for geography with Latin America, claiming one continent and a large part of another.

Firstly, there was its loose dynastic claim of succession, starting with Spain’s succession from the Visigothic monarchy as heirs or successors to the Roman Empire in Spain. Subsequent Spanish monarchs apparently used the title Imperator totius Hispaniae to assert equality with the eastern and Holy Roman Empires.

Those claims of succession became a little more concrete firstly when “the last titular holder heir to the rank of Eastern Roman emperor, Andreas Palaiologos” purported to bequeath what he saw as his imperial title and domains in Greece, themselves pretty tenuous claims on his part (particularly as he’d already purported to sell them to another special mention entry), to the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ of the now unified Spain, Ferdinand II and Isabella I, by his will written in 1502.

It gets a lot messier than that – with dynastic claims to the Crusader vassal states to the Latin Empire in Greece and the Spanish crown’s territories in Italy thrown in to the mix. Preempting something of a recurring meme in history, Andreas apparently had grandiose dreams of a Spanish crown crusade from its territories in Italy to reconquer the imperial claims in Greece and ultimately Constantinople itself. Sadly however, the Spanish monarchy ignored “its Byzantine imperial titles”, although it did gain the title of “King of Jerusalem” from the pope and square off in war with that other claimant of Roman succession, the Ottoman Empire.

With Charles I, the Spanish monarchy also succeeded to the title of Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 – “the first time, since the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, in which the Romano-Germanic and Byzantine crowns coincided in the same person”, albeit that seems to me more like historical sleight of hand for both Charles and Charlemagne.

Anyway, Spanish claims to the succession of the Roman empire go on from these dynastic claims to include more broadly geopolitical and cultural claims – dare I say it, themes and memes of Roman empire – including the Spanish empire in the Americas.

“With all of this history in the Spanish Monarchy, Spanish nationalism claims that there is a legitimate ideological-dynastic (titles of Emperor of Constantinople and King of Jerusalem in the Spanish Crown, also in the past have been Holy Roman Emperor), geostrategic (kingdom of Naples and Sicily together, the conquests of North African plazas in Barbary, like Melilla, Ceuta, Mazalquivir, Oran, Bugia and Peñón of Algiers) and cultural basis (being a Latin country) to claim the inheritance of the Roman Empire.”

“This claim is also reinforced by the history of Spanish colonization of the Americas, which a lot of Hispanists claim is the definitive proof that Spain is the most accurate heir of Rome’s imperial legacy, as Spain was important for the culture of a continent, America (the New World), like Rome was to Europe (the Old World), some even claim that Spain surpassed Rome, since it also knew how to unify diverse peoples for centuries and maintaining cultural unity despite the imperial collapse. Even today there are opinions in which Philip VI of Spain is considered the nearest heir of Rome.”

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

Imperial Coat of the Arms of the French First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte – reproduced by Sodacan for Wikipedia “Emperor of the French” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

 

 

(15) FRANCE?

 

Well, the French monarchy did snap up the title of Emperor of Constantinople from Andreas Palaiologos in his imperial title garage sale to Charles VIII in 1494 prior to him bequeathing it to Spain, for what it was worth.

Spoiler alert – it was worth nothing, although surprisingly the French monarchy apparently used the title until Charles IX could no longer keep a straight face about it in 1566.

And there it lay, until Napoleon Bonaparte, never one to lack for audacity, claimed the mantle of the Roman Empire at his imperial coronation as Emperor of the French in 1804 – albeit through the heritage of the Frankish and Carolingian Empires, as the founders of the Holy Roman Empire.

He imitated Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope, down to having Pope Pius VII at the ceremony. Although unlike that pansy Charlemagne, Napoleon crowned himself rather than having the pope crown him (embellished in historical legend as Napoleon snatching the crown from the Pope).

In fairness, Napoleon did at least achieve what is otherwise my high-tier ranking criterion of occupying Rome itself, which places his claim somewhat above other wild tier claims.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

Imperial coat of Arms for Austrian Empire – by Sodacan for Wikipedia “Austrian Empire” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

 

(16) AUSTRIA?

 

Yeah, Austria picked up the Roman succession ball through the Holy Roman Empire, which had essentially become a title held by the Austrian Habsburg monarchy while everyone else played along with it.

That is, until Napoleon Bonaparte came along and told them to drop it in 1806 – but the Austrians still ran with it for their own empire, borrowing from the imagery and symbolism of the Holy Roman Empire, not least with the imperial eagle as symbol, even after Austria became a republic.

That’s it, though – but arguably still not the wildest or most tenuous of my wild-tier special mentions.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

(17) GREECE?

 

Probably not too surprising that modern Greece would claim the mantle of the eastern Roman Empire as its former heartland.

Indeed, after Greece won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, it developed the “Megali Idea” or Great Idea “of recreating the Byzantine Empire, understood as an ethnic-Greek polity with capital in Constantinople”, or the “Greece of Two Continents and Five Seas” (Europe and Asia, the Ionian, Aegean, Marmara, Black and Libyan seas, respectively)”.

Apparently, the idea popped up in political debates in 1844, although of course it had older roots. And Greece took a swing at it in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 when the opportunity seemed to present itself with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. That didn’t work out too well for them, as while the Ottoman Empire was gone, the new republic of Turkey was not as down and out as everyone had first thought.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

(18) ITALY?

 

Well you had to see this one coming – although the Roman Empire may have shifted east, the city of Rome remained in Italy after all. I remember an internet meme to that effect, something about God punishing the Romans by turning them into Italians…

So naturally Rome became the focus of modern Italian nationalism, along with concepts of the revival of the Roman Empire or at least the revival of Rome with respect to a unified Italy – and beyond to a colonial empire and Mediterranean supremacy.

Italian nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini even promoted the notion of the Third Rome, although Mazzini substituted the papacy for Constantinople as the Second Rome – “After the Rome of the emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, there will come the Rome of the people.”

“After the Italian unification into the Kingdom of Italy, the state was referred to as the Third Rome by some Italian figures. After unification, Rome was chosen as capital despite its relative backwardness as it evoked the prestige of the former Empire. Mazzini spoke of the need of Italy as a Third Rome to have imperial aspirations, to be realized in the Italian Empire. Mazzini said that Italy should “invade and colonize Tunisian lands” as it was the “key to the Central Mediterranean”, and he viewed Italy as having the right to dominate the Mediterranean Sea as ancient Rome had done.”

And so the new Italy set about acquiring the crappiest of the eight modern major European colonial empires, partly because it was a latecomer from its unification in 1871 – and it was the only European power to be decisively defeated by one of its targets in Africa, Abyssinia or Ethiopia, at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.

Infamously, Mussolini also evoked the Roman Empire, referring to his regime as the Third Rome or New Roman Empire – perhaps most embarrassingly out of all my special mention revivals of the empire, not unlike an elderly relative trying to replicate some feat of their youth at a family gathering to look cool

In fairness, he did manage to avenge the Italian defeat at the Battle of Adwa, (briefly) conquering Ethiopia, but if anything, this and other territory that he acquired such as Albania made his empire even crappier. The crown jewel of the Italian colonial empire, Libya, didn’t even have oil as they hadn’t discovered it then (and I recall reading even if they had it was beyond the contemporary drilling technology, although those two things probably overlap) – an irony that might have struck Rommel and his fuel-starved Afrika Korps had they known they were driving over some of the world’s largest oil reserves. That’s what happens when you try for a Mediterranean empire at least half a millennium or so after the world’s economic center of gravity had moved on from the Mediterranean.

Also in fairness, I should point out that Italy, even under Mussolini’s Roman empire no one wanted, did have Rome in it – my foremost criterion for high-tier ranking. So we might add another year for the fall of the Roman Empire – 1943, for the Italian surrender to the Allies in the Second World War. I have actually seen this proposed, although the person proposing it clearly had their tongue firmly in their cheek.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

(19) GERMANY?!

 

Similarly to Austria, Germany picked up the Holy Roman Empire ball and ran with it when unified under the Prussian monarchy as the German Empire in 1871, styled as the Second Reich after the Holy Roman Empire’s First Reich and with the same imperial title of kaiser derived from Caesar.

Hence the title of Third Reich for Germany’s subsequent and most infamous regime, also touted to last a thousand years like the First Reich (spoiler – it lasted only twelve) – although apparently that was downplayed later as the Holy Roman association was a little too cosmopolitan and not quite, well, German enough.

In fairness, that last Reich did technically meet my high-tier ranking criterion by occupying Rome, if only for less than a year. It also had one of the most recognizable eagle standards, adapted from the Reichsadler of its imperial predecessors.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

(20) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?!

 

Pax Americana. Washington DC – the Fourth Rome!

Friends, Romans, countrymen – we’re at the bottom of the Roman Empire iceberg here!

I’m joking. The United States has never claimed succession from the Roman Empire, nor has even the most tenuous basis for doing so – although “Americans have been comparing their country to Rome since its foundation” and “in shaping the new country, the Founding Fathers consciously hoped to copy the strengths of the Roman Republic and avoid its eventual downfall”.

Unless you accept such metaphysical fantasy claims as in the Percy Jackson series or in John Crowley’s “Little, Big” that the realm of Olympus or the Holy Roman Empire has transferred to it.

However, as usual I’m joking and I’m serious. It is a claim that is so often made for it, not least by Americans themselves, that it has become something of a trope – often overlooking that the same trope was also used for the British Empire and its Pax Britannica. (Now people tend to deflect to the British or Europeans being the Greek predecessors to the American Romans).

In his preface to “The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower”, Adrian Goldsworthy laments that “at certain sorts of parties” the discovery that he is an ancient historian “almost inevitably prompts someone to remark that ‘America is the new Rome'” – “more often than not this is followed by a smug, ‘Of course, they don’t see it.'”

As Goldsworthy opines, “any close look at the Roman Empire will soon reveal massive differences from any modern state, including the United States” – although of course there remains the point of comparison that the United States “is overwhelmingly the strongest country in the world and in this sense its position mirrors that of Rome”.

Bonus points for having as the most recognizable eagle standard in popular culture – and arguably that most closely resembling the Roman eagle in visual design (as opposed to species).

Also bonus points that it, like the latter-day Visigoths or Vandals that preceded and were driven out by it, the United States did technically meet my high-tier ranking criterion by occupying Rome from June 1944 in the Second World War.

And while on the subject of American connections to latter-day Italy, if nothing else the United States did give the world the Italian-American film Caligula in 1979 (produced by Bob Guccione and Penthouse) – which along with Suetonius (on which it is largely based) I take as gospel about the reign of Caligula and has influenced my perceptions of the Roman Empire in perpetuity ever since. No – this is not a subject in which I will entertain my debate. And yes – I strive where I can to reserve my final special mention for some kinky entry where the subject permits. I believe I’ve fulfilled that obligation.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

TOP 10 ROMAN EMPIRES (SPECIAL MENTION) – ROLL CALL RECAP

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

(1) ROMAN REPUBLIC

(2) ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH / VATICAN CITY

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

(3) HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

(4) OTTOMAN EMPIRE

(5) RUSSIAN EMPIRE

 

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

(6) KINGDOM OF ITALY

(7) OSTROGOTHIC KINGDOM

(8) EXARCHATE OF RAVENNA

(9) VENETIAN REPUBLIC

(10) LATIN EMPIRE

(11) BULGARIAN EMPIRE

(12) SULTANATE OF RUM

(13) SERBIAN EMPIRE

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

(14) SPAIN?

(15) FRANCE?

(16) AUSTRIA?

(17) GREECE?

(18) ITALY?

(19) GERMANY?!

(20) USA?!

 

 

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires (Special Mention) (20) USA

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(20) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA??

 

Pax Americana. Washington DC – the Fourth Rome!

Friends, Romans, countrymen – we’re at the bottom of the Roman Empire iceberg here!

I’m joking. The United States has never claimed succession from the Roman Empire, nor has even the most tenuous basis for doing so – although “Americans have been comparing their country to Rome since its foundation” and “in shaping the new country, the Founding Fathers consciously hoped to copy the strengths of the Roman Republic and avoid its eventual downfall”.

Unless you accept such metaphysical fantasy claims as in the Percy Jackson series or in John Crowley’s “Little, Big” that the realm of Olympus or the Holy Roman Empire has transferred to it.

However, as usual I’m joking and I’m serious. It is a claim that is so often made for it, not least by Americans themselves, that it has become something of a trope – often overlooking that the same trope was also used for the British Empire and its Pax Britannica. (Now people tend to deflect to the British or Europeans being the Greek predecessors to the American Romans).

In his preface to “The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower”, Adrian Goldsworthy laments that “at certain sorts of parties” the discovery that he is an ancient historian “almost inevitably prompts someone to remark that ‘America is the new Rome'” – “more often than not this is followed by a smug, ‘Of course, they don’t see it.'”

As Goldsworthy opines, “any close look at the Roman Empire will soon reveal massive differences from any modern state, including the United States” – although of course there remains the point of comparison that the United States “is overwhelmingly the strongest country in the world and in this sense its position mirrors that of Rome”.

Bonus points for having as the most recognizable eagle standard in popular culture – and arguably that most closely resembling the Roman eagle in visual design (as opposed to species).

Also bonus points that it, like the latter-day Visigoths or Vandals that preceded and were driven out by it, the United States did technically meet my high-tier ranking criterion by occupying Rome from June 1944 in the Second World War.

And while on the subject of American connections to latter-day Italy, if nothing else the United States did give the world the Italian-American film Caligula in 1979 (produced by Bob Guccione and Penthouse) – which along with Suetonius (on which it is largely based) I take as gospel about the reign of Caligula and has influenced my perceptions of the Roman Empire in perpetuity ever since. No – this is not a subject in which I will entertain my debate. And yes – I strive where I can to reserve my final special mention for some kinky entry where the subject permits. I believe I’ve fulfilled that obligation.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires (Special Mention) (19) Italy

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(19) ITALY?

 

Well you had to see this one coming – although the Roman Empire may have shifted east, the city of Rome remained in Italy after all. I remember an internet meme to that effect, something about God punishing the Romans by turning them into Italians…

So naturally Rome became the focus of modern Italian nationalism, along with concepts of the revival of the Roman Empire or at least the revival of Rome with respect to a unified Italy – and beyond to a colonial empire and Mediterranean supremacy.

Italian nationalists such as Giuseppe Mazzini even promoted the notion of the Third Rome, although Mazzini substituted the papacy for Constantinople as the Second Rome – “After the Rome of the emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, there will come the Rome of the people.”

“After the Italian unification into the Kingdom of Italy, the state was referred to as the Third Rome by some Italian figures. After unification, Rome was chosen as capital despite its relative backwardness as it evoked the prestige of the former Empire. Mazzini spoke of the need of Italy as a Third Rome to have imperial aspirations, to be realized in the Italian Empire. Mazzini said that Italy should “invade and colonize Tunisian lands” as it was the “key to the Central Mediterranean”, and he viewed Italy as having the right to dominate the Mediterranean Sea as ancient Rome had done.”

And so the new Italy set about acquiring the crappiest of the eight modern major European colonial empires, partly because it was a latecomer from its unification in 1871 – and it was the only European power to be decisively defeated by one of its targets in Africa, Abyssinia or Ethiopia, at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.

Infamously, Mussolini also evoked the Roman Empire, referring to his regime as the Third Rome or New Roman Empire – perhaps most embarrassingly out of all my special mention revivals of the empire, not unlike an elderly relative trying to replicate some feat of their youth at a family gathering to look cool

In fairness, he did manage to avenge the Italian defeat at the Battle of Adwa, (briefly) conquering Ethiopia, but if anything, this and other territory that he acquired such as Albania made his empire even crappier. The crown jewel of the Italian colonial empire, Libya, didn’t even have oil as they hadn’t discovered it then (and I recall reading even if they had it was beyond the contemporary drilling technology, although those two things probably overlap) – an irony that might have struck Rommel and his fuel-starved Afrika Korps had they known they were driving over some of the world’s largest oil reserves. That’s what happens when you try for a Mediterranean empire at least half a millennium or so after the world’s economic center of gravity had moved on from the Mediterranean.

Also in fairness, I should point out that Italy, even under Mussolini’s Roman empire no one wanted, did have Rome in it – my foremost criterion for high-tier ranking. So we might add another year for the fall of the Roman Empire – 1943, for the Italian surrender to the Allies in the Second World War. I have actually seen this proposed, although the person proposing it clearly had their tongue firmly in their cheek.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Empires (Special Mention) (19) Empire of Joshua Norton

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Emperor Norton in full dress uniform and military regalia, his hand on the hilt of a ceremonial sabre, 1875

 

(19) EMPIRE OF JOSHUA NORTON (1859-1880)

 

Emperor Norton I – Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

Joshua Norton – the man who essentially memed himself into being the first and last Emperor of the United States.

No – he’s not fictional but a real historical figure, albeit somewhat obscure these days but one of San Francisco’s most prominent citizens in the nineteenth century and has fascinated me since I first read about him (in the Illuminatus Trilogy).

And his empire…was not entirely fictional either. Sure – the consensus seems to be that he had a complete mental breakdown after he lost his fortune from commodities trading and real estate speculation, which had elevated him to one of San Francisco’s richest citizens, from being financially ruined by a deal gone bad.

And so he declared himself emperor of the United States by imperial proclamation in a letter to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin newspaper in 1859 – which they published because they thought it was funny. Which it was.

How did the city of San Francisco receive it? That’s the funniest thing – they played along. Restaurants and businesses accepted his self-issued imperial currency, effectively providing their services free of charge in return for being able to proclaim his imperial patronage, as he went about his “duty” inspecting the city. The city did a thriving trade in souvenirs from his eccentric celebrity – even donating him a new imperial uniform to replace his old one, given to him by army officers.

At one point, an overzealous police officer arrested him to commit him for involuntary treatment for a mental disorder. What followed was a massive uproar from the public and newspapers – “let him be emperor if he wants to be” was the public outcry. One paper wrote “that he had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line”.

The Police Chief ordered him released, with a formal apology – which Emperor Norton graciously accepted by way of an imperial pardon for the officer – and thereafter police officers saluted him in the street.

He also used his imperial powers for good. One story told of him was that he had stopped a violently anti-Chinese race riot by interposing himself between the rioters and the hapless Chinese, praying the Lord’s Prayer. The story went that the rioters were so ashamed or embarrassed that they dispersed – and thereafter the residents of Chinatown were among his most loyal subjects.

After a “reign” of 21 years, he collapsed and died on the street. Despite legends of a hidden imperial fortune, he died in complete poverty – but one of the city’s clubs donated a fund for a casket and funeral procession, which was reported to have lined the streets with thousands of the city’s citizens.

I can only hope that my own breakdowns are accompanied by such imperial delusions of grandeur, published and received so warmly. Of course, it helped that Norton carried himself with a sense of genteel grace and nobility, more than a century removed from the city’s contemporary itinerant street figures – and that he lived modestly within his imperial means donated to him rather than some grift.

One of my favorite adaptations of Joshua Norton was in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman – where Dream gives Norton his imperial dream to ward off Despair and Desire. And as it turns out, Delirium, who observes to Dream “He’s not one of mine, is he? His madness keeps him sane”. Death is similarly charmed by him, telling him that out of all the kings and queens she had met (and she has met all of them), he is the one she liked best.

And to end on a personal note, when I visited Los Angeles and San Francisco, I gave myself a quest in each city, with my quest for the latter to seek out the tomb of Emperor Norton.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – History (Rome): Top 10 Roman Empires (Special Mention) (18) Germany

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(18) GERMANY?

 

Similarly to Austria, Germany picked up the Holy Roman Empire ball and ran with it when unified under the Prussian monarchy as the German Empire in 1871, styled as the Second Reich after the Holy Roman Empire’s First Reich and with the same imperial title of kaiser derived from Caesar.

Hence the title of Third Reich for Germany’s subsequent and most infamous regime, also touted to last a thousand years like the First Reich (spoiler – it lasted only twelve) – although apparently that was downplayed later as the Holy Roman association was a little too cosmopolitan and not quite, well, German enough.

In fairness, that last Reich did technically meet my high-tier ranking criterion by occupying Rome, if only for less than a year. It also had one of the most recognizable eagle standards, adapted from the Reichsadler of its imperial predecessors.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

X-TIER (WILD TIER)