Counting down my Top 10 Judge Dredd epics and episodes – essentially as a running list updated as I finish each volume of the collected Judge Dredd Complete Case Files in my ongoing Mega-City Law reviews (presently up to Case Files 18).
I distinguish between epics and episodes – with epics as longer storylines over a five or more episodes. However, that still leaves a distinction for me with respect to episodes – episodes that encapsulate their storylines within the single episode as opposed to those that have a longer story arc over 2-4 episodes (with four episodes being perhaps the most common standard for such arcs).
That is because there seems to be a distinction between the art of telling a story within a few episodes and telling it in only one – a mere six pages or so at that! I tend to admire the art involved in the latter more – but some of the stories in the Judge Dredd comic I have enjoyed the most or which had the most impact on me are those stories of potentially epic proportions yet encapsulated in only a few episodes. In short – literally (heh) – behold the arcs of Judge Dredd! These are my top ten arcs or storylines of 2-4 episodes.
(10) INNOCENTS ABROAD
(CASE FILES 18: progs 804-807 – 4 episodes))
“Go to Mega-City One…bring back them O’Dilligan brother hallions”
That pretty much sums up the post-heist shenanigans of Innocents Abroad. That and “a couple of Emerald Isle scumbags are on the run in the Big Meg”.
Essentially the reverse of the Emerald Isle arc, except now Judge Dredd escorting Irish Judge Joyce around Mega-City One to retrieve two Irish perps – the Sons of Erin they ain’t.
It’s a good romp – a bit of a Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels vibe to it before that film’s time – essentially involving three Emerald Isle elements on collision course.
The first of those elements is Judge Joyce, assigned the mission because of his previous involvement with Dredd back in the Emerald Isle arc in Case Files 15. Sadly, Joyce is not having the luck of the Irish – the running gag of this arc with Joyce as butt of the joke, and after all that work writer Garth Ennis put into boosting up Joyce, his own creation hailing from his homeland, into something more than a joke character in Judgement Day…only to return to Joyce as the butt of the gag here.
The second of the elements is Mickah O’Dilligan, Emerald Isle boyo made good in the Big Meg. If by good you mean running an Irish club as cover for his “shady little racket” – and looking down the barrel of McSod’s Syndrome, one to add to the list of diseases you do NOT want to get in MC-1. The good news – it can be completely cured. The bad news – that cure is literally gold.
Enter the luck of the Irish with the third element – his prodigal brothers Paddy and Francie O’Dilligan on the lam from the Emerald Isle who just happened to rob a bank of the gold their brother Mickah needs right now, if only they can avoid the heat to retrieve it from its hiding place…
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(9) BILL BAILEY, WON’T YOU PLEASE COME HOME
(CASE FILES 15: progs 723-726 – 4 episodes)
It’s a pity these guys didn’t pop up during Necropolis when they could have been genuine heroes.
One of my favorite storylines over four episodes – I guess I just have a soft spot for lost legions. In this case the lost legion is a Citi-Def unit that literally went underground during the Apocalypse War when their block, Bill Bailey presumably named for the British comedian, was destroyed – and comes out swinging against the Sovs nine years later or so. Except of course there are no Sovs, as Mega-City One won the Apocalypse War, so they’re just committing random acts of terrorism against their own city.
As I said, it’s a pity these guys didn’t pop up just a little earlier during Necropolis – when they could have been genuine resistance against the Dark Judges. They may have initially thought they were fighting the Sovs and their puppet Mega-City One Judges, but the latter was not too different from the Judges as puppets of the Dark Judges – and they would have soon adapted after realizing the situation, albeit they may have assumed the Dark Judges have simply taken over after the Sov victory.
Sadly, these guys are just too unlucky for that and the storyline does resemble a comedy of errors, with one bad luck pile-up after another to stop them realizing that Mega-City One is not Sov-occupied, or at least to avoid their last stand shootout with Mega-City One Judges, even with Judge Dredd doing his best to, well, bring Bill Bailey back home.
So a comedy of errors but also tragedy of errors, as the storyline has some surprisingly effective pathos. I dare anyone to remain unmoved as the unit defiantly sings their block anthem before going over the top – both in First World War parlance and the slang of extreme reaction – one last time to their doom.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(8) BOB & CAROL & TED & RINGO
(CASE FILES 7: progs 346-349 – 4 episodes)
Judge Dredd does Jurassic Park: The Lost World!
Like that film, this time the dinosaurs are coming (from Sauron Valley in the Cursed Earth) to Mega-City One. They’re essentially part of a Jurassic Park-style circus, but of course the titular four carnivores escape (with the help of a strangely empathic caretaker robot) to wreak havoc in the city. And that’s the plot of this four episode mini-epic in a nutshell.
And we get it right from the opening panel, narrated as the Parade of the Century – “the day Irrawaddy Skinner led his monsters in from Sauron Valley”. Oh – how the Cursed Earth has fallen from the days of the Cursed Earth epic, where it was virtual suicide to cross it by land, let alone all the way to Sauron Valley and back again. Or to travel around it in some sort of dinosaur circus, as this episode implies Skinner does – and riding the tyrannosaur Bob, no less. Of course, that would make me feel safer, from everything else but the tyrannosaur itself. His control over it is explained by reference to a Skinner box, itself a play on controversial American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his conditioning chamber or Skinner Box. In this case, it’s some sort of electrical shock collar – which begs the question of how Skinner installed it on his dinosaurs and trained them using it. One suspects he must have got the dinosaurs as eggs or hatchlings.
The storyline then uses the plot device of Mega-City One wildlife expert, David Baloney – a play on British nature documentary television presenter David Bellamy – to explain the origin of the dinosaurs. And it’s essentially Jurassic Park (pre-dating it – where’s the check, Jurassic Park), except the dinosaur theme parks (plural!) were on the American mainland and the dinosaurs were set loose by the Atomic Wars. (One would have thought the Atomic Wars would rival the asteroid as an extinction event for them but now you know better).
The dinosaur exhibition is basically a big dinosaur zoo, with cages to match, and we’re introduced to our titular carnivorous dinosaurs through the labels on the cages – Bob the tyrannosaurus rex, Carol the tyrannosaurus rex, Ted the allosaurus and Ringo as the runt deinonychus of the litter.
Unfortunately, while the herbivorous dinosaurs are docile in captivity, the carnivorous dinosaurs just aren’t adapting themselves to captivity (which just raises even more questions about that Skinner box) and slowly killing themselves resisting it (injuring themselves against the bars and so on). Caretaker robot Granville takes pity on them for their plight, but his protests to Skinner falls on deaf ears – as Skinner callously tells Granville there’s more where they came from. Although the carnivores have adapted enough at least to sense that Granville is their friend when he tends to their self-inflicted wounds (it probably helps that he’s not made of tasty flesh), Anyway, it’s too much for Granville, who decides to help them to, well, run away FROM the circus…
Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(7) PIRATES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC
(CASE FILES 4: progs 198-201 – 4 episodes)
Judge Dredd does Pirates of the Caribbean! Literally, as in mutant submarine pirates (or are they?) operating out of an underwater sea fortress in the Caribbean. There’s even a version of the Kraken. Where’s the check, Disney?
Anyway, even as another ‘mini-epic’ entry, Pirates of the Black Atlantic had a significance extending beyond its four episode story arc and its mutant pirates to foreshadowing the escalation of conflict with Mega-City One’s most persistent adversaries, the Sov-Judges of East Mega-City One…
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(6) BLOOD OF SATANUS
(CASE FILES 3: progs 152-154 – 3 episodes)
These episodes feature a little spot of horror, a genre that recurs surprisingly often in Judge Dredd.
Satanus is back!
Well, not quite – just his blood. Remember Satanus, the tyrannosaur from the Cursed Earth when Judge Dredd did Jurassic Park? Quick recap – the Judge Dredd storyline did genetically recreated dinosaurs before Jurassic Park and they still roam the Cursed Earth. The biggest and baddest of them all was Satanus, the black tyrannosaur – who survived his encounter with Judge Dredd (after Judge Dredd survived his encounter with Satanus).
Satanus himself doesn’t return – he went on to haunt humanity’s galactic empire in the far future through time travel and alien warlocks in Nemesis – but his blood returns to haunt Judge Dredd in Mega-City One. Of course, his blood doesn’t have a mind of its own or cross the Cursed Earth to Mega-City One – a genetic research laboratory in Mega-City One has some of the original “plasma based secretion” taken from Satanus when he was still in Dinosaur National Park, from which potentially “a new tyrannosaur can be grown”. Fortunately, “the Judges have banned such experiments as being too dangerous”. Unfortunately, disgruntled laboratory assistant Cyril Ratfinkle sees the potential for his own dangerous experiment, posing the question what would happen if someone drank the tyrannosaur blood?
If you think probably nothing (other than perhaps some food poisoning or similar reaction), then clearly you are not familiar with science in comics. Of course, Satanus’ blood has mutagenic properties, capable of transforming people into tyrannosaur-like creatures, because Satanus just oozes evil tyrannosaur-ness. It’s the tyrannosaur version of the elixir in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
And so Ratfinkle does David in Prometheus before Prometheus, stealing the plasma so he can slip it into someone’s drink like David did with the black goo. He drills a hole in his floor to the apartment below him, which fortuitously lines up perfectly with the exact position and opportunity to drip plasma into the wine glass behind the back of his unfortunate neighbor Rex. (Get it – tyrannosaurus…Rex?)
The next day, Rex expresses his concern to his wife Lynsey about the new black scales on his stomach. Unfortunately, “some days later”, Rex also expresses his concern about his worsening rash when he bumps into Ratfinkle, who exploits the opportunity to lie that his laboratory is working on a cure for this new virus and offers Rex free medicine. No prizes for guessing what that medicine is…
Yes – it’s more of the blood. After several doses of the “medicine”, Rex is thickly scaled and develops a taste for raw meat, “red and dripping”, much to the alarm of his wife – and much to the delight of Ratfinkle observing through the spyhole above, that “on day twelve of the experiment…the metamorphosis of man into tyrannosaur is imminent”. Enough of his humanity remains for Rex to exhort Lynsey to leave the apartment – “Get out before it’s too late!” – when she discovers him building a nest of their furniture and chowing down on another neighbor’s pet.
Lynsey contacts Judge Dredd but unfortunately he’s busy dealing with a “crazy punk”. However, Dredd remains troubled by Lynsey’s message, but unfortunately she did not leave any address. Even more unfortunately, she has returned to her address, where the tyrannosaur-thing that was her husband waits hungrily – and strangely, still wearing shorts, like the Hulk, with the same artistic concern for modesty.
And so Rex spontaneously divorces Lynsey by devouring her, due to their irreconcilable differences that he is now homo tyrannosaurus – as Ratfinkle gloats through his spyhole at the success of his experiment, although he soon receives his poetic justice as just dessert for Rex as the latter sniffs him out.
Well, it wasn’t a total loss as Ratfinkle left the “tapes” of his experimental notes behind – allowing Dredd to identify that Mega-City One has a man-beast on the loose. Meanwhile, Rex has reverted to his human state, but Dredd apprehends him just as his attempted suicide causes him to transform into the tyrannosaur again – because the beast within won’t let him kill himself. The tyrannosaurus Rex (heh) attacks Dredd and things look grim as the beast is poised to devour Dredd (while choking him with its strangely prehensile tail). Fortunately of course, Dredd has been in a similar spot with the original Satanus, so escaping this beast’s grasp is easy in comparison. (He cuts the tail with his trusty boot knife). Dredd pursues the beast into the slum area of ‘Old New York’, where it reverts to Rex again – but Dredd lures out the beast once more by the scent of his own blood (by cutting his hand) and shoots it. As it dies, the beast reverts into Rex once more, thanking Dredd for restoring his humanity – “You may have taken my life – but you have saved my soul!”
And Dredd’s dry reply – “Just routine, citizen”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(5) NOSFERATU
(CASE FILES 9: progs 430-433 – 4 episodes)
The Judge Dredd comic introduced vampires into its world in the City of the Damned Epic in Volume 8, but that might readily have seen them become a one-off feature. After all, the vampires in that epic were the Judges from the future 2120 timeline transformed into vampires by the uniquely powerful psi ability of the mutated Owen Krysler or Judge Child.
However, Volume 9 reintroduced vampires as a recurring and surprisingly regular feature in the mini-epic Nosferatu – continuing the vein of the nominally post-apocalyptic or dystopian SF Judge Dredd as a regular fantasy kitchen sink, where any genre trope from SF, fantasy or horror was up for grabs. Of course, the title was a dead giveaway, a word popularized by Bram Stoker purportedly as a Romanian name for vampire, but in fairness the vampire here had an SF rather than supernatural twist – an alien spider-vampire, albeit a shape-changing one.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(4) SHANTY TOWN
(CASE FILES 6: progs 300-303 – 4 episodes)
Ah – Shanty Town! Or Judge Dredd does Helm’s Deep (or the film Zulu)
Shanty Town looms large for me among Judge Dredd episodes. For one thing, it’s a storyline very much told in the shadow of the Apocalypse War, as the titular Shanty Town is some weird refugee residue from that war just beyond the outskirts of Mega-City One (although it’s a little unclear how it came into being and persisted outside the attention of Mega-City One’s Judges).
For another – and more fundamentally – it has always been a classic Judge Dredd story for me. Judge Dredd – and the Mega-City One Judges (including Hershey) who accompany him to enforce the Law in Shanty Town – are at their most classic characterization. Damn they make those Mega-City One Judges tough.
It is also a classic Judge Dredd action plot – in this case similar to those heavily outnumbered heroic last stands we see in war films, although of course here Dredd and his fellow Judges (although not all of them) prevail by force of sheer guts and toughness as well as their superior firepower, experience and training.
Shanty Town is introduced in the first few pages as a lawless – indeed literally beyond the Law – makeshift but vast “conglomeration containing the flotsam and jetsam of the Apocalypse War”. Well, not literally flotsam or jetsam, since that refers to debris in water, and Shanty Town is very much on land beyond the west wall of Mega-City One, but you get the idea. It also consists of more than a million refugees – presumably originating from the millions we saw flee the city during the Apocalypse War – lorded over by crime gangs. How exactly the refugees subsist is not clear – since most shanty towns eke out their economic survival from the cities of which they are part or attached – but it is clear how the crime gangs subsist, off the backs of the refugees. Literally in some cases, as they harvest them for organ smuggling, to which has recently been added smuggling live merchandise or babies. Which is how Shanty Town provokes the attention of Judge Dredd, as he comes across a baby being smuggled into Mega-City One.
And so Dredd gets authority from Chief Judge McGruder to “clean up Shanty Town” – to which end she orders him “choose a squad and take whatever action you deem necessary”. Finally, the Law comes to Shanty Town – as Dredd and his squad (on Lawmaster bikes) ride into it and nail their notices up:
“Justice Department be warned. This habitation now comes under the jurisdiction of the law of Mega-City One. All lawbreakers will be punished accordingly. By order – Dredd”
Of course, Shanty Town has its own way of biting back hard – hence the epic battle that is the climax of the storyline.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(3) THE BLACK PLAGUE
(CASE FILES 3: progs 140-143 – 4 episodes)
Judge Dredd gets spider-iffic in The Black Plague – and there’s a spider invasion of Mega-City One!
Actually, Dredd gets spider-iffic surprisingly often, although usually not on this scale – typically in the form of some sort of mutant or mutants, courtesy of the Cursed Earth, that endless source of mutant weirdness. In this case, it’s a mega-swarm of billions of Cursed Earth spiders – which would be bad enough in itself, but you know if anything comes from the Cursed Earth, it’s usually highly toxic as well, and these spiders are no exception.
This storyline of four episodes also sees one of my favorite minor characters (although unfortunately we never see him again after it) – the carnivorous talking mutant horse jokingly named Henry Ford. Carnivorous, intelligent (with quite the wise-cracking personality) and the ability to talk – that’s one hell of a mutation, but who cares? He’s just too much damn fun.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(2) FATHER EARTH
(CASE FILES 3: progs 122-125 – 4 episodes)
The Father Earth storyline was the first of the recurring incursions into Mega-City One from the Cursed Earth, that post-apocalyptic mutated wasteland that was the United States.
Setting aside a previous minor incursion in the nature of a raid by the mutant Brotherhood of Darkness, this is the first incursion on a major scale – particularly as earlier mutant raiders preceded the city wall built by Chief Judge Cal.
This particular incursion is led by the messianic mutant Father Earth, apocalyptic eco-terrorist and walking embodiment of flower power (as plants literally bloom from him). Father Earth is accompanied by his groupies, who seem surprisingly attractive for inhabitants of the Cursed Earth (much like Immortan Joe’s supermodel “wives” in Mad Max: Fury Road).
More ominously, he has his mutant army 10,000 strong or so, with his revolutionary vanguard of the Doomsday Dogs – and doomsday is what Father Earth preaches for Mega-City One. Father Earth has a dream – and that dream is the total destruction of Mega-City One, returning it to nature (such as it is in the Cursed Earth).
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(1) MONKEY BUSINESS AT THE CHARLES DARWIN BLOCK
(CASE FILES 4: progs 184-185 – 2 episodes)
This two-episode story features one of my classic Dredd favorites, in which Dredd arrests the origin of the species. Literally.
Set in one of the most aptly and conveniently named blocks in Mega-City One history – “Mega-City One had seen some strange disasters, but none so bizarre as the day evolution ran wild – and a whole city block became…the naked jungle”.
Well not so much evolution but devolution. It starts with Professor E. Northcote Fribb, who has just “isolated an enzyme which can reverse the process of evolution” – because, uh, science! However, for someone who is intelligent enough to succeed in such an unprecedented discovery, he is remarkably stupid in taking no basic precautions – or indeed, outright sniffing his test tube (which smells rather like spaghetti sauce). The scent immediately starts to devolve him. Worse, he drops the enzyme on the floor and ventilation spreads it throughout the block, devolving the rest of its population into hominids or ape-like primates, even Judges sent in without respirators.
Dredd of course figures out it’s an airborne contaminant and heads into the block to root out the source of contamination – quickly identified to be the block’s notoriously mad professor on the 66th floor. Dredd slowly makes his way through the apes of wrath to the 66th floor, impeded somewhat as the apes set fire to the building in an inversion of that black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. As he nears that floor, the devolution has, ah, regressed further from ape-like primates to “lower animal stages”, from recognizably mammalian to unrecognizably reptilian on the 66th floor itself…
Behold the origin of the species – as in the professor’s unit 66C itself, the professor has kept devolving right back past any vertebrate ancestry to its starting point. As Dredd exclaims (after the usual “Drokk!” of course), it’s “some kind of giant amoeba”.
Eww! And why does it still have eyes?! Kill it with fire! Not the amoeba, but the de-evolutionary enzyme – as Dredd instructs the fire-fighting crews to eliminate any trace of it. As for the now protoplasmic perpetrator, Dredd arrests him or it of course, presumably to do a few billion years in an iso-cube to evolve back to humanity.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
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MEGA-CITY LAW:
TOP 10 JUDGE DREDD EPICS & EPISODES – ARCS (TIER LIST)
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(1) MONKEY BUSINESS AT CHARLES DARWIN BLOCK
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(2) FATHER EARTH
(3) THE BLACK PLAGUE
(4) SHANTY TOWN
(5) NOSFERATU
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(6) THE BLOOD OF SATANUS
(7) PIRATES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC
(8) BOB & CAROL & TED & RINGO
(9) BILL BAILEY, WON’T YOU PLEASE COME HOME?
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(10) INNOCENTS ABROAD