Any Judge Dredd/2000AD fans?

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

I've always been something of a casual fan of The Galaxy's Greatest Comic, and it's most famous character (Dredd).

But recently I just can't get enough of it! I've become obsessed with Nemesis the Warlock, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper....the list goes on.

British comics seem to be much more political and subversive in nature.....probably has something to do with the lack of anything like the Comics Code Authority that pretty much neutered American comics several years ago.

Any other fans?

[Os Cangaceiros]

The movie was pretty stupid but all-in-all it wasn't that bad, it was watchable at least. (Speaking of the latest one, "Dredd", in this case)

[tallguy]

I've always been something of a casual fan of The Galaxy's Greatest Comic, and it's most famous character (Dredd).

But recently I just can't get enough of it! I've become obsessed with Nemesis the Warlock, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper....the list goes on.

British comics seem to be much more political and subversive in nature.....probably has something to do with the lack of anything like the Comics Code Authority that pretty much neutered American comics several years ago.

Any other fans?
I'm 50 years old and start getting 200AD as a teen when it first came out in the late 70s. I loved it and occasionally pull out some of my old copies i kept hold of. Apparently, if I had kept hold of every copy and kept them in good nick, they'd be worth a fair bit of dosh now. Naturally, I didn't do that as they were just comics. Which is a bit of bugger really as I could do with the money.....:o

Anyhow, yep, I loved judge Dredd. especially those drawn by Brian Bolland. It was always the artwork, coupled with what seemed to my 15 year old mind, very subversive storylines, that attracted me.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

I'm 50 years old and start getting 200AD as a teen when it first came out in the late 70s. I loved it and occasionally pull out some of my old copies i kept hold of. Apparently, if I had kept hold of every copy and kept them in good nick, they'd be worth a fair bit of dosh now. Naturally, I didn't do that as they were just comics. Which is a bit of bugger really as I could do with the money.....:o

Anyhow, yep, I loved judge Dredd. especially those drawn by Brian Bolland. It was always the artwork, coupled with what seemed to my 15 year old mind, very subversive storylines, that attracted me.

Yeah, the artwork and the stories has always been the real selling point to me for 2000AD. My favorite artist has always been Carlos Ezquerra, the co-creator and artist for Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. Dave Gibbon's work on Rogue Trooper , both as artist and later as a writer is absolute gold.

And yes, the storylines in 2000AD can be extremely subversive, especially when you consider the time many of them were published.

[Celtic_0ne]

I like 2000AD although their comics can be quite depressing.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

I like 2000AD although their comics can be quite depressing.

Oh yeah, they can be. But they can also be really funny as well.

Dredd is a good example of this. His stories vary wildly along the comedic/tragic scale.....expecially when it has to do with the subject of Democracy in Mega City One.

[Red Commissar]

They're pretty interesting strips. As to why they're different from their American counterparts, I don't think it has all to do with the comics authority code. For all intents and purposes the code really became defunct by the 70s, by then even the big publishers like Marvel or DC were tackling subjects like racism (or just bigotry in general), drug abuse, poverty, looking towards moving beyond being seen as 'kid-friendly' medium, etc.

I believe 2000AD's unique nature probably came about more from being originally a smaller publication that wasn't too beholden to a marketing strategy and the use of an anthology format for their publication. Unlike the typical comic structure which is released once a month and anywhere from 18-26 pages (excluding adverts and back-ups), the anthology dropped once a week totaling a bit over 30 pages with 5 features, 6 pages each. That necessitated long-term plotting of story arcs ahead of time and pacing them such that each story felt even. Stories flowed better I think that way and reduced instances of filler within the same story - this is not excluding however one-off stories that did act as filler between arcs. What we have then are pretty long story arcs that go across months sometimes with character development and looking at issues beyond "this person is good and he has to foil bad guy". I think also too the willingness to kill off characters- permanently- distinguished them from other comics. With a few exceptions characters who've died have stayed that way.

For me an appeal of it, even in the more childish ones, is that it's a break from the usual superhero centric comics that dominate a lot of the market. You have a good deal of world-building, references and parallels to real world issues, narratives, genres as varied as sci-fi to fantasy to more bizarre ones that combine all of them (speculative fiction in a sense) that often get pushed to the back when you have a story that has to develop a superhero character above all else.

Humor varies a lot on the strips. Dredd had a lot more of its humor in the 80s and then focused on being more serious later on. Humor is a lot more subtle and referential in recent strips. Reading the really early Dredds up through the 90s, you notice a lot more simple, if not light-hearted tone, then it shifted to being more serious following Necropolis. I suspect this might have been both as a response of their readership aging as well as following the overall trend of comics to recast themselves as being less juvenile. I suppose a case could be made too that doing that approach for over 10 years, with Dredd being a constant feature in just about every issue (where as other features would take breaks of months or even years), they were worried it would get old and repetitive if they kept doing that and had to change gears.

Some strips though've always been more erratic and odd for the heck of it.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Well, 2000AD's unique nature can also be attributed to the men who started it.....namely Pat Mills. Mills has always had a violent, anti-authoritarian character to his stories, even as far back when he was working in IPC's Girl's department. With 2000AD he basically just decided to say 'fuck it' and just went all out from issue one. Nemesis is probably the most famous example. The anti-religion tone in that strip is so strong it would make Anacharsis Cloots blush.

It doesn't just stop there, though. The stuff he's done outside of 2000AD like Marshal Law or Requiem Chevalier Vampire is, if you can believe it, even MORE violent and anarchic in nature than anything that's ever been published in the Galaxy's Greatest Comic.

The latter especially. Jesus FUCK but I don't think I've ever seen that much blood gush in a single panel. :laugh:

[blake 3:17]

I love the old Judge Dredd comics -- frigging brilliant. I read them in the 4 story 32 page comic books with the Brian Bolland covers.

Otto Sump and his Ugly Clinic! The best!

It was so great that the only sentimentalism Dredd had was for Walter -- fuckin right on.

Used to have an interview with the guys who wrote it -- they were weird politically (like we're not) -- may have been Conservatives critical of Thatcher or the other way round...

Never got into the other series, but I was into stuff like the original Teenage Mutant Turtles and Reid Fleming Worlds Toughest Milkman and The Spirit (post-war is the best) and also the original ECs and crime comics which brought the Comics Code in.

Glad there's another Dredd fan here! Was just sharing some crazy shit from Dredd yesterday: http://britishcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Mayor_Jim_Grubb

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

@blake 3:17

The primary writer of Judge Dredd, John Wagner, is a working class-oriented writer with a strong anti-authoritarian bent to his work. The Dredd stories have always been meant to be satires on the nature of authoritarianism and the police state. Wagner would later make politics a BIG part of the Dredd universe in the late 80s, when he started introducing storylines around militant Democracy activists, specifically a storyline called "America", where the Judges (including Dredd) wind up being the villains.

And believe me, "America" ain't subtle. It's also considered to be the best Dredd story ever written.

[Red Commissar]

Politically I think that the crew aren't different from what the rest of the comics industry is dominated by. Most of them are generally liberals of some sort or apathetic. You'll get the occasional right-winger but they generally tend to associate with the larger publishers because in a smaller house they'd likely run into trouble fast.

As far as Judge Dredd is concerned, the main writers of that weren't different from the rest of the crew. Brandon already pointed out with Pat Mills in general who to this day is still occasionally made fun of for how unsubtle his plot lines can be with respect to a social message.

The "golden age" of Judge Dredd which is generally seen as beginning with The Cursed Earth up to the conclusion of Necropolis. It was then that we got a lot of the off-the-wall things going on with the weird stuff in Mega-City One, like the ugly clinic, fatties, simps, jimps, crazy game shows, generally parodying and satirizing a lot of things. The two main writers then were Alan Grant and John Wagner. Grant had come off as the archetype of the left "radical" then (to me at least) which carried over into his early years in American comics before flipping to objectivism. Wagner's views I'm unsure of but in an interview nearly two years ago he had this to say:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=40172

Q: It's been said many times and by many people that Judge Dredd is John Wagner. Dredd started out as a no-nonsense, anti-democracy, authoritarian figure, but has seemed to inch closer and closer to a more liberal viewpoint over the decades. Is that an indication of how your personal politics have swayed during that time as well?


A: I suppose there is a lot of Dredd in me, but isn't there a bit of Dredd in most of us? I'd describe my politics as fairly left wing. Any kind of police brutality appalls me, and yet -- and yet -- I admit there are times when I fantasize about Dredd appearing and giving this or that creep a whack with his daystick.

As far as Dredd the man is concerned, there was a need to allow his character to develop without altering the essentially retributive nature of his role or indeed his attitude to the job. He's changed, but never make the mistake of thinking he's some bleeding-heart liberal.In the 90s it was a slump for 2000AD in general, due to many factors including the state of the industry then as well as many of their established and popular writers deciding to go to the states. Then the strip I think was in confusion as to where they should go with their stories but they seemed to've resolved it after 2004 or so, focusing more on Dredd's world being a crapshoot dystopia.

Wagner also wrote on the Strontium Dog series which wasn't meant to be a satire or dark humor so it was more upfront with its positions. As with any story involving mutants it seems it became a parallel to racism and bigotry in general. They even took a potshot at Ronald Reagan in one strip where they were sent on a mission to save him after he was abducted by time-traveling alien fighters trying to secure their freedom since they thought Reagan was a god-like deity to the humans who the colonizers would recognize. When the Dogs find Reagan there's a lot of confusion from them encountering Reagan as to how he was considered one of Earth's greatest leaders, as well as some references to Reagan's increasing senility then with his constant references to anal polyps and insistence that the whole episode was just a Soviet plot to derail talks.

Even in the recent Strontium Dog they've largely kept the position of mutants being an oppressed underclass and using that as an allegory to real-life situations.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

@Red Commisar

I love Strontium Dog. I have the first Search/Destroy Agency Files volume with me right now and its a lot of fun. I love the fact that it doesn't really have a set tone, it basically just goes off in whatever direction Wagner and co. want it to go. There have been stories that are just balls-out loony, and stories that have been dramatic and dark.....and sometimes anywhere in between.

And yes, Pat Mills isn't very subtle at all. That's what I love about his work. He has that 'fuck you' attitude that just makes his comics a ton of fun.