Some Of The Usual Suspects: Judge Dredd #14 Review

A couple of months ago, recognizing a gap in my comics history education and having a 20 percent off coupon from Barnes & Noble burning a hole in my pocket, I started reading 2000AD’s Judge Dredd from the beginning. I picked up the first five volumes of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files, and have been picking up volumes one at a time since, getting up to volume eight so far.

So while I am by no means an expert on Judge Dredd, I have soaked up enough to have formed the opinions that Ron Smith is my favorite artist on the title other than Brian Bolland so far, that Walter The Wobot is a fucking stupid character, that Dredd should have ventilated The Judge Child as soon as he found him, and that based on the apparently constant appearances of The Fatties, those British comics creators have a fairly solid handle on American culture.

So while we have had IDW’s adaptation of Judge Dredd by writer Duane Swierczynski in the house, it’s been Amanda who’s been picking it up. I haven’t been reading it, because I figured they would hew closer to the recent Dredd movie than the original comics, and that they would go along the lines of DC’s 1990s version of Judge Dredd, that took place in an entirely different continuity from the original 2000AD comics.

But I finally knucked and checked out Judge Dredd #14, and, well, I was half right. The IDW version of the book seems to take place in the 2000AD continuity, with at least a couple of familiar characters who won’t necessarily mean anything to anyone who hasn’t read some of the original books. And it gives us two stories that are pretty solid crime stories with sci-fi elements like body switching and psychic predictions that fit well into the overall Dredd universe.

It’s a good comic, but it’s only an okay Judge Dredd comic. Because it is missing something.

Passing Judgement – Review Of Judge Dredd #2

I am behind the times where Judge Dredd is concerned. When the comic was coming out in strip form back in the late seventies and eighties in the British publication 2000 A.D., I was an ocean away. Also, I was 7 (at least at the start of it). I managed to miss both movie versions of it, which, from what I hear, is probably a good thing. Why Sylvester Stallone would’ve been cast to play an iconic British comic hero seems bizarre, but it was the 90s and a lot of crimes against comic books were happening -so why should their treatment in a movie be that much more surprising? As far as Karl Urban is concerned – well, I know he was Bones McCoy in the Star Trek reboot. I liked him in that, but not enough to go to Judge Dredd 3D. I’m ok with that.

IDW currently has the rights to Judge Dredd and is two issues into a new run, written by Duane Swierczynski. I picked up issue #2 with no context, having missed the first one. If you’re like me and have no background on the series, Judge Dredd is a futuristic tale, set in the dystopian society of Mega-City One. Joseph Dredd is a Judge; Judges are cops who also impose sentence on their perps. This issue seems to be as much about what the system asks of its participants as it is about the characters. The comic is split into two stories by Swierczynski, “Cover Me”, with art by Nelson Daniel, and “The Good Parts”, with art by Brendan McCarthy.

So, for a reader with no grounding in the series, who is also starting late to the party, what’s the verdict?

My findings, riddled with spoilers, after the jump.