I was planning on celebrating the 40th anniversary and 2000th issue of 2000AD by going back and looking at some of my favourite stories; but to be honest, I haven't really found the time. This week, I was listening to the 2000AD podcast, and I heard the announcement that they have started work on a Judge Dredd TV show. By started work, I mean, just started. Like, they haven't even got a writing team yet. If it gets made, we're not going to see this thing for years.
I don't know how happy I am to hear this. Comic books don't always traslate well to the screen. I mean, the 2012 Dredd film was fantastic (hunt it down if you haven't seen it yet), but then there's the old Stalone flick, which … well, the less said about that the better. I know the Marvel movies are going gangbusters at the moment, but the few I've seen have struggled to reach mediocre. I hear the Daredevil Netflix series is decent though; as well as the Luke Cage and Jessica Jones series; but I can't comment, since I haven't seen them.
Being a weekly strip that's run for 40 years, there's a lot of Dredd stuff out there, and the material has changed a lot over the years. In the late seventies, it was very much a children's adventure strip; however, going into the eighties, the tone of 2000AD became much more adult, and the writers of Dredd started to inject a lot more political and social commentary into the mix.
For the uninitiated, Dredd is set in the futuristic metropolis of Mega City 1, which is surrounded by a radioactive wasteland referred to as The Cursed Earth. See, at some point, the United States elected a charismatic, populist buffoon as president and he started a nuclear war. Democracy was declared a failed experiment, and now, the only people who champion the concept are considered dangerous fringe lunatics. Instead, the city-state is run by the judges; a single bureaucracy which serves as government, military, police, and judiciary. The rule of the judges is brutal and authoritarian. All stimulants are banned, including sugar and caffeine; most film and literature from the 20th century is considered subversive; almost all crimes carry minimum gaol time. Judges are given the power to hand down sentences on the spot—no trials, and no appeals process.
With robots having taken over 97% of jobs, most of the population survive off government welfare. Crammed into tiny apartments within monstrous buildings, with nothing constructive to do and no hope of improving their station in life, most people spend their time jumping from one ridiculous fad to the next, before eventually giving in to madness or despair and killing themselves … and quite often others.
In the middle of all this craziness is Judge Joseph Dredd—pride of the Justice Department, grizzled veteran, and hard-nosed believer in the status-quo. And that's the magic of Dredd—you've got this protagonist who is unbelievably principled and would give his life in the line of duty without thinking twice, but that duty involves propping up a brutal, authoritarian, military dictatorship. In interviews, I've heard the writers talk about how much fun they had seeing how far they could push the character towards being an outright fascist without losing the audience. In a classic story, he unflinchingly obliterates a Russian city of a billion people with nuclear weapons (note, this story was published during the cold war).
One of the most unusual aspects of Dredd is that time in the comic progresses apace with time in the real world. Joe is now 40 years older than he was when the strip started, and there are prominent characters who we have watched grow up in real time. The world has also expanded considerably, and many of the best stories don't feature Dredd in them at all. In fact, the creator of the series, John Wagner, has openly stated that he wants to kill Joe off and let the other characters take over, but the publisher won't let him.
Unfortunately, as Dredd has aged, the character—and the tone of the comic in general—have softened considerably. Dredd isn't as hard and oppressive as he once was, and neither is the system he represents. In fact, while you do still get the odd great Dredd story, a lot of the material published in the last 20 years or so has dropped the fun angle of "how far can we push the audience" in favour of straight action/adventure stories. Which is a real shame. I do hope that if they make this show, they draw most of their inspiration from that golden period that happened in the eighties and nineties, and not too much from the shit that sits either side.
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