A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans
What on earth was Morrison’s take on Judge Dredd? And why is it something that seems to almost never come up when people talk about their work? Why is it almost buried and forgotten? What did they even try to do there?
We’ll explore that here, picking up where we left off….
What on earth was Morrison’s take on Judge Dredd? And why is it something that seems to almost never come up when people talk about their work? Why is it almost buried and forgotten? What did they even try to do there?
We’ll explore that here, picking up where we left off….
Grant Morrison has done pretty much everything. In a career spanning 4 decades, starting from their late teens into their now early-sixties, Morrison has trekked across most of the Western comics landscape. They’ve done a great deal of work, both big and small. Whether it be redefining major flagships like The X-Men or Batman in Big Two superheroes, helping pioneer the Vertigo weirdness with The Invisibles and The Filth, or being part of the wave of new creator-owned books of Image and Boom in the early 2010s with Nameless and Klaus, they’ve been around and done it. They’ve done Original Graphic Novels, they’ve done mini-series, they’ve done maxi-series, they’ve done one-shots, and lengthy ongoing series, and they’ve even done zines. They were a Musician, with much music of their own, they’ve performed with Gerard Way in MCR Music Videos like Na Na Na and SING. They were even a comics critic and columnist back in the day. And now they work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, as they have done for over a decade now.
Much has been, and continues to be, said about their work.
And yet there is a gap.
There is an odd little gap.
A gap that exists not because nobody’s noticed it, but because it is seen and then brushed past.
Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd.
I’d always liked Judge Dredd.
I remember seeing the 2012 film adaptation, starring Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby. It was a tremendously entertaining film. I thought it rather a shame that it didn’t do better commercially, thus being viable for more sequels. Alex Garland and Pete Travis’ film was a tightly constructed story, and a good time. I thought ‘neat’.
But I didn’t love Dredd. [Read more…] about The Moment I Truly Loved Judge Dredd
Since his debut in 1977’s 2000 AD #2 over forty years ago, the grim, fit, and unapologetic Judge Dredd has become both one of comics’ most emblematic figures, but also one of its most enigmatic. A “Street Judge”—officer, judge, jury, and executioner in the monolithically dystopic Mega-City One—Dredd is, by all outward appearances, a one-dimensional satire of fascism in his original conception by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra. Indeed, many purists and diehard fans will tell you that Dredd functions best when he is unflinching and morally reprehensible. A reflection of our own struggles with law and justice, living and dying.
But that idea essentially lacks nuance, dismissing the flexibility of Dredd as a figure and the function of his stories. As time progresses in both Mega-City One (literally—the series started in 2079 and as of now takes place in 2143) and the real world, so, too, does Dredd. A legacy character from a vast array of the most recognizable creators in comics, (including Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Mark Millar, John Wagner, Dan Abnett, and Pat Mills), Dredd is a vessel for stories with overwhelmingly sardonic takes on law, justice, and the often wholesale inability of politics to synthesize the two. Once lauded, over time these stories were also found to be all too prescient, overlapping with our own grim reality in both telling and narratively trying ways.
So, out of gross necessity, Dredd changed. Law and justice incarnate, saint and sinner, he’s better for it. A complex, enigmatic figure, in any given series Dredd can be seen as an uncompromising villain, but also, when needed, a legitimate hero. Violent, unhinged, resolute, kind, caring, contradictory and complex all in one, Dredd is a genuine icon, and one that has been central to some of the best comics stories of all time included below. [Read more…] about This List is the Law: The Best Judge Dredd Comics