Tag: 2000AD

As I’ve said more than once, I grew up on British comics more than American ones, most notably 2000AD, whose most iconic character, of course, is a certain officer of the law. Obviously, being only about eight years old when I started reading The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, I had no real conception that Dredd and the Judges were essentially operating a fascist, hyper-authoritarian system, not until the strip itself started addressing the whole issue of the absence of democracy in Mega City One… by which time I had aged into double figures and impending teenagehood, and frankly still didn’t understand the political issues or really care about them that much, really.

But Dredd was the hero, wasn’t he? Dredd was the living embodiment of THE LAW in Mega City One (and indeed outside it). The figure we were supposed to look up to. THE LAW was sacred to him, and, let’s face it, he was there to administer it to a bunch of unquestionably Bad People. He was opposed to Bad People. He was the Good Guy.

Wasn’t he?

Dredd co-creator John Wagner said of his creation many years later:

This was back in the days of Dirty Harry, and with [Margaret] Thatcher on the rise there was a right-wing current in British politics which helped inspire Judge Dredd. He seemed to capture the mood of the age – he was a hero and a villain.
That villainous aspect to Dredd’s character – and the Draconian laws of Mega-City One [the post-apocalyptic metropolis Dredd polices] – really caught the readers’ imagination.
Occasionally we’d get letters from children who seemed to be agreeing with his hard-right stance, so we made the strip more political to bring out the fact that we didn’t agree with Dredd. We introduced a democratic movement in Mega-City One as a counterpoint. So in a way the readers helped the character develop.

So, basically, kids not getting the point of the strip was what caused Wagner to be more overt, cos he was a bit alarmed by what he had wrought. But it took me rather longer to appreciate that point myself, and indeed I’d argue that I only finally did so tonight, when someone posted the meme at the top of this post on the PIAT FB group. Cos on more recent reading about 2000AD and its history, I’ve been kind of struck by the often-expressed notion that TGGC was related to the punk movement of the same period, which I could see in a lot of instances, yes, but not with Dredd, who was the flagship character of the comic, he was specifically mentioned in the cover logo for years. He was… not punk particularly.

But yeah, thinking about it now from the perspective offered at the top of the post, the idea that the Judges were just another gang in Mega City One… that makes a certain sense. The gang with the best resources, evidently, and the power to declare themselves THE LAW. The gang that, to some extent, took over the territory of the erstwhile United States from someone even worse than them, the gang that just destroyed democracy rather than most of the rest of the world like Bad Bob Booth… the gang that, per that particular Dredd story, was supposed to restore democracy eventually but just became dictators, the gang keeping on top of and wiping out its competitors for decades… some of whom are still even worse than them. The devil you know, indeed. I don’t know who made that meme, but after 40 years I think I understand Dredd much better now…

As I think I’ve said before, I grew up on British comics rather than American ones. Beano, Dandy, Eagle (i.e. the 80s revival, the original was a bit before my time), Battle, Whoopee, Buster, and above all 2000AD, whence this glorious image. I don’t really give a good goddamn about Marvel vs DC, and the relative merits of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams or whoever else; I was all about the likes of Massimo Belardinelli, Carlos Ezquerra, Kevin O’Neill, Steve Dillon, Mike McMahon, Cam Kennedy, Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Arthur Ranson, Ron Smith, and Ian Gibson, the artist behind this beauty. It comes from a very early Judge Dredd story, I didn’t read it until it was reprinted years later, but I’ve loved it ever since I first saw it; not exactly the greatest Dredd story ever but what a way to kick it off…

So that’s the full first page of the story to put it in context. Mum’s putting Billy to bed, putting the fear of Dredd into the poor child, when Dredd himself bursts into the apartment to give him something to be afraid of. What a stunning first page, ending in Dredd casually saying him and Giant are trying to, frankly, decapitate a poor defenceless child at the bottom of the right of the page… so you have to turn the page to discover the poor defenceless child is nothing of the sort. Marvellous. I’ve seen avowed comedies that were less funny than this one comic strip panel.

One of the riddles of the ages has finally been solved! …well, maybe. When I were a lad I grew up on comics like 2000AD, none of this Marvel or DC nonsense, so one of the strips I grew up with was Pat Mills’ Slaine. The latter was my first, somewhat roundabout acquaintance with Celtic myth, a sort of Conanesque heroic fantasy with occasional SF elements…

…getting off to a marvellous start with our eponymous hero facing off with some sort of dinosaur-like monstrosity. Couldn’t not get drawn in by that sort of thing when I was 8. But how to pronounce the name of said hero? Cos we’re dealing with something old Irish here so I remember some befuddlement in the letters page about the “correct” pronunciation of an admittedly fictional name (I particularly recall one who explained at some length that it was actually “Dennis”)… which would probably have been something like Slawn-ye or Shlawn-ye. Wikipedia accepts the former but how did Pat Mills intend it to be said?

Well, somewhat randomly, I got recommended Pat Mills’ Youtube channel, where he handily has a video about a book he’s written on the subject of Slaine. And he pronounces “Slaine” as… well… “slain”, as if it were an English rather than Irish name. So there it finally is, straight from the author’s mouth… weirdly anticlimactic after 40 years somehow and a wee bit racist towards my Irish ancestors (like *I* know bugger all about Irish?), but there you go.