Get two juve-cubes ready!
Since we are in the topic of British comic books, we can't avoid perhaps the most popular British comic book of all time, "Judge Dredd".
I would imagine that every single Finnish male in my age cohort is
familiar with this character, since it has been published in
translations of the Titan Book albums collection. My American readers
might not be familiar with this comic (there seems to be something
funny about the rights for this comic in this side of Atlantic or
something, since you can't even find these albums in comic book stores)
except as the somewhat forgettable movie, so a short explanation of the
premise might be in order. A hundred years in the future after the
nuclear war, the humanity lives in a bunch of massive Mega-Cities
because the rest of the world is radioactive and full of muties. There
is no democracy or individual freedoms, but all legislation and law
enforcement is in the hands of totalitarian Judges who have the power
to be the judge, jury and executioner. The main character, strongjawed
and serious judge Joe Dredd in Mega-City One lives only for the law and
patrols the streets hunting lawbreakers and mutants.
In their heyday, these comics were absolutely excellent, especially those drawn by artists such as Brian Bolland and my personal favourite Ron Smith. The best thing about these comics is that even though they are drawn in the 80's, you can still read them today and they don't look ridiculous or stupid at all. These comics just work very well and they convey a good overall sense of being in the future. There is also often an educational social message, and the comics include elements from science and both high and lowbrow culture, and not too much but just the right amount. The comic paints a pretty bleak picture of the future. Because robots do pretty much all physical work in the future, there is 90% unemployment and a void of meaninglessness that the citizen try to fill with entertainment and all kinds of stupid things. Sometimes citizens go into "future shock" and start wildly firing at their fellow citizens. (Now there is another expression that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere for a long, long time. I wonder why that is?) The Judges don't give a damn about individual rights and conduct searches without any kind of warrant or probable cause. Dredd often derides "troublemakers" who don't play ball but complain about some drastic action that Judges took for the greater good. Judges also keep "muties" out of the Mega-City and thus maintain its purity.
There are a couple of innovative conventions in the comic itself that are worth mentioning. First, I guess that the writers weren't allowed to use even relatively mild swearwords, so they simply invented new swearwords such as "drokk" and "grud" that Dredd constantly uses without explanation pretty much the same way as we would use "hell" and "damn". After a few episodes, these words become so natural for the reader that he doesn't even notice them. Second, each time the judges use their personal weapons that can shoot many different kind of bullets, they say out loud what type of bullet they are using. This goes for other types of weapons too, so that Dredd might shout "Boot knife!" when he has to attack his opponent with a knife. This makes the flow of the comic easier to follow, and after a few episodes, this convention also becomed totally natural. (In the movie version, this convention couldn't really be applied, so the filmmakers made the Lawgiver gun respond to vocal commands to switch between different kinds of bullets. I think this was a nice touch.)
I remember how impressed I was when I first read the episode where rebellious and vicious punks had started their own society in the streets of Mega-City One. The punks had their own "courts" and a "chief judge" who gave arbitrary sentences to the victims brought before him while the other punks laughed and drank beer in the background. Dredd announced to his superior officers that there is no need to send a force of judges to fight them, because he wants to show that one Judge is harder than a hundred punks together. Dredd fights his way through the punks and in the end makes the punk "chief judge" cry and admit that he is nothing but a worthless punk. To complete the story, Dredd banishes the punks from the City to walk in the radioactive Cursed Earth that surrounds it, which is a de facto death sentence. In the last three panels of the episode, the punks are begging to get back in, but Dredd just thinks to himself that he is being hard but necessarily so, since he has to teach people by this example that citizenship is a priviledge, not a right.
(An amusing side note about punks in genral: the post "Punk culture and ideals promote all body types, all sexualities, all genders and all esthetics" at Althouse had one pretty good comment in it, by "Sippican Cottage" that described punk as "Faux socialism tied to a sort of Hallowe'en costume party. Affecting the pose of nihilism and self destruction for amusement's sake, all the while as serious and humorless as any biddy in a black frock wagging their finger in saloons and telling the sinners to repent." That is so very true.)
In many episodes you can tell what aspects of British society found their way to these strips. In one memorable episode, a rich real estate developer had constructed an orbiting luxury community in outer space, away from all social problems and crime. (Space travel was routine in Judge Dredd comics, although space aliens tended to stay away from Earth, which was a good storytelling decision from the writers.) Dredd entered and announced that according to law, a certain percentage of these apartments must be given to the city for social housing purposes. Complaints were ignored, and soon the first shuttle full of people in need of social housing landed to the community. Of course, these people immediately started an aimless rampage of crime and violence. With this influx of underclass, decent people moved out of the community, thus giving the underclass even more room for social housing. In the last panel it was announced that the place finally had become the first slum in orbit, and the side of the place had a giant graffiti "Spug you all". I have to wonder if the writer of this episode had based it on his own personal experiences.
Whereas the giant Mega-City One covers the eastern seaboard of America (and literally covers the old New York the same way as in Futurama), East-Meg One and Two are two corresponding towns located in Russia. (In later episodes, we also find out that there is also Texas City where everything is big, Brit-Cit, Sino-City etc.) Since this was the eighties, the Russian Mega-Cities were ruled by socialism and their judges used corresponding language and imagery. When we remember how the Finnish leftists reacted to the Commodore 64 hit game "Raid over Moscow" (to cut a long story short for my American readers, suffice to say that even the Parliament eventually became involved) I guess that it's a good thing that they never thought of reading these comics. In the story arc "Apocalypse War", East-Meg One starts the nuclear war against Mega-City One. The Russkies are led by an evil marshal who sends his failed subordinates to Siberia. When he later sees these people lining up for distribution of winter gear, he tells his underling to go cancel that order. To send these people to Siberia? No, the order of giving them winter gear. I wonder how many leftists would get that one.
The story ends with Dredd infiltrating East-Meg and using its own missiles against it so that their magic anti-missile shield cannot help them. (This missile shield had earlier teleported Mega-City One's doomsday missile salvo to an Earth in another dimension where all war is totally unknown, so when its people see these missiles flying in the air, they think that they are very beautiful, and in the next big panel these missiles explode and destroy the whole planet.) East-Meg One gets completely nuked and the few survivors have to walk towards East-Meg Two, and Mega-City One starts a massive rebuilding project that leads to all kinds of lighthearted and more comical incidents.
Some episodes featured the League of Fatties, a fat acceptance movement whose members were so fat that they used a unicycle wheel under their belly to support them and move around better. In the first episode that introduced the League, the fatties were angry about the fact that they were losing weight since under food rationing, they could eat only the same amount of food as all others. The League starts underground action and e.g. attacks a food caravan by having some fatties use their corpulent bodies as suicide missiles to crash and stop the caravan. The greatest sacrifice: they killed themselves so that others could eat! At the end of this episode, Dredd solves the obesity problem by locking up the fatties in isolation blocks and not letting them exit until their weight falls under 400 pounds. At the exit door, there was talking scale that worked as a gatekeeper and mocked and berated the fatty stepping on it if his weight was above this threshold.
Dredd's most famous opponent was perhaps Judge Death, a character whose ingenious simplicity is almost at the level of The Borg in Star Trek. Death was a judge from a parallel dimension in which the judges had decided that since all crime is done by the living, life itself is a crime, and had therefore promptly executed all inhabitants of that dimension. Judge Death was able to move freely in his ghost form that was immune to bullets, leading to his trademark line "You fools! You cannot kill that which does not live!" Of course, Death simply wanted to kill everybody, following his philosophy of life being evil to the end.
In the first episode that featured Judge Death, he was defeated by tricking him to enter the mind of the beaufiful telepath Judge Anderson, who was then instantly sealed inside a hard plastic bubble to keep them both trapped forever. Of course, it was not smart to use an excellent characters of Death and Anderson this way only as one-shots, so in a later episode Death's three comrades Fire, Mortis and Fear also travelled to Dredd's dimension and released Death and Anderson, who became a recurring character. This time these dark judges were defeated by having Dredd travel to their dimension and there letting the ghosts of citizens avenge their deaths to the dark judges who had killed them. Of course, the dark judges later returned many more times, and in one particularly memorable episode they attacked a senior citizens nursing home.
In their heyday, these comics were absolutely excellent, especially those drawn by artists such as Brian Bolland and my personal favourite Ron Smith. The best thing about these comics is that even though they are drawn in the 80's, you can still read them today and they don't look ridiculous or stupid at all. These comics just work very well and they convey a good overall sense of being in the future. There is also often an educational social message, and the comics include elements from science and both high and lowbrow culture, and not too much but just the right amount. The comic paints a pretty bleak picture of the future. Because robots do pretty much all physical work in the future, there is 90% unemployment and a void of meaninglessness that the citizen try to fill with entertainment and all kinds of stupid things. Sometimes citizens go into "future shock" and start wildly firing at their fellow citizens. (Now there is another expression that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere for a long, long time. I wonder why that is?) The Judges don't give a damn about individual rights and conduct searches without any kind of warrant or probable cause. Dredd often derides "troublemakers" who don't play ball but complain about some drastic action that Judges took for the greater good. Judges also keep "muties" out of the Mega-City and thus maintain its purity.
There are a couple of innovative conventions in the comic itself that are worth mentioning. First, I guess that the writers weren't allowed to use even relatively mild swearwords, so they simply invented new swearwords such as "drokk" and "grud" that Dredd constantly uses without explanation pretty much the same way as we would use "hell" and "damn". After a few episodes, these words become so natural for the reader that he doesn't even notice them. Second, each time the judges use their personal weapons that can shoot many different kind of bullets, they say out loud what type of bullet they are using. This goes for other types of weapons too, so that Dredd might shout "Boot knife!" when he has to attack his opponent with a knife. This makes the flow of the comic easier to follow, and after a few episodes, this convention also becomed totally natural. (In the movie version, this convention couldn't really be applied, so the filmmakers made the Lawgiver gun respond to vocal commands to switch between different kinds of bullets. I think this was a nice touch.)
I remember how impressed I was when I first read the episode where rebellious and vicious punks had started their own society in the streets of Mega-City One. The punks had their own "courts" and a "chief judge" who gave arbitrary sentences to the victims brought before him while the other punks laughed and drank beer in the background. Dredd announced to his superior officers that there is no need to send a force of judges to fight them, because he wants to show that one Judge is harder than a hundred punks together. Dredd fights his way through the punks and in the end makes the punk "chief judge" cry and admit that he is nothing but a worthless punk. To complete the story, Dredd banishes the punks from the City to walk in the radioactive Cursed Earth that surrounds it, which is a de facto death sentence. In the last three panels of the episode, the punks are begging to get back in, but Dredd just thinks to himself that he is being hard but necessarily so, since he has to teach people by this example that citizenship is a priviledge, not a right.
(An amusing side note about punks in genral: the post "Punk culture and ideals promote all body types, all sexualities, all genders and all esthetics" at Althouse had one pretty good comment in it, by "Sippican Cottage" that described punk as "Faux socialism tied to a sort of Hallowe'en costume party. Affecting the pose of nihilism and self destruction for amusement's sake, all the while as serious and humorless as any biddy in a black frock wagging their finger in saloons and telling the sinners to repent." That is so very true.)
In many episodes you can tell what aspects of British society found their way to these strips. In one memorable episode, a rich real estate developer had constructed an orbiting luxury community in outer space, away from all social problems and crime. (Space travel was routine in Judge Dredd comics, although space aliens tended to stay away from Earth, which was a good storytelling decision from the writers.) Dredd entered and announced that according to law, a certain percentage of these apartments must be given to the city for social housing purposes. Complaints were ignored, and soon the first shuttle full of people in need of social housing landed to the community. Of course, these people immediately started an aimless rampage of crime and violence. With this influx of underclass, decent people moved out of the community, thus giving the underclass even more room for social housing. In the last panel it was announced that the place finally had become the first slum in orbit, and the side of the place had a giant graffiti "Spug you all". I have to wonder if the writer of this episode had based it on his own personal experiences.
Whereas the giant Mega-City One covers the eastern seaboard of America (and literally covers the old New York the same way as in Futurama), East-Meg One and Two are two corresponding towns located in Russia. (In later episodes, we also find out that there is also Texas City where everything is big, Brit-Cit, Sino-City etc.) Since this was the eighties, the Russian Mega-Cities were ruled by socialism and their judges used corresponding language and imagery. When we remember how the Finnish leftists reacted to the Commodore 64 hit game "Raid over Moscow" (to cut a long story short for my American readers, suffice to say that even the Parliament eventually became involved) I guess that it's a good thing that they never thought of reading these comics. In the story arc "Apocalypse War", East-Meg One starts the nuclear war against Mega-City One. The Russkies are led by an evil marshal who sends his failed subordinates to Siberia. When he later sees these people lining up for distribution of winter gear, he tells his underling to go cancel that order. To send these people to Siberia? No, the order of giving them winter gear. I wonder how many leftists would get that one.
The story ends with Dredd infiltrating East-Meg and using its own missiles against it so that their magic anti-missile shield cannot help them. (This missile shield had earlier teleported Mega-City One's doomsday missile salvo to an Earth in another dimension where all war is totally unknown, so when its people see these missiles flying in the air, they think that they are very beautiful, and in the next big panel these missiles explode and destroy the whole planet.) East-Meg One gets completely nuked and the few survivors have to walk towards East-Meg Two, and Mega-City One starts a massive rebuilding project that leads to all kinds of lighthearted and more comical incidents.
Some episodes featured the League of Fatties, a fat acceptance movement whose members were so fat that they used a unicycle wheel under their belly to support them and move around better. In the first episode that introduced the League, the fatties were angry about the fact that they were losing weight since under food rationing, they could eat only the same amount of food as all others. The League starts underground action and e.g. attacks a food caravan by having some fatties use their corpulent bodies as suicide missiles to crash and stop the caravan. The greatest sacrifice: they killed themselves so that others could eat! At the end of this episode, Dredd solves the obesity problem by locking up the fatties in isolation blocks and not letting them exit until their weight falls under 400 pounds. At the exit door, there was talking scale that worked as a gatekeeper and mocked and berated the fatty stepping on it if his weight was above this threshold.
Dredd's most famous opponent was perhaps Judge Death, a character whose ingenious simplicity is almost at the level of The Borg in Star Trek. Death was a judge from a parallel dimension in which the judges had decided that since all crime is done by the living, life itself is a crime, and had therefore promptly executed all inhabitants of that dimension. Judge Death was able to move freely in his ghost form that was immune to bullets, leading to his trademark line "You fools! You cannot kill that which does not live!" Of course, Death simply wanted to kill everybody, following his philosophy of life being evil to the end.
In the first episode that featured Judge Death, he was defeated by tricking him to enter the mind of the beaufiful telepath Judge Anderson, who was then instantly sealed inside a hard plastic bubble to keep them both trapped forever. Of course, it was not smart to use an excellent characters of Death and Anderson this way only as one-shots, so in a later episode Death's three comrades Fire, Mortis and Fear also travelled to Dredd's dimension and released Death and Anderson, who became a recurring character. This time these dark judges were defeated by having Dredd travel to their dimension and there letting the ghosts of citizens avenge their deaths to the dark judges who had killed them. Of course, the dark judges later returned many more times, and in one particularly memorable episode they attacked a senior citizens nursing home.
Dood. Word.
Posted by SippicanCottage | 9:47 AM
Even better than Judge Dredd is Nemesis the Warlock.
Unlike in usual comics, humans are evil and aliens good. Human empire, mighty Termight, is strange mixture of KKK, nazism and inquisition.
Torquemada, leader of the humans, is fanatic racist madman, who wants to cleanse whole universe of all intellgient alien presence. Humans are at constant war against their neigbours and all aliens of the conquered planets are send to be killed in vaporization chambers (haihdutussammiot).
Good guys like main character Nemesis and his allies fight against humans. There is much of cynicism and black humour in this comic.
Posted by Anonymous | 12:14 PM
Unlike in usual comics, humans are evil and aliens good. Human empire, mighty Termight, is strange mixture of KKK, nazism and inquisition. Torquemada, leader of the humans, is fanatic racist madman...
I agree, "Nemesis the Warlock" is indeed a great comic, much better than one might expect from this description that is accurate but makes the comic basically look like your typical leftist rant about Western nations and conservatives. This comic is a lot more than that.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 12:30 PM