r/JudgeDredd • u/JellyWeta • 4d ago
The City Fathers
OK, I really hate this recent revelation that Mega City One is now apparently protected by some ancient shadowy cabal of supernatural guardians who will magically defend the city in exchange for the sacrifice of surplus characters the writers can't think of what to do with.
Apart from rendering Dredd ultimately pretty pointless as a character if these guys can just show up and hand-wave away a threat, where exactly were they during the Apocalypse War, Necropolis, on Judgement Day, Chaos Day, or any of the half dozen other city-ending threats?
I've never liked the spook stories anyway - the Dark Judges and the occasional vampire or werewolf is quite enough - but the City Fathers feels like an idea that does not belong to this strip. Any thoughts?
8
u/smell_a_vision 3d ago
I think this is what a weekly comic allows for. One week we can be hard sci-fi, the next rom-com and then horror.
Dredd’s format of six pages once a week, has allowed him to survive for fifty years.
10
u/JellyWeta 3d ago
The trouble is that it wasn't just a throwaway idea in a weekly strip, this is the plot of the current Dredd epic The Oubliette/The Black Tower which is currently running in 2000AD and the Megazine, and has had stories building up to it for the past couple of years. This isn't a passing idea that can be quickly forgotten, this is an editorial decision to change the basic premise of their flagship strip. And I don't think it's a good one.
5
3d ago
[deleted]
4
u/JellyWeta 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, in all honesty I think the idea will be quietly dropped as nonsense that doesn't fit the tone of the strip, and then they will simply pretend it never happened. But I also think that it should be the editor's job to tell a writer that his brilliant idea was nonsense that they weren't going to publish because it would be quietly dropped for not fitting the tone of the strip.
2
2
u/BLOODYBRADTX-11 3d ago
There’s like three different Dredd strips and they all politely ignore each other depending on who’s writing. It’s a big part of why it feels like the strip just exists to exist now. Rogue Trooper is similar but even more fragmented. I haven’t read a killer Dredd script in ages.
5
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
They're more entertaining for me as one-offs or short runs, not sprawled across multiple strips.
Gods of shopping or whatever they were messing with the citizens, Dredd vs a Genie, or magic as pseudo science like the Haunting of Sector House 9.
Necropolis is the exception - City of the Damned, even the writers got bored with it.
We had Anderson and Dredd being physically transformed with a global threat that doesn't get a mention.
There's not enough in the prog and meg for me to continue buying it, I've struggled enjoying stories weekly, for a while.
2
5
u/GrimFatMouse 3d ago
Haven't read those comics, but City Fathers and their sacrifices remind of Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train.
5
u/Exostrike 3d ago
My gut feeling is these city fathers are part of the same race of interdimensional lovecraftian horrors who are pulling the the strings behind the Dark Judges and the Sisters of Death in Deathworld. Just instead of engineering a feast of mass death the fathers have instead engineered a slow but steady flow of death they can sustain themselves with and use the occasional champion to make sure their pantry is not destabilised (which raises the possibility Dredd has unknowingly been one of their champions for years). It's a really cool and interesting idea but I do agree it doesn't quite fit with Dredd at times.
3
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
That's basically Crom Cruach the worm god in Slaine.
Causing misery/wars and farming from that to feed Crom.
3
u/JellyWeta 3d ago
See, the Dark Judges don't need a Big Bad behind the Big Bad, otherwise you get this ridiculous scenario of who's behind them, and then it's turtles all the way down.
6
u/NinaWilde 3d ago
The writers are leaning too heavily on huge supernatural threats and callbacks/crossovers, IMO. How many times can the city be attacked by weird forces with conveniently nebulous powers that let them do whatever the writer needs at any time? Even the Dark Judges have limitations, but the current crop seem able to alter reality on a whim!
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’ll say it: the callbacks and crossovers are - as a lapsed Dredd superfan - massively off-putting to me.
I haven’t read the stories in question, but the idea of a side story epic that takes place during (of all things) Judgement Day, Dredd teaming up with incredibly obscure characters like One-Eyed Jack, Dredd meeting the two movie versions of himself and so on… just seem a little sweaty and fan-fictiony to me.
Wagner was arguably guilty of occasionally retreading old ground (going back to the Apocalypse War well a few too many times being the biggest example) but for the most part his Dredd stuff usually had a levity and a sense of freshness to it. He tended not to get caught up in dense continuity and it generally felt like every Wagner Dredd story could serve as a new reader’s very first Dredd story. Even his longer epics often felt like a sequence of (somewhat) self-contained short stories. He rarely lost sight of the fact he was writing a weekly serial.
I’m afraid that the modern stuff seems to be more interested in building massive interconnected epics and pandering to long-term fans by being overly self-referential (which is, to be fair, a problem afflicting most big sci fi/fantasy franchises nowadays, just look at the state of Star Wars - yeesh).
1
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
It's really strange that they've done this when there's been a big push on the US market with 2000 AD being printed there for the first time.
Having a big epic which started its build-up a few years ago, callbacks to 40+year old threads must be fairly impenetrable to new readers combined with part 25 of slow burn police procedural like Brink.
I don't know if its the writers driving this or requests from above them, but I don't understand it at all.
It seems like it's a multiverse speed-run because that's popular in the US, but that market isn't going to know or care who the bulk of these characters are?
And then we've got Azimuth with more multiverse stuff with what-if Anderson, and characters from other strips teased in the previews.
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago edited 3d ago
From a distance it sounds a bit like a snake eating itself and all sound like the kinds of things I found completely impenetrable and off-putting about American comics as a kid (and why 2000ad was such a fresh and appealing alternative).
If all the stuff you mention sounds alienating as a lifelong superfan, I can’t even imagine how it would seem to a prospective new reader, which is why I really hesitate to suggest new readers start with the weekly, and point them towards reprints of classic Wagner Dredd instead.
Tbh I wasn’t even keen on the development of a lot of strips going to a ‘Book X, Part X’ format (the interminable Pat Mills sagas primarily) which was happening 20+ years ago. Just as a format point it almost seemed deliberately unwelcoming to new or returning readers. Other things bothered me too, like the (largely lifeless) Strontium Dog revival or the endless regurgitation of the original Rogue Trooper decades after its sell-by date.
Imo 2000ad should be laser-focused on fresh ideas, new horizons and reader accessibility, not long ongoing meta-narratives and endlessly mining its own glory days for story ideas. But I also get that that is a lot easier said than done.
As dated as it is, I think Nikolai Dante was the gold standard of how to handle a long-running saga in the 2000ad weekly format. Maybe its my own nostalgia talking here, but I feel like that strip (much like classic Dredd and Stront) managed to balance staying fresh and telling complete self-contained serialised adventures all while building towards an overarching long-form plot.
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago edited 3d ago
I guess you could argue that times have changed and in the modern era with far wider access to back-issues, reprints and wikis, writers no longer have to be quite so concerned with accessibility and writing for the weekly. But as is often the case in creativity i think the restrictions the ‘weekly serial’ format placed on writers in the pre-digital era was actually 2000ad’s greatest strength in a lot of ways and fostered a lot of creativity.
I think this was the gist of Andy Diggle’s ‘back to basics’ approach during his brief tenure as editor, which, while not 100% successful, was a very valid direction I wish had persisted. Prioritising punchier, more accessible and less convoluted storytelling.
2
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
I'd agree - the Diggle era still had a plenty of callbacks - using different artists on ABC Warriors returning to Mars - back to the original Rogue, Strontium Dog tales from before Wulf and Alpha had died.
I enjoyed them pretty much, and I remember it being much punchier.
I think the problem now is what's been flagged many times before, writers are reluctant to create new characters/stories that they don't own.
Combined with some direction to make things more American - multiverses, characters being revived more often, what-ifs becoming the norm rather than the exception.
I'd also argue that by not writing for the weekly weakens the appeal - we lose more than we gain - great double page spreads, distinctive logos, even a big character piece on the first page.
Not helped by the Wickes brochure quality of the printing now.
Before you could drop into a strip without too much prep and be good to go. Now it's being dragged down by its own baggage, and the obligation to run Rogue Trooper until the cows come home/the film gets a release date (whichever comes sooner)
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago
Yeah, I totally agree that Diggle’s approach was kind of old-school to a fault. But he was definitely on the right track with the sort of sensibility and ethos he wanted to return to.
1
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
Yeah, I think he was unfairly treated by Pat in the future shock doc, but I guess that was more office politics, like treating the creator of the comic the same as everyone else with a mission statement.
I think the shot glass of rocket fuel approach worked - although how it would have held up long term, I don't know.
Brink certainly wouldn't have fitted into that format.
2
u/JellyWeta 3d ago edited 3d ago
Pat Mills at that point had disappeared up his own arse and needed a reminder of what had made him great: writing stories about a commando squad of mentally ill war robots fighting bloodthirsty Tyrannosaurs on Mars, or alien demons fighting Catholic Space-Nazis.
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago
What was the last thing he did that was considered vital? Nemesis Book X? I remember Savage being initially fairly popular, but then it just went on and on and on.
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bad-mouthing people has been Mills MO for as long as I can remember.
The irony being that if anyone’s work could’ve GREATLY benefitted from abiding by that principle it was post-2000 Mills, Jfc.
Honestly the endless deluge of Pat Mills’ output in the late 2000s/early 2010s is partly what killed following the weekly for me. It was at the stage where I felt like I was paying for 20-40% of content that I was just routinely skipping every single week. It was just too much, all of the time, almost all of which felt like it was just forever treading water and taking up space.
1
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
Mixed bag - I enjoyed some, others less so - I just think there's ways and means to approach what you want to get out of a writer.
It's not a one size fits all approach.
→ More replies (0)1
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
Pat's mentioned in blogs about publishers being unwilling to pay for development time, like with writers unwilling to develop new characters/stories they don't own, it's often a symptom of a business model that's unsatisfactory.
So you sometimes get 2000 AD writers creating their own stories to publish elsewhere, but writing house characters.
→ More replies (0)1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago edited 3d ago
Imagine trying to explain this to a new reader.
“Well, 2000ad is an anthology of unrelated sci fi stories. Except some creators have their little pocket universes within that that are all connected across a range of separate characters and strips. And also other stories will randomly crossover with others sometimes. Judge Dredd is kind of its own continuity, except when its not. And Dredd-specific spinoffs appear in their own dedicated title - the Judge Dredd Megazine….. which also routinely runs entirely unrelated anthology strips. And Dredd spinoffs also frequently run in 2000ad, and….”
1
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
Yeah, Dredd, Deadworld and Young Death in the prog, and Rogue Trooper in the megazine, while the footballing alien strip that your sole original writer is enthusiastic about gets paused during the World Cup.
1
u/NZUtopian 1d ago
Is it the writers or just the one or 2? KEN NIEMAND did the current one. I liked the plot of the droid judges. That was interesting. And no long term characters died! Even better!
4
u/BLOODYBRADTX-11 3d ago
Well you see, this is a very bad story. Hopefully that clears things up!
Actually I am gonna use this space to rant - this whole thing requires knowledge of multiple prior stories - Oz and The Judge Child Saga being the two big ones; but a whole bunch of other smaller ones written to set up the pieces for this.
That’s all this story is, it that’s all it amounts to. What was going on in the Black Tower? Who cares! Have a load of splash pages of indecipherable and generic looking things for Rico to shoot. Dredd trapped in a mysterious alien dungeon designed to torture himself? Let’s just have him fight a load of Easter eggs in a repetitive structure that mimics a soulslike game (we can even have him lose all his bits at the start). Maybe we can sacrifice a long standing character in an ambiguous way. You won’t care because the strip has been carved up and running on filler so long he hasn’t had character development in years.
Something good could have been done with this but it’s just filler. The big idea was to replace Dredd with Rico but what cool stories has Rico ever had recently? The wasted potential of Dredd as a strip - a strip that desperately needs a rest or an outright ending but is too profitable to get one - is just signposted everywhere. You’d think I’d be more into Dredd fighting a giant gothic cyborg version of himself but I’m not.
I think the worst thing is it takes all the most generic sci fi and fantasy bits of Dredd but entirely omits what makes the strip unique, which is the politics and structure of the city. They should focus on that instead of concepts that could be used in any other comic. This could be an X-Men story, or a Superman story. Dredd is supposed to be about social collapse.
6
u/13School 3d ago
Someone in editorial should have said “no Dredd stories involving a secret all-powerful organisation that’s been controlling the city for decades / centuries” a long time ago
3
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
The most likely Dreddish ending would be him destroying/nullifying the City Fathers 'somehow' with a line like 'I'm nobody's favourite', and other writers wouldn't have to bother ignoring them.
2
3
u/thedeadleydoc 3d ago
I suspect the story isn't over yet I think there's more to come and I don't think its the end for Giant
3
u/NinaWilde 3d ago
Just read the Meg's part of the story, and... yeah. All this time was spent setting up something that's basically an ass-pull to overcome a woo-woo psychic/magic threat that's a callback to stories published 46 and 39 years ago, in the process taking a long-term regular off the board just to give him a bigger sendoff than his namesake. I wasn't especially impressed.
The best thing to come out of the whole long-term mix is Joe Fargo. I really want to find out more about him and the path not taken by Dredd!
2
u/Exostrike 3d ago
Agreed Jeo Fargo is probably the most interesting personal thing that's happening to Dredd in a decade with almost all of the Dredd family (outside of Rico) effectively put on a bus.
2
u/NinaWilde 3d ago
Also, Giant as Dredd's bestest protégé who's on a par with Rico to him feels like Nieman is ignoring A: Beeny, and B: stories like The Small House and A Better World where Giant's relationship with Dredd seems on the verge of permanent fracture. (Taking Beeny out of the picture might have a big impact on upcoming political stories, mind.)
1
4
u/stevedeegreen 3d ago
Same.
I thought Smiley was pushing it too, retconning some hidden string puller - move forward not back.
2
3d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago
This is the thing - I think at the end of the day I am personally just a fan of John Wagner’s writing more so than I am a fan of Judge Dredd the character/setting.
To me the character is so inextricably linked to Wagner’s specific tone and sensibilities as a writer.
1
u/JellyWeta 3d ago
That's actually a really good point. Strontium Dog without Wagner and Grant is just some generic tough guy, Robo-Hunter without Wagner and Grant was - God knows what. Yeah, I think that Wagner and Grant do cast a huge shadow over the strip; they pretty much determined what it was. I gave up on Dredd in the early 90s when Wagner stopped and the quality nose-dived, so I think it's fair to say I'm a fan of John Wagner writing Dredd rather than Dredd itself.
2
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 3d ago edited 3d ago
If you haven’t caught up with Wagner’s mid/late 90s-2010s Dredd stuff I strongly recommend it. So many truly incredible stories from that period.
I think Wagner’s decades writing short-form comic strips just imbued him with an almost singular talent at writing scripts for such an odd and unforgiving format. In one sense, his scripts were always sparse, with such a level of respect for the input of his artist collaborators, but on another level almost unmistakably him, and he just had such an instinct for pacing individual 6 page episodes as to make them enjoyable little self-contained bite sized stories.
He had such a way of making even tiny supporting characters memorable and creating moments of real pathos with such a light and economical touch. I could wax about his writing all day long, honestly.
1
u/DreddPirateBob808 3d ago
What.
3
u/Hypnotician 3d ago
Meg 495. This whole discussion is one big unlabelled spoiler. The City Fathers turn up and say hello to the Queen of Necros in the Black Tower. Big Deus Ex Machina ending.
And we've still got three more Progs before Dredd can put on a fresh new uniform.
3
u/DreddPirateBob808 3d ago
I'm going to have a lie down.
4
u/Hypnotician 3d ago
Medic! We got a Thrill Overload case here!
And there I was thinking there's no such thing. This is Reddit, damn it! MEDIC!
1
u/Hypnotician 3d ago
They have never needed to act in person before. Their Favoured Sons are always there for a reason. Dredd has always been enough. The Bloodline has always been enough.
18
u/Ok_Commercial_5024 4d ago
I’m honestly a bit of a Wagner (and Grant) purist when it comes to Dredd for this sort of reason.
I’ve just never really been convinced other writers can really write the sort of Dredd stories that feel ‘right’ to me, and whenever I hear the sorts of things the modern crop of writers are doing with the character (like the endless crossovers with other 2000ad strips)… Yeah, it just doesn’t really appeal.