Kenny Evil

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  1. Judge Dredd

    in Comic Book Adaptations

    Posted

    Resident Judge Dredd fan here: Dredd started out as a fairly standard cop but quickly evolved into something more subversive with the first multi-part strip "The Robot War". In that Dredd had to put down an uprising by the robots that did most of the work in the city. What made this fairly subversive was that the robots were blatantly shown to be a slave caste. Despite this they managed to make the perfect villains for the strip because they could be maimed and blown apart in the most horrible ways and no one would complain like they had with Action, another IPC comic that had brought a tabloid crusade against it because of the depictions of ultra-violence. My favourite part of this early story was that the robot's leader was a carpenter who was killed and resurrected part of the way through it.

    As the years went on it developed into a really fun sci-fi/action strip with a great sense of dark humour. Mike put up a newspiece about the release of Case Files 5 which covers the Apocalypse War and some other strips around it. Without a doubt this is probably the best of Dredd from around that era, and me and Tom covered the Apocalypse War in our inaugural edition of Waiting for the Trade.

    About 6 or 7 years into the strip, John Wagner and Alan Grant, the strips co-writers, were becoming concerned with the number of young readers who were clamouring for a Judge-style system in the UK. When their editor rejected a story "A Letter from a Baath Island nudist" they rewrote it as "A Letter From a Democrat" which was framed as a letter from Hester Hyman, a democrat terrorist who held a TV show audience hostage, to her husband and children. This was the starkest portrayal of the Judge system as a repressive, fascist-styled government yet. For once the repression of the citizens was shown without any nudges or winks and this storyline was visited several more times over the strips existence leading to America which I consider to be, not just the best Dredd story of all time, but one of the best comic stories of all time.

    The work of Wagner and Grant and the short page count of each episode of Dredd meant that it could take any stance they wanted without betraying the character. Dredd could be the hero, the villain or barely even feature in any given story and it would feel like a Dredd story. It could be a whacky screwball comedy, or something relentlessly grim and Dredd's stoic character worked as a great centrepiece for the insanity that was Mega City One.

    Really, to my mind, an almost perfect Dredd film has been made: Robocop. Between that and his adaptation of Starship Troopers, I'm utterly convinced that Paul Verhoven would have been the ideal director for a Dredd movie and it's a shame for all of us that that never happened.

  16. 30 Day Comic Challenge- 2012 Edition

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    24th- A Comic By Your Favorite Artist

    This changes all the time but my current favourite artist is Henry Flint

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    I love this series for its sheer batshit insanity. The last human being alive gets killed off in the first six pages as an afterthought! Lovely stuff and Flint just goes to town drawing all of the weird stuff Robbie Morrisson throws at him.

    I mean, seriously, look at some of this

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    shakara.jpg

  18. 30 Day Comic Challenge- 2012 Edition

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    22nd- A Comic By Your Favorite Writer

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    EDIT: Should follow up on this. While Wagner hasn't done anything as structurally impressive as Watchmen, he is undoubtedly one of the most underrated writers in comics. For the thirty five years that Judge Dredd has been running he's written the vast majority of the strips and the tone of the strips could range from light comedy to the dark drama of America. In addition to Dredd, he's also responsible for one of 2000AD's other mainstays Strontium Dog. During the 80s he partnered with Alan Grant and the amount of material they produced is staggering. They were writing so many of IPC's comics (including up to 60% of 2000AD) that the editors forced them to write under pseudonyms. Outside of this he was also responsible for "A History of Violence", "Button Man" and Song of the Surfer.

  23. Episode 517

    in Earth-2.net: The Show

    Posted

    Don't you come in here ruining our fully formed prejudices with your correctly-sourced facts!

    I was thinking of writing up something based on the tradition of character borrowing in comics. I think the Authority would have to be included in that and maybe the Boys as well.

  25. 30 Day Comic Challenge- 2012 Edition

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    12th- A Comic From Your Favorite Independent Comics Company

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    I quite like Slave Labour Graphics, partly for their output and partly for their very honest tagline: We pay you peanuts so that you can draw monkeys.

    13th- A Comic From Your Favorite Comics Company, Period

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    Again, not a surprise, but with the anthology format there's probably been more characters that have been in 2000AD's pages than any other company bar the big two.