Buy Mega City Undercover
Review by Paul Stewart
 
Mega-City One: shining metropolis of the future, a place of lofty dreams clad in rockcrete and steel, a place where the impossible becomes possible. At least, that’s what it said on the brochure. But we know better. Mega-City One has an underbelly that makes ‘seamy’ seem complimentary. Down in the dregs, people get desperate. Life is short and brutal and harsh. The law, represented so well by the Judges, just doesn’t mean that much when you struggle just to survive. The Judges become a symbol of law at best, and other resources are needed. Enter: the Wally Squad.
 
The oddly named division of Justice Department takes care of the undercover work, of mixing with the citizens and trying to blend in with them. They are trained as any other Judges are in the Academy of Law, but are found to be adept at infiltration, manipulation and going inexplicably unnoticed. Some of them are stern and inflexible as any other Judge, but many find themselves embracing life on the streets too easily. Boundaries blur, laws get bent, and the thin blue line gets very thin indeed.
 
Mega-City Undercover follows the lives of a number of these Wally Squad Judges who have appeared in the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine and 2000 AD. Most significant of these are Lenny Zero, created by Andy Diggle and Jock, and Judges Aimee Nixon and Dirty Frank, created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint. 
 
Lenny Zero is a Wally Squad Judge who has made the unfortunate mistake of giving up on the celibacy that the Judges so often practice and has fallen in love with a cit. Love might be a very private emotion, but when the chance comes top bail on being a Judge and to escape off-world with his squeeze and a bit of cash to boot, Zero decides to go for it. But his indiscretions have been showing and Justice Department have already been onto him. Indeed Wally Squad aren’t the only ones who can go undercover and the girl of his dreams is from none other than the SJS, the Judges who judge the Judges.
 
Caught in a triple-bind of betrayal, Zero uses his incredible skills to escape the clutches of the law, and the mob again and again, playing one off against the other in an effort to some how start a new life away from it all. And it is thrilling stuff. Zero is a well conceived and well written character, with his exploits, few though they are, being legendary. Some of it of course calls for some deus ex machina twists to explain how he manages to get away with what he does, but because the stories are so strong, this is easily forgivable. Most notable is Zero facing off against none other than old stony face himself, and as Zero is the protagonist, he gets the opportunity to get one over the mighty lawman himself. And Dredd, he don’t like that.
 
Lenny Zero was conceived, as Diggle tells us in the introduction, as his chance to break the editorial mode and get into writing comics. And Diggle does a very good job. It was also the debut for Jock with his distinctive scratchy fine-line approach. It was like both new creators had nothing much to lose and gave it their all. The result is a marvellous stint on this character who could easily have gone on to bigger and better things.
 
Lenny Zero only takes up a small amount of the volume though, as the rest is taken up by Low Life. Low Life tells the stories of a group of undercover Judges, mainly focusing on Aimee Nixon and Dirty Frank. Nixon is a sassy, highly adaptable woman with a cybernetic left arm and an ability to fool lie detectors. She was born and raised by the section of Mega-City so grotty it is known as the Low Life, a place where respectable dreams crawl away to die. 
 
Nixon sees her job as a Wally Squad Judge less as a calling, and more what it is inevitable for her to do. The Low Life is a part of her, running through her veins and part of her very soul. And it can cause the boundaries between her role as a Judge and as a desperate human being to become blurred. An ability to fool a lie detector is thus a way of dealing with the impossible, particularly in her debut story, Paranoia, when she finds herself caught up in a conspiracy which is killing undercover Judges. The irony is that the conspiracy might actually be for a good cause. This raises some intriguing issues about the morality of having an underclass, that perhaps societies need to have the dregs, because sometimes people feel more comfortable there.
 
The following story, Heavy Duty, sees Nixon transformed bodily into a Fattie to go undercover in a suspicious health spa. A novel idea with a dramatic, gory opening which is over too quickly to properly explore the conflict of trying to one’s duty when weighing short of a ton.

Dirty Frank is another undercover Judge introduced in Paranoia who gets his own story in Rock and a Hard Place which, for my money, is one of the funniest things ever to grace the pages of 2000 AD. Some of the humour is not very subtle as a merciless lampooning of the heavy metal music industry ensues. But then again, Dirty Frank is hardly subtle as an undercover operative. Posing as a long-dead rock-god, it doesn’t take long for Dirty Frank to start referring to himself as ‘Dirty Frank’ as he only speaks of himself in the third person. Apparently his character's look is based on Alan Moore, being like a dishevelled Old Testament prophet with an eye-patch and an aversion to personal hygiene and excessive danger. I personally find Dirty Frank’s dialogue such a delight, whenever I read it, I find myself speaking it out loud.
 
The remaining stories remain in the Low Life with Dirty Frank and Aimee Nixon teaming up and working by themselves on three more cases, in which Nixon continues to be tested on where her loyalties truly lie, and Dirty Frank hams it up against a cadre of ninja infants, which is actually much cleverer a plot device than what it sounds.  
 
Low Life is excellent story telling. Flint’s initial designs are followed faithfully by Simon Coleby who does the art on about half the Low Life tales. Each panel tells the story well, and all stories come with a sense of pacing that is almost cinematic. The storylines are clever, fast moving and when they aren’t making you laugh, may well make you think. The Low Life is a place where the battle for survival is frequently ironic, and that it is the undercover Judges themselves who face this same irony. Always there is the temptation to sink deeper into the mire of desperate citizen life, and sometimes the thread of judicial integrity hangs very thin indeed. Like their compatriot, Jack Point, over in the Simping Detective, daily life always threatens to throw you over the edge.
 
The extras in the form of the introductions by Diggle and Williams, the cover galleries, and an excerpt of script are all welcome, if pedestrian editions to the volume. The original cover by Jock is a thing of beauty and I hope may herald an end to the rainbow spines of the Rebellion graphic novels.
 
Mega-City Undercover is a fine hybrid volume collecting the stories of Wally Squad Judges. While I suspect that we are unlikely to see any more of Lenny Zero, the Low Life remains fertile ground for many more stories to come. These stories work because of their contrast to the mainstream Judges, those staunch bastions of the law, slowly, slowly corrupted by simply being human.
 
The last word is best left to Dirty Frank: “Desist from supernatural activity and put your claws or elongated digits in the air where Dirty Frank can see them… …which is a sentence Dirty Frank never expected to say.”
 
Try saying it out loud in a kind of muttered twang. You know it makes sense.