By John Wagner & Colin MacNeil

Buy Judge Dredd: America
 
What to Expect: Arguably the greatest Dredd story ever produced, and the two sequel stories to round out the saga.

Review by Paul Stewart

"This is a love story."

The words are beautiful and jarring and follow the brutal and uncompromising introduction by Judge Dredd as he extols his philosophy of Justice at any price, including that of freedom. Thus the first story of the America trilogy begins.

In many ways America is a love story, or a loving tribute to the legacy and legend of Judge Dredd. In the introduction to this volume John Wagner, script-droid extraordinaire, tells of how the America storyline was like the culmination of all that had gone before with Dredd. The story itself is long in its scope covering a generation of Mega-City history covering such important moments as Block Mania and the Apocalypse War, and the rise of democracy and the great Democratic march. It was also the story that introduced us to the terrorist group, Total War. Yet the story is an intimate portrait of the lives of two people, Bennet Beeny and America Jara.

America was brought up in Mega-City One following her parents migration, looking for a land and life of freedom and opportunity. America herself is almost the bright shining dream of hope that her parents carry, a life filled with virtue. Yet the big Meg is an oppressive place and virtue can be an inconvenient commodity when it rubs up against the Judges exercising their duty to uphold the law. Fear, oppression and the excesses of justice do not sit well for young America who learns that standing up for what you believe in can come with a terrible price.

Watching on is Bennet Beeny. Beeny is talented but fearful and insecure, and pines for the love and spark of life he sees in America. He lurches between doing what is right and what is wrong, between the good life and the life of rebellion. His desire for America drives him to make the most extraordinary decisions, perhaps the most extraordinary is to shut out the world of oppression which exists all around him. Beeny is so lost in the potential of the private universe he longs to have with America that little else matters. For America, it is the focus on the world around her is all that matters.

The shocking conclusion to America shows the desperate lengths that both Beeny and America are prepared to go to for their mutual causes, and the final twist, although embedded in the very beginning of the story is one of those great moments in the annals of Mega-City history.

There is so much to note here in this superlative story. The artwork by Colin MacNeil is nothing short of astounding. The fully-painted depiction of life in Mega-City one is virtually flawless. Its vibrancy fairly leaps from the page, making you believe in the characters and places are somehow more real than if photographed. The full page images of a Judge being shot, of Dredd standing over the bloodied U.S. flag, and the extreme close-up of Dredd’s face are phenomenal. For my money though it is the simplicity of the image of a Judge seated on a Lawmaster staring down a brightly dressed child who has had the misfortune to drop their ice cream. This image alone is worth the cost of admission: the drama, the tension, the sheer weight of oppressive authority simply oozes from this image. Cast in a background of white space, it is as if nothing else in the world matters but this moment. Pure genius.

The genius continues with the structuring of the story. While it is a Judge Dredd story, Dredd himself plays a background role, less as a character, more of a force of nature, oppressive and tearing at the lives of ordinary people. The narration too is a puzzle in itself that only becomes revealed at the end, when you realise that the answer to the conclusion was in plain sight the whole time.

America is a masterwork of comic storytelling and stands with the best that has ever been produced.

Perhaps then the following story ‘Fading of the Light’ may feel like something of an anticlimax. Certainly it would be a hard act to follow. While MacNeil continues on art duties the fully painted art has given way to line far simpler line art with computer colourisation. This adds to the feeling that perhaps the story is somehow ‘cashing in’ on the original. Do not be fooled by this however as Fading of the Light has a complexity and pacing all of its own.

Some years later and Beeny’s health is deteriorating. Beeny has a daughter whom he has also named ‘America’ out of love and guilt for the fate of the first America. With his death looming he wants to provide for the best life for his daughter possible and starts to contemplate the world that she lives in. That is when he is visited by an operative from Total War, Herris, who urges Beeny to end his life with meaning by committing a suicide bombing. Herris uses Beeny’s guilt to manipulate him into doing it, but we discover that guilt isn’t the only motivator in his life.

The Judges become suspicious of this activity and Beeny is shadowed by a street Judge who confuses the role of surveillance with preventing crime. Beeny is brutally assaulted and when the Judge fails to act to protect him, this festers inside his declining mind. The climax of the story is whether Beeny is prepared to go through with the bombing or not, and when young America is used as a hostage, Beeny knows that there is only one course of action to ensure her ongoing safety… that the only safe people in an oppressive regime is to be one of the oppressors.

Beeny’s final act is to have his daughter become a Judge.

One of the interesting facets of this story is the character of Robert, who is the robo-butler to Bennet Beeny. Such characters are usually treated as part of the furniture, yet Robert has a kind of life and soul all of its (his) own. Wagner loves playing machines and robots in roles of being the carers, nurturers and spiritual advisors, and this happens again here. Robert is the main carer for both Beeny and young America and does so with understated pathos. When Beeny becomes too sick to write his final farewell to America, it is Robert who takes on the task, a significant moment.

While not as moving as the first America story, Fading of the Light has a disquieting message. Beyond the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach, it suggests that oppression and suffering has value if it somehow serves a greater good, even if that greater good may never be realised. It is easy to pity the character of Beeny as he is so very human, and so very flawed. He is prepared to take a stand, and perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Rounding off the trilogy is ‘Cadet’. In Cadet things have a sense of having come, if not full circle, then at least into a kind of spiral. Some ten years later and young America Beeny is a very able Cadet Judge. As part of her assessment she must open an old case and investigate it afresh.

The case she chooses is the one tracked in Fading of the Light, but she begins by putting Dredd through an interrogation. What was so black and white for Dredd in the opening statements of the saga becomes placed under new scrutiny. The solid foundations from which he has operated, through the pugnacious spirit of Judge Beeny, becomes cast into a new and uncomfortable light. Where Dredd has remained in the background for the first too tales, suddenly he is in the spotlight and his judgement is virtually called into question. It is a gripping moment.

While Dredd is so often cast as a stoic, almost stony figure, it is the consummate skill of Wagner as a writer to draw out the emotion and drama from such a figure. By playing on the values that Dredd has we get to see the chinks in his character.

Beeny recruits Dredd to assist with her investigation into who the real powers were behind the Total War bombings and what follows is a quite personal journey for Beeny as she returns to her father’s estate where Robert still manages things. The trail will eventually lead back to America Jara, and we discover that Bennet Beeny was not the only one with an obsessive love for her.

Cadet is almost a by-the-numbers tale of street Judging, but in the light of the background of events from the first two stories carries with it an emotional weight. It also introduces Judge Beeny as a fully-fledged street Judge was an agenda of reform, of reshaping the Judicial system. There is a sense that the spirit of America lingers on within the young Judge, and that perhaps one day justice and freedom may yet be able to coexist.

The final part of this story sees MacNeil’s artwork become simplified again. Yet this transition into the fabric of the regular Dredd world seems to fit with the style of artwork. It is almost as if the grand dreams become reduced down to having to fit in with everyday life, and subtly Cadet carries with it a sense of the dream merging into business as usual.

This is the first time that all three stories have been collected into the one volume. Somehow this works better than just the first two, as Cadet provides almost a sense of closure to the saga, visually as much as anything else. The first America is a work of comics perfection, yet the story carries on. Dredd and the world he lives in marches impassively on much as in life. There are those moments of great import, when it seems that everything that is important collides. They are a moment to reflect on what has been achieved and what will be the way forward. America serves this purpose for Judge Dredd, it is the legacy for the strip, a yardstick by which all future Dredd stories will be measured.

The Dream that was America.

Buy Judge Dredd: America