By John Wagner, Kev Walker, Simon Coleby and Carl Critchlow

Buy Judge Dredd: Mandroid
 
What to Expect: A tale of a war vet who comes home to Mega City One barely in one piece, only to lose everything else...

Review by Robert Frazer

"Wh-what're you lookin' at me like that for?"

"I'm just counting, Frigg. Counting the years I'm going to put you away for. I'm up to twenty. Oops, there goes twenty-one."

"Mandroid" is a tale with particular resonance for me. While naturally I have been aware of Judge Dredd and 2000AD as cultural icons, and flicked through the odd prog on the newsagent shelf from time to time, I have only become a disciple of Tharg, His Mighty Greenness, in the last few years. "Mandroid" was running when I started to take an active interest in the comic, and the interrogation scene distinguished by the above quote is fixed in my mind as the agent through which the vague, general impressions I had of the character Dredd as "extreme policeman" condensed down into a concrete and tangible knowledge of the man.

It's a crucially important scene - not just for my own personal reminisces, but for followers of Dredd in general, and newcomers who may want to see what he's all about. It speaks volumes about him and the comics which bear his name - while the cold, biting cruelty of the intimidation is plainly no-nonsense, it's significant that Dredd isn't just laying in with his truncheon and rearranging the necessary confession out of the suspect's broken teeth, as the mainstream-media stereotype might lead us to expect. There are subtleties to the lawman and his environment, and his adventures are not straightforward disposable action romps. This crucial detail, apparent throughout this book, and combined with the self-contained lack of continuity and more familiar basic plot, makes Mandroid a thorough and splendid introduction of the Dreddverse to new readers.  

For the more established Squaxx Dek Thargo, "Mandroid" has additional significance for the attitude that Judge Dredd displays. Dredd is not really the monolithic paragon of the law he's commonly depicted as, because in actual fact he's two different people. The tough and taciturn Lawman Of The Future is still crackin' skulls and stopping at nothing to ram a perp - or, indeed, any creep who glances at him sideways - into the kerb. This is perhaps best illustrated recently with the Megazine story Red Handed, where Dredd actually imprisons the hero of the story on a technicality.

However, Wagner has sought increasingly in recent years to present a new Dredd - one who is still stoic and sure in the face of obvious criminality, but bemired and bogged down in the muddy grey uncertainty beyond the muggers and drug pushers, and struggling to reconcile the letter of the law to the ideal of justice. This is most prominently seen in the ongoing "Mutant Rights" arc played in several stories grown from the seeds planted in Origins.

These two judges are starkly different people, and their tone and approach are dissonant and uneven - it's not hard to imagine that another of Dredd's clones has been quietly phased in to pound the beat. This awkward, stumbling imbalance is also indicative of continuing editorial uncertainty over who possesses the crown of "the writer of Dredd". The dichotomy between Dredds is a significant influence upon Mandroid. The saga is a memorable one for a variety of reasons, but most significantly it's Wagner's happy success in repairing the schizophrenic personality fault line and marrying the two different Judges back into a single, coherent character.

The Mandroid graphic novel collects the two Thrills that form the complete and unabridged storyline - the titular opening story from 2005, and the 2007 sequel "Mandroid: Instrument of War".

"Mandroid" tells the tale of one Sergeant Nate Slaughterhouse. He is an able NCO in the Space Corps, until he's mortally wounded in action and rebuilt into a combat-cyborg, or 'Mandroid', as the only way for him to survive. Feeling emasculated and paralysed by self-loathing over being transformed into the cybernetic 'freaks' he reviles, Slaughterhouse is unable to adjust back to normal service. Eventually discharged, accompanied by his loving officer wife Kitty (who resigned in order to remain with him) and their young son Tommy, he returns to Mega-City One. 

As we know all too well, though, the foetid blocks and shadowy alleyways of the Meg are far more dangerous than the bloodiest battlefields, and the displaced family are hit very hard by a particularly solid form of culture shock. With Nate continuing to wallow in sullen self-pity, relations between him and his wife start to sour, and the family is rent asunder by tragedy when Nate inconveniences the local Block Mafia's protection racket. Consumed by incandescent hatred for the rotten criminal cesspit in which they've drowned - and the dark knowledge that it was his own pigheadedness that threw them into it - Nate works out his grief in the only way a Mandroid can, spiralling into a self-destructive revenger's tragedy.

"Mandroid: Instrument of War" returns two years later, with Slaughterhouse trapped inside an iso-cube due to his bloody vigilantist spree, and trapped inside himself due to his silent guilt. Encased in a catatonic shell, Nate is finally broken out of it and engineers an escape, sheltering from pursuit with ex-Corps veterans. They charge a steep fee for their help, though, and Nate finds his unique warfighting skills as a Mandroid being marshalled into supporting a cause he doesn't believe in...

The mention of "revenger's tragedy" might initially disaffect readers - after all, such stories have been played in fiction many times before. However, the delivery of these stories is what sets them apart.

"Mandroid" is a superb slow-burner and does not confront us with an episodic week-by-week series of hits as the revenger crosses names off of his death list. Instead it gradually stokes up tensions so that we have the time to appreciate every blow Slaughterhouse suffers (self-inflicted and otherwise) and so quiver with his own anguished rage when the climax finally erupts. With a liberality of veiling noirish shadows, laden, impassive gazes, under-angled cameras that give the characters looming and forbidding presence and sombre, moody wide angles of wet, dank, unwelcoming streets, the environment is certainly emotive. If this wasn't a lowbrow vulgar entertainment medium, I might even say artistic.

Walker continues to prove himself a premier Dredd artist, not least in his depiction of Dredd himself. It's a commonplace frequently trotted out that Dredd can't work as a character, he's just a plain cipher which engages the more varied and interesting lives of those in the Mega-City itself. "Mandroid" gives the lie to that as Wagner's writing and Walker's realisation show the breadth and depth of the bootprint. Yes, we never see Dredd underneath the helmet, but we don't actually need to.

From the peeled grin of vicarious pleasure at getting to grips with the foe, the way that the interrogation lamp is reflected in his visor, and how even Old Stoney Face's typical scowl vanishes under a shadow as he bows his head in the shame of defeat, the full gamut of human emotion is expressed by Dredd. All this is combined with a number of visual cues such as the coffin of a door-frame closing around Dredd when the villain squirms off the hook. The repeated motif of the family photograph (Tommy salutes with the left hand in it, which is a lovely detail - very unmilitary, of course, but that shows the boy's innocence) is one more details that makes "Mandroid" a compelling and eminently re-readable tale.

The art of "Instrument of War" suffers in comparison to Walker's tour de force on the original story. Coleby starts off well with his own solid, craggy, hard-edged style, but his brief run is spoiled by an utterly and irredeemably catastrophic case of confused panel progression during a recap scene. The Thrill also suffers from the 'Kiss of Death' - a mid-series artist change - and true enough, while Critchlow does make a fair approximation of Walker's shadows in some places, his sketchier art and lank, gangly, awkward knobble-kneed figures compare unfavourably to Coleby for the majority of the story.

The writing also becomes more enervated from the Mandroid's initial story - the core plot is interesting enough but when "Mandroid" successfully showed the wider Mega City and advanced Dredd's character, "Instrument of War" has him cut back down into a cipher again, with literally only a scanty couple of lines afforded to reflect on how the story may have affected him. There are also a few curious plot developments - I want to know the address of General Vincent's moving company, because being able to strip an entire house of every furnishing and fitting in ten minutes is nothing short of remarkable. It's also strange that he has the able planning, tremendous resources and logistical support to destroy and falsify evidence, outfit Slaughterhouse into a walking tank, dispatch him on cross-border killing sprees and indulge in a spot of brain surgery on the side. But when it comes to launching his actual revolution he can't even muster a dozen discharged ex-Corps cripples? It does make the final scene seem sadly ludicrous. Maybe that was Wagner's intention - the emphasis on a "mad" plot - but unfortunately the patent ridiculousness breaks suspension of disbelief and reflects badly on him as well.

However weaker "Instrument of War"'s writing may be in relation to "Mandroid", both stories are elevated immensely by Wagner concocting a pair of stupendous villains.

Denzo Shultz, the block don who devastates Slaughterhouse's life in "Mandroid", is appallingly reprehensible. Withered like a dried husk with every last ounce of goodness wrung out of it, spitting bile and venom at the temerity of the "Tin Man" mandroid and compunctionlessly killing even his own men to cover himself, he harangues from his hoverchair like a grotesque, twisted parody of 'pops' hectoring the kids from the porch rocking chair. While he's only a bit player in the grand sweep of city crime, he swaggers as though he's Nero Narcos himself - his sheer obnoxious arrogance only making him even easier to despise.

General Trig Vincent, the would-be revolutionary of "Instrument of War", has wild hair which infuses him with a vitality and energy beyond his slightly hunched frame, and the needle-point pupil of his bionic eye gives him a suitably manic expression. Where Shultz succeeded by bombast, though, Vincent succeeds in restraint. When we first here Vincent speaking of fate and rebuilding the New Jerusalem we're already wearied at the prospect of turgid fanatic diatribes, but to his credit Wagner doesn't overegg the pudding. He allows Vincent's inclinations to enunciate his speech but not overtake it, so that he's compellingly fevered and not contemptibly insane.

The Mandroid graphic novel was released in December of last year, but its lack of prominence here at 2000AD Review before now shouldn't be interpreted as it being an inferior offering. It's another strong performance from the Dreddverse team, and with the slower pace of "Mandroid" unrolling at its own rate in a complete book, one ideally suited to the graphic novel form, too. It is a neat and beautiful package, a revelatory hook for new readers and meaty and chewable for established ones, and a credit to Rebellion's ongoing graphic novels - the downbeat endings to both Mandroid stories shouldn't reflect on the fortunes of the programme!

Buy Judge Dredd: Mandroid