Synopsis by David Knight & Gavin Hanly
Review by Stephen Watson
Summaries and reviews contain spoilers for this issue.

Cursed Earth Rules

Dredd gets slimed...

Synopsis: On the West Wall of Mega-City One, overlooking the Cursed Earth radioactive desert, a crowd gathers to watch the expulsion of mutants detained for offences committed upon illegal entry to the city. Two elderly Brit-Cit tourists ask Judge Dredd what is going on.

Among the mutants scheduled for expulsion is Booger, who spent 4 years 220 days in Iso-block 20 after entering the city to steal food; being released early from a 5-year sentence for crossing the wall and flinging snot at a Judge. On top of the wall, mutants rights activists protest the massacre of 10,000 mutants the year before, in a purge led by Judge Dredd against the New Mutant Army. Also on the wall are anti-mutant bigots come to throw rotten vegetables and other missiles at the departing mutants.

Suddenly, a pack of dune sharks appears out of the desert, and begin attacking and eating the mutants. Judge Dredd orders the judges manning the wall guns to ward off the sharks with gunfire, but they query his order as a waste of ammunition. Dredd takes charge of the gun turret himself, but it is too late to take aim at the sharks without risking hitting mutants. Dredd leads to two gunnery judges out into the desert to engage the sharks at close quarters. Booger comes face to face with Dredd once more, the judge who arrested him. Dredd targets the bull male, the leader of the pack. One of the mutants tackles Dredd and another takes Dredd’s gun and turns it on him, but because the gun is booby-trapped and imprinted to Dredd’s own hand, it explodes in the hands of the mutant.

Dredd is left with a boot knife as his only weapon with which to fight the bull male shark. It turns, devouring one of the other judges, and knocks Dredd to one side. He drops the knife, and Booger picks it up, uncertain what to do with it. Instead of taking revenge on Dredd, he earns his respect by stabbing the pack leader, ending the shark attack.

Two days later, Judge Dredd pays a visit to the Justice Department Public Relations Unit, where Judge Campbell tells him that the shark attack was a success as a public relations exercise. By risking judges’ safety to rescue the mutants from the dune sharks, Dredd stole the limelight from the mutant rights protestors who were making daily headlines protesting the 2126 massacre. Dredd isn’t happy about losing two judges for the sake of a public relations exercise; nor about there having been so many sharks, when Tek judges were supposed to have put out enough bait to attract just one.

SW: This first Dredd story itself is nothing special, although for a run of the mill episode it simply didn’t sit right. Dredd often the scourge of bureaucrats, seemingly agrees to an ill advised publicity stunt in which muties and Judges alike are eaten up by dune sharks, which seem to be proliferating at an exponential rate in the Cursed Earth. For a man not adversed to checking goldfish licences he goes pretty easy on himself and others for this disaster.

It’s clearly a pretty clumsy dig at spin doctors in general but we could’ve been given some credit to suss this out without needing the responsible spinner to be called Campbell.

The John Ridgway art is generally up to standard, but the computer rendered panels stick out like a sore thumb - the bottom of page two looks like some ice bergs are floating by!

Playing Futsie - Part 3

Point gets Dredd to do the dirty work...

Synopsis: Point tells Daveez about Devries and how he’s in charge of the Hunters Club (having taken over from his father): an underground gambling organisation that hunts citizens. Daveez orders him to shut down the operation.

Point visits the Credpit, a legal gambling establishment where Devries works. Dredd is preparing a raid but Point takes over as lead judge as the judges storm the place. Point heads straight for the manager’s office, asking Dredd to wait outside. Inside he meets Elmort Devries junior who explains how the racket was run. He says Chegs picks a likely victim, they push him over the edge and whoever gets the closest to the eventual death toll wins the pot. Zig was Daveez’ first go at the game and he lost. The only way for him to get his money back is for Point to arrest Devries, so the department can seize his assets. The only way out for Point is if Devries dies – so Point says Devries is guilty of murder by proxy. Devries challenges the made-up-law law, and Point demonstrates by throwing him the gun given to him by Miss Anne Thrope, calling out “Dear Grud, he’s got a gun” at which point Dredd bursts in and kills Devries.

Later, Point decides he needs to tell Zig what happened, so gets put back in his cell to explain. Before he can, Daveez comes through over the speaker and calls him “Judge Point”. Zig goes mad and tries to kill Point – but has a hemmorage first – as the pressure got too much for him. But with Zig dead, the death toll has finally reached Daveez’s stake – so he wins after all…

SW: Poor old Dredd’s indignities continue as he’s forced to play second fiddle
in both the mission and in the Strip to our man Point - surely the Megazine’s strongest new character since, well ever.

The long forgotten Hunter’s Club is resurrected in fine style with the great and good punting on the body count. The art is rough and the strip is wordy but it works. Scribe Simon Spurrier who also wrote the earlier Dredd seems to do better when lampooning the Mega City rather than trying to adhere to it’s strict rules

This three part story was full of ideas and managed to be both funny and dark simultaneously. Best bit was the inclusion of a ‘next issue’ box which means there’s a chance of Point getting to be a regular.

City of Dead - Part 6

Cutting it fine...

Synopsis: The signal goes out, but it doesn’t seem to be working – the half life virus still keeps building. As the devastation gets worse, the Death Cult leader prepares to fire a missile at the nuclear facility. Back at justice HQ, Anderson tries to work out what happened at the "skule of filosofy" to kill the nanobots. She suddenly realises that there was a whetstone in operation which combined with the alarm noise and created a sound that killed the nanobots. The judges finally replicate the frequency and everyone is cured with the citizens realising with horror what they have done.

Later Faust is found guilty and sentenced. Faust says that he’ll live forever and all he has to do is wait. But the sentence was to put him in an iso cube tuned to his own brainwaves – random bursts of current caused him to live eternal nightmares. Anderson and Shakta go back out on the streets as Resyk goes into overtime to clear the corpses…

SW: Well here we are at last, the long awaited conclusion of the ‘Half Life’ saga, and was it worth the wait? Probably not. Don’t get me wrong it looks great with Arthur Ranson’s visuals to their usual high standard, it just never really had that epic sense to it with the ending being somewhat of a damp squib.

Anderson’s adventures, no matter how Earth shattering, never really filter through to Dredd’s world, meaning they have inevitably less impact on the reader. You would think the whole city going on a murderous rampage, judges included, would have a devastating effect on the Megs’s future but I doubt if it’ll ever be mentioned again. And rightly so, Sonics or even a combination of Sonics is no way to end a story arc longer than a week in the jail.

I did however enjoy Fauster’s fate of an never ending Hell - wonder how many episodes of ‘Dredd Lines’ that involves!

Midnapped - Part 3

Middenface gets mean...

Synopsis: The three escapees jump onto a speeding train, the Portobello Express. Hiding out in the carriage, they realise that someone else is already there. They discover it’s the reverend Angus, blinded after Killoden when the norms gave him that punishment instead of killing a priest.

The train stops at a random search checkpoint, so Middenface, Charlie and Davie are forced to leave – although Angus stays. They finally reach Davie’s uncle’s home. Davie gets tasered again, but Middenface butts Uncle Hamish out of the way. once inside, his uncle admits to Davie that he is in fact his father and they they are both mutants (“but I thought every man had two…um…er…things”).

At that point the Kreelers arrive, after their dogs have tracked them down. The guns and food in the house have all wasted away in the damp – so it’s all useless to them. Hamish shows them out through a secret underground passage and then lets in the Kreelers. When they are all inside, he lets off the last high explosives left untouched by the damp and the place explodes. Davie has no choice but to join up with the mutants – who still haven’t found supper…

SW: This unashamed retelling of ‘Kidnapped’ through Mutant eyes was a pleasant surprise. Quite often stories of this ilk are hampered with too many clever ‘Do you see what we are doing here?’ moments but here the story flashed by with menace and horror aplenty.

Middenface has been promoted from a supporting drunkard role to being the real face of the mutant race and of genocide in general. Shaun Thomas’s visuals are excellent and add welcome realism to the Mutant race - compare his with Ridgway’s snot shooter from the Dredd!

I’m glad the spirit of the strip is maintained with the Scots’ language in full usage and no sign of a glossary. Either read it phonetically or have a drink beforehand and it will all become clear!

The strip has great potential and I hope we see Middenface advance through the years and into the Search/Destroy Agency years. We could even hope for a lump head perspective on some of his adventures with Alpha.

See Naples and Die - Part 3

Antonio loses it...

Synopsis: Faulkner meets up with the Camorra and the kidnapped Michelle at Pompeii - to trade for the money he stole from them. Upon seeing Michelle, they argue and he says they can keep her. he says it's a joke as They hold a gun to his head and check the trunk for the money. As one of the goons looks through the money in the trunk, a fire bomb goes off, killing him. Faulkner kills the one holding him and another beside Antonio. Michelle escapes, but Antonio sends Bruno after her. Faulkner gets out from behind the car, holding the body of the one of the crooks as cover. Antonio kills the cover without pausing and prepares to kill Faulkner when his hun jams. Faulkner reaches for a gun, but Antonio's wife Sophia gets it first. She fires.

Elsewhere bruno has caught up with Michelle, but as he slashes at her with a knife, she uses one of her own and kills Bruno. Back at the car, Sophia has shot Antonio as revenge for what he did to their son. She finishes him off as we discover that Sophia gave Michelle the knife. She was their contact afte all - but she warns them never to come back to Naples...

SW: This concluding episode was almost entirely a shoot out and frankly it did
little for me. It started badly, with Pompeii looking like a car park - I’ve been there and you could barely get a chariot down the main street!

I had pretty much lost track who was who and why they were doing it to each other and I didn’t really care too much. John Burn’s painted art looks good, but why does this strip, devoid of all things Dredd and Sci-fi, merit a place in the Megazine?

I’ll certainly take it ahead of reprint, but I don’t see it going anywhere if previous episodes are anything to go by. Italians bitching about families, betrayals and vengeance - give me ‘The Sopranos’ any day!

In the Stomm

Dredd gets his hands dirty...

Synopsis: The Lon Chaney Block is locked down for a Crime Sweep (Code 66). Judge Dredd leads a squad of judges stationed in the block sewer to catch evidence of criminal activity flushed down the toilet by block residents. Judge Verne hopes that Dredd has been attached to the squad for assessment purposes, offering him the chance to return to street duty after his heavy-handed questioning led to the death of am arrestee, but Dredd is only there as a routine duty rotation.

As soon as the Code 66 is announced, contraband begins to flood into the sewer, and can be traced back to each apartment, leading to arrests. Circumstantial evidence points to the Block being used as a hideout by the Sector Six Slasher, Vinnie Rama. Judge Guthrie investigates apartments on level 73. In apartment 731 he finds a charnel house full of human body parts. The resident has a license to perform hobby surgery using cloned human parts. Guthrie remains suspicious.

In the sewer, a Tek judge’s hand is bitten off under water while he is retrieving evidence, and a huge rat-squid escapes down the tunnel. Dredd chases after the monster, which took the evidence along with the Tek’s hand. Dredd corners the rat-squid, but is unable to shoot it because the methane in the sewer would cause an explosion. He is left with just his boot knife with which to fight the rat-squid. Thrown into the creature’s larder, Dredd sees its store of human body parts, no doubt Vinnie Rama’s victims. Among the debris flushed from apartment 731, Dredd finds not only body parts with tattoos and wedding rings, but a live human brain in a jar. The hobby surgeon had been keeping the murderer’s brain in a jar until he could find a decent body to put it in. Having been rumbled, the surgeon holds Judge Guthrie at gunpoint. He has no license to transplant non-cloned organs, and has been sheltering a fugitive criminal, and intends now to kill Guthrie, but the wounded rat-squid bolts up the soil pipe its food supply came from, and burst out of the surgeon’s toilet, killing him and saving Guthrie.

Judge Verne asks if Dredd might recommend him for reassessment for street judge duty, but Dredd tells him not. Judge Verne fouled up once in the past, and “stomm sticks”.

SW: In what has been a poor Megazine for Dredd, he finishes off down the toilet
- literally. Despite holding 70,000 residents we are asked to believe that each has his own waste pipe - my flat has a communal soil pipe for four so how much plumbing would 70,000 need?

Minor gripes aside this was a poor outing. The two familiar story lines of ‘something in the sewer’ and ‘nutty body part collector’ collide in a mess of a strip that offered little and delivered nothing. The art was busy and the panel layout confusing, with the story falling squarely between the stools of horror and humour catching not a sniff of either.

You do sometimes get the impression that the writers are thinking ‘where hasn’t he been in a while?’ and just setting a story in that location regardless of whether it makes any sense or has any point. A real stinker!

Miscellaneous Material inc.

• British Icons - Desperate Dan
• Robbie Morrison Interview Part 3
• Dreddlines
• Charlie's War
• Metro Dredd
• Dredd Files
• Heatseekers
  

SW: I enjoyed the Desperate Dan feature despite it having almost nothing in common with Dredd and his world. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking the Dandy to be a kids’ comic, unlike our mature organs! The piece was well written but at seven pages it outstayed it’s welcome by at least four. I know everyone grew up with the Dandy, but surely the DC Thomson titles ‘The Hotspur’ and ‘The Victor’ would have offered more interest for the Megazine reader.

The Robbie Morrison Interview was interesting but somewhat brief, being padded out by several oversized pages of his work. Dante has never been a favourite of mine but you do have to respect his burgeoning output and enthusiasm for the job.

Charley’s War remains a treat although the plot device to tell the tale of Verdun seemed somewhat laboured. The consistency of the storytelling and art do however make this an undoubted classic.

Apart from ‘Threads’ I hadn’t heard of any of the subjects of this month’s heat seekers. I’m all for something new but similarly they’d be no harm in reviewing something that was not only available from one market stall in downtown Shanghai! I think these pages would be better used covering things with a broader appeal rather than ‘look at the trendy avant garde thing I profess to like that you’ve never heard of’!