Judge Dredd the Megazine, ranked part 12: Hey, read these comics!

Goodness me, we've reached the point where I'd actively recommend even a casual Judge Dredd / 2000AD fan gives these comics a go.

Tempest by Al Ewing and Jon Davis-Hunt
(12 episodes / 2 series across Megs 266-297)

What was this? A mad-cap comedy but also quite nasty and gory noirish OTT action romp about a criminal in the Undercity disguised as an undercover Judge fighting against other criminals. Or maybe he really is an undercover judge who lost his mind/memory and thinks he’s a criminal disguised as an undercover Judge? I was never quite sure…

This is a cover to advertise the story Tempest, by using the phrase 'storm warning'
It's not advertising the story 'Storm Warning' by using the phrase 'tempest'.
Art by Jon Davis-Hunt

Anyway, Tempest the character (which may or may not be his real name) is a little bit Deadpool, in the sense of constant chatter and self-awareness, but is also a little bit Batman, in the sense of being incredibly well-trained in all things, and a bit of a master-planner.

The story veers wildly from being kinda of silly (in a giant talking evil pandas kind of way) and kind of nasty (in a bodies being ripped apart from the inside with glee kind of way). The overall tone works, just about, although I struggled to marry up the antics/fun vibe with the idea that the overall plot is meant to be kind of serious, maybe?

What if a person with ninja skills was also childish?
Words by Ewing; Art by Davis-Hunt

It’s the sort of thing Ewing would go on to do better for Other Publishers, to be honest, but it’s a memorable early work from him. Davis-Hunt, meanwhile, absolutely nails the tone and the delight and makes that extreme gore feel fun. He also demonstrates a real facility with facial expressions that can bring you from laughter to fear surprisingly quickly.

Dreddworld relevance? It’s set in the Undercity below MC1, and there are Judges in it sometimes.

Writing: 7/10 The fun of it outweighs the bits that don’t quite work, which includes the central character. He is perhaps too competent to enjoy, even if he is silly enough to get away with a lot.
Art: 9/10
Impact: 5/10 I was surprised this didn’t get a third series, but it had sorted of painted itself into a ‘Creep’ corner, of all things, where you have a protagonist who is SO nasty, and SO gifted, that he’d have to come up against Dredd pretty soon, and would probably beat him, which no one wants to see.

Overall score: 21 / 30

Has it been reprinted? It has! In Hachette 69: MegaCity Underworld.

  

The Scarlet Apocrypha by Dan Abnett and various
(Volume 4 issues 12-18)

What was this? A series of one-off stories about not-quite Durham Red. It kind of functions as an epilogue to the long Abnett/Harrison run of Durham Red in the far, FAR future stories. But actually it’s not about that character or setting at all, and it’s not even really about Durham Red, mutant bounty hunter. Which is why I’m inclined to include it in the Megazine-story round-up, because it’s a different thing. It’s kind of an experiment in ‘what kind of stories could we tell with a sexy vampire lady (who may or may not be an actual vampire)?’. It ends up riffing on various classic vampire tropes, from Dracula to 70s euro-horror to manga to Fiends of the Eastern Front. Durham Red as herself is in each story, but imagined as if she was like an actress who played a signature role but in loads of different films. There’s a new artist to match each setting, Abnett doing his usual playful mix of puns and references and simple twist plots. I like this sort of thing, but feel that 7 episodes was a good amount.

What if... Durham Red was a vampire who accidentally gets cast as a Vampire
in a Jess Franco Vampire movie?
Words by Abnett, Art by Burns

What if... Durham Red was Japanese, and lived in Samurai times?
Words by Abnett; Art by Irving

I’d be well up for a ‘Teal Apocrypha’ featuring the what-if adventures of Venus Bluegenes…

Dreddworld relevance? None. (Although one has to wonder if 'What if Durham Red turned up in the City of the Damned timeline' was mooted...)

Writing: 8.5/10 Not every story is a winner, but the very experimentation of it adds to the fun. And a couple really are very good!
Art: 9/10 You’ve got John Burns, Carlos Ezquerra, Enrico Romero and Mark Harrison all delivering total excellence here. Frankly it’s a bit of a miracle that Frazer Irving, doing very good work, is not in the top tier!
Impact: 4/10 I think people generally liked this, and it’s been reprinted a couple of times – but it’s a shame this kind of experiment hasn’t been repeated.

Overall score: 21.5 / 30

Has it been reprinted? It has! It's all in the 'Empty Suns' collection, and in the Ultimate Collection 171: Durham Red Born Bad (one of the volumes that sold out super fast, sadly)

 

Numbercruncher by Si Spurrier and PJ Holden
(Megs 306-315)

What was this? The very Spurrier-ish story about a young man in love who finds a way to cheat death so he can reunite with his lady love, by finding loopholes linked to a sort of afterlife death-tax concept. Oh, and he’s chased by a smart and surly bruiser with a pinstripe suit and bowler hat.

The promise of menace!
Art by PJ Holden

I say ‘Spurrier-ish’ because I associate his writing with various ticks that include: complicated but ultimately followable plots; smart-alec characters who outwit each other; wordplay; a desperate desire to be ABOUT something; a desperate desire to be so much fun you ignore the ‘ABOUT’ thing; a desperate desire to throw unexpected things in the way of both the characters and the readers; being just a bit tiring to read.

Now, I suspect a lot of that sounds like (negative) criticism, and I suppose it is. But honestly, I generally like/admire Spurrier’s work, although I rarely love it. Numbercrucher is up there with the very best of his stuff (that I’ve read – not dabbled much in his recent American work).

It helps that PJ Holden on art is a master storyteller, and also the kind of artist who seems to revel in really filling in the background details, and the way this story is told – jumping around from real life to afterlife to different eras of real life, it helps a LOT to always be able to o see and understand where (and indeed who) the people are at each twist and turn.

Love a good 'bureaucracy of the Afterlife' tale.
Words by Spurrier; Art by Holden

The fact that the ‘ABOUT’ in this case is romantic love is also just refreshingly unlike most other 2000AD/Megazine stories, so it helps this one stick out.

Dreddworld relevance? None

Writing: 8/10
Art: 9/10
Impact: 5/10 As with all these creator-owned comics, it’s impossible to judge it on anything other than how much I liked it and how much other people appeared to like it. I get the impression it has its admirers but is not as well-loved as other examples in this slot.

Overall score: 22/30

Has it been reprinted? It has! By Titan Comics, who co-sponsored the whole venture.

  

Harmony by Chris Standley and a bunch of artists
(24 episodes across 6 series between Volume 2 issue 55 - Volume 3 issue 25. And a kind of elseworlds type thing with Judge Dredd that I’m ignoring)

What was this? Harmony, the series, is just very tricky to describe. The central character of Harmony stayed the same, despite going through some quite intense but somehow reasonable changes. Not an easy ntrick to pull off! Meanwhile, the specifics of the setting, and the tone of the story, and the ideas being thrown around, really change quite a lot! 

The first story is very much an outdoors-y comedy action adventure number. But it moves into the city and becomes a bit more sci-fi-ideas-y, and more of a character study. I guess part of the point was to hook people into Harmony as a character, then reveal more about her hidden past (a frankly annoying trope of most new series in Megazine volume 2…). So she’s introduced as a bounty hunter, but is also something of an outlaw, and maybe used to be a kind-of Judge type person, and ends up becoming some kind of gladiator  as well as a rebel hero among other things. A lot going on in this series!

The first story is quippy, 'splodey, action comedy.
Words by Standley; Art by Hairsine

Anyway, without getting into the details of the story, the point is it’s weird and surprising and often clever and funny. But also sometimes tough to follow. The first story in particular is one of those that keeps jumping from one place, and one characters’ point of view to another. Outside of the fact the strip is called ‘Harmony’ it’s not even clear she is the main character sometimes. Once it moves into the city, that side of things tidies up a bit, but only a bit.

Mid-period Harmony is more introspective, borderline pretentious.
Words by Standley; Art by Murray

Hairsine’s art and designs keep that first story light and fun, though. Jim Murray’s cartoonish faces do the same trick, although the actual plots during his tenure are increasingly dour, before it all goes rebel uprising and vicious with Steve Sampson. For a series resting on three at the time pretty new artists, and one very new writer it looks fab and reads not bad!

Back to her old self, but less flip.
Words by Standley; Art by Sampson

Dreddworld relevance? Pretty tenuous – it’s set in and around Uranium City, Alaska. One of the classic ‘Ooh, someone’s made a map of Dredd’s world, I’ll pick a place at random and see if I can conjure up a story.’ This one worked better than many, to be fair – and near the end Mega City 1 does come into it.

Writing: 7.5 / 10 It gets better as it goes along, in general.
Art: 8.5 / 10 Not a duff sequence, although arguably there are no stand out amazing pages as you get in plenty of Megazine thrills.
Impact: 6/10 This really could have been dropped after one series, but instead got to span two eras of the Meg, and tell a satisfying if tonally odd story. Sadly it wasn't a stepping stone for Standley, more of a crowning jewel.

Overall score: 22 / 30

Has it been reprinted? It has! The first story was bagged with Meg 288. And the whole thing is in Mega Collection 22: Independent Operators.

 

 Hondo City Justice by Robbie Morrison and various artists
(3 short series running in 9 issues from Megs 300-334, but I’m including some earlier Inaba stories from Volume 3 as well)

Hyper-Japanese Hyper-Sci-Fi
Art by Neil Roberts

What was this? A spin-off of Morrison’s long-running Shimura series. I’m including the two Inspector Inaba-themed stories here, who is basically the lead character in Hondo-City Justice anyway. So it boils down to a high-tech action adventure stories featuring women with various talents/powers/abilities fighting crime in future (but still super sexist) Hondo City.

Inaba started out as the main point-of-view character in Shimura, but fairly quickly got sidelined and basically became Hershey to Shimura’s Dredd. As in, hyper competent, rises fast up the ranks, readers (including me) just really like her despite being unable to point to any significant bit of character design or personality that justifies it…

Us Megazine readers value Quitely mostly for his action beats, you understand.
Context by Morrison; SFX one has to assume by Quitely

In the three stories running as Hondo-City Justice, things do switch up a gear as Inaba gathers together a bunch of female characters (some of them met in earlier Shimura tales) who have psi powers / mad ninja skillz and they all get into fights with villains / corrupt Judges and so on, and it has a very deliberate teen-Manga feel (especially the Neil Googe drawn story), and it becomes fun and breezy where Shimura was often dour. It’s good clean fun, without being exceptional.

More sick action beats!
Words by Morrison; Art by Googe

More to say about Shimura in due course, but it’s worth noting that this strip very much continues the idea of ‘what Japan in the future might be like, as imagined by a non-Japanese person who is mostly interested in the action movie stuff’…

Dreddworld relevance? Hondo City is a long-established part of the world by this point, perhaps second only to Brit-Cit?

Writing: 7.5 / 10 It’s fun and clever! But perhaps not super memorable (certainly by Morrison’s standards).
Art: 8.5 / 10 The art is uniformly excellent; you’ve got a bit of Quitely, some rare solo Dylan Teague, Mike Collins with Cliff Robinson – but for my taste Googe is best in show.
Impact: 6 / 10 Kind of sad this didn’t keep going for longer. People liked it well enough, I have to believe? Certainly this world is one of the more enduring parts of Megazine lore. I think it’s mostly that Morrison had at the time finished off both Shakara and Nikolai Dante, and was moving out of the grind of weekly/monthly comics?

Overall score: 22 / 30

Has it been reprinted? It has, although it's a bit of a mixed bag. There's a collection literally called Hondo-City Justice, which includes the last two Hondo City Justice tales, sandwiched by a couple of late-period Shimura stories. Then there's Hondo City Law, which includes the first Inaba solo story and the first official Hondo City Justice, as well as more late-period Shimura. Over in Hachette's Mega Collection, Vol 60 Hondo City Justice includes early Shimura and then the first Inaba and all of the series titled Hondo City Justice. For some reason, the second Inaba solo story is reprinted only in Rebellion's old Shimura collection - its not in any Hachette volume. Not that you really NEED to read these stories in a specific order, mind.