2000AD excels at bringing grotesque, fantastical creatures to life – there’s an incredible talent with the writers and artists who bring nightmarish visions to life in bold, visceral styles. Judge Death is famous for being one of the reoccurring, key antagonists encountered by Judge Dredd and his fellow Judges in the Mega City One – notably Judge Anderson during it’s ongoing forty year run.
This compilation brings together the strips from the various progs (issues) between 1973 – 1949. It’s narrative explains how Judge Death and his cohorts take over their version of Earth, a parallel version of Mega City One. Researching the origins of charismatic evil antagonists often leads to a captivating and revealing narrative – this is exactly the result of this collection.
Writer Kek-w and artist Dave Kendall take the scant references woven through the many Dredd strips featuring the Dark Judges and creates a backstory filled with horror and heroism. We begin with the death of the Bees, when contemplating how to begin such an apocalyptic narrative, Dave suggested that the death of every world begins with Bees disappearing or dying and so the first panel depicts a blight, a terminal sickness infesting the world, a rotting planet and a struggle for survival.
These glimpses of Deadworld before the rise of The Dark Judges give us an never seen before perspective on the backstory of universe that Judge Anderson visits in it’s future, her boots crunching under a carpet of bones and skulls having been tricked into releasing him. It’s established that the Street Judges of Deadworld are far more ruthless than their Mega City counterparts, Kendall builds a realistic depiction of a world of escalating violence and madness which builds to a crescendo of death on a grand scale.
The Tainted storyline follows a renegade Street Judge – Fairfax who is evading his fellow Judges – who appear to be acting quite strangely, under the influence of the proclaimed new Chief Judge Sidney De’ath, joining a family trying to escape from the increasing horror which is overtaking their world. Through this journey we are pulled into a conspiracy which is infecting the planet and allowing the Dark Judges and their psychic sisters to posses the populace.
The writing is compelling and breathtakingly horrific as the events continue to unfold in a terrible inevitability but it’s the artwork which really grabs the readers attention. It’s this gruesome and atmospheric illustrative work which made this series of comic strips a hit of 2016. It’s incredibly detailed and gives a dark dreamlike quality which is viscerally putrid and his redesigned versions of the Dark Judges are realistically twisted aberrations of their Mega City One counterparts.
Throughout these stories there’s the trademark dark humour of 2000AD subtly mixed with social commentary, the absurdity of the Dark Judges trademark quip “The crime is life, the sentence is death” is the central theme of the narrative and although absurd, is recognised as the natural progression of an increasingly violent and non-empathetic Justice Department. There’s a sense of the familiar zombie apocalypse theme pervading through the series and one semi-rotting converted Street Judge proclaims ominously that “Everything is a Crime Now”. With that uttered sentence we can see how close to this statement Dredd’s rigid philosophy could take him.
This is a Spoiler-Free review and as such I don’t want to get into too much depth regarding the specifics of the narratives in the compilation, but be assured that this is a collection of the most compelling and atmospheric and deeply horrific pieces of 2000AD story telling in the last ten years.
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