The Cadet Giant story - I think the longest here - very much feels more purposeful than it did first time round Necropolis is a horror epic with a subtler sense of Dredd’s doubts bubbling under and it’s actually very impressive seeing these slowly grow as the book develops. There’s periodic discussion of Dredd’s age - he’s well into middle age by now - and so when we get the first appearance of Kraken about midway through the year, we’re already beginning to see the first major story about Dredd facing his future starting to slowly turn up.

It’s also the only Grant story like this here, as he’s happier with the goofy stuffīut Wagner may well have been thinking along these lines already. John Cassavetes is Dead was not only the first time I had heard of the actor/ director but felt for the first time like a story that was in our future - the incongruity of Dredd reading the Guardian and doubts beginning to seed inside him feel like a subtler dry run for the final story in this (and the prelude for the Necropolis saga), Letter to Judge Dredd. It’s a surprise that the story that had the most effect on me as a child is a Grant version of Wagner’s vision. After Oz, Wagner and Grant stopped working together because they both had very different visions for the series: Grant wanted to push the satire, black humour and Dredd as fascist Wagner wasn’t averse to these, but wanted to focus more on the sense of Dredd ageing, becoming a more human and flawed character and how he felt about the Judge system and democracy But more interestingly, it functions as probably the most transitional year of Judge Dredd yet. So a lot of these stories are very memorable to me already. I bought this today on something of a whim, without realising it’s in effect the last complete year of the prog that I read as a kid. Confessions of a Rottweiller (Prog #648-#649) The Great Little U-Front Disaster (Prog #641) The Confeshuns of PJ Maybe (Prog #632-#634) A Total Near Death Experience (Prog #629-#630) Breakdown on 9th Street (Prog #620-#621) Keeping order are the Judges, a stern police force acting as judge, jury and executioner. Mega-City One: the future metropolis bustling with life and every crime imaginable.

Judge dredd the complete case files 10