Article - Judging Dredd

Judging Dredd

As a child, I didn’t much care for the few British comic books we did get in India. The condescendingly simplistic stories, burdened with a lot of explanatory exposition, talked down to us and seemed to be mostly about schoolboy football heroes or jingoistic World War 2 action (I found the histories of the actual conflict far more interesting). The art was usually a dreary black-and-white and pretty static, too. 

The British comic strips’ art lacked the quality, color and fluid dynamism of the American imports. Honorable exceptions were the comic book adaptations of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV shows; Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Fireball XL5…

The optimistic 1960s view of the future that those TV Century 21 comic strips had, with all their glamorous high technology, has now dated somewhat. Ironically, what was once futuristic has now become nostalgic.  The Anderson stable did serve to get me hooked on science fiction, though. A lot of this was initially in the gentler, more hopeful vein of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, but a lot of it was far more grim and gritty, bleak and sordid. I had, in short, found dystopian SF.

This branch of science fiction has had a more respectable literary ancestry than the cheap pulp magazine origins of most SF. Beginning with H. G. Well’s increasingly pessimistic visions of the future and Valery Zamyatin’s marvelously gloomy We -  ripped off by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) – the genre has increasingly ditched the essentially Victorian idea of eternal progress through technological development. That naively optimistic belief was itself satirized during Victorian times in Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon – an anagram of  “nowhere”.

Then I discovered Judge Joe Dredd in the comics page of The Times of India on Sunday. Judge Dredd - by John Wagner (an American expatriate, by the way) and Ron Smith - had a brief run in that newspaper, fittingly enough, during 1984. JudgeDredd, as everyone knows, is set in the awful post-nuclear war 22^nd century conurbation of Mega City One, covering the entire US eastern seaboard, where rampant crime, unemployment and general public disorder has led to a merger of the police force with the judiciary. The Judges, part Roman legion, part supercops, are empowered to deal out harsh summary justice; being judge, jury and (quite frequently) executioner combined.

If present systems of justice are flawed, laborious, costly and tend to favor the rich and the powerful; the Judge System of the future is even more prone to worse abuses. A typical satirical scenario in the Judge Dredd strips usually featured some luckless innocent being booked for a trivial offence caused mostly by circumstance and given a disproportionately harsh sentence. It’s eerie how this British SF comic strip presciently anticipated former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s “zero tolerance” attitude towards crime by over a decade. Still, a lot of the actionable offences in Judge Dredd’s world wouldn’t even be considered crimes in ours.

However, with the kind of draconian anti-terrorism legislation increasingly coming into force worldwide, we just might be heading that way. Chillingly, artist CarlosEzquerra saw a reflection of his original design for the character in the working uniforms of today’s European riot police – high boots, gauntlets, kneepads, padded shoulders and visored helmets.

Creators John Wagner and Pat Mills based the character on, of all people, Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” Callahan. The two characters have some similarities  - eye-for-an-eye attitude to law enforcement, emotions limited to anger and disgust, big gun carried - but while Dirty Harry was a brutally rebellious vigilante at odds with his superiors and the system he was part of, Judge Dredd IS the establishment, vigilantism institutionalized. So complete is Dredd’s identification with The Law, which he enforces as fanatically and rigidly as any religious zealot, that his catchphrase, bellowed in stentorian tones throughout the comics, is “I AM THE LAW!”

As a mark of this total commitment to law enforcement, Judge Joseph Dredd has no civilian persona, unlike most conventional superheroes. He’s never off-duty or out of uniform and his face is always partly obscured by his helmet (which he never takes off). There is no man behind the mask, just a living(?) embodiment of summary justice. Hardest of fictional hard men, Judge Dredd is a more ambivalent character than most comic strip protagonists. Both protector and oppressor in equal measure, he could save a young woman from being mugged by a “Juve Tap Gang” and then promptly book the would-be victim for jaywalking.

Judge Dredd works very well; both as a futuristic action-adventure and a tongue-in-cheek satire of contemporary obsessions with justice and vigilantism. TV cop operas, print “whodunits” and film policiers occupy a disproportionate part of popular culture. Popular fantasies of rough justice, if made real, could come with an unacceptable price tag; the disappearing of the freedoms and civil rights enjoyed in most liberal democracies. It would do well to note that the police and the judiciary are just two facets of civil society the world over, not the only aspects of the state. The nightmare  world of  Mega City One is literally a police state, in which Justice Department is the sole authority, discharging such functions as healthcare, education, administration and defense. Fearing that their satirical purpose would be obscured and the strip seen as an unambiguous endorsement of institutionalized repression, the creators later introduced a political reform movement called Democracy Now! –  eventually undone by public apathy in a civil referendum.

Most SF in this vein is usually from the viewpoint of the heroic resistance to the futuristic totalitarian/authoritarian dystopia. The protagonist of Judge Dredd is one of the enforcers of the system. This is a bit like a member of the Thought Police being the protagonist of 1984, instead of poor, victimized Winston Smith. The central character, a totalitarian anti-hero, was a bracingly satirical change from the by now stereotyped spandex-clad do-gooders of DC and Marvel Comics. Given the setting (the post-apocalyptic United States of America) and iconic symbols incorporated into Judge Dredd’s baroque uniform (fascism as high fashion), it was often difficult to believe that this was a British comic strip.  The black humor and deadpan satire were something new too.

Science fiction in comic strips is usually mostly in the artwork and design, not the ideas. The creators of Judge Dredd have obviously been plundering a lot of mainstream SF for themes and tropes; for like several authors in the genre like Peter F. Hamilton and Iain M. Banks they’ve created a fully realized future world with its own culture, customs and fads. Mega City One has its own futuristic argot (“Drokk! Grud!”) rather like the “Nadsat” spoken in Anthony Burgess’ AClockwork Orange. The overcrowded urban hell that is Mega City One resembles the future New York of Harry Harrison’s Soylent Green. The city with its vivid street life is often the real protagonist of the strip; Judge Dredd usually arriving at the last possible moment to arrest someone or comment sardonically on the situation.

Judge Dredd had its origins in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain; some of the steely intransigence of the Thatcherite era, with its often Darwinian disregard for the gentler human values, echoes throughout the strip. Right-wing regimes are traditionally very obsessed with issues of “law and order” and Judge Dredd certainly embodies a hard right stance on these, but one deliberately carried to a ludicrous extreme for satirical purposes. This satire is a blandly deadpan one with typically simplistic bromides ironically contrasted with often bizarrely violent events. There’s a suggestion that despite all their sweeping powers and futuristic hardware, the judges are barely keeping the lid down on a seething social cauldron.

Brute survival of the fittest is the order of the day in Mega City One, with life for many of its citizens being very “nasty, brutish and short”. As a cult comic book, Judge Dredd is something of an acquired taste, with a fanbase much smaller than that enjoyed by more mainstream characters such as Superman and Spider-Man. Despite the graphic violence and unremitting cynicism of the strip, I think the creators of Judge Dredd have hit upon something enduring; a cult SF classic that can really be refined, developed and extended in very many ways, on several different levels.