Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth

Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth

Writers: Pat Mills, John Wagner, Jack Adrian

Artists: Mick MacMahon, Brian Bolland

Rebellion 2016 (First published in 2000AD progs 61-85, 1978).

                The first of many multi-issue epic storylines, The Cursed Earth is the road trip that expanded Dredd’s world beyond Mega City One (and the moon colony Luna-1) into the post-apocalyptic wasteland of what was once middle America.  Dredd and a small crew are tasked with delivering an antidote to the west coast’s plague-ridden Mega City 2 and this loose overarching narrative gives the writers plenty of scope to create a series of mostly stand-alone two-part tales in which the heroes face various foes (vampire robots, flying rats, resurrected dinosaurs, warring bands of mutants, Las Vegans) as they rumble across the continent. Nearly forty years after its original appearance, it contains a lot of features that regular readers will recognise as defining elements of the strip – vicious satire, violence and black humour – and presents, for the first and only time, Dredd from the somewhat different perspective of writer Pat Mills.

                Much of the publicity surrounding the collection’s publication last year centred on the reprinting of four episodes that hadn’t seen the light of day since their original appearance in 1978 – stories involving copywrited figures that had somehow escaped the notice or concern of IPC’s management at the time. In the first of these wickedly funny tales, Dredd and company get caught up in a war between two neighbouring cities ruled by a lunatic version of Ronald McDonald and the ‘Burger King’. Both men are intent upon converting every available space into a burger bar (which feels weirdly prescient for 1978). In one startling panel, Ronald disciplines a worker for his poor hygiene standards by shooting him dead!

                The second story (written by Jack Adrian when Pat Mills couldn’t make a deadline) Dredd almost falls foul of a mad scientist clearly modelled on KFC’s Colonel Saunders who has created his own community of mutants that resemble trademarks such as the Green Giant and the Michelin Man.   A change in U.K. law regarding the satirising of licensed figures paved the way for the re-publication of these stories and they are the clear highlight of the collection and very much in the anarchic spirit of 2000AD.

                As the writer of twenty of the twenty-five episodes, Pat Mills puts his own stamp on Dredd and his world. There are dinosaurs and freakish religious cults (two classic Mills preoccupations) and Dredd himself is a more heroic figure who occasionally strays from his mission to do good, even though he is outside of his jurisdiction. For this Dredd, the law is a force for good whereas for creator John Wagner’s fascist bastard Dredd, the law is an inflexible and often brutal force for maintaining the status quo.

                While the energetic stories lack the sophistication and character development of later tales – Spikes Harvey Rotten is an underused tip of the hat to the punk movement and to the comic’s growing fanbase of older readers – the furry, rock-eating alien Tweak is, in classic 2000AD style, the most sympathetic figure in the epic, a victim of the human race’s greed and compulsion to tamper with, and to destroy, other species (and lifeforms).  Mills’s later Nemesis the Warlock mined similar territory.  

               Perhaps the main attraction of the collection is the glorious artwork. Re-printed in its original black and white with double page colour spreads, there is a startling contrast in styles between Bolland's smooth, ultra-detailed draughtmanship and MacMahons's rough-edged explosion of scratches. Anyone with an interest in the evolution of Dredd should investigate.