Judge Dredd The Megazine

Rip It Up, Issue 173, 1 December 1991, Page 35

Judge Dredd The Megazine

Over a decade ago 2000 ad came out. | bought it for the orange friss-bee giveaway stuck to the cover which didn’t even last a week as it was as attracted to rooftops as a junior Clapton. Stickers designed to turn you into a cyborg (pre-empting Terminator by 11 years!) sold me on N 0.2, but for the life of me | can’t remember what came with N 0.3. No doubt this was due to the debut of Judge Joe Dredd, England’s answer and improvement on Batman. | Dredd is a cop of the future, streetcop, judge, jury, and more often than not excecutioner. Taken into the - law acadamy at five and placed onto the streets 15 years later a self contained peace keeping unit, this is the original Robocop. Here in his own mag Dredd excells in the latest blood & alien rich episode of Rapture; Dirty Harry and The Thing written into a Bladerunner set. A collection of other 2000 ad type stuff with the standout being the story titled “The Straitjacket Fits.” A strip that deserves its own : paragraph. What the story lacks in weet-bix is recovered by New Zealander Roger Langridge’s sharp colourful artwork and the constant pictorial allusions to Kiwi music, a bastard trick when you think about all these spotty English kids trying to understand the humour behind a floating nun on a broom with a caption

saying Flying Nun. ; - This would be a great Xmas gift but it won't be available in normal shops ill March-ish, comic shops January. Instead | recomend the Sandman tradebooks. The Sandman is one heavy duty mainstream comix and just for those of us too slow to pick them up first time round the people at DC comics have put out these thick collections of the first batches of stories for S4O abook. Not since Alan Moore wrote for Swampthing has a mainstream comic pushed the boundaries as much. My pick is Preludes & Nocturnes, a particularly bent theme.

HANS HOEFLICH