My first sojourn into the comic world of Judge Dredd. I like it. Interesting to see how the satire elements get stripped out in the movie adaptations, both the awful Stallone one and the great Urban one.

The grimmest of Dredd sagas, and the chilliest of Cold War era comics, in which writer John Wagner is quite happy to obliterate a planet of hippies as the punchline to a (deeply bleak) joke, and have his 'hero' sentence an entire city to death. The story is chock full of 'holy shit' moments like that. One of the most revealing and pointed scenes comes when both Sov Blok and Mega City judges discuss the irrelevance of their respective and rapidly dwindling populations to the nuclear confrontation. One might also glimpse Wagner's similarly off-handed attitude to the denizens of his fictional world in that exchange. To sum the book up in a word: Yikes.

Fuck yeah