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scans_dailyBeen collecting scans for this for a while, but the reappearance of a certain character in this week's Judge Dredd pushed me to get my act together and finally post.
Brothers of the Blood was the TPB collection that tipped me over the edge from a casual Dredd reader to a major fan. Since a lot of my love for it springs from the way it builds on decades of past continuity, I thought I'd collect some scans from earlier stories for context. Then I figured what the hell, collected the follow-up stories too, and the whole thing snowballed into an epic three part history of Dredd's relationship with his family of clones.
Around 17 pages of scans and a fair bit of waffle lie beneath the cut. (NB: these stories were mostly published in six page instalments, so two pages max from any individual prog.)
The Background
One of the reasons the Dredd stories have such a strong sense of continuity is that the series runs in close to 1:1 time. In the 35 years the strips have been running, 35 years have passed in-universe, and the characters get to evolve and grow older.
When the comic first begins, it's 2099, and Joe Dredd is already an established Street Judge with 20 years' experience. In prog 30, "The Return of Rico", we get our first glimpse of his background. Unlike regular Judges who are recruited as children, Dredd was a clone created for the role, and he had an identical clone-brother called Rico. Of course, this being comics, one of them had to be the evil twin:
Rico was given disfiguring facial surgery to be able to survive in a vacuum while he served out his sentence on Titan. He planned to kill Joe in revenge, but after twenty years on Titan his reflexes had slowed, and Joe was quicker on the draw and shot him dead.
Two years later, in prog 116, we discover that that Rico left behind a young daughter, Vienna. (Exactly how he was able to leave behind a toddler daughter when he spent 20 years on Titan was left unexplained for decades. But more on that in part two.) Anyway, whether you ascribe it to youth, guilt over killing his brother, or just dodgy early years non-continuity, Dredd was a bit more emotional in those days...
After Joe saves his little niece from a kidnapper...
...and she promptly disappears into the ether for long decades, like many a comic book relative before her.
In prog 377, we learn that Mega-City 1 is still pumping out more Judge clones, when Dredd is sent to rescue a batch that have been lost in a hijacking. (Apologies for some dodgy scans below: the case files don't always have the greatest reproduction to begin with, and they are hefty books to fit into a scanner.)
Like many things in Dredd continuity, this will Be Important Later.
Anyway, by this time it's 2106, and Dredd, in his mid-forties, is starting to behave a little erratically for his superiors' liking: second-guessing whether it was strictly necessary to kill a perp, going out of his way to help out a kid with disabilities, and other such worrisome behaviour. In prog 389, "A Case For Treatment", he's sent for a psych assessment, and we learn some more about his early life.
It turns out that, being a clone, Dredd wasn't raised from a baby, but rather popped out of the clone tank at a physical age of five and immediately inducted into the Academy:
We also discover for the first time that Dredd is in fact a clone of Fargo, father of the Judicial system. (Which makes that earlier full-face image of Fargo from prog 377 a bit of an "Oops" moment in retrospect.)
The therapy session concludes that there's no particular inciting incident for Dredd's behaviour, just the gradual effect of long-term exposure to the citizens. The usual remedy would be brain surgery to burn out the emotional centres, but what with Dredd being a Fargo clone, they're reluctant to mess with his head and potentially damage what makes him so good. Instead they elect to keep him busy and let him work through it himself.
In 2110, the Judges encounter a group called the Judda, rogue Judges who are discovered to be clones of Mega-City's finest:
The Judda are the creations of Morton Judd, the man behind the original cloning program that created Dredd. Having fallen out with the other Judges not long after, he's spent the last few decades hiding out in Australia and building a clone army. In the epic story "Oz" Dredd is sent after him, on the pretext of being in the country to catch rogue Super-Surf champion Chopper. While he thwarts the Judda invasion, Dredd fails to catch Chopper, reigniting his doubts that he's getting too old and soft for the job.
By the time of "Bloodline" in progs 583-4, Dredd's pushing fifty and having a bit of a quiet mid-life crisis. He's getting tired of putting away petty criminals who are just replaced by new ones, and beginning to feel the effects of his age.
Despite being psi-rated double zero, Dredd experiences a psychic flash, leading him to an escaped Judda prisoner. It turns out that the Judges managed to capture a few, but only one was strong enough survive the interrogation - a Fargo clone, another of Dredd's clone-brothers. The Judges are hoping to rehabilitate him, and allowed him to escape to the Judda's former base so he could see for himself he was the last one left.
Dredd realises he's met his intended replacement.
A year or so later in prog 650, "The Shooting Match", we see Dredd and his Judda clone unknowingly measured against each other when they're put through identical field tests:
And so begins the build-up to "Necropolis".
Dredd's crisis of faith comes to a head in prog 661 when a schoolboy writes him a letter full of awkward questions about the Judge system, and then gets murdered before he can deliver it. This time, Dredd's not able to put the doubts out of his mind quite so easily, and it's beginning to become obvious to his superiors.
While he's still dealing with that, Dredd's assigned the final assessment of a new rookie Judge - the Judda clone Kraken.
Kraken puts in an exemplary performance on his assessment, but even so, Dredd fails him, unconvinced that he's really overcome the Judda brainwashing. And that's not the only thing that Dredd's decided...
In "By Lethal Injection", progs 669-670, we learn the fallout of Dredd's decision about Kraken.
Kraken's told that since he's been rejected, he's to be executed by lethal injection. Despite the unfairness of the decision, Kraken goes along with it, and even willingly administers the injection himself. However, it turns out it was just a sedative, and this was actually one final test.
The Chief Judge decides that to soften the major blow to morale of losing Dredd, they should keep it classified and let Kraken take his place for a while. Unfortunately, things proceed to go straight to hell.
The main Necropolis story runs from progs 674 to 699, and is far too long and awesome to do justice here. To cut the story very short, Judge Death's allies the Sisters of Death are able to influence Kraken's mind thanks to the lingering traces of Judd's brainwashing. He starts having memory lapses and unknowingly doing their bidding, reluctant to report it at first because he knows what a tight leash he's on.
Kraken ends up helping the Dark Judges to take over, and they run amok until the original Dredd, badly scarred from his own encounter with the Sisters of Death, returns from the Cursed Earth to help free the city. Afterwards, he confronts Kraken, who tells his story:
And so ends the story of another unfortunate clone-brother.
In part two: two more clones join the family Dredd, and Vienna returns.
Brothers of the Blood was the TPB collection that tipped me over the edge from a casual Dredd reader to a major fan. Since a lot of my love for it springs from the way it builds on decades of past continuity, I thought I'd collect some scans from earlier stories for context. Then I figured what the hell, collected the follow-up stories too, and the whole thing snowballed into an epic three part history of Dredd's relationship with his family of clones.
Around 17 pages of scans and a fair bit of waffle lie beneath the cut. (NB: these stories were mostly published in six page instalments, so two pages max from any individual prog.)
The Background
One of the reasons the Dredd stories have such a strong sense of continuity is that the series runs in close to 1:1 time. In the 35 years the strips have been running, 35 years have passed in-universe, and the characters get to evolve and grow older.
When the comic first begins, it's 2099, and Joe Dredd is already an established Street Judge with 20 years' experience. In prog 30, "The Return of Rico", we get our first glimpse of his background. Unlike regular Judges who are recruited as children, Dredd was a clone created for the role, and he had an identical clone-brother called Rico. Of course, this being comics, one of them had to be the evil twin:
Rico was given disfiguring facial surgery to be able to survive in a vacuum while he served out his sentence on Titan. He planned to kill Joe in revenge, but after twenty years on Titan his reflexes had slowed, and Joe was quicker on the draw and shot him dead.
Two years later, in prog 116, we discover that that Rico left behind a young daughter, Vienna. (Exactly how he was able to leave behind a toddler daughter when he spent 20 years on Titan was left unexplained for decades. But more on that in part two.) Anyway, whether you ascribe it to youth, guilt over killing his brother, or just dodgy early years non-continuity, Dredd was a bit more emotional in those days...
After Joe saves his little niece from a kidnapper...
...and she promptly disappears into the ether for long decades, like many a comic book relative before her.
In prog 377, we learn that Mega-City 1 is still pumping out more Judge clones, when Dredd is sent to rescue a batch that have been lost in a hijacking. (Apologies for some dodgy scans below: the case files don't always have the greatest reproduction to begin with, and they are hefty books to fit into a scanner.)
Like many things in Dredd continuity, this will Be Important Later.
Anyway, by this time it's 2106, and Dredd, in his mid-forties, is starting to behave a little erratically for his superiors' liking: second-guessing whether it was strictly necessary to kill a perp, going out of his way to help out a kid with disabilities, and other such worrisome behaviour. In prog 389, "A Case For Treatment", he's sent for a psych assessment, and we learn some more about his early life.
It turns out that, being a clone, Dredd wasn't raised from a baby, but rather popped out of the clone tank at a physical age of five and immediately inducted into the Academy:
We also discover for the first time that Dredd is in fact a clone of Fargo, father of the Judicial system. (Which makes that earlier full-face image of Fargo from prog 377 a bit of an "Oops" moment in retrospect.)
The therapy session concludes that there's no particular inciting incident for Dredd's behaviour, just the gradual effect of long-term exposure to the citizens. The usual remedy would be brain surgery to burn out the emotional centres, but what with Dredd being a Fargo clone, they're reluctant to mess with his head and potentially damage what makes him so good. Instead they elect to keep him busy and let him work through it himself.
In 2110, the Judges encounter a group called the Judda, rogue Judges who are discovered to be clones of Mega-City's finest:
The Judda are the creations of Morton Judd, the man behind the original cloning program that created Dredd. Having fallen out with the other Judges not long after, he's spent the last few decades hiding out in Australia and building a clone army. In the epic story "Oz" Dredd is sent after him, on the pretext of being in the country to catch rogue Super-Surf champion Chopper. While he thwarts the Judda invasion, Dredd fails to catch Chopper, reigniting his doubts that he's getting too old and soft for the job.
By the time of "Bloodline" in progs 583-4, Dredd's pushing fifty and having a bit of a quiet mid-life crisis. He's getting tired of putting away petty criminals who are just replaced by new ones, and beginning to feel the effects of his age.
Despite being psi-rated double zero, Dredd experiences a psychic flash, leading him to an escaped Judda prisoner. It turns out that the Judges managed to capture a few, but only one was strong enough survive the interrogation - a Fargo clone, another of Dredd's clone-brothers. The Judges are hoping to rehabilitate him, and allowed him to escape to the Judda's former base so he could see for himself he was the last one left.
Dredd realises he's met his intended replacement.
A year or so later in prog 650, "The Shooting Match", we see Dredd and his Judda clone unknowingly measured against each other when they're put through identical field tests:
And so begins the build-up to "Necropolis".
Dredd's crisis of faith comes to a head in prog 661 when a schoolboy writes him a letter full of awkward questions about the Judge system, and then gets murdered before he can deliver it. This time, Dredd's not able to put the doubts out of his mind quite so easily, and it's beginning to become obvious to his superiors.
While he's still dealing with that, Dredd's assigned the final assessment of a new rookie Judge - the Judda clone Kraken.
Kraken puts in an exemplary performance on his assessment, but even so, Dredd fails him, unconvinced that he's really overcome the Judda brainwashing. And that's not the only thing that Dredd's decided...
In "By Lethal Injection", progs 669-670, we learn the fallout of Dredd's decision about Kraken.
Kraken's told that since he's been rejected, he's to be executed by lethal injection. Despite the unfairness of the decision, Kraken goes along with it, and even willingly administers the injection himself. However, it turns out it was just a sedative, and this was actually one final test.
The Chief Judge decides that to soften the major blow to morale of losing Dredd, they should keep it classified and let Kraken take his place for a while. Unfortunately, things proceed to go straight to hell.
The main Necropolis story runs from progs 674 to 699, and is far too long and awesome to do justice here. To cut the story very short, Judge Death's allies the Sisters of Death are able to influence Kraken's mind thanks to the lingering traces of Judd's brainwashing. He starts having memory lapses and unknowingly doing their bidding, reluctant to report it at first because he knows what a tight leash he's on.
Kraken ends up helping the Dark Judges to take over, and they run amok until the original Dredd, badly scarred from his own encounter with the Sisters of Death, returns from the Cursed Earth to help free the city. Afterwards, he confronts Kraken, who tells his story:
And so ends the story of another unfortunate clone-brother.
In part two: two more clones join the family Dredd, and Vienna returns.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-01 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-01 07:31 am (UTC)I remember reading that he deliberately wears boots a size too small, with the idea being that the constant discomfort would prevent him thinking too deeply about the flaws of the system.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-01 02:38 pm (UTC)I don't think anything's been said about the comfort of the helmets one way or the other, but it sure seems like everybody else aside from Dredd is in a hurry to take them off when they're not on combat duty.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-01 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-01 02:54 pm (UTC)I might do a couple of other "history of" posts like this if people are interested; I've been gradually gathering scans on Judge Beeny and one of my personal favourite characters, DeMarco. It seems like the best format for posting Dredd scans, really, since it's a bit difficult to cover individual stories when you're limited to two pages a prog.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-11 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-12 12:03 am (UTC)