Judge Dredd: Day of Chaos

[nomadicwriter]

Following on from my previous series of posts about Judge Beeny's backstory (America, America II & Cadet, Tour of Duty) some scans from the latest mega-epic "Day of Chaos". Roughly ten pages beneath the cut.

Day of Chaos

In the "Day of Chaos" epic, running from progs 1740-1789, everything goes to hell in the run-up to the mayoral elections. It begins when PJ Maybe escapes from prison. Dredd and Beeny head the operation to try and recapture him, but it all goes disastrously wrong.



(As a sidenote, this story saw a marked shift in the character art for Beeny, where she began to be depicted as considerably darker-skinned than back in "Tour of Duty". As it's all the same colourist, I'm presuming it was an editorial decision to avoid the appearance of whitewashing.)

Things go from bad to worse with a Sov-created virus released in the city and premonitions of large-scale disaster from a psychic cadet. Dredd puts Beeny, Roake, and his aide Logan on the case of trying to decipher her predictions.





Beeny puts together that they're looking for a corrupt Judge, but it's too late to stop his assassination of the young psychic and her twin sister.



Dredd assigns the team to hunt for Wile's contacts. Roake goes off to investigate one possible lead:









Beeny and Logan track down Roake's killer, but find he's already infected with the Chaos Bug that's running wild through the city's population.





Things spiral still further out of control when another Sov plant among the Judges leaks a fake video to the media, purporting to show mass euthanasia of people with the Chaos Bug.





Rioting and anti-Judicial sentiment erupts, and the Judges lose any chance of containing the disease. They're forced to make sweeps of the city blocks, killing any Chaos victims that they find. The strain of the horrific situation is almost too much for Beeny:



And she's not the only one taking it hard.



The aftershocks of Day of Chaos are only just beginning to play out in the latest progs, so what the future has in store for Dredd and Beeny we still don't know.

Comments

[robinzegblu]

So America is Mega-City One and the USSR (which still exists?) is Sov-City, but Berlin is just Berlin?

[nomadicwriter]

Yeah, the reference to Berlin surprised me too. I don't think the comics have ever really mentioned much about what happened to mainland Europe, though. The US has (or had) three mega-cities, Mega-City One and Two and Texas City, and the Sovs had East Meg One and Two. I guess we have to assume that Dreddworld is some kind of parallel history where the USSR stuck around or reformed or something, since the war with the Sovs was a major plotline in the early comics from the 70s and 80s. (In fact it's part of the setup for the Day of Chaos storyline, because the Sovs' attack on the city here is revenge for Dredd having given the order to nuke one of their cities thirty years ago.)

[icon_uk]

Well, if Britain had Brit-Cit, there's really no reason that Berlin wasn't the major European "Mega-City", is there?

[q99]

While possible, it doesn't have '-City' in the name!

There are some non-megacities around.