Jeff Anderson’s artwork, while displaying real skill on some panels, is very stiff.
Death and his cronies feature in this story, but not as much as one would expect, as little more than supporting characters. Phobia and Nausea are effectively indistinguishable, which stands in sharp contrast to the strikingly unique designs Brian Bolland created for Judges Death, Fire, Fear and Mortis. Overstretched, and treading a lot of ground that feels familiar from earlier multi-part stories such as the far superior ‘Armageddon Wars’, this also commits the crime of the main threat not being that terrifying or even well designed.
However, most of the story is epic in terms of length alone. And the eventual reveal of the Dead Man’s identity had been truly shocking.
This story contains many interesting and bold plot choices, like retiring and replacing Dredd. They rescue a seriously injured Cassandra Anderson, and work together to bring down someone who’d already considerably harmed Dredd. We catch up with the present as Dredd and his mutant companion encounter ex-Chief Judge McGruder, who’d also taken the Long Walk, then head to Mega-City One, where they discover a ragged bunch of cadets led by the young Judge Giant. Combined with doubts Dredd had long been having about the Judge system, this was enough to force him to take the Long Walk into the Cursed Earth. We begin instead with Dredd in the Cursed Earth, and flashback to the events that led him here: going out on the streets with Kraken, his clone-brother and eventual replacement, and the death of Morphy, Dredd’s mentor. A weakness of collections like this – especially when they claim to be complete – is that the story leading into ‘Necropolis’, The Dead Man, didn’t appear in 2000AD as a Judge Dredd story and so isn’t included here. Case Files 14, written entirely by John Wagner, contains the epic ‘Necropolis’ story, and the events leading up to it, also available as a separate graphic novel.
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