Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: The Judge Child Quest
Written by: John Wagner and Alan Grant
Penciled by: Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, Mike McMahon
Inked by: NA
Colored by: NA
Lettered by: NA
Editor: NA
Publisher: Fleetwood Comics
With DC and Rebellion (owner of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd franchise) reaching a new distribution deal for North America, let’s look back to the early 1990s and Fleetwood Comics’ “Judge Dredd: The Judge Child Quest” TPB. The arc, which originally ran in 2000 AD #156-181, was ultimately reprinted and colorized by Fleetway Comics as the five-part mini-series and then collected in 1991 in a single TPB volume that is now out of print.
The plot of “The Judge Child Quest” is this: the most respected and accurate Psi-Judge in Mega-City One has predicted a horrific apocalypse that will one day devastate Mega-City One. The only way for the sprawling Mega-City to survive is for rule to be given to a child of destiny who will lead Mega-City One in this darkest hour and ensure its survival. Judge Dredd is given the task to find the child, which leads him to the depths of space and into the heart of the Cursed Earth to find the child of destiny.
The “Judge Child Quest” is a typical, quasi-self contained arc that features Judge Dredd getting into various situations and fighting against various figures (most of which are of a satirical nature) with very little being given towards the actual plot itself. This creates a slight flaw in the storytelling, as seen in the way that Wagner and Grant set up the entire storyline with a rather flimsy two-page flashback sequence that does nothing to establish the urgency of the coming apocalypse. This lack of fear/dread is most notable because of the context of the story, which takes place early in the existence of Judge Dredd, since the now annual holocaust-like slaughtering of the Mega-City One’s populace wasn’t a regular occurrence of the franchise.
Judge Dredd’s quest to find the Judge Child leads him into conflict with the villainous “Angel Gang”, a twisted family of hillbillies who are the living personification of evil. They seek to use the Judge Child and his versatile psychic powers for their own selfish goals. But even the Angel Gang, including the monolithic cyborg “Mean Machine”, can not imagine the evil that exists inside of the Judge Child. Is he truly the savior of Mega-City One or is he something even worse? Of course this leads to your typical Judge Dredd twist ending as the Dredd decides that the Judge Child’s psychotic evil makes him useless to Mega-City One.
