Judge Dredd Megazine 237

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Comic Reviewed by Floyd Kermode

Title: Judge Dredd Megazine 237
Written by various
Art by various
Lettered by various
coloured by various
Editor: Alan Barnes
Published by Rebellion

Intro: What is this like? Like waiting for the Beatles and getting Wings? Like 2000 years being celebrated with the Millenium Dome? Like running out of metaphors?
The Judge Dredd Megazine has been brilliant for so long, I was really looking forward to reviewing an extra-good birthday edition. I have always liked the way the Megazine managed to be more adult and experimental than 2000 AD without being all prissy about it. I even liked the less successful moments, such as acres of reprints and pretty unfunny humour. It helped that I was new to the world of Dredd and hadn’t read most of the reprints. Perhaps I wasn’t as demanding as the fans who had started on the Megazine after a lifetime of 2000 AD. However, it always seemed like something of real quality.
Recently, however, the Meg has been absolutely bloody brilliant. Loads of new comics, ranging from good fun to genius, reprints I haven’t read before (which is my acid test for whether old material is appropriate. Selfish of me, I know). He has given us genius new stories from Dredd’s seemingly inexhaustible world (Lenny Zero and Jack Point). All this and magazine articles that are, usually, damn good stuff, notably the funny tv colums and interesting pop culture nostalgia! A ‘text story’ which wasn’t a chore to read! True, this last happened only once. Simon Spurrier deserves some kind of medal for it. If only he would do more.
True, there were some bloody awful ‘lad-mag’ features, the occasional dud comic and David Bishop’s interminable histories of things. But you can’t have everything, as Steven Wright says, where would you put it? Overall the Meg has been a huge treat over the last couple of years and I’ve begun to have cravings in the week before it’s due to arrive. Just like I used to be with smoking and like I always am with the first coffee of the morning.
It’s my sad duty to report that if the Megazine has been my first coffin nail and/or expresso, then the 15th Birthday issue is a nicotine patch or a cup of caro made with skim milk. There’s just not that much to it. As I said, it’s like the British celebrating the millennium with that embarrassing dome thing. Here’s why.

Cover; The Cover is nice, I suppose. Dredd’s face peers through a window under the caption ’15 Years Creep”. Peel back the cover and we see he and some other judges are filling a furnace with old copies of the Megazine. The phrase ‘Farenheight 451’ is prominent. This is okay and Cliff Robinson does a reasonable job, but it’s not spectacular. As the cover for a 2000 AD special, this would be great but the Meg has a history of groovy, unconventional covers (as well as a fair few bloody awful ones). Like the rest of the Meg, the cover has a lot to live up to but doesn’t.

‘Flood’s 13’; John Wagner, Henry Flint
Here is a birthday present indeed. A good, long, classic Dredd story from Wagner and Flint. The format is very old; take something popular, in this case the Ocean’s 11 and 12 movies and give them a Megacity One twist. It’s a formular Wagner is very adept at, not just plonking parody but using someone else’s formula in a different setting Some old comic characters appear; not major league ones like Walter the Wobot, but familiar. Flint is in fine form; giving us style, emotion and pathos, the works. The panel in which Dredd first has suspicions about the heist is wonderful story telling.

15 Years Creep: David Bishop, history of the Megazine

Described in the editorial as ‘long awaited’, the prospect of more Bishop historicizing filled me with intertia. Actually there’s nothing extremely wrong with the piece itself. Aside from Bishop’s curious habit of writing about himself in the third person thus: “Bishop admits he was slightly worried…”, which always grates with me. It always reads as if he’s trying to gain a spurious objectivity by pretending he’s a different person to the writer. Of course it’s always possible David Bishop comes home and says to his significant other “David Bishop is home, honey”, in which case Oliver Sachs should be writing about him.
If you like detailed histories of how comics are produced and would like to read such an account of the Megazine, then ’15 years Creep’ is for you. Look no further. Mind you, if you were that interested in it, you’d probably know a lot of the history already. On the credit side; there are lots of interesting pictures from the Megazine’s past, and readable little boxes summarizing some of the more popular stories. The piece is reasonably well written.
On the debit side, there’s just too bloody much of it. It goes on and on, there’s a break for a Devlin Waugh story, then it goes on and on again. And there is to be more next month, which really makes my heart sink. The joy of the recent magazine pieces such as the comics page and ‘British Icons’ is that they were interesting things about the related world outside the Megazine. Having them replaced by a history of the Megazine itself is a mistake. Do the lad mags do this sort of thing – ditch 18 pages of jokes and reviews and replace them with 18 pages of magazine history? Barnes is breaking his promise in the editorial to have “no nostalgia….no stomm, just full-on future justice” Oh well, as I said, nice pictures.

Devlin Waugh: All Hell (John Smith, Colin McNeil).

Speaking of broken promises, here’s Devlin Waugh. He’s a terrific character; a Terry Thomas style gay Englishman, future vampire, occultist and dandy. Devlin is a terrific character but his career in the Megazine and 2000 AD is littered with broken promises. The only satisfying story of his I’ve seen is “Fetish”. I first encountered Devlin in Sirius Rising, a bloody awful, badly illustrated story which went on for ever and I still liked him.
All Hell promised much. Colin McNeil’s art is really good, mostly realistic, dense images, characters who seem very tangible. A good artist in a comic makes up for a lot of weakness in the script. Even allowing for this effect, the script seemed more restrained. John Smith does rather tend to smother his stories with gibberish. All sci fi must have some nonsense along the lines of “this ship uses the new glaxon sneeb drive to travel through worm holes in dark matter”. Smith likes to combine an ‘occult’ version of gibberish with Gerard Manly Hopkins touches, like this:
“the shatterlight screecrawls softharshly through my anguished chakras as the yogi reaches the 12th anti-mantra”
For most of ‘All Hell’ he seemed to be restraining himself, as Devlin and some buddies trundled through Hell, on the trail of the Catechist. ‘Good editing’, I thought to myself. Alas, Smith was just saving all the nonsense up for the last episode, and the baddies’ plot to replace everyone in existence with giant floating grubs is foiled by something or other. Very disappointing. I remain a Devlin fan and can’t wait to see him again.

The Simping Detective: Fifteen (Simon Spurrier, Fraser Irving)

The Simping Detective, aka Jack Point hasn’t been around for very long. For those who don’t know him; Jack Point is an undercover Judge who dresses as a Simp (clown like eccentrics). He’s only appeared in six stories, but they’ve all been gems so far. Dark, humorous art by Frazer Irving, loads of witty Chandlerising by Spurrier. The two creators suit each other very well, both bursting with promise, both changing what they do so rapidly that you occasionally have to check to see if it’s the same person. In The Simping Detective, Spurrier really had it right, not straining too much, not outsmarting himself. Usually the stories have clever, slightly cynical plot resolutions, which point to continuing sleaze in Jack Point’s portion of Mega-City One, whilst leaving Point looking smart but stuck, almost about to get the dirt on his crooked boss, but not quite. If there was a collection of the Jack Point stories, I’d be queuing up to buy them. He’s a great choice for a birthday issue.
AND YET…….(you knew this was coming didn’t you?), it’s a bit flat this time around. Maybe it’s just one too many “guess what, the boss got away” story lines, maybe it’s the misuse of Galen DeMarco, who does something way out of character here. True, DeMarco hasn’t had much luck as a character in her own right, so in a way it doesn’t matter, but it still jars. Maybe it’s just that the story came at the end of a disappointing tribute to a great magazine, and I was a little tired by the time I got around to it.