fire and forget

Just come back from an extremely interesting panel discussion involving comics legend Pat Mills, Nikolai Dante creator Robbie Morrison and 7-year 2000AD editor Matt Smith at the BFI. The focus was split between the history of 2000AD and the possibility of the galaxy’s greatest comic on film. Cyber-Matt was a bit cagey about details of upcoming projects, but apparently a new Judge Dredd film may be in the offing…

Smith made a great point about Judge Dredd being a straight man to the insanity of the world around him. That made me realise that suspension of disbelief works with Dredd in almost the opposite way to the usual: instead of placing a changeable character in a believable world, with its own internal logic, Dredd is a fixed point in a world where pretty much anything goes.

Morrison’s recollection of a Dredd story in which Brian Bolland conjures up Hammer horror with a story of waxwork robots escaping into a peasoup fog evokes Dredd’s ability to span genres and styles without sounding a wrong note. Something that has always mystified me about why Dredd endures as a character even though he has almost no character arc now becomes clear to me: he is near-incapable of change, and as such he will always be our fixed point of reference in a world of everyday criminals and aliens, psychos, psychics and super-fiends.

My friend and chief red biro-wielder Nick made an excellent point over a pint or two later, that Dredd is also about the British relationship — or perhaps more accurately, fascination — with American fiction. It occurred to me that Dredd is less about the gap in time between his world and ours, than the gap in space between us and the incipient violence of the States. Dredd was partly inspired by Dirty Harry — or his comic book counterpart, One-Eyed Jack — which suggests that Dredd’s creators weren’t commenting on the crypto-fascist ultraviolent urban hell that could happen way off in the future, but on the crypto-fascist ultraviolent urban hell that was already threatening way off across the Atlantic. And, most importantly, what that means to us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under comics, film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.