Now collected as a graphic novel in both digital and print formats, Judge Dredd: A Better World examines the politics behind governance in Mega-City One. The creative team of Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt, and Henry Flint take a break from their 2000 AD work to unpack this tale of timely themes in world where authoritarianism runs rampant.
(Content warning: this article explores themes of real-life police brutality and state violence.)
COMIC BOOK YETI: It is a pleasure to have the team behind the latest expansive tale in the Judge Dredd universe here in the Yeti Cave!
I noticed prior to the foreword, there were 35 volumes of Judge Dredd collecting the stories from nearly 50 years of publication. Arthur, you and Henry worked together on the Judge Dredd comics following the film starring Karl Urban, and Rob, you and Henry worked on some Low Life installments twenty years back, but is this is the first time the three of you came together on a Dredd title? What led to this momentous occasion?
Rob Williams: I’ve worked with Henry a few times now. Not just on Low Life but also on a few Judge Dredd Graphic Novels - Titan, The Small House and End of Days. Henry is, for me, one of the best storytellers we have in comics today. Arthur and I were co-writing a few Judge Maitland stories building up to what would become A Better World. I think we knew we were onto something good.
We asked if Henry was available and he was - lucky for us. But we had no idea he was going to attempt a different sequential style on this story. Henry asked us if we minded if he tried ‘something different’ this time. We said sure. And he created something really special.
Arthur Wyatt: When you are bringing out Henry for a Dredd, you are really bringing out the “big guns.” Rob and I had been working on these sequence of stories for a couple of years, building it out incrementally with the knowledge that we wanted to bring it all together and bring things to a head in one big story - we both wanted Henry for that and we were fortunate enough to get him, because the resulting story really could be drawn by no one else.
CBY: It's certainly going to stick with me now that I've read it! One of the most useful allegories employed in A Better World is the implicit utilization of the Overton Window; in the world of Judge Dredd, governance of Mega-City One emerges from an ontology where punitive justice is the response to disorder, and Judge Maitland assumes the idea of social welfare is so far beyond the comprehension of the existing system. The mass protests around police brutality in the United States set off by George Floyd’s public murder clearly provided fodder for the plot. What seems more fantastic; the rapidity of change within a setting as dystopian as Mega-City One, or the idea that police reform might emerge from within an institution corrupted by its power?
RW: You’re right of course, the #DefundthePolice marches were an influence on the writing of A Better World, but I think I’m right in saying (Arthur can correct me if wrong) that when we started the Maitland arc with ‘Carry The Nine,’ that was before the #DefundThePolice marches. Maitland, in our story, is no idealist. She has zero interest in destroying the Judge system. She simply acts on empirical evidence. She runs modelling software that shows that taking money away from what is essentially a policy of warfare against the citizens, and putting that money into education and social programmes instead, crime levels drop.
And when she sees that, she cannot understand why the Judges would not make this change. Justice Department see her evidence and, with Judge Dredd’s backing, allow her to use one City Sector as an experiment. Which is kind of the "Hamsterdam" scenario in The Wire. That’s probably an influence here.
AW: Those are very much the themes and I’m glad they stand out. Honestly one of the hardest things about writing a science fiction satire of society and policing is keeping the hyper-real aspect where it goes bigger and harder and stupider than what’s going on outside our windows. We’ve a couple of factors in our favor here keeping us in the realm of fantasy: The deeply incorruptible nature of Dredd, who may be a bastard but always tries to do things right, and that we have Judge Maitland who is basically the Accounting Division version of Dredd, only twice as dedicated. So if she sees something is the right thing to do, she’s going to go all in on it even if it’s bucking the system and everything she knows, and she’s going to have Dredd on her side because he knows she’s good at her shit - even though solutions that don’t involve boots and bullets don’t come natural to him,
Not getting the same backing from everyone else and running into an insane amount of backlash for what are fairly moderate, sensible proposals that she can prove work takes things back to realm of shabby realism.
CBY: I've lived the life of a policy wonk having my findings around the evidence base ignored by governments, so Maitland's journey hit awfully close to home. To your point on the timeline, Rob, I'm not sure the lead time on completing work before it goes into print, but it looks like "Carry the Nine" dropped starting in September, 2020 and Floyd was murdered on May 25th, so it would have been the thick of the zeitgeist.
On that note, I’m writing this as Trump’s inauguration in the United States is ten days past, so understanding the mechanisms of authoritarianism should be a priority for every citizen of the world with an interest in avoiding a descent into the same form of dystopian police state Mega-City One embodies. Can you tell us a bit about the character of Robert Glenn and how his corporate reach across the sectors of Mega-City One impacts the governance of society in Judge Dredd?
AW: He’s pretty much an amalgam of every self-service oligarch who would wrap themselves around fascism to profit from it - he protects the system and the system protects him. I’m sure everyone with the advantage of being a few years on from when we wrote it can draw their own parallels. He’s a bit of a late addition and not an aspect of Mega-City One you usually see, but I think when we came up with him an important aspect of the story really clicked into place.
As much as A Better World is about political maneuvering or on-the-street action, it’s also about battles of ideas and narratives, so having a real life parallel to how ideas are molded and manipulated by media was really important to it.
RW: Robert Glenn is a media mogul who uses his various vid-shows and internet influence to push fear and anger into the populace, simply because when he does his ratings rise, and his share price rises. Again, he’s no ideologue. If peace and love gave him the same ends, he’d do that.
The Maitland experiment gives him the perfect target to tell the population that this is putting them in danger - "woke mind virus," etc. And the people of Mega-City One are, as ever, only ever one tinderbox away from a bloody great riot. Glenn sits in his penthouse, watches the City burn, and counts his money.
CBY: Yep, the sensationalization of conflict for viewership is one of the chief failings of the current media industry, and many journalists play into the clickbait game in pursuit of revenue over building civic accountability (The insipid tactics of Andy Ngo took a well-deserved lampooning with your Zweit character's activities, I should note). You’ve all been working across the 2000 AD roster for decades now. Henry, can you tell us a bit about your illustration technique? What tools are you working with, and how do you handle each stage of penciling, inking, and coloring? Rob and Arthur, what sort of differences can you note about closing this story with Henry compared to Boo Cook and Jake Lynch?
Henry Flint: The story is a thriller, so I wanted to play around with time, stretching it out by allowing each caption and speech balloon to have its own little moment to breathe. Sometimes five panels can represent hours in a story, sometimes only seconds. The trick is to make the reader feel that passing of time - easy with a script like this.
2000 AD is an action, adventure comic with mostly six panel pages so at least one panel per page gets a dynamic action shot. Rob and Arthur’s script was a little different. It wasn't a typical Dredd story, and it gave me an opportunity to have a little fun and experiment. I knew the script was going to be good after reading the first few episodes, so I felt inspired to pull out a few stops.
Equipment-wise, I use an extra fine fountain pen on heavyweight A3 sketching paper.
RW: Henry took our scripts - which were initially quite traditional and 5/6 panels, and split those into page grids that were sometimes 12/13/14 panels. Each acting beat was given its own moment. It’s an amazing display of the power of sequential storytelling. After a few episodes, when we saw what Henry was doing, we adjusted our script style to match. And the moment we saw Henry’s pages the key plot point at the end of the story became clear - we would react to Henry’s style to use it as a staccato tension build, for the eventual explosion that the story builds toward.
AW: It’s honestly great when you know an artist you are working with and their strengths and weakness and get to play into it - there’s some highly comicsy, diagrammatic stuff I love to do that I will only do with some artists, and there’s a level of density that’s fun to work with that I’d only really throw at artists who are into that kind of thing.
Boo got "Carry the Nine" and "The Pitch;" two stories that really could have been a bit dry in the wrong hands, as they are really about high-level political meetings that set events in motion. Boo really made them sing, with some great character work and these big, bold panels where we break into some action or a flashback. Jake, I’ve worked with a lot - if you pick up the collection Regicide it’s pretty much all his and my work on Dredd, and he’s really great at the dramatic action stuff and the crazy designs.
And then Henry is Henry… who took a look at our script, decided the job wasn’t complicated enough and broke everything apart to be a 15 panel grid. That’s a case of having a fair idea of an artist’s capabilities and what to expect, then having them outdoing those expectations by an order of magnitude just for fun.
CBY: I only had a low-res digital copy for review, but the expertise in the art came through bright and clear. I also absolutely love the team assemblage montage you put together in “The Hard Way.” There are some brilliant characters brought in from around Dredd’s world (and I don’t want to spoil them for our readers). Can you share a bit about the guidelines provided and liberties allowed by the 2000 AD editorial team when further developing areas outside of Mega-City One, both in narrative canon and visual depiction?
AW: We had a fun time spitballing a list of those and cutting down that list to a reasonable group of hit squad archetypes, a lot of those characters being based on classic 2000 AD or Judge Dredd stories of the past. Rob and I are both long term fans and I guess have a fair feel for the lore of the world and what can be pulled from it and what works?
I don’t think we got particular push back on anything except the DEF Warrior, a robot who was going to be the same model as Hammerstein from ABC Warriors but has freed himself from his programming to pursue a mercenary life. That was felt to be treading too much on another writer's toes, so it became Sentientoid, a Sov war robot who has freed itself from its programming to pursue a mercenary life in the name of communism. Sentientoid was a thousand percent more fun to write than DEF Warrior would have been, so really that as for the best.
RW: Matt Smith has been 2000 AD’s editor for 20 years now. All Dredd storylines run through Matt. I think Arthur and I have been reading Dredd since we were kids, so we’re pretty well-versed in the world. But Matt has an encyclopaedic knowledge. You’ll pitch something to him and he’ll say Y/N and sometimes make suggestions. Matt also knows what other Judge Dredd writers have planned, so he’s the conduit.
With the lineup of mercenaries who come to try and assassinate Maitland in "The Hard Way," a couple of them are variations on some figures from classic Dredd stories of the past. The rest are brand new.
CBY: They are abundantly entertaining. The line, “Halt, citizens! Linear time is fabricated! Only the rotating cube of truth can educate you!” was possibly my favorite in the entire comic, despite it not being central to the plot. I can only assume; was this a reference to Gene Ray’s Time Cube? What other references and inspirations did everyone take the opportunity to drop into this story that our readers should keep an eye out for when they pick up a copy?
RW: There are certain signs and figures in the riots that build in A Better World that made me laugh. I’m a big fan of The Bishop of Grud and Guns, and Henry’s design for him was like something out of Kev O’Neill and Pat Mills’s Marshal Law. And I like one sign in the riot that says, ‘WE WANT LIES!’ which is pretty much where we are as a society right now, worryingly.
AW: Qaganon the Living Meme extensively recycles conspiracy theories and Forteana of the past, and is in no way Educated Stupid about our 4-dimensional rotating time reality, so you might be right about that reference. Qaganon shows up again in Judge Dredd: Regicide so if you pick that up you might get a few more of those as well.
CBY: Oh, that alone is an enticing reason to pick up the Regicide collection, too. Now, I will admit I have not been an extensive Judge Dredd reader most of my life. Writing for Comic Book Yeti has induced me to start picking up the Progs, and this plot in particular caught my eye, given my work in socio-economic and environmental policy. London’s Centre for Economic Performance released this past year an extensive discussion paper examining the role of education in crime reduction much in-line with Judge Maitland’s data analysis in Judge Dredd: A Better World. Earlier international research concerning the impact of education on crime precedes this arc for Dredd’s character. What tangible lessons do you want readers to take away from this story regarding the role of police in society?
RW: I’m not sure we want people to take away lessons. We want them to enjoy a good story that hopefully hits them in the gut and makes them question a few things, whether it be subjects like oligarchs’ influence, the use of media as a weapon or the dangers of an authoritarian state. Judge Dredd is, first and foremost, a satire and a cautionary tale. Dredd’s world is pretty much hell on earth. It’s never something to aspire to.
AW: Honestly David Lynch talking about the work being the last word on the work comes to mind here. If you read this story, you’re going to have a fun time and it might trigger some deeper thought and discussion, especially about the way narratives around these things are formed and whose interests those narratives serve, but it is not an academic text.
(That academic text is I Am the Law by Michael Molcher and you should absolutely read it.)
CBY: The world is now at a loss for David Lynch's passing, and I'll see if Michael is up for a chat on I Am the Law. Now, if only our current batch of billionaires were better at critical reading... On that closing note, it is the time to bring attention to any creative work unrelated to Judge Dredd: A Better World that you all think our readers should give their time. What has been keeping all of you inspired and entertained lately?
AW: It’s 2000 AD but entirely outside of Dredd's world… everyone should be checking out Brink by Dan Abnett and I.N.J. Culbard. Imagine The Expanse meets True Detective set on huge space stations that house the last remnants of dead Earth.
And for something more retro, I’m very much enjoying the podcast Shelved By Genre at the moment, who are covering William Gibson’s Sprawl books at the moment and doing a great job of it.
RW: I just finished reading S. Craig Zahler’s Wraiths Of The Broken Land, which is a bloody and beautiful western that asks a few questions of the reader in terms of just how dangerous and brittle this world is, and what you’d do to defend those you love. Comics-wise, I just finished Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntse Vicente. That was pretty great.
CBY: Gentlemen, thank you for the recommendations, and for popping by the Yeti Cave to talk about this incisive entry to the Judge Dredd canon. Please feel free to share any other portfolio, publication, and social media links for our audience to check out, especially if you’ve got other projects underway!
RW: I would urge your readers to buy the graphic novel of Petrol Head, the Image book by myself and 2000 AD alumni Pye Parr. It’s sort of an all-ages world that’s like a distant cousin of Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One and tells the tale of a drag-racing robot trying to save the world from a climate emergency. And it looks lush.
Oh, and buy my & Henry Flint’s other Judge Dredd graphic novels, too; The Small House is probably the most notable of those.
AW: Together we are all currently working on a sequel story to A Better World called The New Future. Maybe this one will have a happy ending and set the world of Dredd to rights!
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