Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your next choice is the comic Judge Dredd by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra. I am a child of the 80s and this was definitely very popular with my two brothers!
Well, I was the same. As a teenager I used to love Judge Dredd. I bought the comics for years and I’m not ashamed! The great thing about it is that it´s actually quite a subversive comic. It took a while, reading it as a kid, to realise this.
The scenario is that there has been a nuclear war and most of the world has been destroyed. Everybody now lives in these mega cities. It is interesting that mega cities now exist. I was reading that Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou have recently become one, with a population of 120 million people. And so everyone lives in these huge mega cities with hundreds of millions of people and they are ruled by the judges who represent absolute fascist law in themselves. They can sentence people on the spot. They can execute people on the spot. They are judge, jury and executioner all rolled into one. But it is a grotesque society of rampant consumerism and total unemployment. And everyone has become a bit of a moron, needing to be governed by this ruthless authoritarian law because there is no meaningful society any more.
The stories would often play with concepts that were going on in the media at the time. So, for example, Cold War anxieties were very much to the fore and in this storyline from the early 1980s the Soviet-controlled East Meg One (formerly Moscow) takes advantage of social unrest in Mega-City One (a conurbation of 800 million covering the eastern seaboard of the USA) to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike that annihilates half the population. Judge Dredd leads the resistance and turns East Meg’s nukes against itself, wiping out another 500 million people in the process.
There are all these crazy drawings of hundreds of missiles zooming in on the city and a massive body count. What you see is that the West and East were both reflections of each other. Both are ruthless totalitarian regimes. One of them is more consumerist than the other but that is the only difference.
So what the comics were all about is great art, non-stop action and a bruising satirical comment about the madness of the Cold War stand-off – this was pulp sci-fi at its best.
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Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
![Image of Judge Dredd: The Complete "Apocalypse War" Including "Block Mania"](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41TT7SRP56L._SL300_.jpg "Judge Dredd: The Complete "Apocalypse War" Including "Block Mania"")
