I’m going to just pick a few of them to illustrate, quite perfectly, what I’m talking about… This particular Case Files is full of all those perfect little short Dredds, the stories that make these Complete Case Files so damn satisfying. So, as good as the thril of ‘Terror’ is, I found myself loving the other stories in here, some of those great little Dredds, the ones that often get overlooked in the grand and long history of the character. These are the ones that build the idea of what it’s like to live in Dredd’s world, these are the ones where we realise how strange, how ridiculous, how dangerous it would be to be a simple citizen living in MC-1.

It doesn’t matter how much you know of the world, all you really need to understand is that it’s a future world where the fascists are in charge, judge, jury, executioner… and it’s all embodied in the figure of Judge Dredd.Īnd so it is that we get the best of Judge Dredd perhaps not through the likes of ‘Terror’, but in the stories of the world of Mega-City One that we find in the smaller stories. And that’s the brilliance that you get from these Case Files. But with Dredd, I can always feel at home, no matter how much I know of the history of the comic. Sadly, Marvel has overly-complicated itself and it’s a world I no longer feel part of. As an old Marvel kid, one who loves the world of Marvel, it’s something I particularly appreciate. That’s the reason why 2000 AD and especially Dredd is so accessible. The world of Dredd is huge, for sure, but the brilliance of it is that it’s not one that’s bogged down in complex continuity. No, it’s actually all about the building of a world for the past 45 years, one where every single Dredd storyline is as important as the rest, whether it be an epic multi-parter or a daft done-in-one bit of silliness. In it, the anti-Justice Department group Total War mount a campaign against the Judges and the City.īut one rash moment of humanity for one of the Total War recruits changes everything and we’re sent off into a Wagnerian epic where we get to question what we know of Dredd’s world and the entire foundation it’s based on…Īnd as epic as that Wagner/MacNeil tale is – and it really is – the thing this Case Files shows us, like all the rest, is that the secret of Judge Dredd isn’t that it’s all about the epic tales, the important tales, the world-changing tales. In the eight parts of ‘Terror ‘ gives you a long, thought-provoking and just brilliant thriller, beautifully illustrated, as always, by Colin MacNeil. In this latest set of Case Files, the highlight for many will be the longest John Wagner-written tale in here, part of Wagner’s ongoing and frequently re-visited Democracy/Total War themed tales.

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