3 out of 5

The IDW pitch for Dredd – or arguably the US pitch – is to just see the judges as an authoritarian regime and go whole hog with that, then getting confused with how to position Joe, and falling back on badass 80s / 90s action movie vibes of explosions and one-liners. Besides grousing that that really misses the “point” of the Dreddverse, it’s just pretty generic.

Brandon Eastman is not wholly avoiding this in his four part False Witness, but it ekes out as one of the best IDW Dredds by… not making Joe the main character. Instead, we focus on a fixer / runner named Mathias, who stumbles his way up in a chain of conspiracies that mostly avoids typical “it goes all the way to the top!”ness by circling the story continually back around to his being raised in the Radlands by muties. Eastman still gives us a fair amount of in-your-face social commentary – also part-and-parcel for the US series, where “commentary” mostly equals saying the thing out loud and then putting a one-liner after it – but it’s social class observations are, again, actually linked to character, and its media observations are kind of so over the top as to be head-shakingly silly before they breach being cringe.

Joe is still on the fringes, of course, chasing after Mathias, but here again, Eastman manages to balance out his overt I Am The Law vibes by inserting Cass into the mix, and there’s an appreciable development where Mathias is somewhat brought into the fold to continue the investigation.

To be clear: this is still pretty clunky and plotily over-complicated, but I feel like Eastman injected more of a sense of identity into the IDW Dreddverse than pretty much any other writer who was new to the IP. And that clunkiness is more because of a need to build up Mathias’ side of the story / world from the ground up, while also giving folks some Dredd stuff they “wanted.” Given an ongoing, you can see how Eastman might’ve been able to take some more time and ground things even further.

Artist Kei Zama’s sketchy, blocky work makes for some confusing action sequences, but they tempered their normally bombastic pace to fit the book, and there’s some good weight to it. Silvia Califano jumps on for the last issue, inserting a kind of Neil Googe-roundness while sticking to Zama’s general template, and that’s a really good look – pretty close to what you’d see from some artists in 2000 AD (where, natch, Silvia has also appeared).