2 crampons out of 5

Judge Dredd has a built in fan set.  It also has unique appeal – if you like Dredd, you probably like most of it, and if you don’t care, you probably won’t care for most of it.  Still, with a ton of reprinted Dredd material available, if a certain storyline only gets printed once its authors have achieved a certain level of fame, I don’t think I’m too off base in casting this collection into the “okay” pile of Dredd stuff.

A lil’ clarity: this ain’t fully Morrison / Millar together.  They both worked on the first story – which resonates a little more, as it includes some characters from their previous Dredd collaborations – but Millar alone wrote Frankenstein Corps.  Interesting in the world ranking of comic book fame is that Morrison still gets top billing.

If you’ve read any of the previous Dredd stuff by either writer, I think these are funnish stories.  Unfortunately, I prefer my Dredd with a little more story development (which means I probably shouldn’t be reading Dredd), hence Crusade working a bit better, as it builds off of judges that seem to have a bit of background, and the premise is fun – everyone tasked to track down a lost judge who may or may not have glimpsed god or something similar – so we get a quest mixed with a chase, mixed with the best of the best judges, giving JD a bit of a run for his money – but it still doesn’t do much more than build to a couple of over-wrought fights that fizzle out with poorly paneled action (it’s hard to keep track of who’s where, which is a shame, because the environment seems cool, it’s just not drawn with a well-depicted sense of scope) and some new-to-me-for-Dredd weirdo surreal humor tossed in that reeks of Morrison and drugs, but maybe was just the duo goofing around.  Either way, I haven’t seen its like in any of the Dredd tails I’ve read (it seems fitting for plenty of 2000 AD things, but Dredd seems to have a semi-established reality), so, uh, off-putting at story’s end.

Frankenstein Corps is sort of what it sounds like, and hints at Millar’s future of widescreen fisticuffs, as it’s just a lotta’ brawlin’ and swearin’ with no real sense of build or consequence, and pitched a little too harshly to be fun Dreddy ultra-violence.

Too harsh?  Note that Morrison and Millar weren’t the major writers on Dredd, and their storylines aren’t often mentioned in the same breath as the “classic” ones.  They’re collected for posterity these years later because of how big the writers have become.  Since everyone had to do their time in 2000 AD and, also, I think it was sort of the goal to get to write Dredd, it’s always nifty to see what guys like Ennis or Millar would do with the character, but that doesn’t guarantee that it stands in line with either great Dredd stuff or great in comparison to that writer’s modern work.