Dredd 3D movie .. Was it worth it?

Finally we get on the bandwagon and present our take on the Judge Dredd new movie...
here. I suggest checking out that review before reading the following review. >

I've been waiting to watch Dredd 3D for nearly a year, since I heard that it was being made last year. Judge Dredd is not your average 'good guy/'hero'. He is the epitome of a true anti-hero. He might even have been the first comic book character to be a anti-hero.

Are Reboots worth the RISK? (Part 2 of 2) : Marvel NOW?

(Continued on from Part 1 here.)

Okay so, lets get back to the real world and the current bombardment of the "NEW", "NEXT", "NOW!".

Usually when you hear, see or read any of those three previous words you would expect something, new, current and better, right? Well, sorry friend, but you are out of luck. Remember last year when all of a sudden Marvel decided to end the decades old run of the Uncanny X-men title and spilt it into Wolverine and the X-Men and renumber Uncanny X-men to #1 with Cyclops leading the team.
Wait.., Didn't this happen before? 
Yes, a similar thing did happen back in 1990s. I remember, because thats when I spent $100 of my wages every week buying comics, especially X-Men related books. There was a split with Cyclops,  'Blue Team' and Storm's 'Gold Team'. Preorder for that 'X-Men' book was 8 million but supposedly only 3 million sold. Which shows that the decision didn't pay off as was expected.

X-Men - 1991 series

His name is Dredd! (Special 2012 Movie lead-in) Part 1

Folks, we have a special guest poster in the house today – and he's brought with him his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Dredd!!
In anticipation of the release (starting 7^th September for the lucky... ducks in Canada, UK and Spain!) of the awesomeness that promises to be Dredd 3D, we've asked our expert comrade to give you the Judge Dredd crash course! Today he brings you his take on the character and his history as well as thoughts on the 90's Stallone movie and the new one coming down the chimney soon.
Enjoy this romp down Mega-City one lanes and be back here soon for Part II of this Dredded (sorry, couldn't help myself!) expose where we bring you some of the best story-lines from the hard-a$$ law-mans career! And now : to the article!!

- Almost-droolin'-in-Anticipation Akshay

Judge Dredd Special Feature

By Stewart Loud

It always shocks me how many people I speak to who've never read any comics featuring 2000AD's premier law man, Joseph Dredd. With that in mind and with the impending release of the new Judge Dredd film, Dredd 3D (September 2012) starring Karl Urban, here's a piece outlining who he is, what his world is like and what makes him one of the greatest and most original comic characters in the world, as well as a few brief reviews of some of my favourite Judge Dredd stories.

Are Reboots worth the RISK? (Part 1 of 2)

Due to poor health, I spend a lot of time reading articles on comics, reading comics and going through reader responses to current trends in the comic industry. Along with writing comics, illustrating them and with a completed graphic novel before an international publishing house (my fingers are tired from crossing that I might get that much needed boost-to-my-ego and finally arrive upon the comic scene - you can cross your fingers as well. I need all the luck I can get. And also, I could do with a little less idiocy in my life), I am weary with how the Comic Industry is going to keep being relevant while rehashing the same characters in a new costume, only slightly changed, and  in a different team etc.

Now let me make myself very clear here before anyone starts to have a go at me for being an upstart, or if you're a little less polite, an idiot.

I LOVE COMIC BOOKS!

I do. Comics were my first love. They were an escape and several thousands of dollars were spent buying them as a collector and as a fan.

JUDGE DREDD: Day of Chaos (Comic Review)

2000AD #1743 - The start of Days of Chaos.

JUDGE DREDD: Day of Chaos (from 2000AD.)




When I was a kid, around 9-10yrs old, my friend who lived directly across the street from us was a huge fan of the British weekly comic series. The two of us at such an early age began a love of a genre in entertainment that I wasn't even aware that I was in love with: Science Fiction. Sure we had our favourite TV shows like Knight Rider, Star Trek and Automan, but they were to us just the normal thing to watch.

My friend Regan was in love with the ABC Warriors which was a series that ran in 2000AD. He made sure he got every single issue of the weekly and so in turn I got to read it and for free. We had our own gang of two called the 'ABC Warriors', with out own clubhouse which his father and the two of us built. That was some 30 years ago.

Snap Reviews : Bad Company

 

 

Bad Company: Goodbye Krool World

Rebellion Publishing

Originally published in 2000ad progs 500-519, 548-557, 576-585 and 601

Available in the UK now. 

Due for release in the USA January 2011

Review by Stewart Loud

This graphic novel collects together one of my all time favourite comic story lines. Originally published in the UK comic 2000ad in the mid 80's I first read it when it was re-printed in classic 2000ad monthly in the early nineties (comics which I read twice and then lost). Then again a few years ago when i spotted this graphic novel in my local comic shop. When I discovered Rebellion were planning to release the book across the Atlantic in the US, I thought it was as good an excuse as any to read it again and give it a review. Having read it 3 times before and knowing how it all ends in the mind blowing climax of the story I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy reading through it all again but I was every bit as engrossed in this dark, nightmarish tale of future war and horror as I was the first time I read it over 16 years ago.

 

This is an absolutely fantastic example of old school science fiction, packed with atmosphere, great characters and an incredible amount of original ideas baring in mind it was written almost 25 years ago! Throughout the book you'll see zombies being used as a weapon, Organic and sentient spacecraft, vast alien races being controlled by a collective hive mind and you'll see humankind go from a battle for a single planet to the very brink of extinction. If they made a film of this now (something I'd love to see but very unlikely) everyone would say how unoriginal it was when in fact it was way ahead of its time.

The story is told from the perspective of Danny Franks, a "Raw" new recruit in the Earth army 1st colony division stationed on the planet Ararat fighting against the horrific Krool empire. The Krool are a race of vicious, utterly evil, hideous aliens. They cannot be bargained or reasoned with. There's nothing they even seem to want from mankind other than victims for their cruel experiments and torture fetishes.

 

Never let the Krool take you alive is the advice from anyone who'd fought against them long enough to know what they do with prisoners. In other words they are the "bad guys". Absolutely no moral ambiguity about that. They torture and mutilate any other beings they come into contact with for no other reason than they enjoy it and are every bit as monstrous in appearance as they are in spirit and you'll learn to hate them just as much as the books characters do.

 

Danny is forcibly recruited into the ranks of Bad Company (an unofficial group of soldiers who operate independently behind enemy lines) after they save his unit from an enemy attack at the stories beginning and has to learn fast to survive in the harshest of combat conditions as Bad Company take him behind enemy lines on their continuing and very personal mission to hurt the enemy. A mission which ends up taking him all across Ararat and eventually the galaxy as the epic scale of the Krool threat is slowly revealed.

The way in which Danny's character changes and grows, not just mentally, but physically is astonishingly well done as he slowly changes from a fresh faced rookie into a hardened, brutal fighter end eventually into an almost burnt out shell, struggling to keep hold of his humanity in the midst of all the horror he experiences. By the books end you'll want to flick back to the beginning to remind yourself what he used to look like. The best modern comparison I can make to the process of change he goes through I can think of is how Rick changes in the excellent Walking Dead series. His hair and beard get longer and he becomes less and less affected by the death he sees. Every injury he and all the other characters suffer permanently alters their appearance making them more and more like monsters themselves.

One of the things that makes Bad Company themselves incredibly original is that I've never been so interested to read about a group of characters I didn't like. And I don't mean I didn't like them because they were crap characters. I didn't like them because most of them are horrible people! Many of them are untrustworthy, selfish, filthy murderers who don't care at all about the lives of their fellow soldiers to the point that some of them even kill their own men as casually as killing an insect. Some of comicbooks most popular characters are liked because they're "Badasses" this lot however are just bad people who you probably wouldn't want on your side in an actual war in case they used you as a shield or pushed you onto an unexploded grenade.

 

Also, something that sets this comic apart from a lot of other ongoing comic series is that like The Walking Dead, apart from the main character who narrates a lot of the story with out takes from his diary, any of the other characters could be killed at any time. This adds a kind of tension that you don't get reading mainstream Marvel or DC titles where, even if they did kill off someone from the X-men or the Justice League, you know they'll just bring them back somehow in a few issues time.

The only word I can think of to describe the artwork in this book is wonderful. Detailed characters, brilliant facial expressions and emotion,stark landscapes and terrible depictions of violence, torture and it's victims, many of whom look like victims of the nazi concentration camps of the second world war, emaciated and thin from the awful conditions. If it wasn't in black and white this would be an incredibly gory comic in deed with all the blood being white instead of red. Being in black and white the artwork does show its age a little but overall it really adds to the desolate hopelessness of the comics feel.

What begins as a fairly straight forward human/alien war story quickly turns into a deep saga about conflict, friendship, revenge, humanity and ends as a galaxy spanning adventure to save the human race from total annihilation. Some of the worlds most successful comic writers spent a lot of their early careers writing for the British comic 2000ad. Mark Millar, Garth Ennis, Alan Moore and Pat Mills to name a few and 2000ad, although not widely read in the rest of the world, remains and always has been one of the greatest examples of creative story telling available and this, in my opinion, is one of the best examples of how good their stories are. The ONLY thing I can possibly think of to fault this book is that some of the dialogue shows it's age a bit but that doesn't stop it from being a superb work of fiction.

 

Read it. And if any of it doesn't impress you, try to think back 25 years to what other mainstream comics were being published at the time and compare it to them.

Just awesome.

SCORE 9/10