Anderson’s an odd one. As a reader, I’d say some of her moments are among the best in ‘Dreddworld’ strips. The to-and-fro with Dredd (“I was wrong. I apologise.”) in Satan was one of the most powerful statements uttered by ol’ square jaw. Shamballa was superb. And those early strips neatly balanced action and pathos in a manner Dredd at the time deeply struggled with.
But I’ve also found Anderson a frustrating read. I do have some issues with her portrayal, primarily because it showcases the male gaze problem at the heart of comics. When she’s illustrated by an artist showcasing their fantasies, looking like a pin-up when she’s a woman deep into middle age, that just feels weird (not least given the continuity that states she cannot have rejuve). Compare that to the recent – and, from a comics standpoint, brave – recent Hershey run. Moreover, there have been the ongoing continuity issues that mean massive events happen in Anderson that aren’t even mentioned elsewhere. That’s part of the problem with an anthology that’s as ‘loose’ as 2000 AD. But it does rather reduce the gravity of an event if it doesn’t impact at all on the wider universe.
I did very much enjoy the Dredd version of the character in the movie, and I thought it a pity the Dredd strips were cancelled. I’d have happily continued reading those to this day – a kind of ongoing Elseworlds Dredd – but I fully understand why the decision was made to avoid that.
It’ll be interesting to see where people take the character next. I’ve mixed feelings about the more recent strips, with Anderson’s ‘gang’. Partly, that might be the storytelling. I dunno. But at least it is trying something a bit different.
(FWIW, I think my intro to Anderson may well have been the 16-page insert that appeared in Zzap!64. Around that time, I was slowly getting into 2000 AD, and so my first ‘proper’ Anderson would have been Four Dark Judges in Best of 2000 AD Monthly 53 – and then The Possessed later that year. Not a bad starting point!)
Read 2000AD back in the day and Dredd was never my favourite character or story. Always enjoyed Strontium Dog more, I think. However, when Anderson was introduced my teenage self got a lot more interested which I guess was their idea. I remember enjoying the Judge Death storylines the most. My fascination in the horror and macabre already coming through I guess
Nice shout out to Zzap!64. Read that religiously for many years. Had binders of all of them from issue 1 but chucked them when I was cleaning out my folks house many moons ago🤦🏻♂️
You’re right. I think in a lot of ways Anderson’s a tougher character to write than Dredd, just that you really need to drill down into her personality to get the best out of her. I personally have zero problem with sexualised images of characters; the issue is when there’s NOTHING BUT sexualised images of characters. Greater diversity of interpretation is always a good thing, whereby different creators bring different things to the table. And Rob’s Hershey run is totally part of that. Great series! Totally with you on the ‘loose’ nature of continuity in the Prog. The cataclysmic effects of Chaos Day lasted, what, less than a year? But then continuity can be its own special poison, I think.
I’m not against sexualised characters per se. But I do like a sense of internal realism within a publication or story. What too often happens with female characters is artists and writers putting their own fantasies on the page. And that feels very odd with Anderson, who we’ve seen mature and change over many years, until she’s abruptly again drawn like a pin-up. (By contrast, the recent Durham Red essentially subverted that trope by making her look like she could tear someone to shreds and dressing her in a manner that made sense for the job she does.)
Of course, this is also part of what comes with a comic that has championed storytelling that doesn’t have a convenient reset switch, or strips where central characters remain frozen in time essentially forever and then mildly ret-conned when their origins no longer makes sense.
That said, Chaos Day did irritate me somewhat. While Dredd isn’t strict about certain elements of its own past (with John Wagner sometimes notoriously deciding if he didn’t write it, it didn’t happen), it does hang together pretty well. And it also has a sense of consequences. Chaos Day was all about that. Dredd did a thing that echoed down the years and basically destroyed the city. But for whatever reason, I think it was a massive mis-step. Perhaps it should have ended with a massive body count and then business as usual. Instead, it was as if Wagner had written a swansong, smashed up the toys, grinned and said “get out of THAT one”. But because other writers were unaware of the scale (notably in one case referring to the “chaos riots”), it had relatively little impact.
Apocalypse War felt like an event. What came after affected the strip visually and thematically for years. Even Judgement Day had some of that, not least in how Dredd looked. Chaos did relatively little, bar the odd story about MC1 being strapped for cash. or some strips set in empty parts of the city. Given the density we see in the story, 90% of MC1 should now be empty and abandoned. There was scope there for something very different – a desperate judge system dealing with a destroyed city. But that probably wouldn’t have been much fun for long, and so we just kind of ignored everything. In hindsight, I do wonder if Tharg wishes he’d dialled down that death count and ‘merely’ had Dredd discover he’d had a very, very bad day rather than the city suffering what should have been its greatest catastrophe.
I like psychological realism with characters too, no matter how loopy the world in which they live. Always feel like it's the surest route to empathising with the reader. Storytelling has changed vastly over the decades and today's comic book writers have to keep pace with the complex brilliance of shows like Succession or whatever. There's so many variables too: readership being a big one, plus deadlines, editorial politicking and a dozen other things that readers will never know about. Continuity, I feel, needs to be plasticised. I'd question whether a concrete approach is actually sustainable in the long term without the thing stagnating and having to dynamite the entire story/character and start over. Regarding Chaos Day, I remember that landed around the time I was starting to pitch Dredd stories and I had no idea what to pitch beyond 'crawling from the wreckage' tales, which would get boring week after week. Luckily, the Meg was back on its feet a short while later. :P
She's my favourite character too. Well, she was under Alan Grant. Few writers since have successfully captured the right balance of action, emotional storytelling, humour and the fortean concepts that Alan introduced.
Often she's reduced to a passenger in her own story while the writer develops new characters and new concepts, such as Psi Div having a supernatural God Judge, that was never previously mentioned.
I agree with all your points. Her being the emotional mirror to Dredd's pathological stoicism was always great entertainment, and probably how she should best be utilised in the Prog now.
Alan Grant was SUCH a brilliant writer. He was daring, sensitive and smart, but knew how to write action too. I must admit to not having read some of the more recent Anderson series. (So much else to read…) Psi Div has a supernatural God what now???
Grant’s an odd one for me on Anderson. He did some stories that are absolute top-tier 2000 AD. Probably everything up until Engram. But there were wobbles for me in 2000 AD with the entire arc where all the kids were taken. And the Meg’s ‘Cass in space’ arc did nothing for me. Satan, though, was masterful.
In more recent years, I’ve felt the character is very hit and miss.
Don't get me wrong, Grant did his share of phone-ins (of the kind you can't get away with until you reach a certain level). But to me, he always had a novelist's sense of enquiry. He'd go deeper into his material than he really needed to, and there come those flashes of greatness.
Anderson was always a great foil for Dredd, but was a strong enough character to stand her own series. Strontium Dog has always been my favourite comic book period, not just my fave 2000AD strip.
In part, it probably doesn’t help with something like Chaos that Dredd’s world became far less wacky and far more procedural around The Pit. So while Apocalypse War was followed by a huge range of often bonkers tales, with a wide variety of tone, Chaos was not.
Again, I think this points to a possibility that it was, in hindsight, an error to hollow out the city so much, not least given the city is so much of the character. I suppose for most readers, it won’t matter in the slightest anyway. They just want new tales. But Chaos in the wider scheme of things, for those of us who have read Dredd for decades, just feels odd. To me, it’s about one or two steps up from Inferno, in the ‘being ignored’ stakes, and that feels quite strange given who wrote it.
Craig, I feel like you've really nailed the evolution of the series with your notes here! I myself was struck by something Pat Mills said a while back about Mega-City One becoming more "rationalised", which I feel is something that has happened to comics overall ever since the late 80s when the popular medium went more towards an adult readership. Older readers will ask questions that younger readers won't. It was that sense of magic that Grant Morrison was trying to recapture with his Frank Quitely Superman books back whenever. As far as Dredd's concerned, I do wonder whether the emphasis on seriousness and political parallels (fine though that is) doesn't reduce the series when left unleavened by crazy humour - of which there's still a good amount, though readers will often hand-wave the humorous episodes as "filler". As a sidenote, It's interesting that the character's co-creator is still writing him. That's the equivalent of Bill Finger writing Batman well into the 1980s! (If my maths are correct. :P)
In some ways, it is a bit sad that much of the weirdness went away. But I do like the nuance in Dredd. I like that he became a more complicated character and (primarily through Wagner) that the strip rewards really long-time readers with both major and minor elements. As you say, there are times when it recaptures some of that old humour (Niemand’s ongoing sporadic series with the sentient toilet, etc.)
And that’s probably a fair reading of comics as a whole. It’s ceased to be a medium primarily aimed at kids. Now it’s for everyone, _but_ many of the strips that were initially aimed at kids are aimed at adults (with, sometimes, new strands for the kids). It’s an odd one. Mind you, I’m finally working through boxes of Panini Marvel monthlies right now and, boy, are the ‘classic’ strips hard to wade through. (As are, TBH, a lot of c. 2000 stuff.) The more recent strips are much, much better for my ageing eyes!
Anderson’s an odd one. As a reader, I’d say some of her moments are among the best in ‘Dreddworld’ strips. The to-and-fro with Dredd (“I was wrong. I apologise.”) in Satan was one of the most powerful statements uttered by ol’ square jaw. Shamballa was superb. And those early strips neatly balanced action and pathos in a manner Dredd at the time deeply struggled with.
But I’ve also found Anderson a frustrating read. I do have some issues with her portrayal, primarily because it showcases the male gaze problem at the heart of comics. When she’s illustrated by an artist showcasing their fantasies, looking like a pin-up when she’s a woman deep into middle age, that just feels weird (not least given the continuity that states she cannot have rejuve). Compare that to the recent – and, from a comics standpoint, brave – recent Hershey run. Moreover, there have been the ongoing continuity issues that mean massive events happen in Anderson that aren’t even mentioned elsewhere. That’s part of the problem with an anthology that’s as ‘loose’ as 2000 AD. But it does rather reduce the gravity of an event if it doesn’t impact at all on the wider universe.
I did very much enjoy the Dredd version of the character in the movie, and I thought it a pity the Dredd strips were cancelled. I’d have happily continued reading those to this day – a kind of ongoing Elseworlds Dredd – but I fully understand why the decision was made to avoid that.
It’ll be interesting to see where people take the character next. I’ve mixed feelings about the more recent strips, with Anderson’s ‘gang’. Partly, that might be the storytelling. I dunno. But at least it is trying something a bit different.
(FWIW, I think my intro to Anderson may well have been the 16-page insert that appeared in Zzap!64. Around that time, I was slowly getting into 2000 AD, and so my first ‘proper’ Anderson would have been Four Dark Judges in Best of 2000 AD Monthly 53 – and then The Possessed later that year. Not a bad starting point!)
Read 2000AD back in the day and Dredd was never my favourite character or story. Always enjoyed Strontium Dog more, I think. However, when Anderson was introduced my teenage self got a lot more interested which I guess was their idea. I remember enjoying the Judge Death storylines the most. My fascination in the horror and macabre already coming through I guess
Nice shout out to Zzap!64. Read that religiously for many years. Had binders of all of them from issue 1 but chucked them when I was cleaning out my folks house many moons ago🤦🏻♂️
I think everyone who reads comics has got a cherished-collection-got-binned story, right? :D For me it was Scream!
You’re right. I think in a lot of ways Anderson’s a tougher character to write than Dredd, just that you really need to drill down into her personality to get the best out of her. I personally have zero problem with sexualised images of characters; the issue is when there’s NOTHING BUT sexualised images of characters. Greater diversity of interpretation is always a good thing, whereby different creators bring different things to the table. And Rob’s Hershey run is totally part of that. Great series! Totally with you on the ‘loose’ nature of continuity in the Prog. The cataclysmic effects of Chaos Day lasted, what, less than a year? But then continuity can be its own special poison, I think.
I’m not against sexualised characters per se. But I do like a sense of internal realism within a publication or story. What too often happens with female characters is artists and writers putting their own fantasies on the page. And that feels very odd with Anderson, who we’ve seen mature and change over many years, until she’s abruptly again drawn like a pin-up. (By contrast, the recent Durham Red essentially subverted that trope by making her look like she could tear someone to shreds and dressing her in a manner that made sense for the job she does.)
Of course, this is also part of what comes with a comic that has championed storytelling that doesn’t have a convenient reset switch, or strips where central characters remain frozen in time essentially forever and then mildly ret-conned when their origins no longer makes sense.
That said, Chaos Day did irritate me somewhat. While Dredd isn’t strict about certain elements of its own past (with John Wagner sometimes notoriously deciding if he didn’t write it, it didn’t happen), it does hang together pretty well. And it also has a sense of consequences. Chaos Day was all about that. Dredd did a thing that echoed down the years and basically destroyed the city. But for whatever reason, I think it was a massive mis-step. Perhaps it should have ended with a massive body count and then business as usual. Instead, it was as if Wagner had written a swansong, smashed up the toys, grinned and said “get out of THAT one”. But because other writers were unaware of the scale (notably in one case referring to the “chaos riots”), it had relatively little impact.
Apocalypse War felt like an event. What came after affected the strip visually and thematically for years. Even Judgement Day had some of that, not least in how Dredd looked. Chaos did relatively little, bar the odd story about MC1 being strapped for cash. or some strips set in empty parts of the city. Given the density we see in the story, 90% of MC1 should now be empty and abandoned. There was scope there for something very different – a desperate judge system dealing with a destroyed city. But that probably wouldn’t have been much fun for long, and so we just kind of ignored everything. In hindsight, I do wonder if Tharg wishes he’d dialled down that death count and ‘merely’ had Dredd discover he’d had a very, very bad day rather than the city suffering what should have been its greatest catastrophe.
(Or maybe it doesn’t really matter. But, hey, geeks gotta geek, right?)
I like psychological realism with characters too, no matter how loopy the world in which they live. Always feel like it's the surest route to empathising with the reader. Storytelling has changed vastly over the decades and today's comic book writers have to keep pace with the complex brilliance of shows like Succession or whatever. There's so many variables too: readership being a big one, plus deadlines, editorial politicking and a dozen other things that readers will never know about. Continuity, I feel, needs to be plasticised. I'd question whether a concrete approach is actually sustainable in the long term without the thing stagnating and having to dynamite the entire story/character and start over. Regarding Chaos Day, I remember that landed around the time I was starting to pitch Dredd stories and I had no idea what to pitch beyond 'crawling from the wreckage' tales, which would get boring week after week. Luckily, the Meg was back on its feet a short while later. :P
She's my favourite character too. Well, she was under Alan Grant. Few writers since have successfully captured the right balance of action, emotional storytelling, humour and the fortean concepts that Alan introduced.
Often she's reduced to a passenger in her own story while the writer develops new characters and new concepts, such as Psi Div having a supernatural God Judge, that was never previously mentioned.
I agree with all your points. Her being the emotional mirror to Dredd's pathological stoicism was always great entertainment, and probably how she should best be utilised in the Prog now.
Alan Grant was SUCH a brilliant writer. He was daring, sensitive and smart, but knew how to write action too. I must admit to not having read some of the more recent Anderson series. (So much else to read…) Psi Div has a supernatural God what now???
Yeah, and witches.
Grant’s an odd one for me on Anderson. He did some stories that are absolute top-tier 2000 AD. Probably everything up until Engram. But there were wobbles for me in 2000 AD with the entire arc where all the kids were taken. And the Meg’s ‘Cass in space’ arc did nothing for me. Satan, though, was masterful.
In more recent years, I’ve felt the character is very hit and miss.
Don't get me wrong, Grant did his share of phone-ins (of the kind you can't get away with until you reach a certain level). But to me, he always had a novelist's sense of enquiry. He'd go deeper into his material than he really needed to, and there come those flashes of greatness.
Anderson was always a great foil for Dredd, but was a strong enough character to stand her own series. Strontium Dog has always been my favourite comic book period, not just my fave 2000AD strip.
In part, it probably doesn’t help with something like Chaos that Dredd’s world became far less wacky and far more procedural around The Pit. So while Apocalypse War was followed by a huge range of often bonkers tales, with a wide variety of tone, Chaos was not.
Again, I think this points to a possibility that it was, in hindsight, an error to hollow out the city so much, not least given the city is so much of the character. I suppose for most readers, it won’t matter in the slightest anyway. They just want new tales. But Chaos in the wider scheme of things, for those of us who have read Dredd for decades, just feels odd. To me, it’s about one or two steps up from Inferno, in the ‘being ignored’ stakes, and that feels quite strange given who wrote it.
Craig, I feel like you've really nailed the evolution of the series with your notes here! I myself was struck by something Pat Mills said a while back about Mega-City One becoming more "rationalised", which I feel is something that has happened to comics overall ever since the late 80s when the popular medium went more towards an adult readership. Older readers will ask questions that younger readers won't. It was that sense of magic that Grant Morrison was trying to recapture with his Frank Quitely Superman books back whenever. As far as Dredd's concerned, I do wonder whether the emphasis on seriousness and political parallels (fine though that is) doesn't reduce the series when left unleavened by crazy humour - of which there's still a good amount, though readers will often hand-wave the humorous episodes as "filler". As a sidenote, It's interesting that the character's co-creator is still writing him. That's the equivalent of Bill Finger writing Batman well into the 1980s! (If my maths are correct. :P)
In some ways, it is a bit sad that much of the weirdness went away. But I do like the nuance in Dredd. I like that he became a more complicated character and (primarily through Wagner) that the strip rewards really long-time readers with both major and minor elements. As you say, there are times when it recaptures some of that old humour (Niemand’s ongoing sporadic series with the sentient toilet, etc.)
And that’s probably a fair reading of comics as a whole. It’s ceased to be a medium primarily aimed at kids. Now it’s for everyone, _but_ many of the strips that were initially aimed at kids are aimed at adults (with, sometimes, new strands for the kids). It’s an odd one. Mind you, I’m finally working through boxes of Panini Marvel monthlies right now and, boy, are the ‘classic’ strips hard to wade through. (As are, TBH, a lot of c. 2000 stuff.) The more recent strips are much, much better for my ageing eyes!