Customer Reviews

Judge Dredd: Bk. 22 (Chronicles of Judge Dredd)

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Forget that stoopid, horrible Stallone flick & READ Dredd--don't WATCH him. "The Apocalypse War" is a Dredd story that would wind up in the "Best of..." ominibus if they ever did huge bound collections of Dredd (hint-hint). This is definately a great John Wagner run of one of the UK's greatest comic book stars.

Dredd is fantastic as he watches his city get nuked by the Mega-City Judges Soviet counter-parts, who want to enslave the citizens of Mega-City One. They picked the wrong city to mess with & Dredd passes a death sentence on an entire Soviet Mega-City--turning it to radioactive dust at the push of a button. He IS the law!

If you've never read a Judge Dredd story, this a good one to start with. Another is "The Complete Judge Cal" wherein the entire story of Caligula is retold through the justice system of Mega-City One--it too should be in a "Best of..." collection. But with "The Apocalypse War", you get UK commentary of their view of the Cold War, raging at the time the Dredd story was written. With each nuked sector of Mega-City One witnessed by Judge Dredd himself, the reader gets the sense of how the people in the middle get caught up in the madness of a nuclear holocaust.

Wagner writes some of the best Dredd stories because he created the character & "The Apocalypse War" shows a morbid side to the writer & his creation. It is a great story with great artwork. You will not be sorry.

NOTE: I think the other 2 reviews here are for the wrong book, they refer to stories Block War and Apocalypse War not to Mechanismo.

In the wake of multiple disasters Mega City One's justice department is stretched to the limit. The Chief Judge's solution is an army of robotic judges programmed to be just as effective and fair as human ones. At least until things start to go wrong...

And then it's a pretty straightforward robots go bad story told with some humor and wit. Dredd's initial suspicion is well founded and he spends the rest of the book dealing with them. There's a neat twist at the end showing how far Dredd will go to stop the robots.

It's not a bad book but really doesn't have anything special to make it worth seeking out.

What seems to be your garden variety block war escalates out of control, expanding in to hundreds of parts of the city. It seems an agent is fomenting trouble.