Judge Dredd Casefiles Vol 15

The Judge Dredd Casefiles are a collection of trade paperbacks that publisher Rebellion (current owners of 2000AD and Dredd) have been releasing now for the last few years, collecting together all of the Judge Dredd stories, in complete chronological order, from his first appearance in Prog 2 (2000AD issues are referred to as Progs) to, hopefully, the present day. Or at least, a couple of years behind the present day, so as not to interfere with more prestige Graphic Novels of individual stories. That's my hope anyway, I don't know what the plans are at Rebellion, but they certainly are showing no signs of slowing down with these books anytime soon. There are currently 16 volumes in the Casefiles series but in this post I'd like to discuss No. 15. Partly because I have yet to pick up No. 16 but mainly because it is in No. 15 that we get the stories marking the handover of control from the renowned veteran Mr John Wagner to the brash young upstart Master Garth Ennis.


At the beginning of the 1990's the then editor of weekly anthology comic 2000AD had a problem. John Wagner, creator and main writer of the titles flagship character, Judge Dredd, for most of the comics life (nigh on 15 years at that point) had expressed a desire to step back from writing the strip. He would continue to provide scripts featuring Dredd for The Judge Dredd Megazine (a newly launched spin-off comic that would feature stories from all around Dredds world) but the main strip in the weekly would require a new regular writer. Given that John Wagner is, in the eyes of all right thinking individuals, a God among writers, and his work on Dredd, especially in the couple of years leading up to this point, had been pretty much peerless, (it wouldn't be surpassed for years and only then when Wagner returned to the character for a run that has become one of the best on any comic ever), it would be very difficult to find a replacement that would a) be up to the task and b) meet with the approval of the readers.

Enter Garth Ennis. Not comic book industry superstar Garth Ennis with acclaimed books like Preacher, Hellblazer, Hitman, The Boys, War Stories, Punisher, Crossed, and Battlefields to his name, among others. This Garth Ennis was young, inexperienced and pretty much the last name anyone would have expected to be appointed, had they even considered him at all. But appointed he was and it was up to him to prove the doubters wrong and make the biggest character in British comics his own. Would he succeed? We'll see.

I am a huge fan of Garth Ennis. I have read and enjoyed a lot of comics by the man and consider him to be in my top 5 comic writers (as is John Wagner) so it is very difficult for me to be totally objective here. Every man has an off day though, and Ennis himself has admitted that his Dredd writing is not exactly his best work. Be fair though, he was young, and this was by far the highest profile gig he'd had to date. Seems only natural that he might take a while to find his feet. With that in mind, there is a lot to like about the first couple of Ennis stories and I can see a lot of potential here for his future on the title.

Only one Ennis story falls flat here and, perhaps tellingly, it's the only one not to riff on a pre-existing piece of continuity. It's called Emerald Isle and sees Dredd visiting Ireland, which has been forced to accept corporate money to aid in it's rebuilding after the Atomic Wars, and as a result has been turned into one big theme park based on Irish cliches. Write what you know they say, so for his first proper contribution to the Dredd mythos it's perhaps understandable that Ennis falls back on his Irish heritage but all in all the whole thing just seems a little bit too silly. Dredd as a strip has a long and distinguished history of incorporating comedy, ranging from slapstick to subtle satire, so it's not the inclusion of jokes that doesn't work, merely that the jokes aren't all that funny. It is, if nothing else, an interesting artifact, in that marks a very early collaboration between the Preacher dream team of Ennis and artist Steve Dillon.

The book also contains the first few Dredd stories written for the Megazine. Sadly, they do not seem to be particularly good. It's possible that I'm allowing my opinion to be clouded by the rather murky art on one story (The Gippers Big Night) and the (in my opinion) messy and unpleasant style of art on another (Black Widow) but hey, a great script can overcome poor art and these scripts didn't.

I hate to end on a downer when talking about a series which I really do love so I'll reiterate here that with the exception of Emerald Isle and the early Megazine mis-fires this book is chock full of arsomness. John Wagner on form is guaranteed class and even sub-par Ennis is better than a lot of stuff out there.

Nerd Do Well

Slight change of pace this week as I venture into the seldom visited realm of the non-fictional. Yes, for all my talk of giant robots, teenage witches, board game inspired shoot-em-ups and Jesus based conspiracies, I can, when the mood takes me, be all, like, intellectual and junk.

I'm not going to be here mind you, I'm just saying I can be. No, for my first non-fiction book in a long time I've gone with a movie stars autobiography. Because that's how I roll.


Nerd Do Well is, the cover tells us, "A small boy's journey to becoming a big kid" and charts the life of Simon Pegg as he grows up, realises he's funny, and parlays that into a huge television and movie career. Jammy bastard.

Pegg is funny. He is also charming and disarmingly honest about his childhood. (I assume he's honest. If you were making stuff up, you wouldn't make some of these stories up.) He seems at times to be embarrassed by the idea that he is important or interesting enough to warrant an autobiography and some of the funniest moments are self deprecating ones.

I can relate to Pegg, in that I was and still am very much the 'geek/nerd'. His obsessions were my obsessions, his heroes mine, although the way things are looking it's highly unlikely that I'll be making any movies with Steven Spielberg any time soon so the similarities probably end there. The fact that I can relate to Pegg so strongly probably explains why I didn't feel let down by this book. Nerd Do Well is not an industry tell-all. It barely scratches the surface of Peggs career. Instead it is a deeply personal account of the man himself, his influences, his relationship with his family and the friendships that have shaped his adult life. Anyone looking for Star Trek anecdotes or scene by scene production diaries for Hot Fuzz need look elsewhere because this is not the book for them. I'd have been happy with that book, but I'm happier with this one.

And it bears repeating, Pegg is funny. Not least in the chapters, inserted throughout the book at choice moments, that are not autobiographical at all, but rather are a bizarre 3rd person narrative in which Pegg is cast as a (pompous and dim) James Bond/Batman figure, jetting around the world with his trusty robotic sidekick to take on evil geniuses intent on world domination. I don't know whether Simon Pegg has read any Robert Rankin but it was Rankins distinctive brand of 'far-fetched-fiction' that these chapters reminded me of, which is a good thing, because few can pull off this level of ridiculous, fourth wall breaking, nod and wink insanity and not fall flat on their face, and I can't help but hope that if Pegg ever decides to write a novel he dares to embrace this style completely. The world needs more toot.

This book is fried gold. You should buy it, or at least get it out of the library, if for no other reason than to look at Peggs baby photos, in which he looks exactly the same as he does today. Seriously, it's uncanny. Oh, and The Galaxys Greatest Comic, 2000AD, gets a brief but positive mention. That's 10 points right there.

Horus Heresy : Mechanicum

Warhammer, the sword and sorcery tabletop miniature game and it's far future equivalent Warhammer 40000 hold little to no appeal for me. I have nothing against them, or the people who play them, but they just aren't my cup of tea. However, for the last couple of years I have been getting really rather hooked on the range of novels that are set in and around the world of the games.

My first encounter didn't go well. The Blackguards by Nathan Long. Not recommended. At all. After that though, I decided a second chance was in order so I went with the Horus Heresy series. The Horus Heresy is actually set 10000 years before the Warhammer 40000 game/novels. It purports to tell the tale of how the pretty bloody shitty, universe in chaos, perpetual civil war, demons running rampant state of affairs in Warhammer 40000 came about, by chronicling the events surrounding Horus Lupercal, Warmaster and right hand man to the beloved Emperor, as he is corrupted by evil and leads a bloody revolt against the Emperor.

I have read a number of these books now and I have to say that it is a strange series to get your head around, at least at first. A number of authors work on the series and while there is a definite 'house style' if you like, you can still see the influences that the different writers bring to the table, so the books all read slightly differently. I read the first three, which were a fairly tightly plotted trilogy, back to back and it definitely felt jarring as I went from one book to another. After that initial trilogy another thing occurred that threw one a little at first. The books began to shift around. Some would propel the story forward, some would backtrack yet further and some would show us events we'd already seen but through the eyes of a different set of characters. The series is as non linear as you're likely to get and yet the sense is definitely there of a plan, a framework that everyone is working to. Once I grasped what was happening (and I'm not so dense that it took me that long) I really embraced the method.

So anyway, Mechanicum is the title of the latest Horus Heresy book I've read and it concerns the titular organization being courted by Horus to join his rebellion. The Mechanicum are, as their name suggests, the technical wizards of this future setting, who have elevated machinery to the level of a religion. They are not in fact one organization but rather a loose alliance of separate 'Forges'; essentially factions that argue and compete amongst themselves but are united in their worship of machinery. Their main function in the story is to provide weapons and ships to the Emperors Great Crusade (he wants to wipe out all alien life and claim the universe for Man basically) and Horus wants them onside so that when the rebellion happens he is equipped and the loyalists won't be. Simple really.

Of course, all does not go to plan and the Mechanicum split down the middle, conveniently allowing both sides in the civil war to have weapons and ammo (otherwise it would be a short series). This outcome is inevitable really, for the reason given, so the book needed to have something else to become a truly essential addition to the series. Whether it has that something is, to be honest, debatable. An aspect I've seen talked about elsewhere is that it is the first in the series not to focus on people or groups actively involved in the Great Crusade. While this is true, I'll be honest with you here and say that a lot of the people we follow in this book, in terms of motivations, character traits and lifestyles are pretty much indistinguishable from the Space Marines et cetera that we've seen in previous books. We are told that they are allies of the Emperor, rather than being under his command, but you'd never know it from the way they live. So for a long time player of the games I imagine this book would be simply a necessary building block in the series, setting the pieces on the board where they need to be for future developments but not necessarily particularly thrilling in it's own right.

For me personally, however, Mechanicum scores very highly in a way that it probably doesn't for these long time fans. And it's for a reason that is going to sound a little strange, given the title and setting of the book. One of my main beefs with the series has always been the over reliance on tech porn. That is, the long, lingering explanations of every piece of weaponry, every inch of battle armour, every rivet and plate on the ships. For those who came to the books from the games, this obsession with tech is probably a big part of the attraction, seeing as how a large part of their hobby is in the construction of incredibly elaborate models of these very ships and bits of kit. For me though, who came for story, they can be laborious and really pull me out of the story. This is not something I can complain about; the gamers are, after all, the primary market for these books and I am the outsider.

Mechanicum is different though. It is the first book in the series to really be about characters over technology and the first book where the smaller characters (characters like Horus and his contemporaries have always been well drawn) have felt like anything other than pawns. It's odd, I know, that a book about technical geniuses who worship machinery should be the book least reliant on technology in it's story but somehow that is what we have here and to my mind, it is much the better for it. Graham McNeill, kudos.

I Shall Wear Midnight

Josh Kirby, late great cover artist extraordinaire, is to be thanked for awakening in me a need I never knew I had. A need to read as many stories by one Terry Pratchett as I possibly could. The book was The Light Fantastic and the cover was a chest of the kind you might expect a pirate to keep his booty in. The chest had legs, actual cute little pink legs, but it wasn't using them, for it was flying through the air, and holding on to the chest, in various states of excitement/terror were wizards, warriors and strange looking little men. They say never to judge a book by it's cover but had I not done so here I would have never known the delights and wonders of a little place called the Discworld.

That was 20some years ago now. Terry Pratchett is still writing Discworld books (the latest is no. 38, not counting short stories and narrative inserts in non-fiction books) and I am still reading them. Sadly Josh Kirby is not still illustrating the covers, having passed away several years ago. I say sadly, and I mean it, because while the man currently tasked with providing cover art (Paul Kidby) is a fine artist, and his work could even be said to suit the slightly more serious tone of the later books better than Kirby's cartoony (but insanely detailed and intricate) style might have, I still can't help but think that a new Pratchett just doesn't look right without a new Kirby on the jacket.

So yes, the Discworld series. The series as a whole comprises, as I've said, 38 books so far, but these can be split, roughly, into subsets. There are Rincewind (failed wizard) books, the Witches (pretty self explanatory), the City Watch (police procedurals in Discworlds largest city) and numerous others.

I Shall Wear Midnight stars one Tiffany Aching, a character who has been the lead now in 4 novels, beginning with Wee Free Men, and continuing through A Hat Full Of Sky, Wintersmith, and now ...Midnight. Tiffany is a witch, and seems to have cornered the market in Witch stories set on the Discworld, as the previous 'star' witch, one Granny Weatherwax, and her established supporting cast, have not had a book of their own since Tiffany came on the scene, although they have made cameos in her stories.

The Tiffany Aching stories were originally marketed as Young Adult novels set in Discworld, somehow seperate from the 'grown up' books, but in truth there was little to seperate them, other than the lead characters young age (and even in that the main series had form, with early book Equal Rites having a child protagonist) and the conceit has been dropped now, possibly due to Tiffany herself having grown up (9 in her first book, she is almost 16 in her latest).

Did I enjoy ...Midnight? Indeed I did. Pratchett is one of the best in the world at what he does so compared with the rest of the overcrowded marketplace this book is right up there with the best of them. On a sliding scale of Discworld though, I'm afraid it's only middle ground for me. The reason is that the whole Witches subset has never been my favourite aspect of the series, so any book in that setting is going to be a minor dissapointment, if for no other reason than it's not a City Watch book, or a Rincewind book. This is purely my own prejudice talking though. As a Tiffany Aching/Witches story it's a belter so those for whom those stories are favourites, this will be a welcome addition.

It is quite dark in places though, touching on teenage pregnancy, domestic abuse and suicide, being sympathetic to everyone involved and allowing no easy answers to be found. All of the other usual Pratchett ingredients can be found here as well; real world folklore given just a hint of a twist to fit Discworld, wry and insightful commentary on human nature (good and bad), and of course an ancient supernatural threat that has to be defeated with good old fashioned common sense.

It also has jokes though, and will make you laugh. It is not the riotous, laugh out loud at every second line, eyewateringly hilarious stuff of the early Discworld books but it is still funny. Oh, yes.

If I have one problem with this series it would be this : because Discworld is a fantasy setting, every book seems to have a supernatural antagonist and they can sometimes feel shoehorned in. Quite often, I will be engrossed in the story of the hero or heroine as they go about whatever their agenda is and then boom, suddenly there is a demon or a ghost or an ancient prophecy to deal with. Human antaganists can be scary too. Indeed, the evil entity Tiffany faces in this book is a reincarnated witchfinder from the past who corrupts people with his old 'witches are evil' spiel. In flashback we see him as a human, before his death. He was far from pleasant then. A modern (at least to Tiffany) version of that character would have sufficed for me, and might perhaps have been more chilling, if he was shown to be corrupting with his prejudices through sheer charisma and force of personality, like a cult leader, rather than being able to 'posess' people.

That is just a pet peeve of mine and is the only one I have regarding Pratchetts books, which are, to my mind at least, nigh on perfect in every other respect.

Cross Bones

Ever felt like a total dunce? I've felt like one quite often the last couple of weeks. Why? Because I've been reading a Temperance Brennan book.




Cross Bones is the 8th novel from Kathy Reichs featuring her creation Dr Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who consults on criminal cases in both the US and Canada. The novels, much like the TV show Bones, focuses on Brennan aiding law enforcement in the solving of murders. That's pretty much all the two have in common though. While the show is a glamorous, high tech product of the post CSI TV landscape the books are a much more grounded affair, focusing on the scientific realities of murder cases requiring the specific expertise of someone of Brennans particular discipline.

Which is where the confusion, and feeling like a dunce, comes in. Now, I flatter myself that I am a reasonably intelligent bloke, sort of, but I do tend to struggle with science of any kind. For me to persevere with something that has a lot of specific technical jargon that is necessary to the plot and can not be skimmed, I need to be properly hooked on the plots and I need to enjoy spending time with the characters. That's why I long ago stopped reading Patricia Cornwells Kay Scarpetta books* but have every intention of catching up and then keeping up with Reichs' work.

Temperance Brennan, or Tempe, is a far more well rounded and interesting character than her television namesake. A more, shall we say, mature, character, she comes intact with ex-husband, college age daughter and history of alcohol abuse. The 'will they/won't they' love interest is provided early in the series by Detective Andy Ryan, an ex bad boy turned cop with an eye for the ladies. I say early in the series because by the time of Cross Bones it's a pretty definite 'yes they will', with the characters firmly ensconced in a relationship and co-habitation being discussed.

It's this aspect of the books that keep me coming back. While the crime plots are as ingenious as you could want (this one takes in a trip to the Holy Land and a skeleton that may or may not be Jesus) and the science is pretty well laid out for the layman (it must be if I can get my head around it, albeit after multiple readings of the techy passages) the real strength of these books are the characters and Reichs willingness to a) develop their personal lives from book to book, avoiding the reset button, and b) do so in a believable, realistic and relatable manner that never seems forced and allows the characters to live and breathe on the page in a way some other ciphers singularly fail to do.

As far as crime thrillers go Reichs, for me, is up there in the top 3, alongside Mark Billingham and Val McDermid, and I'll be reading for as long as she keeps them coming.

*There is a quote on the back of my Cross Bones paperback that says 'It is becoming apparent that Reichs is not just "as good as " Cornwell, she has become the finer writer'. I'm not sure at what point that review was written because I seem to remember it being used in the blurbs of the last couple I've read as well but in my opininon it was readily apparent from the time her first book hit the shelves that she was always the 'finer writer'.