Judge Dredd: Under Siege reads kind of exactly how one would expect it to read from the unrealistic proportions of Dredd compared to everyone else and his really bad one-liners. It opens with the revelation football has been outlawed because it causes concussions. The Judges don’t want people with brain damage or something. Fascists.
Other than the one-liners and the eye-rolling attempts at social commentary, writer Mark Russell doesn’t bring anything else. Under Siege doesn’t bring anything else. It reads like a bad adaptation of the Dredd movie, only Russell thinks Dredd is a dick, not a hero.
Oh, and there’s an armed civilian force. They’re fighting the mutants, who have gotten in from the Cursed Earth.
Doesn’t matter. The story beats in the first issue are almost identical to the movie. Except the mutants.
Dunbar’s art isn’t terrible; other than the Dredd as Frank Miller Dark Knight. Yawn. It also isn’t good enough to make the comic worth reading.
Judge Dredd: Under Siege reads kind of exactly how one would expect it to read from the unrealistic proportions of Dredd compared to everyone else and his really bad one-liners. It opens with the revelation football has been outlawed because it causes concussions. The Judges don’t want people with brain damage or something. Fascists.
It’s the penultimate issue. I forgot there were six. I was hoping for five. Especially since the comic opens with the Soviets–in the fifties–talking about how eventually America will elect a complete idiot president and then they’ll nuke us. Or something. If Russell wanted to correlate with modern day stuff, he needed to do it. Not just as a throwaway joke to distract from the endlessness of Exit Stage Left.
If Exit Stage Left were any better, it might be full on problematic. Some of Russell’s juxtapositions and analogues should cause more intellectual consternation. They don’t, however, because the comic isn’t better. It’s perplexingly mundane.
I think this issue the series’s best so far. But it has jack to do with Snagglepuss. There’s a TV interview bookend with he and Huckleberry Hound and Snagglepuss is in most of the issue, he’s just not important to any of it. Not when there’s a Marilyn Monroe cameo, a full-on Joe DiMaggio first person flashback, not to mention the implication Snagglepuss is responsible for Clint Eastwood’s success.
So, Snagglepuss. How many more issues of Snagglepuss.