Hairy and harried, “A Better World” begins with a tower block coming into focus against an acrid sky - gray on gray differentiated by subtle hues of color and tight inks. These abstractions, set off in the distance, conjure a hint of texture, glimmers of light, the suggestion of monumental scale. A variegated world opens up to us, teeming with life and riddled with death. With his stylized figures, too-smooth textures and over angularity, artist Henry Flint manages to conjure a sense of real lives being lived out in dynamic, contradictory ways. Panning down from the city, Flint brings Judge Maitland into focus as she winds eastward through Sector 304 of Mega-City One. “It was working,” we are narrated as Maitland watches “Sector Services” approach a homeless man: not to throw him in an Iso-Cube, but to find him housing.
In addition to how it visually establishes the juxtaposition between the story’s two central figures–the city (its structures, history and dynamics inhibiting and prohibiting change) and Maitland (the visionary who individuates herself by struggling to overcome the world’s limits)–this opening sequence might interest readers familiar with Judge Dredd for what appears to be compassion on the part of the Judges. Indeed, as writers Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt highlight in the page’s final panel, what we are witnessing may be “heresy” under the familiar terms of the Justice Department. Over the subsequent pages, Williams and Wyatt elaborate on this heresy (this “it,” which was working), and detail for readers how Maitland had been given one year to manage one sector and perform an experiment in crime reduction.
Observing this experiment over nine issues of the weekly 2000 AD, #2364 (10 January 2024) through #2372 (6 March 2024), “A Better World” is a direct sequel to 2022’s “The Pitch,” a story in issue #2302, and follows as an extension of a yet-earlier serial, “Carry the Nine.” Originally published in the fall of 2020 (issues #2200-2203), “Carry the Nine” appeared as a reflection on the real world of that summer - which saw, as most of us will remember, what was by some estimates the largest street protests in U.S. history, emerging in the shadow of a once-in-a-century pandemic as a response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and intensified by the murder of Rayshard Brooks that June. Punctuating a decade of police killings captured on smartphones and circulated around the world (and more than a century of anti-Black violence at the hands of the police), this street activity signaled a new phase of opposition to the police. In contrast to professional activists and politicians who reiterated old calls for more professionalization, more training, more resources, an ascendant movement to abolish the police moved to the fore and demanded an end to policing completely and its replacement with new means of remediating and preventing harm (Restorative Justice and Transformative Justice), and more universally distributed access to food, shelter, healthcare, education and free time. Between this desire to completely reorganize society and the forces working to preserve it, a compromise was forged and a demand began circulating widely: Defund the police and refund the panoply of public services that have been gutted and hollowed out over 50 years of deindustrialization and austerity.
Meanwhile, Mega-City One was experiencing a crisis of its own. The summer 2020 “End of Days” storyline had just seen the city attacked by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Though Dredd, of course, defeated these Biblically proportioned foes, their assault devastated the city and its citizens, already severely weakened by a bacteriological disaster of its own in the 2011-12 “Day of Chaos” sequence. With its infrastructure demolished and countless people dead, the Judges struggled to maintain their tight grip on social life. Out of this crisis, however, came an opportunity to reconstruct Mega-City One according to different principles and with a different distribution of its strained resources. In an effort to maximize efficacy in the midst of crisis, the aforementioned Judge Maitland—head of the Justice Department’s Accounts Division—ran a number of statistical models in "Carry the Nine" to determine how to best allocate Justice’s budget to reduce crime and free up personnel. Presented to the ruling Council of Five in “The Pitch,” this “raw data” model indicated that funneling money into “education” and “services” and away from policing would deflate crime rates and lead to conditions that would require fewer police. This would allow Judges to focus on addressing serious issues rather than social problems.
These preliminary stories (made with a different artist, Boo Cook) do oversimplify the Defund argument. The first episode of “Carry the Nine” ends with Maitland looking at a cartoonish bar graph with “Education” maxed out and “Crime” minimized, and her actual proposal is articulated in the vaguest of terms; this is a stark contrast from the more thoughtful, detailed and specific proposals advanced by Defund advocates, and a far cry from its more modest, more patient aims, which included demands to decriminalize certain activity and a critique of the police as “violence workers.” Nonetheless, “Carry the Nine” and “The Pitch” reflect and attempt to work through the general premise that policing does not solve crime and that the incessant growth of police budgets has done nothing to prevent or remediate harm. While a reorganization of municipal budgets would not have the immediate and direct effect Maitland believes it would, the evidence does indeed suggest that such a reorganization of resources would, in the long term, produce less violence, harm and death. By expanding stable access to healthcare, housing and education, people’s individual and collective well-being would improve, and by reducing the number of interactions people have with the police, the opportunities for the police to mete out violence would be reduced.
More than three years after it first unspooled, “A Better World” picks up this thread and follows Maitland’s attempt to put her idea into practice. The experiment is short-lived, however, and it is beset with opposition internal and external to the Justice Department. Maitland’s peers and superiors subvert her efforts until they fail, and abort them based on that failure. Outside the Justice Department—though intimately bound up with it—Maitland is opposed by Robert Glenn, a capitalist and news mogul who uses his position as a media figure to mount opposition to Maitland in order to enhance his own political and economic power. In this regard, “A Better World” carefully observes the collusion between capitalists and the police, who supplement and support one another in order to expand and entrench their own power. These forces conspire to instigate violence and then represent that violence as evidence of Maitland’s failure - a failure punctuated by her own assassination, which Glenn and Maitland’s fellow Judges then represent as a tragic symbol of her naive and sentimental politics.
This accurate (if imprecise) view on the nature of policing and the structural impediments to altering it represent Williams’ and Wyatt’s greatest achievement, and they shape the narrative’s drama around the very real obstacles faced by any effort to shift state capacity away from policing and toward redistribution. With the brief space afforded any Dredd story, only six pages per weekly chapter, the pair successfully incorporates into the plot the dynamics and contradictions that form the police-industrial complex, and then movingly underscore the role that power and the perception of power plays in the idea and practice of policing.
But if there is something admirable about Williams’ and Wyatt’s attempt to reflect these contemporary politics, and something satisfying about their achievement, there is also something limited and consequently frustrating about it. Conforming to the expectations, demands and constraints of writing a Judge Dredd story, Williams and Wyatt move through their Defund drama much too briskly, much too amorphously, and they focalize it through the perspective of the Judges - including Dredd himself, who is figured as just one judge with just one perspective on judging. This inside-out perspective allows Williams, Wyatt and artist Flint to illustrate (figuratively and literally) the limits to institutional reformation, but it also obscures the role played by people outside of institutions - those who are most vulnerable to police violence, those most responsible for organizing and mobilizing opposition to the police and in developing alternatives to them. In contrast to John Wagner’s and Colin MacNeil’s 1990-91 “America,” for example–perpetually the go-to example of a Dredd story committed to a sincere (rather than ironic or slapstick) look at the Judges from the perspective of an ordinary citizen–Williams’ and Wyatt’s scenario casts the Justice Department as both good guy and bad guy: an internally contradictory institution, but one intending to change itself for its own benefit.
Indeed, Maitland’s proposal comes from within the Justice Department in an effort to preserve it as an institution, and she makes her case to the Justice Department itself. Accordingly, Maitland must appeal to the self-interest of the Judges, and the story itself takes the rhetorical form of an appeal: not to those who hate the police for doing their job, but those who frame police violence as a transgression against the law, or who view the inability of the police to fulfill their mandate as a failure. Because they are overburdened, as one version of this argument goes, cities should reallocate resources so that police can perform their job more effectively. Presupposed by this perspective is a belief that the police perform an important, necessary or good social function, and appealing to the police on this basis reinstates this belief in public discourse.
This presupposition is undermined by another recent Rebellion release, which similarly grapples with the relationship between Judge Dredd and policing: Michael Molcher’s 2023 prose study of the strip as a politically relevant text, I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future. Although I found the book’s treatment of Dredd more interesting than Tim Hayes in his review at this site, it was not as tightly woven as it could have been and proved less satisfying than it might have otherwise. Nonetheless, Molcher’s history of policing is striking in many regards, and helpfully, if obliquely, illuminates “A Better World.” Despite its mistaken contrast between post-WWII policing and a pre-war Golden Age when police really were actually good and helpful, Molcher neatly summarizes and compellingly rearticulates 50 years' worth of historical, sociological and criminological research that has demonstrated the dynamic, evolving relationship between law and order, crime and race, sex and violence, capitalism and poverty. Reiterating that the object of his critique is not this or that police officer but the police as an institution, Molcher illustrates how the police cannot serve and protect because they do not intend and are not intended to. If the purpose of policing is what they do, then their purpose is violence.
In one instance, which is particularly illustrative for how it speaks to a common criticism of the police, Molcher addresses the question of corruption. From a reading of the 2021 rape and murder of Sara Everard, which was committed by a London police officer and facilitated by the power and authority ceded to police, Molcher correctly identifies policing as an asymmetric structure of power that enables, incentivizes and produces acts of violence as a natural extension of itself. It is the entire institution that’s corrupt, because it is characterized by enormous, putatively legitimate power over other people. Such power inevitably corrupts those who wield it. While it may be the case that institutions such as the police transform people for the worse, the preponderance of bad apples, Molcher writes, makes “it… increasingly clear that something is rotten with the tree.” What I Am The Law makes just as clear, however, is that the tree has always been rotten - and, in fact, has always been and always will be defined by that rottenness.
What’s at issue is not police brutality, then, but the brutality of policing: a clarifying inversion that Molcher demonstrates for readers even as his own conservation of “rotting” and “corrupting” as a discursive frame preserves the possibility of an unspoiled police force.
“A Better World” operates in a similar contradictory fashion, and it concludes with the preservation of the Judges’ status quo even as it demonstrates the intolerability of that preservation. The experiment is ended with a bullet: Matiland is shot and killed, though only future stories can say whether her dream has died along with her. With this conclusion, Williams, Wyatt and Flint suggest that the titular “better world” is not the one depicted by them, nor is it a metaphor for Maitland’s vision. Perhaps we might instead read it as a world that may become possible by going beyond Dredd, going where it stops short, where it cannot go - adopting not just a critical perspective in relation to the police but an abolitionist one.
However, despite the utopian dimension opened up by the series, Williams and Wyatt are generically compelled to “get real” and foreclose the possibility of positive social change. It can be demanded, but it cannot be achieved. After all, the Dredd strip operates by feeding on the real world and transfiguring it, allegorizing it, working through it in contradictory ways. Its writers, artists and editors fashion it into a place that speaks to the real world: a place that, for all its speculative breaks from reality, remains grounded in it. In keeping with the present state of reality, the utopianism of “A Better World” must be interceded with a dystopian impulse. In this way, the story depicts and the comic exemplifies carceral realism: or, the widespread sense that the police are good, necessary or socially inevitable. This sense (which may be both an aesthetic form and a form of consciousness) includes the repression of any effort to even imagine an alternative solution to harm or social disorder: a repression reflected in the story’s narrative arc and in its own inability to imagine Maitland’s success.
This contradiction between its utopian and dystopian tendencies illustrates the incapacity of Judge Dredd to dramatize and advance a particular set of politics - and, in fact, it may indicate something more general about the inability of comics (or even art) to sufficiently articulate them. It is nonetheless noteworthy that a comic as mainstream as this is attempting to tackle these questions, and it suggests an ongoing realignment of popular attitudes about the police. For whatever criticisms I might have about whatever it is I think Williams and Wyatt believe, this story and the press around it (including this essay) have required Dredd readers to think about defunding the police; readers have been narrated an account of what that might look like and what obstacles it might face. Only time knows what the consequence of that might be, but it is worth considering as an extension of 2020’s protests - which included, we must remember, not merely the demand to Defund, but the burning of a police precinct and the formation of no-cop zones. While we can suppose that Williams and Wyatt might adopt any number of positions in relation to these things, it would be naive to believe a comic book is capable of advancing those positions in anything more than discursive ways. Like all art, it is limited by technical capacity, constrained by expectation, inhibited by readerly expectation, narrowed by space and determined by historical circumstance. It has to be circulated and supplemented and put to use by people in particular contexts and to particular ends if it is ever going to do anything.
In specific regards to the police, however, the narrative infrastructure of Judge Dredd makes the police uniquely durable in the story-world, and this makes a critique of the police through a critique of the Judges trickier than it might in other works of fiction. As Maitland is asked in “The Pitch”: “Where in your models is the mutant.... Or sentient ice from Saturn. Sov invasions. Judge Death. Singular threats…” Read as a metaphor for the present, as the Judge Dredd series, its creators, its critics and its publisher are constantly insisting we do, this appeal to “singular threats” seems an obvious stand-in for the questions police abolitionists are reflexively asked: “What about the rapists?” “What about the murders?” “What about the psychopaths?” This real-world corollary has been addressed numerous times - precisely because, as innumerable historians, sociologists, literary critics, philosophers and criminologists have demonstrated, such questions are rooted in racist, sexist misperceptions of violence, crime and criminal punishment, and easily overcome (rhetorically, at least). As such, we might treat this exchange as merely a site of frustration and dramatic tension, which reflects actually-existing ideological impediments to abolishing the police.
Read diegetically, however, this is a more pertinent question, because the inhabitants of Mega-City One do, in fact, live in a world quite unlike our own. For them, as they work through Maitland’s experiment, supernatural and extra-dimensional threats—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for example—are surely in the back of their mind. These otherworldly beings and cataclysmic events serve as a narrative justification for the necessity of, if not the Judges per se, someone with the power, resources and personality of Judge Dredd.
If there is some difficulty in figuring out how exactly we ought to read Judge Dredd, it is shared by the series’ creators and publishers. As Hayes points out in his review of I Am The Law, Rebellion themselves play up this oscillation between satire and fetishism, and in recent years they have produced several panels at recent San Diego Comic-Cons asking “Judge Dredd: Supercop or Satire?” and have authorized a collection of essays working through the same question. If readers oscillate between these two positions, it is because the series itself (produced by innumerable writers, artists and editors, and framed by two major motion pictures and nearly half a century of public discourse) is caught between them and moves from one to the other - sometimes in the same issue of 2000 AD. From the earliest strips, we are faced with a Dredd who is clearly a fascist created to shock - a man who hands down death sentences for littering, and goes to great lengths to produce a crime as a pretense to brutalize. In others, however, Dredd is represented (visually and dramatically) as an upstanding hero who is worshiped - indeed, is worthy of worship. Though an exhaustive account of how this works would require too much space than I have available here, my favorite example is the series’ first extended story, 1977's “Robot Wars” and its same-year sequel, “The Neon Knights,” which recasts the U.S. Civil War as a victory for the Confederacy, with which we are intended to sympathize.
Indeed, “A Better World,” with its narration by a world-weary Dredd conscious of the old ways no longer working and hopeful that some alternative path through the future may be laid–rendered by Flint with anatomical stylization and expert use of color–keeps readers moving from one angle to the next, casting characters first in one light and then another. Who is the hero and who is the villain? Sometimes Judge Dredd and his brand of law enforcement are the one, and sometimes the other.
Moving visually and dramatically from irony to sincerity, invoking real-world developments but refashioning them in a divergent world with divergent values, operating in a realist (if not always realistic) register to depict a world that is often punctuated by the unreal, Judge Dredd asks we read it metaphorically and literally at the same time. It is not one or the other that characterizes the series and character, but both; the tension between them is what propels us. This is at the heart of the strip's lasting power. But for all such propulsion affords, it also inhibits the series’ capacity to speak back to the real world. Dredd can reflect it, but it cannot intervene in it. Only we can do that. Like Molcher, Wyatt, Williams and Flint advance a case for the abolition of the police by making a case for the abolition of the Judges. Just like Molcher, however, they must disavow their conclusions because the abolition of the Judges would require and represent an advancement in the abolition of the police, which would disarticulate Dredd from its grounding in reality. Indeed, if police abolition includes and entails the termination of the conditions that make the police possible, then it would mean the very abolition of Judge Dredd itself. We might not like it, but as “A Better World” suggests, it may be necessary.
The post Abolish <em>Judge Dredd</em> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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