Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m not much of a Judge Dredd fan. I’ve seen the two movies, read a few books, but it just never really clicked with me. So, I approached this book more as a curiosity because it was a first issue and I felt it was my duty to at least look at it. What I wasn’t expecting was to get interested in it.
Since this is a fairly new character to me, even though through research I see that she has been around since 1980, I had no expectations going into this at all. We start out with a flashback to Cassandra Anderson being born then jump to her being woken up by a psi-flash, which is something that normally doesn’t happen since sleep is when she can shut things off. We find out quickly that Judge Anderson has psychic powers and in her words, “this is the future trying to tell me something.”
Anderson investigates the museum that she saw in her precog flash and things come to fruition pretty quickly. She ends up having to team-up with another Judge that has psi-powers too. However, her powers are based on Psychogeography where she can read the environment and use it to track people. They end up in a swamp and find out that they might not be the only ones doing some hunting.
As I mentioned, I’m not really up on my Judge Dredd characters, so the first thing that jumped out at me about this book was the art by Carl Critchlow. From what I do remember about Dredd books they are always really dark and typically drawn with real severe lines. This book has a different look to it then what I associate with Judge Dredd, at least with my limited experience. Panels are constructed in interesting ways, but not so much that it is hard to follow. He uses the space to help tell the story and show off some impressive skills along the way.
Matt Smith does a solid job constructing the story. He catches us up with what we really need to know in a short time and then jumps us right into the action. There is a lot of internal dialog that is used well to help us know what is going on and gives a good sense of Anderson’s personality. Another thing that I liked is that it doesn’t overdue the future babble. There are the occassional “gruddammit” and “drokk me” flung about, but we all know what those really mean. It would have been easy to get us lost in lots of talk about psi-this or psi-that, but it all fees grounded and as is easily understood for a Dredd rookie like me.
I would imagine that Judge Dredd fans and fans of Judge Anderson will pick up this book, but don’t be afraid to give it a try if you are new to it. There is a lot here to like and it kept me interested and left me wanting more. I can’t ask anything else of a first issue.
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