High-rise humour: making a city of the future worthy of the future’s greatest lawman
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Judge Dredd is a creature of his environment. Without the city, he cannot exist. Without its gleaming plasteen towers, he makes no sense. They have a symbiosis, they complete each other.
As Tom Shapira pointed out in his book, The Lawman, the city is also the strip’s first star. The opening page of Dredd’s first case, Judge Whitey (2000 AD Prog 2, February 1977), shows him bursting out of the page on his futuristic motorcycle, but the city is the first character we are properly introduced to.
The Empire State Building, supplanted as the world’s tallest building only five years previously and still the potent symbol of the emergence of America as an industrial nation in the 1930s, is not just overshadowed by Mega-City One it is crowded by it, buildings like budding fungi seem to close above the reader’s head as artist Mick McMahon tries his best to mimic Carlos Ezquerra’s original, organic vision. It’s a vision of future straight out of Le Corbusier’s fever dreams, the constant renewal of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, and Jane Jacobs’ interconnected urbanism — a bustling vertical city of cushioned walkways and floating highways, of unthinkable vistas and unknowable depths. Mega-City One is mega, it is huge, it is boundless — the kind of environment that befits a new kind of policing.
The city, like Dredd, is formed piece by piece, writers throwing ideas at the conceptual wall to see which of them will prevail. Saprophyte-like, it grows in the imagination too — first it is just New York, then the sprawl of the Boston-Washington Corridor, then consuming the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor and down the entire eastern seaboard of North America to Florida’s Key West.
The greatest emblem of this megalopolis is the ‘city block’ and their first appearance marks a major turning point in the strip.
These vast blocks are integral to the mythos of Judge Dredd, yet for such a key concept it wasn’t until 1979 that John Wagner and Ron Smith introduced them in ‘City Block’ (2000 AD Progs 117). Prior to this, readers knew that citizens lived inside the Mega-City One’s soaring towers, but the idea behind the ‘city block’ was something else.
To British ears the name sounds unabashedly American; for readers used to winding streets often mapped out in deference to medieval cartwheels, the words immediately evoke the uniformed, modern urban planning of New York — die-straight streets neatly cutting up towering edifices, the cities of Dirty Harry and ’50s flat-foots, of A Streetcar Named Desire and Rear Window. A city street can be anywhere, but a city block is American.
Yet despite Charlton Heston Block’s open mall-like plazas, parks, and artificial beach, the story’s opening narration — “In this tightly-packed community, tension could flare into violence in a moment” — portrays it as a mile-high powder keg: “One spark here and I’ve got a riot on my hands,” notes Dredd as he enters. JG Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise had already introduced the idea of a tower block as a self-contained community, Wagner merely scaled up and mixed in the element of ‘cradle to grave’ social housing.
In 1979 the ’tower block’ had achieved a dual utopian/dystopian meaning in Britain. Solving the problems of the inner city by building up had been a common dream of the 20th Century. In 1964, following the riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbours of New York following the murder of black teenager James Powell by a white off-duty police officer, Black feminist writer and activist June Jordan and architect R Buckminster Fuller conceived of vast towers reaching up from the crowded New York streets to provide light and air for people who were crowded into tenements and slums, releasing them both physically and emotionally from the confinement of their surroundings. Meanwhile, in the UK the ‘high rise’ has been pushed as the solution for housing populations displaced by post-war slum clearances — clean living in boxes made for people, communities reaching up rather than hemmed in on all side. The foundations of the UK’s first tower block (a 10-storey affair in Essex, which opened in 1951) clearly rested on ideals of post-war equality and enduring modernity that had previously seen an inter-war fad for utilitarian communal living.
Yet by the 1970s, the boom in government-administered high-rise social housing projects in Britain, usually delivered cheaply and with little thought about the actual act of living, had begun to bear a sour harvest. The high-rises in Greenock, where John Wagner and his mother had settled after leaving America, were symptomatic of the failure of this post-war urban planning. Rather than the Continental urbanity of Vienna’s Karl-Marx-Hof or Berlin’s Hansaviertel, integrated communal living projects like Leeds’ Quarry Hill Flats (built 1938) and the “streets in the sky” of Park Hill estate in Sheffield (opened 1958) had become worrying symbols, not of glittering utopianism but of decline. Filled with Ballardian apocalyptic visions of savagery, Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange had been filmed against a backdrop of the Thamesmead estate in south-east London and seemed to sum up the descent of the virtual city into a new kind of decay — one that was not just structural but social and moral. These were not glittering towers of modernity, they were slums by another name. (Large social housing projects have also always had a dark duality to them, perhaps a subconscious similarity to the blank uniformity of prisons but also to the sinister homogeneity stressed by the 20th Century’s totalitarian regimes. The French puppet regime of the 1940s took Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin’s La Cité de la Muette (“The Silent City”) near Paris and turned into an internment camp for 67,400 French, Polish, and German Jews, including 6,000 children, who were then deported to extermination camps such as Auschwitz.)
So why is ‘City Block’ a turning point for Judge Dredd?
Dredd had already left the city twice by this point — once to become Marshal of the Luna-One colony and then again to trek across the Cursed Earth to save Mega-City Two — and both Pat Mills and John Wagner later admitted to a kind of boredom with the city, coming up with ever more extreme and outlandish sci-fi twists was proving increasingly difficult (by this point the strip had already recycled Frankenstein twice — in ‘Frankenstein 2’ (Prog 6) and ‘The DNA Man’ (Progs 113 to 115)).
‘City Block’ not only fleshes out the city, giving it an internal life it didn’t necessarily have before, but it also gives Dredd a reason to remain there.
The story strikes at the heart of what makes Dredd an enduring character by taking a concept from his very first story. Not ‘Judge Whitey’, but ‘Bank Raid’, written by Pat Mills and John Wagner and rejected as too violent (it was eventually published in a 1981 annual). In this story, drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, as Dredd summarily executes a gang of foiled bank robbers a member of the crowd — becoming over-excited in his support for Dredd’s sentencing — accidentally steps into the road. Chastising him for his overexuberant callousness, Dredd also sentences him to four hundred days for ‘jaywalking’ and the citizen foolishly tries to bribe his way out of trouble before running away. Coolly, Dredd draws his Lawgiver and fires a heat-seeking bullet that follows the fleeing man and strikes him in the back. The citizen, whose blood-thirstiness already betrays him as morally repugnant, is shown to be a coward and a criminal-in-waiting.
‘City Block’ plays on the the same idea but in a very different way. While patrolling the block’s main plaza, Dredd confronts a citizen who, panicking, takes flight. As he is pursued by Dredd, the man takes us on a tour of the entire block, allowing Wagner and Smith to conduct a Pevsner’s tour of the artificial park, artificial beach, and hospital filled with robotic medical staff, showing us how this truly is a city-within-a-city (the artifice of everything in the block stresses its ‘Uncanny Valley’ alieness and dual rejection/mimicry of nature). The chase comes to an end only after Dredd jumps onto the windscreen of a stolen ambulance and threatens to shoot the fleeing citizen if he doesn’t comply.
The reason for the pursuit is then revealed — Dredd had intended to confront the man for simply dropping a candy wrapper. The tiny misdemeanour had become a comedy of errors thanks by the man’s foolishness, crime being piled upon crime due to his rashness. If he had only submitted to Dredd’s authority, he would have been likely let off with a fine. Instead, he is in handcuffs.
If ‘Bank Raid’ had become a template for Dredd’s stories (and it very nearly did), his merciless execution of lawbreakers would have quickly become a moral and storytelling dead-end — readers could not possibly have countenanced week after week of lethal justice for long before becoming bored. However, his pursuit of the citizen in ‘City Block’ is an amusing farce; Dredd’s commitment to bringing him in, rather than killing him, makes him a straight man to the citizen’s comedic escape. The way the situation escalates, followed by the humorous conclusion, perfectly sums up Dredd’s central premise — extreme sentencing for an extreme environment. ‘City Block’ creates a fresh template for Dredd stories that would preserve the character’s longevity while providing a setting worthy of his brand of ‘justice’.
‘City Block’ explained the idea of Dredd in a way few previous stories had — the city of the future was finally a match for the lawman of the future.
