I Am The Law chapter by chapter #1 –BATTLE, ACTION, CRIME!
This February, my first book — I Am The Law — will examine how Judge Dredd, the violent future hyper-cop from the pages of the weekly comic 2000 AD, predicted our modern world, from the politicisation of policing to the shift towards authoritarianism, from neoliberal hyper-capitalism to the end of protest.
For each chapter, I have taken a single ‘Judge Dredd’ story from 2000 AD and used it to demonsrate how John Wagner, Alan Grant, Carlos Ezquerra, and many other writers and artists created a stunningly prescient parody of how ‘law and order’ politics would come to remake the world.
In the lead-up to publication, I’ll be writing posts about each of the fifteen chapters.
The story of I Am The Law begins in 1976, on streets both real and fictional. That summer there was rioting at the annual carnival in the London district of Notting Hill, the epicentre of Black culture in the UK, and in the pages of Action, a comic book produced by International Publishing Company (IPC) five miles away on London’s South Bank.
Action had been created by editor and writer Pat Mills after the previous year’s success of Battle Picture Weekly, his comic book collaboration with fellow editor/writers John Wagner and Gerry Finley-Day for IPC’s managing editor, John Sanders. It was packed with what editor Geoff Kemp called ‘dead cribs’ — literally ‘accurate copies’ — of popular action and thriller movies of the time — Jaws became the murderous shark ‘Hookjaw’, Rollerball became the deadly sport ‘Death Game 1999’, and James Bond and Dirty Harry merged to become the psychopathic secret agent ‘Dredger’. Action was unapologetically violent and anti-authority, with a brash, no-holds-barred wildness that was catnip for kids but a horror show for Puritanical teachers and politicians.
Just as newspapers claimed the Notting Hill Riots were a sign of the “collapse of law and order”, so they insisted comics like Action would encourage children — or more specifically the socially threatening teenager — to engage in mindless violence, especially when writer Tom Tully and artist Barrie Mitchell’s football strip for Action, ‘Look Out For Lefty’, featured the kind of football hooliganism that was blighting terraces across the country.
The final nail was the cover to the thirty-second issue, which hit shelves the Saturday after Notting Hill. Drawn by Spanish artist Carlos Ezquerra, whose action-packed work on Battle — characters like Major Eazy and Rat Pack were perfect anti-heroes for the age of Kelly’s Heroes and M.A.S.H. — was immensely popular, was intended to advertise a new story called ‘Kids Rule O.K.’.
For this series about a post-apocalyptic world without adults, written by Chris Lowder and illustrated by Mike White, Ezquerra had drawn an image straight out of tabloid newspaper nightmares: against the backdrop of a burning city, a crowd of rioting teens turned over a car as their longhaired, wild-eyed, denim-clad leader menacingly waved a chain in the air, charging at a terrified man cowering on the floor. By the man’s feet Ezquerra had placed a policeman’s custodian helmet, with its distinctive silver ‘rose top’.
Although he is clearly not wearing an officer’s jacket, the in-house IPC colourist was instructed or assumed that the helmet related to him, and coloured both it and his clothes the traditional deep blue of the British policeman’s uniform. Whether Ezquerra had intended it or not, the scene looked, to any casual observer, like the youth was attacking a police officer. At a time when images of police being attacked by demonstrators, hooligans, and picketers were beamed into sitting rooms, this was simply too much.
The backlash, which had been growing since Action had launched the previous February, now became overwhelming — IPC pulled and pulped the thirty-third issue. When it returned weeks later, it had been neutered and lasted barely a year before folding into Battle.
Yet, as I Am The Law details, Action’s fate actually had little to do with comics, or its young readers. Knowingly or not, Sanders, Mills, Kemp, and their writers and artists had stepped into the heart of the moral panic around crime that had engulfed all forms of dissent and disorder. For this was the beginning of the age of ‘law and order’.
This is the thread that runs through my book — amidst national narratives of chaos, disorder and decline, which were often at odds with reality, ‘law and order’ politics became an effective means by which politicians and reactionaries could mobilise social forces against social and political change. As the police became increasingly politicised and Margaret Thatcher was on the path to 10 Downing Street, ‘law and order’ was becoming more than politics, more than policing — it was starting to take over the world.
The cover to Action issue 32 embodied the historical moment, as a picture was painted of the imminent collapse of liberal democracy and politicians, policemen, and pundits began to insist that something fiercer was required to face these manifold ‘threats’.
In the end, it was more than fitting that it was Ezquerra who, as officers in custodian helmets waded into crowds and picket lines, created the character that would embody this new, punitive politics and issue a stark warning about their endgame.
Judge Dredd.
Blending comic book history with contemporary radical theories on policing, I Am The Law is out on 23 February and takes key Dredd stories from the last 45 years to demonstrate how they provide a unique wake up call about our gradual, and not so gradual, slide towards authoritarian policing. From the politicisation of policing to ‘zero tolerance’, from violent suppression of protest to the rise of the surveillance state, I Am The Law examines how a comic book warned us about the chilling endgame of today’s ‘law and order’ politics.
Order now from your local book or comic book store, or from one of these online retailers >>
Further reading:
Martin Barker, Action: The Story of a Violent Comic (1990)
Moose Harris, Action: The Sevenpenny Nightmare
Martin Barker, A Haunt of Fears (1984)
Stuart Hall et al, Policing the Crisis (1978)
Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009)
