Review by Roy Boyd

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 42 features twenty stories: fifteen from 2000 AD and five from the Judge Dredd Megazine. There’s one at four parts, which is longer than the six parter, a pair each of two and three part tales, and the remainder are standalone. So, that’s six longer stories, and fourteen one-hit wonders, though one of those is 36 pages. Still with me?

Taking the longer stories worthy of mention in order, we begin with the six parts of ‘Your Beating Heart’. For the most part, it’s a straightforward police procedural very much in the mould of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, but with a sci-fi twist to complicate matters. With John Wagner writing and Patrick Goddard on art duties, this is solidly entertaining, if not much more.

‘Flood’s Thirteen’ is 36 pages long. Blatantly riffing on Ocean’s Eleven, this – like all good heist stories – spends time on the planning stages before exploding into action. The combination of Wagner’s writing and Henry Flint’s drawing deliver exactly what you’d expect: an exciting story that’s often funny.

‘Warzone’ (four-parts, 48 pages) is also written by Wagner, with art by PJ Holden. Dredd travels off-world to bring home a wanted criminal. He joins a ragtag military unit on a planet where various factions (of humans) are engaged in a never-ending war. With shades of The Dirty Dozen, or 2000 AD’s Bad Company, this ticks many boxes you’d expect from a story like this. It’s unsophisticated fun, though Holden looks as if he hasn’t quite settled on his own style of drawing Dredd. Strangely enough, it also channels the spirit of a Commando comic, which is no bad thing.

Okay, the best of the shorter tales? ‘Change of Loyalties,’ by Gordon Rennie and Henry Flint, looks amazing, and the disco-coloured palette helps it feel like a 1980’s classic. Flint is always good, but he excels here, with linework that has more than a bit of Brendan McCarthy about it.

‘Class of ’79’ is a single-part Xmas tale at a dozen pages. Wagner writes a hard-hitting story that fits a Dredd family get-together – just as much fun and jollity as you’d expect – into a tale of a Judge gone bad. The art, by Greg Staples, is superb.

‘Time and Again’ by frequent collaborators Ian Edginton (writer) and D’Israeli (art) is a great time travel story packed with wit and simply gorgeous artwork (see sample). Trust these two to work a Victorian time-traveller into a Dredd story.

Some of the seventeen artists featured include Mike Avon Oeming, Arthur Ranson and Iain Gibson, so there’s the usual wide range of styles in stories that skip with gay abandon through the genres, whether it’s war, sci-fi, horror, or comedy. As well as writers already mentioned, Simon Spurrier and Robbie Morrison also lend their talents.

This is one of those collections without an obvious outstanding story to single out for the back cover blurb. Speaking of which, there’s a mistake in the aforementioned blurb (‘taunt crime capers’ instead of taut), but that’s a minor niggle about a book that’s so entertaining. It may not contain the answer to life, the universe and everything, but this 42nd volume is yet another worthwhile addition to the series.