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if-you-fan-a-fire · 3 years ago

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Kay Dick’s 1977 book They, which has been newly republished in Britain, is a fiction with a story attached. It was plucked from obscurity after almost half a century by the literary agent Becky Brown – a slim orange paperback found languishing amongst the shelves at a Bath branch of Oxfam Books. They is the latest in a steady stream of reappearing books by dead women from the middle of the last century. Perhaps there has never been a better time to be a writer hitherto judged as too strange, too working class, too queer, too intellectual, too foreign, too not-a-man or simply too much. Recent years have seen the republication of the work of Brigid Brophy, Ann Quin, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Christine Brooke-Rose, amongst others. Novels in translation by Clarice Lispector, Tove Ditlevsen and Ingeborg Bachmann, meanwhile, have become Penguin Modern Classics. An awkward, difficult-to-categorise era of literary history has emerged as prime prospecting ground for a publishing industry apparently eager to demonstrate its willingness to right the wrongs of the past, but not yet able to fully address the failures of the present: systemic racism, lack of class inclusivity, endemic sexual harassment, amongst other ills. In the Los Angeles Review of Books recently, Katie da Cunha Lewin warned of the ways in which such narratives of rediscovery, and their elevation of the figure of the neglected woman writer, can risk further solidifying the structures of power they seek to dismantle.

Such questions about the protection and preservation of culture, and what parts of it we rescue and for whom, are central to Dick’s book, which is less a novel or collection of short stories than a series of frightening visions – it bears the subtitle ‘a sequence of unease’. When old books like this one are drawn from the margins back towards the centre of our literary culture, we cannot help but read them for the ways they give the present meaning. Certainly, when encountering They in 2022, the sense of prescience is startling. The book is set in an unnamed but unmistakeable England under an authoritarian regime. It all began as a joke, a ‘parody for the newspapers’, Dick tells us, but ‘[n]o one wrote about them now’ – in fact, newspapers no longer exist. It has become impossible to ‘close the door between work and leisure’, while ‘[n]othing goes right, yet nothing goes really wrong’. Life is tightly surveilled and controlled and there’s a powerful sense of encroaching dread – though for some it is still possible to sun oneself on a veranda with a decent Muscadet, whilst the horror happens nearby but not quite here yet.

Love, creativity, pain, grief and living and working alone are all outlawed but enforcement is chillingly unpredictable. ‘Silent stealth was a greater pain to bear; it was their form of punishment’, the narrator notes. ‘They only took sharper measures if one went beyond the accepted limit.’ A phalanx of anonymous envoys is apt to show up at any time, they may simply quietly remove books from shelves and cart away paintings, a process they call ‘gleaning’, or they may dole out savage retribution: artists have their eyes put out, writers their hands and tongues removed. The injured are allowed a two-week grace period for the expression of pain. The single pair up into ‘family units’ under duress.

They is set amongst a community of artist and writer dissidents rounded up into communal ‘Centres’ along the coast, like a dystopian reimagining of the Bloomsbury group’s Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where they are granted special dispensation to keep working. When the regime tightens, they continue in careful defiance. Each part of the sequence begins in the natural landscape, made heady and at times out-and-out erotic, but for the most part Dick’s prose is austere and eerily neutral, like the sparse and urgent notation of a dreadful present as proof against future erasure. Characters are rendered flat and unknowable, we find out little about them beyond their names, the way they talk is clipped and odd. Like the hydrangeas blooming defiantly amongst paving stones described in the opening scene of the book, they are ‘an insolent abundance of flourish’. Or, perhaps, as a fisherman the narrator meets on the beach says of his latest catch, they are ‘[s]illy buggers… [s]currying under rocks’. Dick leaves this question open. In They, she is preoccupied by playing out debates about the role of the artist in dystopia – questions of protest, refusal and commitment, as well as collusion.

In the opening part of the sequence, as news comes through that the Bodleian library has been ransacked, the characters attempt to commit to memory, and thereby preserve, artworks that are being disappeared. Later, a poet whose right arm has been badly burned defiantly continues to write with her left. ‘It’s a matter of survival, not of suicide’, one character says. Though it’s a perspective frequently voiced by characters, They isn’t a straightforward paean to the value of art and the dignity of holding out at all costs – it’s a more complicated, and more profoundly pessimistic, book than that. As it progresses, the narrator begins to question the artist’s strategy, asking ‘Aren’t we keeping dead tombs alive?’ and ‘Can we go on creating for ourselves?’ Hurst, who owns and runs one of the artists’ enclaves, is revealed to be conspiring with ‘they’, permitted to collect and keep the artworks in return for betraying and turning in the artists who created them. The artists maintain a wilful blindness, telling one another that it’s ‘[b]est not to notice these things’. They seems to ask whether this form of resistance – the attempt, as characters put it more than once, to ‘explore the limitations’ – may well amount to the same thing as acquiescence. Every now and again, the narrator speaks of ‘making a stand’, but they don’t.

Within the context of Dick’s own body of work, too, They represents a voice regained after a long silence. It was her first work of fiction in fifteen years after a breakdown and suicide attempt in the mid-sixties. She would later recall how the ‘psychological repercussions’ of what she calls her ‘demonstration of free will’ resulted in ‘an inability to work properly and function as a writer’. When she returned to writing, it was at first in conversation with others: two books of literary interviews: the first with her friends, Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith in 1971, the second, Friends and Friendship (1974), with a wider selection of authors from her circle, including Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy. After They she would write one more work of literary fiction under her own name, The Shelf (1984), about a tragic infatuation which drew on one of her own relationships – apparently closely enough that thirty years later it was still being referred to in the literary press as a ‘heartless roman a clef’.

Several of the obituaries written upon her death in 2001 remark upon Dick’s failure to realise further ambitions for a cycle of novels and several literary biographies. These notices are markedly scurrilous, noting her ‘taste for controversy’ and ‘androgynous mental attitude’, her perceived profligacy with money and lovers, as if these were a reasonable quid pro quo for the difficulties she endured. By her own candid account, once she’d got better, what paralysed her writing was money. Upon her recovery, she took on freelance work to support herself and pay off debts and was a prolific literary critic. She did not exactly vanish into obscurity, then – so much so that for years her birthday continued to be recorded in the Times’ society pages – but this kind of work dragged her away from the writing she actually wanted to do. In the memoir that makes up the second half of Friends and Friendship she recalls:

Apart from this despair about money, there was a worse despair; the fact that having to devote so much energy and time to obtaining the very basic monies for living, there was little strength (let alone peace of mind) left for working on the books whose non-completion was daily haunting and tearing away at my mind. I was, for a period, reduced to a total feeling of inferiority, hating myself, placing no value on myself, lacking all confidence.

When she returned to writing fiction with They, it was different in form, style and mood from the novels she had produced in the fifties and early sixties. The critic Lucy Scholes has described it as a ‘surreptitious late-career aberration’, and Carmen Maria Machado in her foreword notes the ‘whiplash’ effect of arriving at They after Dick’s other works.

They is not quite without precedent, though. In the late 1940s, she edited three collections of fantasy and supernatural stories under the pseudonym, Jeremy Scott, which she also used later on for a couple of racy thrillers. In her introduction to one of these volumes, The Mandrake Root (1946), Dick writes of her preoccupation with ‘the whole question of the reality of fantasy’.

‘Each man carries within himself his own fantasy’, she writes, that usually lies ‘untouched in a corner of his brain’ because the ‘unknown is a terrible world, its associations are too ephemeral for the humanly acclimatized mind to recognise, let alone live with’.

That nameless dread and how it irrupts into people’s lives can be glimpsed elsewhere in her work. The title of The Shelf refers to the place where we sequester the things that besiege us – in this instance letters sent by the protagonist, Cass, to her lover, Anne, that are returned to her when Anne kills herself. Anne, Cass recalls, had some kind of originary wound, ‘a stigma invisible to the naked eye, yet sentient, attracting brutal responses as some wounded animals attract attack from their kind’. Elsewhere in the book, speculating on what might have caused her friend Maurice to also attempt suicide, Cass cannot find the source of the ‘despair’ that was concealed behind his ‘general impression of solidity’. Writing may be one means by which to keep it at bay. Sophia in The Shelf tells Cass:

‘I had to write…. I’ve always felt the need to explain myself, because I’ve felt so acutely in the wrong’.

Recalling her own childhood in Friends and Friendship, Dick remembers how at seven years old, with her mother newly married, what she calls her ‘vie en rose’ – referring to the freedoms she’d enjoyed as her mother’s consort amongst London’s artistic demi-monde – ended abruptly, when she was sent to boarding school. It was then, for the first time, she ‘became conscious of unmentionable matters, never quite defined, yet vaguely menacing’.

Dick was not alone amongst her peers during this period in feeling that the borders between reality and fantasy had gone fuzzy, leaving the conventional forms of literary fiction wanting. A generation of British writers, including Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Brophy, Alan Burns and others sought to question the approaches to knowledge of the past, embracing the idea that existence could be understood in terms of a number of different provisional and contingent narratives. Brooke-Rose, who was a friend of Dick’s, understood the modern re-emergence of the fantastic as central to these novelistic experiments.

‘[T]he sense that empirical reality is not as secure as it used to be is now pervasive at all levels of society,’ she would write in her study of this new mood, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981), and ‘if the “real” has come to seem unreal, it is natural to turn to the “unreal” as real.’

Neither was Dick the only writer for whom this sense of existing epistemes collapsing had a personal dimension that was felt in the form of breakdown, breakthrough, or some other alteration of consciousness, and which resulted in transformations in their output. Several of her peers found themselves moving to new styles, forms or genres. Following religious conversion experiences, in the mid-fifties Muriel Spark moved from poetry and literary criticism to writing the brittle, hollowed-out and deeply strange stories she’s now famous for; in the early seventies the poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks gave up writing altogether. After a serious illness, Brooke-Rose claimed she had gained ‘a sense of being in touch with something else’ and upon her recovery, in a manner somewhat akin to Dick, abandoned the social satires she’d written during the fifties to produce a cycle of wildly experimental novels.

It feels churlish to do anything other than celebrate a work that has, in unlikely fashion, shuffled its way up to the top of the great, teetering stack of unread books. But we do such books and their authors a disservice if we allow the goodwill that attends such republications to smooth their edges. Reading They, I found myself wishing that Dick hadn’t made the threat cohere, hadn’t finally given an object to the dread that makes the earlier parts of the book so unmooring. Though we are never shown where all this is coming from, in the fifth of the nine parts of the sequence we begin to see how it manifests itself in the form of industrial cities, new-build housing and tower blocks, peopled by feral children and yobs who sling beer cans around and piss in the street.

Earlier in the book, two sinister envoys appear at the narrator’s garden gate and are welcomed in for tea and cake and offered flowers – as if they might yet be redeemable – and in return they put off what we assume to be the enforcers who follow in their wake up the garden path. Meanwhile, the ‘sightseers’, the name Dick gives to the marauding hoards who flock like ‘locusts’ to the artists’ precarious coastal idyll from those urban centres as eager spectators of scenes of surveillance and demolition, are depicted with lurid aesthetic revulsion. They are a ‘uniformity of ugliness’, aroused by carnage and assuaging ‘their apathy with small acts of vandalism’. They ‘jabber like savages’ in ‘indecipherable gang vocabulary’. So very uncouth are they that they ‘prefer concrete’:

Think of their passion for marinas, not for boats, but for the car parks, the amusement arcade, the proliferation of restaurants and blocks of high-tower apartments. They like to see the sea pulverized out of its natural area by concrete. They dislike the beaches for the same reasons; bathing in the sea is too uneasy a freedom, they prefer swimming pools. They like nothing better than to sit in their cars and look at the sea from the safe harbour of a monstrous marina complex.

At length, then, in They the unease is given a form and it is mass culture – pointedly not the invisible regime itself, but its subjects, those represented as narcotised by television and by the pop music piped over public address systems at ear-splitting volumes. As all this comes into focus, Dick’s vision of a peculiarly out-of-time artistic set, bewitched by the landscape or busy in their studios and at their desks and forever setting the table for a nursery tea, like the phantoms of a previous era, whilst brutality is meted out nearby, becomes more ordinary. We’re back in familiar territory here, that of the intellectuals versus the masses, of Richard Hoggart’s ‘shiny barbarism’ and the anxieties about cultural decline, ‘massification’ and the threat to individual expression that were felt by a post-war generation of intellectuals thirty years earlier. That’s not to say Dick invokes the same old metaphysic about the value of art being its ability to act as a moral guide to the ‘good life’. In They its power is about friendship, communion, love – a means of living separately together. Where Dick seems to falter is in extending these capacities of culture to everyone.

In the penultimate part of the sequence, two characters visit an eighteenth-century pleasure garden. In its heyday, it was carefully maintained for the enjoyment of a select few, but now the garden is mostly left to grow into wildness. Its walls are beginning to crumble and the gate is often left unlocked. The ‘sightseers’ don’t go there, though, suspicious of its ‘beauty’ and ‘sensuality’. For the artist dissidents, meanwhile, the garden is a ‘trap’ that lures them in with its ‘dangerous fantasy’ – ‘[i]n the garden it’s easy to forget’. In They, Dick writes her way into, and productively sustains, perennial questions about culture: its social role, its capacities as a form of resistance and the individual responsibilities of the artist. But although she seems at times to implicitly recognise them, she is unable or unwilling to think through the implications of having her dread cohere around the all too familiar spectre of ‘the masses’ as a uniform, passive and pathologised other.

- Jennifer Hodgson, “Dreadful Present.” New Left Review: Sidecar. March 11, 2022.

#jennifer hodgson #kay dick #they #new left review #literary review #rediscovered novel #dystopian fiction #literary quote #literary history

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warriorofbookingham · 4 years ago

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Homosexuality is not a sin or a disability and if you still call it so, then it really justifies your inability to accept the wider prospects of life due to your poor and unqualified social literacy. But still as India has it, Centre has yet again failed to clear Saurabh Kirpal as HC Judge on basis of what? 1. Well, ‘cause he is a proud gay.

2. His partner- is a foreign national, a Swiss human rights activist, Nicolas Germain Bachmann.

Will India fail to get it’s first Gay High Court Judge?

#unfair #justice #absurd #gay couple #judge

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imperialfate · 5 years ago

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Quintessence of Sacrifice

| Three of Swords | Six of Cups | The Hanged Man |

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“Those granted power invariably come to believe that they deserve it.”

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The worth of one’s Soul is impossible to measure, but that worth is and has always been of immense concern to a Guardian. For their goals - despite the suspicion and distaste offered by the rest of Awakened society - has always been to uplift those worthy Awakened souls at the cost of their own.

It is a contradictory act, then, to sacrifice oneself for another in an act of ego. It seems impossible that an act of Hubris might be taken for reasons that are Wise. And yet, this is the fundamental belief of the entire Order - that one can sacrifice one’s own Wisdom to allow another to rise up and become Wiser still.

But then, it is an act of Hubris to do such a thing, to consider oneself worthy of making that choice in the place of another, especially another who, by the virtues of one’s own argument, is by definition more wise than oneself. Voluntary martyrdom is an act of vanity. To throw oneself upon one’s sword, unasked and unforced, is more melodrama than sacrifice. The Guardians are naught but a society of willing victims, canonizing themselves in silence, comforting themselves in the illusion that their suffering grants them enlightenment.

“The Awakened version of a teenager, sitting by the window in the rain while she listens to Dashboard Confessional, thinking herself deeper and oh-so-much-more-world-weary than her poor, blind peers,” Oestra muttered, shuffling through a few legal documents on her desk.

She’s exaggerating, of course. Her peers are infinitely more subtle than a child who imagines herself the protagonist in a sad movie. Not that such a distinction makes them better - it’s worse, even. A child has some excuse, a reason to still be self-absorbed enough to create such fantasies about being made worthy through self-flagellation. The Wise should know better. It’s hardly a sacrifice at all if one believes that the very act of sacrifice will return more than they had lost in the first place.

Neither does she believe the entire Order to be saturated with this perversion of the tenets. No, there are many of worth among the Guardians yet, many who have chosen their path in the open-eyed awareness that it might yet deny them Wisdom, and with no illusions as to the high cost. They do not imagine secret worth bestowed upon them in a fair exchange for what they have given up. There is no fair exchange. That is the point. The very act of engaging in such sacrifice is, itself, an act of Hubris - a necessary one, but an act of Hubris nonetheless. To deny that is to deny the foundations of the Order itself.

There is a rot at the heart of the Order. One that threatens to undermine all that it has built, and all that it means. There is one - or perhaps many - who believes that his sacrifice has granted him Wisdom beyond that of the rest of the Diamond Wheel. That it is his sacred duty to guide the turning of the Wheel, rather than simply pushing the souls already turning through their paths, both predestined and chosen.

There is a secret hierarchy of Souls. There is no denying such fundamental truth - some Souls will rise, and others will flounder. Banishers and Seers both, pinnacle examples of those who have proven themselves unworthy of their Awakening, through fear and greed. Some will lift themselves to great heights, and others will not. It is a fact of reality, despite how others might dislike the notion of it.

It is the duty of the Guardians to drive all, to demand from all, to test all. Some will endure, and others will not. But that is the key - all are pushed in this way, because anyone might be worthy. It is not the place of the Guardian to decide who falls upon which spoke of the Wheel.

“But there is one among us who dares try.”

Megalomania. There is no other word for such extreme Hubris.

She slammed the folder in her hands down on the desk, earning a look of wide-eyed fear from the two paralegals hovering outside the office door. There were spells layered over the office that hid the meaning of her words, allowing them to hear only meaningless muttering, but it didn’t hide her frustration, nor the sound of the flat leather hitting the solid oak surface. Her gaze lifted to the two stares, her expression perfectly neutral. They would project whatever emotion suited them onto her expression - from the way they scampered down the hall, she imagined they saw anger in her eyes. Well, perhaps what wasn’t surprising. She knew she had resting bitch face.

A single long finger touched the speaker on her phone. “Liam, I need that report on the status of the Bachmann case. Now.” Short, clipped, but professional, her tone brooked no argument and implied a supreme confidence in the fact that the report would be brought to her within the next minute or so. No one here so much as considered refusing her. No excuses. Especially since each of them unknowingly bore sufficient luck that they simply couldn’t explain that the bus had run early this morning, or their car had broken down on the way in, or their computer had gotten a virus. Because it wasn’t true. Nothing like that ever happened to her employees. She wouldn’t allow something as fickle as fate to interfere with her plans.

The Bachmann case was, as far as anyone in the office was concerned, a pro bono case that she’d taken up as a spontaneous favour. It was not. The case itself concerned a young woman - Casey Bachmann - who had endured a mauling at the hands of a cougar and become paralyzed in the process, and who was now suffering terribly because she had been denied care on the premise that she had remained in the country after her visa had expired - though she’d only done so because she’d been injured so badly and was unable to safely travel at the time. It was a case of bureaucracy butting up against humanity; the humane answer was obvious, and no one argued that it was the wrong one, but there was still no one mired in the red-tape of the process willing to take the initiative to make the necessary exceptions, insisting always that it was someone else’s problem. Or they would, until the judge made it their problem.

Liam rushed into Oestra’s office, smoothing his tie as he came to a stop in front of her desk, and held out a manila folder. “Miss Park,” he greeted, clearing his throat one he realized just how out-of-breath he seemed. “Justice Berle will be presiding, but hasn’t reviewed the notes of the case as of yet. He has indicated that he intends to give both the prosecution and defense another three days to provide any additional notes they deem appropriate.”

Oestra - or Olivia Park, as she was known in the office and among the larger Sleeper community - took the offered folder and flipped through a few pages. Then she sighed. “There is no reason to do this but to urge the defense to provide something of value. They have nothing, if the judge is covertly begging them to submit like this. I knew our case would be solid, but it seems only a matter of time, now. Still, speak to Dr Kennedy again. See if she has any additional comments to make about Casey’s condition. There’s no harm in providing more information.”

This was not the sort of case that Oestra was known to work. Any lawyer, even a half-drunk ambulance-chaser, would need to put active effort into throwing the case in order to lose it. It was a simple matter of process, requiring a judge’s order that that person do something in order to cease the endless passing of responsibility. Nothing more. Oestra’s time was too valuable for something like this. No one fully understood why she would put such effort into something that, while horrible, was already unquestionably going to be ruled in favour of the prosecution. Everyone knew something else had to be going on. Perhaps the Bachmann’s were friends with the notoriously cold Olivia Park? Did Miss Park even have friends?

It was nothing of the sort. Casey Bachmann had suffered a suppression of her natural Awakening. Oestra had seen it coming, and had seen the bloom of Prime energy from where the attack occurred, and had seen it warp away from her screaming form as the cougar nearly killed her, instead of being thrown back by the energy of her Soul opening to the Supernal.

The nimbus had been cloaked but unmistakable, hidden by a Masque. A Guardian had suppressed an Awakening, stepped into the Diamond Wheel and tore a Soul out of it, out of some misguided sense that it was mistaken, that he knew better who belonged there. The very thought of it made her lips pull back into a small, but unmistakable, silent snarl of disgust.

Liam startled at the look on her face and excused himself.

The case was not some attempt to make up for what the traitor had done. Nothing in the Fallen World could recover what was lost. For Casey, the best Oestra could hope for would be that a full recovery might provide her the opportunity she needed to touch the Primal Wild again. It was unlikely, but better to give her that chance, however slim.

No, this was a calculated move. Oestra’s involvement in the case was bizarre. She had no doubt that the mage guilty of the suppression would recognize her interference for what it was - a sign that he’d been caught, that she knew what had happened, that she was working against him. There was no chance that she’d happened upon this case and taken it up for any other reason.

If all went as she hoped, he would take the sign for what it was an strike immediately. It was the most sensible response to such a move. The more time he left her to prepare to stand against him, the better chance she would have. A quick, deadly act would be required to prevent exposure.

She was counting on it.

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She’d planned for everything. She knew how this would play out from the moment she’d started planning it. She knew the corrupted Soul as only an Obrimos could. She knew the mind of a traitor, as only a Voice would understand. She hadn’t needed a mastery of Fate or Time to see the dominoes she so painstakingly lined up, and where they would lead when they fell.

Still. She hadn’t expected that he would be the one to knock them down like this.

Her spell had been the work of weeks. Most of that had been spent exploring the Astral Realm, seeking to face a daemon of the Masque. She hadn’t known who he was, then. Only the Vice he’d chosen for himself. That would have to be enough. The essence she brought back was burned in the casting, lending the spell its perfected sheen.

The pattern of it was bright, clear and perfect. A grand working of Prime, Fate, Space and Time that would rip a fatal spell out of her very body and throw it back at the one who cast it. It was a work of shimmering power, the kind of magic worked only by a true master of the arcane. Beautiful. Beautiful and false.

It needed be powerful and convincing, of course, because her attacker needed to believe that her response to his attempt on her life would be to launch a counter-attack. He needed to believe that his protection need be against the very spell he was working, so that he might build the perfect shield to protect himself against that spell, and discover only when it was too late that he’d left himself too open to anything else.

Alone in her Sanctum, she knew the moment had come when she felt a touch of magic tearing its way through her protections. She didn’t move. Coming to peace with her death had been easier than she’d imagined. To defend herself meant leaving it to chance that she might fail to reveal the traitor for who he was. To guarantee success, she needed all the power she could muster. He would have defenses. She would need to shatter them completely.

Spears of liquid thaumium materialized inside each joint in her body, shattering her bones, fixing her in agonizing place like a doll with joints seized by pins. She might have screamed, but that her mouth was fused shut by her broken jaw. She could not move. She could not speak. Some small part of her recognized the devious intelligence of such an attack - if he could not kill her in an instant, he would render any attempts she made to cast further spells all the more difficult by denying her the ability to make use of any yantras.

Alas, she needed no yantras. She needed only the will to hold her Soul in her body for the split second needed to tear his memories from him. For that - that was the true purpose of her spell. The false pattern melted away as the magic exploded outward. His protections had been wrong, aimed to work against a similar attack of thaumium. Instead, her will-work drilled into his mind, pulling out the moment of unforgivable corruption in which he’d suppressed the touch of a Watchtower out of supreme egotism.

The memory was cast to every Magister in the Order, alongside the events currently playing out in both her Sanctum, and his. And his face, that look of horrified shock, when he realized what was happening. All of it, touched with the Supernal - a sign and guarantee that all of what was happening was the Truth.

She’d never seen him look quite like that before. She’d imagine that she never would. Maybe it spoke to her own arrogance, to think that, of all the available suspects, she truly never imagined that it would be him. Her mentor. Her teacher. Her guide.

She might have cried, had she been given the opportunity. She had, perhaps, a half-second of life left in her - it wasn’t enough time to form tears. The sense of betrayal was a deep cut, but it was one quickly overwhelmed by the feeling of her life draining away. It felt both hot and cold, under the physical pain.

My body is a Lie.

It was a nice thought, but that didn’t do anything to dull the agony and nausea. Perhaps it was a Lie, but it was a hell of a convincing one, at the moment. God, she just wanted it to be over. She didn’t regret what she’d done - it was the right thing, the only thing. But a spear of hate raked through her consciousness in that last, rattling breath, as she realized that this was punishment. He’d designed the spell to not just to eliminate a threat to his plans, but he’d actually intended to torment her in her last moments.

Narcissistic and petty, she scoffed.

And then she was gone.

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To throw oneself upon one’s sword, unasked and unforced, is more melodrama than sacrifice.

Perhaps that was so. Perhaps that was what she’d just done. Had there been another option? What of the risk involved in defending herself, and giving him time to recover? Was it unforced?

Did it matter? Maybe she was being melodramatic. But it wasn’t as if she’d ever imagined herself to be more noble for it.

Maybe that was the difference.

For all the power she’d gathered, she’d never claim that she deserved it.

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Spell: Read the Depths, Scry, Supernal Veil, Words of Truth Rote 3 Reach Available, 6 Spent

Spell Factors Advanced Primary Potency - 16 total + 2 vs dispel, 5 for primary, 20 dice spent. Standard Duration - 1 turn, 0 dice spent. Standard Casting Time - 3 hours, 5 dice gained. Advanced Range - Sympathetic, 2 reach spent. Advanced Scale - 10 subjects (attacker + 9 magisters), 2 dice spent.

Other Reach Add a spell beyond limit - 1 reach spent. Veil the spell as something else - 2 reach spent, 1 per falsified spell.

Yantras Mudra - +4, empathy Sacrament - +3 Shadow Name - +3 Mantra - +2 Sympathy - -2, medium connection

Outcome Paradox - 0 Mana Spent - 3 Total = 6 Gnosis + 5 Prime - 17 Factors + 10 Yantras = 4 dice pool 4 ÷ 3 = 2 successes (due to rote quality).

#three of swords #six of cups #the hanged man #oestra #seeking #quintessence

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dwightturner · 2 years ago

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Just learned the Kentucky Flood Fundraiser raised over $10,000 in monetary and physical donations! Every bit helps. Thank you to the following individuals for helping make the fundraiser a success. State Representative Derrick Graham State Representative Daniel Grossberg Candidate for State Senate Teresa Barton Candidate for District Court Judge Claudette Patton Actor Conrad Bachmann Miss Juneteenth India Marks Miss Pure International Preteen Addie Walters Owner of Trifecta BBQ Bar & Grill Tony Bryant And de de Cox for her fundraising experience #dwightturner #kentuckyfloodfundraiser #derrickgraham #danielgrossberg #teresabarton #claudettepatton #conradbachman #indiamarks #addiewalters #tonybryant #dedecox #trifectabbq https://www.instagram.com/p/CiA8sLOpkEP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#dwightturner #kentuckyfloodfundraiser #derrickgraham #danielgrossberg #teresabarton #claudettepatton #conradbachman #indiamarks #addiewalters #tonybryant #dedecox #trifectabbq

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jrpneblog · 2 years ago

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North End fail to sting the Hornets

Another game, another 0-0 draw as North End`s quirky start to the season continued against Watford at Deepdale. Both side had their chances but poor finishing and good defending ensured we witnessed another stalemate in front of the Deepdale faithful. It would be difficult to criticise North End as the Hornets are as good a team as I have seen this season albeit early days to judge but to keep a team just relegated from the Premiership to zero must mean North End are doing something right at the back. We had some good passages of play and once again played some decent football but we are just not clinical enough, at the moment, when we get a sight of goal. Ryan Lowe stuck with the 3-4-2-1 formation for the third game in a row and while it seems to make us solid defensively the lack of that second forward up front and the options it gives us is the price we are having to pay.

No changes from the manager to the team that drew 0-0 on Tuesday evening against Rotherham at Deepdale with Parrott once again playing the lone role up front. North End were first out of the blocks with Browne having a good effort well saved by the Watford keeper. The visitor got into the game and had a couple of decent efforts at the other end with Woodman doing particularly well to save a one on one and keep Watford out. We lost Hughes to an injury after 20 minutes but Greg Cunningham came on in his place and I thought he did a great job as stand in at left centre back. North End then had two good efforts, firstly through Parrott and latterly a shot from Ledson both of which were very well saved by Bachmann in the visitorsgoal. Watford finished the half the stronger and had a couple of half chances late on in the first period but the North End defence held firm.

North End started the second half unchanged and roared on by the home fans, in a crowd of 15,317, we set about trying to convert one of the chances that were coming our way. The early stages of the second half actually lacked a bit of energy but eventually we got going and a Browne effort flashed across goal but was palmed out by the keeper. Watford had a great chance on the hour mark but the centre forward smashed it over the bar when closing in on goal. Watford were on top at this stage and as the second half wore on North End made one or two uncharacteristic errors giving the ball away in open areas and allowing the visitors to get forward quickly into dangerous situations. Fotunately we got away with them in this game but those little lapses of concentration could cost us in future. Having said that we generally defended very well again and fully deserved the point against one of the best sides in the division.

So it is five league games for North End without conceding a goal and that is an excellent stat in anyone`s book. The performances are there for North End and we are making some decent chances but it just hasnt happened so far and while the fans can be a little frustrated at the lack of goals they certainly cant be critical of the all round effort of the team and the defensive record. The goals will come and I think once Troy Parrott converts one we will see that he is a real asset at centre forward. Three games in a row away from Deepdale, now, that is if the game at Coventry on 31st August goes ahead and the pitch is up to standard. A free hit of sorts on Tuesday evening as we travel to Woves for the Carabao Cup second round and I expect the manager to make quite a few changes to the side that played in this game as we go on the hunt for a bit of Cup glory.

PRESTON 0-0 WATFORD

WOODMAN 8

STOREY 7 LINDSAY 7 HUGHES 7

POTTS 7 WHITEMAN 6 LEDSON 8 BRADY 8

JOHNSON 7 BROWNE 6

PARROTT 7

Subs:-

RIIS 6

WOODBURN 6

McCANN 6

CUNNINGHAM 7

MOTM: Ryan Ledson

Attendance 15,317

Preston Fans 14,192 (92.66%)

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philhoffman · 2 years ago

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God’s Pocket is a flawed movie but somehow it fits as a swan song to Phil

I totally agree. There’s so much about God’s Pocket that I don’t like, that doesn’t work — I can’t stand Richard Jenkins’ character or that entire plot line, as just one example — but every scene with Mickey is so thoughtful, so heavy and purposeful.

It’s almost like, idk… it’s difficult to judge that performance in retrospect, solely on its merits, without being influenced by what happened, the knowledge that Phil died. I know that shadow plays a large part in my affection for Mickey as a character and the film overall. But it’s also interesting to think about what Phil was thinking about and put into that role while, obviously, very much alive. At Sundance, he talked a lot about how he related to Mickey (and Bachmann) and walking away, this sort of time of uncertainty and crisis in his life.

I wonder what God’s Pocket would’ve meant if he hadn’t passed away, the spot it would hold in his filmography. He sort of joked about quitting acting after those two films but I seriously doubt he would’ve — acting was his way of existing in the world, his air. A break to direct, maybe, I could see that. Yeah, idk, I guess GP just shows he was still so good at being the best part of any film, despite everything.

#god's pocket #ask #anonymous

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judgeanon · 6 years ago

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A SHORT HISTORY OF FEMALE JUDGES IN JUDGE DREDD FROM 2012 TO 2015

Seemingly satisfied with having thoroughly destroyed Mega-City One and making Dredd horribly responsible for and uncharacteristically powerless during all of it, John Wagner let go of the reins of 2000AD’s flagship character after “Day of Chaos”, leaving the strip in the hands of a new crop of writers who’d waste no time in staking their territory. First with an absolute tour de force of storytelling, and later with epics of their own, filled with supporting casts either handpicked or created by themselves, these writers have carved their own place in the strip by exploring the themes and characters most interesting to each other.

Speaking of characters, the most important development of this era as far as this series is concerned is the return of Judge Hershey to the Chief Judge’s seat. Ostensibly brought back to form an interim administration while the city gets back on its feet, Hershey would end up staying far longer than anticipated, mostly on account of there being nobody else willing and able to take on the monumental responsibility. Least of all, Dredd himself. More on that… right away, actually.

(Previous posts: 1979 to 1982 - 1982 to 1986 - 1986 to 1990 - 1990 to 1993 - 1993 to 1995 - 1995 to 1998 - 1998 to 2001 - 2001 to 2004 - 2004 to 2007 - 2007 to 2009 - 2009 to 2012. Cover art by Cliff Robinson)

We hit the ground running with “Bullet to King Four”, by Al Ewing and Henry Flint (prog 1803, October 2012) a prologue to the year’s first epic. Back in the driver’s seat of a city dangling from a cliff, Chief Judge Hershey is already hard at work. During an interim council meeting that includes Dredd, Judge Stalker and new Wally Squad acting chief Judge Folger (Judge Hollister is mentioned as being MIA, her cover blown during Chaos Day), she reveals her plan to merge Justice Dept’s various units into larger divisions as a way to consolidate their beleaguered forces. She also introduces, to Dredd’s immediate disgust, a new head of Undercover Division and obvious source of future trouble: Judge Carolyn Bachmann.

Bachmann had been introduced in a Megazine story set during Tour of Duty called “The Family Man” by Ewing and Leigh Gallagher (Megs 312-313, July 2011), where she was hinted to be the secret head of Justice Dept’s Black Ops Division, introduced years ago in Si Spurrier’s “Dominoes.” An incredibly shrewd, cunning and manipulative woman, Bachmann clashed with Dredd over unsanctioned killings in the mutant townships, but he was ultimately unable to gather enough evidence to go after her in any official way. In fact, during “Bullet…”, Hershey directly references having heard Dredd’s accusations, but stands by her decision to keep Bachmann around. And then we get three of the most savage panels in the history of the strip:

Oof.

Clearly, the good old days of the Dredd/Hershey team are over. Or at least on life support. There’s definitely a lot to be said about Hershey’s words here, starting from the fact that she’s unequivocally, absolutely, 100% right. Dredd has proven, again and again, that he has extremely little patience or desire to deal with the logistical consequences of his decisions. The clearest example of this is back during “Mutants in Mega-City One”, when Dredd arm-twisted his way through the entire Council of Five, but then grew tired with all the politicking he himself started and left them to deliberate it on their own. It was Hershey’s cunning and willingness to stay the course that saved the repeal then.

And then there’s the resignation thing. This is something that Hershey’s not only had to deal with twice (first in “Total War”, then in “Mutants...”), but she was also there when Dredd did resign and eventually came back, during McGruder’s second term. She knows, arguably better than anyone alive, that Dredd is a judge and could never be anything else. What’s interesting is that this time, she doesn’t hesitate to call his bluff. While before, Hershey would’ve been more open to cooperation and second opinions, now she’s stuck doing triage for a half-dead city. And the last thing she needs is Dredd’s constant small picture problems meddling with her attempts at saving what’s left of the big picture, a responsibility that Dredd is staunchly reluctant to take as long as there’s someone else available to do it.

But although Hershey is right in her assessment of Dredd’s mindset, Dredd is likewise right in his assessment of Bachmann’s intentions. In fact, it’s even suggested at the story’s end that Hershey and Bachmann might be working together, which, given Hershey’s penchant for secret operations during her first reign, isn’t entirely unfounded from an in-universe perspective. Par for the strip’s course, nobody is entirely right. But despite the particulars of the story, the key element of “Bullet…” is how it has come to define Dredd and Hershey’s relationship for the last six-odd years.

Following such a strong start, we have “Asleep”, by Rob Williams and Mark Harrison (progs 1804-1805, idem), about a sov sleeper agent being reactivated by accident and gunning for the Chief Judge. The end result is an unabashed Hershey-in-peril scene, complete with her staring down the barrel of a gun on her knees and Dredd saving her life with some quick talking. So bit of a disappointment after the previous story, but hopefully it won’t become a trend or anything. Also of note: yet another redesigned female med-judge.

Then we get to the first epic of this new post-Wagner era, “Trifecta”. Which, in my opinion, is one of the strongest and smartest uses of 2000AD’s anthology format in storytelling since “The Dead Man”. Even in collected form it’s still not quite as interesting as it was reading it in the progs, and that’s because it is formed by three different series by three different creative teams that all started independently, and were only revealed to be different parts of a same story one third into it. Now, because I’m a stickler for the self-imposed rules of this series of articles (and certainly not because I’m a lazy bastard), I’ll focus only on the Dredd portion of it: “The Cold Deck”, by the returning team of Ewing and Flint (progs 1806-1811, October-November ‘12).

The story starts with the news that Judge Folger has been found dead in rather grisly circumstances, and to make matters worse, she’d also taken an important file from Wally Squad’s computers and erased all copies before dying -- a file so top secret, nobody knows what it is. Dredd suspects Bachmann, and Buell, former head of the SJS, agrees, further suggesting that she’ll use the scandal to prompt a reorganization, strengthen her position and eventually become Chief Judge herself. Which of course, doesn’t sit well with Dredd at all.

We’re also introduced to Judge Estrella, Bachmann’s partner in crime. A psi-judge, she spends most of the story mentally spying on Dredd on her boss’ behalf. Bachmann is not one to leave anything to chance.

Dredd tracks the file down but intentionally fails to stop it from being sold to someone off-world, where it’s revealed to be a list of every Wally Squad judge in operation. For this, Hershey summons Dredd to her office in an episode that picks right up where “Bullet...” left off, in more ways than one. Opening with Hershey having a flashback to the final pages of “The Judge Child Quest” during a budget meeting with Judge Maitland (who’s also hinted at being part of the epic’s underlying plot), she’s left alone with Dredd. The chapter, set almost entirely from Hershey’s perspective, is an exceptionally sharp bit of writing that segues flawlessly from plot to character development and then right back to plot with notable ease, comfortably aided by Flint peppering the pages with tight close-ups that convey a feeling of claustrophobic closeness between the two judges.

On one hand, we find out that Hershey was fully aware of Bachmann’s underhanded tactics, having made good use of her advice in the past, and wanted her in the Council as a way to get her out in the open and hopefully find something more solid to arrest her for. For the sake of the city, Hershey is willing to give an ambitious spymaster just enough rope to hang herself with, while Dredd would prefer to just hang her himself. But now, both Dredd and Hershey find themselves playing different games but not trusting each other enough to let the other in on them.

And on a deeper level, we get to see the differences between Hershey and Dredd’s conceptions of what it means to be Chief Judge, which is where the flashback comes in. After all, it was Dredd who refused to bring Krysler back to Mega-City One, espousing the notion that the Chief Judge had to be incorruptible. Hershey notes that Dredd idolizes the position of Chief, often leading him to stand in harsh judgment of the men and women who have taken it in the past. Indulging in a bit of armchair psychology, I feel like a lot of it has to do with Dredd’s relationship with the closest he had to a biological father: Judge Fargo, the first and best Chief Judge, against which all others have to be compared. And even if Fargo proved to be more human than it seemed, his myth and Dredd’s indoctrination have created an impossible set of standards in the latter’s mind that nobody else is able to live up to.

But Dredd has never been Chief Judge. Hershey has. Twice. If Dredd knows what the position should be, Hershey knows what it is. And she has no qualms in admitting that it comes with a hefty amount of compromise, subterfuge and even corruption. She laments the loss of her ideals, some of which we’ve been first-hand witnesses to over the years, but still proves to have the good of the city as her ultimate goal at all times. In fact, her attempt at ousting Bachmann is likened to her “victory” over Judge Edgar during her first reign. But in an even more personal level that has very little to do with the current situation, Hershey is shown to be wounded by Dredd’s lack of trust in her, when she trusted him enough to be kicked out of office for him. Dredd’s narrow focus on his vision of what the Chief Judge and the city should be makes him willfully blind to the compromises needed to fulfill it and to the sacrifices others make for believing in him. And Hershey, who has already given everything save her life for him once, is officially through taking his stomm.

And on a personal (for me) note, having such an exceedingly layered, compelling relationship between two estranged former friends without any romantic tension at all is one of the reasons I absolutely love Judge Dredd.

Things escalate pretty quickly after that. Bachmann is forced to execute her plan sooner than expected due to the Wally Squad list being a fake used to lure her out and ruin her scheme to create a shiny new Mega-City reserved for indoctrinated citizens with the assistance of an insane shark-headed (that’s not an euphemism, he literally has a shark’s head) business mogul. Her black ops troops start taking over the Hall of Justice, and she herself beats up and guns Dredd down, but he’s promptly saved by Maitland, who also kills Estrella in the process. This all sets up the stage for the last episode of the epic, the titular “Trifecta”, by Al Ewing, Simon Spurrier, Rob Williams and drawn (gorgeously) by Carl Critchlow (prog 1812, December 2012).

With all the conspiracy and most of the character bits out of the way, the conclusion is a very two-fisted action affair that includes an honest-to-grud flashback cameo by Chief McGruder of all people, a hilariously uncomfortable one-panel reunion between Dredd and Galen DeMarco (who’d been featured in Spurrier’s portion of the story), and one of the all-time greatest Hershey panels:

So with Dredd finally fessing up to knowing about Bachmann’s plans and Hershey admitting that she underestimated their scope, all that’s left is dealing with the mastermind herself. Like any good final boss, Bachmann proceeds to beat the crap out of everyone, including lobbing a stun grenade at Hershey to get her down on all fours which is awkwardly similar to the end of “Sleeper” up there. But in the end, she gets killed from behind by Judge Smiley, a more-secret-than-secret black ops judge who’d been brought in as a countermeasure by Judge Griffin after Cal’s reign, to prevent something like that from ever happening again. Hershey is understandably upset to learn there’s been a presumed-dead spy living in the walls of the Chief Judge’s office for the last 20 years, and berates him for not coming out for any other previous crisis and Dredd for not trusting her. So although the day is saved, it wasn’t without damage, both inside and out.

To Dredd’s credit, however, he’s not a bastard to everyone in this story.

What’s especially notable about “The Cold Deck” is the sheer breadth of roles in display for its female characters. The antagonist, the main side protagonist, the sidekick, the antagonist’s sidekick, even the catalyst for the story itself are all female, plus a handful of background judges in the final chapter. In many ways, this story is the end result of all the past years of development for female judges in the strip. Women encompass all possible roles, from minor to major, from incidental to fully developed, and on both sides of the conflict. By comparison, the other two parts of the story have either no female characters (”Saudade”) or only DeMarco in a very secondary role (”Jokers to the Right”). Meanwhile, the many female characters in "The Cold Deck” are all established characters with different degrees of development, none of which were created for this story except for Estrella. And while it can be argued that it’s astonishingly easy to introduce new characters in Dredd, the fact that a major storyline can encompass such a wide variety of female characters in an organic way still speaks volumes of the people behind it.

After such a whopper story we get a chance to catch our breaths with a Judge Hughes doing sidekick duties in prog 1818’s “Witch’s Promise”, by Alan Grant and David Roach (February 2013) and then it’s right back into the fray with 1820-1822’s “Wolves”, by Michael Caroll and Andrew Currie (idem). The story concerns Dredd and Hershey’s efforts to stop a wave of violence against sov-born citizens after Chaos Day. When things come to a head, Hershey orders all citizens with roots in East-Meg to be taken to a massive internment camp, and then repatriated by the sov block in exchange for much needed food rations, a plan that Dredd is adamantly against. When the citizens refuse to be moved, Dredd proposes relocating them to Mega-City Two instead.

So we can see how Ewing’s character development threads have been picked up by Carroll: Dredd’s increasingly humanistic streak clashes with Hershey’s cold, pragmatic worldview, and in the end it’s Dredd who suggests the solution. At times it reads like a modernized version of much, much older stories where Dredd suggests a straightforward solution to a complicated situation (“Bob’s Law”, anyone?) but I’d argue that the wider context upon which it happens and the decision to let these problems become longer plotlines instead of isolated incidents all conspire to create some annoying quibbles, at least for me. But more on that later.

The story continues in “Cypher”, by Carroll and Iñaki Miranda (1824-1825, March ‘13), where Hershey and Dredd have a meeting with a soviet envoy and his bodyguard, Judge Caterina Pax, to discuss their reneging on the deal. The meeting is almost immediately broken up by a sniper who wounds Hershey and is driven off by Dredd and Pax. With the sov judge’s assistance, Dredd manages to kill the sniper, who turns out to be a cyborg hired by the envoy to kill Hershey for not quite clear reasons, and Pax expresses her desire to defect to MC-1, netting us our first new recurring female judge of this period.

Speaking of new recurring female judges, Psi-Judge Hamida returns in “Suicide Watch”, written by Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby, and drawn by Paul Davidson (1826-1829, April ‘13). The first Dredd story written by a woman, it features Hamida having a bit of an Anderson/Corey moment, hallucinating a chat with her dead imam over halal hot dogs and feeling the weight of all the dead citizens killed by the Chaos Bug. She links up with Dredd after having a psi-flash, and together they go on the hunt for a potential suicide cult. But things get complicated when Hamida reveals that there’s a jinn -- a supernatural entity who erases people from existence and history behind it, and then even more complicated when Dredd finds out Hamida has been a suicide risk herself since Chaos Day. Ultimately, Hamida perseveres and beats the jinn, saving both Dredd and the day in a rare case of Dredd playing sidekick.

Carroll returns with PJ Holden in tow for “The Forsaken” (1830-1835, June ‘13) which features no less than five female cadet judges, each one with full names and in one case a big secret. Lori Cassano, Madison Echavez, Cheryl Tanuma, Angela Sorvino and Jessica Paris are all part of a group of cadets left for dead after Chaos Day who, feeling abandoned by Justice Dept., made a run for it. The story is told mostly in flashback as Dolman and Dredd track each surviving member, some of which are terribly wounded, and eventually manage to find Paris, who is then revealed to be a clone from Fargo’s DNA strain, effectively making her a female Dredd. Dolman brings her back to the city, with the added complication that she’s carrying the child of one of the other survivors of the incident.

The main hook of “The Forsaken” is getting to see a group of would-be judges giving in to absolute despair, their training falling apart under the strain of an extreme situation and how they form bonds and relationships between each other. While we’ve seen female judges “give in” to their humanity more than once, it rarely comes accompanied by dereliction of duty, and this one has it en masse. Unfortunately, far as I know neither Paris nor her child have appeared again so far, so we’ve yet to see what a fully-fledged female Dredd can look like.

Up next, a Judge Lawadski meets a gory end in Rob Williams and Trevor Hairsine’s “Skulls” (1836, idem) and we check in on Judge Beeny in John Wagner and Dave Taylor’s “Wastelands” (1837-1841, July ‘13). She only makes two short cameos in here, but we find out that she’s been taking a page from Dredd’s book and keeping busy to stop herself from brooding. Interestingly enough, Dredd suggests that she take a break, noting that she’s “going to have to deal with it sometime” and that, if she really wants to change things, she’s going to have to do it “from the inside.”

That last comment in particular is interesting, as it sets up a plotline that Wagner will eventually bring to the Megazine while also staying true to Dredd’s characterization. Dredd, like Beeny, wants Justice Dept to change, but he remains reticent to go in and do it himself. And now that Hershey’s been compromised, he’s putting all his chips on Beeny, making sure that she doesn’t burn herself or become too attached to the streets. Dredd even sugars her up a little, off-handedly noting that she’s one of their best judges. Of course, Wagner being Wagner, this is all conveyed in about eight panels and less than twelve lines of dialogue, all book-ending a completely unrelated plot. In other words, a grand study in character development economy.

Carl Critchlow comes back to art duties in the Rob Williams-written “Scavengers” (1842-1843, August ’13), which sees Dredd travel underwater to the submerged ruins of Bachmann’s new Mega-City. The story features a Judge Chen who sacrifices herself in a fight against a giant mutated squid in order to keep the mission a secret and also a rather handsome Chief Judge Hershey appearance. We have a Judge Bova in Wagner and Ben Willsher’s “Bender” (1845-1849, September ’13) and Judge Pax returns as one of the stars of Michael Carroll and Paul Davidson’s “New Tricks” (1850-1854, October ’13). After an in-depth screening, she has been allowed to join judges from several other Mega-Cities (including the son of Irish judge Joyce, from “Emerald Isle”) as part of a transfer program to pad out the city’s drained forces.

Pax is shown to be exceedingly competent from the get-go, and the story is even narrated entirely from her journals, through which we learn, among other things, that Dredd seems to have taken a slight shine to her. The main plot involves a Judge Gwendolyn Kilgore, who’s returned from taking the Long Walk into the Undercity to ask for help in taking down a mythical Troggie gang boss called the Goblin King. Fairly standard action strip fare, mostly used to showcase Pax’s skills and to introduce Joyce. But it is certainly interesting to read the former’s thoughts on Dredd and MC-1 in general.

Hershey comes back for another round of workplace awkwardness in “Prey”, by TC Eglington and Karl Richardson (1855-1857, November ’13), although she seems to have grown accustomed enough to crack jokes about it. And that leaves us right at the doorstep of the first of a three-part epic by Rob Williams and Henry Flint: “Titan”.

This first part, which ran from progs 1862 to 1869 (January-February, 2014), kicks off with the news that all contact has been lost with the judges’ penal colony in the eponymous moon of Titan. Without an army to bring any possible rebellions to heel and unwilling to destroy the whole colony before getting all the facts, Hershey sends Dredd and a team of space marines to Titan to recon the place and see what’s going on in there. But after a seriously messed up landing and a couple of betrayals, Dredd finds himself alone and at the mercy of the masterminds behind the convicts’ uprising: former Chief Judge Sinfield, and former Wally Squad Judge Aimee Nixon.

Nixon, of course, was one of the main characters of Williams’ own Low Life serial. An undercover judge on the edge, she eventually quit the department and joined the Hondo City Yakuza in a bid to save her sector from a gang war, but was brought back by her partner, Dirty Frank, and put in an iso-cube for a debriefing, her intel supposedly keeping her safe from Titan. But after Chaos Day, her and several others were shipped there anyway, breaking their deal and leaving her even more embittered and vengeful. Her appearance here is quite the surprise, but makes sense considering the creative team. As Williams’ time became more focused on the main Dredd strip, more characters from Low Life would begin appearing there in guest spots. We’d already seen a hint of that in the last epic.

Back in the plot, once she realizes who she’s got in her hands, Nixon begins negotiating with Hershey. Unlike the last revolt (“Inferno”, all the way back in part four of our retrospective) the inmates here only want to be given Titan as an independent colony. But meanwhile, Nixon has also begun torturing Dredd, trying to break him down to make the man underneath the stoneyface come to the light in hope that his desire for revenge will overcome his loyalty to the law. It’s all a bit “The Killing Joke”, as Nixon seems intent on proving that every judge, even the toughest of them all, hides a human being inside, full of human desires and emotions -- just like she had.

But ultimately, Dredd proves to be too tough a nut to crack, and even when the only survivor of the marines sabotages the colony and Aimee and co are forced to evacuate towards Enceladus, Dredd still refuses to destroy their escape ships, ruining Aimee’s plan to destroy him by making him break the law. The former judges escape, Dredd survives to fight another day, and everything works out alright… for now. Overall, “Titan” is a fairly intense start that goes to some surprising places, but it also does rely a bit too much on a foregone conclusion, which is Dredd not choosing revenge. It’s also pretty funny that this makes it two epics in a row that include a scene of a female judge antagonist arguing with Hershey over a monitor. Wonder if that will be the real trend?

Also of note: Flint seems to have some trouble keeping Hershey’s eye color consistent, since they were blue back in “The Cold Deck.” Or maybe she just has a box of contacts.

We take a breather with a Judge Sisulu side-kicking it up in “Squirm!” (Carroll and Nick Dyer, 1870-1872, February ’14) and then we’re back with Williams and Flint for prog 1873’s “Fit” (March ’14). An epilogue to “Titan”, the story has Hershey send Gerhart, an SJS judge with an axe to grind who was with Dredd during the ill-fated mission, to check on Dredd for any lasting side effects of his experience on the colony. The most interesting part of this one-off for our subject is the very last page, where Gerhart notes that, owing to her history with Dredd, Hershey is ultimately ready to follow him anywhere despite this ongoing cold war between them, which zeroes in on a particular wrinkle in their relationship. For all their mutual posturing and disagreements, ultimately both Dredd and Hershey are fueled by a strong sense of duty towards the city. But while Hershey is worried by its continued day-to-day survival, Dredd is increasingly driven by his vision of a fairer, more human society. In an overly simplified nutshell, Hershey cares about the city, but Dredd cares more about the citizens. And despite her barely being present in it, the next story is one of the strongest examples of this seemingly irreparable schism.

Running in progs 1874-1878 (April ‘14), “Mega-City Confidential” marks the return of John Wagner to the strip, accompanied by Colin MacNeil. A delightfully bleak conspiracy procedural, it ends with the reveal that Justice Department has been taking advantage of the post-Chaos Day rebuilding projects to install covert surveillance equipment in millions of homes, accumulating information that is then parsed by human operators to seek out any signs of criminal activity that may necessitate a not-so-random house search. But when one of those operators escapes and turns whistleblower, Dredd is forced to defend the secrecy of a project he himself had grave misgivings about, calling it “a rare mistake” from Hershey. And once the secret is out, public outcry forces Justice Dept to roll the project back, but not before jailing the operator and probably having the journalist responsible for the leak murdered. Light reading, this ain’t.

That sounds familiar. Also, while not named, this might be Judge Stalker.

On its own, the story works as evidence of Dredd’s growing disgust with the dehumanization inherent to the judicial system, and his own discomfort as a cog within a machinery that seems increasingly prone to falling into these excesses. As such, Hershey’s error of judgment is mostly an afterthought, but I do find it’s interesting to put it within context. The Chaos Bug attack, for example, relied heavily on privacy and subterfuge, so it’s easy to see why Hershey, who’s trying to keep a dying city alive, would be tempted to go forward with something -- anything that could prevent something like that from happening again. It’s a steep change from when Hershey was considered the most liberal of all the candidates for Chief Judge, but makes sense given her own personal development and the circumstances of her return to the position. As she’s grown older and her situation direr, she seems much more open to sacrificing the liberties she used to champion for the sake of keeping people alive. So in a way, her character development has taken on a polar opposite route to Dredd’s.

Wagner stays a little longer for “Shooters Night” (art by John McRea, 1879-1882, May ‘14), which nets us an unnamed female judge and a small Hershey cameo at the end. Then Carroll returns with Nick Percival for “Traumatown” (1883-1887, June ‘14), a story about Dredd being haunted by a near-dead Psi’s vengeful spirit that features a veritable cavalcade of female judges: Pax and Hershey guest star alongside new Psi-Judge Lewis, and there’s even a funny little cameo by a Judge Parkhouse, clearly named after long-time 2000AD letterer and unsung heroine Annie Parkhouse. After that blowout, we get a small med-judge appearance in 1890-1891’s “Student Bodies” (Wagner and Boo Cook, July ‘14) and a new crisis for Dredd and Hershey in “Cascade” (Carroll and Paul Marshall, 1894-1899, August-September ‘14) as the Lawlords, a race of brutal alien overseers whom Dredd had already faced in a previous story, attempt to take over the city. The story features a Judge Reyer who dies trying to stop the attack early on, and unfortunately, Hershey’s role in it is mostly just glowering a lot while Dredd saves the day as usual.

Up next we have the return of Judge Beeny in Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s “Block Judge” (1900-1909, September-November ’14), where she assists Dredd in bringing a troublesome block to heel. But although it’s great to check on her progress as a judge, there isn’t much character development to be found here, and it’d seem Beeny is on the track to becoming another Dredd sidekick template. Wagner, however, has bigger plans for her, although as mentioned before, the big turn will happen in the Megazine.

The story also has a couple of guest appearances from Hershey, as Dredd for once acts very tactfully around her, asking for her help in keeping a couple of crime lords locked up for incredibly petty crimes until they can uncover more evidence. As usual, a common enemy does seem to unite them well enough, although Hershey can’t resist calling Dredd out a little on his criticisms. But for a moment, the old team is back together, with Hershey making sure Dredd is able to do his job as effectively as possible.

Another nameless female judge shows up in Alec Worley and Leigh Gallagher’s “End of the Road” (1911, December ’14) and the year closes with a return appearance by Judge Lewis in Carroll and Karl Richardson’s “The Ghost of Christmas Present” (prog 2015, idem). And if things sound like they’re finally settling down a little, don’t worry, because our last stop of this post features the biggest return of them all...

“Dark Justice” (progs 2015-1921, January-March 2015) was famously born out of artist Greg Staples’ desire to paint a classic Dark Judges story. And although John Wagner had admitted to basically having run out of ideas for them, he was happy to go back in after seeing Staples’ test sketches. The end result is a visually stunning mini-epic with an otherwise fairly standard plot, as Dredd and Psi-Judge Anderson team-up to hunt down Judge Death and his pals onboard a deep space colony ship. Not much to say character-wise about this one, as both Dredd and Anderson seem to revert back to their early 80s action hero selves, filling the story with wisecracks and one-liners as they batter the fearsome foursome. Anderson does get to shine pretty brightly on this one, pulling Judge Fire’s spirit out of Dredd’s mind and revealing that her past experiences with Judge Death have allowed her to develop a slight immunity to his powers. In the end, the superfiends are ejected and left drifting in space while our heroes await a rescue, and there’s not really much else to say.

One thing that is noteworthy is that Staples used model and cosplayer Lauren Integra Fairbrook as his model for Anderson in “Dark Justice”. Which makes sense, considering she’s the official Anderson model for Planet Replicas and has featured in the Judge Minty and Strontium Dog: Search/Destroy fan shorts. In fact, there’s even a reference to an “Lauren Integra Cosplay Ground” in “Mask of Anarchy”, a previous Dredd story.

And as an extra bit of trivia, Planet Replicas’ official Dredd model is… Greg Staples himself.

In our next episode: two epics! Two thousand progs! And... The End?

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