38: Judge Death - The True Story

This two-parter marks the first real move towards treating Judge Death as a figure of fun, and I guess your perspective on this story largely depends on whether you prefer they were kept as dark figures of evil. As someone fairly new to the world of Dredd, I'm not very bothered by it. With nearly 40 years of history as characters, they couldn't just stay the same evil doom-merchants.

Ian Gibson takes the cartoony elements of the story pretty literally, and the whole thing almost reads like some sort of cartoon version of Dredd Vs. Death. The two of them time-travelling back to 1994 to muck around with some senior citizens is a far cry from what we've seen before, and presented alongside the other stories in this Volume it certainly stands out.

My main issue with this story is largely just confusion - who is Death addressing as he narrates the story? Why exactly does he think this story will raise support for him, and undermine Dredd? Death tries to claim the story is about how similar he and Dredd are, but that doesn't really come across.

This is the first big step in moving Death into comic territory before bringing him back. I guess we'll see how the rest of those stories play out in this Collection.