Wednesday, March 9, 2022

The best mayor Mega City-One ever had



In the world of Judge Dredd, PJ Maybe was an absolute monster.  Created by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Liam Sharp in 1987, PJ would kill innocent people for the most random of reasons - or just because he was bored - and had an intellect that allowed him to slip away from the law time and time again (until Dredd eventually blew him the fuck up.) He was also objectively the best mayor Mega City One ever had.

That's not saying that much - his predecessors include a man whose most lasting feature is that the fatal fungus that killed him bears his name, and another was Dave the Orangutan.

But hiding behind the face of Mayor Ambrose, PJ was compassionate and kind, and a friend of the law. He dealt with poverty and hardship with empathy and generosity, and actually made life better for many citizens. He would slaughter a hoverbus full of pensioners if he needed a distraction, but he could make that the juves at the local school got school dinners.

All of his good deeds were fake, but if, like Kurt Vonnegut said, you are what you pretend to be, maybe there was some good in PJ Maybe after all.

Of course there drokking wasn't, he was a bleeding psychopath. One of the great moments in Judge Dredd in recent years is the moment PJ drops the Mayor act and admits everything, going from the frightened and cowering Ambrose to the cold and calculating Maybe in the space of one panel. He had some more misadventures after that, but the cruel sneer never went away again, and 

It's entirely debatable what John Eagner was trying to say with PJ's political adventures - the writer's cynicism about the entire political system has been baked into his work since the 1970s - but even though it carried on for years, it never stopped being funny, seeing PJ stand up and assume his mayoralty duties, no matter how many people he had to secretly kill to get the job done.

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