Wagner on Dredd: The Robot War never ended

Judge Dredd is one of the great comic serials because it has unfolded in real time, with the title character growing and strengthening over decades and decades, and themes developing at the slowest pace, while still delivering loads of kickass action. 

And it still has one of the original creators coming in occasionally and blowing everyone away with incredible and concise new stories, which build on all those years of work. Long ago, back in the 1970s, John Wagner gave us the first great mega-epic with the first Robot War, and is still mining that technophobic vein for rich stories in the year 2024.

Specifically, he has been using the Mechanismo storyline - the logical progression of all that futuristic technology - to tell an ongoing saga of robot judges coming increasingly into use. It's a story that really kicked off 20 years into Wagner's Dredd stories, and the most recent issues of 2000ad have seen Wagner return to it, with his great collaborator Colin MacNeil.

The long game Wagner has been playing with the robot judges has suddenly blasted back into life,  quickly establishing the latest problems with ceding authority to robots, and has AI putting people under custody for their own good, which is very much an issue when that AI is coming in the form of a fucking big robot with massive firepower.

Dredd has been slowly coming around to his robotic comrades, with the robo-judges performing well in recent years - even old Joe can't argue with the numbers - but he never took a step back on his line that humans must always make the ultimate decisions. It has seemed like he was scared of the future, but he's also been proven right, because for a fascist bully-boy, Dredd is always right.

In a way, the great Robo War never ended, with robot Judge Spencer a direct evolution of the long-destroyed Call-Me Kenneth. And that's why Dredd remains a rock solid comic strip, still fresh after all these years, because it can keep coming back to a storyline again and again, and making it richer and smarter every time.