One of the great dark jokes about Judge Dredd is that he doesn’t have that much of a rogue’s gallery, because most stories end with him just shooting the bad guys in the drokking face. Even the great psychopath PJ Maybe eventually found justice at the end of Dredd’s lawgiver, after decades of mayhem, murder and a reign as Mega-City One’s finest mayor.
The most notable exception to this rule is - of course - Judge Death and the other Dark Judges, who can’t be stopped with something as mundane as a bullet. Dredd can shoot them to hell and they will just keep crawling out of the grave to kill, over and over again.
There is one other villain who has constantly butted their way into Dredd’s orbit without being permanently dispatched, and that’s the mighty Mean Machine Angel. He’s a cyborg monstrosity who just kept on coming back, in dozens of stories over more than 30 years.
While Mean Machine’s longevity can certainly be attributed to the fact that he’s funny as hell and a fucking cool looking character, he’s also one of the few true innocents to cross paths with Dredd.
And in the harsh-but-fair (but mainly harsh) world of Judge Dredd, that innocence counts for a lot, and even leads to Mean getting the rarest of farewells.
Created by John Wagner and Mike McMahon – although it is notable that the late Alan Grant joined Wagner as Dredd co-writer at about this time - Mean Machine Angel first appeared in 2000ad prog 160 in early 1980, along with the other members of his murderous clan.
The main villains of the Judge Child Quest mega-epic, the Angel Gang were a homicidally ornery crew, quick to torture and murder, and fleeing into the galaxy with the Judge Child. Mean was the gang’s big heavy, with a metal skull that could headbutt anybody into oblivion.
It did not end well for the Angel Gang. Along with his Pa and brothers, Mean was quickly despatched once Dredd finally caught up with him, blowing himself up after getting his dial stuck on 4½, (an event that would keep happening to Mean with guaranteed hilarity).
The editorial and creator droids at 2000ad quickly realised that while dead usually meant dead in the Dredd universe, Mean was too good a character to let rot on the planet of Xanadu. When his long-lost brother Fink Angel came looking for revenge a few weeks after the epic ended, a significant part of the story was devoted to Mean’s origin.
It showed how he was a sweet, innocent young man who happened to be born in a family of the most ruthless scum, and they decided the only way to fix him was some dirty brain surgery, creating the psychopath with their brutality.
A year later and Mean was brought back to life by the Judge Child, and went on a rampage that never really stopped. He butted heads with Dredd multiple times and always lost the fight, but was never permanently dispatched, his misadventures almost always ending with him back in the padded walls of a psycho cube. He accompanied Dredd on several incursions into the Cursed Earth and had a few solo stories of his own, although he was always at his best when he went toe to toe with the law.
Mean Machine Angel only has four moods, all controlled by that thoroughly punk dial that has been soldered into his brain. On one, he’s surly; on two he’s mean; on three he’s vicious; and on four he’s downright brutal.
But like a lot of the wonderful freaks in Dredd’s world, his appeal has more sides to it than that. A lot of it is in how the man looks – such an incredible design from McMahon, with the claw arm, one bulging and red robotic eye, and the greatest of redneck sneers.
All the great Dredd artists – including Carlos Ezquerra, Ron Smith, Ian Gibson, Steve Dillon, Henry Flint – had typically powerful interpretations of Mean, while Simon Bisley’s amped-up look for Mean in the Judgment on Gotham crossover became the default beefy look for the character for the next decade.
It’s such a striking design, that it’s little surprise that it was one of the few things that genuinely worked in Danny Cannon’s misfire film adaption of Dredd in the 90s. His monstrous form - based on concept art by Chris Cunningham - gave the film a real kick of sci-fi absurdity, and was almost enough to forgive it for Dredd taking his helmet off 10 minutes into the film.
Another great appeal of Mean Machine is that he does tend to be very funny when he shows up in stories. While full of animal cunning that has kept him ticking, he’s not exactly a smart man, and is frequently getting up to all sorts of weird escapades.
The comic effect of his altered nature clashing with Dredd’s unbending strictness never went out of style, and that moment where he inevitably goes butt-crazy is always funny.
(It’s even arguable that Mean is an advocate for disability rights, as he spends almost all of his adventures with no arms. After his left limb is blown off by Dredd towards the climax of the Judge Child Quest, it’s never replaced and he just has that robotic claw and a stump. And it never slows him down or bothers him, he’s just as capable as anybody else. As long as he gets to lead with his head.)
Because one thing that slowly becomes clear is that Mean Machine Angel is a true innocent. He’s committed more crimes than anybody, but he’s not really guilty, because he’s mentally impaired, and it was done to him by his own goddamn family. Underneath that grizzled and harsh exterior, somewhere behind that metal plate he has for a skull, there is a kind soul.
Mean headbutts a shitload of people, some into absolute paste, but never anyone who doesn’t really deserve it. The people he pounds tend to be other scumbags, or dickheads, or arrogant arseholes who think they can easily push Mean around (before finding out that he has some kind of smarts they didn’t reckon on.)
Even Judge Dredd knows it would be wrong to summarily execute Mean, although a little light maiming may be necessary. The world of Mega-City One is a true nightmare, and terrible things often happen to good people, but the truly innocent have a chance.
Consider the case of Mrs Gunderson - another Wagner co-creation - a little old lady who is almost completely blind and deaf, and still tottering along happily. Gunderson is one of the very, very few people to survive prolonged contact with Judge Death and somehow walks through all the gunfire and other madness on a regular basis.
Mrs Gunderson might not look much like Mean Machine Angel, but it would be wrong to do either of them any real harm. It would be mean.
The last time we see Mean Machine Angel in a story by John Wagner, he’s given the quietest of exits from the series – all the aggression finally burned out of him, the dial removed, his monstrous claw replaced by a thin prosthetic limb. His endlessly optimistic son, who shares the rare gene of kindness in his bloodline, takes him in happily.
He’s done, he’s just another citizen and no threat to anybody. He’s another reminder to Dredd that even an Angel gets old, and isn’t a threat forever.
There has been another story since then by a non-Wagner writer, that has Mean turned back into a monstrous figure roaming the Cursed Earth again, but there was something so understated by Wagner’s version, that it’s easy to ignore.
Because there shouldn’t really be a blaze of glory ending for this damnable robo-hick. Just a quiet shuffle off the stage, where he can take the time to smell the flowers again. That’s all Mean ever wanted to do.
- This was originally published by The Gutter Review, and edited by the most excellent Chloe Maveal. The Gutter Review site doesn't exist right now, so I'll be reposting all the essays I did for it here in the Tearoom for the next week, because everyone must know how Mean Machine is really a big softy.
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