Books like Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 03

Third in the excellent series reprinting every Dredd story, this covers progs 116 to 154, published between 1979 and 1980 (both in 2000AD and the annual). Focussing this time more on self-contained stories (there are two small series, one being “Father Earth”, the other the first appearance of “Judge Death” - which is excellent), the bulk of the stories are written by Wagner (often as John Howard), with Pat Mills also contributing and the artwork is superb, especially that of Brian Bolland (naturally), Ron Smith (who drew a lot more of my childhood/teenage reading than I’d remembered), Ian Gibson, Mike McMahon, Barry Mitchell (who I’m sure drew “Twisty” for Bullet) and the excellent John Cooper amongst others. Wagner, in some stories, also manages to predict events that would happen a few years beyond his writing (and get worse thirty years later - the gap I re-read these at), with reality TV shows such as “Sob Story”, so I hope he wasn’t as prescient elsewhere. The bulk of the stories work (I’m not so keen on Walter), some of them are brutal, some amusing, most are clever and occasionally you get flashes of anger from the writer, especially in one where a mad scientist is going to unleash the common cold. Great fun, with top notch writing and artwork, superbly reproduced and iconic to the core, I’d highly recommend this.