Judge Dredd: False Witness #1 - IDW Publishing

JUDGE DREDD: FALSE WITNESS No. 1, March 2020

Despite apparently wanting “to capture the essence of how he was portrayed in the early years of the 2000 AD comics”, Brandon Easton’s narrative for Issue One of “Judge Dredd: False Witness” arguably won’t please many of the Mega City One lawman’s oldest fans. For whilst Old Stony Face certainly plays a somewhat prominent part in this twenty-page periodical, the book’s spotlight is very much more focused upon the misadventures of Mathias Lincoln and his uncovering of a “horrific conspiracy stretching from the Cursed Earth to the city’s seats of power.”

Indeed, considering that for large swathes of this story, the “Glyph Award-winning writer of comics and television” does little else but present the background, thoughts, feelings and aspirations of his new character, a Justice Academy drop-out turned courier, it is somewhat surprising that Joseph Dredd obtains as much ‘screen time’ as the senior judge actually does. Such a disagreeable relegation to the side-lines really is this publication’s biggest frustration, especially when at one point it appears that the legendary lawman is going to have to track down his perp through “roughly fourteenth thousand kilometres interconnected tunnel lines”, battling all sorts of tentacled horrors on his travels.

Sadly however, such a promising ‘manhunt’ is quickly snuffed short by the Baltimore-born writer, who instead depicts Dredd uncharacteristically giving up the chase “a while later” and simply has him return to the sewer system’s street entrance outside Scalia Block empty-handed. Of course, for Lincoln to reach his extremely rich client and discover he’s carrying a container of Sulfuric Dioxide, the carrier clearly has to evade capture. Yet the manner in which the young man avoids both arrest and his spending time in the iso-cubes, seems as contrived as the punk’s first encounter with the veteran of the Apocalypse War, who Mathias far too easily defeats courtesy of a “low-grade flash-bang.”

Luckily, what this comic lacks in proficient penmanship it does contain in prodigious pencilling, with Kei Zama’s dynamic, action-packed panels predominantly proving a real delight for the eyes. Indeed, it’s a real pity that the Japanese “metalhead” isn’t given more opportunity to draw both Dredd and a pair of seriously formidable-looking Mechanismo robots, as the lawman has debatably never looked better; “You are all participating in an illegal demonstration. Disperse immediately! The next volley from the droids won’t be a warning shot.”

Writer: Brandon Easton, Art: Kei Zama, and Colors: Eva De La Cruz