Judge Dredd: False Witness #3 - IDW Publishing

JUDGE DREDD: FALSE WITNESS No. 3, September 2020

Chock-full of contrivances and manufactured motivations, Brandon Easton’s narrative for Issue Three of “Judge Dredd: False Witness” probably struck most of its 2,400 strong audience in September 2020 as being a bit of a choppy mess. Indeed, whether it be “illicit plastic surgery centres” helpfully providing the Justice Department with a sub-dermal identification marker on their illegal “surgical subterfuge” so the surgeons can be readily traced, or Mathias Lincoln just happening to have an “override disc” about his person so as to conveniently commandeer a Lawmaster just as the Judges have him cornered, this comic’s script is literally riddled with disconcerting coincidences.

Perhaps this twenty-page periodical’s biggest disappointment however, is just how the Baltimore-born writer depicts Pendleton Snipe’s meteoritic rise from Eden Bridge refugee to super-rich media personality simply because the kid apparently had the ‘gift of the gab’. Having made his way across the Cursed Earth into Mega-City One it is not unbelievable to imagine the immigrant becoming involved in the distribution of contraband, and somehow scraping his way through a criminal organisation to the very top. But instead, this book’s American author would have his readers believe the adolescent merely ‘appealed’ to the better nature of an underground physician to provide him with “the full monty of body mods” after he handily “got the attention of the executive producer” of a television show one day..?

To make matters worse though, the recently deceased Snipe is suddenly revealed to be the long-lost brother of Technical Judge Dolphy, who also happens to have illegally entered the giant metropolis with Lincoln and joined the Justice Department using a false identity. This revelation is made even more fantastic when Mathias admits to swapping his final psych-evaluation with Bernita’s in order to fool Psi-Judge Franklin into thinking Dolphy was a suitable recruit; “They’re going to discover us! No, scratch that. They’re going to discover me!”

Perhaps therefore this comic’s one saving grace is Kei Zama’s ability to pencil the violence of the Twenty-Second Century, especially when Judge Dredd is busy bashing a surgeon’s security staff so badly they’ll need “two weeks of reconstructive facial surgery”, or punching Lincoln straight in the chops just as the fugitive thought he’d escaped the city. In fact, the Japanese artist’s layouts depicting the “organizer” gunning down a Mechanismo droid whilst hurtling through the streets on a Lawmaster is probably the sole highlight of this publication.

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