Ireland, B. - Errand Into The Wilderness

Journal of American Studies, 43 (2009), 3, 497534 f Cambridge University Press 2009
doi:10.1017/S0021875809990715
First published online 30 October 2009
Errand into the Wilderness :

The Cursed Earth as Apocalyptic
Road Narrative
BRIAN I RELAND
Mobility is a signicant feature of American history and culture. This is reected in the
literature and cinema of the road genre, in inuential novels such as Jack Kerouacs On the
Road and John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath, and in lms like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy
Rider (1969). However, when non-Americans create road stories they tend to employ symbols
and narratives that are often considered intrinsically American. These storytellers appear to
have absorbed or internalized aspects of American national identity, and this is reected in
their work. This is demonstrated in The Cursed Earth, an apocalyptic road story in twenty-ve
parts, which was published in the British weekly comic 2000AD from May to October 1978.
Written by British writer Pat Mills, with contributions from John Wagner and Chris Lowder,
The Cursed Earth features the character Judge Dredd, perhaps the most popular and most
recognizable icon of British comics of the last thirty years. Through close textual analysis of
the Cursed Earth story, this article reveals how thematic elements of the road genre are linked
to signicant themes in American history and culture.
In 1960, three years after Jack Kerouacs novel On the Road sold a trillion
Levis and _ sent countless kids on the road,1 Senator Robert F. Kennedy
dened Americas national purpose as an ongoing pursuit of happiness,
a constant, restless, condent questing that had been set in motion cen-
turies before by Thomas Jeersons Declaration of Independence. Kennedy
stated,
Quest has always been the dominant note of our history, whether a quest for
national independence ; a quest for personal liberty and economic opportunity on a
new continent from which the rest of mankind could take heart and hope ; a quest
for more land, more knowledge, more dignity.2
Brian Ireland is Lecturer in American History, and runs the American Studies award, at the
University of Glamorgan. He is currently writing a book about the inuence of the road genre
in American culture.
1
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York : Penguin, 1991), xxvii.
2
John F. Kennedy, The National Purpose Discussion Is Resumed : We Must Climb to the
Hilltop, Life, 22 August 1960, 70B77.
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. National University of Ireland, Galway, on 13 Nov 2017 at 10:17:14, subject to the
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498 Brian Ireland
In using this metaphor, Kennedy was echoing the views of many commen-
tators on this facet of American national character. For example, in 1840
French writer and historian Alexis de Tocqueville devoted a chapter of his
respected work Democracy in America, to explain the causes of the restless
spirit of the Americans in the midst of their prosperity.3 In 1893, historian
Frederick Jackson Turner addressed a special meeting of the American
Historical Association at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, to argue
that movement has been [the] dominant fact of American history and
American national character.4 And in the Roaring Twenties, journalist
H. L. Mencken pronounced that Americans were marked by a character of
restlessness , which he attributed to their inheritance of the immigrant
experience. 5 It is clear, therefore, that the road has always been a signicant
and persistent feature of American culture.
Many such reasons have been put forward for the restlessness of the
American character. In the colonial period the abundance of supposed
virgin land made westward movement inevitable, especially when
prompted by the semi-religious doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Furthermore,
the geography of the United States lends itself to wanderlust : the West in
particular was seen by many as a blank slate on which they could write their
American dreams. There is also a certain romantic appeal in John Steinbecks
hypothesis, which he articulated in Travels with Charley in Search of America:
Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satised
with where they are as a matter of selection ? The pioneers, the immigrants who
people the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones
stayed home and are still there _ every one of us _ are descended from the restless
ones, the wayward ones, who were not content to stay at home. Wouldnt it be
unusual if we had not inherited this tendency ?6
One of Americas most famous adventurers, Meriwether Lewis, wondered
about his passion for rambling and concluded that this Quixottic dis-
position of mine [was] inherited [from] the Meriwether Family.7
Is it possible, as Steinbeck and Lewis suggest, that there is some sort of
nomadic gene that is more prevalent in the United States than elsewhere ?
Taken literally, this is a somewhat fanciful notion. However, as a metaphor,
3
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York : Bantam, 2000), 661.
4
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York : Henry Holt &
Company, 1953), 37.
5
Henry Louis Mencken, The American Language (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 2930.
6
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (New York : Penguin, 1986), 1034.
7
Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jeerson, and the Opening of
the American West (New York : Simon & Schuster, 1997), 43.
Errand into the Wilderness 499
the idea is hard to resist. How else can one explain, for example, the abun-
dance of road stories in the United States and the popularity of such artistic
wanderers as Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac and Bob
Dylan ? The rst Americans were travellers : it is widely believed that the
ancestors of Native Americans crossed a land bridge from Asia approxi-
mately 12,000 years ago to populate the Americas; European settlers would
later make their own epic journeys across the Atlantic to the New World.8
The friction and interaction of the two groups from the fteenth century to
the nineteenth set in motion a process of mythogenesis recurring and
evolving ideas, symbols, narratives and metaphors that appear repeatedly
in American literature and performing arts, and in US political discourse.9
While not unique to the United States, the frontier experience has therefore
left an enduring imprint on American culture and this is reected in the road
genre. The continuing popularity of the frontier outlaw is perhaps the most
obvious example of this. Although access to motor vehicles assisted the real-
life escapades of antiheroes such as Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie Parker and
Clyde Barrow, and the Hells Angels, their fame and celebrity depends also
on their ability to evoke the long-gone American frontier what Kitses calls
Americas dening myth. 10
Through close textual analysis of the epic British comic book story
The Cursed Earth, this paper reveals how certain thematic elements of the
road genre are linked to signicant themes in American history and culture.
These images and themes constitute the road not only as a distinct genre, but
also as a distinctly American genre. Janis P. Stout contends, for example, that
since American history has been so pervasively concerned with journeys
and so forcefully enunciated as myth, there is an overwhelming tendency for
American writers who utilize journey narratives to perceive them after the
8
See David Hopkins, ed., The Bering Land Bridge (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1967).
For a dissenting Native American point of view see Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies:
Native Americans and the Myth of Scientic Fact (New York : Scribner, 1995).
9
In particular see Richard Slotkins trilogy of books Regeneration through Violence : The
Mythology of the American Frontier, 16001860 (Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University Press,
1973), The Fatal Environment : The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 18001890
(New York : Atheneum, 1985) and Gunghter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-
Century America (New York : Atheneum, 1992).
10
Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London:
British Film Industry, 2007), 9. Hunter Thompson writes of the Angels, The concept of
the motorcycle outlaw was as uniquely American as jazz. Nothing like them had ever
existed. In some ways they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human
hangover from the era of the Wild West. Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angels (London:
Penguin, 1999), 78.
500 Brian Ireland
patterns of history.11 Likewise, Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson assert
that road cinema emerged from America, where notions of the open road
and travel form part of a potent cultural myth far more powerful than in
Europe. 12 Although these recurring themes often appear in non-American
road narratives, they usually have a dierent meaning that is mediated by the
history and culture of the country in which they are set, as well as by the
individual experiences of the protagonists.13 However, when non-Americans
create road stories located in the United States they tend to employ symbols
and narratives that are often considered intrinsically American. These
storytellers appear to have absorbed aspects of American national identity,
and this is reected in their work. Due to the dominance of American
popular culture in the global media market it is, perhaps, inevitable that many
non-Americans will envisage the United States through the distorted lens
of American lm and television programmes. British novelist Alex Garland
acknowledged as much in his road novel The Beach,14 where an English
backpacker destroys an uneasy truce between beach dwellers and locals be-
cause he has been conditioned by Hollywoods Vietnam War movies to see
the Thais as gooks, like modern-day Viet Cong.
In his authoritative study of western lms, John Cawelti has cautioned
that a thematic analysis such as this risks isolating elements of the story from
their context.15 However, as Sargeant and Watson have demonstrated,
the recurring genre conventions of the travel narrative or road genre, such
as the all-male cast of characters, the theme of rebirth or regeneration,
the tension between urban and rural life, the enduring mythology of the
American frontier experience, and the story of the picaresque hero whose
adventures oer a critique of the society in which he operates, provide an
opportunity here to address questions about the genres dialogic relationship
with the society, culture, and politics of the United States.16 In addition,
a useful aspect of road stories is that they often reect the time period in
11
Janis P. Stout, The Journey Narrative in American Literature : Patterns and Departures (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 17.
12
Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson, eds., Lost Highways : An Illustrated History of Road
Movies (London: Creation Books, 1999), 18.
13
See, for example, Eyerman and Lofgrens analysis of Swedish road lms. Ron Eyerman
and Orvar Lofgren, Romancing the Road : Road Movies and Images of Mobility, Theory
Culture Society, 12 (1995), 5379.
14
Alex Garland, The Beach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).
15
John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green : Bowling Green State University Press,
1984), 35.
16
See Looking For Maps: Notes on the Road Movie as Genre, in Lost Highways: An
Illustrated History of Road Movies (London: Creation Books, 1999), 620 .
which they are made. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark assert, for example,
that a cinematic road story provides a ready space for exploration of
the tensions and crises of the historical movement during which it is
produced.17 Road narratives can, therefore, oer insight into the social
context in which the stories were read or watched in this case, the
increasingly conservative mood in both Britain and America, which led to
election victories for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The Cursed Earth, written by British writer Pat Mills, with contributions
from T.B. Grover (John Wagner) and Jack Adrian (Chris Lowder),
presents a valuable opportunity to discuss these themes. The Cursed Earth is a
futuristic road trip set in a postapocalyptic United States. It rst appeared
in the pages of 2000AD, a British weekly comic that began in 1977 and is
still ongoing. 2000AD was a product of a new wave of British comics that
challenged traditional comic book storytelling by pushing, and sometimes
overstepping, the boundaries of conventional comics. Mills and Wagner had
previously worked on the comics Battle (197588) and Action (197677), both
of which oered new and innovative stories with a hard edge. In fact, Action
had to be withdrawn from publication for seven weeks in 1976 due to media
criticism of its violent content.18 When Action was reissued in December
1976, it proved to be a tamer version of the comic that had shocked parents
across Britain. Mills, Wagner and Lowder abandoned the watered-down
comic to work on what was to become Britains most successful weekly
comic book. In 1975 Mills had been asked by IPC Magazines to create a
science ction comic to cash in on the wave of science ction movies being
released at that time. Mills therefore became the rst editor of 2000AD and
Wagner one of its rst script writers.19 One of the new characters they
created would become the most popular and most recognizable icon of
British comics for the next thirty years. That character was Judge Dredd.
In the dystopian future that spawned Dredd, America has been decimated
by a nuclear exchange with the Sov-Blok in 2070, and then by a civil war
which ended with the Battle of Armaggedon in 2071. The survivors have
built a vast Mega-City, which covers the whole of the Eastern Atlantic
states. As most of the United States is irradiated and usable land is at a
premium, the survivors build upwards rather than outwards. As a result, the
17
Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (London and New York :
Routledge, 1997), 2.
18
Martin Barker, Comics : Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester and New York :
Manchester University Press, 1989), 2530.
19
Colin M. Jarman and Peter Acton, Judge Dredd: The Mega-History (London : Lennard
Publishing, 1995).
502 Brian Ireland
citys massive structures tower above the remains of old New York like a
new city upon a hill. However, this new society is anything but puritanical :
with crime raging and unemployment levels close to ninety-ve percent,
all stages of government and law enforcement are run by an elite group of
Judges men and women recruited from childhood to protect the city
from internal and external threats to order. As their name suggests, Judges
were part lawman and part judge. There are no trials in this society because
Judges have the power to impose instant sentences on lawbreakers. As
Martin Barker notes, Judges combine the roles of law-maker, policeman,
jury, jailer and (frequently) executioner.20 Mega-City One is a fascist city
state in which democracy has been consigned to the history books as a failed
political experiment. As if to illustrate this point, a huge statue of a Judge
towers over the increasingly irrelevant Statue of Liberty (see Figure 1). The
toughest and most respected lawman in the city is Judge Dredd. So when a
plague infects Mega-City Two (rebuilt from the ruins of Los Angeles),
driving its citizens insane and closing all communications between the two
cities, Dredd is chosen to lead a trek across the irradiated wasteland known
as the Cursed Earth to deliver a vaccine to the plague-infected city.
The Cursed Earth was inspired by Roger Zelaznys 1969 novel Damnation
Alley. Mills states, It was a conscious decision on our part not to use
the essence of Damnation Alley but to use that kind of generic road-movie
concept as a framework to give us direction.21 Consciously or not, this
framework meant that the story consequently would feature many of the
genre conventions that are typical of road narratives. According to Ronald
Primeau, these predictable patterns give the reader or viewer
assurances about what has worked so far and _ clues on how conventions can be
further exploited, developed, or modied within a range of what will still be ac-
cessible. At the same time, readers are likely to _ bring to their reading expectations
based on what they understand to be the genres appeal.22
These familiar genre conventions or formulas act, therefore, as an instru-
ment of seeing beyond the deceptively simple comic book format of The
Cursed Earth, to reveal recurring themes, symbols and imagery of American
history and culture, in this instance seen from a British perspective.
20
Martin Barker, Taking the Extreme Case : Understanding a Fascist Fan of Judge Dredd,
in Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Trash Asthetics :
Popular Culture and Its Audience (London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997), 1430, 15.
21
Quoted in Jarman and Acton, 82.
22
Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green:
Bowling Green State University Press, 1996), 2.
Figure 1. The Statue of Judgement towers over the increasingly irrelevant Statue
of Liberty. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.
www.2000adonline.com.
Like other science ction stories that feature a journey narrative, such as
Harry Harrisons Wheelworld, Stephen Kings The Stand, and movies such as
The Road Warrior (1982) and The Postman (1997), The Cursed Earth story is
positioned in a devastated landscape. This serves a number of purposes that
have their specic origins in the American frontier experience. For example,
the apocalypse whether it is nuclear, biological or environmental in nature
denudes the landscape of people and creates an Arcadian landscape similar
to that facing Americas original European settlers. This wilderness is part of
the American national consciousness and has been celebrated in literature
and lm. For example, James Fenimore Coopers character Natty Bumppo
504 Brian Ireland
felt he had to move on when settlers began to encroach on the wilderness.23
Similarly, Arthur Guitermans 1926 poem tells the apocryphal tale of Daniel
Boone, and his preference for Arcadian solitude:
And the settlers ocked anew,
The farm lands spread, the town lands grew ;
But Daniel Boone was ill at ease
When he saw the smoke in his forest trees.
Therell be no game in the country soon.
Elbowroom ! cried Daniel Boone.24
In lms such as Stagecoach (1939) and many other John Ford westerns, the
epic landscape ennobles the travellers ; their petty concerns are nothing
compared to the majesty of Monument Valley.25 Here, too, the wilderness
works to elevate Dredd and his companions, their task made more heroic
and grand when viewed against such a hostile, imposing environment.
The vast size of the United States is a factor in these stories. Unlike
western Europe, the United States geographical landscape is a vast blank
slate on which artists can paint their visions. The American Southwest in
particular is a favourite of road writers, not only because of its vast open
spaces but also because of its history of frontier conict, and the traumas
of slavery and the Civil War.26 Dredd co-creator John Wagner remembers,
I never thought of setting it [Dredd] anywhere but the US Britain
somehow seemed too small-scale for the things we wanted to happen.
America with a vast nuclear desolation outside the city provided ample scope
for everything we want to do. Martin Barker and Kate Brooks argue,
It was _ crucial to the success of Dredd that he is within the epic frame of
America . The dream-land of dreams has so long provided us with scenarios for
futurity: land of freedom, home of the brave, refuge of the oppressed, world of
technology, nightmare of crime, cityscapes of misery.27
23
Cawelti, 91.
24
Arthur Guiterman, I Sing the Pioneer (New York : Dutton, 1926).
25
Kitses, Horizons West, 48. Kitses also makes the connection between the road genre and
the western. He states (93), The journey is a trans-cultural, archetypal form, mimicking
life itself, its rites, passages and cycles. The quest, the going and returning, the tests and
encounters these speak to the mysterious journey each of us makes in our own exist-
ence _ the Western is by no means always a journey lm. Nonetheless, by denition
Westerners are travelers, immigrants, pioneers.
26
Typical examples of such geographic focus in literature are John Steinbecks The Grapes of
Wrath, Sam Shepards Motel Chronicles and Barbara Kingsolvers The Bean Trees or, in lm,
Paris, Texas (1984), Thelma and Louise (1991) and Kalifornia (1993).
27
Martin Barker and Kate Brooks, Waiting for Dredd, Sight and Sound, August 1988,
1619. Having an outsiders viewpoint can give storytellers a dierent perspective of
America. For instance, in a discussion about the on-location lming of the road lm
Setting the story in a devastated landscape restores the danger that was
once present on the frontier. In the Cursed Earth, beyond the relative calm
of the city, bands of hostile mutants replace Indians as protagonists. This,
in turn, allows Dredd to dispense some old-fashioned frontier justice
another major staple of American mythology. Wagner has admitted that
Dredd was inspired by ctional lawmen like Dirty Harry Callaghan.
He recalls, Pat Mills and I came up with the idea for Judge Dredd in
1977 _ This was back in the days of Dirty Harry, and with [Margaret]
Thatcher on the rise there was a right-wing current in British politics which
helped inspire Judge Dredd. He elaborates further: Dredd came from an
idea I had done in Valiant One-Eyed Jack, which had some roots in the
Dirty Harry movies. 28 Like Harry Callaghan, Wagner envisaged Dredd as
Judge, Jury and Executioner. Critic Pauline Kael argues, Harry doesnt
bring anyone to court ; the audience understands that Harry is the court.29
According to Barker and Brooks, Dredd was to be the Dirty Harry of the
next millennium.30 The appeal of such a character is that his mythology
derives from the western rather than from the detective genre. These
archetypical gures oer simple explanations to complex problems and
they deliver justice immediately, rather than arbitrated through an often
Thelma and Louise, director Ridley Scott stated, I tried to make the heartland look as exotic
as possible. To us Europeans, it is. The scale of things is so vast. We can eulogize about
roads with telegraph poles and Americans think were crazy. I looked for days to nd one.
They dont actually exist much any more, but they are very much part of what I believe is
the American landscape. Quoted in Amy Taubin, Ridley Scotts Road Work, Sight and
Sound, July 1991, 1819, 18.
28
Quoted in Jarman and Acton, 17. To illustrate the inuence of Dirty Harry on both Mills
and 2000AD consider another Mills character, Bill Savage, from the Mills-penned story
Invasion (Pat Mills et al., Invasion (Oxford : Rebellion, 2006)). In 2000ADs second issue,
which was, coincidentally, the issue in which the rst Dredd story appeared, Savage faces
down an enemy with the words, I can read your mind sunshine _ you reckon Ive red
both barrels of me cannon _ so youve got the edge on me ! But supposing Ive only red
one barrel? Draw your own gun and lets see how lucky you are _ Compare this to
Harry Callaghans dialogue in Dirty Harry as he taunts a wounded bank robber : I know
what youre thinking. Did he re six shots or only ve? Well, to tell you the truth, in all
this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a.44 Magnum, the most
powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean o, youve got to ask
yourself a question: Do I feel lucky ?
29
Pauline Kael, Killing Time, in Karl French, ed., Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury,
1996), 175. Kael argues that Eastwoods Harry is partly based on the character Roy Bean,
the hanging judge, known for dispensing instant frontier justice. John Milius has
screenwriting credits for both Dirty Harry and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972).
It is possible that Dredds creators were inuenced by both characters.
30
Martin Barker and Kate Brooks, Knowing Audiences: Judge Dredd, Its Friends, Fans and Foes
(Luton : University of Luton Press, 1998), 1.
506 Brian Ireland
frustrating legal system. Michael Wood notes, for example, that Eastwoods
spaghetti western characters cannot be judged by a code which has not
yet come to their world, or which exists only in lame or fumbling forms.
In the west of the movies, asserts Wood, the law is in abeyance or in the
wings. 31
Dredds origins therefore go back further than Dirty Harry, to the
Eastwood character The Man With No Name. Kitses describes him as a
laconic, mask-like, minimalist character, 32 and comparisons can be drawn
with the machine-like _ [h]umorless _ grim and misanthropic Dredd
of the pre-Cursed Earth era.33 Dredd is, in fact, The Man With No Face,
a lawman whose features are forever covered up by his helmet (see
Figure 2).34 Reminiscent of a sheris tin star, Dredd wears a silver badge
in the shape of a shield. He does not use the oversized weaponry typical of
cinema action heroes. Instead, Dredd carries a modest sidearm called a
Lawgiver, which is analogous to the infamous Colt peacemaker. His futuristic
rie is holstered on his motorcycle and is therefore evocative of a sheris
Winchester rie. One critic claims the rst Dredd story planned for 2000AD
was nothing more than a futuristic variation of a Wild West sheri, with his
faithful horse, badge and shining six-gun, cleaning up Dodge City.35
Wagner and Mills gave Dredd a futuristic motorcycle to ride rather than a
car, which gives the character a harder edge due to the obvious associations
with high-prole outlaw motorcycle gangs such as the Hells Angels. The
Angels themselves were often compared with Americas western icons.
According to John Wood, Bikers were seen _ as throwbacks to the indi-
vidualist and frontier spirit _ The image of the cowboy on the open plains,
the epitome of American rugged individualism, had been replaced by the
31
Michael Wood, The Impatience of Harry, New Society, 2 Feb. 1984, 16667, 166.
32
Kitses, 251.
33
Barker and Brooks, Knowing Audiences, 200. It is signicant that Dredds creators were
inspired by Eastwood rather than that other iconic cowboy, John Wayne. In 1966
Eastwood played a young, cool antihero in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. A few years later,
Wayne played almost the only role suitable for him at 62 years of age, namely the grizzled
old lawman Rooster J. Cogburn in True Grit (1969). While both roles helped cement the
actors screen personas, Eastwood had already gone some way towards replacing Wayne
as the most popular actor in this genre. When Wayne attempted to emulate Eastwoods
Dirty Harry character in the gritty crime dramas McQ (1974) and Brannigan (1975), the
results were less than successful : Gary Wills adjudges Wayne to be here a kind of Slightly
Soiled Harry. Gary Wills, John Waynes America : The Politics of Celebrity (New York : Simon
& Schuster, 1997), 284.
34
In Per un pugno di dollari (1964) Eastwoods character is briey referred to as Joe. It was
only in 1967, after United Artists released the lm in the United States as A Fistful of
Dollars, that the moniker The Man with No Name became popular. Dredds rst name
35
is also Joe. See Kitses, 251. Jarman and Acton, 28.
Figure 2. The Man with No Face. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007 Rebellion
A/S. All rights reserved. www.2000adonline.com.
Hells Angel of the open road. 36 According to George Christie, current

president of the Ventura chapter of the Hells Angels, part of the attraction
of their organization is that it evokes the imagery of western outlaws such as
Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Doc Holiday.37
36
John Wood, Hells Angels and the Illusion of the Counterculture, Journal of Popular
Culture, 37, 2 (2003), 33651, 348.
37
Quoted in John Wood, 338. At rst glance, the comparison between Dredd and the Hells
Angels seems contradictory : Dredd is, after all, a lawman, and the Angels built their
reputation on law-breaking. They initially had connections with the 1960s counterculture :
they took drugs and seemed to be antiauthoritarian. However, if the Angels had any kind
of political outlook it was undeniably conservative. They supported the war in Vietnam,
for example, even oering their services in the ght. They also attacked an antiwar march
in Berkeley, California in 1966. Despite harassment by law-enforcement agencies, Sonny
Barger, head of the Oakland Angels, refused the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union
because he believed the organization had communist sympathies (Thompson, Hells
Angels, 70). Journalist Hunter S. Thompson has argued that the Angels and the police
had quite a lot in common. He states, They operate on the same emotional
frequency _ Apart they curse each other savagely, and the brittle truce is often jangled by
high-speed chases and brief, violent clashes that rarely make the papers. Yet behind the
508 Brian Ireland
Dredds bike has extended handlebars, similar to the bikes in the road
movie Easy Rider (1969). Given Dredds western antecedents, his bike is
his modern-day iron horse. David Laderman notes, for example, that
sequences in Easy Rider recall the Wild West imagery of The Searchers, with
the motorcycle substituted for the horse. 38 This metaphor has been in
constant use in American popular culture since mechanical transport began
to compete with the horse as a mode of travel. Railroads were the iron
horse of the nineteenth century, and motorcycles the iron or steel horse
of the twentieth century. Timothy Corrigan notes,
If a friendly horse became the way a person would gallop through the Wild West, a
train the way to cross nineteenth-century industrial landscapes, and a silly jalopy the
way to get through the newly risen urban jungles of the rst quarter of this century,
the car of the fties and sixties becomes a consumer tank.39
The dierence between a motorcycle and a car is, however, the dierence
between a horse and a covered wagon: the latter is entirely functional whereas
the former serves as an icon of freedom often associated with the charis-
matic cowboy or dashing cavalryman.40 When one recalls that Dredd lives in
an apartment block named after Eastwoods Rawhide character Rowdy Yates,
it is evident that the characters creators were drawing from western icon-
ography.41 This was part of a wider trend of association between gunghters
and modern-day lawmen, as Robert Berner astutely notes: the modern
sound and the fury, they are both playing the same game, and usually by the same rules
(Thompson, 44). Indeed, in the late 1960s it was sometimes hard to tell the dierence
between the forces of law and order and those opposed to those very principles. During
the infamous Chicago police riot of 1968, journalist Philip Caputo recalls a band of
militants, wearing motorcycle helmets and armed with baseball bats vandalizing his car
because they thought it was the sheris. A few moments later a passing police ocer,
dressed much the same as the rioters, smashed Caputos windshield after noticing a press
pass on the dashboard. Philip Caputo, 13 Seconds : A Look back at the Kent State Shootings
(New York : Chamberlain Bros., 2005), 11.
38
David Laderman, What a Trip : The Road Film and American Culture, Journal of Film
and Video, 48, 12 (1996), 4157, 48.
39
Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls : Movies and Culture after Vietnam (London:
Routledge, 1991), 147.
40
Kitses, 8384. David B. Davis argues that the cowboys horse is what separates him from
vagabondage and migratory labor. It is his link with the cavalier and plumed knight.
David B. Davis, Ten-Gallon Hero, American Quarterly, 6, 2 (1954), 11125, 121. In much
the same way, Dredds motorcycle distinguishes him from the mundane law-enforcement
duties of the lowly beat cop.
41
Dredd lives in an apartment block called Rowdy Yates Conapt. See 2000AD 5, 26 March
1977.
cops-and-crooks genre is modeled, consciously or not, on the classic Western
and all manifestations of it, to one degree or another, resemble the models.42
In Dredds world, the frontier begins at the walls of Mega-City One. Like a
besieged fort, the city walls repel a daily assault from mutants, some of whom
are enraged at being abandoned by the city dwellers and some driven by the
lure of a better life in the city. This is a familiar theme of the road genre,
which often features plot elements that invite contrast between the urban
and the rural. Often the city is portrayed as something to escape from,
its confusion and alienation in marked contrast to the calm of Americas
deserts. Walter J. Matherly claims, The city diers from the country. The
city moves swiftly ; the country moves slowly. The city is characterized by
feverishness; the country is characterized by placidness. The city is a place of
confusion; the country is a place of composure.43 To conservative, rural
America the city traditionally has been a place where the permissive society
has run amok. In The Decline of Western Civilization Oswald Spengler lamented
the victory of the city over the country whereby it freed itself from the
grip of the ground but to its own ultimate ruin. 44 Spenglers ideas would
inuence Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.45
Kerouac, in particular, was fearful of the American city : in On the Road he
spoke of millions hustling for a buck in awful cemetery cities. 46 In this
particular future, however, the American Dream exists only in the cities, and
even there the mass of citizens live lives of drudgery and boredom, often
punctuated by bursts of extreme violence.
The theme of sacrice is a recurring feature of both the action-hero genre
and the road genre. The outsiders and antiheroes of the road are frequently
punished for their behavioUr by a society that perhaps does not deserve
them. The deaths of the main female protagonists in Ridley Scotts 1991 road
lm Thelma and Louise is perhaps the most obvious example of this, although
the murder of Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider, and the executions of the outlaw
42
Robert Berner, Old Gunghters, New Cops, Western American Literature, 21, 2 (1986),
13134, 132.
43
Walter J. Matherly, The Changing Culture of the City, Social Forces, 13, 3 (1935), 34957,
354.
44
Quoted in ibid., 354. Some historians have argued that prohibition (192033) was rural
Americas revenge on the big city : Prohibition permitted the Protestant countryside to
coerce the newer Americans in the city. Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager
and William E. Leuchtenberg, A Concise History of the American Republic (Oxford : Oxford
University Press, 1983), 591.
45
See, for example, Michael DOrso, Man out of Time : Kerouac, Spengler, and the
Faustian Soul , Studies in American Fiction, 11, 1 (1983), 1930.
46
Kerouac, On the Road, 107.
510 Brian Ireland
folk heroes in Bonnie and Clyde set the trend in the 1960s. Eric Lichtenfeld
points out that in the action-hero genre the masculine hero is frequently an
outsider who suers for the society that has rejected him. He argues that
these protagonists play the role of sacricial hero a martyr stained on our
behalf. According to Lichtenfeld, the prototype of this hero is the Christ
gure.47 This is evident in a number of Eastwood lms, particularly A Fistful
of Dollars (1964), in which No Name endures Christ-like suering as he
is beaten to a bloody pulp by Rojo thugs,48 or in Dirty Harry, when he suers
a similar beating at the hands of a crazed kidnapper.49 This trait is not limited
to Eastwood characters: for many male action heroes the evocation of an
heroic masculinity _ principles of absolute individuation, solitude, probity,
and personal resourcefulness _ demand the social marginality of the princi-
pal gure, much as their Western antecedents did.50 Dredd very much ts
this pattern: he is a loner by choice, whose only love is for the law. This has a
negative eect on his relationship with women a trend typical also of many
western heroes. Gregory states, for example, From Natty Bumpo to John
Wayne our western heroes _ dene themselves through killing, contempt
for all authority except their own, and their mistrust of women and the social
structure they represent.51 This trait is also present in modern-day action
heroes such as Harry Callaghan, who seldom seeks out female company,
preferring instead the company of other men, or more usually solitude.
Richard Combs argues that for Inspector Callaghan, sexual denial is part of
the work ethic.52 Similarly, there are no females in Dredds life. In fact, this
trait is taken to the extreme : not only does he not have a girlfriend, wife or
sister, he even lacks a mother due to having been cloned from the DNA of
47
Eric Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks Louder : Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie
48
(Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2004), 25. Kitses, 259.
49
Many critics have noted this recurring theme in Eastwoods oeuvre. Charles T. Gregory
observes, for example, that Eastwood characters in Coogans Blu (1968) and Two Mules for
Sister Sara (1970) are violent, alienated social outcasts. Charles T. Gregory, The Pod
Society versus the Rugged Individualists, Journal of Popular Film (Winter 1972), 214, 4.
Richard Combs concludes, Martyrdom to his job is one way to describe Harrys curse.
Richard Combs, 8 Degrees of Separation, Film Comment, JulyAug. 2002, 5053, 53.
50
Richard Sparks, Masculinity and Heroism in the Hollywood Blockbuster , British
Journal of Criminology, 36, 3 (1996), 34860, 353; original emphasis.
51
Gregory, 4. This is also a main feature of Eastwoods Dollars trilogy A Fistful of Dollars
(1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) where,
Kitses notes (257), the absence of women, law, religion and culture make for a wilderness
52
where savagery and greed can ower. Combs, 52.
another Judge.53 Dredds usual companion is a robot, the feminized, lisping
Walter the Wobot, which Dredd bullies at every opportunity.
In The Cursed Earth,54 Dredds travelling companions are two male Judges,
a number of armed robots, and Spikes Harvey Rotten, a violent convict
recruited by Dredd to add repower to his group. There is no obvious
diegetic reason why Dredd would need to include Spikes on the journey.
However, in nondiegetic terms, the plot requires someone to act as a comic
foil for its main protagonist. One of the dangers in creating such a minimalist
character as Dredd, whose world view is often a simple dichotomy of right
and wrong, is that the novelty quickly wears thin. If there is no character
maturity, plots can become predictable and stale. This can be avoided by
adding a supporting character to allow plot exposition or, as is usually the
case in the road genre, to have the traveller meet a variety of interesting or
opposing characters on the journey. Both approaches are apparent here.
Spikes is Dredds opposite, an irreverent criminal and reluctant hero whose
inclusion follows the conventions of the buddy movie, in which two
dierent and conicting personalities are forced to work together for a
common purpose. As Kitses notes, this allows a balance between one im-
movable character against which a more interesting split character can be
placed.55 As shall be illustrated, Dredds interactions with all of these gures
allow for signicant character development.56
Like many other road tales, The Cursed Earth is notably lacking in fem-
ininity. In this genre women are typically mistreated at every opportunity
and regarded by males as interlopers who threaten male bonding. David
Laderman argues that in road movies female characters ultimately become
distractions from [the] freedom on the road. 57 In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for
example, the lead female character complains, We used to be goin some-
where, now it seems like were just goin. She doesnt get it : for many males
53
Matthew T. Althouse, Kevlar Armor, Heat-Seeking Bullets, and Social Order :
A Mythological Reading of Judge Dredd, in Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell Jr.
and Ian Gordon, eds., Comics and Ideology (New York : Peter Lang, 2001), 195219, 199.
54
For the sake of convenience, I am using a collected edition of the story, entitled Judge
Dredd : The Cursed Earth (London : Titan, 2002). The four banned chapters are not included
in this edition. All further references to the story are from this source, unless mentioned
55
otherwise. Kitses, 289.
56
Shari Roberts argues that character development is what distinguishes the genre of road
cinema from other lms that merely feature a journey of some sort. Roberts states, The
road as theme may appear in any lm, regardless of historical context, whereas, in the road
lm genre, the metaphor of the road becomes the main structuring device through _
interdependence of the physical and spiritual journeys. Shari Roberts, Western Meets
Eastwood : Gender and Gender on the Road, in Cohan and Hark, The Road Movie
57
Book, 53. Laderman, What a Trip, 43.
512 Brian Ireland
in this genre just going is the whole point of the journey. As Michael
Atkinson states, The journeys the thing, and anyone who thinks dierently
is just wasting gas. 58 The dominance of men in this genre is, undoubtedly,
a reection of traditional gender roles, especially outdated views about the
nature of reproduction. In this lexicon the female egg is stationary while the
male sperm undertakes an incredible journey. As Tim Cresswell notes, the
mobility of the sperm [is] equated with agency, [t]he sperm does things and
the egg has things done to it. 59 These terms of reference code mobility
as masculine and exciting, and immobility as feminine and passive. These
foundational attitudes are reected in society as a whole, and are catered to in
much of the road genre.
While Dredd is a loner, he is nevertheless prepared to sacrice himself for
a society he often disparages. Sometimes the human race makes me sick !
he pronounces (in Requiem for an Alien ). Matthew T. Althouse states,
seemingly, half of the population is criminal _ [t]he other half of Mega-
City Ones population lives in terror of city judges, who are authorised to
assess crime situations and to issue on-the-spot nes, jail terms, and death
sentences. 60 According to Martin Barker and Kate Brooks Megacity [sic]
One is a claustrophobic, teeming, urban nightmare, where all citizens are
potential perpetrators, where the line between guilt and innocence is deter-
mined only by the Judges, and where Dredd judges without mercy. 61
According to Althouse, Dredd believes that all inhabitants in Mega-City
One hide some kind of misdeed.62 Dredds attitude towards the citizens is
therefore ambivalent in the extreme. Despite this, he undergoes a near-
suicidal journey to save those he often judges unworthy. My life doesnt
matter as long as the vaccine gets through to Mega-City Two he declares
( Dredds Last Stand ). In this respect, Dredd is the reluctant antihero
typical of both the road and action-hero genres.
Dredds attitude towards the inhabitants of the wastelands is also am-
bivalent. At one point he states that they deserve pity _ not vengeance,
but he also refers to them as the damned. In Night of the Vampire
Dredd states, These simple hillbillies barely scratch a living from the soil
yet they welcome us with open arms. They are good people. These ragged
survivors of ruinous nuclear exchanges cannot seek refuge in Mega-City One
because of their mutations. The city therefore represents normality and
civilization, and those excluded are deemed to be uncivilized and threatening.
58
Michael Atkinson, Crossing Frontiers, Sight and Sound, Jan. 1994, 1417, 16.
59
Tim Cresswell, On the Move : Mobility on the Modern Western World (New York and London:
60
Routledge, 2006), 8. Althouse, 195.
61 62
Barker and Brooks, Waiting For Dredd, 17. Althouse, 213.
This particular stigma has its origins in ancient Greece. Anthony Pagden
points out, for example, that those who chose, or were compelled, to
leave their native cities were looked upon both as potentially degenerate and
as potentially dangerous. Exile in the ancient world was a punishment
comparable to death.63 This image continued through feudal times, when
the mass of European peasantry existed in tight-knit, stationary communi-
ties. Tim Cresswell explains, To be mobile was to exist on the margins.
Wandering minstrels, troubadours, crusaders, pilgrims, and some peripatetic
monks existed, for periods of time, outside of the obligations of place and
roots. Not all of these groups or individuals were mistrusted, but a mobile
lifestyle could cause suspicion and result in persecution for some. Cresswell
notes, for example, the [s]o-called wandering Jews [who] lived outside the
web of obligations and duties that marked feudalism. For this reason they
were looked down upon and distrusted.64 The threat of exile continued in
the supposed new world of America. For example, the punishment for
miscegenation in Virginia in 1691 was banishment from the colony.65
The inhabitants of the Cursed Earth form two major groups: the rst are
criminal gangs, usually distinguishable by their somewhat extravagant mu-
tations. In the second group are the innocent victims of these mutants,
usually distinguishable because they appear normal. The story therefore
follows familiar plotlines of horror, science ction and James Bond movies
in which disgured people are unfairly stereotyped as evil. In this respect, The
Cursed Earth departs from what is a notable and unusual facet of the modern
American road genre, namely that the road can be a haven for what society
considers abnormal or uncivilized. For example, in Easy Rider the freaks of
a hippy commune in Arizona are much more welcome and tolerant than the
racist townsfolk and hostile lawmen of small-town America. This departure
from the norm may be attributed to the fantastic properties of the story, but
it is more likely that Dredds character type drives the plot in this direction.
The forces of law and order are, by their very nature, conservative, and
anyone outside the norms of society is automatically suspicious.
A further area of the Cursed Earth story that does not follow the traditional
road-genre convention is Dredds politics. Frequently in this genre those
who set out on the road tend to express liberal views and lead countercultural
lifestyles. Althouse states bluntly, however, Dredd is a fascist. 66 He may
be an antihero, as are many of the road genres protagonists, but he is a
63
Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires : Europeans and the Rest of the World, from Antiquity to the
64
Present (London: Phoenix Press, 2002), 5. Cresswell, 11.
65
Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States, 1492present (London : Pearson
66
Longman, 2003), 31. Althouse, 207.
514 Brian Ireland
right-wing, authoritarian antihero in the Dirty Harry mould, rather than
the drop-out antiheroes of Easy Rider or work-shy car fanatics of Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971). Despite this, the story features satirical and picaresque
themes. These are evident in two storylines that have never been reprinted.
In issues 71 (1 July 1978) and 72 (8 July 1978) Wagners Battle of the Burger
Barons and Burger Law satirized the giant American corporations
Burger King and McDonalds (spelt MacDonalds in the comic). In issues
78 (12 August 1978) and 79 (19 August 1978), Chris Lowders stories Giants
Arent Gentlemen and Soul Food featured copyrighted images such as
the jolly green giant of Green Giant sweet corn, the Michelin tyre mascot,
and a mad scientist who bore an uncanny resemblance to Harland Colonel
Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate.67 These tales were not part of
Millss original plans : he found that he could not keep meeting 2000ADs
weekly deadlines, and both Wagner and Lowder were therefore asked by
editor Nick Landau to contribute some ll-in stories. 68 In Battle of the
Burger Barons, the suspicious, heavily armed townsfolk of In Between,
Kansas explain to Dredd that competition between two hamburger chains,
MacDonalds and Burger King, has turned violent. Citizens must choose
between one or the other, or face death. In Between is the only burger-free,
neutral town left in the area. When it is attacked and overrun by an armed
gang whose leader dresses as Ronald MacDonald, Dredd is captured and
taken to MacDonalds City. He quickly organizes his escape but is captured
by Burger King vigilantes. Mistaken for a MacDonalds employee, Dredd is
quickly lynched. Before he is completely throttled, however, he is rescued by
Judge Jack. In typical road-genre fashion, this plot is not resolved: Dredd
orders the Burger King lynch mob released, and he then presses on for
Mega-City Two.69
The Burger Wars narrative features a number of familiar plot themes
from the American western genre. The title of the rst part of the story,
67
These companies threatened legal action claiming trademark and copyright infringement.
IPC subsequently decided never to reprint any of these stories. See Judge Dredd : The Cursed
68
Earth, intro. Quoted in Jarman and Acton, Judge Dredd, 85.
69
Pat Brereton has identied a number of iconic, elemental symbols of the western, such
as the sheris badge, to dramatise the need for law and order, a hanging tree to
symbolise the ultimate deterrent, and a barbershop to wash away the (symbolic) im-
purity of outside nature. Pat Brereton, Hollywood Utopia : Ecology in Contemporary American
Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005), 93. The Cursed Earth features all of these scenes,
which demonstrates once again the inuence of the frontier on road stories. Brereton
argues (91) that movement and travel remain a central preoccupation of American cul-
ture and concludes that the road movie is simply an extension of the western. Frank
Gruber points to seven basic western storylines and elements of at least four of these
appear in The Cursed Earth. See Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 6162.
Battle of the Burger Barons, is suggestive of the cattle barons and range
wars of the frontier era, a theme reinforced by the inclusion of a cattle
stampede in the storyline. In addition, Dredd is subjected to the supposed
frontier justice of a hangmans noose. There is also a suggestion that the
burger wars are a distorted version of a family feud. Ronald MacDonald
states, That wasnt the real Burger King just like ah aint the real Ronald
MacDonald. See, back fore th atom war, my pappy ran MacDonalds in
these parts. Me, ahm jus carryin on th family tradition. Cept were at war
now! The senseless violence and exaggerated southern aristocratic accents
are suggestive of the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, the feuding families
of Mark Twains canonical road novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
There is here perhaps also an allusion to the fake aristocratic fried chicken
mogul Harland Colonel Sanders, whose likeness also appears in Giants
Arent Gentlemen and Soul Food. Wagner used the Burger Wars
story to critique the abusive power of giant corporations like Burger King
and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Dredd states, After the war, with the
government gone, there was nothing to stop the big burger chains lust for
complete control. They grew more and more powerful, until their hamburger
war turned violent. Dredds authoritarian nature leads him to the con-
clusion that lack of government regulation is the problem. However, he
also criticizes the consumers of fast food and the apparent apotheosis of
Ronald MacDonald. For example, in MacDonalds City he witnesses the
execution of a fast-food employee who failed to wipe a table quickly enough.
MacDonald declares, Everythin in MacDonalds is disposable includin
th sta. Dredd comments, The hamburger chains have grown so
powerful theyve taken over. The people worship them! Wagner may also
be critiquing the so-called McDonaldization of British society. Although
McDonalds had opened its restaurant in the United Kingdom only four
years before, the franchise had already achieved market dominance. George
Ritzer, author of The McDonaldization of Society, writes,
the fundamental problem with McDonaldised systems is that its other people in the
system structuring our lives for us, rather than us structuring our lives for ourselves.
I mean, thats really what McDonalds is all about. You dont want a creative person
clerk at the counter thats why they are scripted. You dont want a creative ham-
burger cook you want somebody who simply follows routines or follows scripts.
So you take all creativity out of all activities and turn them into a series of routinised
kinds of procedures that are imposed by some external force. So thats the reason
why it is dehumanising _ The idea is to turn humans into human robots.70
70
George Ritzer, interview, 10 Nov. 2007, available at http://www.mcspotlight.org/
people/interviews/ritzer_george.html.
516 Brian Ireland
However, in using the deeply conservative Dredd to criticize lack of
government control over giant corporations, Wagner sends a mixed message.
Utilizing Dredd as a vehicle for freedom is particularly problematic. Dredds
appeal is due mostly to the straightforward, good-versus-evil nature of the
character. However, for a large section of his audience his attractiveness is
his straitlaced conservatism. For Dredd, no level of government control is
too much, and every transgression of the law, no matter how trivial, must be
punished severely. If electoral politics is any indication of the mood of the
nation, the dominance of Thatcherite conservatism in the late 1970s and the
appeal of Judge Dredd to a section of 2000ADs readership go hand in hand.
However, Dredd also appealed to those readers who found his behaviour
indicative of the new conservatism of British society and who saw in Dredd
a dire warning of things to come. Many of those on the receiving end
of Dredds unforgiving punishments were, after all, guilty only of not con-
forming to Dredds harsh laws. A few of these characters struck such a chord
with readers that they became popular in their own right. For example,
in the non-Cursed Earth story Unamerican Grati, Marlon Shakespeare
( Chopper) was a grati artist whose artistic talents could not be expressed
in a society with ninety-ve percent unemployment rates. Originally planned
as a one-o story, Chopper was quickly captured and jailed by Dredd.
However, his popularity with readers was such that he featured in future
stories where he was the main character and Dredd an incidental part of the
story.71 This demonstrates that while many readers admired Dredd for his
authoritarian and uncompromising approach, many others were more at-
tracted to Dredds rebellious victims.72
Giants Arent Gentlemen and Soul Food oer an opportunity for
Lowder to further explore the theme of big business exploitation that
71
These stories are Midnight Surfer, by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy, in
2000AD 42429, 1986 ; Oz, by John Wagner and Alan Grant, in 2000AD 54570, 1987;
Soul on Fire, by John Wagner and Colin MacNeil, in 2000AD 59497, 1988 ; and Song
of the Surfer, by John Wagner and Colin MacNeil, in 2000AD 65465, 1989. In the six-
part story Earth, Wind and Fire, by Garth Ennis and John McCrea, in Judge Dredd
Megazine (sic) 1, 1 June 1990, Dredd does not appear at all.
72
In Unamerican Grati Chopper faces competition from The Phantom, a rebellious
and elusive grati artist. When the two eventually meet, Chopper is shocked to discover
that his fellow traveller is a robot, so disillusioned with its mundane life that it turned to
the petty crime of grati for excitement. The message here is clear : lawmen like Dredd
demand passivity and obedience from the citizenry. Citizens must be as uncomplaining as
the robots that have made so many of them unemployed. The word robot derives, after
all, from the Czech word robota, meaning labour or drudgery. But in Mega-City One
even robots get bored, and the Phantom chooses death rather than be captured by Dredd.
The irony of this is that if Ritzer is correct, both MacDonalds and Dredd want the same
thing, as Ritzer states, to turn humans into human robots. George Ritzer interview.
Wagner had begun in Burger Wars. Dredd stumbles upon a government
agricultural research station, which dates to the pre-atomic war era. It is run
by Doctor Gribbon, a Colonel Sanders look-alike, who uses genetic engin-
eering to give life to vegetable matter. Obviously insane a protege of the
Frankenstein, mad scientist school of scientic research Gribbon uses
advertisements from old magazines for inspiration. Hence Dredd is menaced
by thirty-foot tall green giant sweet corn monsters and by Bibendum, the
gun-wielding Michelin tire mascot. Gribbon dies in an explosion caused
by one of his mutinous creations. Dredd passes judgment on the aair:
Gribbon learned too late that man cannot play at being God! His creations
had feelings _ emotions ! He created life but in the end it was the death of
him! These stories appear to be inuenced by well-known science ction or
horror literature, such as Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and H. G. Wellss The
Island of Doctor Moreau. Although Mills feels that the ll-in stories of Wagner
and Lowder were a big mistake because of their abuse of copyrighted
gures,73 they remain the most memorable individual chapters of The Cursed
Earth. This may be because of their notoriety, but it is also undoubtedly due
to their satirical, picaresque nature, which is a recurring feature of many road
stories.
The artwork in The Cursed Earth is primarily the work of Mike McMahon
and Brian Bolland. Despite their undoubted skills, neither artist fully captures
the feeling of movement associated with a road trip. However, both draw
dramatic and dynamic scenes that were particularly appealing to the young
audiences that were the mainstay of 2000AD. Many chapters in the story
feature, for example, an introductory double page spread of a single
image usually an eye-catching and exciting action scene (see Figure 3).
McMahon states modestly, what I regard myself really as is someone who
can string a sequence of pictures together you can follow quite easily. 74 The
artwork of The Cursed Earth therefore follows in the tradition of the road
genre in its appeal to youth culture. The artists were given plots and
characters that appealed to late 1970s youth. For example, Dredds reluc-
tant companion,75 Spikes Harvey Rotten, a spiky-haired rebel with hand
grenade ear-rings, was no doubt inspired by that eras punk rock movement
(see Figure 4).76
73
74
The Art of Mike McMahon, 10 Nov. 2007, available at http://www.2000ad.nu/mcmahon/
75
wor/in3.htm. Primeau, Romance of the Road, 10.
76
In Chapter 4, King Rat, Spikes compares himself to one of dem [sic] twentieth century
punk rockers.
518 Brian Ireland
Figure 3. Mount Rushmore in the year 2100. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007
Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved. www.2000adonline.com.
Another aspect of the art in The Cursed Earth is what Leo Marx has re-
ferred to as The Machine in the Garden. Marx demonstrates how in-
dustrialization and technology (the machine) threatened idea of America as a
new Eden (the garden). Marx explains how writers such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Mark Twain incorporated such ideas into their work. In
Huckleberry Finn, for example, the tranquility and peaceful nature of life on a
raft is suddenly disrupted by the appearance of a monstrous steamboat.
For Hawthorne it was the startling shriek of a locomotive that disrupted
their meditation in the woods. Marx concludes, it is dicult to think of a
major American writer upon whom the image of the machines sudden ap-
pearance in the landscape has not exercised its fascination. 77 Aside from the
motorcycle that Dredd rides, the bulk of the journey is made in an armored
vehicle known as The Land Raider. The vehicle is introduced to readers
in a dynamic two-page spread in Into the Darkness. McMahon draws the
image without a frame, which conveys both space and action. This scene
is replicated throughout The Cursed Earth, particularly in The Coming of
Satanus and Losers Leap. When Dredd is depicted on his motorcycle
McMahon either draws the image without a frame, or he uses a splash
77
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (London, New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1968), 1316.
Figure 4. Punk rocker, Spikes Harvey Rotten. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007
panel a panel bigger than those around it (see Figure 5). This has the
eect of emphasizing the panel.78 These intrusions of machinery into the
wastelands are symbolic of the citys inuence on the rural. Here it is
benevolent, but in American history it has often been seen as malevolent.
Like so much of this story, then, the writers (and artists) send mixed mes-
sages of intent.
78
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics : The Invisible Art (Northampton, MA : Tundra Press,
1993).
520 Brian Ireland
Figure 5. Flying over the Death Belt : splash panel. Judge Dredd Copyright f
2007 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved. www.2000adonline.com.
Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson argue, Historically the desert is a

space in which protagonists are tested and emerge as transformed, in narra-
tives that go back to the Bible and Jesus forty days and nights spent in
the wilderness. 79 The Cursed Earth incorporates a rite of passage ordeal
like this, in what has become a familiar road convention. For example, in
The Grapes of Wrath the Joads must traverse the great American desert, face
physical and spiritual trials, and lose a family member along the way, before
they reach the supposed Eden of California. In Death Crawl ! Dredd is
the sole survivor of the original group that left Mega-City One. In a scene
reminiscent of the suering of Eastwood characters in both A Fistful of
Dollars and High Plains Drifter (1973), Dredd, wounded, exhausted and de-
hydrated, is haunted by hallucinations of the mutants, villains and monsters
that he has faced in the Cursed Earth (see Figure 6). Dredd, however, en-
dures, eventually crawling to Mega-City Two with the vaccine that will save
the city. A grateful ocial of the city declares, Only a Judge couldve made
it and this guy Dredd _ he must be special, even for a Judge.
Passage through the wilderness can either ennoble the travellers or reduce
them to insignicance when pitted against the forces of nature. At the
79
Sargeant and Watson, Lost Highways, 14.
Figure 6. Death Crawl ! Dredds rite of passage. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007
beginning of the story Dredds group overcome natural obstacles such as a

mountain and wild beasts.80 At the end, however, it seemed for a moment
that the Cursed Earth had won. Dredds companions are dead or missing,
his motorcycle destroyed, and the clothes ripped from his back. His pain
is, however, the price of being cleansed, reborn and transformed into a
fairer, less inexible, character. As noted previously, the theme of sacrice is
apparent in both the action-hero genre and the road genre, but Dredds
test here is also typical of the road journey as a modern-day quest. Primeau
notes, for example, that a typical formula is the hero who sets out on a
quest, experiences ordeals, and ultimately returns triumphant. 81 Closely
connected to the rite-of-passage theme is that of transformation. In the road
genre, characters or protagonists often face an ordeal and emerge, buttery-
like, transformed. Timothy Corrigan argues that this is related to the quest
80
In Chapter 5, The Mutie Mountains and Chapter 3, The Devils Lapdogs.
81
Primeau, 7.
522 Brian Ireland
motif, in which the confrontations and obstacles faced generally lead, in
most cases, to a wiser individual and often a more stable spiritual or social
state. 82 To an extent, this happens to Dredd. The draft of the rst ever
Dredd story sees him execute in cold blood three alleged bank robbers.
Although this scene was eventually edited from the story, it is much closer to
Wagners vision of the character as judge, jury and executioner than the
post-Cursed Earth era Dredd.83 Landau states,84
During the journey, Dredd underwent a complete character change from a re-
lentless, macho cop, who could cope with the insanity of Mega-City One by being
tougher and more ruthless than its inhabitants, to a fairer, more compassionate
lawman whose treatment of the Cursed Earth mutants was both sympathetic
and just.
Mills calculates that the cold, merciless Dredd of the Mega-City streets
couldnt have made that journey. The city was about control, The Cursed
Earth was about lack of control it brought out the dierent halves of
Dredds psyche.85 The search for identity is characteristic of road tales.
In Paul Austers Moon Palace, for example, Marco Fogg undergoes a similar
transformation. He states, I felt like someone about to be reborn, like
someone on the brink of discovering a new continent. 86 In a sense, Dredd
is also reborn as a more rounded gure than the cold-blooded killer of
earlier stories. Just as Huckleberry Finn learned the dignity of human life
by virtue of being on the road that is, by realizing that the slave Jim was
more than a piece of property Dredd becomes aware that instant justice
(killing) is not the answer to every problem.
Not every road story has a destination and not every traveller arrives at
their goal. In fact, those that do are often disappointed with the result.87
82
Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls, 144.
83
See The Judge Dredd Story and The First Dredd, in Judge Dredd Annual (London:
84
Fleetway, 1981). Quoted in Jarman and Acton, Judge Dredd, 81.
85
Quoted in ibid., 86.
86
Paul Auster, Moon Palace (New York : Penguin, 1989), 52. Transformation can take many
forms: Thelma and Louise switch from being house-bound, unhappy women to free-
spirited, liberated outlaws. In experiencing the freedom to make their own choices, they
achieve a transcendent state of awareness and fullment, which, somewhat paradoxically,
results in an unspoken suicide pact. By the end of Rain Man (1988) the obnoxious, arrogant
and materialistic car salesman Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) is a mellower, more com-
passionate gure, due to prolonged close contact on the road with his autistic brother,
Raymond (Dustin Homan).
87
In On the Road, for example, Sal does not nd the answers he looks for in California and
cannot settle down with Terry despite professing his love for her. Mexico initially seems to
be a haven: he states, we had nally found that magical land at the end of the road and
we never dreamed the extent of the magic. However, he returns to the United States only
However, when the story takes the form of a quest, as in The Cursed Earth,
achieving the goal is important if the story is to reach a satisfactory con-
clusion. Dredds objective is, of course, Mega-City Two, a huge metropolis
that has been built from the ruins of Los Angeles. Journalist Mike Davis
notes that science ction writers have destroyed Los Angeles more often in
their imagination than any other American city. Davis states,
No other city seems to excite such dark rapture _ The destruction of London the
metropolis most persecuted in ction between 1885 and 1940 was imagined as a
horrifying spectacle. The obliteration of Los Angeles, by contrast, is often depicted
as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilization.88
Daviss explanation for this racial anxiety89 does not, however, apply
to The Cursed Earth saga. Mills states,90 for example, I had become very
passionate about what was basically a story of oppression, touching a lot of
areas where Western civilization has oppressed other races. It made me feel
very angry. Here, again, the authoritarian character of Dredd came into
conict with the natural tendency of the road story towards rebelliousness
and support for the underdog. Dredd is, after all, very much the oppressor
and bully. Mills dealt with this conict by introducing the character
Tweak, an intelligent alien with paranormal powers. The alien and his
family are abducted from their home planet to be exhibited in an alien
nature reserve.91 In the aftermath of the nuclear exchange that created the
Cursed Earth, locals bought the aliens to use as slaves. Dredd avows, The
use of slave labour is evil, and swears to put an end to the practice when his
mission is accomplished. However, events overtake his plan: when Tweak
escapes, Dredd oers the alien sanctuary and kills the pursuing slave-traders.
In very poignant scenes that are, perhaps, unexpected in a comic book aimed
at seven- to eleven-year-olds,92 readers discover that Tweak escaped because
a few days later. [A] little further , he states, it never ends. Kerouac, On the Road, 276
and 243).
88
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear : Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York : Vintage,
89 90
1999), 277. Ibid., 281. Quoted in Jarman and Acton, 81.
91
See Chapter 9: The Slay-Riders ! and Chapters 16 and 17, Tweaks Story.
92
In attempting to explain the enduring popularity of the iconic cowboy in post-Second
World War popular culture, David B. Davis concludes that the cowboy hero is the hero
of the pre-adolescent boy. Not only is pre-adolescence the stage of revolt against
femininity and feminine standards (Davis, Ten-Gallon Hero, 119), but also the time
when worries about physical prowess are evident. According to Davis, identifying with
the heroic cowboy empowers boys and allows them to vicariously triumph over fear,
doubt, and insecurity, in short _ evil (ibid., 123). Such wish fullment is a familiar
theme of the superhero genre, which is attractive to young boys because the classic hero
transforms from an everyday person into a powerful, noble being whose purpose in life is
to ght evil (for example, Clark Kent/Superman, Peter Parker/Spiderman or Bruce
524 Brian Ireland
Figure 7. Alien roots. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007 Rebellion A/S. All rights
reserved. www.2000adonline.com.
he had been separated from his family, which had been sold to work on a
plantation. Tweak is too late, however: his wife and kids have already been
murdered by their master.
Comparisons with the American slave trade are obvious here. The cover
of issue 82 of 2000AD depicts Tweak on an auction block, having his teeth
examined by an overseer. The image is entitled Alien Roots (see Figure 7),
an obvious reference to the television series based on Alex Haleys novel,
which was rst broadcast in the United States in January 1977, and in Britain
Banner/Hulk). While having no special powers as such, Dredd nevertheless has many of
the qualities of the superhero, including the ability to tolerate comic book levels of
physical punishment and, of course, his ultimate triumph over evil.
soon after. The forced-labour plotline, references to the Big House, the
auction, and the slave-traders use of whips are all evocative of Americas
peculiar institution. While it would be a mistake to attribute too many
historical parallels to the story hanging too much weight on what may be
simply an insubstantial narrative hook the portrayal of a slave escaping to
be with his family is, nevertheless, a surprisingly accurate retelling of his-
torical events. For example, until the 1943 publication of Herbert Apthekers
America Negro Slave Revolts,93 the generally accepted image of slavery was that
portrayed by southern historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, namely that slaves
were passive, happy and obedient. Their destiny, Phillips argued, was af-
fected only so far as the master race determined. Lacking in agency, these
Negroes were an inert and backward people for whom it was a
satisfaction to work sturdily for a hard boss. 94 Despite Apthekers work
(Aptheker was a communist, and much of his research was therefore unfairly
discredited), it was not until the publication of Kenneth Stampps book
The Peculiar Institution in 1956 that the racist image of the docile male slave
was put to rest.95 In Tweaks Story,the slave is described as stupid,
vicious and a thick brute a lexicon of dehumanization very familiar to
scholars of the slave system. On the surface, Tweak resembles the Sambo
personality type docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but
chronically given to lying and stealing : his behavior was full of infantile
silliness96 but it is a masquerade. Mills states, Tweak suered all the
horrible tests without revealing he was intelligent. He would pretend to be
a dumb animal because thats what humans and slaveholders expected (see
Figure 8). This has remarkable parallels to Apthekers description of indi-
vidual slave resistance wherein slaves would pretend to be dumb animals,
while striking back at their masters through such tactics as carelessness
and pretending illness. 97
In keeping with the typical liberal inclination of road tales at its core, the
genre is about exploring the limits of freedom when its characters run up
against, and sometimes transgress, social, cultural and political boundaries
and perhaps therefore also to add balance to stories usually dominated by the
93
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York : Columbia University Press,
1943).
94
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University
Press, 1966), 117, 343 and 292.
95
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution : Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York :
Knopf, 1956).
96
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago :
97
University of Chicago Press, 1976), 82. Aptheker, 141.
526 Brian Ireland
Figure 8. Tweak suered all the tests without revealing he was intelligent.
Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.
www.2000adonline.com.
ultra-conservative Dredd, Tweak also makes a wider point about Western

oppression. For example, when humans arrive on his planet for the rst
time they insist We come in peace for all mankind. However, Tweaks
mind probe reveals thoughts of war and brutality that belie these words. One
image reveals the persecution of a Native American, a theme that Mills
returns to in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Picnic at Black Rock and Black
Sabbath. These stories feature dinosaurs re-created from fossilized DNA.
Locals follow a bizarre religious ritual that entails sacricing individuals in
order to save their town (aptly named Repentance). In these stories, Mills
creates a satire not just of organized religion, but of the Catholic missions
that did so much to destroy Native American culture. Mills reects,98 The
scene where Satanus (the Devil beast) is perched atop a Mexican church was,
for me, deeply symbolic, referring to the forces of evil triumphing over
good (see Figure 9).
Mills and Wagner are consumers of American culture. The authors draw
from many dierent aspects of Americana, and the result is an exciting tale
containing jumbled, polyglot images of America. Leo Marx argues, for ex-
ample, that there are two competing versions of the New World. The rst is
the idea of the virgin land, an Eden-like garden where life could begin
98
Figure 9. Satanus the devil beast. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007 Rebellion A/S.
All rights reserved. www.2000adonline.com.
anew. The second is that of an American wilderness. Marx notes the dier-
ences between the two :
To depict America as a garden is to express aspirations still considered utopian
aspirations, that is, toward abundance, leisure, freedom, and a greater harmony of
existence. To describe America as a hideous wilderness, however, is to envisage it as
another eld for the exercise of power. This violent image expresses a need to
mobilize energy, postpone immediate pleasures, and rehearse the perils and pur-
poses of the community. Life in a garden is relaxed, quiet and sweet _ but survival
in a howling desert demands action, the unceasing manipulation and mastery of the
forces of nature, including, of course, human nature. Colonies established in the
desert require aggressive, intellectual, controlled and well-disciplined people.99
99
Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 43.
528 Brian Ireland
In The Cursed Earth, the writers cannot decide which version of post-
apocalypse America they subscribe to. The Devils Lapdogs features, for
example, imagery similar to what William Bradford saw from the Mayower,
a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men. 100
However, Giants Arent Gentlemen features a gigantic sea of grass that
is reminiscent of the garden metaphor or America as a land of plenty.
Similarly, Dark Autumn and Night of the Vampire depict the kind of
idyllic Arcadian society of small farmers advocated by Thomas Jeerson.
Jeersons rural idyll is, however, not usually reected in the road genre.
Often, small towns are depicted as violent and repressive, and the townsfolk
ignorant, ultra-conservative, and dangerous. For example, in a review of Easy
Rider, Chris Hugo notes the lms depiction of small-town America as
brutal and corrupt. 101
After Dredd leaves Kentucky, his journey follows roughly the direction of
Route 66, Americas Main Street. From Mega-City One, Dredd travels
100
Roderick Nash, The American Wilderness in Historical Perspective, Forest History, 6, 4
(1963), 213, 3.
101
Chris Hugo, Easy Rider and Hollywood in the 70s, Movie, 32 (1986), 6771, 69.
Situating the story in a postapocalyptic landscape serves a number of purposes, perhaps
the most important being the re-creation of the danger and excitement of the American
frontier experience. That the imagery here is both apocalyptic and Edenic reects the
predominant competing notions of the American historical experience : was the New
World a howling wilderness populated by beasts or a location where the righteous could
start anew ? A connecting theme between both views is that of judgement and atonement.
The Puritans believed that America was a land set aside for them by God, and that the
Indians who died in their thousands from newly introduced European diseases were
sinners who had been judged by God as unworthy. For instance, when a smallpox epi-
demic devastated the Pequots in 1634, the governor of Plymouth colony, William
Bradford, crowed, by the marvelous goodness and providence of God, not one of the
English was so much as sick or in the least measure tainted with this disease. William
Roger Louis, Nicholas Canny, P. J. Marshall and Judith M. Brown, The Oxford History of the
British Empire (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998), 341. The counterpoint to the
Eden narrative is, of course, the belief in a biblical Apocalypse, where only the chosen will
be saved from destruction. In some respects, 2000AD is a cultural product of these
Western mythologies : its title reected a millennarian belief that great changes were ahead,
and some of its most popular stories were apocalyptic in nature, for example the afore-
mentioned Invasion. In Dredds world, the Cursed Earth is large enough and vague
enough to encompass both narratives : those that remained healthy after the apoc-
alypse the saved are given protection within the walls of Mega-City One. In con-
trast, the mutated survivors the damned are exiled to the Cursed Earth to fend for
themselves. Their fate is in the hands of people like Dredd ; he stands over them in
judgment and exercises god-like power over whether they live or die. However, towards
the end of Dredds journey, there are evocations of the Edenic garden metaphor, which
reects both the traditional American narrative of starting over and the tendency of
road stories to oer a contrast between sinful cities and the supposed freedom and purity
of rural America.
through Kentucky, Kansas, Utah, Colorado, Las Vegas and Death Valley, to
Mega-City Two. Route 66 was, of course, the road taken by thousands of
migrants especially during the Great Depression. The road was decommis-
sioned in 1985, mainly due to lack of use following the growth of the US
interstate highway system. However, the myth and icons of Route 66 remain
alive due to a well-organized nostalgia industry that has helped replace
tourist trac lost to the interstates.102 This nostalgia for times past can be
found in many road narratives and an element of it exists in The Cursed Earth.
Night of the Vampire and The Sleeper Awakes tell the story of the last
President of the United States and the origins of the Judge system. Primeau
argues that the road genre often takes on the tone of pilgrimage to search
for origins.103 Usually this takes the form of a New World/Old World
dichotomy in which comparisons are invited between the United States
and Europe, particularly the supposed parent country of Great Britain.
Occasionally, it also takes the form of a contrast between pre- and post-
Columbian America. In this section of The Cursed Earth, however, Mills ex-
plores the origins of the judicial system by comparing the two men who
represent the old democratic society of the United States and the police state
that replaced it President Booth and Judge Dredd.
In Night of the Vampire, Dredd is enjoying the hospitality of some
Kentucky locals, when he is interrupted by a posse in search of a supposed
vampire. The vampire is, in fact, a robot which has been programmed to
search for and collect blood samples. Dredd follows the posse to a ruined
castle, which turns out to be the remains of Fort Knox. Inside, Dredd
discovers that the head vampire is, in fact, Bad Bob Booth, the last
President of the United States. Booth had initiated the atomic wars, which
created the wastelands, led to the establishment of city states like Mega-City
One and Mega-City Two, and allowed the Judges to take control of the
executive, judiciary and legislature. Rather than execute Booth, the Judges
sentenced him to 100 years of suspended animation. When blood supplies
began to run low, the robots assigned to provide medical care to Booth
began to prey on the locals, and the legend of the vampire began (see
Figure 10). When Booth is awakened from suspended animation by the
posse, Dredd convinces the angry mob that the robots can be reprogrammed
to work for them in the elds, and that Booth should join them, getting
your lily-white hands dirty bringing life back to the Cursed Earth.
102
Phil Patton, Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway (New York : Simon &
103
Schuster, 1986), 22945. Primeau, Romance of the Road, 8.
530 Brian Ireland
Figure 10. The legend of the vampire. Judge Dredd Copyright f 2007 Rebellion
A/S. All rights reserved. www.2000adonline.com.
Mills states,104 I always have to know the history of everything, which is

why I wrote the story about President Booth. I just had to know how the
Judges came to be. Mills lls this lacuna in Dredds origin story with the tale
of Booth, the symbolic lost parent (and motivation for many characters in
104
this genre to go on the road). Booth is the female-coded progenitor who
gave birth to Dredds world. He is weak and indecisive, having been assigned
the feminine role of staying home while his robotic children go shopping
for blood a simulacra of Dredd, the man of action, who is mobile, decisive,
prepared and able to use violence to enforce his will. The message this sends
is a mixed one. In the context of the mid-1970s, when conservative values
were replacing the liberalism of the turbulent 1960s, democracy seemed to be
threatened by corrupt politicians like Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
However, while Mills may have intended this story to act as a grim warning
of the possible results of such political corruption, Dredds masculine actions
and decisive judgment also oered 2000ADs young male readers a positive
hero gure, especially when compared to the weaker gure of Booth.105 That
Dredd actually represents an antidemocratic, illiberal police state, in which
dissent is ruthlessly crushed, is lost in the penumbra of mixed messages and
morals created by the arc of the story.
The Cursed Earth is very much a product of its time. The punk-era inu-
ences are evident with the inclusion of Spikes Harvey Rotten, the greatest
punk of all time. Punk fashions also inuenced Dredds uniform, which is
adorned with chains (although artist Carlos Ezquerra claims otherwise).106 In
addition, a relocated and redesigned Mount Rushmore monument features
then-President Jimmy Carter. According to Mills,107 this was his attempt to
show American kitsch culture at its most vulgar. Combined with dynamic
artwork and compelling stories, adding contemporary punk and political
imagery added to the storys attraction. However, The Cursed Earth is not
without its faults: there are, for example, occasional continuity and artistic
errors. Furthermore, some elements of the plot appear contrived.108 Overall
105
Like his infamous namesake, Abraham Lincolns assassin, President Booth betrayed the
republic, which was, in Dredds world, quite literally mans last, best hope of survival in
the postapocalyptic world.
106
Ezquerra claims that the look of the character pre-dated punk. See Jarman and Acton, 23.
It is also possible that the characters look was inuenced by the 1973 road movie Electra
107
Glide in Blue. Quoted in Jarman and Acton, 83.
108
For example, in the road movie Rain Man, scriptwriter Barry Morrow needed a reason why
the characters would have to drive across America rather than y. Morrow decided that
Raymond Babbit, an autistic savant, would be afraid of ying. In Rain Man, this plot device
is plausible. In The Cursed Earth story, however, little attempt is made to explain why the
protagonists do not y either all or most of the way to Mega-City Two. We are told that
the spaceports are under the control of plague-infected crazies and that there is a
Death Belt of debris in the atmosphere that somehow prevents ying in most areas of
the Cursed Earth ( Forbidden Fruit ). Obviously the journey could have been con-
siderably shortened if the rescue team had simply own to the gates of Mega-City Two
instead of travelling four thousand miles across a hostile wilderness.
532 Brian Ireland
though, The Cursed Earth is a success. This can be attributed to innovative
editorial decisions, inventive storylines and exciting artwork. The radical
decision to run the story over twenty-ve weeks was unheard-of for a weekly
British comic book. The artwork, featuring, for the rst time, coloured
double-page introductory panels, ranks among the best British comic art of
the period. The plot expanded Dredds narrow, one-joke character and
dened the Judge Dredd of today.109 Choosing the road genre character-
istics of Damnation Alley as a framework meant incorporating recurring
images and themes such as myths and symbols of the West, transformation
of identity, an appeal to youth culture, the antihero or villain as hero (in this
case, Spikes Harvey Rotten), the city-versus-frontier comparison, the heroic
quest, same-sex relationships (the buddy theme, in which women are ex-
cluded), and a contrast between Old World and New World values, which, in
this case, manifested itself in a story about a search for origins. In addition,
The Cursed Earth demonstrates that the road genre can encompass a great
variety of plots and situations as long as the aforementioned basic conven-
tions are retained. Beyond this, however, the story includes themes articu-
lated by Marx in The Machine in the Garden, such as the intrusion of modern
technology into the untouched land beyond the cities, and the contrasting
images of this land as either a new Eden or a howling wilderness.
Beginning in the 1950s with Henry Nash Smith,110 the myth and symbol
school of American studies posited that Americans had a common and un-
ique cultural tradition, and that inuential American archetypes can be found
both in the canon of American literature and in works of popular culture.
Americans, therefore, have a common origins story, featuring archetypal
images, ideas and themes, to which they can all refer (and in the case of
writers and artists, draw inspiration from). Marxs aforementioned Machine in
the Garden is a product of the myth and symbol school. How is it, then,
that non-Americans such as Mills can access this supposed origins story ?
Either the archetypes are also present in non-American cultures or the
myth and symbol explanation is incomplete or incorrect. The former ex-
planation is entirely plausible given the widespread exposure of American
culture through various media. Furthermore, the mythsymbol mode of
analysis has serious shortcomings : Bruce Kuklick is among its most promi-
nent detractors : he has criticized its methodological deciencies, in
109
110
Henry Nash Smith, Can American Studies Develop a Method ? , American Quarterly, 9
(1957), 197208. idem, Virgin Land : The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1950).
particular, calling the whole form of scholarship suspect. 111 In addition,
any attempt to assign common characteristics to a national group, or to
identify a shared popular consciousness, is fraught with diculties. This is
especially problematic when discussing hybrid, protean cultures such as the
United States.
It may, then, be possible to say that the narrative framework of this
story the road trip is responsible for the presence of themes which are
supposed to be inherently American in nature. The recurring road-genre
themes mentioned above are not necessarily innately American, but the
dominance of American culture in the areas of lm, television and literature
has resulted in widespread dissemination of peculiarly American road stories.
These stories may consciously or otherwise act as a template for non-
Americans. In the twisted road movie 112 Taxi Driver (1976) a character
named The Wizard states, You get a job, you become the job. This is the
classic existentialist position that humans dene their own reality, taken to
the extreme in another road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, where the obsessive
driver and his mechanic reject every human emotion as they attempt to meld
machine and man into the perfect driving experience. While those characters
welcomed the fusion, it is unlikely Dredds writers would feel the same
way about the fusion of American and British culture. Many of the stories
featured in 2000AD are about aspects of American culture and one could
argue that, in this respect, the comic reects a wider national view of the
United States. Concurrent with the so-called special relationship between
Britain and the United States the supposed common tradition and com-
mon culture there is also ambiguity of feeling. This is usually articulated by
reference to the changing roles of the two countries in the post-Second
World War period; that is, British resentment at the rise of the global
American superpower and, conversely, American unease about Britains
colonial past and class-based social system.
However, while the British may often express resentment at the pervasive
inuence of American culture, they are, at the same time, also fascinated and
attracted by it.113 Thus, in Dredds world, we are introduced to the peculiarity
of the League of Fatties, a civil rights group for the grossly overweight,
whose members are so obese they require a wheel underneath their belly to
move around; or we can visit Otto Sumps Ugly Clinic, where those too
111
Bruce Kuklick, Myth and Symbol in American Studies, American Quarterly, 24 (1972),
112
435450, 443. Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls, 143.
113
For a recent examination of the relationship between Britain and the United States see
Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Empire : The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship
(New York : Nation Books, 2004).
534 Brian Ireland
pretty for future standards of beauty can pay plastic surgeons to make
themselves less attractive. 2000AD readers were invited both to laugh at the
eccentricities of Americans and also to admire Dredds stern response to
their odd behaviour. Yet, for every time Dredd is depicted as the straitlaced
enforcer of normality, his writers also ensured that readers could identify
occasionally with Dredds victims, such as the aforementioned Chopper.
Dredds uninching belief in enforcing the letter of the law meant that he
was sometimes in on the joke, and at other times the butt of the joke, as,
unlike many readers, his rigid nature excluded him from identifying with the
attractive absurdity and random lunacy of both this future world and, by
extension, the United States of the late 1970s.
In The Cursed Earth Dredds British writers satirize American culture using
Dredd to expose the aws of contemporary society. In this respect, one
could argue that Dredd is, then, in the best tradition of sociological science
ction, extrapolate[ing] the future consequences of present circumstance
to encourage constructive activism in the present.114 However, while writers
may set out with one goal in mind, their creations sometimes evoke sur-
prising audience reactions. Dredd fans were both attracted to and repulsed
by his fascist tendencies. Given that Dredd was created, in part, as a response
to some of the more reactionary aspects of American culture to hold
Dredds fascist tendencies up to ridicule, for example Dredd is, in fact, a
polysemic gure who can be viewed variously as a gure of fear and loathing,
as an antihero, or as a hero/superhero. The unintended irony of The Cursed
Earth is that in addressing the contradictory nature of Britains relationship
with the United States using the generic road-movie concept, the writers
appear themselves to have internalized many myths and symbols usually
considered intrinsically American.
114
David Ketterer, The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American
Literature, in Mark Rose, ed., Science Fiction : A Collection Of Critical Essays (Englewood
Clis, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 148.

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Journal of American Studies, 43 (2009), 3, 497534 f Cambridge University Press 2009

Errand into the Wilderness :

Hells Angel of the open road. 36 According to George Christie, current

Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson argue, Historically the desert is a

beginning of the story Dredds group overcome natural obstacles such as a

ultra-conservative Dredd, Tweak also makes a wider point about Western

Mills states,104 I always have to know the history of everything, which is

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