Judge Dredd Mega Collection – issue 3 – 18th February 2015 – includes preview pages

Judge Dredd
Mega Collection
Published by Hachete & Rebellion

Issue 3
Apocalypse War
18th February 2015

Available in UK & Ireland only
In Stores £9.99

A word on Subscription. If you subscribed and haven’t received issues 2 & 3 yet don’t panic. Hachette are sending issues out in batches to save costs and keep postage free. They also don’t intend sending two batches to subscribers too close together to prevent charging twice in one month. Yes personally I’d prefer to get up to date first, after all the first payments added up are less than the subsequent months; Issue 1 £1.99 + Issue 2 & 3 £6.99 totaling £8.98 (subscribers get one issue free).

New Subscribers, I’d advise you to buy this issue in store & subscribe now from Issue 4 (Origins) you avoid the delays that would be caused by starting at a current or past issue.

Apocalypse War is one of the early mega-epics, spanning 26 issues. It tells of an invasion of Mega-City One by East-Meg One. The first story in this volume is however Block Mania, which ran for 9 episodes. The six preview pages below are the first episode of that story.

Though this volume is smaller than the originals the pages are in the original ratio. However all colour double spreads are presented in black and white. I’m reviewing from a Pdf, electronic versions are not for sale and in this version the images are trimmed due to guttering issues, I’ve been told by readers from the test release that the double spreads look fine in the books.

Block Mania deals with one of the many problems that the densely populated Mega-City One suffers. At times rivalries between neighbouring city Blocks of unemployed citizens can spill out in to extreme violence, a Block War. Each Block has a Citi-Def unit so even without illegal weapons there is plenty of ordinance on hand. So when two Blocks go to war, it gets messy.

In this story, seemingly unrelated, numerous Block Wars break out throughout the city. This is however a plot by East-Meg One. Following the confusion of Block Mania the East-Meg tanks roll.

This was far reaching in its day with swathes of the city wiped out. It also served to show just how far Dredd would go to protect his city.

There is a short article by Michael Molcher at the end of the book explaining the fallout from this story through the years. The reach is far indeed.

Block Mania introduced the East-Meg spy Orlok, you can read more about him in my article Who is Orlok. Similarly there is more about Judge Giant in my article Who is Judge Giant?. There are spoilers for Block Mania in both those articles.