The bleak desert setting also serves as a fine counterpoint to Ezquerra’s decrepit urban landscapes in the Mega-City. Koburn is the absolute antithesis of Dredd, a scruffy, laconic iconoclast who doesn’t do anything by the same book that Dredd himself lives by, but nevertheless gets the intended result. The nine episodes of this series close out this collection. Koburn, a Dreddworld reincarnation of Ezquerra’s old “Major Eazy” character from Battle Picture Weekly, got a short spinoff series in the Judge Dredd Megazine after the success of this story.
In a wonderfully funny two part story called Sturm and Dang, Rennie introduces a former judge named Koburn who was demoted to frontier duty in the wildlands outside the city, and then incapacitates Dredd to act as Koburn’s straight man. Gordon Rennie understands Dredd’s character more than Ennis does, and his episodes are considerably more successful.
Wagner and Ezquerra also team up for The Girlfriend, a tragic little tale which shows that the wealthier citizens of the future can purchase lifelike robot companions, and that the foolish citizens of Mega-City One will treat them as terribly as they do eachother. You can almost hear the schoolboy chuckle from its writer, John Wagner, on every page. However, Ezquerra occasionally gets to tackle a one-off, such as the incredibly silly Phartz episode about gaseous aliens.
Ezquerra is most often reserved for the more important Dredd episodes which advance the ongoing storylines, such as those already compiled in Rebellion’s Brothers of the Blood and Origins. The editors must have had a difficult time in choosing the material in the book. Most of the episodes are from the last six years, but the book also has room for The Taking of Sector 123, a two-parter from 1992. This volume includes five Dredd adventures of varying lengths, and several from the spin-off Cursed Earth Koburn. A third, spotlighting Henry Flint, is anticipated in the spring. Judge Dredd: The Carlos Ezquerra Collection is the second of Rebellion’s artist-centred volumes, following a Cam Kennedy book from last year.
His depiction of Dredd’s world as a violent, crumbling metropolis, sirens always audible somewhere in the distance, behind one mile-high city block or another, is bleak, powerful, and for many readers, the definitive one. His thick, prominent foreground linework with blobby inks immediately pulls the reader’s eyes towards his gruff, powerful heroes, and his use of overstated body language to convey emotion is unsurpassed. Judge Dredd: The Carlos Ezquerra CollectionBy Carlos Ezquerra, John Wagner, Garth Ennis, Gordon Rennie and Henry FlintPublisher: Rebellion.ISBN-10: 1905437358ISBN-13: 978-1905437351When it comes to depicting the violent, mean streets of Mega-City One, nobody draws them meaner than Judge Dredd’s co-creator Carlos Ezquerra.
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