Judge Dredd: A Better World

by Rob Williams, Arthur Wyatt, Henry Flint (artist)

A Better World is a modern Judge Dredd classic, a powerful story focusing on a large-scale experiment with the aim of making Mega-City One a better place for the citizens who live there, but if the experiment is successful them the power of the Judges could well be destroyed.


Writers Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt, with artist Henry Flint, craft a taut political thriller that challenges readers to reassess what they think of the world of Judge Dredd.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction, Action

144 pages, Paperback

Published February 25, 2025

Reviews

[Peter Baran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jumping into a story collection (even if it is a discrete story) in Dredd's timeline requires a little bit of adjustment as to what level of destruction and recent disaster Mega City One is rebounding from. Nevertheless this story of a Judge Accountant crunching the numbers, and realising that you get a better return for your Justice buck by increasing education in a sector than paying for more judges. It boils down to a much too quick fix in the Sector she manages, and is obviously undermined from within to maintain its still salient satire. And its nice to see Dredd at least part convinced by her has a straight shooter (and this being Dredd, and despite the philosophical economic underpinnings of the story, there is a lot of straight shooting).

[Alex Sarll]

Dredd was never meant to be a pro-violent policing strip, so it was a surprise how badly prequel Dreadnoughts fumbled dovetailing its established future with rising anti-police discourse in the present. A Better World, on the other hand, was excellent, Accounts Judge Maitland crunching the numbers and realising that maybe a little more education and a bit less jackboot might actually reduce crime. Of course, a lot of people are invested in the way things already run, and it's easy for them to paint her unflinching pragmatism as impractical idealism - and, if that doesn't work, put a finger on the scales. It could happily have run twice the length, but it was still a high point even in an era when Dredd has been doing pretty consistently well.

[Nicholas Karlsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, depressing and good people dying. This is a story on the same level as AMERICA. Excellent read.

[Paul Spence · Rating 3 out of 5]

For years the Judge system has ruled Mega-City One harshly, enforcing justice as they see it, but with an iron hand ensuring even well-intentioned citizens are guilty of something. However, it’s a never ending cycle, and what with the city-wide disasters constantly requiring massive rebuilding allocations, how can the budgets be balanced in the long term? Financial officer Judge Maitland has been running the numbers and she has the solution, except no-one’s going to like it. If money is diverted to education and social betterment, in the long term crime will greatly decrease. Should this experiment proceed across the city? It’s the thread running throughout this collection.

Boo Cook’s neat, but eccentrically pale coloured art introduces the topic, a fair contrast with the following wilder style of Jake Lynch (sample art left), whose exaggerations are suited to the collection of weirdos introduced. His Dredd is fine, but Maitland under Lynch is alternately wild-eyed and plain wild. Henry Flint’s art is constantly evolving (sample art right) and he moves away from standard Dredd storytelling by using many small panels on a page, telling the story via facial expressions accompanying text. He’s on a sticky wicket with Dredd on that basis, but the system works even with the action moments, where Flint will occasionally expand a panel to half a page. While the style is very different, the technique brings to mind Howard Chaykin’s work on American Flagg!, and look out for a fine page of visual metaphor.

A further complication is that Maitland’s actions in Regicide impacted massively on a crime syndicate, and they’re out for revenge, which occupies the second collaboration between Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt. They follow a tried and true narrative procedure of first introducing a selection of eccentric, yet seemingly invincible assassins, then set them loose in a fragile location, in this case the tunnel beneath the Atlantic ocean.

The two plot threads then merge in the epic nine chapters of the title story. With Flint propelling the action and selling the subtlety, Williams and Wyatt explore both the political and street level ramifications of Maitland’s idea. Many within the system are opposed, and there’s the opportunity to take a dig at slanted rabble rousing masquerading as news commentary personified by TV host Robert Glenn, who readers know is being fed information by a Judge.

Readers used to what happens in Mega-City One over the years can root for Maitland and hope this is an exception leading to better times, while those less versed in Dredd and his world will have greater optimism. Either way, it’s a thriller with the epilogue pages setting up the consequences, which means Williams and Wyatt aren’t finished and there’s going to be more to come. Good.

[Artur Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

De vez em quando, a cultura pop surpreende com a visceralidade com que aborda temas delicados. Sabemos que Judge Dredd é uma das mais mal interpretadas metáforas sobre o fascismo autoritário. O futuro das megacities não é uma visão a aspirar, nem a justiça de Dredd sequer justa. A metáfora dilui-se imenso no uso que é dado ao personagem, muitas vezes em tom de policial e heroísmo futurista. Há séries que escapam, e esta foi uma delas. Foca-se numa Juiz que é essencialmente uma administradora, responsável pela contabilidade do departamento de justiça que governa Mega City 1. E que, nas suas contas e simulações, percebe que o investimento linear em mais forças, em reforço da segurança repressiva, tem como efeito o aumento do crime e insegurança. Se os recursos são priorizados para estas áreas, outras, como a educação e o bem estar dos cidadãos, deterioram-se e as pessoas reovltam-se. Percebendo isto, a Juiz avança com um projeto experimental que melhora as condições de vida de um dos bairros da cidade. Um projeto mal visto pelos poderes tradicionais, que se aliam aos media sensacionalistas para denegrir e pintar uma falsa imagem do projeto, enquanto conspiram para assassinar a Juiz que trabalha para construir um mundo realmente melhor. E, sendo o mundo de Mega City 1 uma distopia, serão bem sucedidos. A metáfora sobre os dias de hoje é palpável. Rendidos ao canto da sereia do populismo, estamos a deixar que as nossas condições de vida piorem para favorecer oligarquias plutocráticas, enquanto achincalhamos aqueles que nos mostram como é realmente possível melhorar o mundo.

[Aiden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful story exploring the politics and economics of the Mega-City. Idealism meets fascism in what is essentially a political thriller.

Henry Flint’s artwork takes this to the next level. Adopting the punishing 16-panel grid of Millar’s Dark Knight allows him to depict the story in granular detail. He is the pre-eminent Dredd artist of the last decade and this is his finest work to date.

[Armando Miličević · Rating 4 out of 5]

The “Defund the Police” movement finally reaches Mega-City One, with Judge Maitland, one of the Justice Department’s long-time accountants, deciding to run some figures and prediction models and coming to the conclusion that the city’s massive law enforcement budget would yield greater results if it were allocated to education and social services instead. Who knew? Needless to say, this is not received very well by anyone, although she is begrudgingly granted oversight of one sector in which to test her theory. Reprinting all nine installments that appeared in the weekly “2000AD” magazine between January and March of 2024, along with a couple of shorter stories dating back to 2020 that attempted to reflect the real-world street protests happening in the US that summer, and in which the seeds of Maitland’s dissatisfaction with the nature of policing were first sown, this collection isn’t quite the instant classic that it’s billed as in some circles (too broad in its handling of a complex issue, too briskly paced, too bound by format restrictions), but it’s an equal parts entertaining and infuriating diversion that proves that this British institution still possesses plenty of cultural relevance, despite the fact that its satirical elements have been almost entirely replaced with a more straight-faced sincerity in recent years, and its protagonist recast as one of the few, well, not “good” cops, but… least bad ones, I guess? But really, what choice do you have when the absurdity of real life catches up to fiction and that satirical lens essentially becomes a mirror? I was going to rate this three stars, but the gritty textures and lived-in feel of Henry Flint’s art bumped it up to three and a half.

[Amal Albaqshi · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of a messy read. I didn’t enjoy this one that much. A lot of the art was distracting and unclear. Even though the story had political depth, I didn’t feel like the message was delivered in the best way possible.

[James Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Better World is both sad and accurate. It captures the heartbreak of trying to fix a broken system, only to be met with resistance from the very people who benefit from the status quo. It’s a rare Dredd story that dares to hope—and then reminds us why hope is so fragile in Mega-City One.

[Sem · Rating 5 out of 5]

A somber examination of how our own world could be improved and why it always seems to fail, wrapped in amazing art and action sequences, some of the best stories I've seen from 2000AD so far.