Preview: ‘Judge Dredd: Regicide’ – Thrills, Spills, Action, Intrigue… All By The Numbers

by Richard Bruton

Orlok the Assassin and La Reine Rouge have Dredd and Maitland in their sights in Judge Dredd: Regicide, this latest Judge Dredd collection and an absolute modern classic…

Regicide is a rather fabulous collection of recent Judge Dredd strips by writers Arthur Wyatt and Rob Williams, with art mostly by the quite brilliant Dredd artist Jake Wyatt, collecting together a series of Dredds from both the Progs and the Megazine from 2019 to 2022.

When they were happening in the comics, a storyline here, a storyline there, you knew it was all connected and had a sense of epic scale, but now that it’s all collected together as one it’s become a thing of absolute brilliance.

It all stems, as the handy ‘story so far’ recap points out, from Accounts Judge Maitland and her absolutely dogged pursuit of Justice. In this case, she’s followed the numbers to the massive Euro-Crime syndicate of La Reine Rouge (The Red Queen).

So… with all that in mind, we plough on into the Regicide collection, running to six stories, all of them connected, all of them involving Maitland (and Dredd) hunting down the Red Queen – but will the Red Queen hunt them down first?

And quite simply, this one’s got the lot. There’s intrigue and cat-and-mouse espionage stuff, theres Mega-City and Dreddworld politics, and there’s plenty of all-out action. In The Red Queen and her Orlok clones (The Red Prince) we have formidable villains, but Wyatt and Williams go even further and really ramp things up on the villain front with The Hard Way, filling the rogue’s gallery with some wonderfully off the wall freaks and weirdos, very much in the classic Dredd fashion.

As the stories go by, the stakes get higher and higher, much to our enjoyment, with the Red Queen always slipping through Maitland and Dredd’s clutches, just like the grande Bond villain she really has become. And with Wyatt (and Williams) and Lynch moving the pieces around so well, it really does become a classic Dredd epic for modern times.

More to come of this one when I review it in a little while, but for now just settle back and enjoy an extended preview from the stories contained in Regicide. It’s an absolutely cracking Dredd that you really need to read and own.