Brit-Cit - Depiction

Depiction

Brit-Cit has contradictory depictions depending on who is writing. Under Dave Stone, Brit-Cit was considerably fleshed out and there was much focus on institutional corruption; John Wagner, who originally created Brit-Cit, has ignored this in his Dredd stories and has the Justice Department as being more like Mega-City One's. When Dredd visited Brit-Cit in "Doomsday", instead of the Star Chamber we saw a Chief Judge and a large governing body in an open assembly room. For the most part, this can be explained away as Dredd looking at Brit-Cit from a different angle to Armitage. When Brit-Cit Judges have been used by other writers ("Regime Change" by Gordon Rennie, "Splashdown" by Simon Spurrier), they tend to follow the Wagner model. One other minor divergence is that the Royal Family lack any political status in Brit-Cit in Armitage, whereas For King and Country presents the Royal Family as the constitutional heads of Brit-Cit.

Brit-Cit has appeared several times in the Big Finish 2000AD audio dramas. Both the Stone & Wagner versions Brit-Cit justice were used in the Dredd audio play Get Karter!, while For King And Country uses elements from the Armitage strips (the Forbidden Citadel and Star Chamber) while portraying the Brit-Cit Justice Department as mainly effective.

The origin of Justice Department and Brit-Cit's history is also contradictory. Dave Stone's version was that Brit-Cit was a "global irrelevance" by the time of the Atomic Wars and only faced fall-out rather than a direct assault as it wasn't worth bombing; Justice Department only existed after the fallout and resulting civil war, and was created solely by organised crime for aid. "Hardly anyone else on the job agrees with me."

Indeed, it has been contradicted by other Brit-Cit stories - Meet Darren Dead (Megazine #240) and Wagner's "Judge Dredd: Origins" both show Brit-Cit being bombed during the war (Darren Dead refers to the city almost being annihilated). Darren Dead indicates that there were no Judges in existence pre-War (the titular character is unfamiliar with them after missing the years 2070-2127), in line with Armitage, though "Origins" states the Judge System was already in its infancy in the 2050s (albeit never stating it had reached Britain).

Cal-Hab has had multiple cameo appearance's in the stories of Wagner and Alan Grant, nearly all of which are played for laughs and which focus on Scottish humour. Jim Alexander's Cal-Hab Justice, on the other hand, was often quite grim and focused on political allegories for mid-90s Scottish issues; the city-state was also shown to be under heavy Brit-Cit control. Gordon Rennie's "Judge Dredd: Tartan Terrors" (#1540) played Cal-Hab for laughs but in a slightly more aggressive manner, such as introducing penny-pinching as a Cal-Habber trait (an old Scottish stereotype); it also referred to Cal Hab as having political independence for a century. In the letters page for #1547, editor Matt Smith (via Tharg the Mighty) openly admitted that Gordon Rennie was ignoring Cal-Hab Justice. Cal-Habbers are also shown to have virtually indecipherable accents (especially heard in the Big Finish audio story - Jihad)

Murphyville and its Judges have mostly been seen in stories by their creator Garth Ennis, who used them to play with Irish political issues and stereotypes for comedic purposes. An exception was the Dredd story "Crusade" (by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar), which had an Irish Judge secretly working with a Vatican Judge-Inquisitor.

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