A new Year One comic book series hits newsstands today. IDW Publishing, who now holds the comic book license to the Judge Dredd franchise once held by DC Comics and originally published in the UK in 1977, begins anew with Judge Dredd’s earliest days in Issue #1 of Judge Dredd Year One, released today and previewed here at borg.com below.
It’s the year 2080 and twenty-three juveniles “juves” begin exhibiting strange “psi-powers” or psychic abilities. First a teenage boy becomes angry and is able to levitate. A baby begins controlling toys and making them float in mid-air. A street thug spirits a man off the roof of a building. And on the “Larry Hagman Freeway” (in Dallas, Texas, I presume) Judge Dredd first appears in hot pursuit. And another child emerges with strange powers of telekinesis.
, everyone has climbed aboard to use the Year One tag to sell copies. Many times the Year One is not an origin story but a random early story that fails to satisfy readers’ expectations. A successful twist on the Year One was Andy Diggle and Jock’s 
, but there’s also been 
, 
and 
, 
and 
, and even 
. It’s not only DC Comics who has cornered the market on Year One titles. We reviewed Howard Chaykin’s well done 
and a 
. This week Matt Wagner, writer of Dynamite Comics’s 
, takes on the 1920s-1930s masked crimefighter The Shadow in The Shadow: Year One. The first issue of Wagner’s Year One creation kicks off the better side of Year One stories.
