Just returned from Serbia, now fighting off a cold and preparing for a ridiculously busy week.
The tower of a church adjoining the walls of Belgrade Fortress:
There was a street of restaraunts, half of which contained (after about 8:00 pm) wandering troupes of mostly-gypsy musicians, serenading the guests in the hope of tips, or payment for requests. A quick sketch:
An even quicker sketch, cut short by the guy on the left moving before I could properly draw his arm or guitar:
In the Balkans for a week. View from the window on the journey over.
Today we joined the in-laws for a trip to the Moravian town of Landshut, named Lanžhot by the locals (I’ve spelt it wrong on the sketches below). The village was celebrating the anniversay of the dedication of the church – essentially, the church’s birthday party.
The celebrations involved a lot of people in traditional festival clothes, or kroj, with groups arriving in different styles of dress over the course of the afternoon (presumably from other villages; and one group was Slovaks, Landshut being near the border). I did some sketches of the Landshut clothes (ignore the top middle, that’s Judge Dredd for last week’s post):
My sketches, however, do not do justice to the ladies’ dresses, and how far to the back they stick out, which is quite extreme. It is as if some woman, frustrated with constantly worrying “does this dress make my bum look big?”, had decided “you know what, to hell with that, I’m going to make a dress that makes my bum look huge. It will look like I’ve got the rear end of a hippo down there. And I will never worry about that question again.”
(There’s a photograph of traditional clothes at the top of the town website, if you’re curious.)
Judge Dredd:
I have not kept up on 2000AD and Judge Dredd for a while, something which I keep meaning to do something about.
Bradford C. Walker recently posted on Iconic Heroes, giving Dredd as an example. Ordinarily, describing Dredd as a hero is a bit dubious; but the linked definition fits exactly:
an iconic hero undertakes tasks … and changes the world, restoring order to it, by remaining true to his essential self.
Dredd is an iconic hero by this standard. He enforces the law, defends citizens from criminals, defends the city (sometimes the world) against external threats. Restoring and upholding order isn’t just what he does for a living, it’s his essential identity. He’s the embodiment of punitive justice, tough but fair (by his lights), incorruptible, and as implacable as the Terminator. But Dredd’s an edge case for this definition: the order which he imposes is that of a zero-tolerance police-state, with rampant surveillance and no respect for the rights and dignity of the individual. Iconic, but not really a hero. (In the 2012 movie – which Mr. Walker was primarily discussing – the dystopian aspects are not touched on much.)
Dredd is a totally over the top character, both in terms of badassery (as is common for action heroes) and in his dedication to the law, which frequently verges on parody – there’s a cover image I cannot find right now, in which a despairing citizen stands atop a high building ready to jump off; and from below, Dredd shouts “Don’t do it, citizen! Littering the streets is an offence!” Meanwhile, to counterbalance Dredd’s straight faced, matter-of-fact, jail-time-for-dropping-chewing-gum attitude to the law, Mega-City One is a complete madhouse. The citizens veer between quiet desperation and demented hedonism, and the writers have a lot of fun writing in the most insane future trends they can think of, with a poker-faced Dredd in the middle of it all ready to break heads and take names whenever anyone steps over the line.
The result is that Dredd can be an action hero, a villain, a straight man, or all three at once, according to the scriptwriter’s choice – not because he’s complex, but because he’s so simple. Add in the flexibility of the setting – it’s easy to work in social commentary or parody – and the possibilities for storytelling are endless. This, I think, is why he’s such a longlived character. He’s also curious in that he’s an iconic hero (see prior qualifications) who is expected to entertain and appeal to the id, while quietly appalling the superego. (In the early 2000’s, when a 2000AD strip compared UK home secretary Jack Straw to Judge Dredd, this was intended as – and understood as – savage criticism.)
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There is a curious feature of English Common Law which now exists more or less in vestigial form: the idea of a citizen’s arrest. Many countries have similar provisions; but if your legal tradition lacks it, it can sound absolutely bizarre that anyone can make an arrest. But in fact, in English legal tradition, the power of the police to arrest people grew out of the power of ordinary people to make arrests. The Peelian Principles of the London Police include the remarkable statement that the Police are
to maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
Just as anyone may grow a plant in their garden, but farmers devote themselves to growing plants full-time, so anyone may enforce the law, but police dedicate themselves to doing that full-time.
Over time things have drifted from this noble intention. The situation in England, Britain, and most countries with any English Common Law roots, is that the police can use greater force to arrest, and have less legal liability on arresting the wrong man, than your average member of the public. They’re also more free to carry weapons. The average English bobby is not all that militarised but the process has begun (I gather in some parts of America things are further along, but that’s a more heavily armed society). Ginning up excuses to arrest people for questioning the actions of the police is also not exactly a Peelian approach but where there’s power, there’s abuse of power.
Megacity One and the Judges are a kind of nightmare vision of what happens if you totally ditch Peel’s principles: a hypermilitarised police, indistinguishable from an army, and a citizenry that has very little legal right to defend itself or complain. If you told Dredd about Peel’s ideas he’d respond with total incomprehension. He believes that there’s no better alternative to the Judges because there’s way too much chaos; at one point, he supported a public referendum on whether MC1 should continue to be run by the Judges, or should become a democracy, because he was so sure that the citizens would understand this. (The city voted to keep the Judges.) And what would happen in Megacity One if you gave the citizens the right to make arrests, I dread to think.
Dredd’s belief in the necessity of the Judges actually makes a lot of sense in its context: namely, that of a fictional world where the script-writers have spent decades throwing a never-ending parade of war, crisis, and megadeath at him and his city. The same way soap opera characters never have stable relationships because of the need for new drama, Megacity 1 has had to face nuclear war, nuclear terrorists, robot uprisings, Dark Judges… Any human society that faced all that would be lucky to survive, and if it did, it would end up in a state of total chaos, or a constant state of martial law to contain the chaos – which, more or less, is what the Judges are. Seriously, liberal democracy is not on the cards for that place until the writers let them have a decade or two of peace.
(I understand that over 95% of the city’s population has been wiped out since I stopped reading – co-creater John Wagner wanted to retire from writing Dredd and decided to go out with a bang…)
From the city once known as Wirtzipurgk, two drawings. Usually I sketch without using a pencil, but I abandoned my normal discipline this time.
The inside of the Franziskanerkirche, drawn after Mass.
The Neubaukirche, as seen from our apartment window (the top bit does not look that wonky in real life, as you might guess).
inadaptation 