smith, steven :: 2000ad: Judge Anderson

Judge Anderson, 2000ad Annual 1990, page 41

Artist: mick austin (All)

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Judge Anderson, 2000ad Annual 1990, page 41 Comic Art

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Page 1 (of 9) of Alan Grant's script

Colour guide

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Artwork Details

Title:	Judge Anderson, 2000ad Annual 1990, page 41
Artist:	mick austin (All)
Media Type:	Pen and Ink
Art Type:	Title Page
For Sale Status:	NFS
Views:	1,112
Likes on CAF:	0 1
Comments:	0
Added to Site:	8/28/2013
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Description

“Confessions of a She-Devil” only makes sense if it’s read as an affectionate and light-hearted parody by Alan Grant of one of 2000ad’s other greatest writers.

In the first panel of page one, Mick Austin, one of first artists to avoid “pin-up Anderson”, colours Anderson’s quarters with a blue wash. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, Austin tips the hat to Ian Gibson’s belief that the erstwhile Anderson was not a “genuine female character”. Secondly, Austin achieves this by swathing her in a colour that corporate marketing since the 1950s has turned into the Western societal norm for baby boys to be dressed in, eradicating earlier traditions, some of which would have been Celtic. But if you are about to rise from your chair and applaud Austin for depicting gender expectations and the evils of capitalism in a single panel, stay seated, please, for Austin’s work here is not yet done. The prominent empty glass represents a Zen koan in which a university professor visits a Zen master to learn about Zen philosophy. The Zen master pours tea and keeps pouring until the cup begins to overflow. The professor then says, “The cup is overfull. No more will go in,” to which the Zen master replies, “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?” Austin, here, is putting on a clinic: gender, corporate greed and its displacing of tradition with money-driven false tradition, plus Eastern mysticism in the one panel. We are indeed privileged to be witnessing this.

A glancing interpretation of panel two shows Anderson dreaming of a hetero-normative encounter with a man from Mills and Boon’s central casting -- he’s tall, dark, handsome, Italianate -- but the subtext that Anderson is not a genuine female character subverts this and we therefore behold one of the first homosexual embraces in 2000ad’s history. Note how Austin avoids ugly nudge-nudge stereotyping: their embrace is portrayed as tender; non-cisgendered; their desire real. Panel two also shows Anderson’s proverbial cup emptying: pink replaces the blue as it drains away and Anderson begins to become a female character for the first time. You will of course notice that this change is top-down and not bottom-up: Grant here is signalling that he will be using deductive reasoning to break down Dredd’s universe in order to educate us of problems that we face in reality today. Note, too, that both characters’ heads are against a pink background and their bodies against a blue one -- Anderson’s dream lover represents the faux male feminist: a man who declares himself a feminist but only if he gets to define what feminism is; that is, the belief that it’s a man’s job to tell a woman what feminism is and that she should make him a sandwich while he does it.

In panels three, four and five, Anderson has become female and has broken free of the gender constraints imposed upon her. Moreover, her dream lover is confronted by a form of feminism that he objects to; that is, it’s defined by a woman, not him. His snakeskin of faux feminism is then sloughed and the “sexist pig” he always was comes to the fore to impose his vision of feminism upon Anderson. A hail of bullets from stage right saves Anderson and she awakens from her dream with a jolt.

In panels six and seven, Grant subverts the “it was all a dream” trope. Anderson is once more “blue”, unfemale. She sits alone and confused in bed -- but she has had a dream. Not just any dream; *a* dream. Grant here is intentionally unsubtle -- he references Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech calling for freedom and equality -- which seems tautological given the foregoing but sometimes a writer just has to make his point with a hammer to the forehead of the reader, but this is, lest we forget, the entire purpose of this parody; its heavy handedness.

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	s smith
Joined:	September 2012
Last Login:	April 2025
Country:	UNITED KINGDOM
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