Judge Dredd: The Megazine, issue 311, page 8

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a website wishing to host good comic art must be in need of Brendan McCarthy’s work.

Mr. McCarthy illustrated some great Dredd stories in the 1980s – Atlantis, Riders on the Storm, Oz, etc – and his work always seethed with creativity and energy and combined a wonderful sense of otherness, weirdness and psychedelia with an eye for detail, coherent storytelling and character/cityscape/technology design.

It was a shame that he didn’t illustrate another Dredd story for about 20 years—“[he] just popped out to get some milk and got waylaid”—but his second story upon his return was a corker. Dredd gets bitten by a zombie in the Cursed Earth and needs to get back to Mega City One before the change becomes permanent. And you get all the McCarthy trimmings: giant mutant spider steeds, the flared helmets, the landscapes, the prominent onomatopoeias, bonkers stuff like Dredd eating a spider’s brain – all that and more.

I’ve been looking for a Dredd page by Mr. McCarthy for quite some time and would pathetically press my face up against other people’s CAF galleries and make strange mewling noises between the sobs. But now— But now I can pick myself up and get on with the rest of my life knowing that my McCarthy itch has been thoroughly scratched.

Published in issue 311 of Judge Dredd: The Megazine, dated 21st June 2011. There’s an entertaining commentary on this story at The Tearoom of Despair (http://tearoomofdespair.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/consider-some-more-mccarthy-dredd.html)