Broadly speaking, there are five or six types of Judge Dredd story. The Apocalyptic (Necropolis, The Apocalypse War), The Goofy Crime of the Week (most Case Files filler stories), The Crime Thriller (The Pit, America), The Conspiracy (The Small House), Judge Death (anything with Judge Death) and Dredd Takes A Holiday (The Cursed Earth, Book of the Dead). Even then, the average Dredd story refuses to be pigeonholed, often spanning several sub-genres within the same story. The soon to be re-released Origins, for example, in which Dredd takes a trip to the Cursed Earth (again) only to uncover yet another massive Mega City conspiracy.
John Wagner and Colin MacNeil’s Guatemala is smaller in scale than that, but not without its Dredd-shattering implications. Chief Judge Hershey is dying, stricken with an incurable virus. On her death bed, she sends Dredd on a diplomatic mission to far-flung Guatemala, and into a meeting with robo-dictator El Presidente. On the surface, anyhow. Dredd’s really there to carry out Hershey’s last request – a mission far shadier than mere trade relations between dictatorships.
With Wagner writing (an increasingly rare event), readers can be sure that Guatemala will have its consequences. This collection (which also includes the short stories Private Contract, Get Jerry Sing, The Trouble with Harry and The Victims of Bennett Beeny) picks up threads from the Mechanismo saga, America and even The Day the Law Died. One of the character’s strongest assets is his rolling continuity, meaning that there’s a deep and rich history to almost everything Dredd does at this point.
But, even on a surface level, the story of Dredd overthrowing a robot dictator is rollicking good fun. El Presidente is a great villain; the robot-run state of Guatemala proving that there’s still plenty of Dredd’s world left to explore, even now, forty years after his creation. This collection spans several subgenres of Dredd, from the relatively serious to the ridiculous. By contrast, The Victims of Bennett Beeny is a more serious action thriller, and a sequel to America. Which leaves By Private Contract as the odd one out, as a ridiculous Strontium Dog crossover (!) with a surprising but altogether too broad villain. This story and Get Jerry Sing are perhaps most notable for being the last work of Dredd co-creator and legend Carlos Ezquerra, ending the collection on a sombre note, despite the stories’ amusing nature. Also featuring the work of 2000AD legends Henry Flint and Dan Cornwell, this is a wonderful-looking collection of Dredd stories; a creative team at the top of their game.
Like many a Dredd book, Guatemala runs a tonal gamut, wishing a teary goodbye to a legend one moment while cheerily (for Dredd, anyway) chumming with mutant bounty hunters the next. This shouldn’t work at all, let alone within the very same book. It’s testament to the power of Wagner and Ezquerra’s creation that it does.
