Last week, 3 US states– California, Washington, and Oregon– announced a new offer. Known as the Western States Pact, the agreement essentially integrated the 3 entities into a West Coast super state for the functions of dealing with Covid-19 and collaborating efforts to potentially reboot their economies. For politicians wanting to assist their citizens cope, it seemed like an appealing idea, a lot so that states on the nation’s East Coast are planning a similar alliance. For longtime readers of Judge Dredd, the serial from the pages of UK sci-fi anthology comic 2000 AD, it also seemed quite familiar. The Western States Pact is essentially Mega-City Two, the sister metropolitan area to Mega-City One, the massive city area of the Dredd comics that extends from Maine to Florida and as far west as Ohio.
This circumstances of truth mirroring sci-fi isn’t a rarity for Judge Dredd, which has actually demonstrated an astonishing capability to forecast the future over the last four years. Dredd, for instance, introduced the idea of a dinosaur amusement park back in 1978, years before the 1993 movie Jurassic Park or the 1990 unique on which it was based. That’s far from the point of Dredd— which was created, and still operates, as an action experience strip with satirical subtext– but however, the present truth of life in the US has now reached a point where the nation’s best imaginary allegory is a British comic strip about America’s future a hundred-plus years from now.
The resemblances do not stop there. The 2006-2007 story “Origins,” which commemorated Dredd‘s 30 th anniversary, laid out how America went from the United States to a nation of Mega-Cities. What took place? Well, the nation eventually fell into fa