The pacing of the overall story seems strange, too: the 'Dredd gets sentenced to Titan' thread has promise (I gather that Wagner went back to that well shortly before 'Wilderlands,' 15 years or so later), and gives Bolland a chance to recapitulate McMahon's indelible image of Rico's altered face, but Wagner doubles back from that possibility very quickly.

So there are some bumpy transitions between episodes-the second one ends with Cal revealing to Judge Quincy that he's captured Dredd and has him in a crate, the third begins with a splash-page image of Dredd fighting Dredd ('It's a fight I can't win! How can I kill myself ?'-yes, that's just the kind of Silver Age-ism Brendan McCarthy has to have loved drawing), then cuts to the manhunt for Dredd, and eventually gets around to showing us that Cal's got a Dredd robot, without actually explaining that that was the one in the crate. But those possibilities mostly get lost: the Tweak sequence is as hamhanded a commentary on the U.S.'s legacy of slavery as anyone could devise, and at some point Mills seems to have decided 'screw it, I haven't written about dinosaurs eating people in weeks.' (To be fair: this stuff was written for eleven-year-old British boys, not aging American aesthetes.) There's a hint of that in some chapters-the moment we get out of the Meg, we're instantly in a town called Deliverance, McMahon's image for 'General Blood 'n' Nuts' is fantastic, and Wagner's lost 'Burger Wars' sequence gets at Americans' ridiculous obsession with brand identities a little bit. So the 'road trip across the country' format should yield lots of opportunities for satirizing bits of America that the feature can't get to when it's got a (mega-)urban setting.

That brings up the big lost opportunity in 'The Cursed Earth.' Judge Dredd, as I tend to tell people I'm trying to describe it to, is (among other things) a smart, vicious satire of American culture by British people.

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