Over on BD Online, the architect’s website, Rory Olcayto has a look at architecture in comics, discussing the super-metropolis of Mega City One, home to 2000 AD’s iron lawman of the future, Judge Dredd:
“Imagine a place the size of a hundred Londons, one that spreads across the entire eastern seaboard of America, and you’ll capture the scale of the fictional city that has been ‘masterplanned’ by writer John Wagner and ‘built’ by artists such as Carlos Ezquerra, Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland over the past thirty years. Imagine a city where prisons are located on traffic islands at the centre of a vast highway complex on which computer controlled lorries hurtle by at 200mph; where there’s only one building left where smoker can light up – the ‘Smokatorium’ – and where the Statue of Liberty is dwarfed by the Statue of Judgement.”
(visiting scenic Mega City One? Don’t miss a trip to the Statue of Judgement!)
The visualisations of future cities seen in comics and films is a source of endless fascination, from the Big Meg to Cassiday’s first glimpse of the then-futuristic skyline of early 20th century New York when he arrives in America in Preacher and from Metropolis in the 20s to Blade Runner’s future LA in the 80s. Mega City One has changed and evolved over Dredd’s 30-year history, with new stories revealing new parts of the city (or sometimes, as in the Apocalypse War, removing entire areas of the city) but right from the start, long before the imaginary city grew and Dredd became the iconic British comic character he would become, a very simple visual sequence established the gargantuan scale of MC-1, when we see a crumbling, semi-derelict Empire State Building below the spiraling roads which curve miles above the ground seemingly without support. This symbol of 20th century modernity and aspiration is now dwarfed by the Mega City, overshadowed (literally) and ignored, now a place for down and outs and fugitive lawbreakers to hole up in; in a few economic panels something of the scale of Dredd’s domain was established, right there in a way a modern reader could understand. A handful of years into Dredd’s existence and we saw the Undercity – long before Futurama we had our glimpse of an old New York, buried beneath a rockcrete sky, the foundation for the Mega City above, constructed when the old city became too polluted.
(From Dredd’s early days, now the opening strip of the first volume of the Complete Judge Dredd Case Files, (C) Rebellion)
Actually, you could argue this visualisation of Mega City One goes back even before the beginning, when early art experiments by Carlos Ezquerra came back not only with ideas of how the Judge’s appearance should be but came back with backgrounds of a vast city with soaring ’starscrapers’ and curving roads running between the tall structures – the Judge’s city. Good writers like Pat Mills and John Wagner picked up on this and very soon the city itself – and its vast and often crazy population of citizens – would pretty much become a character in and of itself, with other artists – starting with the great Mike McMahon onwards – following Ezquerra’s original vision of the city and building on it. I wonder why it is that we continue to be so fascinated by imaginary places, from Plato’s description of Atlantis in antiquity to Borges in the mid 20th century or even Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris today; places where we can project our ideals of a better world, or our fears of a more disturbed and darker place or – more intoxicatingly – where a good storyteller can take such spaces and use them as a canvas to mix our best hopes and worst fears. If there are a thousand stories in the naked city then there must be an infinite amount of tales in the imaginary city. The first part of Rory’s “Travels in Toon Town” where he explains how his interest in architecture was awakened by the depictions of cities in comics like 2000AD, From Hell and Watchmen can be found on the BD site here or via this link Rory himself kindly suppled.
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