MYTHCOMICS" THE MAD COMPUTER" (2000 A.D. #144, 1979)

There’s a special kind of irony that the most mythic Xmas-comic I’ve found thus far doesn’t actually take place in the holiday season.

From the near-totalitarian philosophical stance of ultimate lawman Judge Dredd, holidays are just one more potential wrench in the gears of a smooth-running Mega-City: one more sybaritic excuse for citizens to misbehave and thus incur judicial wrath. This week’s mythcomic, spawned by John Wagner and Mike McMahon, shows that such “libelous displays” (to quote from Lerner and Loewe) are so infectious that they can even spread their cheery poison to days that are not holy, and to beings that are not human, like the titular “Mad Computer.”

“Everyone loved Barney, and Barney loved everyone—until the day that Barney went haywire, and Christmas came a little early to the Des O’Connor Block!” It would be interesting to know why Wagner chose the name of “Barney” for Mega-City’s master computer. The famed Purple Dinosaur, the “Barney” best known for cloying affection, did not come into being until 1992, and earlier Barneys from THE FLINTSTONES and ANDY GRIFFITH don’t seem like probable inspirations. Computer-Barney, a vital instrument in the running of the city, is given a human face by his creators—two tape-reels that look like eyes and a big red-lipped, toothy grin pasted on the machine’s front. The story, being only six pages long, doesn’t state outright that Barney has gone “haywire” because humans make the mistake of humanizing a mechanical intelligence, but the “everyone loved Barney” line implies that this is the proximate origin of the chaos.

One day, Barney decides that the Christmas spirit shouldn’t be confined to one day of Mega-City’s year. The inhabitants of “Des O’Connor Block” are the only residents who get expensive gifts from the computer, possibly because these are the people the computer most often sees day-to-day. Further, the local school is damaged by Barney so that all of the kids will be out of school, and the computer sends special announcements to some residents, which notes give unto them false “good news,” like a widow being told that her husband is still alive. Barney tells all of the residents, “I want you to be happy, folks—an’ I’ve got the power to do it! Before long, I’m gonna make it Christmas in every cityblock! Christmas every day of the year!”

The Bard memorably wrote, “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.” Judge Dredd isn’t worried so much about tedium as the insupportability of eternal good cheer. Since he can’t immediately attack the computer, which threatens to cripple all of Mega-City, Dredd tries to reason with the runamuck mechanism. When Barney proclaims his gospel-- “The law’s no good if it don’t make folks happy”-- Dredd responds with the Voice of Experience:

It’s false happiness, Barney! You don’t understand people! Pretty soon the bubble is going to burst—then the Judges will have to clean up the mess!

And Dredd’s gospel is borne out. Given a false god who promises that all one’s wishes can be fulfilled, the residents of Des O’Connor Block begin to fight amongst themselves, and even to commit murder, despite Barney’s confused, futile protests: “You should be happy!” Finally the Judges charge in to restore order, and by then, Barney’s circuits have become scrambled by seeing the results of his irresponsible largesse. Faced with a mother whose little girl was trampled by crazed residents, Barney commits suicide by switching himself off, making it possible for the Judges to control the city once more. The story’s final dialogue conveys the ironical gospel of Dredd, which counters that of the Pale Galilean by stating that essentially “man WAS made for the Sabbath:”

JUDGE TELFER: We can’t give people happiness. The best we can do is good old law and order.

JUDGE DREDD: As far as I’m concerned, Telfer, happiness IS law and order.

NEAR MYTHS: STOCKING STUFFER #2

This Xmas season’s second and last near-myth comes from the same series as the forthcoming mythcomic: the venerable series British series Judge Dredd.

In the first “stocking stuffer,” I opined that good sentimentality doesn’t always make good mythicity. However, sardonic irony doesn’t always provide the Keys to the Kingdom of Myth, either.

This cover, first appearing for a 1987 American reprint., seems to sum up one of the primary themes of JUDGE DREDD: no free rides for the pleasure-principle while Dredd, the incarnation of the displeasurable reality-principle, is on duty. 

However, most of the stories collected in this Quality Comics reprint, JUDGE DREDD v. 2, #6, make only niggling use of Xmas elements. The only tale that even deserves the status of a near-myth is 1985's “A Merry Tale of the Chiistmas Angel.”

That said, “merry mix-up” would be a better title, since scripter John Wagner and artist Steve Dillon simply tossed together four loosely-related plot-threads involving the terminally addled citizens of the futuristic Mega-City. One, the least memorable, involves a performance of the Nativity by a troupe of actors with bad Italian accents. In the second, Dredd’s perpetual sparring-partner, the manic Mean Angel, is lobotomized in order to make him into a model citizen, and in the third, a Christmas-hating terrorist named Flymo takes the Nativity-performers hostage. Lastly, there’s a frame story that starts out by suggesting that the Judges of Mega-City are extending the hand of charity to the grotty mutants outside the city’s borders.

Regarding the first and third plots, Wagner doesn’t even bother developing them past functional status, with Dredd commenting, after Flymo’s demise, that they (and the readers) will never know why the terrorist had a mad-on against the holiday season. Mean Angel is always fairly amusing with her berserker-rages against the incarnation of law and order. However, in symbolic terms the best part of this thread doesn’t involve the battle of hero and villain, but a comical bit where Mean receives a Christmas package containing a “Dredd-in-the-box”—which gift inadvertently helps break down the savage thug’s conditioning. As for the frame story, I’ll just say that it’s sort of plot that insures that JUDGE DREDD, despite its adventurous aspects, always keeps one foot planed in the realm of irony. Wagner’s Judges take no holidays from dispensing justice, and the Mutants—who are, very conveniently, all “known murderers”—find that the hand of charity is actually concealing the sword of Old Testament justice.