Okay, the majority of tomorrow's big new books may not be the most jolly holiday of reads, but there's a lot of great stuff to pick up.

Diving straight into Marvel Comics' deluge of product, you can catch up with the mondo depresso Dark Reign storyline with the following collections - Dark Reign: The Hood, Dark Reign: The Sinister Spider-Man, Dark Reign: Skrull Kill Krew, Dark Reign: Young Avengers and the very, very recommended Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign (Seriously, people: Gorilla Man? Marvel Boy? Venus? What about that doesn't sound appealing?).

You can also pick up a couple of single issues from the current Marvel status quo, Fall of The Hulks: Gamma and Captain America: Who Will Wield The Shield which, amusingly, is the follow-up to the Captain America Reborn series that finishes... next month. Hurrah for scheduling!

(Marvel also has a new Halo comic book, Halo: Blood Line, a hardcover version of the recent Marvel Zombies Return series, and a collection of stories from writer Brian Michael Bendis' first decade at the publisher: Brian Michael Bendis: 10 Years At Marvel, coming out. Told you it was a deluge.)

Over at DC, it's a much quieter week, albeit with a new Blackest Night tie-in launching (Blackest Night: JSA). There's a collection of the first half of superhero fantasy The Mighty, and also one of the kids' title Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures In The Eighth Grade that would make a pretty good gift for small kids with big imaginations.

Also suitable as stocking stuffers are Dark Horse's two one-shots of the week, Hellboy: Bride of Hell and the Joss Whedon-written Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Willow.

Keeping in a Whedon mood, IDW offers the Angel Annual (telling the story of the movie version of LA's time in Hell, which promises to be amusing), as well as the weather-appropriate fantasy genre Winterworld hardcover. Finishing up, there's a new Wall-E comic from Boom! Studios - which looks really fun, based on previews - and a new collection of the classic Judge Dredd spin-off, Judge Anderson: Psi-Files, from Rebellion.

If you're looking for something very unfestive to get your year finished right, however, there's one book that's definitely what you're looking for: The Last Days Of American Crime, which mixes crime noir, mind control and heist stories all together for something murky, slightly paranoid and altogether wonderful. Book of the week, easily.

Make sure you get to your local comic store tomorrow having seen this list and checked it twice to find out what's naughty and nice, because this is the last shipping week for new comics this year. Next Wednesday, there are (a few) new releases, but this is the last official week. Go with open wallet and heavy heart. Ho ho ho.

Since the mid-2000s, Mishka NYC has been at the vanguard of popular streetwear. A cornerstone of their success has been designing clothing influenced by gonzo horror, Z-grade sci-fi, and the overall dank and stanky underbelly of pop culture. Indeed, their gear is worn with equal aplomb by metalheads and hip-hoppers (Lil Jon and Lady Sovereign have sported Mishka in music videos), and the label's past collaborators have ranged from everyone from Iron Maiden album artist Derek Riggs to erotic photographer Ellen Stagg to electro-reggae supergroup Major Lazer.

Label heads Mikhail "Mike" Bortnik and Greg Rivera were nice enough to sit down with io9 and answer some questions about Mishka's design philosophy, winter line, and how Stan Lee cold lamps it at Comic-Con:

What's the Mishka origin story?

Mikhail Bortnik (left): It started sometime in '03. My job I was working at was going to close, so I decided to take a stab at t-shirt design, which I had wanted to do since college. This was about the same time I met Greg. A few months into it, I realized I was in over my head so I asked Greg to join on-board and sell the line. Greg immediately came on as a full-time partner. The basic idea was we wanted to sell street wear, but we soon realized there were so many fans who were into both street wear and scifi that there was absolutely no reason we couldn't incorporate these two things.

In terms of scifi, what were your earliest influences?

Greg Rivera (right): A lot of our influences have come from B-horror films, straight-up scifi films, and comic books, especially for Mike. I was big into horror comics when I was kid and also things like The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, anything with the ironic twist at the end. Both of us are also big toy fans. Being in our early thirties, we grew up with 1980s toys, which ended up being a huge influence in our designs.

MB: One example of this influence was in our Fall 2008 Skyway Trippers collection – we tweaked an Israeli Special Forces design to include the phrase "Spaceknights" in Russian, as a homage to the old Spaceknights comic and toy line.

ROM Spaceknight allusions? That's wild. On a similar note, Mishka has a roster of kaiju-like characters who appears on a lot of your apparel – i.e. the half-serpentine, half-ursine Death Adder and the Cyco Simon skull. What's the story behind them?

MB: Actually the notion of bringing characters into the clothing brand goes back to metal bands. Cyco Simon is a reference to [Megadeth's ] Vic Rattlehead and Eddie from Iron Maiden, and we wanted our own. As for the Death Adder, we use our designs to tell a story with him – he's often seen teaming up with our Soviet super-soldier character.

Are we going to see an Adult Swim series with these guys anytime soon?

MB: I'll be honest, Greg and I would love to be able to a comic book or cartoon series with them.

What was the first sci-fi influenced Mishka piece?

GR: "They Live" was probably one of the first ones. It's hard to remember since we've had so many designs over time.

One of my early favorites was your Judge Death-inspired "Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode" logo.

MB: That was a mixing of the old Brian Bolland artwork with what people guessed [what the name of German industrial band] KMFDM stood for. KMFDM actually gave us a cease-and-desist for that one.

Really? Not the 2000 AD people?

MB: We figured we'd get something from them or Depeche Mode, but no, it was from the KMFDM people!

On a similar note, when was that moment when you said to yourselves, "Holy crap. We can't believe we just put that on a t-shirt."

MB: The "Tom of Eternia" t-shirt.

GR: Mike had the idea of doing a Tom of Finland-style shirt [featuring He-Man].

MB: If you've never hear of Tom of Finland, he's like the homoerotic artist. There was this impetus [to create this shirt] early on when someone made the comment that all we do is put naked girls and 80s cartoon characters on our shirts. Street wear on a whole seems more macho than we are as a brand, so Greg and I were like, let's do this.

GR: Our friend Robin Nishio – who is this amazing illustrator – met up with us and Mike pitched him the idea. Robin actually went and bought two big books on Tom of Finland and aped the style exactly. That was the coolest because we got so much shit from our customers because it was like, "Here's Skeletor as the master and He-Man down on his knees, gay porn style."

What sort of pieces are in the pipeline at the moment?

GR: We did this series of shirts for [the new heavy metal-themed video game] Brutal Legend and we're working with Dark Horse Comics on a project.

Oh wow, are you at the liberty to talk about that right now?

MB: Not really, but if anyone has followed our brand, you'll know that one particular Dark Horse character particularly sticks out.

As far as the Winter 2009 line goes, you seem to have strong robot theme going. You have the Terminator cyclops, the Decepticon hearse, and my favorite, the Ultron bear. Why robots this season?

MB: We've gone so far doing themes that this season just happened to be robots. This was probably one of our most rigid designs themes. The Ultron shirt's been particularly popular.

You guys hit up the San Diego Comic-Con this year. How was it being a street wear brand at what's been historically a comic and scifi show?

MB: We were selling some things there, but we were mostly there as fans.

GR: It's been a little calculated – and not to reveal all our secrets – but if a lot more other brands saw the potential of that market, you'd see a lot more people doing it. It's hard for us to do business, because Mike and I go and we're just geeking out. Besides going out there to meet Tim and Eric [from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!], we're both really into Japanese kaiju and we had the chance to show off our own kaiju designs.

MB: Comic-Con 2008 was my first one. We wanted to see the Lost panel, but after we saw it spilling into the street, we just said "fuck it" and went to the Battlestar Galactica panel. That crowd was pretty big too, but Dean Koontz was still speaking. So yeah, we killed two hours listening to Dean Koontz.

Any good Mishka Comic-Con party tales?

GR: We crashed an Activision party at the Hard Rock Café and saw Stan Lee. If you're at a Comic-Con party and you see Stan Lee, you know you're at the coolest party.

MB: He was just hanging out with this girl on his arm.

GR: (laughs) She looked like she was twenty years old.

MB: I don't if she was, like, hitting on him or he was hitting on her, but Stan Lee's exactly how you picture him. He really says "true believer."

I wouldn't want him any other way. Do you find yourselves getting calls from influences who've enjoyed your work?

MB: Other than the artists who we're huge fans of and end up working with – like Derek Riggs and L'Amour Supreme – no, not really. A lot of our influences are grumpy old men.

What would you say is the most quintessential Mishka design?

GR: On our first trip to Japan, we stayed in this little town outside of Tokyo and found all these old Japanese horror and sci-fi press kits. These kits would take the coolest part of the movie and turn it into poster art. We found this great Westworld kit and Mike added some comic book stuff, like Ultron and Cyborg from Teen Titans to the design. To this day, it's still one of my favorite ones.

MB: We also found this Motel Hell kit in which we used for our "Electric Funeral" shirt. We electrified the faces and it turned out great.

Alright guys - some final lightning round questions. Kim Cattrall in Big Trouble in Little China or Kirstie Alley in Wrath of Khan?

MB: Kim Cattrall. I'm a Next Generation fan, what can I say.

Zardoz or Troll 2?

GR: Troll 2.

MB: Zardoz.

Would you rather have John Carpenter compose you a personal theme song or direct a movie about your life?

MB: I'd rather have him direct the movie because then he'd have to compose the film's theme song.

Shit! I hadn't thought of that loophole. Any final words to io9 readers?

GR: By all means check Mishka out - you'll definitely find something you like.

Mishka apparel is available at their website and their Brooklyn store at 350 Broadway in Williamsburg, NYC. Store photography courtesy of Dave Digioia.

Paolo Soleri, who coined the term "arcology" to describe a super-dense hyperstructure that houses tons of people in a sustainable manner, is building Arcosanti, a nascent arcology, out in the Arizona desert between Phoenix and Flagstaff. So far, it's still fairly small, and is supporting itself by making Soleri's ceramic and brass bells — a lot of the cool-looking structures are actually foundries for the bell-making, or casting tons of concrete for more structures.

Journalist Simon Bisson visited Arcosanti, and took a ton of photos. (There are more at his Flickr stream):

The idea of a sprawl-free city seems attractive and smarter for our long-term survival. And the two great barrel vaults look amazing in the middle of the desert, as the sun goes down. But after visiting the site, Bisson has a couple of concerns:

However I'm left with some disconcerting thoughts.

The society that's grown up around Arcosanti reminds me of the guilds that built the great cathedrals of Europe. It's not difficult to see the arcology as a secular cathedral, a project that will take generations to complete and that will never be what Soleri dreamt all those years ago. Perhaps that's not a bad thing.

One thing did seem clear: it's in the wrong place. If arcologies are to replace the urban sprawl of a city with a new, intentional community on a human scale, then the desert (as beautiful as it is) is the wrong place for Arcosanti. It should be in a city, in a Detroit, a LA, a New York, a London, a Moscow, a Hong Kong. It shouldn't be isolated, a new Taliesin for Soleri's architectural disciples. It should be a visible sign of a different way to live, of a new city. Make it La Sagrada Familia, big, vibrant and reaching in the heart of Barcelona, not a hermitage in the desert.

[Simon Bisson on LiveJournal]

Talking to /Film, Grant - co-writer of Dredd for more than a decade, complained that producers hadn't contacted either himself or Dredd creator John Wagner to consult on the movie, but Jock responded on 2000AD's official message board that that was not accurate. According to fans at the board, Wagner has seen the movie script and given feedback to the producers, as early as May this year. So was Grant mistaken, or were his comments a sign of sour grapes over being left out of the loop?

(Thanks for the heads up, Matthew.)

[Slashfilm]

Just as the 1980s predicted that all futures were most likely dystopian (Unless they were Star Trek), they also brought the idea that the sheriffs of the future would most likely take those "fascist pig" comments to heart and start modeling themselves as leather-wearing, faceless figures with a love for violence and a distaste for personal freedoms. Anti-authoritarian zeitgeist, or something more sinister? Consider the evidence:

Judge Dredd (1977)
Appears in... The comic strip that's appeared in 2000AD, his own series, and the we-only-wish-we-could-forget-it movie.
Would you describe him as personable? Not exactly. Cloned from a former high-ranking official of Mega-City One, Joe Dredd's life is focused on one thing and one thing only: The Law. And if you're unclear on what that may entail, Dredd - or any number of his fellow Judges - will be happy to help teach you. Preferably by arresting you for ignorance and letting you work it out yourself in jail.
Does he have special weapons or vehicles? Oh yes. Primarily, his suped-up ride the Lawmaker, and his multiple-bullet-firing (including heat-seeking and armor-piercing) Lawgiver gun.
What about a fascistic outfit?

Yes. Although we're not sure about the knee-pads.

Plexus Rangers (1983)
Appears in... Howard Chaykin's wonderful American Flagg comic.
Would you describe them as personable? Definitely - Almost all of Chaykin's corporate cops policing the United States while taking orders from the Mars-based Plex HQ are, in their own ways, charming. Corrupt, selfish and lacking in most redeeming values, yes, but definitely charming.
Does he have special weapons or vehicles? Nope. Use of subliminal advertising and robot cops aside, the Plexus Rangers are pretty old-school. There's a talking cat, though. Does that count?
What about a fascistic outfit?

Yup.

Justice Peace (1986)
Appears in... Various Marvel comics, whenever they need a time-traveling hard-ass from the future.
Would you describe him as personable? Yes - as long as you can prove that you're not a criminal. Coming from the World War VIII-era of Future Earth, Special Agent of the Federal Police Force Peace - regular beat Brooklynopolis - will stop at nothing to get his man. Not even time-travel to make sure that the crime doesn't even happen in the first place.
Does he have special weapons or vehicles? He's got a time-traveling flying bike called the Hopsikyl. That's got to count for something, right?
What about a fascistic outfit?

Um... No? But then again, it's was mid-1980s Marvel Comics.

Robocop (1987)
Appears in... The eponymous movies, comics and cartoon series.
Would you describe him as personable? If it was backwards day, sure. Poor Alex Murphy may have been gunned down in the course of duty on the streets of Detroit, but OCP - clearly fans of The Six Million Dollar Man - had the technology to rebuild him... except for that whole "personality" thing. But are you surprised, considering the four Directives he had, making decisions for him?
Does he have special weapons or vehicles? His whole body is a special weapon.
What about a fascistic outfit?

Not really. It was more functional than stylish, for one thing...

Marshal Law (1987)
Appears in... The comic book.
Would you describe him as personable? Depending on your taste for schizophrenic, sadistic, war-flashbacking psychopaths, potentially. When he's not the unstoppable, S&M-flavored superhero-killer Law, veteran supersoldier Joe Gilmore is almost an upstanding citizen of the wonderfully-named San Futuro. Problem is, he's normally the unstoppable, S&M-flavored superhero killer.
Does he have special weapons or vehicles? Given to carrying around (and using, of course) guns as big as Kevin O'Neill's imagination could make them, the better question may be "does he have any normal weapons?"...
What about a fascistic outfit?

Almost ridiculously so.

It wasn't all doom and gloom - After all, there were some cuddlier examples of future police forces based in older, more optimistic fantasies of tomorrow - but the storm trooper ideal that dominated more than a decade of SF policing remains a strong one (Consider the non-Tom Cruise cops of Minority Report), even if we're more likely to see robots taking over the world than police officers in mainstream SF these days. Here's hoping that those who try and imagine real futures of law enforcement are a bit more imaginative - and a little less enamored of the idea of living in Mega-City One.

So why are these cities so overwhelmingly large? And where do they come from? Here's a list, by region:

North America:

The city of North Am (in Magnus Robot Fighter) does just what it sounds like — it covers almost the entirety of North America, giving you lots and lots of space in which to (what else?) fight robots.

The Maze is a huge network of underground parking garages that stretches all the way from New York to Los Angeles, in the movie Circuitry Man.

Lots and lots of SF stories predict a huge swathe of city stretching along the East Coast of the United States. One of the most famous is Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, which eventually stretches all the way down to Florida.

In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson, a mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or The Sprawl.

In He, She And It by Marge Piercy, the urban megalopolis that stretches from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop.

And similarly, in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins, a huge sprawling "Conglomerate City" occupies most of the East Coast of the United States.

There's also BosWash, the city that stretches from Manchester, NH to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was first predicted in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman.

The City in Transmetropolitan is commonly believed to be a megacity including New York and stretching as far West as the Great Lakes, which are referred to as its Western lakes.

The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone: In Halo, the former city of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana. And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city-state consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations.

In real life, some urban planners talk about an area called ChiPitts, which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh, and everything in between.

Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz, appears to cover a huge chunk of the former Texas and Arkansas, and becomes the capitol of an empire that rules the Western Hemisphere — and eventually wipes out its main rival, New Rome. (Map from Wikipedia page.)

Texas City, in the Judge Dredd comic, covers a huge area of the former Southwest — including Texas, of course.

Bay City is a massive conurbation covering San Francisco as well as its outlying areas, in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

San Angeles appears in many different works of fiction, and it usually encompasses Los Angeles, San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara. It's the setting for Demolition Man.

Mega-City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did, until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comic.

South America:

Sao Paulo/Rio: In Ben Bova's Mars, the rural poor stream into the cities of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such huge numbers, the two cities grow into "a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide, that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all."

Ciudad Baranquilla, aka Banana City, is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics.

Europe:

Greater London — in Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, London has grown outwards massively, swallowing up tons of villages and formerly independent towns. Clarke and Baxter describe London as spreading out, "kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories... the scattered, helpless city that lay helpless below" a passing airplane.

Edinburgh/Glasgow — it's not strictly speaking science fiction, but there's a lot of talk about these two Scottish cities combining into one megalopolis in the coming century. The two cities could soon be linked by a high-speed maglev train. But it doesn't appear that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet.

Metropia, in the animated film of the same name, is a massive network of subway systems and "undergrounds" linking all the cities in continental Europe. The world is running out of oil, so the leaders come up with the plan to link all of the subway systems into one huge network — which appears to be haunted.

City Europe, in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, covers an enormous area of continental Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The city is made up of a series of "stacks" with the richest people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the wastelands below.

The south of England is occupied by Brit-Cit in Judge Dredd. Plus East Meg One is another mega-city in the Judge Dredd universe, which covers a big chunk of the former Soviet Union, including Moscow.

And of course, there's East-Meg One, the Soviet mega-city in Judge Dredd, which sprawls around the remains of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega-City One.

Africa:

Pan-Africa is a continent-wide quasi-state comprising several mega-cities in the Judge Dredd universe: they include Umar (the former Libya), Simba City (Cameroon), Luxor (Egypt), New Jerusalem (the northeast of Ethiopia), and Casablanca.

Gauteng is another one that doesn't appear to have popped up in science fiction very much, but it's talked about a lot in real life. In a nutshell, Johannesburg (a city already growing way past its capacity) joins up with Pretoria/Tshwane and a number of other municipalities, to form a single megacity. There are already plans to join them via a high-speed "Gautrain."

Asia:

Mega-Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis. An earthquake splits Tokyo in two, and as the city rebuilds, it gets even larger and much more sprawling, coming to be known as Mega Tokyo. Here's a map of Mega Tokyo, from B-Club Special (via Igarashi) Likewise, Akira takes place in Neo Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis of steel and neon. And the anime Cyber-City Oedo 808 takes place in a fictional future "Edo," or Tokyo, which is apparently much larger than the existing city.

And real-life urban planners talk about the Taiheiyo Belt, which will cover the Pacific coast of Japan including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

A single continuous robotic structure known as The Host covers almost all the islands of Japan, and 50 million people live inside it, in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai.

And of course, Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City covers most of Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama.

Australia:

Greater Sydney is predicted to encompass a region spanning from Melbourne, all the way up to Queensland along the coast. But as with Edinburgh/Glasgow and Gauteng, it doesn't appear that anybody's written science fiction about this megalopolis yet.

The South Pole:

A continent-wide city called Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic, in Magnus, Robot Fighter. Because robot-fighting is best served... cold.

And of course, the city of Holy Terra, or just Terra, occupies almost the entire planet's surface in Warhammer 40,000.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Map layout by Stephanie Fox.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Elizabeth Bear, DJ Chaotica, Larry-Bob Roberts, Zack Stentz, Daphne Gottlieb, Paul McEnery, James McGirk, Jessy Randall, Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Susie Kay, Kat Page and David Fraser for the suggestions!

The Mayor In City Of Ember
He's the textbook example of a corrupt mayor who's only interested in saving his own skin. He knows the underground city of Ember is on its way out, and soon it'll be uninhabitable due to power failures and dwindling supplies. But instead of trying to cope with the problem, the mayor tries to hoard as much stuff for himself as possible, in a secret room — and puts together meaningless commissions to study the problem. Here he is in this video, eating sardines in the grossest possible manner.

Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Okay, so Lando is the kind of scoundrel we love to watch. And he's a perfect counterpart for Han Solo. But would you really want him in charge of your city? His Cloud City of Bespin seems like a pretty corrupt, messed-up place. And then he goes inviting Darth Vader and his crew there, which is not good city planning at all. And then after Vader has demolished half the city in his battle with Luke Skywalker, Lando takes off and leaves his city behind. Call that leadership?

Aunty Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
She does keep the city of Bartertown humming along — except when she gets stuck into an idiotic power struggle with Master/Blaster, and everything grinds to a halt. Plus she rules with an iron fist, and forces people to fight to the death in a deadly arena. That's not the kind of leadership our post-apocalyptic cities need!

Mayor in RoboCop 2
He makes deals with drug dealers and criminals. And then he mismanages the city's finances and winds up handing the entire city over to the evil OCP. This clip pretty much says it all. And when he's in a tight corner, he just loses his shit.

Mayor Wilkins, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, season 3
Your average terrible mayor may let the city fall apart, or make deals with drug lords, or bulldoze your house for no reason. But a really awful mayor, like Wilkins, makes cozy arrangements with vampires and tries to kill off the town's only protector. And then tries to turn into a demon so he can eat the high-school graduating class. Now that's bad leadership.

Vilos Cohaagen, in Total Recall.
He's an evil administrator of the Mars settlement, keeping the mutants down and ruling with an iron grip. He uses mind-control and brainwashing to keep his minions in line. And worst of all, he won't give the people air. WTF, Cohaagen?

Mayor Bentham Rudgutter, in Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
He's always described as sitting "regally on his throne," or sitting "behind his desk with an air of utter command." He rules over New Crobuson, with its corruption and oppression — and he's not averse to making deals with the city's crime syndicates as well as its demons. He systematically rounds up dissidents and has them tortured, and he's not above imposing martial law if the situation gets out of hand.

Father in Equilibrium
Father rules over the city-state of Libria and outlaws all human emotion, even the love of a small puppy. To this end, he keeps the people doped up on a drug called Prozium, and keeps everyone under constant surveillance. (Similar to other figureheads like Big Brother in 1984, or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World — except that Father just rules over one city.) The only good thing "Father" has going for him is his kick-ass gun-centric martial art, gun-kata. Woo hoo!

Judge Cal, In Judge Dredd
This character, closely based on the Roman emperor Caligula, seized power after he had the Chief Judge of Mega-City One assassinated. In Mega-City One, the Chief Judge has absolute authority — an arrangement that's caused some problems on several occasions. So Judge Cal goes completely nuts, making it a crime to criticize him and appointing a goldfish as his deputy. He even shoots Judge Dredd! Dude!

Mayor Prentiss in The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
Prentisstown is not a nice place to begin with — there are no women, and the males can all hear each other's thoughts all the time, whether they want to or not. But Mayor Prentiss makes matters worse, by figuring out a way to control men's minds. He declares himself President and invades the neighboring settlement of Haven, where there are some women. And that's just the beginning of his reign of terror. Runner up: The mayors in Truancy by Isamu Fukui.

Clickwheel have teamed up with 2000AD owners Rebellion to offer 2000AD Origins, a free collection of the first episodes of such classic strips as Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, The Ballad of Halo Jones and many more (including more recent creations like Nikolai Dante and Shakara) in both PDF and CBZ format. Featuring early work from Watchmen's Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, as well as other comic greats such as Kevin O'Neill, John Wagner, Ian Gibson and Dan Abnett, this is an almost-perfect way to get introduced to the self-styled Galaxy's Greatest Comic. Spludig Vur Thrigg, as Tharg would say.

2000AD Origins [Clickwheel]

Erskine's cityscape - the full-size version of which is available at his blog - was, surprisingly, pulled together in only a few hours, according to the artist:

A bit of work trying to pull in all the seperate elements and lots of colour correcting but [I'm p]leased with final version... not bad considering it was completed over a Saturday afternoon and early evening.

He describes the image as

trying to capture the sheer scale of the city. The Sergio Leone close up of Dredd is a deliberate attempt to force a contrast of scale to image and there is more than a passing nod to Blade Runner, Fifth Element and AKIRA too.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day:

Sarah Connor herself decides to explain the first movie, and the background of the second movie to us, while robots slaughter people and her scarred son scowls at us. (That glimpse of Future John packs more punch than five hours of Bale, incidentally.)

Robot Jox:

An all-time classic movie, this Joe Haldeman/Stuart Gordon joint starts out with a gruff voiceover packing everything we need to know about robotic single combat into one speech. With rubble.

Slipstream:

This opening monologue from Steve Lisberger's followup to Tron almost belongs in the "what the hell are you talking about" category. What the Hell? Earthquakes, okay. And then they "merged civilizations together?" But then there's a wind that ate everything. And someone is traveling it. Wha?

2019: After The Fall Of New York:

This one wins extra points for having the synthesizery blues score, and the guy in the trenchcoat pretending that the synthesizer is actually his trumpet. Twenty years after the bombs fell, New York is still a shithole. Sorry.

Doomsday:

This actually isn't the entire opening voiceover of this film, because it continues after about five minutes of people being shot by riot cops. Scotland gets turned into a scabby plague sore, and those sensible Brits wall it off. Which works out perfectly, of course.

Judge Dredd:

Can I just say, I love it when a voiceover comes with a text crawl, in case you need to follow along at home? Most movies do one or the other, but only a truly great movie has a text crawl and a voiceover. The U.S. has gone to mega-shit with Megacities, and a new breed of law enforcer rises up.

City Of Ember:

The movie's entire backstory is compressed into a couple of minutes. Global disaster, underground city, box of instructions... box gets lost. Oh noes.

The Road Warrior:

Thanks to John Hazard for finding this online. Still the greatest post-apocalyptic movie opening of all time.

The new Dredd movie seems to be doing everything right so far — Jock is one of the most exciting artists to come along in recent years, so I'm very encouraged to see him doing concept art for the film. (He's best known for working with writer Andy Diggle on Losers and 2000 A.D., but has also worked on Green Arrow: Year One and Hellblazer.) As Jock himself says, the Dredd concept needs to be redeemed from the 1995 Stallone movie.

[Standard Attrition]

I'm in a tiny minority of people who enjoyed the Stallone film as an example of shlock cinema at its finest, without worrying about its manifest deviations from the comics. (With Stallone's looks, you'd have thought he'd be the one star that could keep the helmet on for the entire movie without anyone objecting.) But I would love to see a movie that captured more of the original's satirical edge — perhaps a retelling of the Block Wars saga, or the Judge Caligula storyline — and maybe a Judge Dredd who kicked a bit more ass. I remember the Dredd in the comics as an unstoppable asswipe who totally lacked a sense of humor but would never give up, even when he's crawling on his hands and knees across the radioactive Cursed Earth.

In any case, the good news is, the new film is being made by British company DNA Films, which produced 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, The Last King Of Scotland, The History Boys and Notes On A Scandal. That's a track record that makes me quite a bit more excited about a new Dredd outing, whether it's a remake or a sequel. (My guess? They won't even acknowledge the first film.) Rebellion and 2000 A.D. announced the venture over on the 2000 A.D. forums, where it sparked great excitment.

Is it too soon to start a rumor that Danny Boyle is directing this film? When I talked to him a while back, he seemed eager to do more science fiction films, and the fantastic Slumdog Millionaire has proven that he can succeed at any type of film he sets his mind to. And he's worked with DNA on a few projects before. So even though I made it up and it's purely wishful thinking, I'm declaring it officially a rumor that Danny Boyle is directing Dredd. [2000 A.D. Online via Teaser-Trailer]

The character - co-created by Judge Dredd creator Pat Mills and io9 favorite and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen co-creator Kevin O'Neill - first made his appearance in a 1987 mini-series from Marvel Comics' Epic imprint, simultaneously riding the wave and bucking the trend of the concept of "adult superheroes" ushered in by the success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns with its mix of sex, dark humor, over-the-top violence and superhero-murdering anti-hero. Now, after years in limbo, he's back in a new prose book by Mills (with spot illustrations by O'Neill), Marshal Law: Origins. Comic Book Resources has the scoop, and a preview:

Marshal Law: Origins (Titan Books) is a brand new volume collecting two scorching stories from the Law canon in illustrated novel format. In Cloak of Evil one of San Futuro's leading sex queen hostesses turn up dead in what appears to be a bizarre suicide, and it seems clear that there is more to this insidious situation than meets the eye. It's time for Marshal Law to once more don his black leather and barbed wire — and dish out the pain! Also featuring the classic Day of the Dead, collected with a new introduction from Pat Mills and previously unseen artwork by award-winning artist O'Neill, this is the perfect way to get to grips with the vigilante super-anti-hero!

And this is just the start of the return of the Law - indie publisher Top Shelf Comics is also reportedly working on a compendium of all of the character's comic appearances to date for release soon. That said, we're holding out for the inevitable movie. After all, what else would work as a palate cleanser after next year's Watchmen movie?

Marshall Law: Origins Preview [Comic Book Resources]

New Chief Justice Robert French, a self-confessed science fiction fan, tells the Sydney Morning Herald about his recent speech where he inserted clips of the Judge Dredd movie:

I was quoting Montesquieu about separation of powers and how when you combine the functions of judge and executive, you get a tyrant. And I suggested here's a Hollywood picture of what this looks like and it's Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd saying 'I am the law,' " he says in chambers on the ninth floor of the High Court building in Canberra.

"In fact what that film was about was some future in which you have combined executive and judicial functions. You've got policemen riding around arresting people, trying them, punishing them and then saying 'Court adjourned' and roaring off on their levitating Harley Davidson. It makes the point."

[Sydney Morning Herald]

Street Hawk: Few people remember Street Hawk, which tried to do for motorcycles what Knight Rider had done for cars and Airwolf had done for helicopters and Ernest Borgnine's career; namely, make them both cool and an indestructible force against crime. The 1985 show only lasted 13 episodes, but nonetheless introduced a whole generation of children to the idea that any motorbike that could shoot things and go up to 300mph was really awesome, even if it was ridden by someone called "Jesse Mach". It also introduced a whole generation of children to Tangerine Dream, who did the opening theme music, but that's not quite as cool.

Super-Cycle: Okay, so the Forever People's Super-Cycle may have three wheels, but it also had a few other things on its side: The ability to fly, for one. The ability to turn intangible and invisible, for another. And then there was that whole "being able to fly, and also transform into a protective shield for its owner" thing. Oh, and the fact that it could create a Boom Tube to travel anywhere within the known universe was pretty cool, as well. In fact, only one thing stops the Super-Cycle from being the most awesome bike ever created: the fact that it was revealed to be alive, then had sex with another Super-Cycle before retiring to take care of its baby cycle, Kirby. And, no, I only wish that I was making that last part up.

Condor: For fans of the mid-80s toyline MASK, there was only one character you really wanted to be: Brad Turner. Brad had it all - He was a rockstar, hill-climber (I love that that was part of his bio back then; was hill-climbing cool in the 80s and I missed it?), part-time pilot and, most important of all, the owner of Condor, a bright-green bike that turned into a helicopter... or, at least, a helicopter-esque bike. It was the kind of thing that made your crime-fighting a little easier, if a little less subtle. But then, when you're into the rockstar, hill-climbing life, who wants subtle?

Lawmaster: Judge Dredd's bike may, technically, have already made it to the silver screen in 1995's Sylvester Stallone vehicle but pretending that that movie doesn't exist hasn't steered me wrong yet, so why stop now? And the quality of any movie shouldn't be held against a bike as beautiful as the Lawmaster, which not only has a turbo boost strong enough to propel it into the air for however long the plot demands, but also boasts a laser, twin machine guns, a stun-gas-grenade launcher and AI autopilot amongst its hidden features. It even comes with its own CB radio... but then, it was created in 1977.

Speeder Bike: There may have been no wheels to speak of on these babies, but if any one of you pretends that you didn't want to ride one when you saw Return Of The Jedi as a kid, then you're lying. Not only was the speeder bike chase the best part of the movie, it was almost the only good part altogether... yet it was so good that it made you want to sit through all the Jabba and Ewok stuff just to see it again.

Admit it; if Death Race had featured these five bikes, it would've been a box office smash.

Professor Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Sheffield University, has been researching robotic trends internationally, and feels that we'll be ready to worship our new robot overlords as early as 2040:

Machines could take over many crime-fighting tasks from the police by 2040, a leading British robotics expert has said. Professor Noel Sharkey believes that by 2084 advanced robots will have human-like features and will be able to detect weapons as well as recognising drunks and aggressive behaviour in large areas... The report also predicts autonomous police cars will appear by 2070 which will be able to recognise speeding cars, identify licence plates and automatically deduct fines from bank accounts at the same time as adding points on driving licences.

Sounds like some kind of robot-driven future dystopia? It should; the report, while genuine, was commissioned to promote the UK release of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on DVD.

Crime-fighting robots 'by 2040' [Press Association]

Gotham City cannot be saved — or gentrified

The biggest movie of the year, The Dark Knight, is about the impossibility of saving cities. Heath Ledger's Joker aims to prove that all of the upright well-behaved citizens of Gotham are maniacs waiting to happen. As he says at one point, they'll eat each other the moment the chips are down. But really, they're only a ready-made mob because they're in such close quarters. When they're not jammed into trains, hospitals, crumbling buildings and public squares, they're crammed into barges trying to evacuate. So much for sustainable development.

Before The Dark Knight came out, Warner Bros. issued a direct-to-DVD animated prequel called Gotham Knight, which included one story about a man who wants to clean up the slummiest slum in Gotham, the East End, and he starts by putting in a golf course. You can see the crumbling tenements in the background as Bruce and the other rich dudes play golf. But we learn that this would-be "urban renewer" has a shady reputation, and he's involved in organized crime.

Batman is almost always ambivalent about gentrification in the comics. Gotham City is always getting destroyed and reduced to Dresden-esque rubble, and Bruce Wayne rebuilds it again and again, just as miserable as before. (Most notably in 2000's massive "No Man's Land" storyline.) In "Watchtower," a future-Gotham story by regular Bat-writer Chuck Dixon (and drawn by Judge Dredd artist Mike McMahon) a corporation turns a whole section of Gotham into its own super-safe gated community, complete with private cops in super-armor, and Batman ends up deciding the whole thing is corrupt and bringing it down.

In the miniseries "Run Riddler Run" by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger, someone wants to tear down the slums and put up fancy condos. Bruce Wayne almost invests in this scheme, because he's in favor of anything that makes Gotham safer. But as Batman he sympathizes with the downtrodden. He's torn, but never actually has to make a choice, because the people behind the real estate deal turn out to be bad guys and he has to break them into little pieces, dooming their real estate venture in the process. I asked Jones why Batman would be anti-gentrification, and he says:

Mark Badger and I always saw Batman as not just an opponent of street crime but also as sympathetic to the little people who are exploited by the big people. Like poor people being displaced by rich people. I never liked the one-note obsessive take on Batman's personality, wanting to see him as a real human being who had a fierce preoccupation with street crime but could consider other issues too... Most writers at the time were interested in nuancing Batman terms of personal psychology, but I was getting really bored with that. His mission to fight criminals was a political and communal act too — So who is this Bruce/Batman as a social being?

In Peter Milligan's story "Dark Knight, Dark City," we actually learn that Gotham itself is built on the site of a demonic ritual by apostate Puritans. As a result, the city's very foundations are cursed, and no matter what you do, Gotham will always be horrendous. The city is a character in many Batman stories, but it's not a friendly one — it's more like a member of Batman's rogue's gallery.

Living in a world Frank Miller made.

You can't really talk about the vision of Gotham City as a brutal, cursed monster without paying tribute to Frank Miller's role in reshaping Batman's surroundings in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, much as he made Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen slum much more hellish. Those superhero works were training wheels compared to Sin City, where everybody's corrupt and violence really is the answer to every situation (except for those rare occasions where the answer is sex instead.) There aren't good guys and bad guys, there are just assholes and monsters. Miller has justly earned a reputation as the master of ultraviolent comic-booky noir.

Even though The Spirit is based on a Will Eisner comic that doesn't feature an especially scary cityscape, it looks as though Miller's film will be just as pulpy and noir as Sin City, with a bit more of a science fiction twist, judging from the first trailer and other early publicity. As the first teaser says, the city screams, and she's female. She's the Spirit's mother and his lover, but that incestuous double-bind probably is not the real reason she's screaming. I'm guessing it has more to do with the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson's fur coat-wearing supervillain, and various other scumbags.

In the world of noir, buildings are old and crumbling, and close together. Noir cities are full of alleyways and dark corners, crumbling docks and destroyed warehouses.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station.) And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag. (I won't even go into the vogue of post-apocalyptic New York movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield, which we've discussed at great length elsewhere.)

Miller's noir imagery has become so much a part of the fabric of genre entertainment that people reach for it as a shorthand when they want to seem edgy or dark. A new web series called Dead End City is using Sin City-esque visuals (via greenscreen) to try and lend some credibility to a silly storyline about zombies. And Sin City's Rosario Dawson is starring in a new NBC.com webseries, Gemini Division, which takes place in a Blade Runner-inspired dark future city where a conspiracy is creating genetically engineered terrorists. Even the usually cheery Star Wars is gearing up to go noir. We've seen a few ugly urban areas in the prequel trilogy, including the underbelly of the Jedi city of Coruscant. Apparently the new live-action Wars show way more of the seedy, dirty world in that faraway galaxy from our distant past.

Noir is the enemy of urban planners.

So what does it mean that we're being bombarded with visions of screaming cities on the verge of an election pitting an African American from Chicago against a Caucasian from Arizona?

It would be tempting to say the persistence of noir imagery benefits conservatives, who tend to identify themselves more with rural areas and suburbs and paint the cities as the source of social decay, welfare spending and crime. But the truth is more complicated than that. After all, the noir city is a place of blatant social inequality, where the strong prey on the weak, and the rich exploit the poor. It's not just full of criminals, it's jam-packed with victims as well. In fact, the old-school noir storyline has much to offer both progressives and conservatives.

The real downside to the vision of the monster city is that as oil becomes more expensive, exurban sprawl gets less and less sustainable. With the huge numbers of people living in greater urban areas in the U.S. now, it makes more sense to build more densely. But the persistence of Miller-esque dystopias makes more tightly packed city living seem a less attractive proposition. Move into a mixed-use retail/residential zone, with pedestrian access and electric trolleys, and you'll be gutted by a scar-faced maniac who smells like baby poo. It doesn't quite work as a brochure.

And meanwhile, the reality is that crime in the U.S., including urban crime, has declined steadily over the past decade and a half. The inspiration for Gotham City, New York, has had such a sharp decline in its crime rate that New York Magazine ran a package in January called "Post-Crime New York." (The magazine concluded we're not quite there yet.)

It would take a whole separate blog post to discuss the reasons for the declining urban crime rate, but let's just say cleaner, safer, more affluent cities make for less interesting backdrops for super-violent crime and monster stories. (Shockingly.) At their root, these are escapist stories, after all, and it's more fun to identify with a hero who jumps off a dark rooftop into an ocean of blight than one who roams a happy well-lit sidewalk.

What would a narrative about superheroes look like if it took place in a relatively safe, friendly urban environment? Or bounced between a safe urban environment and various suburban and rural areas?

One word: Heroes. With the possible exception of a few sequences in New Orleans, the NBC super-mutant show has never shown cities as dangerous or gritty places. We spend lots of time in New York in the first two seasons of the show, and it's always a perfectly nice place to hang out, no more dangerous or disturbing than Odessa, Texas or the other small towns we spend time in. The threats, in Heroes, come from shadowy conspiracies. And the danger is that the city will be destroyed, not that it will destroy anyone.

But it's hard to imagine the Heroes version of urban heroism becoming as influential as Miller's. Even though it's definitely a major escapist thrill to imagine living in lofts and townhouses as nice as most of the Heroes cast seem to inhabit.

Ignore the Sylvester Stallone movie from the '90s - Starting next year, America is going to find out what it really means to know Dredd. Announced yesterday at the Wizard World Chicago convention, Dynamite Comics is going to bring the UK's futuristic lawman Judge Dredd back to American comics after more than a decade.

While the character - a hard-ass cop in a far-future America - has been published continually (in a variety of titles alongside the core 2000AD series) since his 1977 debut in his native United Kingdom, the character hasn't had his own American series since his 1995-96 run with DC Comics. That will change midway through next year, when Dynamite Comics - publisher of comics based on The Terminator, Highlander, Battlestar Galactica and an upcoming Buck Rogers series - plans to create an all-new series written by the character's creator, John Wagner, with input from Preacher's Garth Ennis.

No word on who'll be drawing the series yet, but something to thrill old-school Dredd fans: Brian Bolland has been confirmed as one of the cover artists (alongside Kingdom Come's Alex Ross), returning to the character that made him famous.

Dynamite Does Judge Dredd [Newsarama]