Judge Dredd//Serial-Serial: Is it time to kill off the serial killer genre?

Judge Dredd//Serial Serial (2) is written by John Wagner and published in PROG 1951 of 2000AD.



A very, very long time ago I decided to write. I did so in an attempt to escape the apathetic emptiness in which I was existing. My writing was a desperate, hopeless and ultimately fruitless attempt to connect with the world around me, a world that felt empty and devoid of all meaning and hope.

I was a young guy, rudderless, with no mentor, and with very little experience of real human 'adult' interactions. So, with no practical experience of life, no insight into anything really, and with nothing to say about the world other than- ‘I’m hopelessly adrift here,’ what could I possibly write about?

I looked at the world around me, and saw apathy and people stuck in routines. I saw dull faces and dull lives. I could have written about that, and probably should have, but the last thing I wanted to do was to relive the disapointingly mundane world around me. So, making the first in a long list of bad life decisions, I decided to write scary stories about the easiest narrative protagonist that I could think about. That protagonist was the ‘serial killer’ a villain loudly lauded over all mainstream media, in films, books, television shows, and just about every other form of mass media entertainment.

Another creative death in a moribund genre.

The serial killer was cool, exciting, menacing, infamous and most importantly, very easy to write fictional stories about.

I would sweat all day in a soul-sucking job, and spend the evening writing ‘cool/sick’ stories about serial killers, in the misguided hope that the stories would offer me a connection to the world.

Everybody loved serial killers. How could I fail?

Guess what? I failed. The connection with the outside world never happened. I wrote my stories, they were ignored, and my isolation from the world around me continued. My stories were terrible, and I feel embarrassed now that I was so blinded by the apathy of the world around me that I used to write such meaningless tosh.

Now zoom forward to October 6th 2015 and imagine my reaction to a ‘new’ story arc in 2000AD that features a serial killer sending cryptic, taunting messages to Judge Dredd, as the big chinned cop looks out into the empty city sky-line asking:

‘Who is he? Where is he? How do we identify him? How do we stop him?’

That short example of dialogue in ‘Serial-Serial’ by John Wagner is the kind of nonsense that I was coming out with twenty years ago, the kind of generic serial killer cliché crap that says nothing about the world, because it’s not even trying to. It is the kind of dialogue that you would expect to come from a lonely, isolated young man, not a professional writer working for a long time established comic book like 2000AD.

When I read stories like ‘Serial-Serial’ I get this horribly despairing feeling that twenty years have flown by, and nothing has changed, that humanity is just as purposefully blind and dumb today as it always has been.

I got over ‘cool’ serial killer stories a long, long time ago. Today, when I read them I am taken back to the lonely lost kid that I was, and I don’t particularly want to go back to those empty, useless times.

I do however understand why John Wagner is writing a story about a Serial Killer.

Serial killer stories offer thrills, twists and ‘cool’ whilst safely avoiding all of the important issues of our time. They are easy to write, uncontroversial, and simple. They are stories for children. A heroic cop chases a crazy villain. Spin it out for a bit, throw in some bodies, have a twist at the end, wrap it up, then onto the next villain. They are stories wearing reality blinkers, refusing to look at the world around them, refusing to reflect the reality in which they are being produced, and if that’s what 2000AD wants, that’s what they’ll get.

A veteran writer like John Wagner will find it ridiculously easy to write these generic bad guy stories, and if 2000AD publishes them, who’s to blame, the writer or the publisher?

A celebration of sickness and authority in uniforms

I blame the publisher. They should demand more, and reject this kind of story. They should have higher standards. They should want their stories to say something, to reflect something, and not just settle for mediocre 90’s thrills to pay their 2015 bills.

The last thing I want is reality obsessed stories featuring stony-faced crowds staring like zombies into their I-phones, but I would prefer blank pages over the tired, lazy, useless, anachronistic, dull, sad and pathetically childish nonsense that is the ‘serial killer’ genre.

Is ‘Serial-Serial’ a bad story? No, it’s not bad. It’s something worse than that. It’s a competently structured story that is pushing suspicion of strangers and dependency on authority figures. That pushing of suspicion makes the world less friendly, people less approachable, and reinforces the sense of isolation that I myself felt as a young man. It’s a story that tells you that the world is scary, and that you are probably safer keeping yourself to yourself, doing what you are told, and relying on the ‘authorities’ to keep you safe from all of the imaginary evils that exist in the world.

That’s not a good message. It keeps people afraid, isolated and dependent upon authority figures. It’s a message that benefits the state, and damages social interaction and overall human happiness.

Today I look at this kind of story and it makes me feel sad, sad because the fear porn lies are the same, and sad that 2000AD is still prepared to publish them.

I’ve lived a little, and learnt a lot in the past twenty years, but when I read stories like ‘Judge Dredd//Serial Serial’ it’s like the world has stood still. Serial killer stories are silly and lazy, they always have been, and all they do is reinforce social isolation and dependency on uniformed authority. I have no time for them anymore. I used to write them, but that was a very long time ago. I changed. I grew up. I stopped wasting my time. I moved on. I started to live, and to write about life. Is it asking too much of 2000AD to do the same?