Episode II: The New You
First print date: March 12 1977
Prog appearance: 3
Writer(s): Pat Mills
Artist(s): Mike McMahon
Total episodes: 1
In a desperate attempt to hide from the law, who are hot on his tail, “Scarface” Joe Levine heads into the “New You” Face Parlour, where cosmetic surgery is carried out in minutes and you can have a new face by the time you leave. Forcing the technician to give him a face change at the point of a gun, Levine is so pleased with his cleverness and so emboldened by the difference in his appearance that he decides to wave to Dredd, who is heading along the highway on his bike.
However, he is aghast to find that Dredd recognises him! Has his elaborate plan all been for nothing? He speeds away but Dredd follows. Reluctant to cause injury to innocent citizens, he is unable to use his gun and so instead puts his Lawmaster on automatic, and jumps from it at high speed to land on Levine’s vehicle, where he shoots him, causing his transport to veer off the road and crash. Dredd jumps back onto his Lawmaster just before the vehicle crashes. As he stands over Levine, the dazed, shocked criminal asks how Dredd was able to recognise him, with his new face? Dredd replies stonily that it was his voiceprint that gave him away. When he spoke to the Judge, Levine’s voiceprint was analysed and came up on Dredd’s display, warning him as to the perp’s identity. Had he not been so smart and overconfident, he might have got away with it.
QUOTES
Levine: “I broke more laws than you've done face-changes honey. So take a look in the mirror at
your face: you wanna stay pretty? Then do as I say!”
(Even faced with the barrel of a gun, the technician at The New You is worried that she will be seen as having been complicit in the crime about to be committed. Often, fear of the Judges trumps even the fear of injury or death).
Dredd: “Levine! You have just added
speeding to your long list of crimes!”
Levine: “I got rid of my ugly mug, so how did you recognise me?”
Dredd: “When you spoke, your voiceprint matched the one sent to me by Control. Just like fingerprints, everyone’s voice is different. All lawbreakers’ voiceprints are on file at Justice HQ. When will lawbreakers learn ... in the 21st century no-one can escape justice!”
(In 1977, this could have been one of the earliest instances of law enforcement identifying someone from their voice. It certainly was the first time I had heard it being used.)
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Already, just one issue later, we’re seeing some pretty major changes, as mentioned in the last episode’s notes. Dredd’s bike is now officially a Lawmaster --- though his gun is still not named. New York City has been absorbed into the vast sprawl of Mega-City One, which at this early point uses the numeral, as in, Mega-City 1, but will soon switch to the spelled version. Jail is called “the time-stretcher” (unless Levine was having a dark joke at his own expense, seeing that he would have to be carried out on a stretcher) but we’ll come to know it as “the iso-cubes”and later just “the cubes”.
We will also see Dredd’s attitude towards bystanders change over time. Here, he fails to shoot at Levine for fear of hitting some innocent or causing a crash. Later on, as he gets older and more hard-bitten, he will come to see these people more as hindrances, obstructions standing in the way of justice, and may not be so touchy-feely about them.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Robbing from Futurama here, I’ll be using this section to talk about aspects of the future city, future living, even future dying, in Dredd’s world. A whole culture and history was built up around Mega-City One and the world that stands, at this point, on the cusp of the twenty-second century, some in fact most of it very inventive, some quite comedic and some downright disturbing!
Here we learn about
The New You face parlour, where those who have the money and the necessary papers --- one would assume the city has to give permission for a citizen to change their appearance, and maybe report to Justice HQ afterwards for new identity papers, to prevent perps doing exactly what “Scarface” Joe Levine is doing, using a new face as a way of dodging the law and losing himself in the heaving thronging city --- can have their appearance altered in a very short time, emerging as quite literally a new person. As a huge percentage of the population is unemployed, you would have to assume that places like
The New You are the pervue of the rich and the indolent, those who can afford to change their faces whenever they wish to. Hard to imagine the ordinary joe having the sort of money that this sort of thing no doubt costs.