All throughout July we’re crowdsourcing an Extra Eisners Reading List from comics journalists and critics. Each weekday throughout the month, we’ll post a new pick we would have liked to have seen nominated for an Eisner. There are so many great comics, it’s impossible for the Eisners to recognize them all. This list is to honor and diversify the pool of work praised by the industry.

Today’s pick comes from Steve Morris of the fantastic comics site Shelfdust…enjoy!

“Best U.S. Edition of International Material” is one of the technical awards categories. What it basically means is “this comic was published in a different language... but now there’s an English-language version we’ll recognize it for awards eligibility”. You know like how foreign-language films never won the big Oscars until recently, because they were shunted to one side and other categories they couldn’t escape? It’s a bit like that.

Being similarly uneducated and unable to read any language other than English, though, I’m going to sneakily sneak into this technical category and nominate “Judge Dredd: The Small House”, by Rob Williams, Henry Flint, Chris Blythe and Annie Parkhouse. Originally published within 2000AD (in the UK! That’s international!), this was a storyline which wove together an astonishing number of long-term plot threads from over the course of a full decade. 

The story is a game of chess between two characters: on the one side of the board is Judge Smiley, a furtive mastermind manipulator who has been hiding from everybody for years, and has a labyrinthine plan for Mega-City One (and who infamously states “we’re fascists” partway through the storyline, which seems set to resonate with Judge more and more as time moves on). On the other side… Judge Dredd, who probably doesn’t know how to play chess. Clearly inspired by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, what unfolds in “The Small House” was one of the most tense and exciting games of cat-and-mouse in 2000AD history. 

It’s an astounding piece of work from the creative team, whose previous stories with these characters ranged from prison-break action thrillers to all-out apocalyptic, supernatural horror. That they could take such wild and different Dredd stories and somehow twist them and come up with a concluding paranoid espionage story is just the kind of surprising twist we should have expected from them by now. 2000AD has only ever been nominated ONCE by the Eisners, which has to be considered one of the most incredible snubs in the history of the awards. As the best story published last year, "The Small House" in particular was more than deserving of that recognition. -Steve Morris

Steve Morris runs Shelfdust and The MNT, and his writing about comics has been published by Comics Alliance, The Beat, and CBR.

Judge Dredd: The Small House
Writer: Rob Williams
Artist: Henry Flint
Letterer: Annie Parkhouse
Publisher: Rebellion/2000AD
The critically-acclaimed and fan-lauded latest Judge Dredd tale which sent shockwaves through the universe and Mark Millar called "one of the best runs ever!" Everything is at stake and no-one is safe - in the critically-acclaimed storyline from Rob Williams and Henry Flint, as Judge Dredd and his team of hand-picked allies finally takes on the nefarious Judge Smiley, Mega-City One's behind-the-scenes manipulator! But who will be left standing at the end?
Release Date: September 4, 2019

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