Major Spoilers Question Of The Day: The Face Of Dredd Edition

Thanks to this week’s Major Spoilers Podcast TPB, I’ve been flipping back through my old Judge Dredd comics and found it interesting to note that, in an age where all the traditional rules of story and narrative are intentionally being broken, 2000 AD still observes the cardinal rule: NEVER SHOW JOE DREDD’S FACE.  He is, after all, the faceless strong-arm of brutal, totalitarian authority and, while Stallone’s movie version of his adventures had MANY flaws, having Dredd unmasked (unhelmed?) sealed it forever as a failure.  In a world where Commander Spock nearly kills Captain Kirk in an emotional rage, where Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuriakin hate one another, where Batman rushes into battle in a massive, cannon-covered tank, it’s nice to see creators standing by their own internal logic.  Of course, this is comics we’re talking about: Bucky Barnes came back from the dead, Mark Millar tried to do a story that revealed that Aunt May was secretly Peter Parker’s mother thanks to a teenage tryst, and Captain America’s unbreakable shield has been repeatedly broken, leaving me to wonder how long they can resist a dramatic reveal, and leading to today’s sacrosanct query…

The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) still thinks that breaking all the traditional rules only leads to different stories, not necessarily better ones, as seen when Peter Parker unmasked circa Civil War, asking: What one storytelling rule (i.e. “Never show Judge Dredd’s face”) do you consider the most important for creators to observe in your favorite fiction?