Mega-City Two

The view in 2094 from the Mountain of Justice

Mega-City Two, nicknamed the "Second Meg", was one of the three megacities in the former United States until its destruction in 2114. Its leadership was part of the Triumvirate that oversaw Luna-1, and up to 2099 it was officially one of the United Cities of North America.

Like its sister cities of Mega-City One and Texas City, it was a dictatorship run by the Judges.

Description

The inhabitants

It was first described as covering "five thousand square miles of the Californian West Coast" and a later map showed Mega-City Two stretching up the entire American West Coast, covering California, Oregon, and Washington. The main spaceport is Los Angeles Spaceport. In Song of the Surfer and Babes in Arms, the city was shown to be a brighter, more colorful place than Mega-City One, with an unpolluted ocean along its coastline and a less oppressive atmosphere.

In IDW's Mega-City Two: City Of Courts, which may or may not be in the same continuity (see below), it was depicted as a intensely crowded, media-intensive place that required a lot of money just to keep the taps running. It was so crowded that robot swarms had to keep building new roads to handle the traffic. In a number of post-Cursed Earth stories, the citizens resembled contemporary parodies of California.

History

The Second Meg

The coast in the 22nd century

The city formed out of a growing urban sprawl and became partially self-governing under the Autonomy Act of 2052, with its own Chief Judge. It was formally called the Los Angeles-San Diego metropolitan district in the 2050s.

Chief Judge Gabe Suarez became concerned about President Booth's actions and attended a crisis meeting with the other Chiefs, only for the Atomic War to break out mid-discussion. Saurez was killed in an airburst while returning home and San Diego quadrant took a direct hit.

President Booth was overthrown by the Judges and finally captured in 2071. Death Valley, not far from the Mega-City Two border, was the site of the Battle of Armageddon against Booth's Presidential Iron Guard.

In the 2080s, the city legalised clone babies.

The city was part of the civil war of 2083, joining Mega-City One against the disgruntled Texas City. The conflict turned into a bloody stalemate and Texas City was allowed greater independence. Luna-1 was built two years later, partly as a diplomatic gesture: all three Mega-Cities would have control over it.

Holding off the infected in 2100

Mega-City Two owed its very survival to a mission of mercy carried out by Mega-City One when it was afflicted with the deadly Virus Strain 2T(Fru)T in 2100. With millions infected and all airports overrun, Judge Dredd had to drive a vaccine through the Cursed Earth. A sergeant in the city's para-med storm stroopers believed that "the yankees" would leave them to die but Dredd eventually reached the city.

MC-2 bay, with Judge's HQ

Despite that, Mega-City Two refused to intervene in the Apocalypse War between its sister city and East-Meg One. While they told the Sovs that this was to prevent a greater world war, they admitted to MC-1 that they could not attack East Meg One when it was protected by its force field and were abandoning their ally to ensure their own defences were ready for the inevitable Sov invasion of MC-2. This neutrality was good news for Bennett Beeny, who sat out the war in the Second Meg.

Supersurf 11, in a moment of no violence

Under the Death Game Amendment of 2104, violent televised "death games" were legal and hugely popular; Supersurf 11 was brought to the city and deliberately made so violent by the organiser that most of the contestants were slaughtered. The organisers StigCo had been bribing the Judges, as their plans hadn't quite matched the law; heads rolled in Justice Department when the news broke).

Destruction and rebuild

During Judgement Day, Mega-City Two was completely overrun by zombies unleashed by the evil Necromagus Sabbat. With the city beyond hope of rescue, the place was nuked out of existence on the orders of a council of Judges from all over the world at the suggestion of Dredd.

Total nukeout

A second incarnation of Mega City Two was later built by the Hondo Judges as a way of relieving the crowding in Hondo proper, and was run by acting-Chief Judge Tokugawa. The city held the Supersurf 13 contest in 2117 to draw attention to the new city and make it attractive to Hondo immigrants, with Marlon Shakesphere brought in to give it legitimacy. The rest of the city remained in ruins, dominated by mutant gangs. Hondo payed Indonesian mercenaries to sneak into the ruins in 2118 to access MC-2's Judicial Data Vaults: MC-1 and 2 had shared compromising data, and this allowed Hondo to gain access without MC-1 being aware it had it.

The "Hondo Cluster" was soon abandoned due to the cost, a series of strange murders and disappearances, and the sheer difficulty of getting people to move thousands of miles from friends and family.

After Mega-City One repealed the mutant segregation laws, a number of anti-mutant residents left to set up a survivalist community in the MC-2 ruins. The Compound shoots mutants on sight.

A few remaining Judges were trapped in a Tek bunker but were swiftly slaughtered when the gangs found them in 2133. Only Judge Siobhan Garrison survived and sought aid from Mega-City One. Dredd was able to repulse the main gang and gain access to MC-2's "snapshot" technology.

After the event of Chaos Day, Mega-City One's Sov citizens were frequent targets for 'reprisal' murders. In 2135, as an alternative to deporting them to East-Meg Two or keeping them in internment camps, the city deported to the ruins of Mega-City Two. East-Meg Judges helped transfer their citizens in the name of diplomatic relations. (This was a quick retcon as artist Andrew Currie mistakenly drew it MC-2 as a Sov-controlled city)

Part of the city was rebuilt as "Sovsec", with Garrison as a senior overseer. A year later, Sovsec was still understaffed, facing constant mutant raids, supplies were rationed, and construction of housing was slow; homes were given by lottery. A visiting Galen DeMarco viewed it as "a stop-gap solution that's only going to blow up in everyone's faces". The Compound glares uneasily at the nearby Judge force.

In 2138, Black Atlantic warlord Krait planned to lead his mutants from the Gyre, where technology did not work, to Sovsec. Using alien Lawlord weapons and a Weather Control satellite, Krait planned to seize Sovsec in the hope it was a better life than the Gyre. Dredd and Fintan Joyce successfully took him out before he could reach it.

Mega-City One and East-Meg Judges had a secret meeting in Sovsec to discuss the appearance of unknown cybernetic soldiers.

During Pamela Oswin's plans of recreating the United States (with Texas in charge), she planned to negotiate to bring all of the remnants of MC-2 into her system. She acknowledged East-Meg Two wouldn't be happy with Sovsec being involved.

City of Courts

IDW MC-2 by Ulises Farinas

IDW Publishing ran a Judge Dredd: Mega-City Two, City of Courts miniseries in 2014, by Douglas Wolk, Ulises Farinas, and Ryan Hill. Wolk said "my internal rule was to not contradict anything in either the IDW Judge Dredd series or the British stories, and to avoid picking a side in cases where details of continuity were in dispute." This led to the story being set in 2094, allowing the city and its Judges (depicted with white-gold uniforms and a 'teddy bear' logo after California's state flag, while SJS wore grey-white with 'dead face' logos) to look different to in The Cursed Earth.

Street Judge

SJS Judge

In 2094, Mega-City Two was run by Chief Judge Kazuo-Juan Kennedy out of the Mountain of Justice. His exploits as a Street Judge had been documented in eight seasons of the show "Bulletproof Law". To cut out the block war problem, Kennedy introduced the court system. Each block or neighbourhood (called "communities" in MC2) could have its own distinct laws, with the same Judge force for all. Many laws now were enforced by fines, helping to grease the city wheels and keep its services running.

Due to the power and importance of the entertainment industry, refugees were only allowed into the city if they fit a list of available roles for extras. The intense crowding on the city's roads mean that the roadbots - which are controlled by a queen node in a hive intelligence - will sometimes build traffic knots in densely populated areas. The rich can escape quickly but everyone else can be stuck in the traffic for days.

Thargs and the Hondo MC-2

Former editors and creators have said that the Hondo MC-2 related to a planned storyline which was then discontinued. This meant nobody refered to the Hondo outpost at all and the next sighting of Mega-City Two after "Supersurf 13" was as ruins in "California Babylon". When a reader question the continuity clash in prog 1738, Tharg the Mighty (actually Matt Smith) said he would made "an emerald executive decision" that the Hondo story did not count, because nobody had paid any attention to it since; in 1741 he had say he would "rather forget the idea was ever mooted", viewing it a mistake. Fans had themselves considered it a silly idea.

Michael Carroll, writer of "California Babylon", would later bring the reconstructed city back into the canon by saying Hondo had tried but failed in their rebuilding.