The Simping Detective

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"What's your point?" "Comes right after the Jack"

The Simping Detective is a Spin-Off from Judge Dredd, set in the seedy Angeltown, the most dangerous and crime-ridden sector in Mega-City-One. Its main character, Jack Point, is a wally squad judge posing as a private investigator. Jack is a chain smoking, womanising, alcoholic with a penchant for dressing as a clown.

Jack soon finds himself with enemies on both sides of the law in the form of a mob boss known only as The Boss, who runs Angeltown and his own boss, Sector Chief Daveez, who runs his own little operations for profit. Furthermore, there is another organisation that is attempting to make changes in Angeltown, making contact with Jack via the mysterious Miss Anne Thrope.

Tropes used in The Simping Detective include:

• Badass Longcoat
• Bad Guy Bar: The High Dive is where all the Boss's Mooks come to play. Jack spends plenty of time there, partly to observe their behaviour, partly to get completely smashed.
• Bait and Switch Comparison: Used in the opening line of the first story and has become part of the blurb at the start of the Megazine.

"I've got two friends in this world: One's long, hard and makes your ears ring after every shot. The other's my gun."

• Brain Uploading: A former lover of Jack's uses a disposable biochip to temporarily implant her personality into Jack to help her commit suicide (the point being that she trusted Jack to dispose of her body without getting caught). However, the chip doesn't completely degrade as it's supposed to and Jack is left with some mental trauma, which it takes brain surgery to excise.
• The Cameo: Dredd shows up on a couple of occasions as a supporting character.
• Combat Pragmatist: Jack. Every clown toy he keeps on him is a concealed weapon of some kind.
• Continuity Nod: Several from the Dreddverse. A number of cases that Dredd has solved come up.
• Cool Pet: Cliq and later Larf, Cliq's offspring. Jack went through some difficulty to get a Raptaur as a pet, as in an early story, he was faced against a pack of them. It was only when he found the remnants of one (Raptaurs leave offspring behind when they die) that he was able to put one to good use.
• Corrupt Judge: Daveez and possibly several others. One perp refers to Jack as the only straight Judge in Angeltown, which still isn't saying much (Read: He Who Fights Monsters, below).
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass
• Deadpan Snarker: Jack again.
• Dead Partner: Jack had a partner named Cheyne when he was still in uniform. Together, they killed the Boss' brother in some Noodle Incident. When Cheyne is killed, Jack is transferred to the Wally Squad with the cover story that he was kicked off the force for killing the Boss's brother without sufficient evidence. When the hit squad comes for him, it forms the basis of the strip's introduction in the form of a sting operation to catch Cheyne's killers.
• Disposable Sex Worker: Point uncovers leads in the production of Cyrstal Blue while investigating the disappearances of "slabwalkers".
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Boss.
• Everything's Better with Monkeys: DeMarco's Sidekick—Mr. Perkins—is an intelligent gorilla in a three piece suit and a bowler hat.
  • Muggro Keevish kept a couple around to interrogate Jack. Until the Raptaurs killed them all.
• Executive Meddling: An example of it being for the better. The Simping Detective was originally a story in a Sin City style strip, known as Mega City Noir, which was to focus on various characters around Angeltown. While a second story centred on one of The Boss' Mooks was published, Megazine editor Alan Barnes felt that Jack Point was too good a character to simply be used in a one shot strip and the rest is history.
• Fair Cop: Kovacs, the SJS Judge assigned to assess Point and determine the extent of his indiscretions.
• Fantastic Drug: Crystal Blue, a hallucinogenic downer made from Raptaur venom that is so powerful that users must take another drug, RedStimm, to shake off its effects. Very Illegal.
• Fetish: Jack really has a thing for female Judges. He spends quite a bit of time ogling the female SJS Judge sent to assess him and has slept with at least one other Judge.
• For Halloween I Am Going as Myself: How Jack gets into the Boss's "Hate Party".
  • Subverted in the case of Galen Demarco. She dresses as Travis dressing as her.
• The Future Is Noir
• Gender Scoff: When Jack is finally betrayed by a female client, he bemoans, "Women—can't live with 'em, can't get 'em lobotomized."
• Hammerspace: Galen DeMarco, dressed in nothing more than a thong and heels is somehow able to keep a gun concealed on her person, Lampshaded by Point.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Wally Squad Judges are allowed more freedoms than other Judges to help them blend in among the civilian populations. Some Wallies, however, occasionally take those freedoms too far and get declared of having "gone native" (or, in other words, become as dangerous to everyone as the criminals they've gone undercover to stop). If Jack isn't already too far gone off the edge, he's damn well close to it.
• Heroes Want Redheads: Jack is into Galen Demarco big time.
• Hot Scientist: Tek Judge Glaive, who Jack seems to have a flirtatious working relationship with. Jack has better tolerance for Tek division than he does for street judges, describing teks as having "half as many bugs up their ass, twice as many braincells and just as many curves".
• Internal Affairs: The SJS, who are part of the Dreddverse. Jack describes them as "The judges who judge the judges, the brakes on fascism or a bunch of drokking drokkheaded evil drokks.
• Interspecies Romance: Most of the Boss's goons are into aliens. Bob, the bartender down at the High Dive, uses this to start eliminating underbosses by injecting alien prostitutes with Jazzalite, a substance which violently explodes upon contact with semen.
• Ironic Nickname: Angeltown is the local name for Sector 13, which to Jack is the same as calling a fat guy "Little John" or a firearm "unnecessary."
• Ms. Fanservice: Galen DeMarco and Miss Anne Thrope.
• The Murder After: "No Body, No How" begins with Jack Point discovering a dead body in his bed with no recollection of how it got there.
• Names to Run Away From Really Fast: In Jack Point's words, Colm O'leary's nickname "Shite" is "either the natural reaction to coming face-to-face with him or a character description."
• Nice Hat
• Pirate: For some bizarre reason, there is a hobo pirate (complete with cutlass) living in a park in Angeltown.
• Pocket Protector: During one firefight, Jack is hit. Demarco asks him if it's bad. Jack pulls out his hipflask, which now has a hole in it and is leaking whiskey, to which he says "It's worse!"
• Private Eye Monologue
• Punny Name: Miss Anne Thrope. Jack even lampshades it at one point by stating that he just got pun behind the name.
  • Jack named his Raptaurs Cliq and Larf, as in "Point and Cliq" and "Point and Larf".
• Obfuscating Stupidity / Obfuscating Insanity: Pretty much the main reason Jack dresses like a cross between Phillip Marlowe and Krusty The Klown.
• Oireland: Colm "Shite" O'Leary's dialogue is all written phonetically and filled with stock Oirish phrases. Reading it aloud will produce the most sterotypical Oirish accent going (ie. that non-existent one that Hollywood believes is real). Justified, as in universe, Ireland is a theme park depicting Irish sterotypes.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: In a world where Lawgiver pistols, laser rifles and stub guns are available, Jack opts for a good old fashioned Colt revolver.
• Shout-Out: Many. The title references The Singing Detective and Jack is named after a character in Yeomen Of The Guard.
• So Is X: When Jack Point lights up a cigar in Sector Chief Daveez's office and makes it clear that he knows Daveez played a significant role in a criminal case he was investigating and covered it up. Daveez responds by grabbing Point by his jacket lapels and threatening him to drop the case, the exchange ends,

Daveez: ...And smoking's still illegal, creep. Jack: (points to the martini glass on his desk) Yeah. Heh, so's alcohol.

• Spy Catsuit: Worn by Miss Anne Thrope.
• Stripperiffic: Galen Demarco's thong, which only just about barely covers her private parts and nipples.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Out of story example. Another Dredd spinoff, Marauder, depicts another judge having replaced Daveez as sector chief in Sector 13. That story also depicts the sector's judges as notoriously corrupt.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl / Would Hit a Girl: Jack, when he discovers an ex-Psi judge is manipulating animals to attack him, states in a monologue panel that there is no justification for hitting a woman, right before kicking her in the face.