I’ll admit now, I love 2000AD. I love the thinly veiled political satire, the weird fiction and the sci-fi. It’s nigh impossible to talk about 2000AD, one of the few things I think good enough for me to maintain an ongoing subscription to, without talking about Judge Dredd. I’ll start at the beginning for those of you who are unfamiliar with the character. Dredd is not a superhero. A few people I’ve mentioned him to have had this misconception so I’ll deal with it first. He simply isn’t when the world he lives in is taken into context. The world of Judge Dredd is a post-nuclear dystopia in which the remains of humanity have

gathered themselves into huge metropolitan centres, thousands of miles large known as Mega Cities. Mega City One is Judge Dredd’s home. To keep law and order in the big Megs humanity has more or less signed itself over to an unquestionable, indisputable police state. This authority takes its form as the Justice Department, and it’s judges. Judges are people that have been trained from childhood to enforce the law and are able to act as judge jury and, if necessary, executioner. They are armed with the best equipment available and enforce the law with extreme prejudice.

Dredd is of course one of the best judges around, and without a doubt the best street judge. The tales of Dredd’s exploits are wonderfully told, bouncing from comedic satire to emotional thriller with ease. It’s hard for me, as I write this, to choose where to start in regards to the stories because there’s so many; Dredd has

been published weekly for nearly forty years. I think it’s best to go to the first extended story the strip ran which was The Robot Wars. This story is about a robot uprising that Dredd has to put a stop to. It’s not only a magnificent action story, but it helps to lay the foundations for stories to come by giving much needed attention to world building aspects the strip. It sees Dredd moving about the city and interacting with citizens and other judges in a way not seen before in the strip. It also explains much more about the life in Mega City One, such as the implementation of a device that controls the weather. And of course, there is a big fight at the end with the robot leader, Call-Me-Kenneth.

I personally find Dredd himself boring. We know that no matter what he will obey and enforce the law. He’s more or less a machine (which makes for an interesting point, as I’ve heard it mentioned to me before that Robocop was largely influenced by Dredd, though I can’t back these claims up). However it is the surrounding characters that largely draw me back, the other judges; Hershey, Anderson, Giant, as well as the other companions like Walter the Wobot. But more than anything, the villains are what make Dredd. Judge Death, the inter-dimensional undead law enforcer is simply sublime, as are his cast of other dark judge cronies. The beginning of last year 2000AD brought him back in a strip called Dark Justice written by the creator of Dredd, John Wagner, and illustrated beautifully by Greg Staples. For me that was the pinnacle of a villain-based extended story for Dredd. It saw the dark judges unleashed on an isolated generation ship and Staples really captured that ‘In-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream’ feeling in his use of lighting. If you want to get into Dredd, but find the huge case-files that I’ve spent the last few years chewing through a bit daunting start with something like Dark Justice or Day of Chaos.

I find that Judge Dredd and Mega City One, at least for me, is less of a story I like to observe and more a transient heads-pace I like to visit every so often. It’s goofy characters, marauding mutants, rampaging robots, blood-thirsty sovs and general satiric behaviour will keep me coming back for more, hopefully for a long time yet.

Carry on friends.