Skip to content

Judge Dredd

Ch. 1 of 8
— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Contents

Judge Dredd

8 sections
  • Judge Joseph Dredd carries the whole legal system on his belt. On the streets of the future city of Mega-City One, this street judge can arrest a suspect, convict them, pass sentence and carry it out on the spot. Writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra created him, and he first appeared in the second issue of the British weekly comic 2000 AD in 1977. He has since become the magazine's longest-running character. The screen followed, first with Sylvester Stallone in the 1995 film Judge Dredd and later with Karl Urban in the 2012 adaptation Dredd. Who dreamed up this black-clad lawman, and why does the reader never see his full face? What sort of future needs a judge who is also the executioner? And what happens when the law's most loyal servant starts to doubt the law?

  • A film advertisement for Death Race 2000 gave Dredd his look. John Wagner handed the ad to Carlos Ezquerra, a Spanish artist who had worked for Pat Mills before on Battle Picture Weekly. It showed the character Frankenstein, played by David Carradine, in black leather on a motorbike. Ezquerra kept the leather and added body armour, zips and chains. Wagner objected at first, remarking that the result looked like a "Spanish pirate."

    Ezquerra's brief was short: a menacing policeman dressed in black and driving a motorbike. He worked fast, and he explained why. In his words, "the longer you stay working on an idea, the more chances you have to spoil it." He drew the essentials first: a grim face, a black suit, a menacing helmet based on the Greeks, protective pads and a gun within easy reach when seated on the bike. Decorating the armour and the bike with symbols took perhaps a couple of days in total.

    The gun became the Lawgiver, a pistol programmed to recognise only its owner's palm-print. Anyone else who tries to fire it, even another Judge, makes the weapon self-destruct. That feature was introduced by the writer Malcolm Shaw. A Judge switches between six kinds of round by voice command. Heat-seeking rounds lock on to a target's body heat, and armour-piercing shells handle robots. Ricochet rounds, coated in rubber, can bounce off a back wall and hit a criminal sheltering behind a human shield. Incendiary rounds carry napalm, high-explosive shells burst on impact, and the sixth is the standard bullet. Dredd also carries a daystick, a boot knife and stun or gas grenades. His Lawmaster motorcycle bristles with machine-guns and a laser cannon, and its artificial intelligence can take orders and drive itself.

    The helmet hides everything except Dredd's mouth and jaw, and the strip has kept it that way. What began as an unofficial guideline soon hardened into a rule. Wagner gave the reason: "It sums up the facelessness of justice - justice has no soul. So it isn't necessary for readers to see Dredd's face, and I don't want you to." In an early story, Dredd is forced to remove the helmet and the other characters react as if he is disfigured, but a faux censorship sticker covers his face. Childhood flashbacks have shown it, but the pictures lack detail. In prog 52, a face-change machine lets Dredd pose as the crooked lawyer of a gang of bank robbers.

    Ezquerra's original design had a hidden extra. He gave Dredd large lips "to put a mystery as to his racial background." Not every artist was told. Mike McMahon drew Dredd as a black man, while Brian Bolland and Ron Smith drew him as white. The strip was not yet printed in colour, so nobody noticed, and the idea was dropped.

  • In 1976, comics editor Pat Mills was building 2000 AD and called in his former writing partner John Wagner to create characters. Wagner had already written a Dirty Harry style cop story called "One-Eyed Jack" for Valiant. Its success convinced the pair that the new comic needed "a really hard, tough cop," as Wagner put it in a 1995 interview. He proposed taking that idea to its logical extreme.

    The name came from a rejected horror strip. Mills had developed a character called Judge Dread, borrowed from the stage name of the ska and reggae artist Alexander Minto Hughes, before deciding it did not suit the new comic. Sub-editor Kelvin Gosnell suggested changing the spelling to Dredd, and Wagner adopted it. Mills explained that Joseph, the first name used in a story he wrote for prog 30, refers to St Joseph's College in Ipswich.

    The launch itself went badly. Ezquerra's hardware and cityscapes looked far more futuristic than the near-future setting first planned, so Mills pushed the story further ahead on the advice of his art assistant Doug Church. Then the board of directors vetoed the original launch story, written by Wagner and drawn by Ezquerra, as too violent. Wagner had by then quit, disillusioned after a proposed buy-out of the comic by another company fell through. That deal would have given him and Mills a bigger financial stake.

    Mills did not want to lose the character. He sent scripts to freelance writers and passed them to a variety of artists, searching for a good introduction. None was ready for the first issue, which went on sale in February 1977. The story that finally introduced Dredd came from a freelance writer named Peter Harris. Mills rewrote it extensively, Gosnell suggested a new ending, and the newcomer Mike McMahon drew it.

    Ezquerra left around then to return to Battle, and the accounts differ on why. He says he was angry that another artist had drawn the first published strip. Mills says he picked McMahon because Ezquerra had already gone, tempted by a better deal from the editor of Battle.

    Wagner came back starting with prog 9. His storyline "The Robot Wars" was drawn by a rotating team of artists that included Ezquerra, and it made Dredd the comic's most popular character, a position he has rarely given up. Wagner wrote most of the stories from then on, working with Alan Grant between 1980 and 1988.

    Success spread outward. Eagle Comics gave Dredd an American series in 1983, made up of reprinted British stories. Since 2012, IDW Publishing has produced original titles. In Britain, the Judge Dredd Megazine launched in 1990. Wagner concentrated his energy there, leaving the 2000 AD strip to younger writers including Garth Ennis, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison and John Smith. Fans liked their stories less and sales fell, so Wagner returned to the weekly strip full-time in 1994.

    Newspapers took Dredd on as well. A strip ran in the Daily Star from 1981 to 1998, and in Metro briefly from January to April 2004. In 2012, the Royal Mail put him on a stamp, one of ten British comic characters honoured in the series. Collected editions continue to appear: The Complete Case Files began in 2005 and reached its fiftieth volume in May 2026.

  • The setting is a future Earth battered by a series of international conflicts, with much of the planet reduced to radioactive wasteland. Survivors crowd into enormous conurbations called mega-cities. Mega-City One stretches from Boston to Charlotte, and it once reached into Florida until the Apocalypse War laid waste to the southern sectors. At its peak the city held about 800 million people. The war, which began with a Soviet attack from East-Meg One in 2104, cut that number in half.

    Most residents live in giant City Blocks, each holding some 50,000 people. Each block is named after a historical figure or a TV character, usually for comic effect. A smaller group lives in "mopads," an evolution of the mobile home, and travels the city's extensive road network. Automation, including intelligent robots, has left most of the population unemployed. As a result, citizens tend to throw themselves into any fashion or craze that comes along. Beyond the walls lies the Cursed Earth, a radioactive desert of outlaws and mutants.

    The Justice Department runs everything. When the United States was overthrown in 2070, following a Third World War that devastated much of America, the Judges became the government as well as the police. Ordinary citizens have no say in government except at the municipal level. Street Judges patrol the city, while administrative Judges work in offices. Executions by sentence are rare, though deaths during arrests are commonplace.

    This is satire as much as science fiction. Dredd stories often poke at American and British culture, with a focus on authoritarianism and police brutality, and many writers have used the Judge System to comment on contemporary politics. The model has also spread worldwide. In the strip, it has become the most common form of government on Earth, with only a few small areas still practising civilian rule.

    Dredd was offered the post of Chief Judge in 2101 and turned it down. He preferred to enforce the law on the streets, though he did serve temporarily in other senior roles. In the story "Tour of Duty" he sits on the Council of Five, the city's highest governing body below the Chief Judge, for two years from 2132 to 2134. Much later, the story "Day of Chaos" kills 87 per cent of Mega-City One's population with a biological weapon released by East-Meg survivors of that earlier war.

  • In 2066, the genetic scientist Morton Judd cloned two boys from the DNA of Chief Judge Fargo, founder of the Judge System. Joseph Dredd had an older "brother" by twelve minutes, Rico. Their growth was artificially accelerated, so they were "born" with the development of a five-year-old and the knowledge and training of a Judge already implanted in their brains. Judd chose the surname Dredd "to instill fear in the population."

    War made them Judges early. When the corrupt President Robert Linus Booth started World War III in 2070, the cadets were temporarily made full Judges under Judge Kinnison, though they were mentally and physically only nine years old. Kinnison died in action. During the war they learned that their clone-father, Eustace Fargo, was still alive, hidden by higher-ranking Judges. He recruited them as temporary bodyguards and confided his doubts about whether the Justice Department had traded away "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for control. After the Battle of Armageddon in 2071, Booth was captured and sentenced to suspended animation.

    In 2079 Rico graduated top of their class, with Joseph second. Judge Morphy supervised Joseph's final assessment and passed him. Soon after, Joseph discovered that Rico had embraced corruption, including murder, and defended it by saying Judges are thugs and killers by nature. Rico asked for help covering his crimes. Joseph arrested him instead. The sentence was twenty years of hard labour on Titan, the Saturn moon that serves as the penal colony for corrupt Judges.

    Rico came home in 2099, hungry for revenge, and challenged Joseph to a fast draw. After two decades away, he was no longer used to Earth's gravity and lost. Joseph shot him dead in self-defence. He was visibly upset and insisted on carrying his brother's body away himself. Readers learned all this in prog 30, in the story "The Return of Rico," which also revealed that Dredd is a clone.

    The family kept growing. In 2129, Eustace Fargo was revived from cryogenic suspension, only to die later the same day. Dredd was at his side. Fargo said he now believed the Judge System was a mistake that had killed the American Dream, and he hoped his blood descendants would fix it. Dredd chose not to share those final words with anyone.

    Later stories gave Dredd something close to a family. There is Vienna, the daughter Rico fathered, who sees Joe as an uncle. There is a younger clone of Dredd who calls himself Judge Rico, with no first name, in order to redeem the name of Joe's corrupt brother. Judge Rico eventually inherits Dredd's old apartment at Rowdy Yates Block.

  • Dredd's devotion to duty has limits. Twice, in "The Robot Wars" and again in "Tale of the Dead Man," he resigned from the force on principle. Both times he came back, convinced that the Judge System, flawed and open to corruption, was still the best protection people had. In 2113 he insisted that the Justice Department stake its existence on a referendum to prove its legitimacy. In 2116 he risked twenty years of hard labour by challenging a Chief Judge's policy, and in 2129 he threatened to resign unless the city's harsh anti-mutant apartheid laws changed.

    The deepest crack appeared in prog 661, in the story "A Letter to Judge Dredd." During the Judges' break-up of a rally of Democrats, citizens who wanted democracy instead of Judge control, a protestor named Sholley was struck so hard he suffered permanent brain damage. A boy named Wenders wrote to Dredd, asking why a seemingly peaceful protest had ended this way and whether a system of such harsh punishments, run by fallible people, could be fair. Sholley later had a violent episode and killed Wenders. The letter was delivered to Dredd, and he read it with doubts he already carried.

    In "Tale of the Dead Man," Dredd assessed his younger clone-brother Kraken, a former member of the Judda, clones created to serve Morton Judd. During the assessment, Dredd's old mentor Judge Morphy was killed, on the same day Morphy had said he would soon leave street duty and hoped to teach. Dredd saw a glimmer of the Judda in Kraken when the cadet got angry and recommended against making him a Judge. Then Dredd announced his own retirement, pardoned all the Democrats he had arrested at the protest, and left for the Cursed Earth.

    What followed in "The Dead Man" is one of the strangest stories in the series. A boy named Yassa Povey, living with settlers in a desolate landscape, finds a near-dead, amnesiac man whose body and face are burned. In the eleventh chapter, the two find the remains of a Judge uniform and a badge reading "Dredd." The man remembers that the Sisters of Death, witches who turned the Dark Judges into supernatural monsters, attacked him with psychic projections and drove him into the acidic chemical lake.

    The city paid a terrible price for his absence. Chief Judge Silver ordered Kraken to impersonate Dredd, to hide the fact that one of Mega-City One's most trusted Judges had lost faith. The Sisters took control of Kraken, and with the Dark Judges they turned the city into "Necropolis." Sixty million people died and were buried in a mass grave outside the walls. Dredd returned with the retired Chief Judge McGruder and Psi-Judge Anderson to end it. Freed from the Dark Judges, Kraken welcomed execution at Dredd's hands.

    The doubt did not destroy Dredd's belief in the system. In the later referendum, most citizens who voted wanted the Judges to stay in control. A march of almost two million pro-democracy protesters headed for Justice Central, ready to riot, until Dredd persuaded their leaders that the count had been fair.

  • Dredd's greatest enemy first showed up in 1980. Judge Death, from a parallel Earth, reasons that since all crime is committed by the living, life itself should be a crime. He is usually one of four undead Dark Judges. In the story that introduced him, he arrived in Dredd's dimension and was trapped inside the mind of Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson, who put herself in suspended animation to act as his cage. Fans voted the sequel "Judge Death Lives!" the third best Dredd story ever in a 2005 poll on the 2000 AD website.

    That same villain once rented a room in Sylvia Plath Block under the name "Jay De'Ath." His landlady, Mrs Gunderson, is a deaf widow who is nearly blind and never realised who her tenant was. Judge Death spared her after deciding she was the one truly innocent soul he had met. She has since returned as an occasional source of comic relief.

    Anderson herself became Dredd's closest colleague, though the friendship was uneasy. It broke when she briefly abandoned the law, and Dredd at first denied it, before reaffirming it once she was injured saving the city. He trusts her with his life but sometimes finds her playful jokes annoying. Chief Judge Hershey was another long relationship, lasting forty years. Dredd called her "the best chief judge we've ever had."

    Then there is Walter the Wobot, a former vending machine robot who pronounces R sounds as W. After helping fight a robot uprising, Walter became the city's first free robot. He chose to stay on as Dredd's cook and housekeeper out of love. Years later he briefly went rogue, started his own robot revolution, and got a probation sentence of community service as caretaker of Mrs Gunderson.

    Some enemies are drawn with a lighter hand. Mean Machine Angel, a psychopath from the Cursed Earth around Texas, has a cybernetic arm and head and likes to kill by head-butting. PJ Maybe killed for the first time at the age of twelve and went on to claim thousands of victims over three decades. Judge Jura Edgar, head of the Public Surveillance Unit, was a rare opponent whom Dredd could not simply arrest or kill. Orlok the Assassin, a secret agent from East-Meg One, killed millions with a chemical weapon.

    The character has also crossed into other worlds. In Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgement on Gotham, written by Alan Grant and John Wagner with painted art by Simon Bisley, Judge Death breaches the DC Universe and attacks Gotham City. Batman travels to Dredd's reality and is arrested. Anderson reads his mind and realises the two are on the same side.

  • The first Dredd story, published in 1977, was set in 2099, which was 122 years in the future. The strip has kept that gap ever since, so time in Mega-City One moves at the speed of the real world. Former editor Alan McKenzie put the consequence plainly: "every year that goes by Dredd gets a year older." He contrasted this with Spider-Man, who had been a university student for twenty-five years. Dredd was 38 when he first appeared, and his years of active service began in 2079.

    For almost thirty years, his age and fitness for duty were recurring plot points. In prog 1595, published in 2008, he was diagnosed with benign cancer of the duodenum. Readers speculated about how the writers would handle the problem. Dredd had already received rejuvenation treatment after the acid lake, which healed his skin and muscle and left him with more vitality than a man of his age should have.

    The answer came in 2016, when writer Michael Carroll and artist Ben Willsher published "Carousel." In the story, set in the year 2138, a 72-year-old Dredd is ordered to undergo another rejuvenation treatment at the Carousel Clinic. His skin, blood vessels and muscle are rebuilt at a cellular level, restoring some lost youth. He is offered a full treatment that would also rebuild his internal organs and bones. He turns it down, satisfied for now.

    The question of how Dredd's story ends has an answer from the man who wrote most of it. In a 2012 interview with Empire, John Wagner said there could be many ways to end it but he probably would not be around to see it. He added that he would love to write the ending. For the moment, the final script has a safe home. "I'll leave the script in my will," Wagner said.

Continue browsing

Updated

Common questions

Who created Judge Dredd?

Judge Dredd was created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra. He first appeared in the second issue of the British weekly comic 2000 AD in 1977, after editor Pat Mills developed the comic and brought Wagner in.

Why is Judge Dredd's face never shown?

John Wagner said the hidden face sums up the facelessness of justice, and that justice has no soul. It began as an unofficial guideline and soon became a rule, so the helmet hides everything except Dredd's mouth and jaw.

What is Judge Dredd's job in Mega-City One?

Judge Dredd is a street judge in Mega-City One, empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence and execute criminals. The Justice Department that employs him also acts as the government of the city.

How was Judge Dredd's look designed?

Carlos Ezquerra based the look on the character Frankenstein from an advertisement for the film Death Race 2000, who wore black leather on a motorbike. Ezquerra added body armour, zips and chains, and gave the helmet a design based on the Greeks.

How does Judge Dredd age in the comics?

Time passes in the Judge Dredd strip in real time, so Dredd ages one year for each real year. The 2016 story "Carousel" has him undergo rejuvenation treatment at 72 years old, rebuilding his skin, blood vessels and muscle.

Who is Judge Dredd's greatest enemy?

Judge Death is generally regarded as Judge Dredd's arch-enemy. He is an undead judge from a parallel Earth who believes that, because all crime is committed by the living, life itself should be a crime. He first appeared in 1980.

All sources

134 references cited across the entry

  1. 1The cover date was actually the last day on which the issue was on sale, so the issue would have been published in the previous week.
  2. 2'Judge Dredd' powers for police urgedPhilip Johnston — 22 September 2005
  3. 4Judge Dredd: The Mega-History, by Colin M. Jarman and Peter Acton (Lennard Publishing, 1995), p. 17.
  4. 6Mills, Pat (2017) Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! 2000AD and Judge Dredd: The Secret History, Millsverse Books, p. 112
  5. 7Jarman & Acton, pp. 21–22
  6. 9Jarman & Acton, p. 30.
  7. 10Mills, p. 37
  8. 11Mills, pp. 47 and 69–70
  9. 12The story was eventually published in Judge Dredd Annual 1981.
  10. 13Jarman & Acton, pp. 18 and 24.
  11. 14Jarman & Acton, p. 34.
  12. 16Jarman & Acton, p. 48.
  13. 17Mills, pp. 70–72
  14. 18Jarman & Acton, pp. 42–43.
  15. 19Mills, p. 62–64
  16. 20Jarman & Acton, pp. 62–63.
  17. 21Except issues #109, 155, 1100 and 1138.
  18. 22MagazineDredd Dispenses Law and DisorderIDG — July 1995
  19. 23Jarman & Acton, p. 128.
  20. 24The Daily Dredds Volume 111 January 2015
  21. 27Excluded from the Complete Case Files series were the stories "America" (Megazine vol. 1 #1–7), "America II" (Megazine vol. 3 #20–25), and "Beyond Our Kenny" (vol. 1 #1–3). They are collected in two o
  22. 32Jarman & Acton, pp. 74–75.
  23. 33Jarman & Acton p. 75
  24. 342000 AD #30 and 1187
  25. 35Jarman & Acton, pp. 56 and 74.
  26. 36"The Face Change Crimes" in 2000 AD #52 (18/2/1978), written by John Wagner, with art by Brian Bolland. Page 14.
  27. 37Jarman & Acton, p. 22.
  28. 38Jarman & Acton, pp. 89–90.
  29. 39Jarman & Acton, p. 112.
  30. 40Judge Dredd Megazine #375.
  31. 42"The Wreath Murders," in 2000 AD #24, 6 August 1977
  32. 43O'Brien, Daniel. "SF:UK: how British science fiction changed the world," Reynolds & Hearn, 2000
  33. 442000 AD #4 and 61
  34. 452000 AD #117 and 118
  35. 462000 AD #261, 630, 1337, and Batman/Judge Dredd: Die Laughing #1-2 (1998)
  36. 47"A Case for Treatment," in 2000 AD #389
  37. 48"Origins," in 2000 AD #1515
  38. 49"The Return of Rico," in 2000 AD #30
  39. 50"The Day the Law Died," in 2000 AD #108
  40. 51"Tour of Duty," 2000 AD #1693
  41. 52"Day of Chaos," 2000 AD #1789
  42. 53"Judgement Day," in 2000 AD #786–799
  43. 54"The Edgar Case," 2000 AD #1595
  44. 55"Robot Wars," 2000 AD #11; "Tale of the Dead Man," 2000 AD #668
  45. 56"Nightmares," 2000 AD #706
  46. 57"Prologue," Judge Dredd Megazine vol. 2 #57
  47. 58"The Spirit of Christmas," 2000 AD #2008 (a December 2007 New Year issue)
  48. 592000 AD #116 and #1300
  49. 60Judge Dredd Megazine vol. 3 #1–7
  50. 61Judge Dredd Magazine #367
  51. 622000 AD #60 and 288
  52. 632000 AD #1101–1110, 1167; Megazine vol. 3 #52–59
  53. 64Judge Dredd: "Giant" (by John Wagner and Ian Gibson, in Judge Dredd Megazine vol. 2 no. 50-52, 1994)
  54. 65The Forsaken 2000 AD #1830–1835, reprinted in Judge Dredd – Day Of Chaos: Fallout
  55. 66"Six" episode 2, in Judge Dredd Megazine #222 (2004)
  56. 69Judge Dredd 1 (DC)Wakefield Carter
  57. 70Legends of the Law 1 (DC)Wakefield Carter
  58. 72Jarman & Acton, pp. 139–140.
  59. 73Progs for SprogsMichael Carroll — 2003-05-20
  60. 76Editor Steve MacManus, quoted in John Hicklenton's afterword to the 2009 trade paperback Heavy Metal Dredd.
  61. 79Dredd Prequel Comic Online – Movie News – EmpireOwen Williams — 5 September 2012
  62. 81Judge Dredd: Year One AnnouncedJoey Espoisto — 3 December 2012
  63. 85Judge Dredd30 June 1995
  64. 86John Wagner on DreddGavin Hanly — 2000 AD Review — 19 January 2010
  65. 89Judge Dredd returning to the big screenStuart Kemp — 11 May 2010
  66. 90Karl Urban confirms Judge Dredd roleKate Rodger — 26 July 2010
  67. 91NewsThirlby joins 'Judge Dredd'Diana Lodderhose — 3 September 2010
  68. 93MagazineHeroes on ScreenStaff — Wizard magazine — March 1995
  69. 94News'Judge Dredd' to Be Turned into TV ShowClark Collis — 20 May 2017
  70. 104BookJudge Dredd Year One: OmnibusMatthew Smith et al. — Abaddon — 28 October 2014
  71. 106"Bad to the Bone" by Stephen Jewell, in Judge Dredd Megazine #407, pp. 51-52
  72. 107Judge Dredd Megazine #396, pp. 36–39
  73. 108The Judge Dredd Arcade Game That Never WasRyan Lambie — 17 March 2016
  74. 115Sackboy is the LawOwen Good — Gawker Media — 9 May 2009
  75. 116Judge Dredd vs Zombies25 September 2017
  76. 125Gangs of Mega-City One2000adreview.co.uk — 25 March 2014
  77. 136The Judge Dredd timelineWakefield Carter

Queue