Dystopia Of The Day: Judge Dredd

Origin: The British magazine 2000AD.

The Judge Dredd strip is 2000AD's longest running since its debut in its second issue, "Prog 2." Judge Dredd has been printed in almost every issue of 2000AD, and has spawned its own monthly luxury spinoff, Judge Dredd Megazine.

Timeline: 122 years ahead of the current present day, currently the year 2133 AD. The year of the setting keeps pace with the current date, so next year's (2012's) stories will be set in 2134.

Creators: John Wagner (creator), Carlos Ezquerra (artist), Pat Mills (first editor of 2000AD, first to wear the mantle of "Tharg the Mighty.")

Protagonist: Joseph Dredd

Background: Nuclear war at the end of the 21st Century, launched by the maniacal President Robert Booth, has reduced much of the planet to a wasteland. In America, this wasteland is called The Cursed Earth.

The human populations live crammed into sprawling megalopolises, known as Mega-Cities. The sprawling mega-metropolis dominating the East Coast of the old North American continent is known as Mega-City One, and this is the primary setting for this strip.

Mega-City One (MC1) has some 400 million citizens. Boredom, unemployment, poverty, craziness and crime are rampant, and the city is always on the verge of boiling over - or just plain blowing up.

Keeping a lid on all the craziness is the city's sole ruling power, the brutal, domineering steel fist of the Mega-City One Justice Department, headed by the Chief Judge and the Council of Five.

The Judges are just as harsh on their own. The little vices we are familiar with: tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, gambling, chocolate: all are banned, to the Judges as much as the civilians. Judges are forbidden sexual liaisons with anybody: civilians, each other. Presumably, even masturbation is frowned upon - though it has never been mentioned in the strip for some reason ... This means that Judges are not allowed to raise families or have children.

Justice Department training is harsh, militaristic. From age 5 to age 20, cadet and rookie Judges are taught Law, armed and unarmed combat, FIBUA (Fighting In Built Up Areas), CQB (Close Quarters Battle), tactics, psychology and whatever skills are necessary to give them the tools to do the job they will do as full Judges.

Judges who fail, or become corrupt, are investigated by a branch of Justice Department called the Special Judicial Squad, or SJS. Their uniforms are distinctive, even among Judges. Their task is to investigate those Judges who fall by the wayside. Punishment is twenty years on Titan, where they are surgically modified with future technology to allow them to endure the conditions on that distant moon.

Social Controls: Straightforward judicial brutality. Justice Department has a truly zero-tolerance and utterly, unabashedly Draconian attitude towards keeping the peace.

The Law in MC-1 is unyielding. Judges empower themselves to arrest, pass sentences on and even execute criminals on the spot. Sentences range from six months' encubement (imprisonment in an "iso-cube") for littering, two years' cube time for common assault, twenty years for aggravated assault, life (automatically without parole) for manslaughter and a standard execution round in the head for murder.

Judge killers get an even harsher sentence: life on a bleak prison called "Devil's Island," a flat piece of ground surrounded on all sides by roads populated by automated commercial trucks, thundering past unendingly on all sides at a constant 200 miles per hour.

The uniformed Judges, with their distinctive one-piece leather uniforms, Justice Department eagle badges bearing their surnames, heavy green boots and gauntlets and face-covering red-and-black visored helmets, are instantly recognisable and comprehensively intimidating.

Judge Dredd, most notably, is famous for never removing his helmet. His lantern-jawed face is only seen from the mouth to the chin. Artists drawing Dredd and scriptwriters are instructed, contractually, never to write in a scene or draw even a single panel showing Dredd's face without his helmet. John Wagner described this as "the facelessness of justice" and "Justice has no soul."

Back Story Dredd was inspired by such Seventies police movies as Dirty Harry, Blue Thunder and Serpico, with hints of Michael Winner's Death Wish series of movies thrown in. John Wagner, former writing partner of Pat Mills who was developing 2000AD in the Seventies, drew upon these inspirations to create a concept for an ultra-violent lawman, perhaps the antithesis of the thugs of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, just as dedicated to ultraviolence but this time on the side of society rather than against it.

The title "Judge Dread" had originally been intended to be more like a Lovecraftian Watcher on the Threshold, defending the Earth against all manner of supernatural infestation, but author Kevin Gosnell suggested the name change to Dredd, and Mills dropped the initial horror strip in favour of Wagner's supercop, attaching the name Judge Dredd to this.

The inspiration for the Judges' appearance came from a movie, Death Race 2000 The fetishistic appearance was developed by artist Carlos Ezquerra, and became an iconic image dominating British popular culture for the next thirty four years.

Ongoing Story: The story of Judge Dredd also spans thirty-four years, and then some - some elements of the back story reach as far back as the present day, and even earlier.

It is impossible to describe the full Dredd strip story more than sketchily, because so much back story has been established for it - the Great Atomic War, the history of the Mega-Cities, the relationship between humans and the radiation-scarred mutants which are the offspring of the Atomic War, and so on.

To summarise: Dredd and his brother, Rico, were cloned from the DNA of Chief Justice Fargo, the first Chief Judge, in 2066, cloning having been perfected some time in the 21st Century. Rico was corrupted by an incident early in his career, forcing Dredd to arrest his brother and sentence him to Titan. Rico returned, and Dredd was forced to kill Rico. The scientist who cloned the twins, Morton Judd, chose the name Dredd to "instil fear in the population."

Throughout Dredd's distinctive 52-year career, his love for Mega-City One has shown itself, time and again, in his willingness to lay down his life to protect it and its citizens while paradoxically, at the same time, striving his utmost to keep them on the straight and narrow, cowed and intimidated by his shadow falling over them.

He has, in his time, faced down a nuclear attack from the Russian counterpart of Mega-City One, East-Meg One, which halved MC-1's initial population to its present level.

He has faced incursions by a dead being, Judge Death, a corrupted and fanatical undead parody of the Judges from a twisted and dead version of his world where it was determined that all crime was committed by the living; therefore life was considered a crime, punishable by death. One such incursion almost succeeded, turning MC-1 into a vast Necropolis, where Death and the other "Dark Judges" - Fear, Fire and Mortis - echoing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from Revelations, murdered sixty million citizens.

Dredd has taken on long missions into the Cursed Earth and other wastelands - once, to deliver a vaccine to MC-2, another time to pursue a mutant child with an eagle birthmark on his forehead, whose fate had originally been predicted to be the saviour of MC-1 in 2120, but who actually turned out to be the monster who would bring about its downfall in an alternate timeline known as the City of the Damned.

And Dredd has faced down corruption within the Justice system itself, arising from without and within, such as when Judge Cal, corrupt and power-mad leader of the SJS, assassinated Judge Goodman and assumed the role of Chief Judge, conditioning the Judges with subliminal suggestions mixed into the briefing tapes, and when an alternate version of Cal from a different dimension where Cal had won managed to cross over into the prime dimension of MC-1, bringing over with him corrupted mirror universe perversions of MC-1 Judges.

Most recently, Dredd has been involved with a major storyline concerning the allowing of mutants into the Mega-City - when a chance discovery of a family of the Fargo bloodline was found living in the Cursed Earth prompted Dredd to revisit MC-1's anti-mutant laws, forcing the Justice Department to partially rescind them and allow mutants in as citizens with some conditions, such as mandated sterilisation and mandatory expulsion to one of four Cursed Earth townships in the event of a mutant being caught committing a crime.

This move has not been popular: part of the corruption Dredd faced recently was internal, from a bigoted cadre of Judges who resented Dredd for his repeal of the mutant laws, led by Martin Sinfield, a corrupted Judge who used mind control drugs to force a resignation out of the legally-appointed Chief Judge Francisco so Sinfield could take over and impose even more Draconian laws on the mutant citizens.

And in his current storyline, Dredd may actually be reaching the end of his career, and even perhaps his first life, with the onset of a major new storyline ominously called "Day of Chaos." With mayoral elections due in weeks, events are being set in motion for city-wide bloodshed, mayhem and violence. The city could fall apart, torn to pieces by bigotry, complacency and infiltration from remnants of the Russian East-Megs craving a long-awaited vengeance for the destruction of East-Meg One at Dredd's hands.

The Unique Angle: What makes Judge Dredd unique among dystopian fiction is its insistence that the Judges be placed firmly in the position of the protagonists. Judge Dredd, for all that he is a clear fascist bully and mass murderer with a death count of more than two billion, is actually the hero of the whole strip. His justice is clearly soulless, faceless, authoritarian and autocratic: Judges have no other legal standing but their own say-so.

They are anti-democratic: the Democracy movement in MC-1 is considered to be as anathema as Communism was in 1950s McCarthyist America. MC-1 holds mayoral elections only because Justice Department has found elections to be a useful tool to control the population and give them the illusion that, in some way, they are contributing to the city by choosing a leader whereas in fact the Mayor has no power, and in fact could as easily be an orang utan or even a psychopathic murderer.

Dredd himself has become more machine than man, with his organic eyes ripped out by The Mutant during the City of the Damned alternate timeline, and replaced with bionc ones; and with his lungs replaced in a later storyline. He has been shot, blown up, impaled on a sword, thrown off a ledge, poisoned, irradiated, given cancer and burned in a polluted river which had been set on fire. But like a really bad penny, he has always managed to bounce back.

Because, for all that Judge Dredd is set in future America, it is really about us here in the UK right now; about our changing fashions, about our unfortunate infatuation with all things right-wing, bigoted and Fascistic, such as uniforms and obsession with The Law; and about our underlying love of irony, fetishism, kink and a sense of humour as black as the polluted Black Atlantic of Dredd's time.

Dredd's an American, but going by the strip's constant dripfeed of references to contemporary issues bothering us here in the UK, it's hard to picture Dredd as anything other than a really pissed-off hardline British copper with a license to carry some powerful ordnance and an attitude straight out of the Regan and Carter, Gene Hunt school of law enforcement.

Will Dredd face his death in the coming editions of 2000AD? Only the publishers can say. But with a clone of his own to carry on the line, and the possibilities of thought-transfer technology, Psi-Division's telepaths and even a small group within Psi-Division comprising Judges who police the dead, who knows whether even death can stop Judge Dredd from continuing to uphold The Law.

After all, as Dredd himself has said, "I Am The Law!"