| abstract
| - Judge Dredd is the flagship title in the 2000AD anthology, first appearing in its second issue in 1977. The year is 2099 at that time, and Dredd is already a hardened street Judge of many years. Dredd faced countless strange menaces at that time, including a robot uprising. A notable early case was The Return of Rico, where Dredd's disgraced dirty Judge clone brother Rico Dredd comes back to frame him. Then we have the first Dredd mega epic, The Cursed Earth, which ran for 25 weeks. Dredd treks across The Cursed Earth that is America, facing numerous mad foes to bring an antidote to Mega-City Two on the West Coast. When Dredd finally returns home, tired and triumphant, he is faced with the next epic, The Day The Law Died. While he was gone, the mad Judge Cal had taken control of Mega-City One and corrupted it. Framed and disgraced, Dredd brings order back to the city through rebellion. In Punks Rule, Dredd makes an example out of criminals by defeating many single-handedly and exiling them from the city in a dumptruck. We meet Dredd's niece Vienna, daughter of Rico, and while Dredd does mean well, he has no time for family. The long walk, a bittersweet retirement for Judges who have grown too old or otherwise unfit to continue their hard job, is shown in Judge Minty. Minty walks out of the city with his final task, to go into the Cursed Earth and bring law to the lawless. Judge Dredd's most fearsome menace Judge Death is introduced around this time ( 2000AD #149), with the goal of wiping out all life. Dredd stops him, but with the price of imprisoning his ally Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson in a plastic stasis while Judge Death possessed her. In Judge Death Lives, The Dark Judges are introduced, further undead galactic menaces. They break Death free and kill many citizens, but in the end Dredd and Anderson are able to defeat them in their own dead dimension. The psychics are a point which gets more focus, with a precognitive vision showing that a Judge Child will be able to save Mega-City One from an ominous fate. Dredd and Hershey travel through space to find this Judge Child, but when they do Dredd recognizes the child as pure evil, and leaves him behind, disobeying his orders. The cold war allegory of Mega-City One's conflict with the Sov Judges reaches its breaking point in The Apocalypse War. With Chief Judge Griffin dead and drug-induced mania tearing the city apart, Dredd puts his finger on the button and launches the nukes, killing millions in Russia's East-Meg, and ending the war. Much of Mega-City One is also destroyed in the process when one of the Sov-Judges' nukes makes it past their shields. Dredd as usual decides to stay on the streets where he's needed, and declines the Chief Judge position. Young serial killer PJ Maybe is introduced, and the evil Judge Child's story culminates in City of the Damned, where Dredd loses his eyes. They're replaced with bionic ones.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)