Judge Dredd

[close] Judge Joseph Dredd is a comics character whose strip in the British science fiction anthology 2000 AD is the magazine's longest running (having been featured there since its second issue in 1977). Dredd is an American law enforcement officer in a violent city of the future where uniformed Judges combine the powers of police, judge, jury and executioner. Dredd and his fellow Judges are empowered to arrest, sentence and even execute criminals on the spot. He was created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra, although editor Pat Mills also deserves some credit for his early development. Judge Dredd is amongst the UK's best known home-grown comic characters. So great is the character's name recognition that his name is sometimes invoked over similar issues to those explored by the comic series, such as the police state, authoritarianism and the rule of law. Judge Dredd was named the seventh greatest comic character by the British magazine Empire. In 2011 IGN ranked him 35th in the "Top 100 comic books heroes".

Time passes in the Judge Dredd strip in real time, so as a year passes in real life a year goes by in the comic. Thus the first Dredd story, published in 1977, was set in 2099, and stories published in 2011 are set in 2133. Consequently, as former editor Alan McKenzie explains, "every year that goes by Dredd gets a year older – unlike Spiderman [sic], who has been a university student for the past twenty-five years!" Dredd is currently more than seventy years old, with over fifty years of active service (2079–2132), and for some time characters in the comic have been mentioning that Dredd is not as young and fit as he used to be. It is not known whether there are any long term plans to address this issue (although Mega-City One has cloning and brain transplant technology, for instance). This remains a major theme of current episodes: in prog 1595 (2008) Dredd was diagnosed with benign cancer of the duodenum.