Where can I find Dredds first comic appearance online?

[The Adventurer]

As someone who has read a lot of American super-hero comics from around the same time as that first Dredd, that sort of exposition is fairly common throughout action comics of the era. Reading through the Dredd Case Files though, I started to notice that Dredd grew out of that sort of thing rather quickly. The Robot Wars is where I think Dredd really jelled as the comic it's be known for. It's the main reason I'm not a huge fan of The Curse Earth, as I feel the Pat Mills of the time (and... to be fair, the Pat Mills of today) regressed the strip back to the exposition laiden primitiveness of its earliest strips. It was very distracting. Thank goodness The Day the Law Died pulled back out again.

But that's the thing with those early day. That kind of comic writing was incredibly common place across the board. And while SOME comics managed to rise above it, the vast majority didn't (one of the biggest reasons early Rogue Trooper is still a hard sell for me.  Gerry Finley-Day was NOT a progressive writer). Your noting of Watchmen and 1986 is interesting, because that's the first real break point where the old gee-whiz comic writing style was finally over taken by a more natural and cinematic approach. After that point you couldn't get away with the old style exposition, and talking down to your readers.

Alan Moore may have popularized it, but IMO John Wagner (and, to be fair, many others) laid a lot of the ground work.

[Frank]

I do feel like the old strips have suffered the test of time quite poorly - so much exposition from the narration and characters - "I'm going to shoot you now" sort of stuff that I assume is there because the reader isn't trusted to know what is going on just from looking at the art ... It makes me wonder how stuff like Watchmen got it so right in 1986 (admittedly 9 years after 2000AD #1) when most other strips were still doing this.

Reading through the Dredd Case Files though, I started to notice that Dredd grew out of that sort of thing rather quickly. The Robot Wars is where I think Dredd really jelled as the comic it's be known for ... Alan Moore may have popularized it, but IMO John Wagner (and, to be fair, many others) laid a lot of the ground work.

John Wagner wrote a ton of Dredd strips in those first two years, and they're almost all just as awful as the stuff by Pat Mills and other writers. Just because Robot Wars is an example of where the strip should be heading, doesn't mean Wagner understood that immediately - the same thing happened with The Pit, which redefined the tone and focus of the strip ... eventually.

As Mills and Wagner have both said, standard publishing practice and thinking at that time was based on the short term - neither of them would have expected the strips they were writing or the comic itself to still be going in two years time, let alone forty, or for adults to still be reading and critiquing them.

Those comics are meant for little kids, and the overly-narrated style of that stuff reminds me of having a parent reading picture books to you, pointing out the funny thing the mice are doing in the corner and explaining what a Marquis is. The real difference in the work of Wagner and Mills appears to come after a couple of years, when it's obvious the comic has an older readership and that they're able to sustain the comic for years to come. You could argue that kind of market segmentation is what did for comics (UK and US) as a popular medium in the long run, but it made/makes some great stuff possible.

[Fontwell Magma]

Yeah I guess the target audience of comics (and 2000AD) has changed over the years. It is interesting to see how Dredd and other strips have developed in terms of their complexity and storytelling.

In fact, I wonder what age the youngest readers are these days of 2000AD... considering half the references and stuff people notice and talk about on here goes over my head and I'm 27...

[Mabs]

oh arse, it's nestling beneath a big pile of books. 

Too heavy to lift, 'muscleman' ? 

Oh no bro!
You calling me weak?! You better watch that mouth! *starts squealing*

[Bat King]

The main thing is as Sauchie said... it was a children's comic in the 1970s and that is how they were written. Actually children's comics still have a lot of exposition.

[The Adventurer]

Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man don't.

[Tjm86]

Wow - I am ashamed to say I've never actually read Dredd's first strip. Look how skinny he is!!

so much exposition from the narration and characters - "I'm going to shoot you now" sort of stuff that I assume is there because the reader isn't trusted to know what is going on just from looking at the art.

It's probably worth bearing in mind the target audience back then.  It was supposed to be a children's comic (hell, I was only about 8 when I was first bought a prog and that was about prog 36) whereas comics have a more mature audience these days and that is not just in terms of age.  If you place it alongside comics of the same era there is a lot of the same style of exposition and structure.