Yes indeed, I would like to add my name (David Knight!) to the list of fans whose imagination seized upon the images committed to paper by Ron Smith from 1979 onwards in the pages of 2000ad every week. I was 8 years old the first time I saw a Ron Smith Judge Dredd. As I recall, it was an episode of The day the Law Died - it must have been Prog 104; but the bits of Ron's The Day the Law Died episodes that really stuck in my memory were the the building of the wall around the city, the trains running on time, the odd little postal delivery robot in Prog 106, and Fergee's heroic sacrifice in Prog 108 - my first glimpse of the Statue of Judgement. All of the crazy futuristic stuff was filling up my head from then on - The Exo-men in Prog 111, Marjorie Blackshack of the Citizens' Committee for Compassion for Criminals, the enormous scale of the Charlton Heston Block in Prog 117, the hard-luck tale of Ralphy Bryce in Prog 121, the erruption of Power Tower and the rise and fall of Father Earth in Progs 124 and 125, the Crime Blitz and the Soviet sea invasion in Progs 128 and 129, and Sob Story, Johnny Teardrop, Otto Sump and the mo-pads in Progs 131 and 132...
Then there came Benji Doonan, the Invisible Man, the death of Judge Harkness, the spiders (Oh my God, the spiders!), alien seeds, the man who drank the blood of Satanus, lawmaster run amok, the demise of Bonnie Crickle, robo-doc run amok, the Ugly Craze, the Blob craze, the graffiti craze, Filmore Faro's garbage mine, the Galipardans on the war world in space, the Grunwalder, pirates of the Black Atlantic and all the rest !
I was fairly dazzled by the detail and the breadth of imagination and the excitement and sheer fun of those pages of Judge Dredd in my formative years, and Ron Smith was in at the start of the list of names of my childhood heroes alongside Ian Gibson, McMahon, Brian Bolland and the pseudonuyms John Howard and T.B. Grover!
Thanks, Ron, for all the hours of pleasure your wonderful story-telling has given me, and for bringing Wagner and Grant's marvellous scripts to life in a way that conveyed all the humour, fun, jeopardy and pathos they contained. It was a pleasure and a privilege to see it. When I was a kid you were one of the magicians whose names I knew who made the magic happen. Your work was food for the imagination in my formative years and remains fixed forever in my mind's eye.
