Judge Dredd: Lawman of the FutureThe
1995 Judge Dredd movie (featuring Sylvester "
Double Whammy" Stallone) spawned a spin-off comic aimed at younger readers:
2000 AD Regened Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future!
Something of a poisoned chalice (especially in hindsight given the poor box office takings and terrible reviews), this required that artists adopt the design aesthetic of the movie, which had mostly ignored the comic and ploughed its own furrow, in the same way as one might decide to pass up a plow and instead use a spoon. The writers couldn't sit inside the canon Dredd continuity so instead did a series of best-of cover versions (like an
Abba tribute act), slightly hamstrung by a need for the villains not to die (just like in the A-Team). This lead to clumsy injected dialog explaining that even though there was a huge explosion that "the perp will be fine".
Given that every story featured Judge Dredd, it's tricky to provide a clean overview. Each issue (except the final issue #23 in 1996) has three strips (discounting the one-pager that run in issues #11-13). So, you could look at it as three slots of Judge Dredd, like so:
Alternatively, you might think of it as writer-driven, where John Wagner helps to launch things, but ultimately the majority of the strips are written by Ken Niemand and Robbie Morrison (with honourable mentions for Simon Furman):
Or, you might do a deep dive, and look at each individual story, but for a twenty-three issue run, (and depending how you count them) there were a hefty forty-five of those (with the longest linked set being Gordon Rennie's Mega-Mobs / Mega-Rackets sequence at nine episodes), leading to something of a deep-dive of data:
Apart from the movie-fied Judge uniform and the transforming Lawmaster (flying mode!), nothing from the screen version seems to be have been used. There's no movie-Fergee, for example. Instead, the comic introduces elements that would be easily familiar to most 2000 AD readers, with the first couple of episodes introducing face-change machines, hotshot homing bullets, Stookies, Fatties, muties, Cadet Judges, The Academy of Law, Apetown, weather control and Zoom trains.
The borrowing from the canon is clear with stories like "Dial Mean for Murder" (the only story featuring Mean Angel, with two arms), "Revolt of the Robots" (after 1977's Robot Wars), "Graveyard Shift" (after 1983's, erm,
The Graveyard Shift), "Death Hunt" (after 1985's The Hunters Club), and so on. The other really obvious ones are a three-part Judge Death, a long-form "Mega-Rackets" sequence and Hotdog Run. The problem here is that
these stories have been told before, and better. There's arguably not much artistic value in making something that's "the same as but not as good as".
Of more interest are longer-form stories where the writers add their own elements to the milieu. Simon Furman gives us the reptilian mutant Coldblood, who features in Heatwave, In Cold Blood and Cold War. Robbie Morrison gets to play with his murderous mutant with magic tattoos, Dragon, in Illustrated Assassin and Dragon's Lair. And Gordon Rennie takes us out to the end of the publishing cycle with the linked six-part mini-epic featuring an alien invasion of Mega-City One (with First Strike and Invasion).
Perhaps cursed from the outset as the spin-off of a risible Hollywood travesty, and now destined to compare unfavorably with both the 2012 movie and the subsequent spin-off Dredd stories in the Megazine, this twenty-three issue
Judge Dredd remix will remain a curious footnote from the annals.
Codpiece of Doom!
by Jim Murray
& Dondie Cox
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A Dance with Death!
by Jim Murray
& Dondie Cox
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Fang-tastic Action!
by Paul Peart
& Sean Barnes-Murphy
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