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I think here the subtext is "Starlord is coming! Run for the hills!"

Roosevelt was dead by the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was Truman.

On the whole, I think comparing the fictional deaths in 'The Apocalypse War' to bombings in the real world in which real tens of thousands of real innocent civilians really died is probably unhelpful when it comes to working out if Dredd is a hero or a villain. But I do think it's fairly clear that we're not supposed to admire or cheer Dredd for doing what he does. There's no insistence of 'Yay! JD kicking butt!'

Even as an 8 year old I felt there was what I'd now describe as a moral distance between the reader and the character both in that and other stories. It made it harder to identify Dredd in unambiguous terms as a hero. This is, of course, one of the reasons why Tooth was a much more intriguing and disturbing read than other comics.

Funnily enough, given that he did more to raise questions about the very notion of heroism in my innocent young brain than anyone else, it's Pat Mills who sees Dredd as primarily a hero and a human being. And it's Mills who provides us with this great quote: "You see, now Mek-Quake is a hero, he needs an excuse for his nauseating acts of sickening violence."

Re: Grant. I recently re-read his 1989 story 'Politics'. This is about a pro-democracy film-maker who gets kidnapped by a far right terrorist group. They turn out to be a front for the Judges. In order to silence her, Dredd has her brainwashed and 'disappeared'.

It struck me that this is a degree of bastardliness on Dredd's part that transcends things like approving the routine tranquilisation of the population, or even suppressing the pro-democracy march. The latter did pose an existential threat to the Justice Department and making a display of breaking it up makes sense in terms of the logic of the authoritarian system (and the character of the incumbent Chief Judge). What happens in 'Politics' seems astonishingly petty and vindictive - it makes the Judges seem no better than a Pinochet/Galtieri-style banana dictatorship, and I think their system is more sophisticated than that.

But worse it makes Dredd seem utterly complicit it in a way that seems out of character. She's not an existential threat to Mega-City One and - more importantly - she hasn't broken any laws. It doesn't help that this is just a month away from 'A Letter to Judge Dredd', or that Grant basically retells the same story in an infinitely more sophisticated and affecting form a couple of years later in 'The Jesus Syndrome'.

(While I find Grant's kneejerk anti-authoritarianism a bit annoying, it's still less irritating than 'Twilight's Last Gleaming' and 'Helter Skelter', wherein the democrats are deluded self-serving wimps who can't measure up to a Real Man like Dredd. Though I can't help wonder if the voting computer that gave the referendum to the Judges wasn't the dodgy one that was fixed for Booth in 'Origins'.)

Generally, I'm not sure that Dredd is either a hero or a villain - he is The Law!

Death does turn up in 'It's a Dredd-ful Life', but it's (spoiler) all a dream.

I seem to remember that most strip indexes published for the Meg in the early/mid-90s listed 'Beyond Our Kenny' with the Dredd strips and 'America' as a series in its own right. But 'America' actually has the Dredd logo on the first episode, while 'BOK' doesn't...

The Over-Writer in Chief is Alan Moore. He abandons the technique later on (and part of his 'How to Write for Comics' is an elongated mea culpa for spawning a generation of writers who think that's it) but some of the text for Swamp Thing and (especially) Miracleman look like clogged arteries in prose. This is a good thing, as he gets better when he takes the opposite tack, and because the talented writers who follow him know how to avoid his mistakes (e.g. Gaiman, whose prose style is a lot suppler and more considered than Moore's by a mile).

Interesting, Our Man Smith takes the prose-poetry caption to a kind of logical extreme, so that the text doesn't just counterpoint the image but acts as a kind of synaesthesia, conveying in words images that can't be drawn. 'Leatherjack' is probably the most literate thing Tooth has ever published, not in the sense of being "well read" but more "acutely conscious of the power of the word".

Am I the only person who saw the Tooth TV advert from 1994? It was on Channel 4 well after midnight. I looked up from my "revision" and saw Armoured Gideon staring back at me from the TV.

I'd gone apostate about 3 months earlier. If it had been Toothless for a bit longer I might have been tempted back.

I am now immune to biscuit bribery.

I still think this is going to go all 'Moses Incident' on our asses.

IIC, Tharg offered Earthside-8 ashcans to readers of the 1993 Tooth Winter Special, so maybe that's where this came from?

What sort of biscuits?

Sorry, but I have sources to protect!

Oh, I have more horror stories about Karen Berger than you could shake a shamanic stick at but am sworn to secrecy.

John Smith: he really is the one writer who's made 2000AD his natural home. Pretty much every other major scripter on Tooth has had a comfortable time finding big projects from other titles and companies, but John Smith is the only one whose core work has appeared almost exclusively in Tooth and her sister titles. Which is not to disrespect him, but to marvel at the weird fecundity of a comic that can nurture and sustain such a talent.

Vertigo was built on Gaiman's Sandman, but that was always going to be a finite thing and so there was a tussle between the direction it might take once Sandman was done. On the one hand you have the Gaimans and the Milligans who I regard as 'The Mad Mod Poet Gods', and then there were 'The Lads' - the Morrisons and the Ennises and the Millars. And the Lads won, but I do wonder what might have happened if Smith had got a foot in the door, given that he kind of straddles both camps (who else could write a story about serial killers fighting each other with dinosaurs as a competitive sport then bookend it with 'Firekind' and 'Deus Ex Machina'?) Maybe this year's big comix flick from Matthew Thingy or Edgar Wright would have had fewer superheroes and more radioactive nuns (their masks oozing light and meat) rewriting palimpsestual reality as a nameless hero battles both obese gay sadist-aesthetes and the ineffable alien spiders who've laid their metal eggs in his brain? It would totally pwn 'The Expendables' anyway.

P.S. I also like Leatherjack.

...who looks exactly like Kidd (or Hoagy), hence the confusion!

I have the horrid feeling that if French Judges do ever show up they'd have stripy leathers, beret-helmets and strings of onions on their left shoulders.

But the French have probably been integrated into the population of pan-continental Euro City, whose Judges might resemble the original idea for 'Rogue Trooper'.

True, but Sam's dream is a subjective fantasy so the Rebellion editors might have felt that was acceptable. In the same way that, for example, Dredd can fling vaguely racist epithets at Shojan the Warlord and it doesn't seem offensive because it's a character rather than the author speaking.