Judge Dredd's first appearance, in an advert in 2000AD #1 (26 February 1977). This Judge Dredd would not be ready for the first issue of 2000 AD, launched in February 1977. Their scripts were given to a variety of artists as Mills tried to find a strip which would provide a good introduction to the character. Mills was reluctant to lose Judge Dredd and farmed the strip out to a variety of freelance writers, hoping to develop it further. īy this stage, Wagner had quit, disillusioned that a proposed buy-out of the new comic by another company, which would have given him and Mills a greater financial stake in the comic, had fallen through. The De La Salle monks at the school were a major influence in the 2000 AD design of the 'judge, jury and executioner' attitude of the judges. In his blog, Mills detailed the moments of rage for which Brother James had a reputation and his own experience witnessing them. Brother James was considered to be an excellent teacher, but also an excessively strict disciplinarian to the extent that he was considered abusive. Mills initially based the characterisation of Judge Dredd on Brother James, one of his teachers at St Joseph's College, Ipswich. A new script was needed for the first episode. The original launch story written by Wagner and drawn by Ezquerra was vetoed by the board of directors for being too violent. The hardware and cityscapes Ezquerra had drawn were far more futuristic than the near-future setting originally intended in response, Mills set the story further into the future, on the advice of his art assistant Doug Church. Ezquerra added body-armour, zips, and chains, which Wagner initially objected to, commenting that the character looked like a "Spanish pirate." Wagner's initial script was rewritten by Mills and drawn up by Ezquerra. Wagner gave Ezquerra an advertisement for the film Death Race 2000, showing the character Frankenstein (played by David Carradine) clad in black leather on a motorbike, as a suggestion of Dredd's appearance. The task of visualising the character was given to Carlos Ezquerra, a Spanish artist who had worked for Mills before on Battle Picture Weekly. Mills had developed a horror strip called Judge Dread (after the stage name of English ska and reggae artist Alexander Minto Hughes), before abandoning the idea as unsuitable for the new comic but the name, with the spelling modified to "Dredd" at the suggestion of sub-editor Kelvin Gosnell, was adopted by Wagner. In a 1995 interview, Wagner said: "When Pat was putting together 2000 AD, we realised from the success of "One-Eyed Jack" this was the kind of story the paper should have – a really hard, tough cop." Wagner had written a Dirty Harry-style "tough cop" story, " One-Eyed Jack", for Valiant, and suggested a character who took that concept to its logical extreme. When comics editor Pat Mills was developing 2000 AD in 1976, he brought in his former writing partner, John Wagner, to develop characters. In audio dramas by Big Finish Productions, Dredd is voiced by Toby Longworth. Later, he was portrayed by Karl Urban in the 2012 adaptation Dredd.
Judge Dredd made his live-action debut in 1995 in Judge Dredd, portrayed by Sylvester Stallone. In 2011, IGN ranked Judge Dredd 35th among the top 100 comic book heroes of all time. Over the years Judge Dredd has been hailed as one of the best satires of American and British culture with an uncanny trend to predict upcoming events such as rampant mass surveillance, rise of populist leaders, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In Great Britain, the character of Dredd and his name are sometimes invoked in discussions of police states, authoritarianism, and the rule of law. He is a " street judge", empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals. Judge Dredd is a law enforcement and judicial officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, which covers most of the east coast of North America. He also appears in a number of film and video game adaptations. He is the magazine's longest-running character. He first appeared in the second issue of 2000 AD (1977), which is a British weekly anthology comic. Judge Joseph Dredd is a fictional character created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra. Bionic eyes grant 20/20 night vision and reduced blinking rate.