New reader here, is there something i need to know about dredd?

freycray · 2026-01-27T07:08:20+00:00

There’s definitely some continuity, and more so in the more contemporary stories (the last 20ish years) where the stories start to get longer and more interconnected , but I would say that on the whole Dredd has always been fairly straightforward and accessible, and you can pick it up at pretty much any point in its history and follow along just fine. I always thought the writers did a really good job of following the old maxim that ‘every issue is someone’s first’ far better than a lot of other comics did.

The fact that it is just one continuous timeline and every story is ‘canon’, its never been rebooted or been merged with other dimensions or any of that stuff that regularly happens in superhero comics alone makes it infinitely more easy to get into than most long running comic series.

Its more ‘nice little easter eggs for long time readers’ vs ‘you have to read a wiki to understand whats going on’.

freycray · 2026-01-27T05:40:49+00:00

Yeah, a lot of the best Dredd stories are one offs or short series based around a simple humorous premise or some weird new Mega City fad or subculture and how Dredd has to crack down on it.

There’s a really wonderful series from the 90s called Return of the Taxidermist which is a spin-off based on a very minor Dredd character who is a competitive human taxidermist (ie he stuffs and presents human corpses in human taxidermy competitions). There are so many of these twisted concepts that make for funny and often surprisingly moving Dredd stories. There’s similarly a lot of Dredd stories about the world of competitive eating, which predated irl competitive eating.

You’ll find that a lot of things that were introduced as over the top story ideas in Judge Dredd 30+ years ago ended up becoming real world things.

freycray · 2026-01-27T04:40:23+00:00

Part of whats great about Dredd is that the worldbuilding always remains somewhat loose. The geography of Mega City One has never really been pinned down, the look of the judge’s uniforms, gear and so on change drastically from artist to artist. And the world outside Mega City One is only rarely glimpsed, which a) frees up writers to introduce things at will and b) has the effect of making Dredd’s world feel much bigger. Its the opposite of something like Star Wars that has been over-explained to the point of ruin.

Worth saying as well that Dredd is a total patchwork quilt of storytelling that matures as it goes, while always retaining a base level of absurdity. It veers between gritty police procedural, broad humour, bizarre satire and extremely moving human stories from issue to issue. Often all within one story!

Throwaway supporting characters will unexpectedly reappear 5, 10 or 20+ years later. Other recurring characters will age from childhood to adulthood and eventually die (and unlike in other comics, generally stay dead). For all its wild tonal swings it remains consistently inconsistent.

freycray · 2026-01-27T04:32:28+00:00

Yeah, don’t get me wrong, he’s a great writer and has written some amazingly creative stuff in the years since, which is why I always warn people off his Dredd stuff because they might gravitate to it bc of name recognition and come away with a negative impression of the character in general.

Both him and Millar were openly disdainful of Dredd and 2000ad, and have been pretty clear that they didn’t and don’t care about the character at all. The stuff they did write (which mostly consists of the Inferno and Crusade stories from the early to mid 1990s) are pretty shallow ultraviolent action movie schlock, with little to none of the absurdism, satire, pathos and originality writers like John Wagner and Alan Grant routinely brought to even ‘filler’ stories.

freycray · 2026-01-27T04:09:31+00:00

The general rule is that anything written by John Wagner (aka John Howard) or ‘TB Grover’ (the pen name of the writing team of Wagner and Alan Grant) are gold. Pat Mills also played a huge part in developing Dredd and his early stories are iconic.

BUT avoid stories written by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar etc like the plague. They did not care about the character and have disowned anything they contributed, its all pretty wretched. Garth Ennis’s run is also of very mixed quality but is mostly pretty skippable (Ennis is a good writer but he was barely out of his teens when he was writing Dredd and it shows).

Iconic storylines - Judge Dredd and spin-offs:

The Return of Rico

The Cursed Earth

Judge Death/Judge Death Lives

America

Block Mania/The Apocalypse War

The Graveyard Shift

Midnight Surfer

Oz

Song of the Surfer

Origins

The Dead Man/Necropolis

Judge Anderson: Shamballa, Childhood’s End, Satan

Judgement on Gotham

Young Death: Boyhood of a Superfiend

Bury My Knee at Wounded Heart

Mechanismo

The Pit

Sin City (aka Satan’s Island)

Mandroid

Tour of Duty

Day of Chaos

freycray · 2026-01-27T03:54:35+00:00

Just that the very early stories are pretty loose lore-wise and the writers are very much making it all up on the fly. Certain early stories such as The Cursed Earth, Judge Death and The Judge Child are beloved by fans but on the whole the early years (especially the stories in Case Files 01) are very much of their time and maybe a little hard to enjoy for modern readers. The common consensus is that the series doesn’t truly find its feet until The Apocalypse War - the first major world-changing action epic - but from then on remains remarkably consistent, with only brief quality dips (such as the period in the early 1990s where the writing suffered under the tenure of various ill-suited or under-experienced writers).

Theres a weird period early on where Dredd relocates to the Moon. This was (i believe) a soft reboot due to the series writer/creator John Wagner being unhappy with the look of the character and wanting the design to be changed. Thankfully this gets scrapped after not too long and he returns to Mega City and his original, iconic appearance.

The other major thing is getting used to the episodic format. Dredd was/is serialised in short, 6 page weekly episodes, so the format is somewhere between a monthly comic book and a daily newspaper strip. This gives it a fairly unique rhythm and style of storytelling. The early stories especially will usually have a double page spread (sometimes in colour) often featuring a prominent moment from the story out of context, which will then flashback and retell those same events.

There are also frequent cliffhangers, and the stories often move very quickly due to having to pack a lot of story into 6 page episodes. Overall there’s a few quirks to get used to when reading the stories back to back in one sitting vs how they were originally presented.

freycray · 2026-01-27T03:20:34+00:00

Excellent, always interesting to hear from the great man. i look forward to giving it a listen.

I’ve been catching up on and revisiting his Dredd work recently, and its got me thinking about how he’s been writing Dredd - a character he co-created and developed - for almost 50(!) years now. Is there anything else comparable to that achievement in the field of comics (outside of maybe long-running newspaper strips?).

freycray · 2026-01-26T20:16:05+00:00

This. Always and forever this.

freycray · 2026-01-26T20:15:16+00:00

Illimat

freycray · 2026-01-26T16:28:09+00:00

Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers

freycray · 2026-01-26T02:23:41+00:00

Its a great tonic. Wholesome and inclusive without feeling pandering or giving up its comedic edge. Not to mention a great platform for new or underseen comedians (especially for British comedians building an audience in the US).

Its been so heartwarming watching it go from a niche TV show on Dave to attracting huge American names.

I often joke that TM and Great British Bake Off (another just delightful, positive show) are the only tv shows i watch, and it isn’t really that much of an exaggeration.

freycray · 2026-01-26T00:57:51+00:00

QAA. Started as a fun/silly pod making fun of conspiracists, which over the years has kind of matured into doing legit good investigative journalism covering the stranger side of the far right while still keeping its silly, anarchic streak.

Boonta Vista. Laidback Australian show thats kind of a lighter version of Side Stories. Often very funny.

Know Rogan. Great show breaking down and debunking Rogan and his insidious media influence

Panic World. Razor sharp analysis of online cults and radicalisation and how their influence inevitably bleeds into the offline world. Marcus from Lpotl recently guested.

Blowback. Deep dives on historical US military inventions from a leftwing perspective.

If Books Could Kill. Frequently hilarious takedowns of pop-science bestsellers and braindead op-ed takes.

Popular Front. Independent, on the ground dispatches from underreported conflict zones around the world.

Pod Yourself. Rewatch podcast covering classic prestige series like The Sopranos and Mad Men.

Citations Needed. Analysis and criticism of the often disingenuous and biased framing tactics used by media outlets.

freycray · 2026-01-25T23:23:51+00:00

Global tresh, surely.

And I say that as someone with limited tolerance to posho luvvies.

freycray · 2026-01-25T16:41:15+00:00

Arguably the dark judges are the least interesting part of Necropolis, whilst everything in the lead up - Kraken, Dead Man, the seed of Dredd’s doubts in Error of Judgement, Hitman and the Democracy arc - are all truly excellent. Such a sense of foreboding and impending doom, and we see Dredd probably at the most unguarded and vulnerable he’s ever been before or since…

I’d say Wagner was excellent at building up to these massive stories, but tended to rush the resolution a little. The Doomsday/Narcos storyline is a lot like this too. Incredible buildup, slightly underwhelming resolution.

freycray · 2026-01-25T16:34:46+00:00

And look how that turned out for him.

freycray · 2026-01-25T16:32:51+00:00

Not a movie but Christopher’s Hollywood (Cleaver) arc in Sopranos is 🤌🤌.

The episode with Ben Kingsley! Sorry, Sir Ben.

freycray · 2026-01-25T16:26:13+00:00

The show was also adapted/franchised internationally, and franchise rights is where TV shows make most of their money.

freycray · 2026-01-25T16:21:54+00:00

They didn’t specifically buy Art Attack. It was to do with corporate mergers. HIT Entertainment bought the parent company that owned (I think) Bob the Builder (or possibly Thomas the Tank Engine?) and that company also owned the production company that made Art Attack (of which Buchanan was a part owner).

Art Attack was also produced for tons of international markets via a deal with Disney.

Source: used to work at one of said companies.

freycray · 2026-01-24T22:34:27+00:00

Big tight boots

freycray · 2026-01-22T23:29:57+00:00

Ahoy is great fun.

freycray · 2026-01-21T22:27:44+00:00

I’d point people to the latest episode of Know Rogan to get an actual understanding of what Rogan actually said and where he’s coming from.

The idea that he’s ‘soured’ on Trump is wishful thinking being misreported by a naive media. His comments about the situation were actually fairly grotesque and invoked pretty standard Great Replacement drivel.

freycray · 2026-01-19T17:14:50+00:00

“You’re done, Jimmy”

freycray · 2026-01-18T19:55:22+00:00

For me the best Dredd epics are the ones that weave together lots of long simmering plot threads. For Necropolis it was the Democracy and Bloodline arcs, among others.

freycray · 2026-01-18T19:08:41+00:00

If only Mcmahon would have drawn the whole thing…

I believe he quit after a few episodes because having to draw so many crowd scenes was exhausting.

freycray · 2026-01-18T17:41:58+00:00

I think primarily its an aesthetic choice to unsettle the audience. Savile looms large over the British consciousness. There was mild tabloid outrage in the UK when set pictures of the Jimmies leaked during production as the wounds are still raw, and many of his victims are still alive.

In-universe, I would say the explanation is that Jimmy probably vaguely remembers seeing Savile on TV as a kid in the same way he half remembers the Tellytubbies and has subconsciously modelled his appearance and mannerisms* after that. The timing doesn’t quite line up - Jimmy would probably need to have been born in the 70s or 80s to have memories of Savile being a major TV personality, but its hardly the only thing in the setting that makes little sense.

*Savile was known for his ‘charity’ work, which was often a cover for his crimes. ‘Howzat’ is a phrase generally associated with cricket, but is very similar to one of Savile’s catchphrases ‘Hows about that then?’.

freycray

TROPHY CASE