Judge Dredd thoughts

6 min readSep 16, 2024

In awe that the first guy after Wagner/Grant to really get Dredd is efin John Smith.

John Smith really hit the ground rolling on Dredd. Captured the tone really well, picked up on the bits of political economy, doesn’t dwell on Dredd interiority. The best way to express why, I think, is to contrast his stories with Ennis’, whose stories are technically pretty good and were they not Judge Dredd stories would’ve been even better. As opposed to most other non-Wagner/Grant writers until the mid 2000s who rarely managed to do Dredd the right way, usually because they make Dredd too much of a caricature, when he should be the straight man. I don’t really know which stories are worse, those that are written as if the author just realized Dredd’s supposed to be the bad guy or those who are just cop stories in the future.

Anyways, Ennis’ stories were political, but for him politics there meant either very specific events, with parallels to real life Cold War situations or abstract discussions about governing systems. Whereas, the best political Dredd stories or moments are those where politics in this sense are absent and what remains is the political economy, with the Judges not the result of a particular history or ideology, but the rational response to keep running a particular society and to maintain functioning a delirious high-modernist project.

Smith’s Dredd is just that. Dredd is the main character, he’s matter-of-fact, working with clockwork precision to maintain a dysfunctional world that finds more and more ways to malfunction. And these ways come from stretching the high-modernist premises of the Megacity. He asks what does it mean to live in a society where most people are surplus to be managed. To Ennis’ credit, he invents a lot more new situations and characters, Smith is going back to older stories more often than not. But he’s additive, instead of replaying the greatest hits he goes to events that haven’t been visited in a while, or even ever and maybe should’ve been.

There’s also an important difference in how they treat Dredd’s character. A very good example is how they treat the way Dredd deals with his wounds.

In Darkside, one of Smith’s longer arcs, there are two or three times here where Dredd wakes up banged up on the hospital bed. But he just pulls the wires out of himself and keeps moving, the Law doesn’t care for pain. Ennis’ Dredd is almost never vulnerable and when he’s hurt, he’s superhumanely hurt.

In Midnight Kiss, he gets crucified, left for dead in the Cursed Earth, but survives on radioactive vulture blood and gets himself off from the cross. It’s extremely metal and Nick Percival draws the whole thing as if it’s a series of Frazetta paintings, but it’s …off.

When Ennis wrote Punisher MAX, Castel was hurt plenty. But because Frank Castle is a normal human and not a SF cybercop he could be writing pages of internal monologue about The Punisher working himself through pain. Because that’s interesting to him, how a character can muster the will to keep going despite the pain, not the simple fact that he does it. So in the few instances where Ennis allows Dredd to get hurt, he ups the intensity to such extremes that it’s out of a Conan story.

This reflects something quite deep. Ennis writes the strip in a subjective mode, from the point of view of characters, Smith in an objective one, from the point of view of the world. Ennis either sat too much in Dredd’s head or Dredd was just…there, something in the background, while other people were driving the stories. But Dredd’s not a cypher nor a witness character like Corto Maltese. He is driving the stories and he has a perspective, but it’s a simple one: the law must be respected. He just acts upon the world to keep it the way it is, no questions asked. Smith got that.

If you don’t know much about John Smith, you probably don’t get why it’s such a strange thing that he’s the one to do it first. Tom Shapira’s overview of a good chunk of the guy’s career is a pretty good primer. So for about a decade Ennis, Millar, Morrison, another Morrison, Abnett and a few others cannot work out Judge Dredd. And then comes one of the weirdest writers of the bunch, purportedly also one of the least disciplined ones, and just nails it.

Appreciating Carlos Ezquerra drawing Dredd on his Lawmaster

It looks like it’s drawn from three different anlges at the same time, but it’s such a strong image. Every time.

The power of cartooning to convey speed, and strength and personality.

he handles are so far apart, they bend so weirdly. I don’t know how the force is supposed to be transmitted to steer the wheel. But that’s so great about it. The sheer power Dredd has to have to contain the bike is inhuman.

Comparing it to movie Dredd makes it almost a chad v virgin meme, with how Ezquerra draws Dredd in a full body manspread, while movie Dredd is hunched over.

inb4, of course Dredd is a fascist, but this is part of what makes the strip so brilliant. It makes Dredd into the perfect vision of how cops see themselves and manages to make that be terrifying and inhuman precisely because he’s a fulfillment of those fantasies.

Dredd cannot be seductive in the way The Punisher is because you cannot be Dredd. Sure, there are some elements of distance, it’s SF, he never removes his helmet, but it’s also the way his strength is represented. It’s abstract, you cannot embody it, only be subjected to it.