Judge Death - Origins and History

Origins and History

The full story of his journey from being a boy named Sidney, the son of a sadistic traveling dentist, to his incarnation as a creature of pure evil is recounted in the Judge Dredd Megazine series Young Death - Boyhood of a Super-Fiend and given extra detail by Anderson: Psi Division - Half Life. A young sadist thrilled by inflicting pain, Sidney would soon go on to murder three bullies from his school. He joined the Judges in order to be able to kill people legally, gaining the nickname 'Judge Death' for his hard-line stance on executing all lawbreakers.

The psychopathic and obsessive Judge shortly afterwards encountered the witches Phobia and Nausea, the "Sisters of Death," who he saw as a means to achieve his vision of total justice - the complete extermination of all life. He reasoned that since all crime is committed by the living, therefore life itself is a crime. Hence the monster's catchphrase: "The crime is life, the sentence is death!" Using their dark magic, he had himself transformed into the unstoppable undead Judge Death. Along with the “Sisters of Death” and his fellow Dark Judges, he wiped his world clean of all life.

Once that was done, he left “Deadworld” and crossed dimensions to reach Mega-City One. His body was destroyed after his first massacre in 2102, and his spirit took control of Judge Anderson in an attempt to rebuild it. He ended up trapped, but the other three Dark Judges arrived to free him and together they slaughtered thousands of citizens. He and his cohorts struck several times, causing great carnage each time, but they were always defeated by the Judges Dredd and Anderson. Eventually the Sisters of Death, now spectral beings, arrived in Mega-City One and along with the Dark Judges, they enslaved the judges, conquered the city and created their "Necropolis" - a horror that took the lives of 60 million people.

Necropolis failed and Judge Death soon ended up as the only Dark Judge left free in this world. Inevitably he too was eventually captured, after jumping across dimensions to Gotham City. He would break loose on several occasions afterwards, being recaptured each time. In his final escape in 2124, he managed to keep his escape secret for a while and then lured Anderson into a trap by murdering children. Catching Anderson unawares, he put her in a coma so she couldn't stand against him - he also infected her with a pestilence spirit so that when she woke up a great plague would be unleashed. Anderson, warning herself via a hallucination of herself around during Death’s rise, purposely remained in her coma.

Death went out into the Cursed Earth, slaughtering as he went and re-evaluating his cause and methods. He decided that Weapons of Mass Destruction were the most effective way to achieve his ends and went on a quest to find them. Using a bunker full of nuclear weapons, he destroyed Las Vegas and tried to destroy Mega City One, but was stopped by the city's anti-missile system. The judges, believing it was just an old bunker becoming active, fired "bunker buster" missiles at him destroying his body releasing his spirit into the astral plane, whereupon he was attacked by Houcus Ritter, a man whose family he had killed when he first entered the Cursed Earth. Houcus had been in Las Vegas when it had been destroyed and had become an angel. He beat Death to the ground then opened a pit leading to hell. Death was then dragged into Hell by the vengeful ghosts of all those he had killed.

Whether this was the final end of Judge Death remains to be seen.