Judge Dredd - Character and Appearance

Character and Appearance

Joseph Dredd is the most famous of the elite corps of Street Judges that run Mega-City One, charged with the power not only to enforce the law, but also to instantly convict and sentence offenders – and occasionally even execute them. Dredd is armed with a "Lawgiver" pistol (programmed to recognise only his palm-print, and capable of firing six different types of ammunition), a daystick, a knife, and stun/gas grenades. His helmet obscures all of his face, except for his mouth and jaw. He rides a large "Lawmaster" motorbike, which has machineguns, a powerful laser cannon, and full artificial intelligence capable of responding to orders from the Judge and operating itself.

Dredd's entire face is never shown properly in the strip. This custom began as an unofficial guideline, but soon became a rule which artists were required to follow. As John Wagner explained: "It sums up the facelessness of justice − justice has no soul. So it isn't necessary for readers to see Dredd's face, and I don't want you to."

On very rare occasions Dredd's face has been shown in flashbacks to when he was a child, in pictures lacking in detail. In an early story in prog 8, Dredd is forced to remove his helmet and the other characters react as if he is disfigured; but, Dredd's face was covered by a faux censorship sticker. In only one other prog has Dredd's face been on view. In Prog 52, during Dredd's tenure on the Lunar Colonies, he uses a 'face-change' machine to impersonate the crooked lawyer of a gang of bank robbers.

An aborted idea was to have Dredd as a non-white character. In Carlos Ezquerra's original design he drew Dredd with large lips, "to put a mystery as to his racial background." Not all of the artists who worked on the strip were told. As a result Mike McMahon spent four months drawing Dredd as a black man, while Brian Bolland and Ron Smith drew him as a white man. As the strip was not printed in colour, this went unnoticed and the idea was dropped.

Time passes in the Judge Dredd strip in real time, so as a year passes in real life a year goes by in the comic. Thus the first Dredd story, published in 1977, was set in 2099, and stories published in 2012 are set in 2134. Consequently, as former editor Alan McKenzie explains, "every year that goes by Dredd gets a year older – unlike Spider-Man, who has been a university student for the past twenty-five years!" Dredd is over seventy years old, with over fifty years of active service (2079–2134), and for some time characters in the comic have been mentioning that Dredd is not as young and fit as he used to be. This remains a theme of some recent episodes: in prog 1595 (2008) Dredd was diagnosed with benign cancer of the duodenum. It is not known whether there are any long term plans to address this issue (although Mega-City One has cloning and brain transplant technology, for instance). In an interview with Empire in 2012 Wagner said: "There could be many ways to end it, but the probability is that I won’t still be around when it happens! I would love to write it, but I can’t see it happening. I’ll leave the script in my will."