The Judges in Judge Dredd are the good guys

The tital 2000AD was a kind of joke when it was made back in the 70s. The average lifespan of a British comics magazine at the time was a few years, so the owners had a laugh about 'what if we made it all the way to 2000ad'. Still going strong today.

And not a single reboot or continuity change. Everything is canon and happens in real-time.

>That GW Judge Dredd RPG is so great

>there was a second edition
>that was cancelled 15 days prior to being sent to the printer
>the book exists SOMEWHERE
It's maddening.

They are the law guys.
Good and evil are irrelevant.

Has anyone tried contacting the writers or producers?

As sort of a brief follow-up; the game has a couple of small snares.

>It ignores the existance of daysticks. This is instantly and easily fixable.
>It's old hat and thus uses the Mk.1 Lawgiver and other old tech. This is subjective, maybe, but fans of modern Dredd might find more housekeeping than they wanted, depending on how specific they wanted to be. My advice? Just stick with the old gear; the entire book is written in the tone of older Dredd stores.
>Also subjective but it is also impossible to power-game. Judges *are* the power game in Mega City One! Even beginning characters are better trained and equipped than all but the most fearsome of opponents.

>The second edition was published by Games Workshop in 1989 as a 142-page hardcover book.[1]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dredd:_The_Role-Playing_Game

You must be a real bootlicking statist coward if you think that the absolute lack of any kind of accountability and power of the Judges is 'good'.

Yes, the Yakuza were heavily meshed into Hondo City's Judge Inspector as of the Shimura stories, but it got a little better thanks to Shimura and Inaba's efforts. Brit Cit is usually far worse though, to the point that some of the Armitage stories show that their entire Judge system, the proto-Mega City and indeed those of a lot of other Mega Cities were actually formed after Mega City One's foundation by various organised crime groups as a way to protect themselves and safeguard their positions at the top of the heap. Mind you, that's shown by other stories to not be strictly true and the origins of the Judges, Mega Cities and immediately pre-War has been expanded upon and changed somewhat since then in main continuity Dreddd.

>And not a single reboot or continuity change.
Mostly true. Aside from the Armitage/mainstream Dredd back-and-forth mentioned above, they attempted one with Rogue Trooper, then went back on it, causing more confusion. Strontium Dog and Durham Red had some oddities, mostly related to Timey-Wimey bullshit. Pat Mills sometimes does stuff in work he's currently writing which fundamentally changes or retcons how things worked in older versions of his stories,but its usually just adding new information (that doesn't always make sense) rather than saying "this never happened". Even so, the long-running series are all still remarkably consistent.

My bad, I meant a third edition.

>the absolute lack of any kind of accountability
What about the SJS?

This strip has me feeling a mixture of heartwarmth and hilarity.

Sure thing, Judge Pal!

Wanker...

I think you're missing the point, a lot.

DREDD 2 WHEN.
I'm also willing to settle for a TV show based off the Dredd movie.

>WHEN.
>willing to settle for a TV show

Well, in that case, 2018.

But is it based off the Dredd movie? Or is it a new adaptation?

But law and order ARE good.

There's going to be a tv show, but it's unlikely going to be like Dredd 2012. It'll probably be more like the comic given that everyone involved in the movie deal is British.

This. It's virtue.

*everyone involved in the tv deal

Kind of off topic but is that how an Adeptus Arbites would work?

The Arbites are direct rip-offs of Judges even down to the helmets they wear so yes.

Yes. Arbites are 1:1 Judge analogues, perhaps with even more brutality somehow.

Just bust their knees with the shock-maul, then claim they died of drug overdose or something if their heart stops.

Penal planets are overpopulated anyway.

tfw the son actually inherits the sins of their father in 40k and generations live an die on horrible penal colonies

tfw imperial law is such an overlapping clusterfuck you can't really obey the law

It's a coincidence (probably) but it makes me smile that the traditional Arbites design takes more after Deadworld's pre-Extinction Judges - primarily red and black, slit visor instead of an X, skulls and winged skulls for badge designs, vicious nature a plus.

Luncheon vouchers! Hot dog! I can't wait to be a Judge!

Maybe. The main difference is that there are higher powers that Arbites have to defer to (the Inquisition, etc) where as the Justice Department is the highest authority in Dredd's world.

There might also be something to be said about the idea that Arbites won't get involved in petty local matters of planetary law whereas there is no matter too petty for Dredd and co. to square up against.

One of the interesting things (and part of the joke) is that the judges of Mega City one are the least corrupt of all the mega cities. They take their monastic lifestyles and devotion to the law seriously!

MC1 is a keen look at mad totalitarianism and every other mega city is a new satire on a different flavour of corruption. It's neat.

It's true, but that's not a good thing.

Arbites are Judges without the optimism or good side.

So it seems Hondo City did have the yakuza influence problem. I really have to read the Shimura and Inaba stories again. Also, Andy Clarke drew an ace Hondo City.

Re: Brit-Cit, the way I remember it, the whole city was founded by (an alliance of?) organised crime groups, who managed to take over the bits that mattered, then actually had the brass to request official MC1 Justice Dept assistance to turn them into the local justice department. I wonder what those instructor judges felt, seeing what the Brit-Cit judges became. Or seeing Murphyville and Cal Hab.

Yeah, the MC1 Judges take the law seriously, but I've always thought that when they go bad, they go 120% bad: two shining examples of arseholery are Grice and Edgar. The level of petty corruption, on other hand, is a lot lower than everywhere else (fear of the SJS?), with stuff like Rico and the judges of the Pit being their style. Nothing like the Star Chamber's mix of corruption and incompetence, or the turbo banana republic style of Barranquilla.

I'm looking for a Dredd arc to read on my week off work that I can get in book form. Any recommendations?

The Pit? I've always liked the story and it's long as well (30 parts, I think) so you've got plenty to read, and it's in TPB form.

...

They're not, but they're really the only option at this point.

Dredd actually got to speak with Fargo, his clone father and the creator of the Justice System who was horrified it was still in place a nearly a century after his 'death' as he only meant it to be a temporary measure to get the US through a bad spot, not the new model of government adopted over the world. He begged Dredd to end it as his last words. Note, this man is the closest thing Dredd had to a God.

...

Good guy Dredd, not as bad as everyone says he is

Virtues are phantasms.

I've always thought Armitage was Regan's and Morse's bastard clone child: not as hard as Regan but not averse to the old interrogation technique of banging a perp's head off the side of a Transit van, not as keen on solving shit with meticulous detective work as Morse but actually being a really bloody good detective under the hard exterior. I always wonder how the hell Armitage has made it this far without telling a perp to get his trousers on because he's nicked, though.

Treasure Steel, of course, is the hip 90s update of DS Lewis.

He's one of the better cops, in part because he truly believes in the law.

There was one short that I really liked which was about the benefits system, with the massive queues to receive benefits.
When the workers there were deliberately working slowly, Dredd fires them all, and replaces them with the first bunch of people in the queue.

Watched the movie yesterday, great coincidence this thread pops up. Any suggestions for a Dredd beginner? What comics? Any easy way to find em? Thanks.

You'd think that society would support physical discipline

I'm going to take this time to note that the Judges are not only not above the Law that they uphold, but actually held to a far higher standard. The same crime that would get a civilian a few weeks in an iso-cube, if committed by a Judge, will get that Judge twenty years of hard labor on the Saturnian moon of Titan.

Also it's worth noting, though it's easy to forget because neither of the movies kept this and it actually doesn't come up that often anyway, that Megacity One actually doesn't have a death penalty. Judges are allowed to kill perpetrators in the line of duty if the situation warrants it - and it frequently does - but when actually sentencing a perpetrator, "death" is not a valid sentence.

Who are these people? Who's Armitage?

Cursed Earth and Armageddon War are great if you want to indulge your inner thirteen year old.

My recommendation: go chronologically but do it selectively, because a lot of the early stuff is rather... weird. The Luna City stuff is one; I think the Judge Child story is a bit naff but since the effects of Judge Child pop up now and then, it's readable. Plus it introduces the Angel Gang.

Try reading Cursed Earth, The Day the Law Died, Block Mania and Apocalypse War for a solid foundation, then go chronologically according to your fancy. You can get them in TPB format (the Complete Case Files) if you want them as dead trees.

>Megacity One actually doesn't have a death penalty

There is a death penalty, but that's only for high treason and during wartime, I think. You can see it during the Apocalypse War. Even mass murder will get you time in cube, though.

Detective-Judge Armitage is a Judge from Brit-Cit, Treasure Steel his sidekick/long-suffering minion.

Detective Inspector Jack Regan is the star of The Sweeney, and the hardest police officer ever seen on big screen or small. Think the bald copper from The Shield, but not (nearly) as corrupt. Detective Inspector Morse is the complete opposite of Regan: he's the brainy type of plod who solves crimes through meticulous detectiving, and the star of a long-running TV series.

The best starting story is The Cursed Earth, which is immediately followed by The Day the Law Died. They run from issues 60-110 of 2000 A.D. They are both found in The Complete Case Files Vol 2.
After that I'd recommend sticking to the big stories (20+ issues in length) or some of the famous story line (like the Dark Judges or Democracy), but your basically free to explore.

My personal favorite is Oz.

>Watched the movie yesterday
Did you was the LAWWWWWW? Or did you watch Anderson: the psychic rape chronicles?

Any good comics shop should have collections of the major stories. As mentioned previously in this thread, Judge Dredd has a very solid and well established continuity that has seen no real retcons in the 30+ years the series has been going. This can feel kind of intimidating, but being a weekly book, they do their best to keep things self contained and understandable, even in major storylines.

The big ones I'd recommend are:

The Cursed Earth
The Apocalypse War (If you only read one, then you need to read this. No other event in Dredd's history has been as important or as influential as this until very recently)
Judge Cal Saga
Judge Child & City of the Damned (City is a direct sequel to Judge Child)
America
Chopper
The Chief Judge's Man
Incubus (AKA Dredd vs Aliens. And yes, this is canon in Dredd)

In recent years, there was a massive shake-up in the Dreddverse in the form of Day of Chaos, and a large number of stories have flowed on from that.

What I never got about Judge Dredd as a setting was this:

1)You have a literal police state with enormous, far-ranging powers over the citizenry.
2) You have a lot of problems necessitating said police state. Most of them are caused by colossal overpopulation, as robotics and other forms of automation mean that you can economically feed, clothe, and otherwise manage everyone without having more than a tiny proportion of them working.
3) Why the fuck don't they institute some kind of birth control policy? It would literally solve everything a generation down the line.

They're also both played by the same actor so it's hilarious to see Morse having watched a ton of Sweeney or vice versa; you seem to be watching a complete hard bastard in his younger-ish days mellow out into this thoughtful detective.

The thing is that in Judge Dredd humanity is thriving.

The Nuclear Apocalypse has happened, biological warfare of horrendous nature has happened, zombies, aliens, robot uprisings, Judge Death and many, many other things and humanity survives and thrives.

The Earth is barely inhabitable for reasons not caused directly from the over population but humanity keeps on going with an unprecedentedly large portion of the population having an unheard of amount of free time. Possibly too much free time. In that case get rid of so much automation would be better than population control.

It was even mentioned in one of the early issues (the one with the organ thieves and black market surgeons) that man could be biologically immortal off of nothing but it's expertise in organ grafting. Made illegal for the risk of increased murders for replacement meat.

In the 2nd Call-Me-Kenneth robot uprising it was revealed that they can transplant a brain into robot duplicate and become effectively immortal.

Cybernetics has a advanced to such a degree that they disqualify you if you have more than 20% by mass metal in the Olympics. Even Dredd has a pair of artificial lungs because lung cancer is a pussy ass bitch that can be forgotten.

And the off world colonies thrive. There are mega-cities on the moon and industrial complexes out in the far orbits. I don't know if humanity has gone extra-solar in The Cursed Earth but it can't be that far off.

Almost everything of note has been solved to an acceptable degree.

Not only organ grafting, but stookie pills make you functionally non-ageing. Now if only you didn't have to slaughter aliens to make them...

The brain-into-robot stuff was also done earlier, during the time when Dredd was having second thoughts about his job, with the little girl who fell into the chemical pool. That was a downer ending, though.

>Dredd has a pair of artificial lungs

I know he has bionic eyes (and wishes he could have had them earlier), but lungs? Have I missed something.

And the biggest hurdle mankind hasn't been able to pass is man himself. Many of the stories in Judge Dredd revolve around people just being too chaotic and incapable of living without a rigid system to structure their lives.

Which brings us back to OP's statement.

The Judges apply some basic minimal framework of structure to the lives of the citizens, without them and The Law it all comes crashing down.

They may be brutal and they may not be an ideal solution but they have in universe been proven to be the only option that works.

When it was given to the vote on what to do of the citizens that could be bothered to vote the majority voted to keep the Judges as the authority because a stupid system that actually works is not stupid.

Hey thanks, much appreciated.

I don't think "modern" (as in, the most recent stories) MC1 has much of a population problem, after three apocalypses within the last couple of decades wiping out most of the population.

Not as much as you are. For a leftist critique of right-wing authoritarianism, Wagner et al. fall prey to that classic blunder, only slightly less renowned than betting against a Sicilian when death is on the line; they've made their fascist thugs appear reasonable in comparison to the alternative.

Megacity-1 is a legitimately awful place to live and the Justice Department, unmoored from democratic accountability, is a brutal regime, but compared to what? Rampant crime and civil disorder? Mutant degeneracy? Or how about good, old-fashioned civic apathy? When the people of the Meg got the opportunity to disestablish Judicial rule, they voted in favor of keeping it.

As long as they continue to portray the Judges as the good guys, they will be the good guys. You want an authoritarian police state where the enforcers are the bad guys? Go read Hunger Games.

Nah man, you have to do it for itself otherwise you're fucking up.
>t.kant

The problem with reading Hunger Games is that while President Snow is unquestionably a bad guy, he's also the most fun character i the book.

Well stated my man.

I assume judges are not allowed to hold property or have relationships because otherwise being a judge is a great way to use the power for corrupt means and eventually to become a dictator.

I also assume they undergo psych evaluation so it doesn't become a self-reinforcing institute of psychopathy.

At least in Mega City One, that's pretty much the case. No relationships, and they all live pretty spartan lives. They're trained from young childhood, so service to the Justice Department is all they know.

Psych evaluations are a somewhat more rubbery concept, especially given the series' strong streak of blacker than hell humour.

MC1 seems to be the best functioning of the Mega Cities. About the only other one that seems to be functional is Oz, which takes a much looser approach to its Judges, who are part of the community and encouraged to have families. Oz of course, has the advantages of being one of the least densely populated Megacities (if not the least, excepting post DoC), and doesn't have psychic demon assaults, Sov terrorists and wars, serial killer mayors or the other madness that assaults the Big Meg every few months either.

What about Israel?

I'm not yet that familiar with Dredd, but I remember this comic being posted before

Yeah, the problem with Hunger Games (and a lot of YA fiction) is that if you don't really care about the theme of "teenagers struggling against the adult system" you just end up being interested in who is the most entertaining character.

Like Code Geass is pretty much a YA fiction plot as a mecha anime, but Lelouch is just so entertaining as a character to watch you can still "root" for the designated protagonist even if you don't care about the fact it's a "young people revolt against old people" teen power fantasy.

The "no relations" stuff is mainly confided to MC1: Brit-Cit, for example, allows its judges to marry (and Treasure Steel is married, to a woman no less).

And yes, there are psychological examinations. Dredd himself starred in a series of strips where he was undergoing an extended one, after he started behaving oddly due to having a "Hans, are we ze baddies?" moment. He punched a colleague for giving him shit for billing the medical care of a young girl to the Justice Department, for instance. In the end, he was cleared for duty but IIRC the chief shrink said that he should be watched.

Dredd, of course, maintains his sanity by wearing boots too small for him.

pretty much, yeah

You can accuse the Judges of plenty of things but they weren't hypocrites

PDFs when?

If you pray and obey all Megacity One ordnances, Judge Shakaranon may swing by, citizen.

Not only will I strive to obey all rules and ordinances, I wish to spread the understanding of law to others.

I came as quickly as I could.

mediafire.com/folder/2t66cc0456c16/Judge_Dredd_Games

Should be everything, uploaded by another kind user many moons ago.

Judge, you do honor to Veeky ForumsCity-1

Psych evaluations are done relatively frequently for all judges, not just the ones displaying abnormal behaviours. The thing is, their priorities tend to be a bit different from ours, so they don't just look for things like excessive use of force, but also feelings of sexual love, over-fondness for personal grooming, some hobbies, things like that. The SJS, the Special Judicial Squad (one part Internal Affairs, one part stormtrooper, all bastard) are excessively zealous in their pursuit of Judges who aren't up to snuff. A few of the peculiar but functioning are allowed to join the Wally Squad, essentially undercover Judges pretending to be ordinary citizens, others are given the option of "retiring" to exile in the Cursed Earth, bringing Law to the Lawless. If they've actually broken laws though, its off to Titan and horrifically invasive cybernetic surgery.

The story is talking about is part of an early arc where Dredd is beginning to questions his role and the Role of Justice Department in Mega City One.
mediafire.com/file/kx76212s1q9u7xi/2000AD_#388_Judge_Dredd_-_Error_of_Judgement.cbr
mediafire.com/file/xak95c049qqg9yy/2000AD_#389_Judge_Dredd_-_A_Case_for_Treatment.cbr
mediafire.com/file/tjlincw1k72f3k1/2000AD_#390-392_Judge_Dredd_-_The_Wally_Squad.cbr

It was cancer of the Duodenum, actually, but he still beat it "like a fleeing perp with a fractured daystick".

I don't have time to stick around for much longer, but I can manage one short story focusing on Dredd's advancing years where that fantastic line comes from: The Man Comes Around.
youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA

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>Time.

>Shakaranon story time

'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go!

>Time...
>... wouldn't beat him.

>HE WOULD NOT LET IT.

...

Classic Dredd.

Does anyone have a mega file for Judge Dredd? I've been wanting to read the comics for a while now.

Unfortunately I don't have time for much anything else right now. If we're all really lucky I might have time in some hours or tomorrow, but I'll lurk and try to help with other things if I can for the moment.

I can't seem to upload the last story right now, but I do have this one curiosity - the original script. Maybe you'll find it interesting?

>Well actually the canon good guys would probably be the Oz judges as in Judge Dredd Australia is the exact same post-apocalypse which makes it a paradise.
No joke, my favorite Dredd story is the one about the surfers in Oz. It's so bittersweet.

Shakanon and Judgeanon, my two purveyors of good comics and 2000AD knowledge.

Thanks a lot, man.

You da man still, Shakaranon. I remembered from the first page that "this is the one with the horse, innit?" but didn't actually remember that last panel at all.