Me and Judge Dredd

Happy borthday Judge Dredd, 41 years and going strong!

If I count the things that are particularly precious to me 2000ad is right up there. I mean right up there, perhaps not above the kids but definitely well ahead of a number of the members of my wider family.

Not sure what it is?

Well 2000AD is a weekly British Science fiction comic, first published in 1977 and probably most famous for bringing us Judge Dredd.

From my earliest age I loved the characters and the artwork and a thread throughout my life for as long as I can remember. I remember first reading it in the early eighties growing up in South Africa and the impact it had was huge, feeding my love of science fiction and it is something that has never left me.

When we had our first child we had very little and only £600 in the bank and the opportunity to buy the entire 30 year back catalogue presented itself. Price? You guessed it. £600. I remember driving 200 miles to Bristol in a battered old Vauxhall Corsa with the last of our savings and loading them into the car from floor to roof. You any idea how many comics that is? Well now I have 40 years worth plus some others and believe me, storing more than 2500 comic books is no easy feat. That is every issue from number 1 in 1977.

Ive also developed a love of comic artwork over the years, and will write about it again in a future post but to feed my love of all things 2000Ad I have amassed a pretty sizeable collection of original comic art which I absolutely adore. The photo below shows A Clint Langley original above the printed version.

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Have I ever mentioned my tattoos? No? Well this is one of my 2000ad themed ones. A quite gorgeous Judge Dredd on my left arm done by Lee Rudeboy Reynolds at Rude studios in Leeds. A truly marvellous artist. I have another on my right that I will show you another time,

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My love gets worse though. I have two children, and both have middle names named after things that really matter to me. I will tell more about my eldest’s some other time but I can confirm that my youngest’s middle name is Joseph, named after Judge Joseph Dredd.

So as you can see, a real influence in my life and there is still nothing as fabulous as the most recent copy dropping through my letter box each week…

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Author: Michael

Husband, dad,(ex)programmer, comic collector and proud Yorkshireman. I have no idea why im here or why im writing but i rather enjoy it. no great fan of punctuation;

26 thoughts on “Me and Judge Dredd”

  6. Oh Michael, you’ve got it bad! 🙂 I too love comic book art. I think it has been terribly Underrated over the years. I have 2 older brothers, both collected comic books as kids. We had stacks of them all over the house.

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  13. Hooray!!! Please do tell me what you think of it. P.S. the sequel is absolute shit. Don’t waste your time on that one.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. No time like the present. Managed to find it on YouTube…

    Really great film how have i never even heard of it???
    The cat scene, “Is it dead?”, so bloody funny!

    Like

  25. As a kid me and my sister would often get comic books. Still have a large collection of them at my Dad’s house. One of them is actually a first edition… a comic call Plop. I am sure you have never heard of it as it did not do well, so it had a limited run. Also… love your ink of Dredd!

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