Judge Dredd: The Movie - Comicbook Adaptation (2025)

Judge Dredd: The Movie - 30th Anni Ed (2025)

Author: Andrew Helfer (based on a screenplay by William Wisher Jr + Steve E. de Souza) | Illustrator: Carlos Ezquerra | Page Count: 80 [1]

NOTE: this post contains spoilers for the Judge Dredd (1995) movie directed by Danny Cannon.

Thirty years after the first Judge Dredd movie took a giant Flesh-sized shit on the franchise that inspired it, its comicbook adaptation got reissued. Why should anyone care? For one good reason: because it was illustrated throughout by Carlos Ezquerra.

Not the cover art - that's by Dermot Power and is the only time it really looks like Sylvester Stallone.

For reasons that I don't know but are probably to do with licensing and/or Hollywood egos, the interior art wasn't allowed to use Stallone's likeness.

But that turns out to be a good thing. The first 4 pages are particularity great. The Judge uniforms and Lawmasters are movie-specific, but otherwise the linework, angles, and colours all work together to make it feel like a proper Ezquerra 2000 AD strip. It's easy to imagine that the city and its people will feel similarly. But then Dredd appears in full on Page 5 and the illusion begins to crack... 🙁

I'm the type of reader who 'hears' a character's voice in my head as a I read their words. Logic says I should hear an approximation of Stallone's voice, but I chose to ignore logic. Instead, I gave Dredd the inner-voice that I've gave to him for 30+ years. That helped for a time.

The helmet comes off on Page 16. I was expecting it, having seen the movie. The story suffers just as much from that point on as it did onscreen, but it'll be interesting to folks who've ever wondered what Ezquerra's interpretation of comicbook Joe's face might have been like.

The story plays out pretty much the same as it did onscreen, with the added benefit of not having to suffer Rob Schneider in the scenes with Fergie. And yes, the ending still sucks.

Surprisingly, the movie version of Dredd lived on for a while after the movie itself tanked, in the Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future (1995-96) fortnightly comic published by Fleetway, which lasted for 23 issues and a single Action Special. Equally surprising: it's not half-bad.

[1] Even though the page count of '80' is technically accurate (minus the copyright info page, etc), this a Rebellion publication, so you're not actually getting 80 pages of the promised content. The adaptation begins on Page 04 and ends on Page 67. Afterwards you get Trinity (Author: Ken Niemand | Illustrator: Richard Elson), first printed four years ago in 2000 AD Prog 2262. It has some relevance to the movie, so isn't just shameless filler on this occasion.