Following the early explosion of female judges in the second half of the first five years of Judge Dredd, there came a settling down period where faceless background crowd-filling women in uniforms mostly faded away in favor of developing the ones established over previous years. In other words, quantity gave way to quality, though of course there were a few notable exceptions and a couple of interesting experiments that are well worth dissecting. But first, let’s pick up where we left off…



(Disclaimer: unless otherwise noted, all stories mentioned in this post are written by John Wagner and Alan Grant. Trust me, it’ll save us a lot of time)



The end of the Apocalypse War would leave Judge Dredd with a devastated city, a decimated population, and a brand new Chief Judge in the form of Hilda McGruder, former head of the SJS (Special Judicial Squad, the judges’ internal affairs division). She would immediately become a regular fixture in most Dredd stories of this period, though as a much more agreeable and supportive boss than what her original, antagonistic appearance would’ve led us to believe. Her harsh judgment of Dredd’s decision at the end of the Judge Child Quest and seeming disdain for Ol’ Stoneyface’s character were quietly swept under the carpet, though it’s easy to imagine her changing her mind about him after his actions during the war. Whatever the case, McGruder’s trust in Dredd is nigh-absolute during her term, sending him on special assignments, agreeing with him in almost everything, and just making a pretty good team in general.



(As an aside, I love how Ezquerra and other artists kept the skull earrings from Bolland’s original McGruder design even after she became Chief Judge, turning them into a constant reminder of where she came from)

Having been sworn in on the very last page of the Apocalypse War, McGruder appears on the very next storyline, Prog 271-272’s “Meka-City” (drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, July ‘82), pretty much completely settled into her new role. From there she appears in a whopping six other stories in a row, handily breaking the record for most consecutive appearances of a Chief Judge outside of an Epic. Prog 273-274’s “League of Fatties” (also July ‘82), with art by Ron Smith, while an absolute comedy classic (try reading the opening caption of episode 2 out loud and see how far you get), doesn’t have much for McGruder to do. The next story, “Fungus”, (progs 275-277, art by Ezquerra, also also July of ‘82) does give her a meatier role, including a particularly strong moment where she straight-up lies to a group of citizens infected with a deadly species of irradiated mutant mushrooms, promising them a cure if they turn themselves in for quarantine. Turns out there is no cure, and they are to be executed for the safety of the city, although their sacrifice, McGruder promises, will not be forgotten.

In my eyes, moments like these were extremely important to the strip’s evolution because through them, the dystopian undertones of Dredd’s universe started to peek out from under the sci-fi action/adventure cover, paving the way for more in-depth explorations of the implications of the judges’ police state, which had mostly been shown as hard yet benign so far, but that’s probably a subject for another article.

McGruder’s next appearances are in ”The Game Show Show” (progs 278-279, art by Jose Casanovas), “Gunge” (280, Ron Smith), “Destiny’s Angels” (281-288, Ezquerra) and “Blobs” (290, Smith) and she plays a similar role in all of them. “Angels” in particular nails the coffin on McGruder’s doubts about Dredd’s decision at the end of the Judge Child Quest, since it proves without a shadw of a doubt that Owen Krysler was indeed a rotten punk. It also sports a single-page appearance by Judge Hershey, her first since the end of the Apocalypse War. After that, both women disappear from the strip for a few weeks, clearing the way for the first new female judge of the era… and the first former female judge too.

“The Executioner” (Ezquerra, progs 291-294, November ‘82) is an excellent example of a Judge Dredd story that’s not really about Dredd at all. A stealthy hooded vigilante woman is murdering members of a criminal syndicate with clinical precision, to the point where Dredd suspects it to be the work of a rogue judge. So of course, his next step is interrogating every female judge, including one Judge DeGaulle:



(He actually does have an identi-kit of the main suspect’s face, who looks very similar to DeGaulle, but I find the idea of Dredd awkwardly drilling every single lady officer in the sector highly amusing)

Funny enough, DeGaulle would get her chance many years later, but for now Dredd is stumped until a fateful epiphany makes him decide to check in the Academy of Law’s records. And sure enough, he finds his Executioner: Blanche Tatum, a cadet who’d been expelled due to an illegal liaison with a citizen which she later married. But her husband got involved with a band of loan sharks with enough lawyers to keep themselves out of the judges’ path, and eventually the stress of it lead him to suicide, orphaning his chilren and widowing Blanche. Coming out of “retirement”, Blanche dons the Executioner’s hood and murders the entire gang one by one before committing suicide by judge.

It’s quite the rollercoaster, and Blanche herself is a very strong character, acting with methodical coldness out of a burning desire for revenge. It’s also interesting to note that she’s the most successful and agreeable of all the citizens we’ve seen so far who’ve tried to do the judges’ job for them. Characters like her or Chopper (who’d debuted almost two years back in “Unamerican Graffiti”), citizens who are disgruntled or disillusioned with the judges’ form of government but are presented as relatable, sympathetic figures rather than mindless kooks or easily-led dumbos, are always a great element in Dredd, especially in these still relatively early days of the strip. It’s through them that we start to see the cracks in the judicial system, and they’re only going to grow more noticeable over time.

Our next stop takes us just beyond the city limits, as Dredd and a squadron of judges ride out to clean a makeshift camp built out of war debris that’s grown into a veritable magnet for the worst kind of crimes (seriously, the story’s first three pages are a guaranteed heartbreaker) in “Shanty Town”, drawn by Ron Smith and published in progs 300-303 (January ‘83). And for the second time in the strip’s history, Dredd hand-picks Judge Hershey for a dangerous mission. There’s not really much to say about her role in the story other than she performs admirably and once more proves to be, pound for pound and blow by blow, Dredd’s equal. Also, she wheelies her Lawmaster right into a dude’s face and it is badassed.

(Speaking of which, here’s a letter from prog 313, in case you were wondering how readers have been reacting to female judges:

And for the record, I’d buy Jeremy a pint if I ever met him.)

Afterwards, McGruder returns for another batch of Chief Judge appearances in “Trapper Hag” (by Steve Dillon, progs 305-307, February ‘83), “The Prankster” (Ezquerra, prog 308, March ‘83), “The Starborn Thing” (idem, progs 309-314) and “Cry of the Werewolf” (Dillon, progs 322-328, June ‘83), always supporting and agreeing with Dredd with only some token resistance here and there. And while it’s possible to see her as a bit of a Yes Woman at this time, it’s easy to see that she’s very much aware of what a huge asset Dredd is, with all his experience and keen sense of judgment, and so she tries to be mindful and take care of him. Sometimes that means sending him into the thick of it, but more on that later.

I’ve written at great, great length about “The Graveyard Shift” (by Ron Smith, progs 335-341, September ‘83) and I doubt there’s a single human being left in the world who wants to read even more about it, but it’s worth noting that all three major female judges (along with a new helmeted crowd-filling judge, Harrison) appear in it, each perfectly entrenched into her own particular station. McGruder oversees operations from her throne at the top of the city, Hershey smashes teeth and busts doors side to side with Dredd, and Anderson is brought in as a consultant to help locate a serial killer with her psychic powers. They can all be pretty much defined by their roles in this story, although in Anderson’s case she’s still missing one key element that will take just about one more year to appear.

The next two new female judges, Bunns and Tapp, appear in “Rumble in the Jungle” (progs 343-345, November ‘83) and “Bob’s Law” (prog 355, February ‘84) respectively, both drawn by Ian Gibson, and although as far as I know they’ve never appeared again, these one-story wonders are worth a bit of appreciation. As good as it is to have recurring characters like Anderson and McGruder, I think random one-off female judges are just as important because they normalize the presence of women in the strip, painting it as an everyday occurrence. Even if one is a PR officer and neither seem particularly fond of helmets.

“Law” also features a Judge Jones who seems to have been at least slightly based on Grace Jones (a casting decision that I seriously would’ve paid to see) and Gibson’s interpretation of the Chief Judge’s uniform, which is exceedingly cool:



Speaking of McGruder, she also appears in prog 350′s “Pie-Romania” (drawn by Kim Raymond, a name we’ll be mentioning in a sec), 354′s “Are You Tired Of Being Mugged?”, 364′s “High Society” (both by Gibson), and seeks Dredd’s counsel in “Portrait of a Politician” (Ron Smith, progs 366-368), showing once again her trust in him. Then there’s the first page of prog 359-363′s “The Haunting of Sector House Nine”, which has a blonde female judge drawn by Brett Ewins in what could be seen as bit of foreshadowing. If things are beginning to sound a little ho-hum however, fret not, because Dredd is just about to net himself a new rookie. And y’re gonna love her.

If you’ve never read Cadet Dekker’s three-round burst of stories before ("Superbowl”, “Bingo” and “The Making of a Judge”, from progs 370-373, May-June 1984, all drawn by Kim Raymond) you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s Hershey’s twin sister or something. It’s certainly possible that Wagner and Grant enjoyed writing Hershey as Dredd’s sidekick of sorts, but realized they’d missed their chance to make him her mentor by presenting her as a fully-fledged judge from the get-go. Dekker, meanwhile, is specifically introduced as a cadet taking her final examination under Dredd. While the relationship between Dredd and Hershey is one of equality, his relation with Dekker is very clearly mentor-apprentice. However, this apprenticeship lasting only four progs and the shiny new Judge Dekker disappearing completely for the strip for the better part of a decade (save for a single text story in an annual) seem to indicate the experiment ran its course pretty quickly. But it wouldn’t be the last time Dredd took a young cadet under his wing, and Wagner’s next attempts (Giant Jr. and especially Beeny) would prove to have a more lasting presence than Dekker.

Oh, and McGruder was also there for her graduation, in case you were missing her. McGruder also reappears in “Dredd Angel” (progs 377-383, by Ron Smith, August '84), tasking Dredd with a vital mission to recover five clones of the city’s “greatest heroes” that have been lost in the Cursed Earth. There’s not much else to her here either, but there is one panel in the first episode of this story that’s very important for a number of reasons:

The most obvious one is Fargo’s face front and… well, not center, but it’s still very clearly his face. And although Dredd’s mug was said to be horrifically disfigured in a much earlier episode, it’s safe to say that’s what he looked like under the helmet, being a clone of Fargo and all. For the interest of this post however, the most important part is the inclusion of Judge Hansar amongst these “greatest heroes.” If we assume all these judges, like Goodman, belong to the first wave of judges under Fargo, then Hansar becomes the earliest bit of evidence that female judges were there from the start of the judicial system, a claim that Wagner would later cofirm via flashbacks in “Origins”.

For now though, let’s go back to McGruder. Her next appearances are in prog 388′s “Error of Judgment” and 389′s “A Case of Treatment” (both published in October 1984), two thirds of a pivotal trilogy of stories drawn by Ron Smith that touches on Dredd’s humanity in ways that had never been done before. After a pair of cases involving juves begin to raise questions about Dredd’s personal judgment and a hitherto-unknown streak of compassion and mercy seems to be surfacing out of Ol’ Stoneyface’s long dead heart, he submits himself to psychiatric evaulation. Showing both her respect and concern for Dredd, McGruder refuses to have him undergo surgery to remove these newfound humanistic tendencies on the reasoning that it would “diminish the man”. And after a short interlude (progs 390-392′s “The Wally Squad”, by Brett Ewins, which introduces the judges’ undercover divison, some of them also women) she sends him off on a special mission that promises to be “his sternest test since the Apocalypse War!” Luckily for him (and us), he won’t be doing it alone.

By now, it was abundantly clear that Judge Anderson was quickly becoming a fan-favorite. In 1983 she’d won “Character Most Worthy of Own Title” at the Eagle Awards and starred in her first solo story, the absolutely amazing “The Haunting”, from the 2000AD 1984 Annual, by Alan Grant and Kim Raymond. It’s the one where she goes inside a possessed man’s head to punch a sumerian demon into submission, then shoves him in a bottle and lobs it into the Black Atlantic. It’s quite a riot. Her next solo story, “The Mind of Edward Bottlebum”, would take another year to happen though, appearing in the 1985 Judge Dredd Annual with art by Ian Gibson. But in-between these two stories, Mrs. Anderson’s little girl would also find the time to co-star in one of the most infamous Dredd epics, where she’d find mind-warping horrors, heart-breaking sorrow, and ultimately, herself.

“City of the Damned” (progs 393-406, drawn by Steve Dillon, Ian Gibson, Ron Smith and Kim Raymond, November ‘84-February ‘85) is in many ways the black sheep of the classic Dredd epics. Wagner and Grant famously grew bored with it halfway through and decided to shorten it from 20 episodes to its final 14. Dillon lost four entire pages of art and had to redraw them at the very last minute to avoid delays. It was, to say the least, a troubled story, but it still manages to pack a couple of extremely strong characters moments for its two protagonists, and in Anderson’s case, define her for the next thirty years and counting.



For those who haven’t read it, “City” is the story of Dredd and Anderson going on a ride to the future in Justice Dept’s shiny new time machine, “Proteus”, to confirm Psi-Judge Feyy’s dying prediction (from “The Judge Child Quest”) of a great disaster befalling Mega-City One and filling its streets with horrible monsters in the year 2120. Considering the first things the dynamic duo see when they step out of the machine are a ruined city, vampire judges and winged devils torturing the few remaining survivors, it’s safe to say he wasn’t too far from the mark. Also, yes, this is the one with VAMPIRE HERSHEY.

But let’s go back to Anderson, because this story sports what I think is the turning point for her character. Here’s the thing: supporting characters in Judge Dredd live or die (sometimes literally) by their capacity to give viewers something different, something that Dredd can’t give, stories that you can’t tell with him. As much as I love Hershey, for instance, it’d be pointless to give her her own series if her adventures ended up being completely interchangeable with Dredd’s. They need a hook, a unique quality that sets them apart and allows them to tell their own stories, letting us see this world through a different perspective. And while it may seem like her psychic powers and sense of humor are Anderson’s hooks, they pale in comparison to a core quality of her that first comes to light in “City” in an incredibly moving way:

Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a female judge cry or show emotion, but what sets it apart is that Anderson is not mourning the death of a comrade or lamenting her inability to love. Her tears have nothing to do with her role as a judge and everything to do with her as a person. And while her dialogue and the ending of “Judge Death Lives” suggest that it’s just a result of her psychic powers, this merciful side of her would eventually become the heart of her character and the main driving force for her stories, especially in the early 90s when Alan Grant takes the strip to the Judge Dredd Megazine.

In the blink of a panel, Anderson goes from a goofy flippant psychic blondie who can still grit her teeth and do her job when the situation calls for it, to a highly sympathetic, compassionate person who literally can’t shut herself out of the pain and misery around her. And by being a part of a brutal, authoritarian regime that shuns its own humanity in favor of iron-clad order despite this compassion, she develops the kind of deep-rooted character-based conflict that immediately sets her apart from every single other character in the strip, including Dredd. Especially Dredd. She’s a good person in the service of a bad system, a hero working for the villains, and it all springs forth from this moment.

Tharg and his cohorts quickly realized they had a winner in their hands, a character people could unapologetically root for and relate to, and started making plans to help everyone’s favorite psi-judge spread her wings. So when a Dredd-centric spinoff weekly comic was proposed, The Mighty One tasked his representative on Earth, Steve MacManus, with adding a very special story to the title’s “dummy” lineup. A “dummy”, in this context, means an “actual size mock-up of a new or intended comic designed to give the people that count in the retail trade an idea of what the comic will look like.” (From Titan Books’ “The Collected Judge Anderson”) For this dummy, Brett Ewins drew the first part of an all-new Anderson solo story by Wagner and Grant, but after a lot of back and forth the spinoff never materialized. Still, that’s no reason to waste a perfectly good script and artist, and the story was completed (with some art assistance from Robin Smith and Cliff Robinson) and published in progs 416-427 (May '85).

Being the first full-length spinoff comic starring a secondary character, “Revenge”, later collected as “Four Dark Judges”, is a big milestone in the history of Dredd. It’s not the first 2000AD spinoff (that would be MACH Zero) but considering it’s still going sporadically nowadays, it’s certainly the longest-running. And what this story may lack in nuanced character exploration, it more than makes up for it in explosive action, gruesome horror and amazing visuals, such as Ewins’ gloriously Bosch-ian interpretation of Deadworld:



I could look at that page all day. Another great element of the story is Anderson’s ingenious way of getting rid of the gruesome foursome, an idea which, mind you, she comes up with all by herself and personally carries it out. And while this isn’t anything new for her, since she did come up with the Boing plan in “Judge Death”, she was still relying in some level on Dredd’s presence. Here, we see Anderson as a fully-formed protagonist, and her victory over the Dark Judges has the immediate effect of making her as much of an obstacle to their plans as Dredd himself. In fact, some later stories would have Death and company specifically targeting Anderson first, most notably "My Name Is Death", showing that they consider Anderson to actually be a bigger threat than Dredd himself, and with good reason. Beyond just the powers or abilities of the characters, there are a number of ways in which Death is more Anderson’s archenemy than Dredd’s. Especially when it comes to themes.

What makes Death an antagonist to Dredd is that he’s the judges’ philosophy taken to its logical conclusion: the outlawing of life as the ultimate resource to stop crime. It’s what he was created to be, a dark mirror to the judges’ system. But what makes him an antagonist to Anderson is that they’re not similar, but complete polar opposites. Death considers that no being is worthy of life, that everyone is a criminal in the making and that the only way to stop that is to cut them all at the root. He revels in his work, murdering people in gruesome ways with a smile on his rotten face. Anderson, meanwhile, is a beacon of life in a sea of horror. She believes in people and tries to see the good in all of them. Her treatment of Orlok is evidence of that. And the longer her comic goes, the more we see just how much her job disgusts her, to the point where she can’t even do it any more. Dredd vs Death is primarily a fight between judges, between two differing ideas of law enforcement that are sometimes too close for comfort. But Anderson vs Death is a fight between life and death. Between the contradictive nature of existence with all of its pain and sorrow and hope and triumph against the cold, stark, seductive but ultimately empty nothingness of oblivion. And the end result is a conflict with much wider implications and thematic depth than Dredd’s more straightforward punch-outs.

And if “City of the Damned” established Anderson’s compassion, then her next solo story, “The Possessed” (this time fully drawn by Brett Ewins, progs 468-478) cemented it in a particularly brutal way. Anderson is sent to handle a case that ends up involving a demonic possession. An otherworldy abomination has taken over the body of a child, and after disposing of the Exorcist Judges (!) called to stop him, makes a run for the Undercity, the ruined remains of New York that exist just below Mega-City One, where a group of cultists help him cross a transdimensional gate back to his own realm with the kid. Anderson gives chase and ends up in the land of heavy metal album covers:

After much shooting and running and climbing and slapping grabby demon hands off her shoulders, she reaches the chamber where the kid is about to be ritually executed to open the gate that will forever bridge the two worlds and allow an army of monsters free entrance into Earth. Surrounded by devils, with time running out and the fate of the world at stake, Anderson has to make a choice. And she does.

As far as character-defining moments go, I’d rank this one up with the end of the Judge Child Quest or the Apocalypse War. While Dredd had had his share of morally gray, ends-justify-the-means moments by now, Anderson so far had fought wholly unredeemable monsters through “clean” methods. The ugliest thing she’d done at this point was help Dredd get the nuclear codes to blow up East-Meg One. But having established Anderson’s deep, undeniable connection to everything that happens around her, having her kill a child because there’s no other way out is nothing short of apocalyptic. And it also helps move her even further away from Dredd.

Dredd would rationalize it, tell himself it was for the good of the city, put it out of his mind and move on. And Anderson does try to rationalize it as well, because as a judge, that’s what she’s been trained to do. But as a human being, she can’t forget it. She can’t shut herself out of the immensity of what she did. While before it was a thematic implication, this is the first time that we see a genuinely good person being forced into doing something bad, a theme that will reappear time and time again in Anderson’s life. And even if it was for the sake of the world, one look at the state of it in Dredd’s time is enough to make one wonder if it’s really worth all the innocent blood spilled in its name.

Meanwhile, in the main strip, it’s business as usual. Ron Smith draws McGruder in prog 442′s “Mega-Man”. Cliff Robinson gives us a particularly stern Judge Hershey in 447′s “The Ugly-Bug Ball”. And in prog 448′s “A Day At The Block Wars” (December ‘85), Smith gives us another first: Tutor-Judge Schwartz, the first on-panel female tutor. Who’s really something else.

Tutor Judges had all been established long ago as being old or crippled judges who didn’t take the Long Walk, but none so far were as gruesomely injured as Schwartz. Sure, some were missing legs and arms and Griffin was missing an eye, but such a degree of facial modification was usually only seen in Titan former judges. It’s safe to assume Schwartz has seen some stomm.

Around this time, Anderson also made a reappearance in the Judge Dredd Annual 1986, in a fairly lighthearted affair called “A Fistful of Denimite”, written by Alan Grant and drawn by Ian Gibson. But now, as this essay approaches its end, it’s finally time to talk about “The Warlord.”

“The Warlord” is a story drawn by Cam Kennedy that ran in progs 451-455. In it, McGruder steps down as Chief Judge of Mega-City One because she underestimated the powers of the villain du jour, causing the deaths of many citizens and judges. And quite frankly, that’s all I really want to say about it. It’s not that it’s a bad story… well, it is, but that’s mostly because it’s a yellow peril story published in 1986 that reads like it was written in 1948. It’s a cringe-worthy hodgepodge of Chinese and Japanese stereotypes mashed together and sprinkled very generously with slurs so outdated that they’d be funny if they weren’t so awful. It is rough. So let’s keep moving…



“Beggar’s Banquet”, drawn by John Higgins and published in prog 456, has a single nameless female judge at the end, which as we’ve seen had become something of a rare sight during these years. And after this small interval,the very next prog would see the end of an era in “A Chief Judge Resigns”, drawn by Cliff Robinson (February ‘86).



There’s three things of note about this story. Firstly, this is the first time we see a Chief Judge resign on panel rather than just taking a bullet. Usually Dredd’s. Secondly, three members of the Council of Five rather forcibly ask McGruder to stay, and in a fantastic character moment, she immediately relieves them all of their posts in her last act as Chief Judge, believing their own judgment is as flawed as hers. And thirdly, now that there’s four new vacancies, four new judges are brought in to fill the empty seats. And one’s a very familiar face.

This is Hershey’s hook to me, and one that was sadly underused over the years. Because of the nature of his strip, Dredd can never be more than a Street Judge. It’s where he belongs, where he wants to be, and Grud willing, where he will die. But through Hershey, we’re allowed to see beyond that. We get to see the kind of career that a judge can have away from the streets, rising through the ranks and reaching for the higher echelons. Unfortunately, most Hershey solo stories would overlook these opportunities, barely touching on her status as Council of Five or the politics inherent to the role, but that’s a story for another time.