Judge Dredd Art Shows What Even Movie Fans Missed About Mega-City One

The future dystopian world of Judge Dredd has never looked as gorgeous sd it does in a cover that really drives home how absolutely packed the Mega-Cities are supposed to be. The Mega-City One portrayed in the 2012 feature film Dredd looks downright roomy compared to the stacked, glowing vista displayed in the upcoming comic’s cover. The accuracy displayed in the art really illustrates how different Judge Dredd’s domain was interpreted in his last cinematic adventure.

The undisputed star of the British anthology comic magazine 2000 AD, Judge Dredd is the title character in a recurring series about a police officer in the not-too-distant future where populations have skyrocketed and entire cities are packed into gargantuan complexes called Mega-Cities. Dredd serves as judge, jury and executioner with extreme authority to control the never-ending waves of crime brought on by the dense population. To give new readers a taste of just how large the world of Judge Dredd is, one artist has nailed towering behemoth that is Mega-City One.

In a tweet from Ian McQue, the artist previews a cover he did for the Free Comic Book Day edition of Best of 2000 AD. Sitting atop his Lawmaster patrol vehicle on crumbling infrastructure, Judge Dredd looks out upon the world that he has sworn to protect. The cover is hauntingly beautiful, full of rich colors that perfectly meld the faint glow of the natural world with the cold, inhuman lights of the sprawling complex below. Fans went wild in the comments, raving over McQue’s depiction of Mega-City One. The vast city-state is an important part of the Judge Dredd mythos, but one that’s not always practical when translated to other mediums.

Judge Dredd has been made into two films, once in 1995 and again in 2012. The 2012 version is regarded as a highly faithful adaptation and highly regarded by fans for bringing Judge Dredd’s world to life. Dredd actor Karl Urban even ensured he would keep an important aspect of Dredd’s characterization in the adaptation and not remove the Judge’s iconic helmet at any point in the movie. However, not everything could be adapted perfectly and some things had to give. While portions of Mega-City One are shown in the beginning of the film, the majority of the runtime takes place in a single megacomplex called “Peach Trees.” With a budget of approximately 45 million dollars, the film opted to tell a smaller, self-contained story much like readers would find in the pages of 2000 AD. For fans of Judge Dredd, though, art like Ian McQue’s shows the missed potential of a dystopic mega-metropolis.

Compromises happen when adapting comics into movies, but that doesn’t mean the film was any less faithful to the spirit of the Judge Dredd. Different mediums have to play to their strengths in order to communicate the right ideas to their audience. While the 2012 Judge Dredd movie may have contained fantastic characterizations, Ian McQue’s cover brings Mega-City One to life in a way that films could only dream of.

Source: Ian McQue

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