The Dredd Phenomenon

Newsinger, John. "The Dredd Phenomenon." Foundation 52 (Summer 1991): 6-19.

Historian JN analyzes significance of the great popularity in the UK of Judge Dredd in the 2000 AD comic series. Relevant here are the settings: "Crucial to the success of the Dredd strip is Mega City One, the vast towering urban jungle where 800 million people are crowded in together. Here the problems of our cities exist but in a magnified, exaggerated form. . . . 95 per cent of the population live in mile-high towers, each housing 60,000 people. The tedium of this life of claustrophobic boredom drives many people mad: citizens regularly go 'futsie', attacking a killing innocent bystanders" (cf. R. Silverberg's The World Inside, cited under Fiction). There are outbreaks of mass suicide, "the Lemming Syndrome," and war between the blocks breaks out occasionally, with casualties in the thousands. Note esp. "the Under City, a secret world of danger and shadows outside the law," a subterranean city "beneath the streets. Beyond the City walls lies the Cursed Earth, a radioactive wasteland, inhabited by mutants, monsters and scattered human communities" (11). See in Keyword Index entries for "underground," "underworld," and "wasteland." See JUDGE DREDD under Drama.