2000 AD was seven years old by the time I was born. It was seventeen when I first picked up an issue, scrabbling through boxes of faded old copies in a second hand bookshop. With almost twenty years of stories to draw upon, I devoured the Judge Dredd back catalogue. My favourite epics are still Judge Cal ruling Mega City One with his pet goldfish as deputy and the long arc that began with The Dead Man and ended with Judge Death returning to create Necropolis. 

One lucky day, I managed to find a terribly abused copy of the first issue. The cover was ripped and the promised Space Spinner had long spun off. It felt like a very odd curio to me. There was no Judge Dredd – he didn’t arrive until Prog 2 – and in his rightful place sat Dan Dare in his execrable ‘more futuristic’ guise, shorn of the glorious retro-futurism of the original and trying to pull of some kind of Star Trek: The Motion Picture-style reboot. Thankfully dodgy Dan didn’t last long. 

While I spent pocket money on the yellowing issues stashed in the bookshop, my gran also ordered glossy new copies of 2000 AD for me at the local newsagent. Judge Anderson looked a lot more like Pamela Anderson in the brave new world of the Megazine and my early-adolescent eyeballs were on stalks perusing the pencilled flesh that filled Nickolai Dante stories. Who knew future Russia would be so racy? 

My nascent love of 2000 AD and particularly Judge Dredd survived the indignity of the 1995 film in which Sty Stallone in which he interpreted the law man’s nickname of “Old Stony Face” as an instruction to chew marbles. I even bought the entire run of the film tie-in comic which sits unloved somewhere in my grandparents’ attic, testament to the commitment of a boy who wasn’t old enough to actually see that atrocity play out at the multiplex. Thankfully a film reboot, Dredd, is due in September backed by Danny Boyle. 

To the adolescent me, Judge Dredd was a hero. Not because I nursed hopes of policing a nightmarish dystopian future city or particularly relished the idea of cracking heads but because he was so certain. Judge Dredd was an ironclad bad ass and he’d certainly not have allowed people to kick his shins in the corridor outside the English room or have to claim he’d ‘lost’ his new trainers when someone threw them on the top of the sports pavilion. 

Such was my love of 2000 AD that when we were asked to prepare presentations on our heroes, I swum against the tide of footballers, pop stars and saccharine paeans about the brilliance of big brothers to deliver a passionate jeremiad about Dredd. It was not a performance designed to earn me much needed cool points.

Four years later, a similar assignment found me presenting a heavily annotated slide deck on the history of US underground music with a rather lengthly digression on the brilliance of The Replacements and an attempt to persuade the teacher on the merits of the Butthole Surfers. I didn’t make things easy on myself. 

Reading Judge Dredd stories as a nominal adult, I realise more and more that that a lot of the drama in them lies in his certainty in the law and his position being undermined. He leaves the city on several occasions and even pushed for a referendum that would have seen the Judges removed from power and replaced. However relentlessly depressing and disturbing Mega City One was presented, I still have a niggling urge to live there. 

In a situation similar to the limit in regenerations slapped on Doctor Who, the saga of Judge Dredd has a built-in limitation that may also be circumvented by clever storytelling. The Dredd tales have run in realtime so that a year in the life span of 2000 AD has also been a year in Mega City One. The first Dredd story from 1977 was set in 2099. In 2012, the fictional world has now reached 2134 and Judge Dredd is over 70 years old with more than fifty years on the clock, by rights he should have received the commemorative carriage some time ago. 

Recent story lines have hinted at Dredd’s age finally catching up on him and he was even been diagnosed with a benign cancer in 2008. If I write about Judge Dredd as if he were actually real, it’s because the character has been such a fixture in my life that I sometimes forget he isn’t. With cloning, brain transplant technology and all manner of other tricks available to Dredd’s writers, it seems unlikely that he won’t be around to see 2000 AD’s fiftieth anniversary. Just like Stephen Moffat getting round the Who conundrum, Dredd’s guardians will cheat.

Happy birthday 2000AD and keep on pounding the beat Judge Dredd, you’re still the law to me.