DREDD : The Ghost of McMahon

Drawing Judge Dredd is probably the dream gig for many artists like myself who grew up wanting to work on 2000AD. The closest I've come is when Dredd briefly starred in the Judge Karyn strip Concrete Sky I drew - ordering a sun bomb be dropped through a manhole onto the vampire citizens of old New York. My other opportunity came through a number of fiction illustrations for the Dredd Megazine . See pencils below.

For me Mick McMahon's Dredd will always be the blueprint for the character design - big chin , big boots etc. Whilst Carlos Ezquerra designed Dredd it was Mick who refined and redefined the character for me so that whenever I go to draw Dredd it will always be  heavily indebted to McMahon's look. Perhaps it's not that obvious in the drawings below but that's because I was striving in naivete to be original with Dredd as much as one can and frankly that's an impossibly tall order. Like the Daleks you can't mess with the design at all without drawing a bad Dredd or Dalek.

 I'm off to see the new movie this afternoon. I like what I've seen and the costume design might be the way forward to exorcising the ghost of McM from our personal Dredd influence banks. You want to be original right? It gives us artists something new to work with and that can't be a bad thing even though McMahon's ghost will continue to haunt me...

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