Hello again, Earthlets, and welcome to the next installment of our Zarjaz news round up from the world of 2000AD! First up, the results of September’s ‘Day of Action’ organized by the Make a Dredd Sequel campaign are in and it was a big success, with the DVD/Blu-Ray hitting the number one spots on Amazon US and UK before being sold out too. So let’s just hope that someone is taking notice of those numbers!
2000AD and publisher Rebellion are doing their bit to keep the ball rolling, having just added loads more digital graphic novels to both their online store and the iPad app. Classic Dredd stories such as America, The Pit, and The Art of Kenny Who? and collections of stories drawn by (co-creator) Carlos Ezquerra and (current star) Henry Flint sit alongside the new epics such as Trifecta and both volumes of the Day of Chaos. Add to that 21 volumes of the Dredd Case Files series – which are reprints of every Dredd story ever from the very beginning – and you won’t be short of reading material for a very long time. Plus, if you haven’t been reading the official sequel comic, Underbelly in the Judge Dredd Megazine then you’ll have another chance in January when they’re releasing it as a one-shot in both analogue and digital formats.
Also out in time for the holidays is a fabulous new t-shirt from my all time favorite haute couture suppliers, Last Exit To Nowhere. For those of you that haven’t heard of them, they produce the most excellent and superbly subtle movie tie-in designs and hand screenprint them onto high quality shirts. At last count I think had 12 of their designs and as soon as I saw the design above, I knew it would be joining them in my wardrobe. The very graphical version of the MC-01 Justice Department Eagle is the same as the one used throughout the movie and it almost makes up for the fact that I was outbid on all of those prop auctions from the beginning of the year.
While we wait for the sequel to be green lit, we’ll have to rely on our fellow fans to fill the void. Judge Minty has been doing really well on the festival circuit, and Oliver Hollingdale has just released the first ‘Prog’ of his Cursed Edge project. Set in the same version of Mega City One as the movie, it starts off in the seedier part of town (the Pleasure District, shot in Amsterdam’s red light area) and certainly captures the feel of the movie. Some of the effects might be a little bit on the video game side, but the story and directing is okay. There’s some good action and the soundtrack is awesome – very much in the same vein as Paul Leonard Morgan’s score for the movie. Have a look below, but watch out for the racy scenes and strong language if the kids are around!
Movie streaming company Epix celebrated adding DREDD to their roster by giving it their DIY Effects treatment, where they recreate effect from movies in their own garage lab – using puppets! Check out the video below if you want to see what it might look like if the Muppets where ripped apart by bullets in extreme slo-mo! Again, probably not best to let the youngsters watch this one!
On a lighter note, this short animation features our favorite lawman of the future drawn in the style of Bod – a classic kids’ animation from the 1970s – and shows him taking on both the Angel Gang and Judge Death’s unearthly posse at the same time.
And finally, a fan film made before even Stallone’s movie hit the screens. The result of a drunken late night conversation between two fans in 1990, The Body Shop is a camcorder masterpiece of no-budget movie making – and has the distinction of being the first Judge Dredd fan film, or ‘filmed’ version of any kind! It’s probably still better than Stallone’s version.
