Judge Dredd Megazine 417-452
As the Megazine crossed its 30th year, the cover price was steady at £5.99 until it jumped with issue 451 due to a new format change. After 176 issues, the 64-page supplement comic that came bundled with the Megazine was discontinued; those 64 pages were now included in the issue itself, which resulted in a hefty 128-page squarebound format. The starting material gave us reprints of American Dredd comics originally published by IDW.
The highlights were continuing Dredd stories that went all over the map, more of Judge Anderson, The Angel Gang, Devlin Waugh, and Lawless, and many new strips that kept making the world bigger. One of the most interesting was Dreadnoughts, a backstory set in 2035, linking the future to the present with the beginnings of Justice Department through authoritarian expansion of law enforcement. Sound familiar?
Another interesting turn was the merging of a previously-unrelated comic character, a detective named One-Eyed Jack, into Dredd continuity. Jack’s debut was in a weekly title called Valiant in 1975, and the connection was that he was written by Dredd creator John Wagner. Jack’s revival was the result of Rebellion Publishing acquiring older IP and finding new things to do with them.
Alternate reality came into play with Megatropolis, a parallel universe that cast major Dredd characters in different roles, and the Dark Judges got more to do with origin stories and other horror-based tales. In addition to a regular diet of reviews and interviews, there was always a regular serving of comic book history in retrospective articles on British comics from across the decades, made newly relevant as Rebellion became a source for reprints of classic strips.
This will be the last Megazine gallery for a while, but have no doubt; it’s alive and well as of this writing and will probably outlive most of us.
