L is for Lawgiver, Lawmaster

However you dress it up, Judge Dredd is a boys’ comic and one thing boys like is their toys. As someone who discovered the comic relatively late via the roleplaying game, the technology was one of its main appeals. Chief among these gadgets was Dredd’s gun, the Lawgiver, and Dredd’s motorcycle, the Lawmaster.

It wasn’t enough for Dredd to simply have a gun. The particular appeal of the Lawgiver was that it fired six different types of bullet (side note: although the number of types of ammunition has always remained the same at six, over the years the exact type of bullet has changed. The ‘grenade’ type never really took off, being a kind of rubbish version of the much more exciting high explosive. Heat seekers were originally portrayed as a sort of optional extra Dredd would stick on the end of his gun – but that was such an impractical idea that the artists ignored it). What’s more, each judge’s Lawgiver was configured so that only someone with their palmprint could fire it – if anyone else tried, the gun would blow up. The fact that judges consistently wore thick gloves and thus had no palmprint was never really satisfactorily explained.

Dredd’s bike was not quite as tricked out, but arguably more distinctive in look, with it’s foot-wide tires. Armed with bike cannon and, at least originally, a front mounted laser, the bikes all had inbuilt computers and could drive themselves. They even seemed to have a sarcastic sense of humour.

The gun and bike were touch touching the surface. Judges were also equipped with handheld lie detectors (something which John Wagner has gone on to say he regretted giving them as from a plot perspective, having judges able to tell who was lying was hopeless), daysticks (essentially baseball bats that judges would use for crowd control), stumm gas grenades (which only occasionally killed people) and helmet mounted respirators. Eventually they would go onto acquire manta patrol tanks, flying fortresses armed with riot foam (a substance that instantly hardened on contact, immobilising the target) used to quell riots.

The technology has changed little over the years. In 1999 the design of the Lawgiver was changed to make the gun somewhat more brutalist (the Mk I Lawgiver is a rather elegant looking gun). This was made a part of the plot in the run up to the Doomsday storyline as it emerged that crime boss Nero Narcos had secretly taken control of the factory and modified the guns to blow up in the users’ hand. The days of weekly technoporn have abated as the series has matured and certainly the pantwettingly exciting parade of new kit, as typified in stories such as the Cursed Earth, Block Mania and the Apocalypse War, are a thing of the past. But barely a week goes by without the gun and the bike making an appearance.

L is also for…

Logan

The second most hapless judge ever to appear in 2000AD, Logan has for several years effectively served as Dredd’s personal assistant. Injured in the Total War storyline, he went on to get severely injured in Origins, losing a hand. Due to the miracles of modern science, Logan was able to grow a new hand, only to lose it once again to the Dark Judge Mortis in the closing chapters of the Day of Chaos storyline. It remains to be seen what horrific injuries Logan will suffer in future storylines.

Logan was by all accounts named after W. R. Logan, the pseudonym of Dredd fan Stewart Perkins who founded the really rather excellent Class of ’79 fanzine.

Lopez

As mentioned under Judge Hershey‘s entry, Judge Lopez appeared in the Judge Child saga as a crewmember of the spaceship Justice One. The most hapless judge ever to appear in the series, Lopez was persecuted from the get-go by Dredd who disapproved of his moustache. Eventually, Dredd orders Lopez to take the Oracle Spice, a hallucinogenic drug which is purported to be able to grant the user the gift of prophecy. Lopez’s prophecies prove decisive in finding the Judge Child, but he dies as a result of his exposure to the drug.

This subplot is one of the most perplexing controversies of the Dredd series. Essentially the controversy boils down to this: was Dredd being a dick? The case for the prosecution goes that Dredd merely took a dislike to Lopez and ultimately caused him to effectively kill himself needlessly in the line of duty. The case for the defence is that Lopez was the most expendable member of the ship’s crew and thus the only logical choice to take the drug.

Presumably, Lopez’s droopy, porno moustache was John Wagner having a joke at Carlos Ezquerra‘s expense who has long sported something similar. It is also entirely likely that this one story was quite decisive in persuading a whole generation of boys that moustaches were not cool, thus leading to its decline in popularities in the late 80s onwards.