Where Judge Dredd - The Boardgame plays up the lunacy of Mega-City One’s legal system for laughs, Michael Molcher’s new book, I Am The Law, should leave you incandescent with rage at the injustices of our own world.

Subtitled How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future, I Am The Law is, surprisingly perhaps, no light pop-culture look at the parallels between say Mega-City meat substitute munce and, say, beyond burgers or the excessive trivialities of our celebrity obsessed age. Rather Molcher has penned an excoriating review of the last few decades of policing in the UK and beyond, the tub-thumping Law and Order politics that have both encouraged and hand waved its worst excesses and the corrosive effect this has had on democracy.

Those not familiar with Judge Dredd, and going by the occasional tweet directed at 2000AD urging them to keep politics out of comics perhaps even many who are, may be surprised by the contents of this book. I Am The Law is a thoroughly researched book that dives deep into the history of policing and totalitarian politics, drawing upon everyone from Weber, Gramsci and Hobbes through to modern day sociologists and philosophers, such as Stuart Hall and Dardot & Laval, to make its often damning case.

Combining a social history of comics with its interrogation of modern day policing, Molcher demonstrates how time and again Dredd has held up a mirror to the neoliberal politics that gained ground in the UK and US at the end of the 1970s. Divided into fourteen chapters, each one ostensibly takes a particular Dredd storyline as a prism through which to look at our relationship with both the police and the state, from the foundational myths of Britain’s ‘policing by consent’ to the creation of the surveillance state and increasingly authoritarian systems of government.

To his credit Molcher is also pretty clear-eyed about the limitations of Dredd’s satire. 2000AD’s readership may skew markedly older today than when it was launched at teenage tearaways in 1977 but it is after all still a weekly comic strip designed to entertain and not ferment revolution. As the product of dozens of writers, all with their own, often contradictory, ideas Dredd will never be a perfect pastiche, and more than that in countless cases the ever increasing threats to Dredd’s world would, on the surface, justify the kind of police state that he’s an avatar of. 

Ultimately Dredd is depicted as a hero as much as an anti-hero and whilst he may have the occasional qualms about the judge’s despotic rule he has, time and time again, found a way to accommodate those misgivings whilst upholding the authority of the fascist state he represents. Furthermore we are more often than not invited to cheer him on as he does so.

Molcher also takes aim at how the strip has, or rather hasn’t, handled race and identity politics over the years. On the few occasions storylines do in some way feature race relations or base stories around subjects such as slavery the strip invariably falls back on a cast of robots, mutants or aliens to make its often confused point. A problem exacerbated, Molcher points out, by the fact that in its 45 year history ‘not a single writer of colour has ever worked on “Dredd.”’

But, even if Dredd isn’t always the absolutely perfect peg for Molcher to hang his ideas on, Old Stoneyface is still a more than serviceable route into tackling some difficult ideas. The book not only provides an entertaining history of the strip itself and the circumstances that surrounded its creation and development, but is a thoroughly rage inducing introduction to several heavyweight topics, the likes of which would otherwise rarely see the light of day outside the halls of academia and ill frequented Marxist bookshops.

One final thought on this book. In many ways it’s fascinating it exists at all. Molcher is no outsider looking in, rather he's 2000AD’s brand manager, for many years its public face, and the book is published by its parent company Rebellion. This is about as official a take on who and what 2000AD’s star turn is and the verdict’s far from flattering.

In an age of politically driven boycotts and tedious culture wars, it’s noticeable that in recent years 2000AD have become increasingly assertive in their approach to politics and that this has in turn led to some of its best stories, a lesson perhaps for other British companies who may be wrestling with the confusing legacy of their own authoritarian poster-boys.

Author: Michael Molcher
Published by Rebellion Books

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 4 (April '23)

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