Chopper (Judge Dredd character)

Chopper
Publication information
Publisher	IPC Media (Fleetway) to 1999, thereafter Rebellion Developments
First appearance	2000 AD #206
Created by	John Wagner Ron Smith Cam Kennedy
In-story information
Alter ego	Marlon Shakespeare

Chopper (also known as Marlon Shakespeare) is a fictional character appearing in British comics anthologies 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine. He was created by John Wagner and Ron Smith (with a redesign for his Midnight Surfer persona by Cam Kennedy) and has appeared in numerous Judge Dredd stories, including "Oz", and has his own eponymous series.

The concept and name comes from a fan letter to 2000 AD, which was signed off "From Chopper". Wagner says "there was something about the lad we [him and Grant] liked and we put some of his character into Chopper".

Marlon Shakespeare was a typical Mega-City One teenager, bored, restless, with no future. His father, Bert Shakespeare, believed that his (Bert's) hobby of head-butting eggs into a basket would make him stand out from his peers whilst Marlon's mother, Ruby, filled her hours by obsessively washing dishes again and again. Marlon wanted more from life than the mundane existence that his parents revelled in so he broke out and found infamy by becoming Chopper - a wall scrawler (graffiti artist), challenging authority by making his mark (a smiley face) in increasingly more ambitious and public locations. Soon Chopper became known as King Scrawler of Mega-City One. That was until a Scrawl War broke out between Chopper and a mysterious rival scrawler known as The Phantom, who challenged Chopper's position as King Scrawler by beating Marlon to some of his more ambitious scrawls and openly mocking Chopper in his scrawl ("Chopper is a Ninco. Signed The Phantom"). The Scrawl War escalated with more and more inventive scrawls turning up and confusing the Judges, culminating with Chopper defacing the relocated white cliffs of Dover in 100 ft letters. This angered The Phantom who then publicly challenged Chopper to scrawl the Statue of Judgement on the following Saturday. When Chopper and The Phantom finally came face to face Chopper was shocked to find that The Phantom was in fact a painting droid. Chopper found himself asking the droid what its motivations for becoming a scrawler were and was just as shocked to learn that they were identical to his own - To escape the monotony of life and to be somebody. The Phantom refused to be taken by the Judges and plunged to its death, leaving Chopper in awe of the similarity of their lives and wondering, as he was being arrested by Judge Dredd, if that was what we all were - robots.

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Wikipedia