Judgement Day (Judge Dredd story)
| "Judgement Day" | |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Fleetway Publications |
| Publication date | 6 June – 5 September, 1992 |
| Genre | |
| Title(s) |
2000 AD progs 786-799 Judge Dredd Megazine #2.04-2.09 |
| Main character(s) | Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog |
| Creative team | |
| Writer(s) | Garth Ennis |
| Artist(s) | Peter Doherty, Carlos Ezquerra, Dean Ormston, and Chris Halls |
| Editor(s) | Tharg (Richard Burton); David Bishop |
| Judgement Day | ISBN |
| Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 17 | ISBN |
"Judgement Day" is a story of British science fiction character Judge Dredd. It was first published with alternating episodes in both 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine in 1992. It was the first crossover between the two publications; three more have since followed. It was also a crossover with another 2000 AD series, Strontium Dog, as it featured the second occasion on which Judge Dredd confronted Johnny Alpha (the lead character in Strontium Dog). It was written by Garth Ennis (based on an idea by John Wagner) and illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra, Peter Doherty, Dean Ormston and Chris Halls.
Set mainly in 2114 it tells of how the Fourth World War took the lives of three billion people when a powerful necromagus called Sabbat raised all the corpses in the world as zombies. The series is mainly notable because it was Ennis' longest Dredd story, because it killed off most of the supporting cast of the Judge Dredd series, and because it was the first story to feature Johnny Alpha since he was killed off at the end of the Strontium Dog series (from Alpha's point of view it was set two years before his death).
Dredd and Alpha had previously met in "Top Dog", published a year before, in which he and his partner-in-crime-fighting Wulf Sternhammer went back in time to Dredd's Mega-City One in order to capture two criminals wanted in their own time period. Dredd refused to accept them as law enforcers like himself and was determined to capture them, even after they managed to return to their own time from right under his very nose.
The previous Dredd mega-epic, "Necropolis," had killed 60 million citizens of Mega-City One; with no way to dispose of them all with dignity, Chief Judge McGruder had them buried in vast pits outside the city.
Judgement Day opens with Sabbat, in an unknown location underground, beginning to raise the dead. Judge Dredd is one of the first people to encounter the zombies while leading a group of cadets (including Cadet Giant), on a training mission in the Cursed Earth. Although Dredd leads the cadets back to the relative safety of Mega-City One, Judge Perrier (Dredd's main sidekick during Ennis' tenure on writing for the strip) is killed only yards from home.
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