Megacities in Judge Dredd

Megacities in the Judge Dredd comics are a fictional exaggeration of the real megacity concept: instead of just being a large conurbation, they cover most of their original country and have replaced nations as the dominant political entity. The most commonly seen megacity is Mega-City One. In the strip, these cities are all that remains of their original countries after the Atomic Wars of 2070, and are mostly dictatorships run by the Judges.

The exact number, location, nature, and even name of megacities is dependent on the writer of any given Dredd strip. For the Shamballa strip in prog 701, Alan Grant told artist Arthur Ranson that he could make up a number of cities and features for a map: he told Ranson “probably nobody will ever bother with it again”.

The first mention of other megacities came in Robot Wars, with a Texas City Oil freighter. This was followed by Luna 1, when Dredd was appointed Judge-Marshall of the Luna-1 colony, with his order calling it a colony of "the United Cities of North America"; the narration referred to three separate cities, in existence from 2061. The next issue would mention Texas City as one of these cities, and The First Luna Olympics would introduce "the Sov-Cities" and "Brit-Territories".

These early strips also referred to nations, but as the strip went on it would be megacities that would be the dominant concept. Luna 1 also showed a modified US flag – three stars instead of 50 – and mentioned the "United Cities of North America" under a body called the Triumverate. The start of The Cursed Earth would then show Mega-City One and Two as autonomous and prog 128 would refer to the Soviet East-Meg One as an independent entity. This would be the default from then on.

In Dredd backstory, the megacities formed out of growing urbanisation and reached crisis point in 2027, forcing the United States to impose an "instant justice" form of law enforcement. This was widely copied by the foreign megacities, which included the Union of Soviet Mega-Cities, the European City-States, Brit-Cit, and the Sino Block by 2070. During the run of Dredd, eight cities have been destroyed.

Two previous maps had appeared in The Cursed Earth and Oz, identifying Mega-City One and Two and various Australian cities, respectively. The Judge Dredd Mega-Special No. 1 (1988) had the first global map, with the locations all the previously depicted Mega-Cities and two unnamed African ones. To give room for future strips, it said that "only cities bound by the Hiroshima Accord are shown... others exist but choose not to acknowledge anything beyond their defensive walls" and that the Sov-Block were keeping the location of all their cities secret. The next map was in prog 701 in Anderson: Shamballa, naming a larger number of cities (and naming the previous African cities as Simba City and New Jerusalem). A post-Judgement Day version of this map, with some added features, was placed on the 2000 AD website. A further map was printed in Judge Dredd Megazine for the Pan-African Judges strip.

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