I Am The Law: coming in February 2023
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this account and, I promise, there’s a damn good reason why — this was, in effect, a space to test out ideas and themes I was working on for my book, which is coming out in February 2023.
I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future is about how Judge Dredd reflected the new ‘law and order’ politics of the 1970s, which grew in opposition to the social, economic, and moral changes of the period. Using specific stories from the past forty-five years, it explains how John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s hardline supercop didn’t just capture the zeitgeist, but pretty much predicted how policing and politics would be changed by this punitive way of looking at the world. While technically it’s one of those ‘pandemic books’ everyone was told they should have written with all that “spare time” on their hands during the hastening collapse of capitalism, it’s something I think I’ve been thinking about most of my life — how a comic book character ostensibly intended for children exposed the authoritarian direction of travel we were already on when it was first published in 1977. I can’t promise that it’s a cheery read, or an easy one, but I believe it is a unique one and something that celebrates Dredd while also analysing it critically.
You can order copies from a host of sites via this list, which I’m updating with new links when they go live.
He is the law — and you better believe it!
Judge, jury and executioner, Judge Dredd is the brutal comic book cop policing the chaotic future urban jungle of Mega-City One, created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra and launching in the pages of 2000 AD in 1977.
But what began as a sci-fi action comic quickly evolved into a searing satire on hardline, militarised policing and ‘law and order’ politics, its endless inventiveness and ironic humour acting as a prophetic warning about our world today — and with important lessons for our future.
Blending comic book history with contemporary radical theories on policing, I Am The Law takes key Dredd stories from the last 45 years and demonstrates how they provide a unique wake up call about our gradual, and not so gradual, slide towards authoritarian policing.
From the politicisation of policing to ‘zero tolerance’, from violent suppression of protest to the rise of the surveillance state, I Am The Law examines how a comic book warned us about the chilling endgame of today’s ‘law and order’ politics.
