If you are a Judge Dredd fan and weekly 2000AD reader like me, you almost certainly remember the 2024 story Judge Dredd – A Better World, which garnered comic of the year buzz for its searing social commentary, panel-busting art, and tense, shocking plotline.
Well, now the same creative is reuniting for a follow-up (not exactly a sequel! but more on that below) called Judge Dredd – The New Future. That creative team was writers Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt, artist Henry Flint, and letterer Annie Parkhouse.
And their new story will kickoff with a prologue in 2000AD Prog 2500, due out in the U.S. on Sept. 30 and in the U.K. two weeks prior.
Check out the cover by Mike Perkins right here!
This is all especially relevant because today we are honored to have an exclusive reveal of four of Flint’s unlettered pages from that story. Flint is already one of the best artists drawing sci-fi comics in the industry (you’ve read Shakara! right?), and these pages (somehow!) feel like a step forward for him.
Stick around after those pages because we also have some quotes from Williams and Wyatt about the new story.
Check it all out below … and enjoy!
Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt talk THE NEW FUTURE
Rob Williams: Judge Dredd – A Better World was one of those rare lightning-in-a-bottle comic stories. Arthur and I had built up to telling it for several years. We’d written a number of stories regarding Judge Maitland’s realisation that taking money from funding the Judges (the police) and instead placing it into social services and education would reduce crime, and improve the lives of Mega-City One’s Citizens. ‘A Better World’ was the culmination of that arc. It was prescient and had some power to it. And we knew we had a killer ending. And then Henry Flint asked us one day would we mind “If I tried something different on this one.’
I’ve been working on Judge Dredd Graphic Novels with Henry as far back as Judge Dredd – Titan (2016). He’s one of the best storytellers in all of comics. So we had total trust in whatever approach he wanted to try. What started to come through were pages where he’d taken my and Arthur’s scripts of 5/6 panels and extrapolated them into 12/13/14 panel pages. Each visual or dialogue beat getting its own panel. It was more than a little influenced by Frank Miller’s Ronin. And it worked beautifully. Incidentally, I think Henry’s colours are some of the best around too. Suddenly ‘A Better World’ felt innovative and looked just plain stunning.
As a result of this approach, Arthur and I started leaning into what Henry was producing. And it influenced our ‘killer ending’ narrative approach. Suddenly all the pressure of Mega-City One’s vested interests coming down on Judge Maitland to stop her social revolution happening were a staccato build-build-build-build of panels on the page. Judge Dredd’s city has never felt more clautrophobic. There had to be an explosion at some point – and that was our key story beat – the only Double Page Spread in the story.
Judge Dredd – A New Future isn’t a sequel per se. It’s a continuation of story threads left dangling at the close of A Better World. The same creative team, the same players on the board, story arcs not quite fulfilled for some of them. Judge Dredd at the centre of it all, a boiling desire for vengeance burning in his gut, and a future City and an army of Judges suddenly split down the middle. All about to burn. It’s a story that has things to say about where we are today and going into Judge Dredd’s 50th Anniversary, it fundamentally changes his world.
Arthur Wyatt: Henry first started using the 15 panel grid on A Better World. The first few episodes were scripted fairly normally with a pretty normal density of panels – with Dredd for me that’s usually 5-6 panels a page, less if there needs to be a big panel to emphasize a moment, maybe a few more if it’s talking scenes or a lot of unlettered panels depicting a sequence of events. Then art for the first episode came back and it had been split up beautifully into these 10-15 panel pages, which meant we knew we were in for something special.
Henry also provided a lettering guide, showing which captions and balloons from our script went to which panel. I *guess* that was also a moment to proof them and make sure there weren’t any placements we objected to, but i don’t think we ever asked him to move anything, as, honestly, his storytelling instincts are pretty much impeccable.
We did adapt our writing style a little to match that – not scripting the full 15 panels, but definitely having more panels and splitting the dialogue up more. Mostly we just anticipated panels might get split up and wrote in a looser style to accommodate that. Panel description became inflection points that Henry could put in a base more panels off of rather than a strict guide.
Then towards the end when we wanted to achieve a specific effect of things becoming more and more hectic and stressful and the events of Sector 304 coming to a head we really had Henry flood things and use the full 15 panels each page, culminating in a big double page spread, which I think worked very well.
For The New Future we very much continued in this style, though Henry went above and beyond….!
The prologue to Judge Dredd – The New Future will appear in 2000AD Prog 2500, out Sept. 30 in the U.S.!
