The Truth About Judge Dredd

In 2027 the British comics character Judge Dredd approaches his fiftieth anniversary. Over those five decades Dredd has seemed static - a stern, frowning, authoritarian in the midst of the madness of Mega City One - but this is not necessarily true. This presentation will compare a survey of Judge Dredd fans to the early results of a new empirical analysis of a representative sample of his appearances in 2000AD to show that what we think know about Dredd may not actually be correct. By doing so it will demonstrate why taking an empirical approach to comics studies is a surer way of producing accurate, truthful, results than our more usual methods.