Stare Into The Face of Dredd.

 There's one enduring mystery of the age, of any age, the issue that has tongues wagging, curtains twitching, and brother waging war against brother. I'm talking, of course, about what Judge Dredd looks like under his helmet. 

Judge Dredd, top law man of Mega City One, the post-nuclear North America, where the salvageable parts of the country have been divided into walled city states and are policed by violent reactionary super-cops, who will kill you for jay-walking, or arrest you for ownership of sugar, a banned substance. 

Dredd's the best of them, which means he's the worst of them. His helmet stays on because he IS justice: remorseless, faceless, impersonal. But he does has a face. So what does he look like? 

Well, I'll tell you. Based on some rubbish evidence I've just slung together.   

We can see some of his face. 

You can see his mouth, his nose, his jaw. Over the decades there have been changes to these. Nowadays Dredd has a grizzled, milk-pail jaw, with a lipless under-bite, his mouth thin as a scar, curved into a sickle. He looks like Edward Fox on steroids. 

But that's not what he used to look like. When he first appeared Dredd had a firm jawline and full lips. So that, for me, is what his mouth and chin look like. The ur-Dredd. The proper one. Like so:

But what about the rest of him. Well, we're in luck: Dredd has a brother. A twin brother or, rather, a clone brother. 

Rico, a corrupt Judge, is Dredd's clone brother. They're both identical chips off founding Chief Judge Fargo's genetic block. And we've seen Rico's face. Sort of. 

There he is, the scamp. Now, obviously, there's a problem here. Rico's face has been augmented so he's able to survive the harsh climate of the Titan penal colony, where he was sent for his crimes. But there's still stuff we can take from this. Rico has lustrous dark hair, with a widow's peak. His facial shape is square, with pronounced cheekbones. He has large, raptor eyes, and heavy eye-brows, shaped rather like George Micheal's. His nose is gone and his mouth has been sewn shut, meaning he speaks through a grill in his throat. But it gives us a bit more to work with. 

Dredd's likely a brunette. Weirdly, he seems to be of Italian extraction, though his genetic Father is never presented as being Italian, though there is a vowel at the end of Fargo, I suppose. In the Mega City world, clones are depicted as having large, bulging eyes - "Mad Dog" Kazan, instigator of The Apocalypse War, was so self-conscious about his he always wore sunglasses. 

So Dredd has dark hair, southern European ancestry, a firm jaw, full lips, and large, bulging eyes. 

 Judge Dredd is surrealist film director Luis Bunuel. 

Except...

Obviously he's not. 

Because Judge Dredd is Frankenstein from Death Race 2000. 

I never saw Death Race 2000 while I was reading 2000AD, because I was a child. But Pat Mills, John Wagner and Carlos Esquerra definitely saw it, because, I mean, look at David Carradine there. Frankenstein wears a black helmet that displays his full lips. While he has his mask on he looks like he's deformed, just as Dredd appeared to be on the one occasion he removed his mask (Prog 6: we don't see his face, but the characters who do reel from him as though he were unusually ugly). He wears skin-tight leather, drives a souped up vehicle and kills people efficiently for a living. 

But the entire ethos of Death Race 2000 is that of Mega City One. It's a pumped-up satire of 70's America, red in tooth and claw, a savage world of near total unemployment, where the population is bored into crazes, where knee pads are essential fashion items, where belly-wheels prop up competitive eaters. A world where you can have any face you want and ugliness is the fashion. Where Olympic athletes have augmented pointy heads for better aerodynamics. On the moon.   

The matte paintings of the world of Death Race 2000 are exactly the city-bloc landscape of Mega City One, the ultra-violence and I can't-believe-we're-getting-away-with-this-just-because-it's-sci-fi sniggering are identical too. 2000AD started because Pat Mill's favoured outlet for outrage, Action, was shut down. 2000AD is Action in space. Murdering a policeman with a bicycle chain is so much more palatable if it's a laser bike chain and the man lying in the rubble is wearing an eagle-shaped shoulder pad. 

I haven't really read 2000AD in 35 years, so I imagine quite a few things have changed. But those mad early stories - a jigsaw disease, a robot rebellion lead by a zealot named "Call Me Kenneth", a demon inside a psychic inside a solid block of Boing - that's my 2000AD, and it fueled my imagination then and now. 

And Judge Dredd IS Luis Bunuel. I've done the math(s).