Celebrating the Judge Dredd Megazine

Why not join me for an absurd task, deciding which are the best comics that have run so far in the 35 years of the Judge Dredd Megazine..?

I made this!

Hachette Collections of 2000AD

Hachette's '2000AD Ultimate Collection' is nearing its 200th and final issue. 
The original Judge Dredd Mega collection stretched to 90 issues, so that's a LOT of 2000AD-related material you can buy in collected hardcover form (mostly second-hand at this point, and some of them go for high prices). 

The whole project will end up spanning 10 years!

You can find lists of everything included on Wikipedia.
Here's the Judge Dredd index (which is mostly but not exclusively major Judge Dredd storylines from 2000AD, and spin-off stories/characters from the Judge Dredd Megazine)

And here's the one for the Ultimate Collection (which is mostly major series from 2000AD, plus a few Dredd stories, plus a very few leftover bits from the Megazine)

There's even an App you can download for the Dredd index! Made by a fan who clearly enjoys this sort of housekeeping exercise as much as me 😀

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about the contents of these fine collections. For that, I refer you to the exhaustive reflections of the Thrillshots blog, where the author is still in the process of reading and reviewing every issue of both collections, roughly in chronological order of when the original stories were first published. Highly recommended.

Art by Patrick Goddard (and yes, this is missing a bit from the far left and right ends)

No, what I AM here to do is to bemoan the fact that the spines of these collections, while artfully designed to have a pleasing poster-style image - IF you have bought and kept every single issue - otherwise are only identifiable by issue number. So you need to refer to one of the indexes above to work out which characters are in which volume. (Or I guess you could pull it off the shelf and look at the cover, but who has time for that amount of effort)

Art by Boo Cook (and this isn't even the whole collection!)

Instead, why not ruin enhance those spine images with teeny-tiny cut-out images of the central characters, thus allowing for slightly easier reference? 

See? The spine shows a picture of Judge Anderson, but inside you'll find 'Low Life'

And how can one go about this task, you ask? Why, by printing out THESE bad boys (on A4), then cutting them out and sticking them onto your books. I used sellotape - other sticky-backed plastics are available. 

SO MUCH less effort than having to double-check an online index or physically pulling a book off a shelf 😉 You'll notice I've offered alternative options for some volumes, the choice is yours!

(Those gaps on the final page to be updated once we find out what the actual contents of those volumes is going to be!)

There you have it.