Perhaps the biggest crime of not giving the world a Dredd sequel is that there's so much amazing material that wouldn't get touched. The character's been around for nearly forty years and in that time he's had his fair share of iconic storylines that would work brilliantly on the silver screen. In fact an early draft of Dredd's script involved the infamous Dark Judges, the malevolent supernatural enemies of the human Judges. Judge Death and his ilk are great villains, but wouldn't really work in the more grounded version of Mega City One that the first Dredd movie brought to life. Still, there's plenty of arcs from 2000 AD and the Megazine that could work perfectly as a sequel: the setting of the first film could easily lead into Block Mania, where violence spreads from a building of the sort we saw in Dredd but ends up encompassing the whole city; the intimations of corruption within the Judges could provide the basis for a spin on The Day The Law Died, where the insane Judge Cal assassinates the Chief, takes control of Mega City One and has to be taken down by Dredd leading a rebellious resistance movement; or even the Cursed Earth, the character's first epic, where Dredd has to cross the irradiated desert outside the city to deliver medicine to a neighbouring settlement (might have to cut out the T-Rex from that for realism purposes, too). Of course, a Dredd sequel might be an entirely new story, as the first film was. That worked out pretty well, so I wouldn't be complaining, but there's plenty of cinematic plots to be pilfered from the comic's storied history.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
