Even in the first Dredd, we got the feeling that not everything was right in the Grand Hall of Justice. Our "hero" was the same unwavering, unquestioning dispenser of the fascistic future law we know and love from the comics, but the likes of the corrupt Judges who came to kill him and Anderson hinted at something rotten at the core of Dredd's very employers. To take a different satirical bent to the America/Russia thing of Block Mania, this two-part storyline - started by creator John Wagner and passed onto enfant terribles Garth Ennis - saw Dredd begin to question the wider political landscape in Mega-City One, pushing for the Justice Department to allow citizens to vote in a referendum: would they prefer to be governed by the Judges, or by a democratically elected government, which hasn't happened in years? The ending might surprise you! Obviously they'd shoehorn some action sequences of the gloriously brutal sort the first film had, but tapping into the decades-long Democracy meta-arc from the 2000 AD comics would be pretty timely.
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/
