Restoring Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth…

For the very first time, 2000 AD is to reprint the ‘banned’ episodes of Judge Dredd from the late 1970s, which parodied the great corporate powers of then – and now.

Published in 1978, The Cursed Earth was the first great Judge Dredd epic, but the story ran into trouble when two episodes – ‘Burger Wars’ and ‘Soul Food’ – featured parodies of Burger King, Ronald McDonald, the Jolly Green Giant, the Michelin Man, and a number of other prominent corporate characters in a raucous and shameless satire of American consumer culture.

After concerns of legal action at the time the then publisher IPC decided all subsequent collections of this classic strip would omit the satirical stories.

But, following recent changes in UK law governing parody, this July Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth Uncensored will reprint the story in its entirety for the very first time in a glorious hardcover edition, available in the UK/Ireland AND North America!

The droids have been hard at work putting the collection together, including using their sleuthing skills to find some of the original artwork from the series by Mick McMahon and Brian Bolland. Old and sometimes damaged archive films have been replaced by fresh scans of original pages by reprographics droid Kat-Scan, who has also painstakingly restored the colour pages and centre spreads to the story.

So we are indebted to Earthlet Mark Perry, who possesses several pages - including two centre-spreads from ‘Burger Wars’ - and allowed us to bring them to the 2000 AD Nerve Centre to have them scanned at high resolution, meaning you’ll be able to see this classic story in all its glory in July. We took the opportunity to snap a few pictures of the pages after they’d been scanned, so you can appreciate the artistry up close…

Pre-order The Cursed Earth Uncensored from Amazon UK and Amazon US, or ask your local comic book store to order you a copy!