>>111796087Grant's approach is good, but more importantly, I think it's necessary. It's important to me that the strip never loses sight of how absolutely monstrous, brutal and oppressive the judges are. Even after all these years of becoming more introspective and sensitive, if Dredd is always written as the hero but never as the villain of a story, then you're losing a lot of the comic's edge.
Likewise, you need the city itself to be interesting. You need weirdo characters, oddball creeps, innocent citizens and dumb, endearing bullshit for the judges to trample all over. And those were two things Grant loved to write.
Grant once mentioned that his perfect Dredd story wouldn't feature Dredd at all, that it'd be just a story about some random citizen or weirdo craze, with the judges only appearing at the end as straight men to bring everything back to order. And there are a lot of stories in the 80s where you can clearly see he took point.
