Like my dad before me, I like a bit o' the old sci fi. Dad grew up reading Eagle, while I grew up reading 2000AD, which initially tried to pass itself off as the successor comic, but soon went off in its own much more visceral direction. The star of the show from prog 2 onwards (and still going strong) was Judge Joe Dredd, a futuristic law enforcer patrolling the mean and often utterly bizarre streets of Mega City One fighting criminals, stookie glanders, mob blitzers, psychers, mutants, fatties, dinosaurs, werewolves, robots, Soviet judges, aliens, plants, ghosts and the undead. He's gone onto cinema twice, but with mixed results; the first film looked pretty, but the story was feeble, if not embarrassing and Joe took his helmet off (no, no, NO!); the second had a better story and a much better Dredd, but lacked the futuristic style of the comic.
There are a few models of old JD on the market nowadays and for those with 3D printers I suppose there are lots of options, but for a long while there was only one decent model on the market, this one produced by Halcyon in 1993, part of a trio of kits including Psi Judge Anderson and ghoulish supervillain, Judge Death, all in a whopping 1/6 scale. The kit is moulded in what I suspect is soft vinyl, certainly it lacked stability and I had to fill it up with plaster to make it easier to handle. I also had to rebuild Dredd's Lawgiver, his computerised handgun, which had a pronounced droop to its barrel that no amount of corrective bending could fix. The kit has undergone numerous repaints and scrapings back over the years, but I achieved this look with a mixture of Humbrol and Games Workshop paints to get the eye-popping comic colours I was after. Dredd's face and visor, though, were painted with artist's oils. I think I will keep this finish as even years later I am still pretty pleased with how it turned out.
