2000 AD #650
Prog 650 is the launchpad for one of the most structurally audacious stories in British comics history: 'The Dead Man', credited to the invented pseudonym 'Keef Ripley' so that readers had no idea they were watching an amnesiac Judge Dredd stumble through the Cursed Earth alongside a young boy named Yassa Povey. The deliberate concealment — a separate strip run in parallel with the regular Dredd pages, with no reference to Mega-City One or its characters until the eleventh episode's shattering reveal — was a masterpiece of long-form misdirection that 2000 AD had never attempted on that scale before. The same prog also debuts 'Rogue Trooper: The War Machine', a full reinvention of the Rogue Trooper concept introducing the new genetic infantryman Friday, written by the original series co-creator Dave Gibbons and painted by Will Simpson. Taken together with the concurrent Zenith Phase III (Grant Morrison/Steve Yeowell) and Sláine: The Horned God (Pat Mills/Simon Bisley), prog 650 dropped at perhaps the single richest creative moment in the anthology's first four decades.
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By late 1989, Fleetway Publications — the IPC successor label that had taken over 2000 AD — had expanded its colour pages, enabling lushly painted strips to sit alongside black-and-white serials in the same issue. Editor Richard Burton oversaw the line-up that converged in prog 650. John Wagner, who had been quietly steering the Dredd mythos toward the 'Necropolis' mega-event, wanted to conceal his involvement in 'The Dead Man' to protect the central mystery, so he used the pen name 'Keef Ripley' — one of several pseudonyms he employed during his career — and engaged artist John Ridgway, a former 'Luke Kirby' contributor whose cross-hatched, horror-Western style looked nothing like his previous Dredd work, providing further camouflage. Simultaneously, Dave Gibbons — original co-creator of Rogue Trooper but long departed as artist — returned to write rather than draw a radical reimagining of the concept, stripping out the beloved bio-chips and Vietnam-filtering the tone through Will Simpson's painted artwork.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Prog 650 marks the first episode of 'The Dead Man' (running through prog 662), written by John Wagner under the pseudonym 'Keef Ripley' and drawn by John Ridgway — a black-and-white strip not billed as a Judge Dredd story, in which an acid-burned amnesiac (secretly Joe Dredd) is discovered in the Cursed Earth by a boy named Yassa Povey.
- The story ran in parallel with regular Judge Dredd episodes for its entire 13-part run; no connections to Mega-City One, its locations, or established characters were made explicit until near the serial's conclusion, preserving the mystery of the protagonist's true identity.
- Prog 650 simultaneously launches 'Rogue Trooper: The War Machine', written by original series co-creator Dave Gibbons (returning to the franchise as writer rather than artist) and painted by Will Simpson — introducing Friday, a new genetic infantryman in a different war, ditching the original's biochip conceit in favour of a grittier, Vietnam-inflected tone.
- The issue also carries an episode of Zenith Phase III ('War in Heaven'), the landmark multiverse superhero crossover by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, which ran in progs 626–634 and 650–670.
- Sláine: The Horned God — Pat Mills's Celtic mythology epic fully painted by Simon Bisley — was running concurrently, and 'The Dead Man' creator index includes Sláine characters Sláine himself and his dwarf companion Ukko, confirming both strips appeared in this prog.
- The character Cadet Kraken, a Judda clone of Dredd introduced in the preceding 'Oz' storyline, appears in the regular Dredd strip running alongside 'The Dead Man' during this period; his arc across these progs feeds directly into his central, catastrophic role in 'Necropolis'.
- 'The Dead Man' has been collected multiple times: as a standalone Rebellion trade paperback, in 'Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 13', and in Volume 4 of the 'Judge Dredd: The Mega Collection' partwork (Hachette Partworks).
- The 'Rogue Trooper: War Machine' story debuting here was later collected digitally and in print by Rebellion, and was noted by the 2000 AD official site as a Vietnam-influenced reimagining that influenced the franchise's direction through the 1990s.