The Long Walk (Judge Dredd)

This article is about the Judge Dredd comic strip. For other uses, see Long Walk (disambiguation).

Judge McGruder taking the Long Walk (drawn by Cliff Robinson)

The Long Walk is an event occasionally depicted in the long-running British comic strip Judge Dredd, which appears in 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. It also featured in the 1995 film starring Sylvester Stallone.

When a street judge retires from service at the end of his career, he may choose to leave Mega-City One and live out his final days in exile outside the city. He may do this either in the Cursed Earth, a radioactive desert outside the city walls, or in the Undercity, the paved-over ruins of New York that lie beneath the mega-city. The Long Walk begins with a brief ceremony at the city gates. The retiring judge walks through an honour guard of judges as they discharge their firearms into the air, while another judge formally bids him farewell. Once they take the Long Walk, judges are expected never to return, but to die "bringing law to the lawless."

Retiring judges may also be given the option to be placed in administrative or teaching posts, instead of taking the Long Walk. The Long Walk may however be the best option open to a judge who has been subject to disciplinary proceedings for misconduct not warranting criminal prosecution.

The Long Walk was introduced in 2000 AD #147, in the 1980 story "Judge Minty," written by John Wagner.

Notable instances

Two unprecedented exceptions to the normally inflexible rule that judges who take the Long Walk do not return from it were Chief Judge McGruder and Judge Dredd himself:

• Chief Judge McGruder resigned in 2108 when she blamed herself for an error of judgement which cost hundreds of lives, choosing exile to the Cursed Earth. Dredd presided over her Long Walk ceremony.

• Dredd took the Long Walk in 2112, after succumbing to doubts he had long held regarding the ethics of the entire Judge System. These were brought to a head after he received a posthumous letter from William Wenders, a child who had been killed as an indirect result of the Judges' suppression of the Democratic March. Whilst roaming the Cursed Earth, however, Dredd learned about the catastrophe known as Necropolis, and so he returned to Mega-City One in order to defeat the Dark Judges, recruiting McGruder along the way. Thus Dredd and McGruder were the first judges ever to return to the city after taking the Long Walk. This later became the focus of former Chief Judge Silver's legal challenge to McGruder's return to office, as Silver insisted that McGruder was disqualified from being chief judge as "Judges don't go back." However, Silver did not object to Dredd adjudicating between them even though Dredd had also returned from the Long Walk.

• In the 1995 film, Chief Judge Fargo (played by Max von Sydow) takes the Long Walk into the Cursed Earth, and shortly afterwards is murdered by Mean Machine Angel. (However, the 2000 AD comic strip version of this character never took the Long Walk.)

• The forthcoming fan film "Judge Minty" shows one of the comic's minor characters, Judge Minty taking the Long Walk and his first encounters in the Cursed Earth. (http://www.judgeminty.com/)

References

• "The A-Z of Judge Dredd," by Mike Butcher (Hamlyn, 1995). (ISBN 978-0600584087)