September has been a busy month for me, but it also marks another career milestone for my writing – it’s been two decades since the publication of Eclipse, my first full-length story featuring future cop Judge Dredd from 2000AD, the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic!
Eclipse wasn’t my first Dredd tale – that was the audio drama Dreddline – but it was the first time I got to pen a novel based on this iconic character, the jut-chinned, stony-faced embodiment of the law who’s been a fixture of British comics since he first rolled on to the pages of 2000AD in the 1970s… Just in time, in fact, to blow the mind of a young Jim Swallow and make that kid a fan for life.
By 2004, I was writing fiction and I got the chance to pitch some ideas to Marc Gascoigne, editor at the Black Flame book imprint, who had taken up the licence for prose fiction based on the characters from 2000AD’s strips. As well as Eclipse, I’d go on to write Whiteout, a second Dredd novel, and Blood Relative, featuring the Rogue Trooper, another iconic 2000AD character.
Originally titled Red Moon, then Total Eclipse, my 2004 novel has Judge Dredd returning to the Space-Wild-West colony of Luna-1, of which he was briefly Judge-Marshall back in a 1977 comic story. When chaos and lawlessness threaten to overwhelm the beleaguered lunar justice department, Dredd leads an international force of fellow Judges to assist, discovering old enemies from his past bent on revenge and a deadly conspiracy that plunges Luna-1 into a firestorm.
I enjoyed writing Eclipse – re-reading it after a couple of decades, I can see I was clearly having a lot of fun, I packed it with everything I loved about the Judge Dredd comics and more besides!
2004 turned out to be pretty Dredd-filled for me, as Eclipse was just one of four stories featuring him that I published that year; as well as the novel, I wrote Passive/Aggressive, a short story for issue #255 of the Judge Dredd Megazine (later reprinted in the collection Judge Fear’s Big Day Out and Other Stories) and I scripted two more original audio drama’s for Big Finish Productions, Jihad and Grud Is Dead. Click on the titles for more about those stories.
After publication in paperback, Eclipse was later reprinted in the mega-collection I Am The Law: The Judge Dredd Omnibus, but after Black Flame closed down in 2008, the books went out of print. However, 2000AD’s publisher Rebellion revived all the prose fiction a year later for their digital store, and Eclipse remains available there in eBook format – so check it out if you’re in the mood for some future law…
