Judge Dredd Justice Department

I’ll start this post with a little Quite a bit of background. I’ve always been a HUGE comics fan, When i was younger I used to read all sorts, from Spiderman and the x-men, Beano & Dandy to Our Wullie and the Broons. Being British, and an avid Sci-Fi fan I should really have got into Judge Dredd. But, as with many people of my generation, I watched the 1995 Stallone film pretty much as it came out, and thought it was rubbish. Even at 8-9 years old. That film killed any interest I had, until 2013. The Dredd reboot with Karl Urban was released in 2012, and by all accounts wasn’t a great success at the box office. Soon after though it gained a huge cult following and became a classic Sci-Fi movie.
While browsing the shelves in HMV I spotted Dredd on blu-ray going pretty cheap, I decided to give it a chance. I was very glad I did! It instantly became one of my favourite Sci-Fi films of all time. I loved everything about it. Needless to say after that I went out and bought a handful of Dredd related graphic novels and became obsessed!

As a typical wargamer, after becoming engrossed in the comics I naturally thought “This would make a good game in 28mm”, after a quick google search I found that Mongoose Publishing had done just that! The rules were free, so downlaoded and instantly fell in love with the game. Shortly after I found the game Mongoose announced a partnership with Warlord Games who were going to take the game to the next level. Being an avid Bolt Action and Hail Caesar Fan, I couldn’t have been happier! my next port of call would be to pick up some minis!

I looked around on some of the normal places I used to buy figures but there wasn’t much in the way of Dredd minis available. Probably because the game was relitively new, and, with warlord taking on the distribution of the game it was a hard time to get the figures from a local store.
I managed to find a couple of boxed sets on ebay, I picked up the renegade robots and the “cursed earth desperados” Then thought “hang on, a Judge dredd game, with no justice department?? NO CHANCE! This led to further purchases! I didn’t actually buy the justice department boxed set however, after finding a rummage box at a local show that had many of the Justice Department figures in it, I just picked a few that I liked and bought them.

After a number of months sitting on a shelf waiting patiently, I finally finished off a few projects and it came round to the Turn of Dredd. I should have painted the other crews first, but I couldn’t help myself and went straight in for the Justice department. Here’s how I got on!

Painting the Judge Dredd Justice Department

Justice Department gang all finished

The Whole gang painted up. I have no idea how many “points” this might be, I purely bought them and painted them based on their “awesome” factor. Included in the painted crew are x1 Judge Dredd, x1 Judge Hershey, x1 Psi Judge Anderson, x1 Jump pack Judge, x1 Street Judge, x1 Street Judge with twin lawgivers x2 Street Judge with baton.

Psi Judge Anderson

I was really pleased with how they all turned out, it has been a while since I painted anything this interesting or colourful and I actually stripped the first figure twice after not liking how the results came out. Once I found the scheme I wanted though, I painted all of them at once in stages (i.e. all the helmets at once, all the armour at once etc)

Ole’ Joe himself.

Ole’ Joe himself. You can tell that these figures were all sculpted by different people, mainly due to the varying degrees of quality in the sculpts, but also in the size. While Dredd is one of the better sculpts, it’s one of the smallest figures too. The other judges often look a lot chunkier than he does. Still. I wouldn’t mess. He is the law after all!

Judge Dredd Justice Department – The whole gang

Rebasing after painting

The hardest bit about the paint job was actually the bases to put the figures on. They came with pretty standard Bases, and I originally intended (and had them on while painting) to have them on lipped bases. Once they were finished though I couldn’t think What I could actually do with the bases. The Desperados will be easy, as a desert base will fit their look, but modelling an industrial mega city 1 is slightly harder. So I looked online and found some bases from a company on ebay that I thought looked nice. I bought 2 packs so if I add to the gang, they’ll get the same bases.

As the bases are resin, they need some support when sticking them to the base. The best way to do this is to pin the model. Generally speaking this requires drilling into both parts, then fixing in some form of pin (usually a piece of a paper clip). However, seen as these guys were already painted, and have rather small feel, I decided to use the already attached tabs as the pins. As you can see in the above photo, the minis came with tabs pre-attached. These were trimmed down, like in the last two and these became the pins. I then used a larger than normal drill bit and only drilled into the base. rather than the base AND the mini.

Cut the tab into small pegs

Close up of the trimmed tabs.

Painted Bases. x2 sets from GGA Bases on ebay

For this project I decided to go for some street type bases, more interesting than just tarmac, the paving stones made a very nice contrast to the figures.
As I’d just read the “chaos day” set (*Tharg note! see “Chaos Day: Fourth Faction” for the intro to this story line) I decided to get the messed up ones. With more litter and debris all over the place. I got two sets & made the decision to paint them up at once before being added to the minis. In total, with the help of my trusty Badger 105 patriot, I managed to get these from sealed in their envelope, to fully painted in about an hour.

Bases

A close up of one of the Packs of bases.

Now I’ve painted up this little lot, I’m going to have to get the rest painted so I can get them on the table! I’ve gone back into scenery mode at the moment though, having received a lovely little package from Mantic in the post. Deadzone! I’ve already started on these figures and got the terrain painted. Expect a post about those very soon!

Thanks for reading my post about the Judge Dredd Justice Department

Chris