Blog: Typing About Dredd

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If you have recently been hearing a faint sad sound echoing around the universe do not fear - it is simply the lamentation of countless readers of this blog, crying out for new updates. "Where am Hibbett"? they wail. "How are we to know wot is GRATE and what isn't without his wise guidance?"

Fear not, gentle readers, I may have been quiet here lately but I have been very busy elsewhere, mostly TYPING, bashing away at the keys like I'm playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon. For instance, recently I've been working on an article for The Conversation about Doctor Doom, explaining some of the things I've been talking about around superhero storytelling in my talks for Pints Of Knowledge (and there's another one of those just before Christmas if you fancy some Festive Doom). Doing that was a LOT of fun, as the editor was also an MCU fan, and hopefully it'll get the word out to a wider audience about me being The Doctor Of Doctor Doom!

The MAIN thing I've been working on though has been to do with an entirely OTHER totalitarian anti-hero who never reveals his face - Judge Dredd! Next year I'm planning to release a book tentatively titled 'How Judge Dredd Works' to coincide with his fiftieth anniversary, in which I use the unified catalogue of transmedia character components (or Hibbett Methodology, if you insist) to examine... well, how he works. Some of you may remember, and some of you may have taken part in, the Judge Dredd survey what I unleashed a couple of years ago. This was the first stage in a LONG process which has since seen me read and analyse 149 stories from across the fifty years of 2000AD and then write them up into a book which, I think, has some VERY INTERESTING things to say about the character that have not necessarily been said before.

I have, excitingly, JUST finished the third major draft of the book, which is the first version to have a complete text, including conclusions and appendices, in it. In a couple of weeks I'm going back in to do draft FOUR which hopefully will be readable enough to go off to my PEER REVIEWERS before Christmas, and then the plan is to SELF-PUBLISH it in Spring 2027, around the time of the anniversary.

There will be LOTS more to talk about around all this, and hopefully THIS time you will actually be able to BUY the book, as self-publishing means I'll be able to sell it at a more reasonable price than the £100 a copy that my previous book was originally sold for (although it's currently at the knockdown price of £31.49 if you fancy a copy). In theory you'll be able to read the new book FOR FREE online if you want to but, as I say, that's all to come. For now, I mainly wanted to say a) hello b) I'm still here and c) I finished draft 3! WAHEY!

posted 8/11/2026 by MJ Hibbett

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