Judge Dredd Breaks Into London's Cartoon Museum For His 50th Birthday

Posted in: Comics, Rebellion / 2000AD | Tagged: cartoon museum, judge dredd, london

Judge Dredd Breaks Into London's Cartoon Museum For His 50th Birthday

Judge Dredd Breaks Into London's Cartoon Museum For His Fiftieth Birthday With 2000 AD And Rebellion Publishing

Published Thu, 05 Nov 2026 07:25:09 -0600
by Rich Johnston
|
Comments

Article Summary

• Judge Dredd breaks into London's Cartoon Museum as 50 Years of 2000 AD & Judge Dredd opens from January to April 2027.
• Rebellion and the Cartoon Museum will fill every gallery with original 2000 AD and Judge Dredd art from top creators.
• The 50th anniversary exhibition includes a new life-sized Judge Dredd statue and explores the comic's lasting influence.
• The Cartoon Museum show joins a wider 2000 AD and Judge Dredd 50th anniversary celebration across London in March 2027.

Rebellion Publishing and the Cartoon Museum have announced that the Galaxy's Greatest Comic will stage a full takeover of the London museum for its 50th anniversary. 50 Years of 2000 AD & Judge Dredd opens on the 14th January 2027 and runs until the 18th of April. This is the third major 2000 AD exhibition at the Cartoon Museum. The 40th anniversary show in 2017, opened by Martin Rowson and Rebellion's Ben Smith, drew tens of thousands of visitors to the old Little Russell Street space. The smaller Dredd @ 45 exhibition followed in 2022. This time Rebellion is filling every gallery in the current Wells Street building. Curated by Rebellion, the exhibition will display original artwork from across the history of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, drawn from artists' own collections, private loans and the publisher's archives. The list of names is exactly what you'd expect for a half-century retrospective: Carlos Ezquerra, Simon Bisley, Brian Bolland, Steve Dillon, Kevin O'Neill, Glenn Fabry, Mick McMahon, Steve Yeowell, Chris Weston, Simon Davis, Ron Smith, Bryan Talbot, Henry Flint, Cam Kennedy, Jock, Ian Gibson, and dozens more.

There will also be a brand-new, life-sized statue of Judge Dredd based on co-creator Carlos Ezquerra's full-length painting of the character. The show will include material on how the comic is actually made and its influence beyond the pages, something Rebellion's Head of Film, TV & Publishing, Ben Smith, has been emphasising in the run-up to the anniversary. "There is barely a corner of popular culture where the influence of the comic is not felt," he says, "whether in film, video games, comics, music or elsewhere." Ben Smith also notes that "the future depicted in Judge Dredd has become more prescient by the year." Which is either a strong sales pitch or a quiet admission that Mega-City One feels less like satire than it used to. Either way, putting the UK's best-known comic character into the capital's only dedicated cartoon and comic museum for three months is a sensible way to mark the half-century.

The exhibition sits alongside the rest of the 50th anniversary programme. Rebellion has already announced the two-day 2000 AD & Judge Dredd 50th Anniversary Weekend at Protein Studios in Shoreditch on the 6th and 7th of March 2027, and the January 2027 solicitations include a 2000 AD Anniversary Special, a Visual History hardcover and Judge Dredd Magazine #500 with band members of Anthrax writing, editing and introducing their own Dark Judge to the canon, Judge Anthrax. The Cartoon Museum show will still leave room for a selection of the permanent collection in the Clore Learning Studio. Details and tickets are at cartoonmuseum.org.

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!