Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth Uncensored

For those of us who love the truly bizarre extremes that the future's toughest lawman will go to, one of the most exciting pieces of news this year was the announcement that Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth would finally be reprinted in its entirety. Originally serialized in the pages of 2000 AD back in 1978, the story took Dredd out of Mega City One and into the atomic wasteland that was America, weaving its way through the strip's signature combination of over-the-top satire and ridiculous action for one of the first great Judge Dredd epics.

If you've ever read through Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth, the sprawling epic that took the future's most brutal lawman outside of Mega-City One on a journey across an atomic wasteland in the years since its original publication, then you may have noticed that there are a couple of strips missing from the paperback collections. Four strips from the original story, the two-part 'Burger Wars' and 'Soul Food' arcs, featured versions of Ronald McDonald, the Burger King, the Jolly Green Giant, and other corporate icons, twisted into post-nuclear villains. As you might expect, that caused a bit of a problem back in 1978, and under fears of a lawsuit, those four strips were excised from later reprints of the landmark story. Until now, that is. Today, 2000 AD announced the upcoming Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth Uncensored, a new printing of the story that will restore the "banned" strips for the first time in almost forty years.