But by the end of the decade he was back in Dundee, living on social security.
For a few years from 1970 he lived in London working for IPC on romance magazines. When he was one his family moved to Newtongrange, Midlothian, in Scotland.Īfter leaving Dalkeith High School and a brief period in a bank, in 1967 he became an editor at D C Thomson. are bequeathing to our grandchildren is a horrible, horrible place.”Īlan Grant was born in Bristol on February 9 1949. We are living in a dystopia, and pessimistically I can only see it getting worse. “But instead of having a Smokatorium, they’ve made us go outside to do it,” Grant complained to The Sunday Times in 2008 : “This blanket ban is, well, it’s Judge Dredd. One Judge Dredd storyline featured morbidly obese activists campaigning for extra food another featured the Smokatorium, the only place in MegaCity One where people were allowed to smoke. Over the years Judge Dredd gained a reputation for its seemingly prophetic powers, and in later life Grant identified several developments anticipated in the series in the 1980s, including the obesity epidemic and smoking bans.
“People in Scotland hated Maggie Thatcher and a lot of what we did with Judge Dredd was very much a reaction to that,” Grant recalled. They would read tabloid newspapers to find stories about youth gangs, unemployment, overcrowding and “neighbour rage” that they exaggerated and placed in the future. Grant began writing for the character in the early 1980s.įrom the outset Grant and Wagner set out to satirise contemporary British and American cultural trends.
With his catchphrase “I am the law”, he combined the powers of judge, jury and executioner as he battled crime in the violent dystopian MegaCity One. The character, a snarling, heavily armoured fascistic supercop, developed by Wagner, first appeared in 1977. It was, however, the creation of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd which brought out the best in the writing duo. Later on they were poached by DC Comics in America to script Batman. Taught to read aged three by his grandmother using The Beano and The Dandy (“The first word I could ever read was ‘aaargh!’ ”), Grant worked briefly in a bank before arriving at D C Thomson, the Dundee publishers, subsequently forming a writing partnership and friendship with fellow Thomson alumnus John Wagner. Alan Grant, who has died aged 73, was a prolific writer for comics and comic books, known for his work on Judge Dredd in the science fiction comic 2000 AD as well as various Batman titles from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.
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