Logan

Logan
Biographical Information
Gender	Male
Position	Chief Judge
Affiliation	Mega-City One Justice Department
Alignment	Good
Status	Alive
Behind the Scenes
First Appearance	2000 AD Prog 1350

Judge Logan was Dredd's assistant and would serve as the Chief Judge of Mega-City One from 2141 onwards.

While brave when called to combat, he was dogged for decades by a string of extremely bad luck, unfortunate events, and serious injuries whenever he entered the field. His main competency was an administrator, which saw him rise from assisting investigations to being the top choice to run the recently recovered megacity.

Biography

Logan's first appeared in "The Satanist"

When he first appeared in 2125, he was already a known assistant for Dredd and was helping with the detective work on a cannibal case. The next year, Logan was part of the investigative team trying to stop Total War's series of nuclear terrorist bombings.

A young and eager worker, it would turn out he was being kept out of the field due to his hip "play[ing] me up".

Logan in action in Origins

In 2128, when a young and eager worker, he was asked to help Dredd draft the team that would retrieve the body of Eustace Fargo from the Cursed Earth. Feeling he was always overlooked for the interesting jobs, he volunteered himself for the mission and promised to push through his hip pain if needed.

During the mission, he turned one battle around by leading the Lawmaster bikes (on autopilot) in a bombing run against enemies. Unfortunately, in the start of a series of bad luck, he would be severely wounded in action and require major surgery, including an artificial lung, arm and spleen.

By Chief Judge Sinfield's time, he had been promoted to senior judge. Shortly afterwards, he personally discovered the evidence which resulted in Chief Judge Sinfield's conviction and removal from office.

During Chaos Day, he was part of the team trying to run down the Sov agents and went on a trip to Ciudad Barranquilla to investigate a mobster with ties to the agents - being forced to back off when confronted with a large number of mobsters. When the Sovs broke the Dark Judges out of containment, he again lost his arm in an encounter with Judge Mortis and was hospitalised, waking up to discover almost 350 million people had died.

The encounter left him traumatised, unable to get the experience out of his head, and he would continue to deteriorate from supernatural contamination. Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson was finally sent to try and cure him in 2136, two years after the fact, and learned he was being used as a bridge to their reality by the Sisters of Death.

After recovering (and gaining a prosthetic arm), he became the quietly competent Sector Chief for Sector 6 and turned it into the best performing sector in the city. Age and the desk job caused him to put on weight.

Barbara Hershey and Dredd both agreed that Logan should take over as the new Chief Judge in 2141; the man himself felt he wasn't yet ready for the role but was talked into it by Dredd.

His cautious nature showed when he appointed a new Council of Five, making his deputy from Sector 6, Ada Porter, his Deputy Chief; consulting with Tek-Division to find a suitable candidate (TJ Han); appointing a known senior Street Judge, Gerard Fulsome; and in appointing another Admin figure, Hector Robles. However, he also was determined to rule on principle and so recognised the importance of Mechanismo by appointing the robo-judge Harvey to the Council. Rumours of impeachment immediately circulated and Fulsome quit, but - despite Dredd's advice - Logan felt he could not back down and reassign Harvey as a purely advisory role. He similarly refused to back down even when Harvey requested this, even as he was rattled by the sight of a ten-million strong march against him.

Unknown to Logan, Judge Farrow of the former Council was preparing a coup against him. When the senior Judges cornered him and threatened to arrest him if he didn't change his government, Logan informed them: "Over my dead body." The arrival of Dredd at the last second allowed him to successfully force the plotters to surrender and he ordered them under arrest.

The crisis was averted when Harvey was killed preventing a bomb - while Logan would still have a Mechanismo advisor, he wouldn't "rub their [the city's] faces in it" and put Beeny on the Council instead of a robot (Fulsome rejoined). He discovered afterwards that Harvey had, in fact, blown himself up and faked it was the bomb to resolve the crisis without Logan losing face; the Chief Judge saw this as proof of the Mark 8s' devotion to duty.

One of his first acts was to order an old Sov craft shot down for the sake of the city, despite Dredd still being in it. He would soon be drawn into the sharp end of foreign policy, attempting to prevent the Euro-City criminal the Red Queen from taking over the Mediterranean Free State and later trying to prevent the rogue robot-ruled state of Guatemala from threatening the megacities with nuclear arms. During the latter, he was also in communication with Hershey (who had relatives in Guatemala) - having helped her fake an earlier death so she could remove agents of Judge Smiley across the world.

When Dredd disappeared for several days, Logan had it hushed up and remarked to Han, despondent: "I take over the job and he disappears. Just like that. On my watch."

Logan would oversee long-delayed reconstruction in the North-West Hab Zone, which after eight years of decay meant demolishing and rebuilding large chunks of it into prototype blocks that would have greater amenities and education.

Logan and Council arguing with Maitland

Logan had the misfortune to be Chief Judge when the Four Horseman manifested on Earth in 2142 and had to approve evacuating the city to the Undercity due to a storm. Afterwards, the city infrastructure was devastated and he asked Maitland to craft an emergency budget that would divert funding to repairs - instead, to his dismay, she came back with a plan to divert funding from Street Division to education and social services to reduce crime. He and the Council found it ludicrous, and the SJS reported Maitland was now planning to leak her theory to the press. Logan overrode the decision to arrest her so Dredd could "set her straight", as she was too important to Accounts to throw away, but had her under full surveillance in case she became a risk again.

Two Logans?

In the Big Finish audio Grud is Dead, a Judge Logan appears and is voiced by Jez Fielder.

A proudly certified pilot with two tours on Justice One, in 2126 he assisted Judge Dredd in tracking a foreign spy - who turned out to be Judge-Inquisitor agents of the Vatican City, after Devlin Waugh. Logan was irritated to find the "Grud botherers" in the city making demands and that the Council of Five had "rolled over" diplomatically to return the agents home. Dredd had Logan fly him, the captive Waugh, and the Inquisitors back to the Vatican. Unfortunately for him, the Inquisitor Sextus was running a conspiracy and shot Logan through the spine in order to crash their stratbat. The paralysed Judge had to talk Dredd into landing.

This appearance was counted as one of Judge Logan's on the old 2000AD website - which is a problem since in that audio story, Logan dies! James Swallow's website noted years later that the character was actually named after the film Logan's Run, rather than meant to be the existing character.

Notes

• Logan is a homage to the Dredd superfan Stewart Perkins, alias W.R. Logan, who had worked as a researcher and adviser for John Wagner on several stories (including Origins) and an archivist for 2000AD. Before this, he started the Class of '79 fanzine - inspiring multiple other small-press work and several future 2000AD creators - and co-created the original version of Harry Heston. While he died in 2016, Perkins' namesake lived on.

• "Dark Justice" was originally advertised for 2013 but didn't start until December 2014. As he mentions Psi-Division help being arranged in "Day of Chaos", this gives the impression the overworked, post-plague Justice Department has taken this long to get round to him!

Gallery

Sector Chief Logan in 2141, weight of the job on his shoulders.