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Judge Fear

Like Judge Mortis last time, Fear is a Dark Judge.  Of all of the Dark Judges he sports perhaps the most preposterous outfit, which in the context of the Dark Judges is really saying something.

Fear has the ability to throw big man-traps that immobilise and/or injure targets.  Im not sure where the traps come from, but they tie in thematically with his costume at least.

Fears never ending Mantrap projectile ability is in addition to the standard suite of Dark Judge powers (immortality, fatal touch, extreme zombie-like resistance to physical attacks, trans-dimensional transport technology, telepathic link with other Dark Judges, the ability while in gaseous form to telepathically control susceptible psychics: common or garden spooky stuff) Fear also has another unique form of dispensing “Justiccce!”.

Fears face is capable of causing fatal effects in onlookers via his creepy gaze.  Fear usually controls the effect by opening the gate/portcullis like faceplate on his hilarious looking helmet.  Barring one or two exceptions Fears spooky visage has not been shown in the strip.

Like most things in the Judge Dredd strip, the interpretations of the Dark Judges uniforms have varied and changed over the years.  I picked the bits that I liked the most from the images that I had looked through and went with scheme shown.

Fears cloak is usually shown as black.  I decided to go with a brown similar to that shown on his cloak and the bat wings on his helmet in the image above as I thought that it would make for a more interesting miniature visually and give him more identity in the context of his colleagues.

While all other Dark Judges play second fiddle to their leader Judge Death (coming in a later installment) Fear in particular never gets any respect.

A lot of this stems from the very first time that Dredd confronted Fear.  Fear had been employing his creepy fizzog to bump off numerous residents of Billy Carter block .  Fear tried it on Dredd, spouting “Gaze into the face of Fear!”.  The rest is a little bit of comic book history, as shown below.

That pattern has become something of a theme.  Judge Dredd + Judge Fear = Fears head gets mangled or severed.

I never understood why in these cases Judge Fears helmet appears to have the durability of a Digestive biscuit, but who cares.

The image above is noteworthy as it shows Fears face (although I imagine that Fears face is indescribable and probably in the eye of the beholder, rather than just a creepy eyeballed thing).

Also of note is that the image is actually a pair of panels from a Dredd “fantasy gaming strip” (a “choose your own adventure” or “you are the hero” sort of affair) called House of Death.  It appeared in a 2000AD spin-off called Diceman in the eighties.

Jangly

While Judges Death, Fire and Mortis are metal figures manufactured by Foundry, irritatingly Foundry never sold a metal Judge Fear (although there is one on Kevin Dallimores site that never saw production as far as I know.  Boo!).

Handily enough the sculptor of 90% of the Foundry 2000AD range (Tim Prow who I presume sculpted that Kevin Dallimore painted Fear figure as well as the other Dark Judges) was hired on the back of his work sculpting 2000AD Heroclix.  Conveniently, he had sculpted a Fear for Indy Clix, which is where this figure comes from.

I had trouble stripping paint from the ‘clix and some of the detail was a bit blobby and indistinct, which made Fear something of a chore to paint.  Another reason why my Dark Judge project stalled for so long I think.

Like my painting on the other Dark Judges many shortcuts were taken while getting Fear finished.  As I had got so bogged down on these guys I simply had to do the minimum to get them done and put them to one side, which had a negative effect on the quality of the paint job.  Unfortunately Fear is the low point of my Dark Judge sub-project.  Ho hum.  I may return to the figure at some point in the future, but its not likely any time soon.

Judge Fire and a group shot of the four Dark Judges finally go up tomorrow.

Filed under: Miniatures | Tagged: 2000AD, 2011, Dark Judge, Judge Dredd, Perp, Sci-fi, Zombie |