The life of Judge Beeny

I was explaining the history of Judge Beeny to a long-suffering friend in a café recently, and had to stop halfway through and take a breath, because I was literally getting too emotional about the backstory of a fictional character to continue.

But I really do care about Beeny and her life in Mega-City One, and she might just be my favourite single character in modern comics, because her history and circumstances give her all the excuses in the world to be a truly terrible person, and she uses them to be something better instead.

It's always the secondary characters in long-running comics that I end up emotionally attached too. It's rarely the main character, they're always the focus anyway, it's the people around them that are always most interesting (anyone who thinks the man called Judge Dredd is the best thing in the strip called Judge Dredd does not understand Judge Dredd at all). I care about Doyle more than I care about Hopey, I adored what they did with Howards in the final phase of BPRD, and Judge Beeny actually gives me hope for humanity.

Because Beeny had the roughest of starts - her very existence is problematic, with her father appropriating her mother's body without consent, and using it to create a virtual clone. Her mother was a murderously idealistic democrat who only ever appeared in one story (although that one story is arguably the single greatest story in the history of Judge Dredd), and the poor kid was shunted off the the Academy of Law without any choice.

With a background like that, she has the stones to be one of the great Dredd villains, but when she came out of the brainwashing academy after years of real-time indoctrination, she proved to be a new kind of judge - still hard on the letter of the law, but with a compassionate side that is rarely seen in this future nightmare.

(It should be noted that while a lot of her characterization has been the work of the peerless John Wagner, America co-creator Colin MacNeil has drawn many of the stories focused on Beeny, and his smooth lines have sold her easy charm as much as any of Wagner's words.)

She has been mentored by the hardest man who ever lived, and is tough enough to stand up to Dredd when he needs to be stood up to. She got through the horrors of Chaos Day and follows the Dredd ethos of tough, but fair (but mainly tough).

But she hasn't rejected her drokked-up heritage, and has embraced part of it, recognizing that the judge system has to change, and that as rigid as Dredd can be, the stick that will not bend can only break.

She is part of a next generation of judges - including Rico, Giant and the late, truly lamented Maitland - that are still upholding the system, but recognizing that it might not need to be as harsh as it currently is. In a relatively short period of time, Beeny has already made into onto the table of the Council of Five, and will surely make the best chief judge Mega-City One ever has, if she can survive the mean streets of the big meg and doesn't get the same sudden bullet so many other great characters end up getting.

She more human than Hershey, more stolid than Anderson, and a new kind of judge for a new future.

Judge Beeny never met her mother, and would probably still slam her in the cubes for the things she did. But she has taken what she needs from her own history and made it a part of her character, and she will, if given the chance, genuinely change the world for the better. America would be proud.