[1]2000 AD editor Matt Smith has expanded on this to touch on the contents: John has always been waiting for the right story to come along to tell Dredd's origins... And in this case he's come up with a riveting plot that will keep readers intrigued and excited, as well as filling in some of the backstory that we've never seen before – President Robert Booth's initiation of the Atomic Wars, Chief Judge Fargo taking control of Mega-City, etc.

[1]"Origins" was preceded by a five-episode story called "The Connection", written by John Wagner and drawn by Kev Walker.

It had been intended that the final episode would appear in the comic's celebratory thirtieth anniversary issue, but publication was interrupted because artist Carlos Ezquerra moved house during his work on the story.

Working for an unseen character called Linus, their task is to deliver a small box to the Grand Hall of Justice in the centre of the city.

(Forensic tests establish that toxins in the tissue show that the source lived through the last century, and so the sample must be Fargo's rather than Dredd's.)

As required by the terms of the exchange, Dredd leads a small, lightly armed party on a mission across the hostile Cursed Earth to retrieve their esteemed "Father of Justice."

Unable to cope with his own lapse in the exacting moral standards he had inflexibly demanded of his subordinates, Fargo tendered his resignation to the President of the United States.

Using sophisticated video technology, they faked footage of Fargo bravely sacrificing his life in the line of duty, gunned down in a brutal drive-by shooting.

When his condition began to deteriorate again, Chief Judge Solomon had him cryogenically frozen in suspended animation until such time as medical science could cure him.

By 2070 President Robert Linus Booth was in the White House, having illegally rigged the voting computers to win the 2068 presidential election, and murdered one of his aides who threatened to expose the fraud.

Booth pursued an aggressive foreign policy, openly stating that he would begin a nuclear war if the rest of the world did not comply with his demands.

However Goodman realised that urgent action was needed to defeat Booth, and the constitutional mechanism for trying him and removing him from office could not be completed in time.

Judge Dredd resentenced him to life working on a farm in the Cursed Earth, to make amends for the destruction he unleashed on America.

When Dredd attempted to exchange the ransom for Fargo, Booth double-crossed him and put him on trial for treason, intending to execute him.

In addition to the judges who appeared in the flashback episodes described above, the following characters appeared in the story in the "present day" of 2129, as members of Dredd's team: Both stories were released as a trade paperback in 2007, with a cover by Brian Bolland (ISBN 1-905437-23-4),[3] and in a volume in the series "Judge Dredd: The Mega Collection" by Hachette Partworks in 2015.