Necropolis (Judge Dredd story)
Set in the year 2112, the story concerns the tragedy that befalls Mega-City One following the resignation of Judge Dredd in "Tale of the Dead Man".
In the midst of this chaos, the Sisters sent Kraken to Tech 21, the dimensional research laboratory, and forced him to use their technology to free the Dark Judges from another dimension.
Following Judge Anderson's advice, Dredd decided to kill Kit Agee and thus break the Sisters' link with Earth.
The Judges returned to the surface, hijacked an H-Wagon and used its weapons to destroy Dunc Renaldo block, where Kit Agee was imprisoned.
The Judges regained control of themselves, and quickly regrouped under McGruder's command, redoubling their efforts to put a stop to the slaughter.
In this fashion he was able to escape and hide himself among the dead, and was soon buried with them in one of the many mass graves excavated to contain the sixty million citizens who died during this period.
The story reintroduced the character Judge McGruder, absent from the strip for four years, now with obvious mental health problems as a result of her prolonged exile in the radioactive Cursed Earth desert.
Stories would be spun out of Necropolis for over a year after it ended: "Nightmares", "Fixing Daddy", and "The Apartment" showed the devastation, diseases, and trauma that had been caused; "Death Aid", Garth Ennis's first Judge Dredd story, had the villains motivated by raising money for Necropolis orphans; "Return of the King" featured an undead Silver trying to retake his position and being executed by Dredd for dereliction of duty; "Wot I Did During Necropolis" had PJ Maybe escaping from the psycho-cubes thanks to the crisis; and "Judge Death – Boyhood of a Superfiend" had Death morose at the failure of his grand work.
The death toll was used to raise the stakes in "Judgement Day" – all sixty million victims became zombies – and both of those mega-epics were used to start off the Mechanismo storyline, due to the damage done to the judge force.
