One of the great, dark jokes about Judge Dredd is that he doesn’t have that much of a rogue’s gallery – mostly because the majority of his stories end with him just shooting the bad guys in the drokking face. Even the great psychopath PJ Maybe eventually found justice at the end of Dredd’s lawgiver after decades of mayhem, murder and a hilariously fruitful reign as Mega-City One’s legitimately finest mayor and possibly the world’s most accomplished illiterate. (The most notable exception to this rule is – of course – Judge Death and the other Dark Judges, who can’t be stopped with something as mundane as a bullet. Dredd can shoot them to hell and they will just keep crawling out of the grave to kill, over and over again. But you get what I’m going for here.)

However, there is one other villain who has constantly erm…head-butted their way into Dredd’s orbit without being permanently dispatched: the mighty Mean Machine Angel –  a cyborg monstrosity who just keeps on coming back, in dozens of stories over more than 30 years. 

While Mean Machine’s longevity can certainly be attributed to the fact that he’s funny as hell and a fucking cool looking character, he’s also one of the few true innocents to cross paths with Dredd. And in the harsh-but-fair (but mainly harsh) world of Judge Dredd, that innocence counts for a lot, and even leads to Mean getting the rarest of quiet farewells in a world of loudly violent ends.

Created by John Wagner and Mike McMahon (with the late Alan Grant joining Wagner as Dredd co-writer at about this time as well) Mean Machine Angel first appeared in 2000 AD prog 160 in early 1980, along with the other members of the murderous Angel clan.  The main villains of the Judge Child Quest mega-epic – in where Dredd and a team of Judges cross the galaxy in search of a possible profit capable of brining peace to Mega City One – the Angel Gang were a homicidally ornery crew, quick to torture and murder, and fleeing into the galaxy with the Judge Child. Out of all of the Angel Gang – to include founder and father Pa Angel, “Link” Angel, “Junior” Angel, and occasionally the horrifically skeletal Fink Angel – the aptly named “Mean Machine” was the gang’s big heavy, with a metal skull that could headbutt anybody into oblivion.

It should also be noted that Mean Machine Angel only has four moods, all controlled by a thoroughly punk-looking dial that has been soldered into his brain. On setting one, he’s surly; on two he’s mean; on three he’s vicious; and on four he’s downright brutal – hence his famously menacing catchphrase “Gonna go ta four on ‘em! But like a lot of the wonderful freaks in Dredd’s world, his appeal has more sides to it than that. A lot of it is in how the man looks – such an incredible design from McMahon, with the claw arm, one bulging and red robotic eye, and the greatest of redneck sneers.  

Anyway – it did not end well for the Angel Gang. Along with his Pa and brothers, Mean was quickly dispatched once Dredd finally caught up with him, blowing himself up after getting his dial stuck on 4½, (an event that would keep happening to Mean with guaranteed hilarity). 

The editorial and creator droids at 2000 AD quickly realised that while dead usually meant dead in the Dredd universe, Mean was too good a character to let rot on the planet of Xanadu. When his long-lost brother Fink Angel came looking for revenge a few weeks after the epic ended, a significant part of the story was devoted to Mean’s origin.  It showed how he was a sweet, innocent young man who happened to be born in a family of the most ruthless scum, and they decided the only way to fix him was some dirty brain surgery, thus creating the psychopath with their brutality.  

A year later Mean Machine was brought back to life by the Judge Child, and went on a rampage that never really stopped.  He butted heads with Dredd multiple times and always lost the fight, but was never permanently dispatched – his misadventures almost always ending with him back in the padded walls of a psycho cube. He accompanied Dredd on several incursions into the Cursed Earth and had a few solo stories of his own, although he was always at his best when he went toe to toe with the law.

All the great Dredd artists – Carlos Ezquerra, Ron Smith, Ian Gibson, Steve Dillon, Henry Flint – had typically powerful interpretations of Mean, while Simon Bisley’s amped-up look for Mean in the Judgment on Gotham crossover became the default beefy look for the character for the next decade. 

It’s such a striking design that it’s little surprise that it was one of the few things that genuinely worked in Danny Cannon’s misfire movie adaption of Dredd in the 90s. His monstrous form, based on concept art by Chris Cunningham, gave the film a real kick of sci-fi absurdity, and was almost enough to forgive it for Dredd taking his helmet off. 

Another great appeal of Mean Machine is that he does tend to be very funny when he shows up in stories. While full of animal cunning that has kept him ticking, he’s not exactly a smart man, and is frequently getting up to all sorts of weird escapades, including time travel and fatherhood. 

The comic effect of his altered nature clashing with Dredd’s unbending strictness never went out of style, and that moment where he inevitably goes butt-crazy is always funny. 

(It’s even arguable that Mean is an advocate for disability rights, as he spends almost all of his adventures with no arms. His left limb is blown off by Dredd towards the climax of the Judge Child Quest, is never replaced, and he just has a robotic claw and a stump, neither of which slow him down or bother him, as he’s just as capable as anybody else – as long as he gets to lead with his head. (How’s that for solid representation?) 

All of this is obvious to anybody who has ever glanced sideways at a story with Mean Machine Angel in it, but as proven by its entire history, Judge Dredd as a strip is all about playing the long game, and all those tales of Mean’s misadventures over all those years –however ridiculous or violent on the surface – have created strange depths. 

One thing that slowly becomes clear is that Mean Machine Angel is, despite what we might think, a true innocent. He’s committed more crimes than anybody, but he’s not really guilty, because he’s mentally impaired – a disability that was given to him by his own damn family! Underneath that grizzled and harsh exterior, somewhere behind that metal plate he has for a skull, there might even be a kind soul. 

Sure, Mean Machine headbutts a shitload of people – some into absolute paste, in fact – but never anyone who doesn’t really deserve it if you think about it. The people he pounds tend to be other scumbags, or dickheads, or arrogant arseholes who think they can easily push Mean or his family around (before finding out that he has some kind of smarts they didn’t reckon on.) 

Even Judge Dredd knows it would be wrong to summarily execute Mean, even when a little light maiming may be necessary. The world of Mega-City One is a true nightmare, and terrible things often happen to good people – or just plain ordinary people – but somehow the truly innocent manage to have a chance somehow. Consider the case of Mrs Gunderson (another Wagner co-creation): a little old lady who is almost completely blind and deaf, and still tottering along happily. Gunderson is also one of the very, very few people to survive prolonged contact with Judge Death and somehow walks through all the gunfire and other madness on a regular basis. 

Mrs Gunderson might not look much like Mean Machine Angel, and she probably can’t ‘butt someone the same way he can, but it would be wrong to do either of them any real harm because…well, frankly, it would be mean. 

So how do you solve a problem like Mean? Dredd never had an answer either. He just thumped his metal noggin and sent him back to the psycho cubes again and again. But in the end Mean was tamed by the same thing that tames us all : the slow passage of time.

After years as a regular protagonist, he started to fade away, before finally being given the quietest of exits from the series. The last time we see Mean Machine Angel in a story by John Wagner, all the aggression has finally been burned out of him, the dial removed; his monstrous claw replaced by a thin prosthetic limb and his endlessly optimistic son, who shares the rare gene of kindness in his bloodline, takes him in happily. 

Mean Machine’s done. He’s just another citizen and no threat to anybody. He’s also another aching reminder to Dredd that even an Angel gets old, and isn’t a threat forever – something that the old geezer himself will one day have to reckon with. But in the meantime, Mean Machine gets to gracefully take a bow.

(There has been another story since then by a non-Wagner writer, of course, that has Mean turned back into a monstrous figure roaming the Cursed Earth again, but there was something so understated by Wagner’s version, that it’s easy to ignore this possibility.)

Because there shouldn’t really be a blaze of glory ending for this damnable robo-hick. Just a quiet shuffle off the stage, where he can take the time to smell the flowers again. That’s all Mean ever wanted to do in the first place.