Michael Molcher
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molcher.bsky.social
Michael Molcher
@molcher.bsky.social
2.1K followers 420 following 2.4K posts
@2000AD.bsky.social Brand Manager
Eisner Award-winning author of 'I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future' & 'The Art of Judge Dredd by Jock'
History weirdo with @englishcivilwar.bsky.social

Links: https://linktr.ee/molcher
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molcher.bsky.social
A book about a 'haunting' that is played with such a straight bat that it almost drains it of a narrative, 6/10
A copy of 'The Haunting of Borley Rectory'
November 11, 2025 at 1:05 AM
molcher.bsky.social
There's *always* an episode of Judge Dredd...
November 7, 2025 at 2:04 PM
molcher.bsky.social
Befitting the horror theme of the performance, the interval is now running over twice as long as promised 😬
A theatre programme saying INTERMISSION (20 minutes)
November 5, 2025 at 9:14 PM
molcher.bsky.social
So terrified and jaded (and complicit) that can't even muster the bare minimum about someone with whom they should actually share common cause.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, adopted a different tone. Asked by Sky News whether she liked Mamdani, she replied: "I'll be honest, I don't follow American politics especially closely". One influential Labour figure said: "I'll tell you what, I cannot be doing with all the takes we'll get on this New York mayor and what it means for the Labour Party."
November 5, 2025 at 1:58 PM
molcher.bsky.social
JHC, BBC News. This needs to be at the top of your front page four years away from an election, does it?
Screen shot of a tile on the BBC News homepage, showing the excretible Three Horsemen of the Shitpocalypse – Tice, Farage & Yusuf – with the headline "What a UK government led by Reform would really look like"
November 5, 2025 at 10:54 AM
molcher.bsky.social
I mean, by this point the "we're all trying to find the guy who did this" meme is practically transparent from overuse...
A screengrab from the Guardian website with the text: "Wes Streeting arriving at BBC Broadcasting House in London Exclusive NHS staff bearing brunt as ‘ugly’ racism of 70s and 80s returns, says Wes Streeting Health secretary and NHS England chief warn of winter pressures and rising levels of abuse" alongside a photo of Wes Shameless Streeting
November 4, 2025 at 9:21 PM
molcher.bsky.social
This is genuinely getting too much.
November 4, 2025 at 2:33 PM
molcher.bsky.social
And, of course, it includes the heroic death of The Torso From Newcastle, who deserved better than this...
A frame from a Strontium Dog comic showing a figure without a head, and a single eye, being shot on the floor. The shooter is saying "Rot you".
October 27, 2025 at 7:52 PM
molcher.bsky.social
As a kid, I used to stare at this line-up of Johnny Alpha's old mutant rebellion comrades for hours.
A section of a comic book page from Strontium Dog, showing a line-up of mutants
October 27, 2025 at 7:48 PM
molcher.bsky.social
Printers' copy of the next Strontium Dog volume arrived and, by snek, it's gold from end to end – 'Outlaw' was the first SD I ever read and it's still brilliant. Alan and Carlos at the height of their powers.
A comic book page from Strontium Dog in 2000 AD
October 27, 2025 at 7:46 PM
molcher.bsky.social
This has been an on-going project for over half-century now: using the fear of 'crime' as a means to entrench colonial power through "law and order" politics

(I may have written a book about exactly this... 2000ad.com/news/i-am-th...)
As odd as it may now seem, given its ubiquity in our modern political discourse, crime had not been a major vote winner prior to the 1960s. But in the 1970s a major shift took place as it became highly political. In America, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended the racial segregation of the ‘Jim Crow’ laws and made discrimination on the basis of race illegal. No longer able to talk about race directly, politicians tapped into white voters’ fears about the upending of the social order and rising crime. Playing on stereotypes about Black criminality, they e+ectively drew a line from protest to crime and to race. ‘Law and order’ became ‘a strategy for reaching suburban voters without having to say the ugly part out loud,’ Leah Wright-Rigueur, a political historian at Harvard University, said. Four years later, there were mass and often violent protests in more than a hundred US cities over racial injustice, police brutality, the Vietnam War, and the assassination of civil rights campaigner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In response, President Richard Nixon used the phrase ‘law and order’ as a codeword for race, culture, and generational backlash as he condemned the ‘mob’ that ‘surges through the street, shouting political slogans, battling the police, hurling epithets.’ ‘Something has gone terribly wrong in America,’ he said in a national broadcast: a year later, he claimed that he spoke for ‘the silent majority’. ‘By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,’ Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, is alleged to have confessed. ‘We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news.’ The politicisation of ‘law and order’ in Britain began two years later, when the Conservative Party election manifesto explicitly linked crime with industrial disputes, protests, and terrorism in what it warned was ‘the age of demonstration and disruption’. When the moral panic over mugging began in 1972, ‘law and order’ began to play in the background like a drumbeat. This was greatly helped by the police, who openly emerged as a political lobby, backing up the Conservative’s ‘law and order’ agenda in advertisements and speeches. ‘What is political about crime?’ asked the Police Federation as it launched an unprecedented publicity campaign in 1975. Unironically modelling itself on the progressive pressure groups it had labelled ‘fanatics’, the Federation demanded politicians support ‘the rule of law’, increase officer pay, and reverse what they saw as ‘the liberalising trend in penal and social policy’.
October 27, 2025 at 2:05 PM
molcher.bsky.social
Waking up to a panicking bigot trying to do the bare minimum.
A headline that says "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" with an image of a white guy below it.
October 26, 2025 at 11:36 AM
molcher.bsky.social
I know I have to be patient, I know you have to work at a skill over time. But the way any success at breadmaking seems to apparently rely on some kind of quantum mechanics and/or the appeasement of ancient, arcane gods can be really very frustrating.
October 19, 2025 at 7:16 PM
molcher.bsky.social
*taps the sign again*

2000ad.com/news/i-am-th...
The cover to 'I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future', showing a right cop with red paint on their visor imitating the shape of Judge Dredd's helmet.
October 3, 2025 at 4:58 PM
molcher.bsky.social
Can confirm that Lulu's remains excellent.
September 18, 2025 at 9:37 AM
molcher.bsky.social
Huge congratulations to @emmavieceli.bsky.social for the opening night of her brand new musical, Unfolding, in Cambridge. It's fantastic!

(holy hell, I know someone who wrote a musical!!!)
A theatrical poster for a musical that reads "An original musical by Emma Viecelli UNFOLDING "What's the best that could happen" With an image of a scrunched up piece of paper beneath It.
September 10, 2025 at 9:40 PM
molcher.bsky.social
Apologies to anyone with a cat, but we live with the best one.
A cat. The best cat. Curled up on the carpet in front of a grey sofa.
September 9, 2025 at 7:46 PM
molcher.bsky.social
linktr.ee/molcher
In 'DREDD', as in our own time, the eternal 'war on crime' is the crisis that creates the state of exception and justifies the Judges' use of violence against individuals in order to protect the collective. The state has a duty to protect life, but its primary tool is death. In Dredd himself, we see ‘the horror of the police'. Think again about his own words regarding his own city – '800 million people and every one a potential criminal'. The citizens of Mega-City One are always a hair's breadth away from being the victim of crime or from being labelled with that designation of ‘criminal', from the state deciding that they no longer 'deserve' life.
September 9, 2025 at 7:41 PM
molcher.bsky.social
I mean, it's an tax overpayment on a health benefit I don't want or use, but every penny counts I guess...
A screenshot that says "HMRC owe you £11.80"
September 8, 2025 at 11:59 AM
molcher.bsky.social
"They make a desert and call it peace."
A screengrab that reads "Speaking during the spectacle in Beijing, China's President Xi Jinping said the world faced a choice between peace and war."
September 3, 2025 at 12:13 PM
molcher.bsky.social
Companion when preparing for podcast.

Companion when recording podcast.
A home office with green walls and a desk in the background. A pair of legs stretches out from a grey sofa into a red office chair. On those legs is a similarly long cat. A fish eye photo of a desk, dominated by the long arm of a podcasting microphone, which sits on a book. Beside it is a laptop with a green tardigrade stress you by the keyboard.
September 1, 2025 at 7:57 PM
molcher.bsky.social
I know it's just a thing, but I've used this MacBook for almost a quarter of my life and, as I decommission it, I'm struck by how much it's helped me to work & pursue my hobbies, to create, to communicate. It got me through lockdowns. I wrote my book on it.

A thing. A tool. But a damn useful one.
A brushed silver MacBook sat on a green sofa. There are various stickers on its surface.
September 1, 2025 at 9:49 AM
molcher.bsky.social
Clunky external harddrive via old USB cable
A red external harddrive sat on top of a tangle of wires next to a silver and black laptop.
August 31, 2025 at 10:41 AM
molcher.bsky.social
Finally upgraded to a new Mac after 12 years. Time Machine transfer started at 1pm yesterday, was saying 17 hours when I went to bed at 2am, just come down to this. Might get to use my new laptop some time next week at this rate!
A screen grab with a blue progress bar barely half way gone with the words "Transferring documents for the user Michael Molcher... Transferred 306,537 files About 29 hours and 36 minutes remaining at 6.8 MB/s"
August 31, 2025 at 10:30 AM
molcher.bsky.social
Already was!
An image by Kevin O'Neill of a robot whose body is fashioned like the armour of an English Civil War cavalryman.
August 31, 2025 at 10:21 AM