Yay! The Dredd comics are absolutely fantastic right now. The scowl and chin have definitely got a bit more exaggerated and stylised over the years, since it's his main defining feature, but I guess I'm just used to it by now.

And yes, Dredd is a clone of Fargo, the man who created the justice system. The Judges make clones of all their best people, who come out of the clone tanks as five-year-old children and immediately start training to be Judges. Which is why Dredd is so... Dredd.

As biod says, I actually did a series of posts a few months back collecting all the stories about Dredd's childhood and his relationships with the other Fargo clones; the first one's here, and the others are linked or you can find them through the Judge Dredd tag.