When 2000AD was the future

It was heartening to read today that veteran sci-fi comic book 2000AD was celebrating its 35th birthday party at a sold-out SFX Weekender in Prestatyn.

For a few fleeting seconds, I was right back in the 1970s, watching a TV ad (on a black and white set) for an exciting new comic book. It cost eight of your Earth pence, came with a free ‘Space Spinner’ and promised it would be ‘in orbit every Monday’. 

Like the sudden warmth of remembrance for a long-forgotten old friend, I had happened on a piece of the future from way back in my past. (Vivid memory as ‘Future Shock’ or perhaps ‘á la recherche de l’avenir perdue’.) 

In February 1977 when 2000AD was launched, the year sounded ever so modern and far off in the glittering 21^st century. Before 2000AD’s launch, comic books for me had meant Beano, The Beezer, Warlord or Action. 

Naturally, I was a member of Desperate Dan Pie Eaters Club, not to mention being a fully-paid up and Lord Peter Flint-certified Secret Agent in Warlord’s fan club. My only real deviation from this diet of World War Two derring do and 1950s schoolboy japery were the very occasional Marvel or DC comics brought by relatives returning from America. In those pre-Star Wars days, I can promise you that County Mayo was much more Cowboys and Indian than little green men.

But seductive novelty aside, sci-fi also seemed much less problematic as a comic book genre. Without getting too political about it, sci-fi offered the perfect escape from the Troubles. The Victor, Warlord, Battle and Bullet were all fine and dandy but even as a youngster, I had begun to question the ideological disconnect between the clear-cut heroism of the British soldiers in these WWII comics and the contradictory ambivalence and indifference shown to the ones that were being shot at on the streets and lanes of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland.

Sci-fi offered no such dilemmas or difficult reconciliations. In 2000AD, the flawed present could be reduced to back story for an exciting future. In the early strip Flesh for example, the plot revolved around Trans-time, a free-booting company sent its operatives back in time to harvest dinosaur meat for a starving dystopian future world, by-passing the present entirely in favour of traffic between a prehistoric past and a dark voracious future.

This comic book seemed to offer a future that was often decisively severed from our present by the finality of nuclear Armageddon; an all-pervading preoccupation of the 70s and 80s. That Cold War fixation could also offer a more ‘near future’ style of narrative such as the strip Invasion! which pitted tough London lorry driver turned guerrilla fighter Bill Savage against thinly-veiled Soviet ciphers ‘the Volgans’ in their invasion of the United Kingdom in a putative 1999.

I was hooked from the start but it was a character that made his debut in the second issue (that’s ‘Prog 2’ to the initiated) who has earned a place in the All Time Pantheon of Comic Heroes.

Judge Dredd, a figure as archetypal as Superman (Nietzsche’s or DC’s), is probably 2000AD’s most identifiable character. He is big enough to share headline billing with Batman (Judgement on Gotham); he has already been given the Hollywood treatment once with Sly Stallone taking the old stony face role.  The Mega-City lawman is now ready once again for his close up; the latest adaptation – scripted by Alex (28 Days Later) Garland – is pencilled in for release in September of this year.

But as early 2000AD readers, in that first year and a half, we followed Dredd through the mean streets of Mega City One as he battled robot revolts and then, in a fatal fratricidal showdown, he dispatched his own cloned brother Rico. Then it was off to the moon for a brief posting where he cleaned up Luna-1. But it was the first Cursed Earth story that really saw Dredd grow in stature. Those storylines (from Prog 61 – 85) represented the first epic cycle in the Dredd mythos.

Following Dredd’s serialised exploits as his mission of mercy took on him on a journey across the apocalyptic American wilderness between the two Mega Cities was the acme of cliffhanging anticipation; a week seemed like an eternity to wait between instalments.

 I have such vivid recollection of daydreaming and doodling away many an hour between ‘Progs’ speculating  earnestly about how Dredd might escape the clutches of Satanus, the GM T-Rex.  Or in that fantastic Death Valley showdown, faced with General Blood ‘n’Guts and the robotic Legion of the Damned, how would Dredd and his dwindling band of misfit comrades escape certain death in their Alamo-style last stand?

If we stray from warm recollection and briefly foray into objective artistic assessment; this publication was, in its time, home to some of the UK’s top comic artists and writers. Pat Mills, the man who started it all, was already a veteran of Battle and Action before he created 2000AD. (For an in-depth interview with Mills see the Sabotage Times.).

Alan Moore also earned a living at 2000AD before going on to pen the masterpieces Watchmen and V for Vendetta which, it could be argued, transcend genre and have earned the right to be considered classics however you shape your canon of literature . Other notable alumni of IPC Tower include Neil (Sandman) Gaiman, Grant (Arkham Asylum)  Morrison and Brian Bolland (widely considered to be the definitive Dredd artist).

One of the most satisfying aspects of reading 2000AD was the whole shared universe idea. It was possible over time to link Flesh with Judge Dredd through the dinosaur Satanus; the futuristic games of games of Aeroball and Inferno  could also be connected to Dredd through the Harlem Heroes’ John ‘Giant’ Clay.  These and many other links and spin-offs gave the 2000AD multi-verse an immensely satisfying depth of dimension. And let’s not forget that the venerable editor Tharg was never afraid to take a chance on a long-shot.

Funnily enough, one of my early 2000AD favourites isn’t really a sci-fi strip. The Fiends of the Eastern Front was actually a Second World War vampire story. The unlikely protagonist was a Wehrmacht soldier who discovered that some of his Romanian allies were vampires. Later in the war, after Romania changed sides, the German soldier was the only one who knew their secret.

With its constant knowing nods to popular culture, in my more high-falutin'  moods, I sometimes think that 2000AD’s imagined future might have given my generation the rudiments of a futurist folklore; a hard-edged mythology forged in a post-punk crucible and liberated from the obligations of historical narrative.  

But mostly, I just think 2000AD told great stories; the traditional values of quality artwork and strong writing  were central to the comic book's success then and three and half decades later, that truth still stands.